James' masterwork, The Varieties of Religious Experience, is an interesting and groundbreaking work.

The book is structured as lectures on a large theme - mysticism, healthy-mindedness, etc, and somewhere in the neighborhood of half of the words are direct quotes from people whose personal experience exemplifies the characteristic in question. In building the book in this manner, James allows for the systematic comparison and contrast for these radically different types of experience, and he uses the method he will later define as the pragmatic method to evaluate them - that is, he looks for the difference in behavior that the belief brings, and writes off completely any ideological differences which do not result in behavioral differences.

I had heard from many people that this was a book I should read, so I suggested it for the nascent Shabbat philosophy book club. Of the seven of us, only two finished the book (I was one of them), but we all agreed that one substantial flaw in James' work is that he does not recognize how much of a Christian worldview he has - that is, the Jewish worldview is entirely missing from his examples.

An example of a classically Jewish experience which he ignores is the idea of mitzvah (commandment) - the idea that by fulfilling a specific command given by God, one becomes a partner in creation with the Creator. This type of experience is well described in traditional Jewish literature, including in those sources which were known outside of Jewish spheres (i.e. Maimonides, Hirsch).

For another example, he says that human experience is all the richer for the presence of the Devil in it, so long as we keep our foot on his neck. Now, this is an interesting and thoughtful comment, but it is not fully developed, and again he misses the Jewish viewpoint - in Jewish thinking, the Satan (adversary) is God's prosecuting attorney - the one whose job it is to bring up all of the person's faults on Judgement day - and thus one who has a necessary but unpleasant task. This is altogether different from the Devil that James describes, who is much more an independent force in the universe, or is analogized to the tempter who seduces humans away from the good and right. Judaism does not need a tempter, because it presumes that the force of temptation is inherent in humanity, as part of the design of God.

However, even with this lack, I think that the book is quite good - James notices several commonalities across the experiences, and well-generalizes them to the human condition. He discusses how theology is generally the after-thought of the religious experience, and I think he is correct: the inchoate religious feeling submits to later analysis, and from this union comes theology. He discusses how different types of experiences appeal to those of different temperaments - that the optimist and the pessimist will naturally dress their religious experiences in different garb - but the power that each experiences is comparable.

I would have liked to have seen what he would have done with Godel's theory - that is, the destruction of rationalism as a possible source of absolute harmony and truth - I believe that he would have seen Godel as having proven, or at least concurring with, some of what he was trying to say in his concluding lecture.