A Walk with William James, Part 7: The Healthy-Minded and the Salvation through Self-Despair

In Lectures 4-7 of The Varieties of Religious Experience William James sets out his famous typology of the religious experience: The healthy-minded believer (lectures 4-5) and the sick soul (lectures 6-7). Needless to say, I have been profoundly influenced by this typology. In my own research, I've called the types Summer Christians versus Winter Christians and Defensive versus Existential Believers.

The healthy-minded believer is the optimistic, happy, and hopeful believer. My Summer Christian type. James says that this kind of believers possess "a constitutional incapacity for prolonged suffering." Further, "This religion directs [the believer] to settle his scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to lay them to heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist."

This congenital optimism bothers many of us (the sick souls among us). And this optimism might not be altogether healthy. James recognizes this when we states that "In some individuals optimism may become quasi-pathological." Or as the psychologist Richard Bentall quipped, Happiness might be a form of mental disease best diagnosed as Major Affective Disorder (Pleasant type).

But one of James' amazing qualities was his openness and curiosity about all kinds of people and all kinds of experiences (which remains a behavioral ideal to me, not just as a psychologist but as a human being). Unlike the leading intellectuals of his day (or ours) James was never dismissive of people. Thus, James warns us academic types to not giving in to the temptation (as we so often do) of being dismissive of our more optimistic brothers and sisters:

"[W]e ourselves belong to the the clerico-academic-scientific type, the officially and conventionally 'correct' type, 'the deadly respectable' type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation."

James goes on to chastise us "deadly respectable" academic types for being downright unscientific in our dismissal of other people's experiences: "[N]othing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves."

Thus, James is at pains in Lectures 4-5 to point out all the positive effects of optimistic religion on its adherents. However, James does admit that, "one must be of a certain mental mould to get such results."

But beyond his description of the healthy-minded type, I love Lectures 4-5 of The Varieties as they contain one of the great psychological descriptions of religious surrender. What James calls "a salvation through self-despair." I resonate deeply with this passage, as it traces my religious trajectory growing up in the Churches of Christ. As James describes, the moral rigor and works-based righteousness of my youth ruined my spiritual machinery. My bearings overheated for the belts were too tight:

"Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness. 'Be vigilant, day and night,' they adjure us; 'hold your passive tendencies in check; shrink from no effort; keep your will like a bow always bent.' But the persons I speak of find that all this conscious effort leads to nothing but failure and vexation in their hands, and only makes them two-fold more the children of hell they were before. The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible fever and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all when the bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight."

At some point, I just couldn't do religion in this manner. It was killing me. Thus, I reached a moment of moral futility that, in hindsight, led to my laying a great burden down. James describes this experience beautifully as he continues:

"Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralistic method, by the 'surrender' of which I spoke in my second lecture. Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves on the Subject the impression that he has been wrought on by an external power."