Deep Thoughts: Henry James's experience

"To the Unknown Gods"
Pragmatism, postmodernity, and the theology of experience.
by Roger Lundin

When he resigned the pastorate of Boston's Second Church in 1832, Ralph Waldo Emerson forsook his ecclesiastical office but not his ministerial duties. To be sure, he did enjoy a two-year hiatus, during which he undertook a tour of Europe and experienced a period of recuperative peace in relative solitude. But all was to change with the publication of his first major work, Nature , in 1836. The wide dissemination of his essays and his growing fame as a lecturer were to give Emerson a more expansive pastoral charge than he had ever held within the Church. The lectern was now his pulpit, the lecture his sermon, and the public his congregation. If the blind did not see and the lame did not walk as a result of Emerson's secular care, many who labored and were heavy laden nevertheless found rest in his words.

One of the early, restless adherents to Emerson's vision was Henry James, Sr., a man who had been made materially wealthy by birth and spiritually tormented by training. In early 1842, James heard Emerson lecture and was so taken with the message that he wrote the inscrutable man from Concord what R. W. B. Lewis calls "a spiritual love letter, expressing a desire to 'talk familiarly with one who earnestly follows truth through whatever frowning ways she beckons him on.'" He implored Emerson to visit him at his home in lower Manhattan. Emerson obliged, and when he arrived, he was first ushered upstairs to the nursery "'to admire and give his blessing' (in the younger Henry's words) to the two-month-old William."

There is something sweetly incongruous about the picture of Emerson dispensing an "apostolic" blessing and the infant William James receiving it. Few things were more galling to Emerson than the claim that authority could be imparted from without rather than generated from within. Belief in the authority of office and the practice of rites of succession—these belonged to that "icehouse of externals" that Roman Catholicism was to Emerson. As James himself would assert six decades hence at the Emerson centenary, "there is something in each and all of us, even the lowliest, that ought not to consent to borrowing traditions and living at second hand." The disdain for tradition and derivative thinking was intense in Emerson, and "the hottest side of him is this non-conformist persuasion." The living soul, the vital individual "is the aboriginal reality," and as a result "the past man is irrelevant and obliterate for present issues."

Despite Emerson's and James' aversions to the "traditions" of "the past man," it seems clear that an apostolic mantle of sorts did pass between the man and the infant that night in 1842. We can speak with confidence of a tradition of enquiry that has wended its way through American intellectual life from the time of Emerson to today.

It is a tradition of disavowing tradition, and it worships whatever unknown gods adaptive individuals are able to fashion out of their experience alone. This tradition moves from the Concord sage through James and William Dewey and finds its center at present in the work of Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and other key figures in what is frequently referred to as the "revival of pragmatism."

The charter document of this movement was Emerson's greatest essay, "Experience," written only months after his introduction to the James family. In that aching work, composed in the wake of the death of his beloved five-year-old son Waldo, Emerson explained, "Grief too will make us idealists." Having discovered through his sorrow that "bodies never come in contact," Emerson could only conclude, "souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with."

With this most personal of essays, Emerson was signaling a major shift in modern conceptions of theological authority. For more than a century before him, the English-speaking world had leaned ever more heavily upon nature for ethical and spiritual support, as the traditional Christian sources of authority seemed increasingly shaky and unstable. Humean skepticism had called miracles, including the resurrection of Jesus, into question; the historical criticism of the Bible had cast doubt upon its historicity and authority; and Newton's mechanistic science threatened to leave no room in the world's workings for the energies and agencies of spirit.

As the traditional pillars of religious authority became badly eroded, the poets of England, along with the theologians and philosophers of Germany, had looked to the union of the potent human spirit and the fertile natural world for deliverance. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth gave classic expression to the hopes invested in this marriage. About Eden, the Elysian Fields, and the lost Atlantis, he asked,

why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.

Yet only decades later, for Emerson at mid-century, the differences between spirit and nature had come to seem all but irreconcilable. Darwin had not yet published his Origin of Species, so it was not a materialist vision that drove Emerson to despair of the possibilities of union. Instead, it was that Emerson's idealism had triumphed so thoroughly that its mate, the material otherness of nature, appeared to fade from his view and draw back from his touch: "Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion," for "life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them," they prove to be lenses of many colors that "paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus." "Experience" was Emerson's discovery that nature and spirit had been put asunder, as well as his announcement that divorce papers had been filed, on the grounds of desertion.

William James was a product of this divorce, and he would labor to the end of his life to articulate a theology of experience that could replace the discredited theology of nature. "The axis of reality runs solely through the egoistic places,—they are strung upon it like so many beads," he wrote, echoing Emerson. "The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one of many worlds of consciousness that exist." Those other worlds must contain larger, more copious "experiences which have a meaning for our life also." They keep their distance from us yet become "continuous at certain points, and [then the] higher energies filter in."

"I believe rather that we stand in much the same relation to the whole of the universe as our canine and feline pets do to the whole of human life," James explains in Pragmatism. "They inhabit our drawing rooms and libraries. They take part in scenes of whose significance they have no inkling." Content with barking, purring, and sniffing, these creatures "are merely tangent to curves of history the beginnings and ends and forms of which pass wholly beyond their ken. So are we tangent to the wider life of things." But just as the cats and dogs have ideals that coincide with ours, and just as they "have daily living proof of the fact, so we may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own."

That is, we in the modern world now read a darkened nature through the lenses of our translucent but dazzling experiences. To us, those experiences appear as the center of life, but in reality, they are "tangent to the wider life of things." Nevertheless, they are our experiences, and it is from them that we must build our theology in the hope that our canine howlings and feline meanderings will somehow point towards these "higher powers" that are determined to save the world.

James pressed on with his efforts to replenish the depleted stores of religion with the bountiful harvest of experience. Even in his final decade, he was still trying to construct a system roughly according to the plan Emerson had sketched more than half a century before. The keystone of the Jamesian spiritual arch was The Varieties of Religious Experience, which he first delivered as the Gifford Lectures in 1901–2. It is a measure of the significance of those lectures and that book that over the following century a number of Gifford lecturers would engage the Jamesian argument and examine the Jamesian scheme.

Both his critics and admirers have shown particular interest in this book's efforts to articulate a natural theology with human experience as its revelatory core. In elaborating this theology, James was executing the terms of the lectureship as established in Adam Gifford's will. The Scottish Lord had made the rational study of natural theology the raison d'etre for the series: "I wish the lecturers to treat their subject as a strictly natural science… . I wish it to be considered just as astronomy or chemistry is." Gifford's assumption carried with it the conviction, Alasdair MacIntyre explains, that "one mark of a natural science [is] that its history is one of rational progress in enquiry." For William James at the start of the twentieth century, the only open highway to that "natural science" and its "rational progress" led through experience, for the road that ran through nature had now been blocked for good.

In his own Gifford lectures, delivered a century later and published as With the Grain of the Universe, Stanley Hauerwas was to take issue with James' experiential response to the 19th-century loss of nature. He reproves James, as well as the liberal theologians of the 19th century and their 20th-century pragmatic descendents, for giving away too much theologically and receiving too little in return. "Under Kant's influence," Hauerwas writes, "Christian theologians simply left the natural world to science and turned to the only place left in which language about God might make sense, that is, to the human" world of moral action. Because theology could no longer "pretend to tell us anything about the way things are, James attempted, without leaving the world of science, to show how religious experience might at least tell us something about ourselves."

Richard Rorty has long praised the same Jamesian compromise that Hauerwas questions. Rorty is happy to have religion say nothing about nature or about God, for he and James worship a taciturn deity who issues no commands and makes no demands. "The quasi-Jamesian position I want to defend says: Do not worry too much about whether what you have is a belief, a desire, or a mood," for "the tension between science and religion can be resolved merely by saying that the two serve different ends." Rorty claims it is no more absurd to resolve the tension between science and religion in this manner, than it was for Emerson and others in the mid-19th century to argue that Christianity had to be demythologized "to immunize religious belief from criticism." Darwin was able to "trace the origin of human beings" and their minds "to the unplanned movements of elementary particles," and if Christianity was to survive, it had to swear a vow of silence about matters science had decided for good. "Demythologizing amounts to saying that, whatever theism is good for, it is not a device for predicting or controlling our environment."

In Rorty's history of immunized Christianity, the 20th-century hero is Paul Tillich, who had possessed the theological good sense not to let our senseless babble about God drown out the revelatory murmurs of our experience. According to Rorty, a "pragmatist philosophy of religion must follow Tillich and others in distinguishing quite sharply between faith and belief." In this curious use of terms, "faith" is our warranted talk about ourselves and the experiential god(s) in whom we have placed our fanciful trust; "Liberal Protestants" eagerly speak of their "faith in God" in this sense. "Belief," on the other hand, involves our fruitless efforts to speak of a God who creates, reveals, and redeems; according to Rorty, it is "Fundamentalist Catholics" who belong in this camp, because they are "happy to enumerate their beliefs by reciting the Creed." In contrast to these benighted souls, the "Tillichians" can "get along either without creeds, or with a blessedly vague symbolic interpretation of creedal statements." They do not believe that religious faith requires a transformation of human character or offers insights into the will of God. For them, the simple goal of religion is to "make the sort of difference to a human life which is made by the presence or absence of love."

With the "presence of love" the goal of human life, the actions or beliefs leading to that end may be as ethically diverse and theologically diffuse as the experiences of life itself. As Tillich wrote in his Systematic Theology , for many who work in the tradition of Schleiermacher, "experience is the medium through which the sources [of theology] 'speak' to us, through which we can receive them," and no authority can predetermine what counts as a valid experience. In this theological tradition, "reality is identical with experience," and "nothing can appear in the theological system which transcends the whole of experience." According to Tillich, a pragmatic Christian must consider the possibility that Christianity has become exhausted and will become irrelevant; "being open for new experiences which might even pass beyond the confines of Christian experience is now the proper attitude of the theologian."

Here again, Emerson had traveled this ground long before James, Tillich, and Rorty began crossing it. In 1838, less than a month before he was to deliver his "Divinity School Address" at Harvard, he complained of our tendency to value the miraculous over ordinary experience. Though each day is "full of facts," we take them to be "heavy, prosaic, & desart," until a creative intellect comes along and finds "that the day of facts is a rock of diamonds, that a fact is an Epiphany of God" upon which "he should rear a temple of wonder, joy, & praise." Those who look to scripture, miracle, or mystery for God's revelation will not discover it, for it is already in their midst and within their power. "They call it Christianity," Emerson concluded, "I call it Consciousness."

This precise conflation of Christianity with consciousness—of theology with experience—is to Hauerwas the problem at the heart of the Gifford Lectures project. If Christianity and consciousness are interchangeable, then Christian belief adds nothing to the deliverances of consciousness and has no means of speaking authoritatively of the world beyond the mind. "The social and intellectual habits" that shaped Lord Gifford's understanding of natural theology and experience deprived Christian theologians of the "resources needed to demonstrate that theological claims are necessary for our knowledge of the way things are and for the kind of life we must live to acquire such knowledge."

According to Hauerwas, this especially proved to be the case for William James and Reinhold Niebuhr, the two most famous Gifford Lecturers of the 20th century. Although "Niebuhr allegedly challenged the humanism James represented," Hauerwas claims the neo-orthodox theologian's "account of Christianity stands in continuity with James's understanding of religion." Richard Fox says Niebuhr's reliance upon James was first evidenced in his 1914 Yale thesis, which claimed that religion no longer could depend upon "superhuman revelation" for its beliefs. Instead, "it had to be grounded in a philosophy of human needs and in the actual experience of belief." Niebuhr's God exercises his freedom only within the workings of the human personality; in dealing with nature, even God must obey the ironclad laws of matter in motion. To the end of his life, Fox says, Niebuhr remained "a skeptical relativist committed like William James to the life of passionate belief and moral struggle."

The struggles of the finite self, rather than the sufferings of an incarnate God, thus became for Niebuhr, as they had been for James, our only viable revelatory source. According to Hauerwas, both James and Niebuhr believed "the truth of Christianity consisted in the confirmation of universal and timeless myths about the human condition that Christianity made available to anyone without witness." These myths are accessible to all without condition, because they are diffused in the human consciousness, that Emersonian spring from whence the tributary of Christianity flows on its way to the boundless sea of religious experience.

In confronting James on religion, Hauerwas refers to George Santayana's well-known gibe about his Harvard colleague. "There was," Santayana wrote, "no sense of security, no joy, in James's apology for personal religion. He did not really believe; he merely believed in the right of believing that you might be right if you believed." Hauerwas criticizes Santayana for a lack of charity yet reaches a similar conclusion: "William James never entertained the presumption that the God of Israel might exist." Being a theist did not entail for James making the "claim that something like God exists." Instead, it meant one believed that no account of the world can be "adequate that denies the aspect of human existence that led us to believe in a god or the gods." We cannot know that God exists but only that we have a compulsive urge to believe he does. In the end, Hauerwas believes, "all James sought was to show that religion is but another name for the hope necessary to sustain a modest humanism."

Historian Ann Taves, who is as sympathetic to James' religious project as Hauerwas is critical of it, agrees with the latter's reading of James' goals. According to her, James shifts our "attention from the study of religion per se to the processes by which religious" phenomena and other phenomena are "made and unmade." The Jamesian approach leads us to "lose a sense of religion as a substantive thing" and to consider it instead as a diffuse force that infuses all human experience. To Taves this diffuseness is a good thing, for it makes us acknowledge there are no bounds to authentic religious experience. Even the narrowest of religious traditions must accommodate a wide-ranging array of beliefs and practices, and it is pointless to stake out creedal boundaries to corral them. With the field of experience so wide open and the horizon of its concerns so vast, "the study of religion opens out at this point into the study of everything."

The "study of everything" in a religion of experience is the opposite of the focus on "something" in a theology of revelation. In the "Divinity School Address," Emerson had complained about the narrowness of Christianity's "exaggeration of the personal, the positive, the ritual. It has dwelt, it dwells, with noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus." In like manner, in A Pluralistic Universe , James claimed the "vaster vistas" of science and "the rising tide of social democratic ideals" had rendered the particular claims of Christianity—that "older monarchical theism"—"obsolete or obsolescent." That "theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors," with its creation ex nihilo , its astonishing eschatology, "its relish for rewards and punishment," and its picture of God as an "'intelligent and moral governor,' sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion." We may still confess our belief in "an external creator and his institutions" in our worship "at Church, in formulas that linger by their mere inertia, but the life is out of them, we avoid dwelling on them, the sincere heart of us is elsewhere."

That "elsewhere" is the nowhere of the universal experience of religion. It comprises a field of study that has no object for its attention but endless subjects for its concern. Hauerwas believes James embraced the universal and shunned the particular, because his democratic concern for fairness was greater than his intellectual passion for truth. Near the close of The Varieties of Religious Experience , James offers a justification for his decision to reject all "particularized" theologies and their claims. When we wish to understand our "union" with the "more" that many have called God, we are tempted to seek some "definite description" for our ineffable experience. Yet we must resist all temptations to "place ourselves offhand at the position of a particular theology," especially "the Christian theology," which would have us "proceed immediately to define the 'more' as Jehovah, and the 'union' as his imputation to us of the righteousness of Christ." If we were to give in to this temptation, "that would be unfair to other religions, and, from our present standpoint at least, would be an over-belief."

Hauerwas counters James' universal religious uncertainties with Karl Barth's particular theological affirmations. In the Barthian vision, particularity is not an affront to our sense of fairness but the substance of our knowledge of God. In Dogmatics in Outline , Barth discusses the portion of the Apostles' Creed that mentions Christ's having "suffered under Pontius Pilate." The inclusion of this historical reference affirms that the drama of God's wrath and mercy—played out in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—did not "take place in heaven or … in some world of ideas; it took place in our time, in the centre of the world-history in which our human life is played out." We must not seek to fly to some "spiritual Cloud-Cuckooland," because "God has come into our life in its utter unloveliness and frightfulness." According to Barth, the incarnation involves a concrete event in which a human name plays a crucial role in the cosmic drama of reconciliation:
There is nothing in the opinion of Lessing that God's Word is an "eternal truth of reason," and not an "accidental truth of history." God's history is indeed an accidental truth of history, like this petty commandant [Pilate]. God was not ashamed to exist in this accidental state. To the factors which determined our human time and human history belong, in virtue of the name Pontius Pilate, the life and Passion of Jesus as well. We are not left alone in this frightful world. Into this alien land God has come to us.

"God has come to us"—to contemporary ears that dissonant assertion does not harmonize with the naturalistic assumptions that inform Jamesian pragmatism. Barth's rejection of those naturalistic premises makes it difficult for the "educated world," as Hauerwas terms it, to comprehend the truth claims he makes. Those claims seem confusing and demand an explanation, while the assumptions of pragmatism appear to represent common sense itself. Thus, Barth needs to be translated into a language we moderns can understand, while in "the world as we know it, James and Niebuhr do not need to be 'explained.'"

To understand them, "you do not need to have your conceptual machinery, to say nothing of your life, turned upside down." The art of avoiding having either "your conceptual machinery" or "your life turned upside down" is, after all, central to the pragmatic tradition, which thinks in terms of adjusting human experience rather than of transforming it.

In good measure, pragmatism was a product of the American universities of the 19th and 20th centuries, and as such, it was defined by the practices of the seminar and sheltered under the umbrella of tenure. Not surprisingly, the experiences of the university have in turn supplied key metaphors for the pragmatic enterprise. For example, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , Rorty promotes philosophy as a conversation without origin or end. The continuation of that conversation—subsidized by ample university salaries and foundation grants—becomes the point of thinking and talking alike. "The only point on which I would insist," Rorty wrote in the final sentence of that book, "is that philosophers' moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation."

Fish speaks ardently of the virtues of the conversational game , but the contest as he and the postmodern pragmatists envision it unfolds on a field protected by a retractable roof.

For Rorty and other postmodern pragmatists, the conversational model has undeniable religious and ethical benefits. They discover a life-affirming power in the refusal to commit to belief, for over the centuries passionate commitment has brought so much grief to history and so many conversations to an end. As long as we are talking, we can't be fighting, or so the theory goes.

Although he disagrees with the conclusion Rorty and the pragmatists reach on this point, Charles Taylor admits they raise a crucial question; these writers point to a general truth, "which is that the highest spiritual ideals and aspirations also threaten to lay the most crushing burdens on humankind." There is some validity to the pragmatists' claim that since "the highest ideals are the most potentially destructive," the "prudent path" may prove to be the safest, and "a little judicious stifling [of those ideals] may be the part of wisdom." Yet Taylor believes this strategy only makes sense on "the assumption that that the dilemma is inescapable, that the highest spiritual aspirations must lead to mutilation or destruction." He does not take this to be our "inevitable lot," for while the "dilemma of mutilation is in a sense our greatest challenge," it is not "an iron fate." Instead, Taylor embraces what he considers the central promise of "Judeo-Christian theism," which is "a divine affirmation of the human, more total than humans can ever attain unaided."

For the proponents of postmodern pragmatism, however, "self-mutilation" remains the central fact of human history, and they argue it may prove to be our destiny, if we spurn the saving powers of conversation. "In the post-Cold War world," there are many competing systems of belief, explains Lewis Menand in the final paragraph of The Metaphysical Club , his highly lauded account of the origins of pragmatism. Given the pluralistic vitality of these competing visions, "skepticism about the finality of any particular set of beliefs has begun to seem to some people an important value again." In like manner, "the political theory this skepticism helps to underwrite" has been resurgent; it is the "theory that democracy is the value that validates all other values." For the pragmatist, Menand says, "democratic participation isn't the means to an end… ; it is the end. The purpose of the experiment is to kept the experiment going."

For contemporary pragmatism, then, it is a given that while many things may transpire in a conversation, none of us should seek to have it reach a conclusion. Conversations provide a means of bringing order to what James famously called the "great blooming, buzzing confusion" of experience; through them, we learn the words others have used to name the world, and we trace the forms they have fashioned to gave it shape. We add a word or two here and tinker with a pattern there, but we have no illusions about the permanence or importance of our work. The purpose of the experiment is to endure the fact that the only point is the experiment itself, and the end of all our activity is to sustain an activity that has no end beyond itself, no point beyond its own pointlessness. On these terms, a healthy conversation will never lead to a repentant turning, a decisive metanoia , but only to evermore satisfying perspectival gazing, an endless round of theoria .

"We are all living out pragmatism," writes Stanley Fish in There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too , "because we live in a world bereft of transcendent truths and leak proof logics (although some may exist in a realm veiled from us)." Lacking those "truths" and "proofs," we must make do with a "ragtag bag" of linguistic tricks, cultural practices, and clichéd conventions "that keep the conversation going and bring it to temporary, and always revisable, conclusions." Others may believe they have something to recommend that would improve the conversation or "make the game better." Not Fish: "All I have to recommend is the game, which, since it doesn't need my recommendations, will proceed on its way undeterred and unimproved by anything I have to say."

In this passage packed with avowals of skepticism and denial, Fish slips in a parenthetical phrase—"although some may exist in a realm veiled from us"—as a gesture toward the possibility of transcendence. Many great works of modernist literature and postmodern theory make similar gestures toward some form of "the protean, and the unpredictable." From Henry Adams' "The Dynamo and the Virgin" to William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming," to Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," the poetry, fiction, and theory of the twentieth century are replete with premonitions of an otherworldly irruption into worldly affairs.

The transcendence of which these authors write and toward which Fish and James doff their rhetorical caps is, however, a power against whose intrusions the conversational model is meant to serve as a shield. Fish speaks ardently of the virtues of the conversational game , but the contest as he and the postmodern pragmatists envision it unfolds on a field protected by a retractable roof. If there are going to be storms or floods or bolts of lightning, we will hear reports of them no doubt, but they will never interrupt the flow of the game or make us call a halt to the proceedings. Our conversation may continue uninterrupted by calamities and unthreatened by those things our insurance policies still quaintly call "Acts of God." Like the cats and dogs of James' analogy, we may romp away at our doggy activities or refine our feline pursuits without fear of divine intervention but with the hope that we nevertheless may be taking "part in scenes of whose significance [we] have no inkling." Coupling and uncoupling, pursuing and being pursued, playing and resting—these are the center of our lives, yet we still long to sense we are somehow "tangent to the wider life of things." So, we keep open the possibility that "higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our own." "Yes, you are free to turn my life (and conceptual machinery) upside down," Fish and James seem to say to the indifferent God hidden behind nature's veil, "but not until I'm dead. In the meantime, please leave me alone, so that I may get on with the game."

This is a conversational gambit with a distinguished history. In first-century Athens, the Apostle Paul covered similar ground with the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers. They too were masters of discourse in a world sealed off from divine intervention; they too lived in a "blooming, buzzing confusion" and worshiped at an "altar with the inscription, 'To an unknown God.'" Paul's response to what he discovered in skeptical Athens was simple and direct: "What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you" (Acts 17:23). After having offered the briefest of summaries of Jewish history and early Christian theology, he concluded, "While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent" ( metanoia )—that "world turned upside down" again. The world, Paul explains, will be "judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead" (Acts 17:30–31).

As lonely as these Stoics and Epicureans were in their cosmic isolation, "when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, 'We will hear you again about this'" (Acts 17:32). And a number of those who did listen no doubt found the rules of the game, and the direction of their conversations, changed forever.

(Roger Lundin is Blanchard Professor of English at Wheaton College. This essay is adapted from his book From Nature to Experience: The American Search for Cultural Authority.)