An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

William James (1842–1910)
Still the acknowledged starting point for the study of religious and 
mystical experience, William James gave the Gifford Lectures of 

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Interpretation of Experience
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1901–1902, published in 1902 as 
The Varieties of Religious Experience
. 
He proposed
four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in 
calling it mystical.
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These defining characteristics were ineffability, meaning difficult to put 
into words; noetic quality, meaning that something had been learned; 
transiency, they did not last long; and passivity, they seemed to happen to 
the experient. James believed that the mystical experience defies expres-
sion, being more like a state of feeling than a state of intellect, an experi-
ence which only those who have had it can fully comprehend, but find it 
hard to describe. Yet mystical states are also states of knowledge, 
states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive 
intellect. 
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Thus ineffablility and noetic quality constitute the main characteristics 
of the mystical experience according to James. However, transiency, 
the limited duration of the experience, and passivity, the sense of being 
grasped by a superior power are also usually found. Examples from 
various religions are given, showing the paradoxical yet universal nature 
of mystical utterance.
In 
The Varieties of Religious Experience
James concentrates on the 
more dramatic instances of conversion and mystical experience. The book 
is filled with examples of the experiences of both well-known and ordi-
nary people, many collected by his colleague Edwin Starbuck (1931–
1996), and gives a clear approach to the subject as a whole.
James draws a contrast between the healthy-minded individual, not 
much given to spirituality, and the ‘sick soul’. It is the latter person, aware 
of the deeper side of life, often dissatisfied, full of angst, who is in need of 
change and so often one who experiences a transformation through 
religious experience. He discusses Tolstoy’s 
My Confession, 
in which the 
Russian author tells of his existential despair, which lasted for two years 
and was only overcome by the realization that he had to acknowledge 
God in order to make sense of life.
As ‘the fountain-head of Christian mysticism’, James cited Dionysius 
the Areopagite, whose apophatic approach to the absolute, assumes that 
nothing one can posit of it can be accurate, we can only say what it is not. 
Despite this, James concluded that mystical experience does point in the 
philosophical directions of optimism and monism, that all is well and 
one, leading to a state of reconciliation and unification.

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Religious and Spiritual Experience
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