Josiah Royce, William James, and the Social Renewal of the “Sick Soul”: Exploring the Communal Dimension of Religious Experience

Abstract

In The Sources of Religious Insight, Josiah Royce assesses William James’ pragmatic evaluation of exalted, private religious experience, advanced in The Varieties of Religious Experience as inadequate to encompass the full range of religious experience. Among other contributions, Royce adds social and communal experience to James’ individualistic appraisal. Rather than tacking on to the familiar contemporary critical conversation about the Jamesian restriction to private experience, I argue that James and Royce are helpfully brought together through an understanding of religious conversion: James’ foundational predicament of the “sick soul” returned to health through religious conversion gains depth and coherence through the attention Royce gives to overcoming alienation through communal participation. In our time of dislocation and self-preoccupation, drawing together these two seminal models of religious experience provides an instructive account of the individual’s transformation by way of communal renewal.

1. Introduction

In consideration of the religious philosophy of the early American Pragmatists, William James and Josiah Royce might easily be deemed proponents of incommensurably antithetical approaches to religious experience. James’ famous 1901–1902 Gifford lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, launch a pragmatic evaluation of religious experience centered on private, subjective states. Therein, he offers his broad working definition of religion as, “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” (James 1982, p. 31). As he develops his phenomenological evaluation of religious experience in the effort to achieve an expansive, reconciling understanding of religion, he trains his sights on the spiritual rebirth of the angst-filled “sick soul,” as well as the mystical states of consciousness of the extraordinary religious subject.1

Whereas James is often understood as laying a roadmap for the private spiritual journey, in the places where Royce’s name endures, he is best known for social emphases, namely for his stress upon the value of concrete loyalty to particular communities and for the notion of transcendent loyalty to loyalty itself and to “the beloved community.” Royce’s most famous work, The Problem of Christianity, takes the shared spiritual life and horizon of the Pauline community as the dominant matrix for his understanding of Christianity in its origins and in its expression at the turn of the 20th century.2

Although William James and Josiah Royce may seem to embody polar opposite philosophical principles—and, indeed, values—the tightest focus upon the two thinkers reveals them to be as inseparable as they are opposed—carrying on like brothers at the family table, betraying a certain ineluctable loving regard even as their relentlessly sharp exchanges make others nervous. Their differences are indeed major, like brothers of different persuasions: whereas Royce ultimately stands as a religious philosopher whose ideas resonate with multiple Christian traditions, James is more the philosopher of religion whose personal version of pragmatism does not necessitate a recognizably Christian God.3 However, the properly weighted James–Royce story must attend equally to their intimacy—intellectual and personal—as to their disagreement.4 When we fall into a glib dichotomization between the two, considering Royce as the communitarian and James as the individualist, we can remember the words of James inscribed in the lobby of the William James Building at Harvard, which could equally have been Royce’s: “The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.”5

In the field of their public thought, perhaps nowhere is a deep relationship more evident than in Josiah Royce’s The Sources of Religious Insight (Royce 2001b). Even as Royce disputes the conclusions of James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, embarking on a two-part focused examination of religious experience that would include his more famous The Problem of Christianity, he does not hesitate to build on foundations supplied by James.6 In Sources, Royce starts with James’ familiar notion of individual religious experience as the platform for the six additional sources of insight he proceeds to explain.7 He also echoes James in starting from the experiential predicament of the individual, which James characterizes as the “sick soul’s” journey to religious conversion (James 1982, pp. 127–212). For Royce, the human being’s religious insight arises out of the felt need for salvation; the needy, questing person advances by adding level of insight to subsequent level, as the individual’s need proves, at each stage, partially yet incompletely addressed through a relationship to a certain mode of experience. Though Royce may end up with a radically divergent vision from James, he arrives there not only through critical distancing but also through constructive engagement with James’ thought.

In this article, I attend especially to the constructive side of the relationship, examining the compatibility of their respective analyses of religious conversion. I explore this territory through Royce’s understanding of the social renewal of the human being in the second chapter of Sources. Royce offers two key insights into social renewal: first, social isolation (either perceived or enacted) constitutes a fundamental mode of negative religious experience; second, social alienation can only be overcome through restoration to the social body. Although in Sources, Royce does not explicitly address James’ model of conversion from Varieties, James’ account stands as a major influence. As I demonstrate, through the application of Royce’s two leading insights, James’ guiding predicament of the “sick soul” finds a new footing; the Jamesian story of conversion need not lose its heuristic power but rather gains a social–communal dimension. I argue that just as Royce’s notion of social experience constitutes a necessary supplement to Jamesian individual experience, so, too, does the experience of the renewal of the self through social healing constitute an essential dimension of conversion. Although significant differences between these two thinkers remain, joining their two models not only provides an instructive account of the social mediation of religious conversion but also of the renewal of the social horizon, leading to a newfound communal orientation.8

In what follows, I begin with a look at the conversation between James and Royce, which provides an essential background for understanding their shared and conflicting positions in their respective lecture series on religious experience. This context frames my assessment of how both Royce and James begin with individual experience, as well as how Royce develops the transition from individual to social experience in Sources. I point out how their accounts demonstrate a shared set of foundational concerns, even as Royce establishes his disagreement with James’ limitation to individual experience. Next, I compare the key elements of James’ account of the religious conversion of the “sick soul” in Varieties with Royce’s own experiential Ideal–Need–Deliver model in Sources. I argue that they mirror one another on the phenomenological level. In Part Two, I consider the social renewal of the previously alienated person described in Sources. I demonstrate how Royce’s insights regarding social conversion correspond to James’ criteria of conversion. Finally, I evaluate the expanded understanding of conversion that emerges from applying Royce’s insights into the social mediation of conversion to James’ personal accounts in Varieties. A picture of the “social renewal of the sick soul” emerges, possessing the strength of James’ still-remarkable portrait of personal conversion and Royce’s signature illumination of social transformation.

2. Methodology

I examine religious experience along the lines of the empirical, phenomenological, and pragmatic methodology first advanced by William James in Varieties. First-hand reports of experiences deemed to include a relationship with the divine are probed for their common patterns and components, and these experiences are evaluated according to their practical effects.9

However, like Royce, I consider this experience as part of a developing process, including various forms of human knowing, relating, and acting. By overcoming the Jamesian restriction to private, direct, and spontaneous encounters with the divine, the method adopted also steers clear of tacitly endorsing several of the questionable presuppositions and conclusions of James’ project. Among the consequences, the Jamesian suggestion of an identifiable common core of mystical experience across religions softens into the Roycean validation of a common religious need for salvation, variously expressed; the Jamesian tendency to preclude theological reflection as invariably second-order gives way to the Roycean search for understanding that entails growth through discursive reflection on religious realities; and James’ inattention to social and communal forms of mediation yields to Royce’s insight that the salvation of one bears upon the salvation of all. In probing Royce’s implicit understanding of conversion in Sources alongside James’ foundational work in Varieties, I intend not only to affirm Royce’s more inclusive framework but also to demonstrate why such an approach proves valuable for the particular question of conversion.

Satisfactory definitions of religious experience are notoriously difficult to formulate; James and Royce, aware of the potential for complicating and confusing their projects, both opt for purposefully broad working definitions. I, too, want to refrain from giving an over-precise definition. Similar to Royce, I focus on the modes of experience that offer insight into religious realities—that is, insight into realities that meet the individual’s sense of the need for salvation. This focus entails stretching the range of experience explored well beyond the “raw, preconceptual perceptions” implied by versions of strict scientific empiricism. Also, as compared with the tradition inaugurated by Schleiermacher that identifies religious experience with direct spiritual intuition, this approach offers a socially, historically, and linguistically mediated view of religious experience (see Schleiermacher 1996).

3. Part One: Individual Experience in Varieties and Sources

3.1. Background and Respective Evaluations of Individual Experience

The Sources of Religious Experience represents Josiah Royce’s continuation of his long-standing philosophical debate with William James.10 James had turned their conversation in a religious direction with his Gifford lectures, pitting his pluralistic metaphysics against Roycean idealism in the arena of religious experience. James acknowledged that he had Royce in mind from the beginning of the composition, intending to strike a lasting blow to Royce’s monistic metaphysics, though he confessed he could not pull off the full confrontation he initially imagined (see Clendenning 1999, p. 268). The division between Royce’s idealism and James’ pluralism had, at this point, long been clear, although Royce’s significant philosophical developments through his study of the logic of Charles Sanders Peirce would render him something of a moving target.11

Sources, originally delivered as the Boss Lectures in Illinois in November 1911 (a decade after Varieties and less than a year after James’ death in August 1910), picks up the thread during an especially intense period of Royce’s ongoing philosophical evolution.12 Royce gave an indication of his aspirations in a speech delivered months before the Boss Lectures, entitled “William James and the Philosophy of Life.”13 After praising Varieties for its intrepid spirit, he diverges from James:

I do not believe James’ resulting philosophy of religion to be adequate. For as it stands it is indeed chaotic. But I am sure that it can only be amended by taking it up into a larger view, and not by rejecting it. The spirit triumphs, not by destroying the chaos that James describes, but by brooding upon the face of the deep until the light comes, and with light, order.14

In Sources, Royce pursues this effort to build on Varieties rather than to dismantle the work. Not only does he ground his sources of insight upon individual experience, but he adopts several features of James’ method. Similar to James in Varieties, when Royce sets out to define religion, he offers a broad, deliberately non-polemical, and subject-centered definition, focusing his evaluation of religion on “the postulate that man needs to be saved.” (Royce 2001b, pp. 8–9). And, like James, he addresses the question from the standpoint of experiential bases rather than from creeds, dogmas, or theological systems.15

In the opening chapter of Sources, Royce is equally clear on two points: one, that he considers individual experience a valid starting point for inquiry; two, that he disputes James’ restriction to individual experience. He states the following:

Now James’ whole view of religious experience differs in many ways from mine. But just at the present point in our inquiry, where it is a question of what I should call the most elementary and intimate, but also the crudest and most capricious source of religious insight, namely, the “experience of the individual alone with the divine,” I feel my own account to be most dependent upon that of James and my own position to be most nearly in agreement with his.

(Royce 2001b, p. 27)

Royce takes as he gives. Compressed beside Royce’s assurance of this close agreement is his expression that this agreement extends no further than “the crudest and most capricious” source of insight. Though James’ sole efficacious source of religious experience marks, for Royce, the indispensable front door to religious truth, it cannot, for him, be the only door. He is responsive here to James’ severe judgment upon socially mediated religious experience, which James took to be a poor substitute for private encounters with the divine. For James, the general life of churches depends second-hand on the original and authentic genius of mystically gifted individuals.16 Ranged beside the mystics’ vivid and powerful personal encounters, the social field can only be rendered in monochrome. Royce argues, contrariwise, that it is not social but individual experience that lacks adequacy and finality; the personal encounter with the divine does not fulfill the need for salvation, because each person is connected with their fellow human beings. The final goal of salvation depends upon the common realization of a unity of spirit and purpose.17

In articulating the transition between individual and social experience, Royce does not yet unfold the full significance of social experience: communal experience’s role as an organizing principle becomes more obvious as he develops his argument in Sources. He ultimately holds that a communal reality undergirds the advances within individual understanding, even if understanding is arrived at prior to communal participation or social mediation. But to arrive at this insight, one has to continue to Royce’s seventh lecture, “The Unity of the Spirit and the Invisible Church.” As he explains here, a foundational unity of spirit, which is recognized through the loyalty of the individual, weaves the path forward through the seven sources of religious experience. This unity of spirit constitutes what Royce calls “the spirit of the invisible church.”18 Fittingly, at the close of Sources, Royce states, “The sources of insights are themselves the working of its [the invisible church’s] spirit in our spirits.” (Royce 2001b, p. 297). The higher spirit leads the individual spirit’s various passages in the movement towards salvation.19 Thus, individual experience may suitably direct the course, but only through the intimation of the awareness of the inherent poverty of the individual; the insight into the spiritual community crowns the process, just as the spirit of the community saves.

3.2. The Shared Ground of the Phenomenological Account

Although Royce qualifies his dependence on James in the area in which he grants James’ influence, he may, in fact, stand closest to James where he does not give attribution. What we might call the narrative structure of Sources, grounded upon the presumed religious journey of a kind of unobtrusive implicit subject, mirrors, in striking ways, the “sick soul’s” more dramatic journey of conversion in Varieties, Lectures VI–IX. This structural isomorphism provides a foundation for the reconciliation of James’ account of the sick soul’s conversion and Royce’s attention to the social dimension of conversion.

William James’ “sick soul” is an archetypal figure introduced in Lecture VI of Varieties, whose journey from melancholy towards peace characterizes the path of religious conversion. The sick soul is plagued by the awareness of tragedy, injustice, irresolution, disharmony, failure, and the inevitability of death that impact every existence. The soul’s consciousness of these realities produces an unshakeable feeling of gloom.20 James describes the sick soul not merely to identify a psychological specimen, but to persuade his audience of this psychological type’s abundant insight.21 He argues that in comparison with the constitutionally upbeat person’s reflexive optimism, which blithely steers around sorrow’s gravitational field, this darker vantage point provides a more profound and accurate reading of life.

In James’ telling, as the conviction of hopelessness on the natural plane of life grows, the “sick soul”, who cannot contentedly abide, gives way to the “divided self”, who cries out for transformation. The divided self glimpses the possibility of escape from their tortured condition but cannot shake their unhappy condition. James suggests that the sole lasting solution for this world-weary condition is rebirth into a new life; the situation cannot be remedied except through a radical reorientation of consciousness.22 St. Augustine of Hippo supplies the consummate example of the person who strains for a fresh way forward—seeking divine regeneration while still caught in a life ordered toward natural gratification, wavering between former habits of desiring and the embrace of a new way of being (James 1982, pp. 172–73).

For Augustine, as for the many subjects whose stories James catalogs, conversion lies on the other side of the successfully navigated conflict. The vital breakthrough occasions the “transformation of the habitual center of personal energy.” (James 1982, p. 196). James understands this process as the replacement of one center of conscious dynamism for another; for Augustine, for instance, the desire for God stably gains the upper hand over the attachment to lust, just as for several of the subjects of James’ first-person accounts, inclinations to prayer and worship take the place of the attraction to spending nights at the bar and other profligacies. Conversion grants a stable state of assurance, characterized by three predominant features: affective peace, the perception of truths not known before, and the appearance of newness and beauty (James 1982, pp. 248–49). The transformation may be well signaled by these three components; taken holistically, it constitutes a renewal of the existential horizon. As James writes, “The process [of overcoming melancholy] is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.” (James 1982, p. 157).

James not only gives this phenomenological portrait but he also introduces a “scientific” explanation of conversion as mediated by the subconscious mind—an explanation from which Royce seeks to distance himself.23 Royce wishes to offer his account of individual experience apart from James—as he puts it, “in my own way, and as independently of James’ special theories as possible.” (Royce 2001b, p. 28). At several points, and with evident sharpness, Royce states his disagreement with James’ explanation of religious experience as an upwelling from the subconscious (see Royce 2001b, pp. 47–48, 63). Royce thinks that James’ explanation is both too elaborate and too quick to bypass the universal experience of the need for salvation. He sets out their respective differences as follows:

For James, our sense of religious need is an experience which mysteriously wells up from the subliminal self, from the soundless depths of our own subconsciousness. James, therefore, conceives it probable that, through the subliminal or subconscious self, we are actually aroused to religious interest by spiritual beings whose level is higher than our own, and whose will, expressed to us through the vague but often intense sense of need which the religiously minded feel, does set for us an ideal task which is of greater worth than our natural desires, and which, when we can get into harmony with those powers through the aid of their subliminal influences, does give a new sense to life. Now, in contrast to such views regarding the origin of that deeper sense of need which is indeed the beginning of religion, I have to insist that the basis of the religious interest is something much less mysterious than James’ supposed workings of the “higher powers” through our subliminal selves and is also something much more universally human than is the opportunity to come under the influence of any one revelation.

(Royce 2001b, pp. 47–48)

Royce takes his approach as the more satisfactory in its appeal to commonsense—relevant, he says sarcastically, for “men who have had no such sudden uprushes from their own subconscious natures as James’ ‘religious geniuses’ have reported.” (Royce 2001b, p. 48). He grounds his own account of the opening to religious experience on what he calls the “religious paradox”: the weak, ignorant, and fallible human being hopes for and depends on precisely the kind of divine knowledge that seems impossible to attain by one’s own lights (Royce 2001b, pp. 23–25). How, for this poor creature, asks Royce, is religious insight possible? (Royce 2001b, pp. 24–25). Religious experience emerges in the tension of the paradox: the human being understands, in some measure, their ideal good and recognizes their failure to attain this good, which leads to the longing for or communion with the power that grants deliverance. Individual experience reveals these three interrelated components: the Ideal, the Need, and the Deliverer (Royce 2001b, pp. 28–29). For evidence, Royce points generally to James’ subjects profiled in the Varieties and he asks his listeners to probe their own experience.

That being said, it appears that Royce’s way of articulating his disagreement with James, as well as the novelty of his own view, belies the affinities between the two. A sympathetic reading of Varieties reveals interior correspondences that Royce does not draw out. Now, James does not always operate in a way that makes the “sympathetic reading” entirely evident. In what follows, I separate out two kinds of accounts in James. I claim that James’ phenomenological account does not depend on his theory of the subconscious mediation of religious experience. I clarify this structural independence where James and Royce do not. First of all, it is not clear that Royce’s commonsense account of religious experience departs from James’ view in the precise way that he states. When he says, “I have to insist that the basis of the religious interest is something much less mysterious than James’ supposed workings of the ‘higher powers’ through our subliminal selves,” he focuses only on one side of James’ account and understates the nuances that emerge in his own (Royce 2001b, p. 48, emphasis added).

Let us evaluate “the basis of religious interest” for each philosopher, taken as a whole. A complete Jamesian account includes both of the following elements: first, from the phenomenological angle, the sense of sickness of soul and the perception of its resolution; second, from the level of his “scientific” (or metaphysical) explanation of the subconscious, the mediation of an unseen power through the subliminal self. On the phenomenological side, the basis of religious interest might be accurately stated as “the existential alienation of the individual.” This level would be appropriately compared with Royce’s formulation of the existential predicament, the model of the individual’s Ideal, Need, and Deliverance. If, in his metaphysical hypothesis, James also conceives the basis of religious experience as the action of the higher power acting through the subconscious, he does not accordingly deny the validity of the phenomenological standpoint. From the first phenomenological level, James’ approach is just as appealing to commonsense as Royce’s; just as the experience of falling short of an ideal and recognizing the need for a greater source of help might be broadly convincing, so, too, the sense of being “out of joint” and powerless to reset oneself strikes a chord in ordinary experience.

Moreover, Royce’s final account does not merely settle at the Ideal–Need–Deliverer paradigm; a deeper reading reveals that he, too, offers a further metaphysical level of understanding. Both Royce and James conclude their works with their own respective metaphysical postulates regarding religious experience. For James, the subconscious mediates the deeper, unseen realm that he supposes to be the fecund ground at the root of religious transformation; for Royce, it is the deeper-lying spirit that drives the process of religious insight. As we have seen, Royce considers the sources of insight to be the manifestations of the working of the spirit of the invisible church in the spirits of the individual religious person (Royce 2001b, p. 297).

Now, Royce’s “spirit of the invisible church” in its manifold modes of action may be judged the superior explanation compared with James’ unseen power acting through the individual subconscious, but that does not change the structural equivalence between his argument and James’.24 Each includes both a metaphysical and a phenomenological (or existential) dimension.25 The metaphysical dimension provides a hypothesis explaining the experience of conversion according to a metaphysical, theological, scientific, or quasi-scientific model—or some blend of them. From the metaphysical perspective, James posits the working of the unseen through the subconscious, while Royce has the universal spirit acting as the taproot of each of the other sources of insight. From the phenomenological side, James proposes the experience of alienation and of conversion, while Royce proffers the experience of failure, need, and salvation. His suggestion of a deeper contrast with James, then, depends upon an equivocal usage of “the basis of religious interest”—taking his own phenomenological basis to demonstrate his proposed way’s accessibility and James’ metaphysical basis as evidence for James’ esotericism.

On the phenomenological level, Royce carries forward the Jamesian archetypal story, though with less embellishment: Royce also imagines the divided self who struggles for harmony and self-control and yet remains incapable of attaining this result on his or her own strength (Royce 2001b, p. 31). The individual need for a form of experience that transcends the powers of the individual—for contact with a source of strength greater than oneself—stands as the leading insight on the path to salvation.26 Echoing James even down to his favored terms, Royce writes, “Unless you have inwardly felt the need for salvation, and have learned to hunger and thirst after spiritual unity and self-possession, all the rest of religious insight is to you a sealed book.” (Royce 2001b, p. 33, emphasis added). Royce takes James’ phenomenological path when he follows the individual sense of spiritual poverty, interior conflict, and human failure up to the threshold of religious experience—and then into its depths. Once their phenomenological compatibilities are foregrounded, we can better evaluate how Royce’s understanding of social experience coheres with many of James’ principal insights regarding conversion.

4. Part Two: From Individual Experience to Social Experience

4.1. Royce’s Notion of Social Religious Experience

Royce’s notion of social religious experience builds on this common phenomenological picture of conversion. The tight kinship between Royce and James might be too easily overlooked by the reader of the portion of Sources, wherein Royce argues for “the social” as a source of religious experience, especially considering that Royce repeatedly returns to the criticism of James’ restriction to individual experience (see, especially, Royce 2001b, pp. 65–75). As Royce transitions from the explication of the individual to the social source of religious experience, he emphasizes a predicament of his own, albeit with a Jamesian ring: the social alienation of the individual wracked by guilt.27 He points out that remorse is not always felt in relation to God but can manifest as the sense of being an outcast standing out beyond human sympathy and community. As he argues through examples of the literary expression of the overcoming of loneliness in Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, the reconciliation of the self-isolating person requires not only a divine but also a social operation. To heal the experience of the loss of fellowship, only the return to fellowship suffices as a cure. And even when guilt and alienation do not set the course, positive social experience points to the transcendent, whether through the glimmers of the divine in the face of one’s beloved, the intimacy of friendship, or the love awakened through patriotic fervor. Despite the ongoing struggles, tensions, dissatisfactions, and injustices of the social world, a “way upward” becomes apparent (Royce 2001b, p. 75).

Royce’s account of social renewal does not explicitly take up the language of conversion, although conversion must be considered the process to which he attends. Royce refers to the “salvation” of Sonia and the Mariner (Royce 2001b, p. 71). “Salvation”, for him, is already something of an adjusted term; he urges his audience to extend the notion of salvation beyond the Christian understanding of salvation. As he writes, “Be willing, then, to generalize our term and to dissociate the idea of salvation from some of the settings in which you have usually conceived it. Since there is thus far in our discussion no question as to whose view of the way of salvation is the true view, you can only gain by such a dissociation, even if it be but a temporary effort at generalization.” Neither does he intend the term in any kind of formal doctrinal sense; rather, the accent is placed on intentional, subjective experience. The idea of salvation emerges from the human predicament of need already discussed: the individual’s awareness of an endangered end or ideal of human life that the individual fails to secure by their own powers. “Salvation”, then, stands for the reconciliation or deliverance recognized by the individual through religious insight. The full dynamic would be accurately captured as “the process of conversion,” given Royce’s focus on the progressive transformation of human subjectivity.28

As with Royce’s characterization of the individual’s predicament, the social process of conversion Royce sketches through his literary examples accords well with the Jamesian description of conversion: the previously sick and disunified self overcomes an unhappy consciousness to operate henceforth from a new center of dynamic energy. The Mariner is healed of the anguished sense of being “alone on a wide, wide sea” and Raskolnikov of the guilt that makes him an outcast in his own eyes. They both find once more the joy of social communion of which they had despaired, just as James’ sick soul finds peace beyond existential dread. The social transformation, then, includes the essential criteria of James’ phenomenological definition of conversion: through contemplation of a fresh sense of belonging, the experience of an affective state of peace; through the goodness glimpsed via social mediation, the perception of truths previously unrecognized; and through the protagonists’ expression of esthetic elevation, the appearance of newness and beauty.

Accordingly, they stand on the new, stable platform that conversion delivers (cf. James 1982, p. 248). The journeys of Raskolnikov and the Mariner should not be reduced to merely social sagas of reintegration, for each is gifted with a sense of well-being transcendent of their condition prior to alienation. They are like the prodigal, whose horizon expands from an initial hope for reacceptance to the gift of a greater inheritance when his father tells him, “All that is mine is yours” (Lk. 15:31). As with the prodigal—and James’ sick soul, no less—no simple return to the former conditions of existence is possible in the crisis in which they find themselves. They not only move about in a state of existential exile; more to the point, they are wracked by the awareness that their previous way of being would bear no promise of relief. When the Mariner finds God amidst the company at the church and Raskolnikov learns love through Sonia, it is not the emergence of a contingent opportunity to experience fellowship and love that most enlivens and fortifies them but the reality that this opportunity discloses. Neither the Mariner’s potential future separation from the community nor Raskolnikov’s loss of Sonia would necessitate the regression to the initial situation of despair. James’ comment that conversion “does not mean reversion but redemption” applies to them. They experience the goodness of human love in its particularity, just as they understand this human love to be a sign of love transcendent of the people and the communities to which they are joined. Royce understands their form of experience in a sacramental sense when he points out that the social world functions as a “hint, or revelation, or incarnation of a divine process.” (Royce 2001b, p. 74). It is this hint that electrifies Raskolnikov and the Mariner. In their newfound joy, we see a sign of the resolution of the archetypal conversion story first told by James in Varieties.

4.2. Conversion: Social Mediation and Social Renewal

In the first part of the article, I argued that, considered from the phenomenological perspective, James and Royce offer similar accounts of the existential predicament at the heart of individual religious experience. Thus far in Part Two, I have maintained that Royce’s portrayal of social religious experience shares core features with James’ understanding of conversion in Varieties. Finally, I would like to point out the value of Royce’s vision of social transformation, considering how “the social renewal of the sick soul” provides an especially instructive model of conversion.

In paging through the conversion experiences James quotes in Varieties, it is quite striking to follow the role of actors besides the subject of conversion. They are largely marginalized. The assorted characters may be catalysts, but only inasmuch as they lead the central subject away from the outer world and into their own inner recesses. These unobtrusive others bookend the intense interior dialogues, illuminations, and visitations where the action happens. A preacher communicates his experience of spiritual healing to a crowd that contains an alcoholic, only to disappear from view as the alcoholic’s inner spiritual drama featuring the devil and Jesus takes center stage (James 1982, p. 203). A “young lady friend” sends along a book to a young man, Natural Law in the Spiritual World, that contains the words that trigger a lasting conversion; pains are taken to describe her as a mere occasion for what follows (James 1982, p. 222). A proselytizing friend runs an errand at a church office and leaves the central subject in the nave to wait for him; in a matter of minutes, the subject has a profound experience of the divine (James 1982, pp. 224–25). A crowd at a revival gathers around a man terrified by locutions and the mysterious sensation of being choked, but the man only notices the group after he comes to his senses (James 1982, p. 250). In each of these cases, the social element is not more than incidental; even the proselytizing friend is credited as serving as something of a taxi driver rather than as an evangelizer.

This highly peripheral activity of additional actors may arouse our suspicions. Of course, we could propose one obvious reason for the deliberate marginalization of others from the story: in a climate of religious skepticism, the converted subject wishes to be certain (in their own mind and in the eyes of others) of divine mediation; an experience of utter aloneness provides a stronger basis to explain the event as emerging exclusively from divine action. If we indeed doubt that the solitary form of conversion is as predominant as the testimonies might suggest, we can raise plenty of other potential factors of bias. We can certainly point out that James has selected which documents appear in Varieties, and it would be no surprise if he were to choose reports consistent with his preconceived notions of religious experience. We can consider the prejudices introduced by the journaling method or by the leading questions of researchers. We can even reflect on the influence of the canon of popular texts of religious conversion in shaping reports; several subjects present variations on the “take and read” experience that stands as Augustine’s turning point in Confessions (Augustine of Hippo 1997). These indications are worth pursuing.

To bring to light the role of social experience, alongside a gesture toward the factors of bias, we can entertain a way of seeing that is attentive to the inescapable ubiquity of social mediation in the unfolding process of conversion. Although in the examples James provides, social experience may be conspicuously absent at the moment of conversion, social mediation goes on in all of the stages leading up to the interior experience. Social mediation informs the personal appropriation of religious experience: not only a certain kind of exalted experience, but rather the effective guidance and assimilation of experience is necessary for conversion. Post-conversion as well, the social field is the arena in which the fruits of religious experience are realized through deeds of charity. These interactions, too, are religious sources, inasmuch as they establish contact with the divine. With a little imagination, the deliberately flattened marginal characters might be breathed into life. For instance, the young female friend, who sends a spiritual book after all, might just have been another kind of Sonia—opening the man’s mind to love and acceptance—except doing her work in ways not initially accepted by the person in question. The proselytizer may have served, to borrow Royce’s words, as a “hint of a divine process,” evincing the transcendent despite all his friend’s willful resistances to letting his love and friendship break in.

Recollect that the process of conversion is characterized by a push–pull dynamic: the divided self longs for but also resists acceptance and integration of the saving truth. Each story of conversion is the story of a person’s resistance to transformation eventually giving out or, to put the point in a more personalistic way, the story of the person being won over. In each conversion, there is always another story to be told from another perspective: the tale of the community’s guidance toward transformation. Take Augustine, whose solitary experience in the garden may be the summit of his conversion, but whose path to the garden has been paved by his mother Monica, by friends, and by bishops. As Augustine makes clear in his Confessions, we must not simply understand these assorted characters as notable for the explicit message they convey, as mere instruments of transmission of beliefs. Rather, as Augustine portrays them, they communicate God’s love in their very actions, in a kind of sacramental form: Monica in her remarkable fidelity to her son despite his hubris; Augustine’s dying friend in his inexplicable resolve to reject Augustine’s mockery of Christians; and Ambrose, who impresses Augustine as possessing a special, magnetic quality unfamiliar from his experience of secular orators.29 If retrospective vision paints their influence most glowingly, then this is to be expected: only the integrated self, possessed of a higher viewpoint, can see clearly what the divided self could not entirely acknowledge prior to conversion.

I present these examples not only to point out that social mediation is central to the process of conversion but also that Royce’s particular model of social alienation and social restoration threads through stories about conversion, whether for Augustine or for the subjects from James’ reports. As Royce indicates in his description of Raskolnikov’s guilt and the Mariner’s estrangement, in the experiential predicament, the individual’s sense of separation from community need not be established through the community’s formal exclusion. There is something particularly modern in Royce’s analysis. The subject constitutes the center of gravity of judgment.

Compare this with an ancient or classical situation. In premodern times, exclusion or punishment from the Catholic Church marks a kind of primordial type of separation; the penitent or the exile who endures the painful expulsion from the ecclesial community is understood not only to stand outside the bounds of the community but also to have compromised (or potentially compromised) their salvation, at least in principle. The paradigmatic premodern perspective emphasizes objective, formal, and institutionally mediated judgments, which come to land upon the individual. However, the paradigmatic modern situation (and the postmodern too) is connected to what Charles Taylor calls an “expressivist” culture and sense of self. In an expressivist understanding, writes Taylor, “the moral or spiritual order of things must come to us indexed to a personal vision.” (Taylor 1989, p. 428). Formal structures of belonging do not become irrelevant, but, even in cases of formal exclusion or marginalization, the individual’s perceptions of group belonging and fulfillment take center stage. When the stress falls on the feelings and judgments of the individual, the sense of rupture, distance, and estrangement may indeed be entirely subjective; one may formally belong to a given community and still feel oneself to be alien to its life, and this feeling is what counts.

In an expressivist age, the individual’s assessment of the religious community takes on greater weight. As long as the community’s promise of mediating salvation, of bringing the individual into intimacy with the divine, seems to go unfulfilled in the individual’s eyes, then the community’s efficaciousness and value come into question. The individual is, in a way, interiorly empowered vis-à-vis the community. However, this power of judgment does not resolve the individual’s problems: as we see with the Mariner, the felt disconnection from the community remains a burden. The individual is thrown back on oneself; not only doubt but also guilt and angst trouble the person.

James’ sick soul is no less prototypical than the Mariner. When the sick soul cries out for help, the soul calls for relief from the disease no community has been able to cure; lost as an individual, he or she is also lost from the community. No community has delivered the foundational support the soul longs for; no community has stably mediated the saving power that later floods in at the moment of conversion. Now, the sting of the condition is double, redounding upon the community. Not only is the individual estranged: the sense of alienation includes the particularly modern perception of the meaninglessness of the community’s forms of existence. The individual may ask whether his or her perception is accurate, but even reserve in judgment does not take away the sense that the community fails to bear life. In this modern expressivist situation, the renewal of the individual’s relationship with the community must be seen as distinct from the classical picture. From the perspective of the individual, the community, too, comes back to life. Transformation is not just about the redemption of the individual but about the redemption of the community in the individual’s eyes.

Keeping with such an outlook, the archetypal Jamesian story of sickness–division–integration can be grasped on the level of the renewal of the individual’s orientation to common life. Contrary to James’ presentation, the various conversion tales show through as stories of social reintegration. The young man not only has a new basis for a strengthened relationship with the young woman who sent him the book, but also a basis for a relationship with his father, in whose rectory he sits on the night of the conversion. Since his father represents the church, he also represents the potential for reintegration into the larger body. The friend of the proselytizer has for himself a ready-made companion and likely a spiritual community to walk into, besides. The healed alcoholic possesses the bond of rebirth in Christ with the others who have been transformed by the same means, and he meets his company straightaway in the room where his heart changes; likewise, the revival attendee opens his eyes surrounded by new friends of a sort.

Thus, by incorporating Royce’s social dimension of conversion, James’ account becomes more adequate. From the social standpoint, let us review again James’ criteria of conversion: the affective state of peace or assurance settles not as an absolute individual novelty but as an assurance all the more powerful for the intimations of its reach; it is an assurance that others, too, have felt. To recognize this assurance is to be brought into union with those who also testify to it. Such a claim does not need to be metaphysically furnished; revival meetings provide sufficient evidence. So, too, the insight into truth—even a truth gained in solitude—fashions social bonds. The young man takes up his father’s Christian faith, and the friend of the proselytizer understands for himself what the man has been driving after. And as regards the third criterion, the appearance of newness and beauty, not only the natural world but also people are washed clean.30 Authentic relationship once again becomes possible. As the process of conversion is socially mediated, so are the fruits of conversion social. According to the modern perspective, the most notable realities of social disconnection are the individual’s feeling of being adrift and the community’s impotence in the individual’s eyes. Correspondingly, conversion brings about the individual’s sense of having a place to stand in a communal life that mediates meaning. The Jamesian notion of interior, spiritual “homecoming” is concretized. The social renewal of the individual culminates with the renewal of the social horizon.

5. Conclusions

To review the reconciliation of these two schemes of conversion: William James’ experiential predicament of the sick soul in Varieties represents a structural model and existential horizon that is evident also in Josiah Royce’s characterization of the path to salvation in Sources. While Royce may question James’ speculations on the role of the subconscious as the conduit to the unseen realm, on the phenomenological level, his Ideal–Need–Deliverer triad follows the essential trajectory of James’ conversion of the sick soul. And for James’ part, while he ignores the social mediation of conversion, the reports he analyzes and the criteria of conversion he supplies can be most amply understood through the action of social factors on the individual. Finally, close attention to Varieties and Sources reveals that not only is religious conversion socially mediated, but conversion also achieves the renewal of the social horizon.

The second, revisionist way of reading James’ phenomenology of conversion—that is, by drawing out the presence of social experience as religiously revelatory—would likely be underwritten by Royce. Not only did Royce long consider James’ limitation to individual experience to be mistaken, but he also took religious experience to be best most adequately understood socially. His follow-up work to Sources, The Problem of Christianity, offers an exploration of social experience in the Christian religion, concentrating specifically on the experience of the Pauline Church (Royce 2001a, p. 40). In Problem, he explicitly develops a social metaphysics based on triadic relationships.31 As he fleshes out the relationship between the individual and the social realm, he proposes that reality includes two levels: the level of the individual and the level of the community. This two-plane paradigm may very well offer the best Roycean interpretation of William James’ account of the conversion of the sick soul. Read strictly on the plane of the individual’s experience of transformation, James’ archetypal story from Varieties remains instructive. However, the most comprehensive account requires the introduction of the communal plane of reality. From this standpoint, James’ narrative would gain a wholeness lacking in his presentation in Varieties. Such an account would be enhanced descriptively in some of the ways I have suggested, as well as philosophically, through a metaphysical appraisal of social experience.32

In the last analysis, the kinship between Royce and James falters at precisely this social–communal site. We can point out how James’ phenomenological approach to religious experience bears a strong resemblance to Royce’s course in Sources. We can demonstrate the affinities between the “sick soul” narrative and the Ideal–Need–Deliverer paradigm. We can also understand the identity of hope between the two men—how the two were inspired by intentions to overcome Christian sectarianism and to find common religious ground through an awareness of shared needs, goals, and struggles. But Josiah Royce’s social metaphysics and his closely connected ethics of loyalty finally separates the two thinkers. One gets the sense that, even after James’ death, Royce’s greatest intellectual effort was expended in persuading his friend to come over to his point of view. To us, too, Royce makes an appeal—especially if, like James, we have accustomed ourselves to concentrating on individual experience. Royce would say that whenever we inquire, a second level—more profound than the first—awaits our attention. Our inquiry into religious conversion stands to benefit from his insight.