In his intellectual biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert Richardson never defines modernism, and never addresses the reasons for its turbulence in America. But he does present the maelstrom through his subject, showing how James helped drive the modernist sensibility he inhabited—a whirlwind of creativity and intellectual passion “whose leading ideas,” to quote Richardson, “are still so fresh and challenging that they are not yet fully assimilated by the modern world they helped to bring about.” Presenting James as an intellectual activity, Richardson focuses on bringing the emotional background of that activity into view, chronicling James's intellectual history as splashes from a turbulent stream of consciousness. The book's dedication to Annie Dillard next to the book's epigraph from James reveals Richardson's respect for the volatility both writers represented. The dedication is: “For Annie, who wrote, ‘we have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, missile, and wild,’” followed by the epigraph from James testifying that, “[life] feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”

Building on Richardson's undeveloped insight into James's similarity to an artist, I argue that James's work on religion can be understood in relation to other modernist works of art, suggesting that James's estheticism offers a fresh way of thinking about the early development of religious studies. I define modernism as an esthetic style that incorporates otherwise misfitting elements in a unified composition, relying forthrightly on the composer's subjectivity as the unifying ingredient. In the subsequent development of post-modernism, by contrast, the composer's subjectivity is more matrix than ingredient, apparently enveloping everything, including the past and the subjectivities of recipients, as in the photographs of Cindy Sherman. The display of subjectivity in modernism and post-modernism sets work in those styles apart from classic art, where the composer's subjectivity is hidden and conflict is resolved through other forces within the work, like the chorus and deus ex machina in Greek drama. Subjectivity is also hidden in neo-classic works of enlightenment artists like Mozart, Racine, and Christopher Wren, which present themselves as formal displays of natural order, while romantic works by Chopin, Goethe and Emerson display the authors' subjectivities as doorways to timeless truths. To take the epigraph from James in Richardson's book as an illustration of James's modernist technique, which departs from romanticism in its play with irresolution, James offers his own subjectivity as the unifying ingredient of otherwise discordant elements, writing that “something really wild” needs redeeming. Not taming. That which needs redeeming is not sin—with its implication of evil—but “something really wild.” Using subjectivity to bring wildness and redemption into relationship, James writes that “it feels like a real fight” and that “our idealities . . . are needed”—in league with his.

In his biography of James, Richardson refers twice to the claim of James's son Henry that his father was “one half an artist.” According to son Henry, James's “imagination played over and around everything that held his attention. [A] penumbra of feeling always enveloped his thought. An idea might give him a pain in the thorax.”Footnote ⁸⁵ But Richardson does not go far enough in emphasizing James's artistic drive, though he does acknowledge James's early desire to be a painter. Richardson skates over the intellectual contest provoked by James's declaration that “Art is my vocation,” telling us only that, “Henry Senior despised painters, and had brought the family to Europe the year before precisely to discourage William's growing interest in art.” Although Europe would not be every American father's idea of where to take his family to get away from art, what Willy really wanted was not to study science in Bonn but rather to return to Newport to resume his painting lessons with William Morris Hunt. At home in New York City, brother Henry (called Harry) remembered, Willy “drawing and drawing, always drawing, . . . his head dropped from side to side, and his tongue rubbing his lower lip.”Footnote ⁸⁶

James abruptly quit painting in April 1861, at age nineteen, the same month as the bombardment of Ft. Sumter. Concluding that painting must have seemed “inadequate” at such a time of crisis, Richardson never considers James's melancholy in relation to the pressures exerted by Henry Senior to pry him away from art, nor does he consider James's ebullience later in life as a result of the stimulation involved in taking science on as an esthete. Thus for example, instead of following through on son Henry's observation that his father attended to things that fed his artistic imagination, Richardson interprets James's dabbling in paranormal activities as a lapse in scientific judgment, which he excuses as the result of James's living in a bygone era when many intellectuals took such things seriously. Acknowledging that James visited Leonora Piper “a dozen times” during the winter of 1885–86 for psychic readings, subjected several of his students at Harvard to experiments in “mesmerizing” that March, and pursued rumors in June about haunted houses on Beacon Hill, Richardson treats these weird investigations as counterweights to the scientific reductionism James resisted.

But in arguing that James attempted to find a “middle ground” on the subject of psychical research, and that the quest for such middle ground reflected James's commitment to science, Richardson accepts a specious understanding of scientific objectivity as the balance between opposing points of view. Richardson follows James in confusing scientific objectivity with James's esthetic impulse, which unlike science had everything to do with balancing opposition. The conclusion that resulted from James's investigation of paranormal activity was not verifiable or quantifiable, but more like a seascape sketched by J. W. Turner in the center of an ornate gilt frame. “I have hitherto felt,” Richardson wrote quoting James, “as if the wondermongers and magnetic physicans and seventh sons of seventh daughters and those who gravitated toward them were a sort of intellectual vermin. I now begin to believe that that type of mind takes hold of a range of truths to which the other kind is stone blind. The consequence is that I am all at sea, with my old compass lost, and no new one, and the stars invisible through the fog.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Seeing James as an artist who experimented with scientific, pseudoscientific, and religious ideas, and felt free to bounce them around promiscuously, clears up some of the difficulties, and explains some of the frustrations, readers have had in interpreting James. James's friend Borden Parker Bowne vented his frustration with James by pointing out how much James depended on word pictures to gloss over the philosophical inconsistency of his ideas. Thus when James pictured the internal activity of the self as a stream of consciousness, Bowne thought James had not accounted for anything like a self, but simply deployed stream of consciousness as a charming image to disguise the fact that his theory of the self yielded nothing but fragments of consciousness. James recounted Bowne's impatience in the concluding chapter of Varieties of Religious Experience: “We get a beautiful picture of an express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I have heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?” James answered that, because “individuality is founded in feeling,” its relation to objective reality could only be rendered impressionistically; “the recesses of feeling,” James wrote, “the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Varieties of Religious Experience is the most popular and influential of James's writings, and the work that has suffered the most from being interpreted as an attempt at scientific theory. Needless to say, James contributed to this misreading, taking himself more seriously as a scientist than we should. At least two other factors contribute to the confusion as well. First is the difference between what science means today and what it meant at turn-of-the-century Harvard, where physiology and philosophy were treated as overlapping disciplines and where James was a pioneer in the new discipline of psychology, having originally been hired to teach physiology. Today, as every psychology major required to read Varieties in a religion class will tell you, James's enthusiasm for empirical study is almost ridiculously subjective and impressionistic, and bears little resemblance the hyper-vigilant pursuit of unbiased evidence characteristic of academic psychology today.

A second factor in the confusion over Varieties as a scientific work is James's strategic effort to confuse subjectivity with empiricism. James deliberately supplanted physiological theories about religious experience with subjective accounts, which he presented as empirical evidence of what he called “quasi-sensible realities directly apprehended.” He cast physiological theories aside not after weighing the best evidence for them but by rendering them preposterous from the outset. Thus he dismissed “medical materialism” because it “finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex,” and because it reduced the religious sensibilities of George Fox to “a symptom of a disordered colon” and those of Thomas Carlyle to “a gastro-duodenal catarrh.” These parodies of scientific materialism cleared the way for the main thing Varieties would feature, namely, “the real presence” of “objects” of religious belief.Footnote ⁸⁹

While James presented Varieties as a work of empirical investigation passing as science, he subverted the procedures associated with science through parody and through collections of personal testimonies to “real presence.” Whatever James thought he was doing in Varieties, its masquerade as a work of science can be appreciated as a means of evoking “real presence.” Similar to Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress with respect to its grand narrative about the soul's quest for redemption, James's Varieties also stands apart from these works by virtue of its pretentious appeal to science. This appeal to two different levels of reality at once is characteristic of its modernist style, as is its coherent depiction of irresolution and doubt, and its balanced composition out of disparate pieces that themselves are never fully harmonized. Varieties is a modernist collage in which snipets of recorded experience come together apart from their original settings, reframed through James's canny use of his own subjectivity to showcase contradictory aspirations to wholeness. For its display of religious irresolution, and multiple universalizing and mutually contradicting tendencies, we can appreciate Varieties as a fine example of modernist estheticism, and an excellent point of departure for reconsidering the emergence of religious studies as a modernist project.

To see Varieties as an example of modernism, we need to step away from the definition of that term that historians of American religion have often relied on, one that marginalizes James and the kind of composition he constructed in Varieties. William Hutchison's Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism has been particularly influential in this regard. According to Hutchison, when modernism emerged as “a common term” in the early twentieth century, it referred to the “adaptation of religious ideas to modern culture,” and for protestants, to the idealistic belief that God worked through the progressive development of human culture. Prior to Hutchison, both Niebuhr brothers defined liberalism along the same simplistic lines, making it a straw man of naive idealism against which they could champion neo-orthodox realism. George Marsden followed suit, adhering closely to Hutchison in defining modernism to “mean that God is revealed in cultural development.” To quote Marsden paraphrasing Hutchison paraphrasing Richard Niebuhr, “the corollary was that human society is moving toward realization of the kingdom of God.”Footnote ⁹⁰

Not surprisingly, Hutchison made little use of James, casting him outside the mainstream of American modernism because of his critique of philosophical idealism. To prove James's outlier status, Hutchison quoted James's architectural sketch of philosophical idealism as “a kind of marble temple shining on a hill . . . a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present.” While Hutchison defines modernism in terms of its rationalism, James put rationalism and irrationalism together. While Hutchison argued that modernist idealism broke down primarily as a result of external factors, especially World War I, James presented modernism as all about modernism's disjointed and precarious position in the modern world.Footnote ⁹¹

Taking James as a practitioner of modernism, and modernism as an esthetic challenge demanding some reconstruction of religion, we can turn to art criticism for help in analyzing Varieties. According to art historian Robert Hughes, “modernism in art” can refer to “practically anything between Georges Seurat and Andy Warhol, including all the constituent movements you can think of—Fauvism, Cubism, Surrealism, the Bauhaus, and so on through to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.” In Hughes's favorite city of Barcelona, the term acquired a specific form of expression, and one I propose that we use for comparative purposes with William James. In Barcelona by 1900, according to Hughes, the term modernism had been “taken over by architecture and decorative arts and so internalized by their bourgeois patrons” that it came to refer very precisely to the work of a small cadre of architects and craftsmen, the most brilliant and prolific of whom was Antóni Gaudḯ.Footnote ⁹²

The builders around Gaudḯ combined an insistently traditional and conservative mysticism with fantastic innovation, extraordinary technical skill, and enormous pride in Catalan culture. While opposites in some respects, one Catalan the other American, one a conservative Catholic who inspired Joan Miró, Salvador Dalḯ, and Pablo Picasso, the other a liberal protestant who inspired Dorothy Day, both Gaudḯ and James embraced religious contradiction as a modern esthetic challenge. And both were pioneers of collage. The benches of Gaudḯ's famous Parc Guell, peppered everywhere with shards of tiles inscribed with words of devotion to the Virgin, come together, as Hughes descibes it, in “a panoramic design . . . filled with curlicues, emblems, words, and ravishing passages of abstract design.” An unprecedented work and, according to Hughes, “the first collage,” Parc Guell “transpos[ed] independent objects into a new matrix where their original identity remains visible, but where their meaning is changed by proximity to others.”Footnote ⁹³

James's Varieties is similar. The book incorporates hundreds of accounts of religious experience torn from their original context and recombined in a new composition of James's devising. Retaining the visibility of their original identity but changed in their meaning by proximity to each other, excerpts from Goethe, Luther, Homer, the French Father Gratry's Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, Tolstoy's Confessions, John Bunyan's autobiography, and the journal of the evangelical missionary Henry Alline all come together in the chapter on “The Sick Soul,” culminating in the possibly autobiographical vision of the epileptic “black-haired youth with greenish skin” James claims to have translated from the French, from personal correspondence with “the sufferer.” James presents these excerpts as illustrations of one dark, despairing, inescapable religious mood. “If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike,” James writes quoting Tolstoy, “what world, what thing is real? . . . what shall I do to-morrow? . . . Why should I live? . . . These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being.” Other chapters reveal, by contrast, a patchwork of spiritual triumph, the opposite of despair “in the soul of every human being,” and equally universalized. “In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism,” writes James in the chapter on “Mysticism,” “we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think.”Footnote ⁹⁴

While Hutchison and his cohort overlook the creative tensions within modernism so productive of esthetic expression, they also fail to acknowledge the pressures exerted by other religions on protestant expressions of modernist sensibility, the most powerful of which come from Catholics and Catholic esthetic expression, not the least of which is the still unfinished church of the Sagrada Famìlia constructed by Antoni Gaudḯ. By the time James wrote Varieties, the integration of Catholics into American society through politics and intermarriage was well advanced, even as anti-Catholicism persisted in politics, family life, business, education, and law. In addition to increasingly porous connections between protestant and Catholic people, American protestants had developed new appreciation for Catholic art through European travel and, more commonly, through encounters with impressive forms of Catholic esthetic expression at home, like St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, which opened its giant medievalesque doors to on Fifth Avenue in 1879. Even as philosophical determinism exerted a strong pull in science and American protestant theology, Americans from protestant backgrounds found themselves living in more textured social and material environments. When James described rationalist idealism as a “refuge from the intolerably confused and gothic character which mere facts present,” his reference the “gothic character” of “mere facts” may have alluded to the modern presence of Catholic sensibility.

Interpreting Varieties as a modernist work of art enables us to link it with works of literary modernists including William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, whose compositions drew on Catholicism and on the juxtaposition between Catholic esthetics and secularity. James's use of Catholicism in Varieties, especially in the chapters on “Mysticism” and “Saintliness” is similar to Joyce's habit of slipping into a back pew during mass despite his proclaimed lack of belief. In his book, American Catholic Arts and Fictions, Paul Giles points to the importance of Catholicism for non-Catholic writers of James's generation, including Henry Adams and William's brother, Henry James. “Like [Henry] James in The Golden Bowl and The Portrait of a Lady,” Giles writes, “Henry Adams exploits Catholicism as an image of a world too subtle and intricate for Protestant ratiocination to gain mastery over.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The role of Catholic mysticism in Varieties, especially that of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa, is especially important in this regard. Calling Teresa “the expert of experts in describing such conditions,” James turns his lecture on mysticism in Varieties over to her account of “the orison of union” with God, as if she were the authority every dispassionate investigator should know. In presenting states of mystical union with God as the “root and centre” of “personal religious experience,” while inserting in the same paragraph the personal statement that “my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand,” James brought these irreconcilables into a modernist composition.

In his juxtaposition of critical detachment and first-person accounts of mystical presence, James joins the cast of esthetes from “From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond” described by Peter Gay in his book on modernism. Although he pays no heed to either religious studies or William James, Gay defines modernism helpfully by two simple criteria, “the lure of heresy” and the “commitment to a principled self-scrutiny.” If readiness to indulge “the lure of heresy” situates modernism historically, the “commitment to principled self-scrutiny” links modernism to a longer tradition; according to Gay, modernism has “deeper roots than unconventionality” in “[t]he hunt for the secrets of human nature [that] has been conducted through the centuries by introspective thinkers.”Footnote ⁹⁶

We can now appreciate why James's recovery of self-confidence in 1876, and independence from his father, coincided with his reading the French poet Charles Baudelaire, whose work Gay views as the primary model for other modernists. With a new wedding of “literary discipline” to “efflorescence of . . . imagination,” Gay writes, “Baudelaire made his reader see, then, perhaps in some degree to share, his moods and his experiences.” Baudelaire's admirer T. S. Eliot referred to the products of such effort the “objective correlative” of artistic subjectivity. This was precisely the kind of objectivity James achieved in Varieties.Footnote ⁹⁷

In The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand calls James one of “the first modern thinkers in the United States,” explaining that, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey, James “believed that ideas are not ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered, but are tools—like forks and knives and microchips—that people devise to cope with the world.” Menand also emphasizes that James was often divided in his approach to things, that he often changed his mind, and that for James as for Justice Holmes, “it was not a matter of choosing sides. It was a matter of rising above the whole concept of sidedness.” Menand interprets James's effort to transcend ideology as an expression of his pragmatism, claiming that James was open to difference not because “principles of love and fairness required it,” but because it led to better outcomes.Footnote ⁹⁸ While not disagreeing that James sought better outcomes, I have argued that his desire for them was itself the outcome of something even more basic—a creative drive for esthetic balance.