Hi all! Sorry for the delay -- I fell behind with all the holiday traveling and visiting. Probably should have built a week off into the syllabus ... but let's pick up where we left off.

"The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness" is a turning point in the Varieties. In the previous lectures, James is concerned with clearing the field for religious experience, establishing its general nature, distinguishing it from neighboring categories such as morality, and showing that it cannot be wholly debunked by science. Now he starts to weight the different elements within religious experience, and moves closer to the vital question of what we ought to look for in it.

In Lecture II, James distinguishes religion from morality by noting that morality always demands an "effort of volition." "The moralist must hold his breath and keep his muscles tense," he writes; but this "athletic attitude tends ever to break down" -- there are limits to human willpower, "even in the most stalwart." Religion, then, starts with the recognition that "when all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked to and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose." In religious experience, that is, the "will to assert ourselves," even to assert the morally good, gives way to the "willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God" (my emphasis). 

In this lecture, we begin to see, however, that there are different ways to imagine and enact the religious surrender of the will. For the deep-dyed religious optimists he discusses here, what is surrendered is the belief in the final reality of evil -- if we think we see pain and suffering, we must surrender the organ of that seeing, and open our inner eyes to the higher truth that "God is well, and so are you," if only you "awaken to the knowledge of your real being." ("All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," as Julian of Norwich said and T.S. Eliot echoed.) Evil, in this view, is real only to the extent that we believe in it -- an idea that is at least superficially congruent with James's argument in "The Will to Believe" that some beliefs (especially of the "I think I can, I think I can" variety) have the power to make themselves true. 

James gives the religion of healthy-mindedness a fair hearing and defends it against his audience's presumed scorn -- though as we'll see in the next lecture he's holding his own nuanced criticisms in reserve. He argues, both here and in this week's supplementary essay, "The Gospel of Relaxation," that the religion of healthy-mindedness offers a needed correction to the moralizing pessimism of New England Calvinism. He also argues that, regardless of the cultural context, there will always be certain types of people who will find in the religion of healthy-mindedness the truest expression of their optimistic temperament, and that no good can come from trying to change such people's relationship to the universe.

James presents the religion of healthy-mindedness as being ambivalent about whether faith negates evil in a blatant or a subtle way; whether, for instance, faith physically heals disease or raises the believer to a spiritual plane where the disease is no longer important. Both the blatant and the subtle versions of the religion of healthy-mindedness are still with us today, the blatant version in Christian Science, the prosperity gospel, and various New Age movements, and the subtle version in faiths, such as Unitarianism, that preach universal salvation and deny the existence of hell. Do you welcome these movements, for the sake of others or yourself? If not, where do you think they do wrong or fall short?

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