ABSTRACT
Modern philosophers have focused almost exclusively on two aspects of the spiritual life—spiritual states and their epistemic status. What is the reason for this? A remark made by William James in 1902 suggests an answer. ‘Feeling is the deeper source of religion... philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.’ While ‘conceptions and constructions are…a necessary part of our religion’, ‘these intellectual operations…presuppose immediate experiences as their subjectmatter. They are interpretative and inductive operations, operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not coordinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains’ (James 1902:423–4). This kind of emphasis on religious experience is new. Traditional Christianity explored the nature of the spiritual life in detail. It also believed that (some) spiritual states involve perceptions. But the epistemic status of mystical states was not an issue, and there was little interest in other spiritual traditions. Nor were religious experiences appealed to to justify religious belief.
