James and Spirituality

A friend recently asked me, as a Jamesian, about spirituality.

She wrote, quite perceptively, that spirituality "is one of those words that everyone uses but likely means something different by it. Lack of precision about this term causes difficulties in discussing matters of the mind, soul, consciousness, and the like."

I replied:

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I doubt that James often used the term, surely not in the loose way in which it is used today as an all-embracing New-Agey thing.

I think I know what you have in mind though, and what in James answers to it. He was of the opinion that the human spirit was at its best if it had come through a storm, if you will. Not only coming through a storm, but internalizing it to a degree, keeping some of the storminess inside you -- that, to James, was key to psychic health, to what one might well call spirituality. Not the effort to live only under sunny skies.

"Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word 'yes' forever. But for others (indeed for most) this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some 'no! no!' must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power."

That's from VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE.

That phrase "character and texture and power" -- is what you mean by spirituality in there somewhere?

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