The Myth of Suddenness: William James

Saint Augustine's Conversion
by Garry Wills

(Page 4 of 8)

If what Augustine is telling us is not so much a conversion story as a vocation story, then its use as a pattern of conversion may be misleading. Yet, as I said earlier, it is often taken, along with Paul's story, to establish the very essence of conversion. Both conversions seem abrupt, emotionally charged, with a great lightning bolt dividing the lives of Paul and Augustine into two main parts - and they have been offered as the highest exemplars of conversion. William James had a great deal to do with instilling the notion that conversion is a sudden and once-for-all-time phenomenon. In the two chapters he devoted to conversion in his Gifford Lectures, he wrote, of deep psychological change, that "if the change be a religious one, we call it a conversion, especially if it be by crisis, or sudden" (emphasis added).¹⁶ Though James was trying to define the typical experience, he admits that cultural expectation has a great deal to do with how one undergoes (and may invite) mental change. Protestantism, for instance, which throws the whole weight of salvation on a personal and intimate acceptance of grace, leads to a higher rate of conversion in his sense than does Catholicism, which allows one to receive a mediated and socially shared salvation through sacrament and ceremony. But he thinks this is not a matter of mere cultural relativism. Protestantism is closer to the authentic type of conversion because "the adequacy of his [Luther's] view of Christianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure is shown by its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and quickening thing."¹⁷ Methodism, too, the religion of revivals, "follows, if not the healthier-minded, yet on the whole the profounder spiritual instinct."¹⁸

James admits the existence of more gradual, conscious, and self-governing conversion, which he calls the "volitional" change of the "once-born." But he prefers the sudden, semiconscious, and self-surrendering type of the "twice-born," because it is more radical and more "interesting."¹⁹ He thinks it is more authentic because less consciously controlled: "self surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning point of the religious life."²⁰ Protestantism lacks some of the aesthetic awareness of Catholicism, "however superior in spiritual profundity it may be to Catholicism" - but that is a small price to pay for profundity.²¹ Which should one prefer, better art or "spiritual profundity"?

James was drawing on a burst of new interest in conversion at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1881, Granville Stanley Hall had delivered at James's own university, Harvard, a series of public lectures on the religiosity of the young. He concluded, from surveys and interviews, that conversion is most common in and around puberty, a thesis he developed in his two-volume work Adolescence.²² He also found that more conversions are gradual than sudden (two thirds to one third). Hall's work was extended and verified in 1897 by Edwin Starbuck, from whom James took the terminology of two types of conversion, those of "volition" and of "self-surrender," while he ignored Starbuck's finding that the average age for conversion of females was 13.8 years and of boys 15.7.²³ Of Starbuck's study, expanded later into the two-volume Psychology of Religion (1899), a later scholar wrote: "His work remains today as the most complete and authoritative of its kind."²⁴

Starbuck, too, found that most conversions are gradual, not sudden. Though James refers to Starbuck's findings on adolescent conversion, he preferred to collect and study adult accounts of sudden conversion, since they seemed to him more interesting and profound than adolescent stories.²⁵ That means he is studying the least common type of conversion in the age group where it least occurs. Survey after survey, subjected to analysis after analysis, found the average age of conversion somewhere in the span between ten and nineteen. Paul Emanuel Johnson, conflating the findings of five major studies of conversion, pinpointed the average age at 15.2 years.²⁶

Naturally, the experience is not uniform for all teenagers entering into this average - there are variables by class, locale, and education.²⁷ As James Bissett Pratt put it, conversions come most often to those "brought up in a church or community which taught them to look for it if not to cultivate it."²⁸ And Johnson says: "The type of conversion is influenced by social expectation. There are styles of conversion, as there are of worship and theology."²⁹ He thought that adolescent conversions would decline in numbers as "sterner" religion faded in America; but cults, Eastern spirituality, Transcendental Meditation, and New Age concepts continue to provide ample opportunity for teenage conversions. Later studies of converts have confirmed the basic outline of these pioneer investigations.³⁰

James's emphasis on suddenness is misleading, since "With most religious people conversion (of the genuine moral sort) is a gradual and almost imperceptible process, with an occasional intensification of emotion now and then during adolescence."³¹ James's celebration of crisis-conversions may be unfortunate since it could lead to complacency about the sudden feeling of being saved. One of the most frequent and most studied forms of conversion in our time is the treatment of addiction by "twelve step" programs, where one is warned against the feeling that one heady moment of resolve is an adequate "cure." The emphasis on "steps," on social reinforcement, on mentoring, on "one day at a time," is meant to dispel the illusion that a quick reorientation can be effected. James noticed the conversion experiences of alcoholics - indeed, he quoted an unnamed "medical man" as saying, "The only radical remedy I know for dipsomania is religiomania."³² But he did not let that distract him from the study of conversions he found "interesting."

Why did James so exclusively direct his attention to sudden conversion? The reason for that must go farther back than sociological studies at the end of his own century. He grew up in a culture that staked a great deal on the "saving experience" of Puritan culture. He was not raised in a Calvinist family - quite the opposite - and he did not belong to any Congregationalist church. But the individualism, the introversion, the autobiographical urges of the New England region pervaded the culture. The private and temporally precise experience of "being saved" was the condition of membership in Congregationalist churches. This need preyed on the minds of young people, whether they were yearning to join the church, afraid that they could not do so, or determined to defy expectation.

Each person had to meet the Spirit alone, and then give a convincing account of this transforming moment to the examiners of the church. The specific time and place of the rescue were important - as they were in Augustine's garden experience. Joseph Addison, in The Spectator, mocked this obsession with the timetable of a Calvinist's conversion, asking a character in one of his essays "what was the occasion of his conversion, upon what day of the month and hour of the day it happened."³³ What Edmund Morgan calls the "demonstration of saving grace" became an art form as well as a personal rite of passage in seventeenth-century Massachusetts.³⁴ It was something no one else could do for the individual. Even those born into God-fearing families were not presumed to be saved, and therefore qualified to join the church's "visible saints," until the conversion had been privately experienced and publicly aired. It was considered a backsliding, a tainting of the church, when later "halfway covenants" let children of the saved take communion without undergoing their own saving moment.³⁵

These conversions would seem to come as close as anyone could wish to the pure model James presents. They are highly conscious, tested by the one undergoing the experience and by those best qualified to judge its nature and effects. Many of them were keyed, like Augustine's conversion, to the impact of a single verse from Scripture.³⁶ If anything could heal the sick soul and give permanent comfort, it should be this. But the diaries of the time show that the sudden stroke was not as efficacious as the theology shaping it would suggest. Even that paragon of Calvinist awakening, Jonathan Edwards, could never be sure his conversion "took." After he became a pastor in the church, he could still write:

It seems to me that, whether I am now converted or not, I am so settled in the state that I am in, that I shall go on in it all my life. But, however settled I may be, yet I will continue to pray to God not to suffer me to be deceived about it, not to sleep in an unsafe condition, and ever and anon will call all into question and try myself, using his helps, some of the old divines, that God may have opportunities to answer my prayers, and the spirit of God to show me my error if I am in one.³⁷

Edwards was not alone in his uneasiness. The diaries of the converted "saints" in his era show distress and fear that the conversion was not genuine or lasting. Social and personal failings reflected and reinforced each other. As "Jeremiad" sermons said that the community remained sinful, the individuals making it up found their private distress increasing.

Drawing on her extensive use of the letters and diaries of the saints, Patricia Caldwell concluded "that the failure of New England, of state and country alike, to meet the spiritual expectations of the individual who is trying to articulate his experiences, devolves back upon that person and presses him into a doubtful limbo of semiconversion or even nonconversion."³⁸ The stakes placed on conversion were so high that they induced the very anxieties conversion was meant to dispel. This record makes it seem that James was too sunny-minded himself on the efficacy and permanence of sudden conversions. Conversion was a process, even for those who felt that they must be changed suddenly. Edwards deplored the way fervent mass conversions during the Awakening led to relapse. All things considered, it seems that James underestimated what the great Quaker Anthony Benezet called "the inward gradual work of grace."³⁹

© 2004 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Garry Wills is one of the most respected writers on religion today. He is the author of Saint Augustine's Childhood, Saint Augustine's Memory, and Saint Augustine's Sin, the first three volumes in this series, as well as the Penguin Lives biography Saint Augustine. His other books include "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, Why I Am a Catholic, Papal Sin, and Lincoln at Gettysburg, which won the Pulitzer Prize.