Personal faith can mean trust or conviction held by an individual. Organised religion includes practices, teachings and institutions that people share. William James separates those aspects to study religious experience. Leo Tolstoy’s account of his own faith shows what the distinction can clarify and how difficult it can be to separate conviction from shared practice in a life. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience · Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
Why William James focused on personal religion
In the second lecture of The Varieties of Religious Experience, James distinguishes an institutional branch of religion, which includes ceremony, theology and church organisation, from the personal branch he wants to study. He focuses on what people experience and how they understand their relationship to what they regard as divine. This is a decision about which evidence his lectures will examine. Personal accounts can bring into view the experience of someone whose religious affiliation or participation is already known. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
What Tolstoy saw in other people’s lives
In A Confession, Tolstoy describes turning from his own social circle to the faith of ordinary Russian working people. In their lives he saw an understanding of work, mercy and the purpose of life that made sense to him. He also explains how the practices and teachings of their communities carried that understanding. People learned from religious teachers and inherited traditions. Tolstoy found much of that life persuasive and still had questions about the sacraments, services, fasts and veneration that accompanied it. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
What happened when he took part
Tolstoy describes fasting, preparing for communion and keeping set times of prayer at home and in church. During services, he tried to give meaning to the words he heard. Participation let him encounter his questions within the practices themselves. His account later describes how disputes over the Orthodox Church’s relationship to other Christian communities contributed to his decision that he could no longer remain in communion with it. Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
James discusses Tolstoy’s change in the lectures that examine experiences of divided or troubled religious life. Read alongside the first-person account, James’s selection brings out the change in Tolstoy’s sense of how to live. Tolstoy’s own descriptions of prayer and worship also show that communal practices were part of the experience he was trying to understand. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience · Leo Tolstoy, A Confession
Conclusion
The distinction between personal faith and organised religion helps a reader notice different things. James’s method draws attention to what a person experiences and how their outlook changes. Tolstoy’s account also records what he learned from religious teachers, neighbours and worship and where his convictions came into conflict with a church. His story gives a concrete example of how individual and institutional aspects of religion can shape one another. See also our introduction to the meanings of faith.
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