The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human NatureJames, William
ReligionComparative
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
James, William
Conversion; Experience (Religion); Philosophy and religion; Psychology, Religious; Religion
Of the process, intellectual as well as emotional, which, starting from
this idea of God, led to Tolstoy’s recovery, I will say nothing in this
lecture, reserving it for a later hour. The only thing that need interest
us now is the phenomenon of his absolute disenchantment with ordinary
life, and the fact that the whole range of habitual values may, to a man
as powerful and full of faculty as he was, come to appear so ghastly a
mockery.
When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a
_restitutio ad integrum_. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the
happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any
does come,—and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though
its form is sometimes very acute,—is not the simple ignorance of ill, but
something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its
elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling‐block and terror
because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is
one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the
sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a
deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before.
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We find a somewhat different type of religious melancholy enshrined in
literature in John Bunyan’s autobiography. Tolstoy’s preoccupations were
largely objective, for the purpose and meaning of life in general was what
so troubled him; but poor Bunyan’s troubles were over the condition of his
own personal self. He was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament,
sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears, and
insistent ideas, and a victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and
sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory
and sometimes favorable, would come in a half‐hallucinatory form as if
they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a
shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy self‐contempt and
despair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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