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
being so great, awful, and overwhelming that none could bear to
live in the country where the spectacle was seen, and the torment
of my mind being vastly greater. And it seemed to me that I found
a perfect willingness, quietness, and alacrity of soul in
consenting that it should be so, if it were most for the glory of
God, so that there was no hesitation, doubt, or darkness in my
mind. The glory of God seemed to overcome me and swallow me up,
and every conceivable suffering, and everything that was terrible
to my nature, seemed to shrink to nothing before it. This
resignation continued in its clearness and brightness the rest of
the night, and all the next day, and the night following, and on
Monday in the forenoon, without interruption or abatement.”(159)
The annals of Catholic saintship abound in records as ecstatic or more
ecstatic than this. “Often the assaults of the divine love,” it is said of
the Sister Séraphique de la Martinière, “reduced her almost to the point
of death. She used tenderly to complain of this to God. ‘I cannot support
it,’ she used to say. ‘Bear gently with my weakness, or I shall expire
under the violence of your love.’ ”(160)
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Let me pass next to the Charity and Brotherly Love which are a usual fruit
of saintliness, and have always been reckoned essential theological
virtues, however limited may have been the kinds of service which the
particular theology enjoined. Brotherly love would follow logically from
the assurance of God’s friendly presence, the notion of our brotherhood as
men being an immediate inference from that of God’s fatherhood of us all.
When Christ utters the precepts: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse
you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully
use you, and persecute you,” he gives for a reason: “That ye may be the
children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise
on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the
unjust.” One might therefore be tempted to explain both the humility as to
one’s self and the charity towards others which characterize spiritual
excitement, as results of the all‐leveling character of theistic belief.
But these affections are certainly not mere derivatives of theism. We find
them in Stoicism, in Hinduism, and in Buddhism in the highest possible
degree. They harmonize with paternal theism beautifully; but they
_harmonize_ with all reflection whatever upon the dependence of mankind on
general causes; and we must, I think, consider them not subordinate but
coördinate parts of that great complex excitement in the study of which we
are engaged. Religious rapture, moral enthusiasm, ontological wonder,
cosmic emotion, are all unifying states of mind, in which the sand and
grit of the selfhood incline to disappear, and tenderness to rule. The
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