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
“which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapable
of attending to external duties. They tried her in the infirmary,
but without much success, although her kindness, zeal, and
devotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of such
a heroism that our readers would not bear the recital of them.
They tried her in the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as
hopeless—everything dropped out of her hands. The admirable
humility with which she made amends for her clumsiness could not
prevent this from being prejudicial to the order and regularity
which must always reign in a community. They put her in the
school, where the little girls cherished her, and cut pieces out
of her clothes [for relics] as if she were already a saint, but
where she was too absorbed inwardly to pay the necessary
attention. Poor dear sister, even less after her visions than
before them was she a denizen of earth, and they had to leave her
in her heaven.”(203)
Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectual
outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and
modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of
saintship which she embodies. A lower example still of theopathic
saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictine nun of the thirteenth
century, whose “Revelations,” a well‐known mystical authority, consist
mainly of proofs of Christ’s partiality for her undeserving person.
Assurances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compliments of the
most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an
individual, form the tissue of this paltry‐minded recital.(204) In reading
such a narrative, we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the
twentieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield
almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be associated with such inferior
intellectual sympathies. What with science, idealism, and democracy, our
own imagination has grown to need a God of an entirely different
temperament from that Being interested exclusively in dealing out personal
favors, with whom our ancestors were so contented. Smitten as we are with
the vision of social righteousness, a God indifferent to everything but
adulation, and full of partiality for his individual favorites, lacks an
essential element of largeness; and even the best professional sainthood
of former centuries, pent in as it is to such a conception, seems to us
curiously shallow and unedifying.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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