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
Take Saint Teresa, for example, one of the ablest women, in many respects,
of whose life we have the record. She had a powerful intellect of the
practical order. She wrote admirable descriptive psychology, possessed a
will equal to any emergency, great talent for politics and business, a
buoyant disposition, and a first‐rate literary style. She was tenaciously
aspiring, and put her whole life at the service of her religious ideals.
Yet so paltry were these, according to our present way of thinking, that
(although I know that others have been moved differently) I confess that
my only feeling in reading her has been pity that so much vitality of soul
should have found such poor employment.
In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curious flavor of
superficiality about her genius. A Birmingham anthropologist, Dr. Jordan,
has divided the human race into two types, whom he calls “shrews” and
“non‐shrews” respectively.(205) The shrew‐type is defined as possessing an
“active unimpassioned temperament.” In other words, shrews are the
“motors,” rather than the “sensories,”(206) and their expressions are as a
rule more energetic than the feelings which appear to prompt them. Saint
Teresa, paradoxical as such a judgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in
this sense of the term. The bustle of her style, as well as of her life,
proves it. Not only must she receive unheard‐of personal favors and
spiritual graces from her Saviour, but she must immediately write about
them and _exploiter_ them professionally, and use her expertness to give
instruction to those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not
of radical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her “faults”
and “imperfections” in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return
upon herself, as covered with “confusion” at each new manifestation of
God’s singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of
shrewdom: a paramountly feeling nature would be objectively lost in
gratitude, and silent. She had some public instincts, it is true; she
hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church’s triumph over them; but in
the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless
amatory flirtation—if one may say so without irreverence—between the
devotee and the deity; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this
direction by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is
absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest. Yet
the spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.
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