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
We have already agreed that they are _solemn_; and we have seen reason to
think that the most distinctive of them is the sort of joy which may
result in extreme cases from absolute self‐surrender. The sense of the
kind of object to which the surrender is made has much to do with
determining the precise complexion of the joy; and the whole phenomenon is
more complex than any simple formula allows. In the literature of the
subject, sadness and gladness have each been emphasized in turn. The
ancient saying that the first maker of the Gods was fear receives
voluminous corroboration from every age of religious history; but none the
less does religious history show the part which joy has evermore tended to
play. Sometimes the joy has been primary; sometimes secondary, being the
gladness of deliverance from the fear. This latter state of things, being
the more complex, is also the more complete; and as we proceed, I think we
shall have abundant reason for refusing to leave out either the sadness or
the gladness, if we look at religion with the breadth of view which it
demands. Stated in the completest possible terms, a man’s religion
involves both moods of contraction and moods of expansion of his being.
But the quantitative mixture and order of these moods vary so much from
one age of the world, from one system of thought, and from one individual
to another, that you may insist either on the dread and the submission, or
on the peace and the freedom as the essence of the matter, and still
remain materially within the limits of the truth. The constitutionally
sombre and the constitutionally sanguine onlooker are bound to emphasize
opposite aspects of what lies before their eyes.
The constitutionally sombre religious person makes even of his religious
peace a very sober thing. Danger still hovers in the air about it. Flexion
and contraction are not wholly checked. It were sparrowlike and childish
after our deliverance to explode into twittering laughter and caper‐
cutting, and utterly to forget the imminent hawk on bough. Lie low,
rather, lie low; for you are in the hands of a living God. In the Book of
Job, for example, the impotence of man and the omnipotence of God is the
exclusive burden of its author’s mind. “It is as high as heaven; what
canst thou do?—deeper than hell; what canst thou know?” There is an
astringent relish about the truth of this conviction which some men can
feel, and which for them is as near an approach as can be made to the
feeling of religious joy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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