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
Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by
innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti‐moralistic
method, by the “surrender” of which I spoke in my second lecture.
Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the
rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign the
care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as to what
becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a perfect
inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular goods you
sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation through self‐
despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage
into _nothing_ of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a critical
point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must
give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy; and this event
(as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently sudden and automatic,
and leaves on the Subject an impression that he has been wrought on by an
external power.
Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly one
fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or
incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely moralistic
character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no criticism avails
to cast doubt on its reality. They _know_; for they have actually _felt_
the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their personal will.
A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who found
himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice. At last he caught
a branch which stopped his fall, and remained clinging to it in misery for
hours. But finally his fingers had to loose their hold, and with a
despairing farewell to life, he let himself drop. He fell just six inches.
If he had given up the struggle earlier, his agony would have been spared.
As the mother earth received him, so, the preachers tell us, will the
everlasting arms receive _us_ if we confide absolutely in them, and give
up the hereditary habit of relying on our personal strength, with its
precautions that cannot shelter and safeguards that never save.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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