The Varieties of Religious Experience · William James
LECTURES XI, XII, AND XIII. SAINTLINESS.
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) ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ 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 best thing is to describe the condition integrally as a characteristic affection to which our nature is liable, a region in which we find ourselves at home, a sea in which we swim; but not to pretend to explain its parts by deriving them too cleverly from one another. Like love or fear, the faith‐state is a natural psychic complex, and carries charity with it by organic consequence. Jubilation is an expansive affection, and all expansive affections are self‐forgetful and kindly so long as they endure.
We find this the case even when they are pathological in origin. In his instructive work, la Tristesse et la Joie,(161) M. Georges Dumas compares together the melancholy and the joyous phase of circular insanity, and shows that, while selfishness characterizes the one, the other is marked by altruistic impulses. No human being so stingy and useless as was Marie in her melancholy period! But the moment the happy period begins, “sympathy and kindness become her characteristic sentiments. She displays a universal goodwill, not only of intention, but in act.... She becomes solicitous of the health of other patients, interested in getting them out, desirous to procure wool to knit socks for some of them. Never since she has been under my observation have I heard her in her joyous period utter any but charitable opinions.”(162) And later, Dr. Dumas says of all such joyous conditions that “unselfish sentiments and tender emotions are the only affective states to be found in them. The subject’s mind is closed against envy, hatred, and vindictiveness, and wholly transformed into benevolence, indulgence, and mercy.”(163) There is thus an organic affinity between joyousness and tenderness, and their companionship in the saintly life need in no way occasion surprise. Along with the happiness, this increase of tenderness is often noted in narratives of conversion. “I began to work for others”;—“I had more tender feeling for my family and friends”;—“I spoke at once to a person with whom I had been angry”;—“I felt for every one, and loved my friends better”;—“I felt every one to be my friend”;—these are so many expressions from the records collected by Professor Starbuck.(164)
“I went down the drift and found the boy crying because a fellow‐ workman was trying to take the wagon from him by force. I said to him:— “ ‘Tom, you mustn’t take that wagon.’ “He swore at me, and called me a Methodist devil. I told him that God did not tell me to let him rob me. He cursed again, and said he would push the wagon over me. “ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘let us see whether the devil and thee are stronger than the Lord and me.’ “And the Lord and I proving stronger than the devil and he, he had to get out of the way, or the wagon would have gone over him. So I gave the wagon to the boy. Then said Tom:— “ ‘I’ve a good mind to smack thee on the face.’ “ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if that will do thee any good, thou canst do it.’ So he struck me on the face. “I turned the other cheek to him, and said, ‘Strike again.’ “He struck again and again, till he had struck me five times. I turned my cheek for the sixth stroke; but he turned away cursing. I shouted after him: ‘The Lord forgive thee, for I do, and the Lord save thee.’ “This was on a Saturday; and when I went home from the coal‐pit my wife saw my face was swollen, and asked what was the matter with it. I said: ‘I’ve been fighting, and I’ve given a man a good thrashing.’
“She burst out weeping, and said, ‘O Richard, what made you fight?’ Then I told her all about it; and she thanked the Lord I had not struck back. “But the Lord had struck, and his blows have more effect than man’s. Monday came. The devil began to tempt me, saying: ‘The other men will laugh at thee for allowing Tom to treat thee as he did on Saturday.’ I cried, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan;’—and went on my way to the coal‐pit. “Tom was the first man I saw. I said ‘Good‐morning,’ but got no reply. “He went down first. When I got down, I was surprised to see him sitting on the wagon‐road waiting for me. When I came to him he burst into tears and said: ‘Richard, will you forgive me for striking you?’ “ ‘I have forgiven thee,’ said I; ‘ask God to forgive thee. The Lord bless thee.’ I gave him my hand, and we went each to his work.”(166)
“Love your enemies!” Mark you, not simply those who happen not to be your friends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should, as far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests aroused? If positive well‐wishing could attain so supreme a degree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the life of other men, and there is no saying, in the absence of positive experience of an authentic kind,—for there are few active examples in our scriptures, and the Buddhistic examples are legendary,(167)—what the effects might be: they might conceivably transform the world. Psychologically and in principle, the precept “Love your enemies” is not self‐contradictory. It is merely the extreme limit of a kind of magnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of our oppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would involve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole, and with the present world’s arrangements, that a critical point would practically be passed, and we should be born into another kingdom of being. Religious emotion makes us feel that other kingdom to be close at hand, within our reach.
The inhibition of instinctive repugnance is proved not only by the showing of love to enemies, but by the showing of it to any one who is personally loathsome. In the annals of saintliness we find a curious mixture of motives impelling in this direction. Asceticism plays its part; and along with charity pure and simple, we find humility or the desire to disclaim distinction and to grovel on the common level before God. Certainly all three principles were at work when Francis of Assisi and Ignatius Loyola exchanged their garments with those of filthy beggars. All three are at work when religious persons consecrate their lives to the care of leprosy or other peculiarly unpleasant diseases. The nursing of the sick is a function to which the religious seem strongly drawn, even apart from the fact that church traditions set that way. But in the annals of this sort of charity we find fantastic excesses of devotion recorded which are only explicable by the frenzy of self‐immolation simultaneously aroused. Francis of Assisi kisses his lepers; Margaret Mary Alacoque, Francis Xavier, St. John of God, and others are said to have cleansed the sores and ulcers of their patients with their respective tongues; and the lives of such saints as Elizabeth of Hungary and Madame de Chantal are full of a sort of reveling in hospital purulence, disagreeable to read of, and which makes us admire and shudder at the same time.
“Some of my friends,” she writes, “wept bitterly at the hearing of it, but such was my state of acquiescence and resignation that it failed to draw any tears from me.... There appeared to be in me then, as I find it to be in me now, such an entire loss of what regards myself, that any of my own interests gave me little pain or pleasure; ever wanting to will or wish for myself only the very thing which God does.” In another place she writes: “We all of us came near perishing in a river which we found it necessary to pass. The carriage sank in the quicksand. Others who were with us threw themselves out in excessive fright. But I found my thoughts so much taken up with God that I had no distinct sense of danger. It is true that the thought of being drowned passed across my mind, but it cost no other sensation or reflection in me than this—that I felt quite contented and willing it were so, if it were my heavenly Father’s choice.” Sailing from Nice to Genoa, a storm keeps her eleven days at sea. “As the irritated waves dashed round us,” she writes, “I could not help experiencing a certain degree of satisfaction in my mind. I pleased myself with thinking that those mutinous billows, under the command of Him who does all things rightly, might probably furnish me with a watery grave. Perhaps I carried the point too far, in the pleasure which I took in thus seeing myself beaten and bandied by the swelling waters. Those who were with me took notice of my intrepidity.”(170)
The contempt of danger which religious enthusiasm produces may be even more buoyant still. I take an example from that charming recent autobiography, “With Christ at Sea,” by Frank Bullen. A couple of days after he went through the conversion on shipboard of which he there gives an account,— “It was blowing stiffly,” he writes, “and we were carrying a press of canvas to get north out of the bad weather. Shortly after four bells we hauled down the flying‐jib, and I sprang out astride the boom to furl it. I was sitting astride the boom when suddenly it gave way with me. The sail slipped through my fingers, and I fell backwards, hanging head downwards over the seething tumult of shining foam under the ship’s bows, suspended by one foot. But I felt only high exultation in my certainty of eternal life. Although death was divided from me by a hair’s breadth, and I was acutely conscious of the fact, it gave me no sensation but joy. I suppose I could have hung there no longer than five seconds, but in that time I lived a whole age of delight. But my body asserted itself, and with a desperate gymnastic effort I regained the boom. How I furled the sail I don’t know, but I sang at the utmost pitch of my voice praises to God that went pealing out over the dark waste of waters.”(171)
The annals of martyrdom are of course the signal field of triumph for religious imperturbability. Let me cite as an example the statement of a humble sufferer, persecuted as a Huguenot under Louis XIV.:— “They shut all the doors,” Blanche Gamond writes, “and I saw six women, each with a bunch of willow rods as thick as the hand could hold, and a yard long. He gave me the order, ‘Undress yourself,’ which I did. He said, ‘You are leaving on your shift; you must take it off.’ They had so little patience that they took it off themselves, and I was naked from the waist up. They brought a cord with which they tied me to a beam in the kitchen. They drew the cord tight with all their strength and asked me, ‘Does it hurt you?’ and then they discharged their fury upon me, exclaiming as they struck me, ‘Pray now to your God.’ It was the Roulette woman who held this language. But at this moment I received the greatest consolation that I can ever receive in my life, since I had the honor of being whipped for the name of Christ, and in addition of being crowned with his mercy and his consolations. Why can I not write down the inconceivable influences, consolations, and peace which I felt interiorly? To understand them one must have passed by the same trial; they were so great that I was ravished, for there where afflictions abound grace is given superabundantly. In vain the women cried, ‘We must double our blows; she does not feel them, for she neither speaks nor cries.’ And how should I have cried, since I was swooning with happiness within?”(172)
The transition from tenseness, self‐responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of the personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down. This abandonment of self‐responsibility seems to be the fundamental act in specifically religious, as distinguished from moral practice. It antedates theologies and is independent of philosophies. Mind‐cure, theosophy, stoicism, ordinary neurological hygiene, insist on it as emphatically as Christianity does, and it is capable of entering into closest marriage with every speculative creed.(173) Christians who have it strongly live in what is called “recollection,” and are never anxious about the future, nor worry over the outcome of the day. Of Saint Catharine of Genoa it is said that “she took cognizance of things, only as they were presented to her in succession, _moment by moment_.” To her holy soul, “the divine moment was the present moment,... and when the present moment was estimated in itself and in its relations, and when the duty that was involved in it was accomplished, it was permitted to pass away as if it had never been, and to give way to the facts and duties of the moment which came after.”(174)
Hinduism, mind‐cure, and theosophy all lay great emphasis upon this concentration of the consciousness upon the moment at hand. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ The next religious symptom which I will note is what I have called Purity of Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to inner inconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable. All the mind’s objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of sacrifice, for the beloved deity’s sake, of everything unworthy of him. Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at a stroke—we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest. Billy Bray’s account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example of the latter form of achievement.
“I had been a smoker as well as a drunkard, and I used to love my tobacco as much as I loved my meat, and I would rather go down into the mine without my dinner than without my pipe. In the days of old, the Lord spoke by the mouths of his servants, the prophets; now he speaks to us by the spirit of his Son. I had not only the feeling part of religion, but I could hear the small, still voice within speaking to me. When I took the pipe to smoke, it would be applied within, ‘It is an idol, a lust; worship the Lord with clean lips.’ So, I felt it was not right to smoke. The Lord also sent a woman to convince me. I was one day in a house, and I took out my pipe to light it at the fire, and Mary Hawke—for that was the woman’s name—said, ‘Do you not feel it is wrong to smoke?’ I said that I felt something inside telling me that it was an idol, a lust, and she said that was the Lord.
Then I said, ‘Now, I must give it up, for the Lord is telling me of it inside, and the woman outside, so the tobacco must go, love it as I may.’ There and then I took the tobacco out of my pocket, and threw it into the fire, and put the pipe under my foot, ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ And I have not smoked since. I found it hard to break off old habits, but I cried to the Lord for help, and he gave me strength, for he has said, ‘Call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee.’ The day after I gave up smoking I had the toothache so bad that I did not know what to do. I thought this was owing to giving up the pipe, but I said I would never smoke again, if I lost every tooth in my head. I said, ‘Lord, thou hast told us My yoke is easy and my burden is light,’ and when I said that, all the pain left me. Sometimes the thought of the pipe would come back to me very strong; but the Lord strengthened me against the habit, and, bless his name, I have not smoked since.”
Bray’s biographer writes that after he had given up smoking, he thought that he would chew a little, but he conquered this dirty habit, too. “On one occasion,” Bray said, “when at a prayer‐ meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me, ‘Worship me with clean lips.’ So, when we got up from our knees, I took the quid out of my mouth and ‘whipped ’en’ [threw it] under the form. But, when we got on our knees again, I put another quid into my mouth. Then the Lord said to me again, ‘Worship me with clean lips.’ So I took the quid out of my mouth, and whipped ’en under the form again, and said, ‘Yes, Lord, I will.’ From that time I gave up chewing as well as smoking, and have been a free man.” The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may take are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example, had hard battles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity of the ecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that cost them most wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee‐ing and thou‐ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and the spirit they professed might be more in accord.
“When the Lord sent me into the world,” says Fox in his Journal, “he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was required to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ all men and women, without any respect to rich or poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and down, I was not to bid people Good‐morning, or Good‐evening, neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. This made the sects and professions rage. Oh! the rage that was in the priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and especially in priests and professors: for though ‘thou’ to a single person was according to their accidence and grammar rules, and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it: and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all into a rage.... Oh! the scorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent for not putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them. The bad language and evil usage we received on this account is hard to be expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing our lives for this matter, and that by the great professors of Christianity, who thereby discovered they were not true believers. And though it was but a small thing in the eye of man, yet a wonderful confusion it brought among all professors and priests: but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity of that custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth’s testimony against it.”
In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one time was secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid account of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in following Fox’s canons of sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but Elwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things in a shorter passage, which I will quote as a characteristic utterance of spiritual sensibility:— “By this divine light, then,” says Elwood, “I saw that though I had not the evil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery, profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I had, through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been preserved out of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils to put away and to cease from; some of which were not by the world, which lies in wickedness (1 John v. 19), accounted evils, but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me to be evils, and as such condemned in me. “As particularly those fruits and effects of pride that discover themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel; which I took too much delight in. This evil of my doings I was required to put away and cease from; and judgment lay upon me till I did so.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.