M. Vianney, the curé of Ars, was a French country

priest, whose holiness was exemplary. We read in his life the following account of his inner need of sacri- fice : —
“¢QOn this path,’ M. Vianney said, ‘it is only the first step that costs. There is in mortification a balm and a savor with- out which one cannot live when once one has made their ac- quaintance. There is but one way in which to give one’s self to God, — that is, to give one’s self entirely, and to keep nothing for one’s self. The little that one keeps is only good to trouble one and make one suffer.’ Accordingly he imposed it on him- self that he should never smell a flower, never drink when parched with thirst, never drive away a fly, never show disgust before a repugnant object, never complain of anything that had to do with his personal comfort, never sit down, never lean upon his elbows when he was kneeling. The Curé of Ars was. very sensitive to cold, but he would never take means to pro-
1 L. TyerMAN: The Life and Times of the Rev. John Wesley, i. 274.
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tect himself against it. During a very severe winter, one of his missionaries contrived a false floor to his confessional and placed a metal case of hot water beneath. The trick succeeded, and the Saint was deceived: ‘God is very good,’ he said with emotion. ‘This year, through all the cold, my feet have always es warm.’ ” 1
In this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrifices for the pure love of God was probably the uppermost | conscious motive. We may class it, then, under our head | 3. Some authors think that the impulse to sacrifice is the main religious phenomenon. It is a prominent, a universal phenomenon certainly, and lies deeper than any special creed. Here, for instance, is what seems tc be a spontaneous example of it, simply expressing what seemed right at the time between the individual and his Maker. Cotton Mather, the New England Puritan divine, is generally reputed a rather grotesque pedant ; yet what is more touchingly simple than his relation of what hap- pened when his wife came to die?
“When I saw to what a point of resignation I was now called of the Lord,” he says, ‘‘ I resolved, with his help, therein to glorify him. So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by her bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest in the world. With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely gave her up unto the Lord: and in token of my real Resignation, I gently put her out of my hands, and laid away a most lovely hand, resolving that I would never touch it more. This was the hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did. She... told me that she signed and sealed my act of resignation. And though before that she called for me continually, she after this never asked for me any more.” ?
1 A. Mountn : Le Curé d’Ars, vis de M. J. B. M. Vianney, 1864, p. 545, abridged. 2 B. WENDELL : Cotton Mather, New York, no date, p. 198.
ess:
et ea!
804 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Father Vianney’s asceticism taken in its totality was simply the result of a permanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm, longing to make proof of itself. The Roman
‘Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collected all the
motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that any one wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system mapped out for him in any one , of a number of ready-made manuals.’ The dominant
a anaemia mnt
7 Chureh notion of perfection is of course the negative
-one of “avoidance 6 of sin. Sin proceeds from concupiscence, tind concupiscence from our carnal passions and tempta- tions, chief of which are pride, sensuality in all its forms, and the loves of worldly excitement and possession. All these sources of sin must be resisted; and discipline and austerities are a most efficacious mde of meeting them. Hence there are always in these books chapters on self- mortification. But whenever a procedure is codified, the more delicate spirit of it evaporates, and if, we wish the undiluted ascetic spirit, —the passion of self-contempt wreaking itself on the poor flesh, the divine irrationality of devotion making a sacrificial gift of all it has (its sen- sibilities, namely) to the object of its adoration, — we must go to autobiographies, or other individual documents. Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flour- ished — or rather who existed, for there was little that suggested flourishing about him —in the sixteenth cen- tury, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose.
“ First of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitual affec- tionate will in all things to imitate Jesus Christ. If anything agreeable offers itself to your senses, yet does not at the same
1 That of the earlier Jesuit, Ropr1GuEz, which has been translated into all languages, is one of the best known. A convenient modern manual, very well put together, is L’Ascétique Chrétienne, by M. J. Ripert, Paris, Pous sielgue, nouvelle édition, 1898.
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time tend purely to the honor and glory of God, renounce it and separate yourself from it for the love of Christ, who all his life long had no other taste or wish than to do the will of his Father whom he called his meat and nourishment. For example, you take satisfaction in hearing of things in which the glory of God bears no part. Deny yourself this satisfaction, mortify your wish to listen. You take pleasure in seeing objects which do not raise your mind to God: refuse yourself this pleasure, and turn away your eyes. The same with conversations and all] other things. Act similarly, so far as you are able, with all the operations of the senses, striving to make yourself free from their yokes.
“The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four ‘great natural passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief. You must seek to deprive these of every satisfaction and leave them as it were in darkness and the void. Let your soul therefore turn always :
“ Not to what is most easy, but to what is hardest ;
“ Not to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful ;
“‘ Not to what most pleases, but to what disgusts ;
“ Not to matter of consolation, but to matter for desolation rather ;
“ Not to rest, but to labor ;
“Not to desire the more, but the less;
** Not to aspire to what is highest and most precious, but to what is lowest and most contemptible ;
*‘ Not to will anything, but to will nothing ;
“Not to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst, so that you may enter for the love of Christ into a complete desti- tution, a perfect poverty of spirit, and an absolute renunciation of everything in this world.
“Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you will find in a short time great delights and unspeakable consolations.
*‘ Despise yourself, and wish that others should despise you.
“Speak to your own disadvantage, and desire others to do the same 5
“Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it good when others hold the same;
306 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
“ To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything,
* To know all things, learn to know nothing.
“To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.
“To be all things, be willing to be nothing.
“To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through whatever experiences you have no taste for.
‘“‘To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.
“To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing. i
“To be what you are not, experience what you are not.”
These later verses play with that vertigo of self-contra: diction which is so dear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical, for in them Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion of the
All.
“When you stop at one thing, you cease to open yourself to the All.
“For to come to the All you must give up the All.
“ And if you should attain to owning the All, you must own it, desiring Nothing.
“In this spoliation, the soul finds its tranquillity and rest. Profoundly established in the centre of its own nothingness, it can be assailed by naught that comes from below; and since it no longer desires anything, what comes from above cannot depress it; for its desires alone are the causes of its woes.” }
And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all our heads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathic individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the sincere Suso’s account of his own self-tortures. Suso, you will remem- ber, was one of the fourteenth century German mystics ; his autobiography, written in the third person, 1s a classic religious document.
1 SAINT JEAN DE LA Crorx, Vie et CEuvres, Paris, 1893, ii. 94, 99 abridged.
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“ He was in his youth of a temperament full of fire and life ; and when this began to make itself felt, it was very grievous to him; and he sought by many devices how he might bring his body into subjection. He wore for a long time a hair shirt and an iron chain, until the blood ran from him, so that he was obliged to leave them off. He secretly caused an undergarment to be made for him; and in the undergarment he had strips of leather fixed, into which a hundred and fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp, were driven, and the points of the nails were always turned towards the flesh. He had this garment made very tight, and so arranged as to go round him and fasten in front, in order that it might fit the closer to his body, and the pointed nails might be driven into his flesh; and it was high enough to reach upwards to his navel. In this he used to sleep at night. Now in summer, when it was hot, and he was very tired and ill from his journeyings, or when he held the office of lecturer, he would sometimes, as he lay thus in bonds, and oppressed with toil, and tormented also by noxious insects, cry aloud and give way to fretfulness, and twist round and round in agony, as a worm does when run through with a pointed needle. It often seemed to him as if he were lying upon an ant-hill, from the torture caused by the insects; for if he wished to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one another.} Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness of his heart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man is killed by murderers or strong beasts of prey it is soon over; but I lie dying here under the cruel insects, and yet can- not die. The nights in winter were never so long, nor was the summer so hot, as to make him leave off this exercise. On the contrary, he devised something farther — two leathern loops into which he put his hands, and fastened one on each side his throat, and made the fastenings so secure that even if his cell had been
1 Insects,’ i e. lice, were an unfailing token of medieval sainthood. We read of Francis of Assisi’s sheepskin that “often a companion of the saint would take it to the fire to clean and dispediculate it, doing so, as he said, because the seraphic father himself was no enemy of pedocchi, but on the zontrary kept them on him (le portava adosso), and held it for an honor ana a glory to wear these celestial pearls in his habit.” Quoted by P. SaBa- TIER : Speculum Perfectionis, ete., Paris, 1898, p. 231, note.
308 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
on fire about him, he could not have helped himself. This he continued until his hands and arms had become almost tremu- lous with the strain, and then he devised something else: two leather gloves; and he caused a brazier to fit them all over with sharp-pointed brass tacks, and he used to put them on at night, in order that if he should try while asleep to throw off the hair undergarment, or relieve himself from the gnawings of the vile insects, the tacks might then stick into his body. And so it came to pass. If ever he sought to help himself with his hands in his sleep, he drove the sharp tacks into his breast, and tore himself, so that his flesh festered. When after many weeks the wounds had healed, he tore himself again and made fresh wounds.
“He continued this tormenting exercise for about sixteen years. At the end of this time, when his blood was now chilled, and the fire of his temperament destroyed, there appeared to him in a vision on Whitsunday, a messenger from heaven, who told him that God required this of him no longer. Whereupon he discontinued it, and threw all these things away into a run- ving stream.”
Suso then tells how, to emulate the sorrows of his crucified Lord, he made himself a cross with thirty protruding iron needles and nails. This he bore on his bare back between his shoulders day and night. “ The first time that he stretched out this cross upon his back his tender frame was struck with terror at it, and blunted the sharp nails slightly against a stone. But soon, repenting of this womanly cowardice, he pointed them all again with a file, and placed once more the cross upon him. It made his back, where the bones are, bloody and seared. When- ever he sat down or stood up, it was as if a hedgehog-skin were on him. If any one touched him unawares, or pushed against his clothes, it tore him.”
Suso next tells of his penitences by means of striking this eross and forcing the nails deeper into the flesh, and likewise of his self-scourgings, — a dreadful story, — and then goes on as follows: ‘‘ At this same period the Servitor procured an old castaway door, and he used to lie upon it at night without any bedclothes to make him comfortable, except that he took off
SAINTLINESS 309
his shoes and wrapped a thick cloak round him. He thus se- cured for himself a most miserable bed ; for hard pea-stalks lay in humps under his head, the cross with the sharp nails stuck into his back, his arms were locked fast in bonds, the horsehair undergarment was round his loins, and the cloak too was heavy and the door hard. Thus he lay in wretehedness, afraid to stir, just like a log, and he would send up many a sigh to God.
“In winter he suffered very much from the frost. If he stretched out his feet they lay bare on the floor and froze, if he gathered them up the blood became all on fire in his legs, and this was great pain. His feet were full of sores, his legs drop- sical, his knees bloody and seared, his loins covered with scars from the horsehair, his body wasted, his mouth parched with intense thirst, and his hands tremulous from weakness. Amid these torments he spent his nights and days; and he endured them all out of the greatness of the love which he bore in his heart to the Divine and Eternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing sufferings he sought to imitate. After a time he gave up this penitential exercise of the door, and in- stead of it he took up his abode in a very small cell, and used the bench, which was so narrow and short that he could not stretch himself upon it, as his bed. In this hole, or upon the door, he lay at night in his usual bonds, for about eight years. It was also his custom, during the space of twenty-five years, provided he was staying in the convent, never to go after com- pline in winter into any warm room, or to the convent stove to warm himself, no matter how cold it might be, unless he was obliged to do so for other reasons. Throughout all these years he never took a bath, either a water or a sweating bath; and this he did in order to mortify his comfort-seeking body. He practiced during a long time such rigid poverty that he would neither receive nor touch a penny, either with leave or without it. Fora considerable time he strove to attain such a high degree of purity that he would neither scratch nor touch any part of his body, save only his hands and feet.” 4
' ! The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by T. F. Knox, London, 1865, pp. 56-80, abridged.
310 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
‘ I spare you the recital of poor Suso’s self-inflicted tore tures from thirst. It is pleasant to know that after his | fortieth year, God showed him by a series of visions that ihe had sufficiently broken down the natural man, and ‘that he might leave these exercises off. His case is dis- ‘tinctly pathological, but he does not seem to have had the alleviation, which some ascetics have enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibility capable of actually turning tor- ment into a perverse kind of pleasure. Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that
“ Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable. . . . She said that she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, pro- , vided she might always have matter for suffering for God; but; _ that to live a single day without suffering would be intolerable. She said again that she was devoured with two unassuageable fevers, one for the holy communion, the other for suffering, humiliation, and annihilation. ‘ Nothing but pain,’ she continu- ally said in her letters, ‘makes my life supportable.’ ” 1
So much for the phenomena to which the ascetic im- pulse will in certain persons give rise. In the ecclesias- tically consecrated character three minor branches of self-mortification have been recognized as indispensable pathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity, obedi- ence, and poverty which the monk vows to observe; and upon the heads of obedience and papreney T will rade a few remarks.
\/ First, of Obedience. The secular lar life of our twentieth if century opens with this virtue held i in no high esteem.
The duty of the individual to determine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequences seems, on the
1 Bougaup: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp. 265,171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387.
SAINTLINESS 311
contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary Pro- testant social ideals. So much so that it is difficult even imaginatively to comprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their own could ever have come to think the subjection of its will to that of other finite creatures recommendable. I confess that to myself it seems some~ thing of a mystery. Yet it evidently corresponds to a profound interior need of many persons, and we must do our best to understand it.
On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expe- diency of obedience in a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as meritorious. Next, experience shows that there are times in every one’s life when one can be better counseled by others than by one’s self. Inability to decide is one of the commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves; friends who see our troubles more broadly, often see them more wisely than we do; so it is frequently an act of excellent virtue to consult and obey a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these lower prudential regions, we find, in the nature of some of the spiritual excitements which we have been studying, good reasons for idealizing obedi- ence. Obedience may spring from the general religious phenomenon of inner softening and self-surrender and throwing one’s self on higher powers. So saving are these attitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utility, they become ideally consecrated ; and in obeying aman whose fallibility we see through thoroughly, we, nevertheless, may feel much as we do when we resign our will to that of infinite wisdom. Add self-despair and the passion of self-crucifixion to this, and obedience becomes an ascetic sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of what- ever prudential uses it might have.
It is as a sacrifice, a mode of ‘ mortification,’ that
312 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
obedience is primarily conceived by Catholic writers, a “sacrifice which man offers to God, and of which he is himself both the priest and the victim. By poverty he immolates his exterior possessions; by chastity he immo- lates his body; by obedience he completes the sacrifice, and gives to God all that he yet holds as his own, his two most precious goods, his intellect and his will. The sac- rifice is then complete and unreserved, a genuine holo- caust, for the entire victim is now consumed for the honor of God.” * Accordingly, in Catholic discipline, we obey our superior not as mere man, but as the represent- ative of Christ. Obeying God in him by our intention, obedience is easy. But when the text-book theologians marshal collectively all their reasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds to our ears rather odd.
“ One of the great consolations of the monastic life,” says a Jesuit authority, “is the assurance we have that in obeying we can commit no fault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you to do this thing or that, but you are certain that you commit no fault so long as you obey, because God will only ask you if you have duly performed what orders you re- ceived, and if you can furnish a clear account in that respect, you are absolved entirely. Whether the things you did were opportune, or whether there were not something better ‘that might have been done, these are questions not asked of you, but rather of your Superior. The moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your account, and charges it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome well exclaimed, in cele- brating the advantages of obedience, ‘Oh, sovereign liberty! Oh, holy and blessed security by which one becomes almost impeccable! ’
“Saint John Climachus is of the same sentiment when he calls obedience an excuse before God. In fact, when God asks why you have done this or that, and you reply, it is because L
1 LEJEUNE : Introduction 4 la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaust simile goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola.
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was so ordered by my Superiors, God will ask for no other excuse. As a passenger in a good vessel with a good pilot need give himself no farther concern, but may go to sleep in peace, because the pilot has charge over all, and ‘ watches for him’; so a religious person who lives under the yoke of obedi- ence goes to heaven as if while sleeping, that is, while leaning entirely on the conduct of his Superiors, who are the pilots of his vessel, and keep watch for him continually. It is no small thing, of a truth, to be able to cross the stormy sea of life on the shoulders and in the arms of another, yet that is just the grace which God accords to those who live under the yoke of obedience. Their Superior bears all their burdens. ... A certain grave doctor said that he would rather spend his life in picking up straws by obedience, than by his own responsible choice busy himself with the loftiest works of charity, because one is certain of following the will of God in whatever one may do from obedience, but never certain in the same degree of anything which we may do of our own proper movement.” }
One should read the letters in which Ignatius Loyola recommends obedience as the backbone of his order, if one would gain insight into the full spirit of its cult.’ They are too long to quote; but Ignatius’s belief is so vividly expressed in a couple of sayings reported by com- panions that, though they have been so often cited, I will ask your permission to copy them once more : —
“ T ought,” an early biographer reports him as saying, “on en- vering religion, and thereafter, to place myself entirely in the hands of God, and of him who takes His place by His authority. I ought to desire that my Superior should oblige me to give up my own judgment, and conquer my own mind. I ought to set up no difference between one Superior and another, .. . but recognize them all as equal before God, whose place they fill. For if I distinguish persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience.
1 Axronso Ropricuez, S.J.: Pratique de la Perfection Chrétienne, Part ili., Treatise v., ch. x.
2 Letters li. and cxx. of the collection translated into French by Bourx, Paris, 1870.
314 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
In the hands of my Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters, to speak or not to speak to such a person, or the like ; and I must put all my fervor in executing zealously and exactly what I am ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse | which has neither intelligence nor will; be like a mass of acme which without resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may\ please any one; like a stick in the hand of an old man, who | uses it according to his needs and places it where it suits him. | So must I be under the hands of the Order, to serve it in the | ) way it judges most useful.
‘“‘T must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular place, to be employed in a particular duty. . .. I must consider nothing as belonging to me personally, and as regards the things I use, be like a statue which lets itself be stripped and never opposes resistance.” }
The other saying is reported by Rodriguez in the chap- ter from which I a moment ago made quotations. When speaking of the Pope’s authority, Rodriguez writes : —
“ Saint Ignatius said, when general of his company, that if the Holy Father were to order him to set sail in the first bark | which he might find in the port of Ostia, near Rome, and to | abandon himself to the sea, without a mast, without sails, with. | out oars or rudder or any of the things that are needful for) | navigation or subsistence, he would obey not only with alacrity, but without anxiety or repugnance, and even with a great in, ternal satisfaction.” 2
With a solitary concrete example of the extravagance to which the virtue we are considering has been carried, I will pass to the topic next in order.
“Sister Marie Claire [of Port Royal] had been greatly im- bued with the holiness and excellence of M. de Langres. This prelate, soon after he came to Port Royal, said to her one day, seeing her so tenderly attached to Mother Angélique, that it
1 Bartoui-MicHkE1, ii. 13. 2 RopRIGUEZ: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi.
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would perhaps be better not to speak to her again. Marie.
Claire, greedy of obedience, took this inconsiderate word for an oracle of God, and from that day forward remained for several years without once speaking to her sister.” !
Our next. topic s shall be be Poverty, felt at all times and under all ll creeds as one adornment of a saint tly I life. Since
ar RGN Seeeny “Senet
the instinct of ownership i is fundamental in man’s nature, this is one more example of the ascetic paradox. Yet it appears no paradox at all, but perfectly reasonable, the moment one recollects how easily higher excitements hold lower cupidities in check. Having just quoted the Jesuit Rodriguez on the subject of obedience, I will, to give immediately a concrete turn to our discussion of pov- erty, also read you a page from his chapter on this latter virtue. You must remember that he is writing imstruc- tions for monks of his own order, and bases them all on the text, “ Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
“Tf any one of you,” he says, “ will know whether or not he is really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the ordi- nary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger, thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See if you are glad to wear a worn-out habit full of patches. See if you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are passed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of spirit.” Rodriguez then goes on to describe the prac- tice of poverty in more detail. ‘The first point is that which Saint Ignatius proposes in his constitutions, when he says, ‘ Let no one use anything as if it were his private possession.’ ‘A religious person,’ he says, ‘ ought in respect to all the things that he uses, to be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but which feels no grief and makes no resistance when one
1 SarnTE-BEUVE : Histoire de Port Royal, i. 346.
a
316 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
strips it again. It is in this way that you should feel towards your clothes, your books, your cell, and everything else that you make use of ; if ordered to quit them, or to exchange them for others, have no more sorrow than if you were a statue being uncovered. In this way you will avoid using them as if they were your private possession. But if, when you give up your cell, or yield possession of this or that object or exchange it for another, you feel repugnance and are not like a statue, that shows that you view these things as if they were your private property.’
“And this is why our holy founder wished the superiors to test their monks somewhat as God tested Abraham, and to put their poverty and their obedience to trial, that by this means they may become acquainted with the degree of their virtue, and gain a chance to make ever farther progress in perfection,
. making the one move out of his room when he finds it comfortable and is attached to it; taking away from another a beok of which he is fond; or obliging a third to exchange his garment for a worse one. Otherwise we should end by acquir- ing a species of property in all these several objects, and little by little the wall of poverty that surrounds us and constitutes our principal defense would be thrown down. The ancient fathers of the desert used often thus to treat their companions. . . » Saint Dositheus, being sick-nurse, desired a certain knife, and asked Saint Dorotheus for it, not for his private use, but for employment in the infirmary of which he had charge. Whereupon Saint Dorotheus answered him: ‘ Ha! Dositheus, so that knife pleases you so much! Will you be the slave of a knife or the slave of Jesus Christ? Do you not blush with shame at wishing that a knife should be your master? I will not let you touch it.’ Which reproach and refusal had such an effect upon the holy disciple that since that time he never touched the knife again.” .
“Therefore, in our rooms,’ Father Rodriguez continues, “there must be no other furniture than a bed, a table, a bench, and a candlestick, things purely necessary, and nothing more. It is not allowed among us that our cells should be ornamented with pictures or aught else, neither armchairs, carpets, curtains,
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nor any sort of cabinet or bureau of any elegance. Neither is it allowed us to keep anything to eat, either for ourselves or for those who may come to visit us. We must ask permission to go to the refectory even for a glass of water; and finally we may not keep a book in which we can write a line, or which we may take away with us. One cannot deny that thus we are in great poverty. But this poverty is at the same time a great repose and a great perfection. For it would be inevitable, in case a religious person were allowed to own superfluous posses- sions, that these things would greatly occupy his mind, be it to acquire them, to preserve them, or to increase them ; so that in not permitting us at all to own them, all these inconveniences are remedied. Among the various good reasons why the com- pany forbids secular persons to enter our cells, the principal one is that thus we may the easier be kept in poverty. After all, we are all men, and if we were to receive people of the world into our rooms, we should not have the strength to re- main within the bounds prescribed, but should at least wish to adorn them with some books to give the visitors a better opin- ion of our scholarship.” }
Since Hindu fakirs, Buddhist monks, and Moham- medan dervishes unite with Jesuits and Franciscans in idealizing poverty as the loftiest individual state, it is worth while to examine into the spiritual grounds for such a seemingly unnatural opinion. And first, of those which lie closest to common human nature.
The opposition between the men who have and the men who are is immemorial. Though the gentleman, in the old-fashioned sense of the man who is well born, has usually in point of fact been predaceous and reveled in lands and goods, yet he has never identified his essence with these possessions, but rather with the personal su- periorities, the courage, generosity, and pride supposed to be his birthright. To certain huckstering kinds of
1 RopRIGUEZ : Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise iii., chaps. vi., vii
o
318 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
consideration he thanked God he was forever inaccessi- ble, and if in life’s vicissitudes he should become des- titute through thei lack, he was glad to think that with his sheer valor he was all the freer to work out his salvation. “ Wer nur selbst was hatte,” says Les- sing’s Tempelherr, in Nathan the Wise, “ mein Gott, mein Gott, ich habe nichts!”’ This ideal of the well-born man without possessions was embodied in knight-errantry and templardom ; and, hideously corrupted as it has always been, it still dominates sentimentally, if not practically, the military and aristocratic view of life. We glorify the soldier as the man absolutely unincumbered. Own- ing nothing but his bare life, and willing to toss that up at any moment when the cause commands him, he is the representative of unhampered freedom in ideal directions. The laborer who pays with his person day by day, and has no rights invested in the future, offers also much of this ideal detachment. Like the savage, he may make his bed wherever his right arm can support him, and from his simple and athletic attitude of observation, the property-owner seems buried and smothered in ignoble externalities and trammels, “wading in straw and rub- bish to his knees.” The claims which things make are _corrupters of manhood, mortgages on the soul, and a drag anchor on our progress towards the empyrean.
“Everything I meet with,” writes Whitefield, “seems to carry this voice with it, —‘Go thou and preach the Gospel ; be a pilgrim on earth; have no party or certain dwelling place.’ My heart echoes back, ‘ Lord Jesus, help me to do or suffer thy will. When thou seest me in danger of nestling, —in pity —
in tender pity, — put a thorn in my nest to prevent me from ews
1 R. Purrp: The Life and Times of George Whitefield, London, 1842, p. 366.
SAINTLINESS 319
The loathing of ‘capital’ with which our laboring classes to-day are growing more and more infected seems largely composed of this sound sentiment of antipathy for lives based on mere having. As an anarchist poet writes : —
“Not by accumulating riches, but by giving away that which you have,
“ Shall you become beautiful ;
“You must undo the wrappings, not case yourself in fresh ones ;
“ Not by multiplying clothes shall you make your body sound and healthy, but rather by discarding them .. .
“For a soldier who is going on a campaign does not seek what fresh furniture he can carry on his back, but rather what he can leave behind ;
** Knowing well that every additional thing which he cannot freely use and handle is an impediment.” }
In short, lives based on having are less free than lives based either on doing or on being, and in the interest of action people subject to spiritual excitement throw away | possessions as so many clogs. Only those who have no private interests can follow an ideal straight away. Sloth and cowardice creep in with every dollar or guinea we have to guard. When a brother novice came to Saint Francis, saying: “Father, it would be a great consola- tion to me to own a psalter, but even supposing that our general should concede to me this indulgence, still I should like also to have your consent,” Francis put him off with the examples of Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver, pursuing the infidels in sweat and labor, and finally dying on the field of battle. ‘So care not,” he said, “for own- ing books and knowledge, but care rather ne works of goodness,’ > And when some weeks later the novice came
“1 EpwARD CarPENTER : Towards Democracy, p. 362, abridged.
320 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
again to talk of his craving for the psalter, Francis said: “After you have got your psalter you will crave a brevi- ary; and after you have got your breviary you will sit in your stall lke a grand prelate, and will say to your brother: ‘Hand me my breviary.’ . . . And thencefor- ward he denied all such requests, saymg: A man pos- sesses of learning only so much as comes out of him in action, and a monk is a good preacher only so far as his deeds proclaim him such, for every tree is known by its fruits.” *
But beyond this more worthily athletic attitude in- volved in doing and being, there is, in the desire of not having, something profounder still, something related to that fundamental mystery of religious experience, the satisfaction found in absolute surrender to the larger power. So long as any secular safeguard is retained, so Jong as any residual prudential guarantee is clung to, so long the surrender is incomplete, the vital crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel, and mistrust of the divine obtains: we hold by two anchors, looking to God, it is true, after a fashion, but also holding by our proper machinations. In certain medical experiences we have the same critical point to overcome. A drunkard, or a morphine or cocaine maniac, offers himself to be cured. He appeals to the doctor to wean him from his enemy, but he dares not face blank abstinence. The tyrannical drug is still an anchor to windward: he hides supplies of it among his clothing; arranges secretly to have it smuggled in in case of need. Even so an incompletely regenerate man still trusts in his own expedients. His money is like the sleeping potion which the chronically wakeful patient keeps beside his bed; he throws himself on God, but 7f he should need the other help, there it
1 Speculum Perfectionis, ed. P. Sasatier, Paris, 1898, pp. 10, 13.
SAINTLINESS 321
will be also. Every one knows cases of this incomplete and ineffective desire for reform, — drunkards whom, with all their self-reproaches and resolves, one perceives to be quite unwilling seriously to contemplate never being drunk again! Really to give up anything on which we have relied, to give it up definitively, ‘for good and all’ and forever, signifies one of those radical alterations of character which came under our notice in the lectures on conversion. In it the inner man rolls over into an entirely different position of equilibrium, lives in a new centre of energy from this time on, and the turning-point and hinge of all such operations seems usually to involve the sincere acceptance of certain nakednesses and destitutions.
Accordingly, throughout the annals of the saintly life, we find this ever-recurring note: Fling yourself upon’ God’s providence without making any reserve whatever, — take no thought for the morrow, — sell all you have and give it to the poor, — only when the sacrifice is ruthless and reckless will the higher safety really arrive. Asa concrete example let me read a page from the biography of Antoinette Bourignon, a good woman, much persecuted in her day by both Protestants and Catholics, because she would not take her religion at second hand. When a young girl, in her father’s house, —
“She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And being one night in a most pro- found penitence, she said from the bottom of her heart: ‘O my Lord! What must I do to please thee? For I have no- body to teach me. Speak to my soul and it will hear thee.’ At that instant she heard, as if another had spoke within her : Forsake all earthly things. Separate thyself from the love of the creatures. Deny thyself. She was quite astonished, not under- standing this language, and mused long on these three points, thinking how she could fulfill them. She thought she could not live without earthly things, nor without loving the creatures,
$22 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
nor without loving herself. Yet she said, ‘ By thy Grace I will do it, Lord!’ But when she would perform her promise, she knew not where to begin. Having thought on the religious in monasteries, that they forsook all earthly things by being shut up in acloister, and the love of themselves by subjecting of their wills, she asked leave of her father to enter into a cloister of the barefoot Carmelites, but he would not permit it, saying he would rather see her laid in her grave. This seemed to her a great cruelty, for she thought to find in the cloister the true Christians she had been seeking, but she found afterwards that he knew the cloisters better than she; for after he had for- bidden her, and told her he would never permit her to be a religious, nor give her any money to enter there, yet she went to Father Laurens, the Director, and offered to serve in the monastery and work hard for her bread, and be content with little, if he would receive her. At which he smiled and said: That cannot be. We must have money to build ; we take no maids without money ; you must find the way to get it, else there is no entry here.
‘This astonished her greatly, and she was thereby undeceived as to the cloisters, resolving to forsake all company and live alone till it should please God to show her what she ought to do and whither to go. She asked always earnestly, ‘When shall I be perfectly thine, O my God?’ And she thought he still answered her, When thou shalt no longer possess any- thing, and shalt die to thyself. ‘And where shall I do that, Lord?’ He answered her, Jn the desert. This made so strong an impression on her soul that she aspired after this ; but being a maid of eighteen years only, she was afraid of unlucky chances, and was never used to travel, and knew no way. She laid aside all these doubts and said, ‘ Lord, thou wilt guide me how and where it shall please thee. It is for thee that I do it. I will lay aside my habit of a maid, and will take that of a hermit that I may pass unknown.’ Having then secretly made ready this habit, while her parents thought to have married her, her father having promised her to a rich French merchant, she pre- vented the time, and on Easter evening, having cut her hair, put on the habit, and slept a little, she went out of her chamber
SAINTLINESS 323
about four in the morning, taking nothing but one penny to buy bread for that day. And it being said to her in the going out, Where is thy faith? in a penny? she threw it away, begging pardon of God for her fault, and saying, ‘ No, Lord, my faith is not in a penny, but in thee alone.’ Thus she went away wholly delivered from the heavy burthen of the cares and good things of this world, and found her soul so satisfied that she no longer wished for anything upon earth, resting entirely upon God, with this only fear lest she should be discovered and be obliged to return home; for she felt already more content in this poverty than she had done for all her life in all the delights of the world.” 1
The penny was a small financial safeguard, but an effec | tive spiritual obstacle. Not till it was thrown away could |
g
the character settle into the new equilibrium completely. |
Over and above the mystery of self-surrender, there are in the cult of poverty other religious mysteries. There is
1 An Apology for M. Antonia Bourignon, London, 1699, pp. 269, 270, abridged.
Another example from Starbuck’s MS. collection : —
“ At a meeting held at six the next morning, I heard a man relate his experience. He said: The Lord asked him if he would confess Christ among the quarrymen with whom he worked, and he said he would. Then he asked him if he would give up to be used of the Lord the four hundred dollars he had laid up, and he said he would, and thus the Lord saved him. The thought came to me at once that I had never made a real consecration either of myself or of my property to the Lord, but had always tried to serve the Lord in my way. Now the Lord asked me if I would serve him in his way, and go out alone and penniless if he so ordered. The question was pressed home, and I must decide: To forsake all and have him, or have all and lose him! I soon decided to take him ; and the blessed assurance came, that he had taken me for his own, and my joy was full. I returned home from the meeting with feelings as simple as a child. I thought all would be glad to hear of the joy of the Lord that possessed me, and so I began to tell the simple story. But to my great surprise, the pastors (for I attended meetings in three churches) opposed the experience and said it was fanaticism, and one told the members of his church to shun those that professed it, and I soon found that my foes were those of my own houses hold.’
324 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
the mystery of veracity : “‘ Naked came I into the world,” etc., — whoever first said that, possessed this mystery. My own bare entity must fight the battle — shams can- not save me. There is also the mystery of democracy, or sentiment of the equality before God of all his crea- tures. This sentiment (which seems in general to have been more widespread in Mohammedan than in Christian lands) tends to nullify man’s usual acquisitiveness. Those who have it spurn dignities and honors, privileges and advantages, preferring, as I said in a former lecture, to grovel on the common level before the face of God. It is not exactly the sentiment of humility, though it comes so close to it in practice. It is humanity, rather, refusing to enjoy anything that others do not share. A profound moralist, writing of Christ’s saying, ‘Sell all thou hast and follow me,’ proceeds as follows : —
“Christ may have meant: If you love mankind absolutely you will as a result not care for any possessions whatever, and this seems a very likely proposition. But it is one thing to believe that a proposition is probably true; it is another thing to see it as a fact. If you loved mankind as Christ loved them, you would see his conclusion as a fact. It would be obvious. You would sell your goods, and they would be no loss to you. These truths, while literal to Christ, and to any mind that has Christ’s love for mankind, become parables to lesser natures. There are in every generation people who, beginning innocently, with no predetermined intention of becoming saints, find them- selves drawn into the vortex by their interest in helping man- kind, and by the understanding that comes from actually doing it. The abandonment of their old mode of life is like dust in
the balance. It is done gradually, incidentally, imperceptibly.
Thus the whole question of the abandonment of luxury is no question at all, but a mere incident to another question, namely, the degree to which we abandon ourselves to the remorseless logic of our love for others.” }
1 J. J. CaapMan, in the Political Nursery, vol. iv. p. 4, April, 1900, abridged.
SAINTLINESS 325
But in all these matters of sentiment one must have ‘been there’ one’s self in order to understand them. No American can ever attain to understanding the loyalty of a Briton towards his king, of a German towards his emperor; nor can a Briton or German ever understand the peace of heart of an American in having no king, no Kaiser, no spurious nonsense, between him and the
.
common God of all. i sentiments S as § simple as these”
a ead
are mysteries which one e must 1 receive as gifts of birth, how much more is" is this the case with those subtler reli- gious “sentiments ‘which we have been considering ! ! One! can never fathom an emotion or divine its dictates by standing outside of it. In the glowing hour of excite- ment, however, all incomprehensibilities are solved, and what was so enigmatical from without becomes transpar- ently obvious. Each emotion obeys a logic of its own, and makes deductions which no other logic can draw. Piety and charity live in a different universe from worldly lusts and fears, and form another centre of energy alto- gether. As in a supreme sorrow lesser vexations may become a consolation ; as a supreme love may turn minor sacrifices into gain; so a supreme trust may render com- mon safeguards odious, and in certain glows of generous excitement it may appear unspeakably mean to retain one’s hold of personal possessions. The only sound plan, if we are ourselves outside the pale of such emotions, is to observe as well as we are able those who feel them, and to record faithfully what we observe; and this, I need hardly say, is what I have striven to do in these last two descriptive lectures, which I now hope will have covered the ground sufficiently for our present needs.
LECTURES XIV AND XV THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS
E have now passed in review the more important
of the phenomena which are regarded as fruits of
genuine religion and characteristics of men who are de-
vout. To-day we have to change our attitude from that
.of description to that of appreciation; we have to ask
whether the fruits in question can help us to judge the
absolute value of what religion adds to human life. Were
I to parody Kant, I should say that a ‘Critique of pure Sainthness’ must be our theme.
If, in turning to this theme, we could descend upon our subject from above like Catholic theologians, with our fixed definitions of man and man’s perfection and our positive dogmas about God, we should have an easy time of it. Man’s perfection would be the fulfillment of his end; and his end would be union with his Maker. That union could be pursued by him along three paths, active, purgative, and contemplative, respectively ; and progress along either path would be a simple matter to measure by the application of a limited number of theological and moral conceptions and definitions. The absolute signifi- cance and value of any bit of religious experience we might hear of would thus be given almost mathematically into our hands.
If convenience were everything, we ought now to grieve at finding ourselves cut off from so admirably convenient a method as this. But we did cut ourselves off from it deliberately in those remarks which you remember we
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 327
made, in our first lecture, about the empirical method ;
and it must be confessed that after that act of renun- ciation we can never hope for clean-cut and scholastic results. We cannot divide man sharply into an animal and a rational part. We cannot distinguish natural from supernatural effects; nor among the latter know which are favors of God, and which are counterfeit operations of the demon. We have merely to collect things together \
without any special a priori theological system, and out, of an aggregate of piecemeal judgments as to the value
of this and that experience — judgments in which our general philosophic prejudices, our instincts, and our common sense are our only guides — decide that on the whole one type of religion is approved by its fruits, and another type condemned. ‘On the whole,’—I fear we shall never escape complicity with that qualification, so dear to your practical man, so repugnant to your system- atizer !
I also fear that as I make this frank confession, I may seem to some of you to throw our compass overboard, and
to adopt caprice as our pilot. Skepticism or wayward |
choice, you may think, can be the only results of such a formless method as I have taken up. A few remarks in deprecation of such an opinion, and in farther expla- nation of the empiricist principles which I profess, may therefore appear at this point to be in place.
_ Abstractly, it would seem illogical to try to measure the worth of a religion’s fruits in merely human terms
of value. How can you measure their worth without | considering whether the God really exists who is sup- |
posed to inspire them? If he really exists, then all the conduct instituted by men to meet his wants must neces- sarily be a reasonable fruit of his religion, —it would be
o\" ve q
828 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
unreasonable only in case he did not exist. If, for in- stance, you were to condemn a religion of human or animal sacrifices by virtue of your subjective sentiments, and if all the while a deity were really there demanding such sacrifices, you would be making a theoretical mistake by tacitly assuming that the deity must be non-existent ; you would be setting up a theology of your own as much as if you were a scholastic philosopher.
To this extent, to the extent of disbelieving peremp- torily in certain types of deity, I frankly confess that we must be theologians. If disbeliefs can be said to constitute a theology, then the prejudices, instincts, and common sense which I chose as our guides make theo- logical partisans of us whenever they make certain beliefs abhorrent.
But such common-sense prejudices and instincts’ are themselves the fruit of an empirical evolution. Nothing is more striking than the secular alteration that goes on in the moral and religious tone of men, as their insight into nature and their social arrangements: progressively develop. After an interval of a few generations the mental climate proves unfavorable to notions of the deity which at an earlier date were perfectly satisfactory : the older gods have fallen below the common secular level, and can no longer be believed in. To-day a deity who should require bleeding sacrifices to placate him would be too sanguinary to be taken seriously. Even if power- ful historical credentials were put forward in his favor, we would not look at them. Once, on the contrary, his cruel appetites were of themselves credentials. They positively recommended him to men’s imaginations in ages when such coarse signs of power were respected and no others could be understood. Such deities then were worshiped because such fruits were relished.
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 329
Doubtless historic accidents always played some later part, but the original factor in fixing the figure of the gods must always have been psychological. The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who founded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them personally. They could use him. He guided their imagination, warranted their hopes, and controlled their will, — or else they required him as a safeguard against the demon and a curber of other people’s crimes. In any case, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them to yield. So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless; so soon as they conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted too extensively other values ; so soon as they appeared childish, contempt- ible, or immoral when reflected on, the deity grew dis- credited, and was erelong neglected and forgotten. It was in this way that the Greek and Roman gods ceased to be believed in by educated pagans; it is thus that we ourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohamme- dan theologies; Protestants have so dealt with the Catho- lic notions of deity, and liberal Protestants with older Protestant notions; it is thus that Chinamen judge of us, and that all of us now living will be judged by our descendants. When we cease to admire or approve what the definition of a deity implies, we end by deeming that deity incredible.
Few historic changes are more curious than these mu- tations of theological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems positively to have been required by their imagination. They called the cruelty ‘retributive justice, and a God without it would cer- tainly have struck them as not ‘sovereign’ enough. But
330 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
to-day we abhor the very notion of eternal suffermg in- flicted; and that arbitrary dealing-out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a conviction, but a ‘ delightful conviction,’ as of a doctrine ‘exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet,’ appears to us, if sovereignly anything, sovereignly irrational and mean. Not only the cruelty, but the paltriness of character of the gods believed in by earlier centuries also strikes later centuries with surprise. We shall see examples of it from the annals of Catholic saintship which make us rub our Protestant eyes. Ritual worship in general appears to the modern transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, as if addressed to a deity of an almost ab- surdly childish character, taking delight in toy-shop fur- niture, tapers and tinsel, costume and mumbling and mum- mery, and finding his ‘ glory’ incomprehensibly enhanced thereby ;— just as on the other hand the formless spa- ciousness of pantheism appears quite empty to ritualistic natures, and the gaunt theism of evangelical sects seems intolerably bald and chalky and bleak. . Luther, says Emerson, would have cut off his right hand rather than nail his theses to the door at Wittenberg, if he had sup- posed that they were destined to lead to the pale nega- tions of Boston Unitarianism.
So far, then, although we are compelled, whatever may be our pretensions to empiricism, to employ some sort of a standard of theological probability of our own whenever we assume to estimate the fruits of other men’s religion, yet this very standard has been begotten out of the drift of common life. It is the voice of human experience within us, judging and condemning all gods that stand athwart the pathway along which it feels itself to be ad- vancing. Experience, if we take it in the largest sense, is
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 331
thus the parent of those disbeliefs which, it was charged, were inconsistent with the experiential method. The inconsistency, you see, is immaterial, and the charge may be neglected.
If we pass from disbeliefs to positive beliefs, it seems to me that there is not even a formal inconsistency to be! laid against our method. The gods we stand by are the gods we need and can use, the gods whose demands on us are reinforcements of our demands on ourselves and on one another. What I then propose to do is, briefly’
y
stated, to test saintliness by common sense, to use human |
standards to help us decide how far the religious fer
commends itself as an ideal kind of human activity. /
If it commends itself, then any theological beliefs that’ may inspire it, in so far forth will stand accredited. If not, then they will be discredited, and all without refer- ence to anything but human working principles. It is but the elimination of the humanly unfit, and the survival of the humanly fittest, applied to religious beliefs; and if we look at history candidly and without prejudice, we have to admit that no religion has ever in the long run
established or proved itself in any other way. Religions, ~
have approved themselves; they have ministered to sun- /
dry vital needs which they found reigning. When they violated other needs too strongly, or when other faiths came which served the same needs better, the first reli-/ gions were supplanted.
The needs were always many, and the tests were never sharp. So the reproach of vagueness and subjectivity and ‘on the whole’-ness, which can with perfect legiti- macy be addressed to the empirical method as we are forced to use it, is after all a reproach to which the entire life of man in dealing with these matters is obnoxious. No religion has ever yet owed its prevalence to ‘ apodictic
332 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
certainty.’ In a later lecture I will ask whether objec: tive certainty can ever be added by theological reasoning to a religion that already empirically prevails.
One word, also, about the reproach that in following this sort of an empirical method we are handing ourselves over to systematic skepticism.
Since it is impossible to deny secular alterations in our sentiments and needs, it would be absurd to affirm that one’s own age of the world can be beyond correction by the next age. Skepticism cannot, therefore, be ruled out by any set of thinkers as a possibility against which their conclusions are secure; and no empiricist ought to claim exemption from this universal lability. But to admit one’s liability to correction is one thing, and to embark upon a sea of wanton doubt is another. Of willfully playing into the hands of skepticism we cannot be ac- cused. He who acknowledges the imperfectness of his instrument, and makes allowance for it in discussing his observations, is in a much better position for gaining .truth than if he claimed his instrument to be infallible. Or is dogmatic or scholastic theology less doubted in point of fact for claiming, as it does, to be in point of right undoubtable? And if not, what command over truth would this kind of theology really lose if, instead of absolute certainty, she only claimed reasonable proba-
ility for her conclusions? If we claim only reasona- \ble probability, it will be as much as men who love the truth can ever at any given moment hope to have within their grasp. Pretty surely it will be more than we could have had, if we were unconscious of our liability to err.
Nevertheless, dogmatism will doubtless continue to con- demn us for this confession. The mere outward form of
~
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 333
inalterable certainty is so precious to some minds that to renounce it explicitly is for them out of the question. They will claim it even where the facts most patently pronounce its folly. But the safe thing is surely to recog’
nize that all the insights of creatures of a day like ours) selves must be provisional. The wisest of critics is an altering being, subject to the better insight of the mor- row, and right at any moment, only ‘up to date’ and ‘on the whole.’ When larger ranges of truth open, it is surely best to be able to open ourselves to their recep- tion, unfettered by our previous pretensions. “ Heartily know, when half-gods go, the gods arrive.”
The fact of diverse judgments about religious phenom- ena is therefore entirely unescapable, whatever may be one’s own desire to attain the irreversible. But apart from that fact, a more fundamental question awaits us, the question whether men’s opinions ought to be ex- pected to be absolutely uniform in this field. Ought all men to have the same religion? Ought they to approve the same fruits and follow the same leadings? Are they so like in their inner needs that, for hard and soft, for proud and humble, for strenuous and lazy, for healthy- minded and despairing, exactly the same religious incen- tives are required? Or are different functions in the organism of humanity allotted to different types of man, so that some may really be the better for a religion of consolation and reassurance, whilst others are better for one of terror and reproof? It might conceivably be so ; and we shall, I think, more and more suspect it to be so as we go on. And if it be so, how can any possible judge or critic help being biased in favor of the religion by which his own needs are best met ? He aspires to im- partiality ; but he is too close to the struggle not to be to some degree a participant, and he is sure to approve
834 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
most warmly those fruits of piety in others which taste most good and prove most nourishing to him. I am well aware of how anarchic much of what I say may sound. Expressing myself thus abstractly and briefly, I may seem to despair of the very notion of truth. But I beseech you to reserve your judgment until we see it applied to the details which hie before us. I do indeed disbelieve that we or any other mortal men can { | attain on a given day to absolutely incorrigible and unim- | provable truth about such matters of fact as those with \which religions deal. But I reject this dogmatic ideal not out of a perverse delight in intellectual instability. I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather do I fear to lose truth by this pretension to possess it already wholly. That we can gain more and more of it by mov- ing’ always in the right direction, I believe as much as any one, and I hope to bring you all to my way of think- ing before the termination of these lectures. Till then, do not, I pray you, harden your minds irrevocably against the empiricism which I profess. I will waste no more words, then, in abstract justifica- tion of my method, but seek immediately to use it upon the facts.
In critically judging of the value of religious phe- nomena, it is very important to insist on the distinction between religion as an individual personal function, and religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product. I drew this distinction, you may remember, in my second lecture. The word ‘religion,’ as ordinarily used, is equivo- val. A survey of history shows us that, as a rule, reli- gious geniuses attract disciples, and produce groups of sympathizers. When these groups get strong enough to ‘organize’ themselves, they become ecclesiastical institu:
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 335
tions with corporate ambitions of their own. © The spirit of politics and the lust of dogmatic rule are then apt to enter and to contaminate the originally innocent thing ; so that when we hear the word ‘religion’ nowadays, we think inevitably of some ‘ church’ or other; and to some persons the word ‘church’ suggests so much hypocrisy and tyranny and meanness and tenacity of superstition that in a wholesale undiscerning way they glory in say- ing that they are ‘down’ on religion altogether. Even we who belong to churches do not exempt other churches than our own from the general condemnation.
But in this course of lectures ecclesiastical institutions hardly concern us at all. The religious experience which we are studying is that which lives itself out within the private breast. First-hand individual experience of this kind has always appeared as a heretical sort of innova- tion to those who witnessed its birth. Naked comes it into the world and lonely; and it has always, for a time at least, driven him who had it into the wilderness, often into the literal wilderness out of doors, where the Bud- dha, Jesus, Mohammed, St. Francis, George Fox, and so many others had to go. George Fox expresses well this isolation ; and I can do no better at this point than read to you a page from his Journal, referring to the period of his youth when religion began to ferment within him seriously.
“T fasted much,” Fox says, “ walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible, and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places until night came on; and frequently in the night walked mournfully about by myself; for I was a man of sorrows in the time of the first workings of the Lord in me.
“During all this time I was never joined in profession of religion with any, but gave up myself to the Lord, having for-
336 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
saken all evil company, taking leave of father and mother, and all other relations, and traveled up and down as a stranger on the earth, which way the Lord inclined my heart; taking a chamber to myself in the town where [ came, and tarrying sometimes more, sometimes less in a place: for I durst not stay long in a place, being afraid both of professor and profane, lest, being a tender young man, I should be hurt by conversing much with either. For which reason I kept much as a stranger, seek- ing heavenly wisdom and getting knowledge from the Lord; and was brought off from outward things, to rely on the Lord alone. As I had forsaken the priests, so I left the separate preachers also, and those called the most experienced people; for I saw there was none among them all that could speak to my condition. And when all my hopes in them and in all men were gone so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do; then, oh then, I heard a voice which said, ‘ There is one, even Jesus Christ, that can speak to thy condition.’ When I heard it, my heart did leap for joy. Then the Lord let me see why there was none upon the earth that could speak to my condition. I had not fellowship with any people, priests, nor professors, nor any sort of separated people. I was afraid of all carnal talk and talkers, for I could see nothing but cor- ruptions. When I was in the deep, under all shut up, I could not believe that I should ever overcome; my troubles, my sor- vows, and my temptations were so great that I often thought I should have despaired, I was so tempted. But when Christ opened to me how he was tempted by the same devil, and had overcome him, and had bruised his head; and that through him and his power, life, grace, and spirit, I should overcome also, I had confidence in him. If I had had a king’s diet, palace, and attendance, all would have been as nothing; for nothing gave me comfort but the Lord by his power. I saw professors, priests, and people were whole and at ease in that condition which was my misery, and they loved that which I would have been rid of. But the Lord did stay my desires upon himself, and my care was cast upon him alone.” !
1 GzorceE Fox: Journal, Philadelphia, 1800, pp. 59-61, abridged.
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A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it be- comes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every at- tempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration. Unless, in- deed, by adopting new movements of the spirit it can make capital out of them and use them for its selfish corporate designs! Of protective action of this politic sort, promptly or tardily decided on, the dealings of the Roman ecclesiasticism with many individual saints and prophets yield examples enough for our instruction.
The plain fact is that men’s minds are built, as has been often said, in water-tight compartments. Religious after fashion, they yet have many other things in them beside their religion, and unholy entanglements and associations inevitably obtain. The basenesses so commonly charged to religion’s account are thus, almost all of them, not chargeable at all to religion proper, but rather to reli- gion’s wicked practical partner, the spirit of corporate dominion. And the bigotries are most of them in their turn chargeable to religion’s wicked intellectual partner, the spirit of dogmatic dominion, the passion for laying down the law in the form of an absolutely closed-in theo- retic system. ‘The ecclesiastical spirit in general is the
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sum of these two spirits of dominion; and I beseech you never to confound the phenomena of mere tribal or corporate psychology which it presents with those manifestations of the purely interior life which are the exclusive object of our study. The baiting of Jews, the hunting of Albigenses and Waldenses, the stoning of Quakers and ducking of Methodists, the murdering of Mormons and the massacring of Armenians, express much rather that aboriginal human neophobia, that pug- nacity of which we all share the vestiges, and that inborn hatred of the alien and of eccentric and non-conforming men as aliens, than they express the positive piety of the various perpetrators. Piety is the mask, the inner force is tribal instinct. You believe as little as I do, in spite of the Christian unction with which the German emperor addressed his troops upon their way to China, that the conduct which he suggested, and in which other Christian armies went beyond them, had anything whatever to do with the interior religious life of those concerned in the performance.
Well, no more for past atrocities than for this atrocity should we make piety responsible. At most we may blame piety for not availing to check our natural passions, and sometimes for supplying them with hypocritical pre- texts. But hypocrisy also imposes obligations, and with the pretext usually couples some restriction; and when the passion gust is over, the piety may bring a reaction of repentance which the irreligious natural man would not have shown.
For many of the historic aberrations which have been laid to her charge, religion as such, then, is not to blame. Yet of the charge that over-zealousness or fanaticism is one of her liabilities we cannot wholly acquit her, so I will next make a remark upon that point. But I will
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preface it by a preliminary remark which connects itself with much that follows.
Our survey of the phenomena of saintliness has un- questionably produced in your minds an impression of extravagance. Is it necessary, some of you have asked, as one example after another came before us, to be quite so fantastically good as that? We who have no vocation _ for the extremer ranges of sanctity will surely be let off at the last day if our humility, asceticism, and devout- ness prove of a less convulsive sort. This practically amounts to saying that much that it is legitimate to ad- mire in this field need nevertheless not be imitated, and that religious phenomena, like all other human phenom- ena, are subject to the law of the golden mean. Political reformers accomplish their successive tasks in the his- tory of nations by being blind for the time to other causes. Great schools of art work out the effects which it is their mission to reveal, at the cost of a one-sidedness for which other schools must make amends. We accept a John Howard, a Mazzini, a Botticelli, a Michael Angelo, with a kind of indulgence. We are glad they existed to show us that way, but we are glad there are also other ways of seeing and taking life. So of many of the saints whom we have looked at. We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example. The conduct we blame ourselves for not following lies nearer to the middle line of human effort. It is less dependent on particular beliefs and doctrines. It is such as wears well in different ages, such as under differ- ent skies all judges are able to commend.
The fruits of religion, in other words, are, like all\ human products, liable to corruption by excess. Common
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sense must judge them. It need not blame the votary ; but it may be able to praise him only conditionally, as one who acts faithfully according to his lights. He shows us heroism in one way, but the unconditionally good way is that for which no indulgence need be asked.
We find that error by excess is exemplified by every saintly virtue. Excess, in human faculties, means usually one-sidedness or want of balance; for it is hard to im- agine an essential faculty too strong, if only other facul- ties equally strong be there to codperate with it in action. Strong affections need a strong will; strong active pow- ers need a strong intellect; strong intellect needs strong sympathies, to keep life steady. If the balance exist, no one faculty can possibly be too strong — we only get the stronger all-round character. In the life of saints, tech nically so called, the spiritual faculties are strong, but what gives the impression of extravagance proves usually on examination to be a relative deficiency of intellect. Spiritual excitement takes pathological forms whenever other interests are too few and the intellect too narrow. We find this exemplified by all the saintly attributes in turn — devout love of God, purity, charity, asceticism, all may lead astray. I will run over these virtues in succes- sion.
/ First of all let us take Devoutness. When unbalanced, one of its vices is called Fanaticism. Fanaticism (when not a mere expression of ecclesiastical ambition) is only Joyalty carried to a convulsive extreme. When an in- tensely loyal and narrow mind is once grasped by the feeling that a certain superhuman person is worthy of its exclusive devotion, one of the first things that happens is that it idealizes the devotion itself. To adequately realize the merits of the idol gets to be considered the
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one great merit of the worshiper; and the sacrifices and servilities by which savage tribesmen have from time ummemorial exhibited their faithfulness to chieftains are now outbid in favor of the deity. Vocabularies are ex- hausted and languages altered in the attempt to praise him enough ; death is looked on as gain if it attract his grateful notice; and the personal attitude of being his devotee becomes what one might almost call a new and exalted kind of professional specialty within the tribe.’ The legends that gather round the lives of holy persons are fruits of this impulse to celebrate and glorify. The Buddha? and Mohammed? and their companions and many Christian saints are incrusted with a heavy jewelry
1 Christian saints have had their specialties of devotion, Saint Francis to Christ’s wounds; Saint Anthony of Padua to Christ’s childhood ; Saint Bernard to his humanity ; Saint Teresa to Saint Joseph, ete. The Shi-ite Mohammedans venerate Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, instead of Abu-bekr, his brother-in-law. Vambéry describes a dervish whom he met in Persia, ‘¢who had solemnly vowed, thirty years before, that he would never em- ploy his organs of speech otherwise but in uttering, everlastingly, the name of his favorite, Ali, Ali. He thus wished to signify to the world that he was the most devoted partisan of that Ali who had been dead a thousand years. In his own home, speaking with his wife, children, and friends, no other word but ‘Ali!’ ever passed his lips. If he wanted food or drink or anything else, he expressed his wants still by repeating ‘Ali!’ Begging or buying at the bazaar, it was always ‘Ali!’ Treated ill or generously, he would still harp on his monotonous ‘ Ali!’ Latterly his zeal assumed such tremendous proportions that, like a madman, he would race, the whole day, up and down the streets of the town, throwing his stick high up into the air, and shriek out, all the while, at the top of his voice, ‘Ali!’ This der- vish was venerated by everybody as a saint, and received everywhere with the greatest distinction.” ARMINIUS VAMBERY, his Life and Adventures, written by Himself, London, 1889, p. 69. On the anniversary of the death of Hussein, Ali’s.son, the Shi-ite Moslems still make the air resound with eries of his name and Ali’s.
2 Compare H. C. WarrEN: Buddhism in Translation, Cambridge, U. S., 1898, passim.
8 Compare J. L. Merrick: The Life and Religion of Mohammed, as contained in the Sheeah traditions of the Hyat-ul-Kuloob, Boston, 1850, passim.
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of anecdotes which are meant to be honorific, but are simply abgeschmackt and silly, and form a touching expression of man’s misguided propensity to praise.
An immediate consequence of this condition of mind is jealousy for the deity’s honor. How can the devotee _ show his loyalty better than by sensitiveness in this re- gard? The slightest affront or neglect must be resented, the deity’s enemies must be put to shame. In exceed- ingly narrow minds and active wills, such a care may become an engrossing preoccupation ; and crusades have been preached and massacres instigated for no other rea- son than to remove a fancied slight upon the God. Theologies representing the gods as mindful of their glory, and churches with imperialistic policies, have con- spired to fan this temper to a glow, so that intoler- ance and persecution have come to be vices associated by some of us inseparably with the saintly mind. They are unquestionably its besetting sins. The saintly tem- per is a moral temper, and a moral temper has often to be cruel. It is a partisan temper, and that is cruel. Between his own and Jehovah’s enemies a David knows no difference ; a Catherine of Siena, panting to stop the warfare among Christians which was the scandal of her epoch, can think of no better method of union among them than a crusade to massacre the Turks; Luther finds no word of protest or regret over the atrocious tora tures with which the Anabaptist leaders were put to death ; and a Cromwell praises the Lord for delivering his enemies into his hands for ‘execution.’ Politics come in in all such cases; but piety finds the partnership not quite unnatural. So, when ‘freethinkers’ tell us that religion and fanaticism are twins, we cannot make an unqualified denial of the charge.
Fanaticism must then be inscribed on the wrong side
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of religion’s account, so long as the religious person’s intellect is on the stage which the despotic kind of God satisfies. But as soon as the God is represented as less intent on his own honor and glory, it ceases to be a danger. .
Fanaticism is found only where the character is mas- terful and aggressive. In gentle characters, where de- voutness is intense and the intellect feeble, we have an imaginative absorption in the love of God to the exclusion of all practical human interests, which, though innocent enough, is too one-sided to be admirable. A mind too narrow has room but for one kind of affection. When the love of God takes possession of such a mind, it expels all human loves and human uses. There is no English name for such a sweet excess of devotion, so I will refer to it as a theopathic condition.
The blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque may serve as an example.
“To be loved here upon the earth,” her recent biographer exclaims: “to be loved by a noble, elevated, distinguished being; to be loved with fidelity, with devotion, — what en- chantment! But to be loved by God! and loved by him to distraction [aimé jusqi’a la folie] !— Margaret melted away with love at the thought of such a thing. Like Saint Philip of Neri in former times, or like Saint Francis Xavier, she said to God: ‘Hold back, O my God, these torrents which over- whelm me, or else enlarge my capacity for their reception.’ ” }
The most signal proofs of God’s love which Margaret Mary received were her hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing, and the most signal in turn of these were the revelations of Christ’s sacred heart, “surrounded with rays more brilliant than the Sun, and transparent like a crystal. The wound which he received on the cross visibly appeared upon it. There
1 Boueaup: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, p- 145.
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was a crown of thorns round about this divine Heart, and a cross above it.” At the same time Christ’s voice told her that, unable longer to contain the flames of his love for mankind, he had chosen her by a miracle to spread the knowledge of them. He thereupon took out her mortal heart, placed it inside of his own and inflamed it, and then replaced it in her breast, adding: “ Hitherto thou hast taken the name of my slave, hereafter thou shalt be called the well-beloved disciple of my Sacred Heart.”
In a later vision the Saviour revealed to her in detail the ‘ great design’ which he wished to establish through her instru- mentality. ‘“Iask of thee to bring it about that every first Friday after the week of holy Sacrament shall be made into a special holy day for honoring my Heart by a general com- munion and by services intended to make honorable amends for the indignities which it has received. And I promise thee that my Heart will dilate to shed with abundance the influences of its love upon all those who pay to it these honors, or who bring it about that others do the same.”
“This revelation,” says Mgr. Bougaud, “is unques- tionably the most important of all the revelations which have illumined the Church since that of the Incarnation and of the Lord’s Supper. . . . After the Eucharist, the supreme effort of the Sacred Heart.’ Well, what were its good fruits for Margaret Mary’s life? Apparently little else but sufferings and prayers and absences of mind and swoons and ecstasies. She became increas- ingly useless about the convent, her absorption in Christ’s love, —
“‘which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more ine capable 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
1 Boueaup: Hist. de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp. 365, 241.
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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 clum- siness 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.” }
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 saint- . ship which she embodies. A lower example still of theo- pathic saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedic- tine nun of the thirteenth century, whose ‘ Revelations,’ a well-known mystical authority, consist mainly of proofs of Christ’s partiality for her undeserving person. Assur- ances of his love, intimacies and caresses and compli- ments of the most absurd and puerile sort, addressed by Christ to Gertrude as an individual, form the tissue of this paltry-minded recital.? In reading such a narrative,
1 Boveaup : Op. cit., p. 267.
2 Examples: “Suffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory of God, to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in her mouth, when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her lovingly, and to find comfort Himself in these odors. After having gently breathed them in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to the Saints, as if contented with what He had done: ‘See the new present which my betrothed has given Me !’
“ One day, at chapel, she heard supernaturally sung the words, ‘ Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus.’ The Son of God leaning towards her like a sweet lover, — and giving to her soul the softest kiss, said to her at the second Sanctus : *In this Sanctus addressed to my person, receive with this kiss all the sanc- tity of my divinity and of my humanity, and let it be to thee a sufficient preparation for approaching the communion table.’ And the next follow
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we realize the gap between the thirteenth and the twen« tieth century, and we feel that saintliness of character may yield almost absolutely worthless fruits if it be as- sociated with such inferior intellectual sympathies. What with science, idealism, and democracy, our own imagi- nation 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
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, pos- sessed 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 ing Sunday, while she was thanking God for this favor, behold the Son of God, more beauteous than thousands of angels, takes her in His arms as if He were proud of her, and presents her to God the Father, in that perfection of sanctity with which He had dowered her. And the Father took such delight in this soul thus presented by His only Son, that, as if unable longer to restrain Himself, He gave her, and the Holy Ghost gave her also, the Sanetity attributed to each by His own Sanctus — and thus she remained endowed with the plenary fullness of the blessing of Sanctity, bestowed on
her by Omnipotence, by Wisdom, and by Love.” Révélations de Sainte Gertrude, Paris, 1898, i. 44, 186.
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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. The shrew-type is defined as possessing an ‘active unimpassioned temperament.’ In other words, shrews are the ‘ motors,’ rather than the ‘sensories, * 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 immedi- ately 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 radi- cal bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her ‘faults’ and ‘imperfections’ in the plural; her stereo- typed 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 shrew- dom: a paramountly feeling nature would be objec- tively 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 irrever-
1 FuRNEAUX JoRDAN: Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition. Later editions change the nomenclature.
2 As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M. BALDwin’s little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.
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ence — 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 abso- lutely 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.
We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saintship based on merits. Any God who, on the one hand, can care to keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence. When Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he stretched the soul’s imagination and saved theology from puerility.
So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intel- lectual conceptions which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.
es The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is ( Purity. In theopathic characters, like those whom we _have just considered, the love of God must not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions; for sen- sitiveness and narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all things a simplified world to dwellin. Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas your ag- gressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out, your retiring pie- tist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells
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himself and from which he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons, dragon- nades, and inquisition methods, we have the church fugient, as one might call it, with its hermitages, monas- teries, and sectarian organizations, both churches pursu- ing the same object — to unify the life,’ and simplify the spectacle presented to the soul. A mind extremely sensi- tive to inner discords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering with the absorption of conscious- ness in spiritual things. Amusements must go first, then conventional ‘ society,’ then business, then family duties, until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne. The lives of saints are a history of successive renunciations of complication, one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the purity of inner tone.’ “Is it not better,” a young sister
1 On this subject I refer to the work of M. Murisimr (Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the main- spring of the whole religious life. But all strongly ideal interests, religious or irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everything to them- selves. One would infer from M. Murisier’s pages that this formal condition was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the pre- sent work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of material content which is characteristic, and which is more important by far than any general psychological form. In spite of this criticism, I find M. Muri- sier’s book highly instructive.
2 Example: “At the first beginning of the Servitor’s [Suso’s] interior life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he marked out for himself, in thought, three circles, within which he shut himself up, as in a spiritual intrenchment. ‘The first circle was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second circle was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside these circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild animal which is ontside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness.” The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by Knox, London, 1865, p. 168.
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asks her Superior, “ that I should not speak at all during the hour of recreation, so as not to run the risk, by speaking, of falling into some sin of which I might not be conscious?” + If the life remains a social one at all, those who take part in it must follow one identical rule. Embosomed in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. The minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities, whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a man of the world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped, and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this stability an incomparable kind of mental rest.
We have no time to multiply examples, so I will let the case of Saint Louis of Gonzaga serve as a type of excess in purification.;, I think you will agree that this youth carried the elimination of the external and dis- cordant to a point which we cannot unreservedly admire. At the age of ten, his biographer says : —
“The inspiration came to him to consecrate to the Mother of God his own virginity —that being to her the most agreeable of possible presents. Without delay, then, and with all the fervor there was in him, joyous of heart, and burning with love, he made his vow of perpetual chastity. Mary accepted the offering of his innocent heart, and obtained for him from God, as a recompense, the extraordinary grace of never feeling dur: ing his entire life the slightest touch of temptation against the virtue of purity. This was an altogether exceptional favor, rarely accorded even to Saints themselves, and all the more marvelous in that Louis dwelt always in courts and among great folks, where danger and opportunity are so unusually frequent. It is true that Louis from his earliest childhood had shown a natural repugnance for whatever might be impure or
1 Vie des premiéres Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congrégation de St Dominique, & Nancy ; Nancy, 1896, p. 129.
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unvirginal, and even for relations of any sort whatever between persons of opposite sex. But this made it all the more surpris- ing that he should, especially since this vow, feel it necessary to have recourse to such a number of expedients for protect- ing against even the shadow of danger the virginity which he had thus consecrated. One might suppose that if any one could have contented himself with the ordinary precautions, prescribed for all Christians, it would assuredly have been he. But no! In the use of preservatives and means of defense, in flight from the most insignificant occasions, from every possi- bility of peril, just as in the mortification of his flesh, he went farther than the majority of saints. He, who by an extraordi- nary protection of God’s grace was never tempted, measured all his steps as if he were threatened on every side by particu- lar dangers. Thenceforward he never raised his eyes, either when walking in the streets, or when in society. Not only did he avoid all business with females even more scrupulously than before, but he renounced all conversation and every kind of social recreation with them, although his father tried to make him take part; and he commenced only too early to deliver his innocent body to austerities of every kind.” }
At the age of twelve, we read of this young man that “if by chance his mother sent one of her maids of honor to him with a message, he never allowed her to come in, but listened to her through the barely opened door, and dismissed her immediately. He did not like to be alone with his own mother, whether at table or in conversation ; and when the rest of the company withdrew, he sought also a pretext for retiring. . . . Several great ladies, rela- tives of his, he avoided learning to know even by sight; and he made a sort of treaty with his father, engaging promptly and readily to accede to all his wishes, if he might only be excused from all visits to ladies.” (Ibid., p- 71.)
2 Mescuier’s Life of Saint Louis of Gonzaga, French translation by Lesrigquier, 1891, p. 40.
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When he was seventeen years old Louis joined the Jesuit order,’ against his father’s passionate entreaties, for he was heir of a princely house; and when a year later the father died, he took the loss as a ‘ particular attention’ to himself on God’s part, and wrote letters of stilted good advice, as from a spiritual superior, to his grieving mother. He soon became so good a monk that if any one asked him the number of his brothers and sisters, he had to reflect and count them over before replying. A Father asked him one day if he were never troubled by the thought of his family, to which, “I never think of them except when praying for them,” was his only answer. Never was he seen to hold in his hand a flower or anything perfumed, that he might take pleasure in it. On the contrary, in the hospital, he used to seek for whatever was most disgusting, and eagerly snatch the bandages of ulcers, etc., from the hands of his com- panions. He avoided worldly talk, and immediately tried to turn every conversation on to pious subjects, or else he remained silent. He systematically refused to notice his surroundings. Being ordered one day to bring a book from the rector’s seat in the refectory, he had to ask where the rector sat, for in the three months he had eaten bread there, so carefully did he guard his eyes that he had not noticed the place. One day, during recess, having looked by chance on one of his companions, he reproached himself as for a grave sin against modesty. He cultivated silence, as preserving from sins of the tongue ; and his greatest penance was the limit which his superiors set to his bodily penances. He sought after
1 In his boyish note-book he praises the monastic life for its freedom from sin, and for the imperishable treasures, which it enables us to store up, “of merit in God’s eyes which makes of Him our debtor for all Eternity.” Loe. cit., p. 62.
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false acvusations and unjust reprimands as opportunities of humility; and such was his obedience that, when:a room-mate, having no more paper, asked him for a sheet, he did not feel free to give it to him without first obtain- ing the permission of the superior, who, as such, stood in the place of God, and transmitted his orders.
I can find no other sorts of fruit than these of Louis’s saintship. He died in 1591, in his twenty-ninth year, and is known in the Church as the patron of all young people. On his festival, the altar in the chapel devoted to him in a certain church in Rome “is embosomed in flowers, arranged with exquisite taste; and a pile of letters may be seen at its foot, written to the Saint by young men and women, and directed to ‘ Paradiso.’ They are supposed to be burnt unread except by San Luigi, who must find singular petitions in these pretty little missives, tied up now with a green ribbon, expres- sive of hope, now with a red one, emblematic of love,” ete.’
1 Mademoiselle Mori, a novel quoted in Hare’s Walks in Rome, 1900, i. 55.
I cannot resist the temptation to quote from Starbuck’s book, p. 388, another case of purification by elimination. It runs as follows : —
“The signs of abnormality which sanctified persons show are of frequent occurrence. They get out of tune with other people ; often they will have nothing to do with churches, which they regard as worldly ; they become hypercritical towards others ; they grow careless of their social, political, and financial obligations. As an instance of this type may be mentioned a woman of sixty-eight of whom the writer made a special study. She had been a member of one of the most active and progressive churches in a busy part of a large city. Her pastor described her as having reached the censorious stage. She had grown more and more out of sympathy with the church ; her connection with it finally consisted simply in attendance at prayer-meeting, at which her only message was that of reproof and con- demnation of the others for living on a low plane. At last she withdrew from fellowship with any church. The writer found her living alone in a little room on the top story of a cheap boarding-house, quite out of touch with all human relations, but apparently happy in the enjoyment of her
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Our final judgment of the worth of such a life as this will depend largely on our conception of God, and of the sort of conduct he is best pleased with in his creatures. The Catholicism of the sixteenth century paid little heed to social righteousness; and to leave the world to the devil whilst saving one’s own soul was then accounted no discreditable scheme. To-day, rightly or wrongly, help- fulness in general human affairs is, in consequence of one of those secular mutations in moral sentiment of which I spoke, deemed an essential element of worth in character; and to be of some public or private use is also reckoned as a species of divine service. Other early Jesuits, especially the missionaries among them, the Xaviers, Brébeufs, Jogues, were objective minds, and fought in their way for the world’s welfare; so their lives to-day inspire us. But when the intellect, as in this Louis, is originally no larger than a pin’s head, and cherishes ideas of God of corresponding smallness, the result, notwithstanding the heroism put forth, is on the whole repulsive. Purity, we see in the object-lesson, is not the one thing needful; and it is better that a life should contract many a dirt-mark, than forfeit useful- ness in its efforts to remain unspotted.
own spiritual blessings. Her time was occupied in writing booklets on sanctification — page after page of dreamy rhapsody. She proved to be one of a small group of persons who claim that entire salvation involves three steps instead of two; not only must there be conversion and sanctification, but a third, which they call ‘crucifixion’ or ‘perfect redemption,’ and which seems to bear the same relation to sanctification that this bears to conversion. She related how the Spirit had said to her, ‘Stop going to church. Stop going to holiness meetings. Go to your own room and I will teach you.’ She professes to care nothing for colleges, or preachers, or churches, but only cares to listen to what God says to her. Her descrip- tion of her experience seemed entirely consistent ; she is happy and con- tented, and her life is entirely satisfactory to herself. While listening to her own story, one was tempted to forget that it was from the life of a person who could not live by it in conjunction with her fellows.”’
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 355 e . ° e Z— Proceeding onwards in our search of religious extravas
gance, we next come upon excesses of Tenderness and | Charity. Here saintliness has to face the charge of pre- j serving the unfit, and breeding parasites and beggars. / ‘Resist not evil,’ ‘ Love your enemies,’ these are saintly maxims of which men of this world find it hard to speak without impatience. Are the men of this world right, or are the saints in possession of the deeper range of truth ?
No simple answer is possible. Here, if anywhere, one feels the complexity of the moral life, and the mysteriousness of the way in which facts and ideals are interwoven.
Perfect conduct is a relation between three terms: the actor, the objects for which he acts, and the recip- ients of the action. In order that conduct should be abstractly perfect, all three terms, intention, execution, and reception, should be suited to one another. The best intention will fail if it either work by false means or address itself to the wrong recipient. Thus no critic or estimator of the value of conduct can confine himself to the actor’s animus alone, apart from the other ele- ments of the performance. As there is no worse lie than a truth misunderstood by those who hear it, so reason- able arguments, challenges to magnanimity, and appeals to sympathy or justice, are folly when we are dealing with human crocodiles and boa-constrictors. The saint may simply give the universe into the hands of the enemy by his trustfulness. He may by non-resistance cut off his own survival.
Herbert Spencer tells us that the perfect man’s con- _ duct will appear perfect only when the environment is _ perfect: to.no inferior environment is it suitably adapted. We may paraphrase this by cordially admitting that
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saintly conduct would be the most perfect conduct con« ceivable in an environment where all were saints already ; but by adding that in an environment where few are saints, and many the exact reverse of saints, it must be ill adapted. We must frankly confess, then, using our empirical common sense and ordinary practical preju- dices, that in the world that actually is, the virtues of sympathy, charity, and non-resistance may be, and often have been, manifested in excess. The powers of darkness have systematically taken advantage of them. The whole modern scientific organization of charity is a consequence of the failure of simply giving alms. The whole history of constitutional government is a commentary on the ex- cellence of resisting evil, and when one cheek is smitten, of smiting back and not turning the other cheek also.
You will agree to this in general, for in spite of the Gospel, in spite of Quakerism, in spite of Tolstoi, you believe in fighting fire with fire, in shooting down usurp- ers, locking up thieves, and freezing out vagabonds and swindlers.
And yet you are sure, as I am sure, that were the world confined to these hard-headed, hard-hearted, and hard-fisted methods exclusively, were there no one prompt _to heip a brother first, and find out afterwards whether he were worthy; no one willing to drown his private wrongs in pity for the wronger’s person ; no one ready to be duped many a time rather than live always on suspi- cion; no one glad to treat individuals passionately and impulsively rather than by general rules of prudence; the world would be an infinitely worse place than it is now to live in. The tender grace, not of a day that is dead, but of a day yet to be born somehow, with the golden rule grown natural, would be cut out from the perspective of our imaginations.
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The saints, existing in this way, may, with their ex- travagances of human tenderness, be prophetic. Nay, innumerable times they have proved themselves pro- phetic. Treating those whom they met, in spite of the past, in spite of all appearances, as worthy, they have stimulated them to be worthy, miraculously transformed them by their radiant eeane and by the challenge of their expectation.
From this point of view we may admit the human charity which we find in all saints, and the great excess of it which we find in some saints, to be a genuinely creative social force, tending to make real a degree of virtue which it alone is ready to assume as possible. The saints are authors, auctores, increasers, of good- ness. ‘The potentialities of development in human souls are unfathomable. So many who seemed irretrievably hardened have in point of fact been softened, converted, regenerated, in ways that amazed the subjects even more than they surprised the spectators, that we never can be sure in advance of any man that his salvation by the way of love is hopeless. We have no right to speak of human crocodiles and boa-constrictors as of fixedly incur- able beings. We know not the complexities of person- ality, the smouldering emotional fires, the other facets of the character-polyhedron, the resources of the subliminal region. St. Paul long ago made our ancestors familiar with the idea that every soul is virtually sacred. Since Christ died for us all without exception, St. Paul said, we must despair of no one. This belief in the essential sacredness of every one expresses itself to-day in all sorts of humane customs and reformatory institutions, and in & growing aversion to the death penalty and to brutality in punishment. The saints, with their extravagance of human tenderness, are the great torch-bearers of this
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belief, the tip of the wedge, the clearers of the darkness. Like the single drops which sparkle in the sun as they are flung far ahead of the advancing edge of a wave- crest or of a flood, they show the way and are forerun- ners. The world is not yet with them, so they often seem in the midst of the world’s affairs to be preposter- ous. Yet they are impregnators of the world, vivifiers and animaters of potentialities of goodness which but for them would lie forever dormant. It is not possible to be quite as mean as we naturally are, when they have passed before us. One fire kindles another; and without that over-trust in human worth which they show, the rest of us would lie in spiritual stagnancy.
Momentarily considered, then, the saint may waste his tenderness and be the dupe and victim of his char- itable fever, but the general function of his charity in social evolution is vital and essential. If things are ever to move upward, some one must be ready to take the first step, and assume the risk of it. No one who is not willing to try charity, to try non-resistance as the saint is always willing, can tell whether these methods will or will not succeed. When they do succeed, they are far more powerfully successful than force or worldly pru- ‘dence. Force destroys enemies; and the best that can be said of prudence is that it keeps what we already have in safety. But non-resistance, when successful, turns enemies into friends; and charity regenerates its objects. These saintly methods are, as I said, creative energies ; and genuine saints find in the elevated excitement with which their faith endows them an authority and impres- siveness which makes them irresistible in situations where men of shallower nature cannot get on at all without the use of worldly prudence. This practical proof that worldly wisdom may be safely transcended is the saint’s
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magic gift to mankind.’ Not only does his vision of a better world console us for the generally prevailing prose
1 The best missionary lives abound in the victorious combination of non- resistance with personal authority. John G. Paton, for example, in the New Hebrides, among brutish Melanesian cannibals, preserves a charmed life by dint of it. When it comes to the point, no one ever dares actually to strike him. Native converts, inspired by him, showed analogous virtue. « One of our chiefs, full of the Christ-kindled desire to seek and to save, sent a message to an inland chief, that he and four attendants would come on Sabbath and tell them the gospel of Jehovah God. The reply came back sternly forbidding their visit, and threatening with death any Christian that approached their village. Our chief sent in response a loving message, telling them that Jehovah had taught the Christians to return good for evil, and that they would come unarmed to tell them the story of how the Son of God came into the world and died in order to bless and save his # enemies. The heathen chief sent back a stern and prompt reply once more : ‘If you come, you will be killed.” On Sabbath morn the Christian chief and his four companions were met outside the village by the heathen chief, who implored and threatened them once more. But the former said : —
«We come to you without weapons of war! We come only to tell you about Jesus. We believe that He will protect us to-day.’
“ As they pressed steadily forward towards the village, spears began to be thrown at them. Some they evaded, being all except _one dexterous war- riors ; and others they literally received with their bare hands, and turned them aside in an incredible manner. The heathen, apparently thunderstruck at these men thus approaching them without weapons of war, and not even flinging back their own spears which they had caught, after having thrown what the old chief called ‘a shower of spears,’ desisted from mere sur- prise. Our Christian chief called out, as he and his companions drew up in the midst of them on the village public ground : —
“¢ Jehovah thus protects us. He has given us all your spears! Once we would have thrown them back at you and killed you. But now we come, not to fight but to tell you about Jesus. He has changed our dark hearts. He asks you now to lay down all these your other weapons of war, and to hear what we can tell you about the love of God, our great Father, the only living God.’
‘“‘ The heathen were perfectly overawed. They manifestly looked on these Christians as protected by some Invisible One. They listened for the first time to the story of the Gospel and of the Cross. We lived to see that chief and all his tribe sitting in the school of Christ. And there is perhaps not an island in these southern seas, amongst all those won for Christ, ‘where similar acts of heroism on the par* of converts cannot be recited.” Joun G. Paton, Missionary to the New Hebrides, An Autobiography. second part, London, 1890, p. 243.
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and barrenness; but even when on the whole we have te confess him ill adapted, he makes some converts, and the environment gets better for his ministry. He is an effec- tive ferment of goodness, a slow transmuter of the earthly into a more heavenly order.
In this respect the Utopian dreams of social justice in which many contemporary socialists and anarchists indulge are, in spite of their impracticability and non-adaptation to present environmental conditions, analogous to the saint’s belief in an existent kingdom of heaven. They help to break the edge of the general reign of hardness,
— are slow leavens of a better order.
Pa The next topic in order is Asceticism, which I fancy you are all ready to consider without argument a virtue liable to extravagance and excess. The optimism and refinement of the modern imagination has, as I have already said elsewhere, changed the attitude of the church towards corporeal mortification, and a Suso or a Saint Peter of Alcantara’ appear to us to-day rather in the
1 Saint Peter, Saint Teresa tells us in her autobiography (French trans- lation, p. 333), “had passed forty years without ever sleeping more than an hour and a half a day. Of all his mortifications, this was the one that had cost him the most. To compass it, he kept always on his knees or ox his feet. The little sleep he allowed nature to take was snatched in a sit- ting posture, his head leaning against a piece of wood fixed in the wall. Even had he wished to lie down, it would have been impossible, because his cell was only four feet and a half long. In the course of all these years he never raised his hood, no matter what the ardor of the sun or the rain’s strength. Henever put on a shoe. He wore a garment of coarse sacke cloth, with nothing else upon his skin. This garment was as scant as pos- sible, and over it a little cloak of the same stuff. When the cold was great he took off the cloak and opened for a while the door and little window of Lis cell. Then he closed them and resumed the mantle, — his way, as he told us, of warming himself, and making his body feel a better tempera- ture. It was a frequent thing with him to eat once only in three days; and when I expressed my surprise, he said that it was very easy if one once had acquired the habit. One of his companions has assured me that he has
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light of tragic mountebanks than of sane men inspiring us with respect. If the inner dispositions are right, we ask, what need of all this torment, this violation of the outer nature? It keeps the outer nature too important. Any one who is genuinely emancipated from the flesh will look on pleasures and pains, abundance and priva- tiony-as-alike irrelevant and indifferent. He can engage in actions and experience enjoyments without fear of. corruption or enslavement. As the Bhagavad-Gita says, only those need renounce worldly actions who are still inwardly attached thereto. If one be really unattached to the fruits of action, one may mix in the world with equanimity. I quoted in a former lecture Saint Augus- tine’s antinomian saying: If you only love God enough, you may safely follow all your inclinations. “He needs no devotional practices,” is one of Ramakrishna’s max- ims, “ whose heart is moved to tears at the mere mention of the name of Hari.”* And the Buddha, in pointing out what he called ‘the middle way’ to his disciples, told them to abstain from both extremes, excessive mor- tification being as unreal and unworthy as mere desire and pleasure. The only perfect life, he said, is that of inner wisdom, which makes one thing as indifferent to
gone sometimes eight days without food. . . . His poverty was extreme ; and his mortification, even in his youth, was such that he told me he had passed three years in a house of his order without knowing any of the monks otherwise than by the sound of their voice, for he never raised his eyes, and only found his way about by following the others. He showed this same modesty on public highways. He spent many years without ever laying eyes upon a woman; but he confessed to me that at the age he had reached it was indifferent to him whether he laid eyes on them or not. He was very old when I first came to know him, and his body so attenuated that it seemed formed of nothing so much as of so many roots of trees. With all this sanctity he was very affable. He never spoke unless he was questioned, but his intellectual right-mindedness and grace gave to all his words an irresistible charm.” 1 F, Max Muttier: Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 180.
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us as another, and thus leads to rest, to peace, and te Nirvana."
We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older, and directors of conscience more experienced, they usually have shown a tendency to lay less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholic teachers have always professed the rule that, since health is needed for efficiency in God’s service, health must not be sacrificed to mortification. The general optimism and healthy-
mindedness of liberal Protestant circles to-day makes’
mortification for mortification’s sake repugnant to us. We can no longer sympathize with cruel deities, and the notion that God can take delight in the spectacle of sufferings self-inflicted in his honor is abhorrent. In consequence of all these motives you probably are dis- posed, unless some special utility can be shown in some individual’s discipline, to treat the general tendency to asceticism as pathological.
Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter, distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticism and the uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may be guilty, ought to re- habilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritual meaning asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence of the twice-born philosophy. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt, but sincerely, the belief that there is an ele- ment of real wrongness in this world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met
and overcome by an appeal to the soul’s heroic resources,
and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering. As |
against this view, the ultra-optimistic form of the once- born philosophy thinks we may treat evil by the method
of ignoring. Let a man who, by fortunate health and cir- |
1 OLDENBERG: Buddha; translated by W. Horry, London, 1882, p. 127.
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cumstances, escapes the suffering of any great amount of evil in his own person, also close his eyes to it as it exists in the wider universe outside his private experience, and he will be quit of it altogether, and can sail through life happily on a healthy-minded basis. But we saw in our lectures on melancholy how precarious this attempt neces- sarily is. Moreover it is but for the individual; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemed and unpro- vided for in his philosophy.
No such attempt can be a general solution of the problem ; and to minds of sombre tinge, who naturally feel life as a tragic mystery, such optimism is a shal- low dodge or mean evasion. It accepts, in lieu of a real deliverance, what is a lucky personal accident merely, a cranny to escape by. It leaves the general world un- helped and still in the clutch of Satan. The real deliver- ance, the twice-born folk insist, must be of universal application. Pain and wrong and death must be fairly met and overcome in higher excitement, or else their sting remains essentially unbroken. If one has ever taken the fact of the prevalence of tragic death in this world’s history fairly into his mind, —freezing, drowning, entombment alive, wild beasts, worse men, and hideous diseases, —he can with difficulty, it seems to me, con- tinue his own career of worldly prosperity without sus- pecting that he may all the while not be really inside the game, that he may lack the great initiation.
Well, this is exactly what asceticism thinks; and it voluntarily takes the initiation. Life is neither farce nor genteel comedy, it says, but something we must sit at in mourning garments, hoping its bitter taste will purge us of our folly. The wild and the heroic are indeed such rooted parts of it that healthy-mindedness pure and sim- ple, with its sentimental optimism, can hardly be regarded
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by any thinking man as a serious solution. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx’s riddle.
In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind’s common instinct for reality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life’s supreme mystery is hidden. We tolerate no one who has no capacity what- ever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it hero- ically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if yet we cling to life, and he is able ‘to fling it away like a flower’ as caring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in his own person feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings.
The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by com- mon sense, that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital meaning.
Representatively, then, and symbolically, and apart from the vagaries into which the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it wander, asceticism must, I believe, be acknowledged to go with the profounder way of handling the gift of existence. Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison. The practical course of action for us, as religious men, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us to-day
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turn them, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the way of privation and hardship might be objectively useful, The older monastic asceti- cism occupied itself with pathetic futilities, or terminated in the mere egotism of the individual, increasing his own perfection.’ But is it not possible for us to discard most of these older forms of mortification, and yet find saner channels for the heroism which inspired them ?
Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the ‘spirit’ of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness? Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up to- day — so different from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles— in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashi- ness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of application for a renovated and revised ascetic disci- pline?
Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the remedies. ‘These con- temporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them.’ War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly. They demand such incredible efforts, depth
1 «“ The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint as re- gards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away.” Ramakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 172.
2 “ When a church has to be run by oysters, ice-cream, and fun,” I read in an American religious paper, ‘ you may be sure that it is running away from Christ.” Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the present plight of many of our churches.
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beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duras tion, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discom- fort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes. With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of power.
The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so con- gruous with ordinary human nature. Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors ; so the most insignifi- cant individual, when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility.
But when we compare the military type of self-severity with that of the ascetic saint, we find a world-wide differ- ence in all their spiritual concomitants.
‘‘¢ Tive and let live,’ ”’ writes a clear-headed Austrian officer, “is no device for an army. Contempt for one’s own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one’s own person, are what war demands of every one. Far better is it for an army to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess too much sentimentality and human reasonableness. If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. ‘The measure of goodness in him is his possible use in war. War, and even peace, require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. ‘The recruit brings with him common moral notions, of which he must seek immediately to get rid. For him victory, suc- cess, must be everything. The most barbaric tendencies
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in men come to life again in war, and for war’s uses they are incommensurably good.” }
These words are of course literally true. The imme- diate aim of the soldier’s life is, as Moltke said, destruc- tion, and nothing but destruction; and whatever con- structions wars result in are remote and non-military. Consequently the soldier cannot train himself to be too feelingless to all those usual sympathies and respects, whether for persons or for things, that make for conser- vation. Yet the fact remains that war is a school of strenuous life and heroism; and, being in the line of aboriginal instinct, is the only school that as yet is uni- versally available. But when we gravely ask ourselves whether this wholesale organization of irrationality and crime be our only bulwark against effeminacy, we stand aghast at the thought, and think more kindly of ascetic religion. One hears of the mechanical equivalent of heat. What we now need to discover in the social realm is the moral equivalent of war: something heroic that will speak to men as universally as war does, and yet will be as compatible with their spiritual selves as war has proved itself to be incompatible. I have often thought that in the old monkish poverty-worship, in spite of the pedan- try which infested it, there might be something like that moral equivalent of war which we are seeking. May not voluntarily accepted poverty be ‘the strenuous life,’ without the need of crushing weaker peoples?
Poverty indeed 1s the strenuous life, — without brass bands or uniforms or hysteric popular applause or lies or circumlocutions ; and when one sees the way in which wealth-getting enters as an ideal into the very bone and marrow of our generation, one wonders whether a revival
1 C.V. B. K. : Friedens- und Kriegs-moral der Heere. Quoted by Hamon : Psychologie du Militaire professional, 1895, p. xli.
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of the belief that poverty is a worthy religious vocation may not be ‘ the transformation of military courage,’ and the spiritual reform which our time stands most in need of.
Among us English-speaking peoples especially do the praises of poverty need once more to be boldly sung. We have grown’ literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient ideali- zation of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly, — the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship ; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irre- ligious a state of opinion.
It is true that so far as wealth gives time for ideal ends and exercise to ideal energies, wealth is better than poverty and ought to be chosen. But wealth does this in only a portion of the actual cases. Elsewhere the desire to gain wealth and the fear to lose it are our chief breeders of cowardice and propagators of corruption. There are thousands of conjunctures in which a wealth- bound man must be a slave, whilst a man for whom poverty has no terrors becomes a freeman. Think of the strength which personal indifference to poverty would
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give us if we were devoted to unpopular causes. We need no longer hold our tongues or fear to vote the revolutionary or reformatory ticket. Our stocks might fall, our hopes of promotion vanish, our salaries stop, our club doors close in our faces; yet, while we lived, we would imperturbably bear witness to the spirit, and our example would help to set free our generation. The cause would need its funds, but we its servants would be potent in proportion as we personally were contented with our poverty.
I recommend this matter to your serious pondering, for it is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated classes is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.
I have now said all that I can usefully say about the several fruits of religion as they are manifested in saintly lives, so I will make a brief review and pass to my more general conclusions.
Our question, you will remember, is as to whether reli- | gion stands approved by its fruits, as these are exhibited in the saintly type of character. Single attributes of saintliness may, it is true, be temperamental endowments, found in non-religious individuals. But the whole group of them forms a combination which, as such, is religious, for it seems to flow from the sense of the divine as from
its psychological centre. Whoever possesses strongly |
this sense comes naturally to think that the smallest details of this world derive infinite significance from their relation to an unseen divine order. The thought of this order yields him a superior denomination of happi- ness, and a steadfastness of soul with which no other can compare. In social relations his serviceability is exem:
plary ; he abounds in impulses to help. His help is in-
Z
7
870 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
ward as well ‘as outward, for his sympathy reaches souls as well as bodies, and kindles unsuspected faculties therein. Instead of placing happiness where common men place it, in comfort, he places it in a higher kind of inner excite- ment, which converts discomforts into sources of cheer and annuls unhappiness. So he turns his back upon no duty, however thankless; and when we are in need of assistance, we can count upon the saint lending his hand with more certainty than we can count upon any other person. Finally, his humble-mindedness and his ascetie tendencies save him from the petty personal pretensions which so obstruct our ordinary social intercourse, and his purity gives us in him a clean man for a companion. Felicity, purity, charity, patience, self-severity, — these are splendid excellencies, and the saint of all men shows them in the completest possible measure.
But, as we saw, all these things together do not make saints infallible. When their intellectual outlook is nar- row, they fall into all sorts of holy excesses, fanaticism or theopathic absorption, self-torment, prudery, scrupu- losity, gullibility, and morbid inability to meet the world. By the very intensity of his fidelity to the paltry ideals with which an inferior intellect may inspire him, a saint can be even more objectionable and damnable than a superficial carnal man would be in the same situation. We must judge him not sentimentally only, and not in isolation, but using our own intellectual standards, placing him in his environment, and estimating his total function.
Now in the matter of intellectual standards, we must |
bear in mind that it is unfair, where we find narrowness of mind, always to impute it as a vice to the individual, for in religious and theological matters he probably ab-
sorbs his narrowness from his generation. Moreover, we |
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 371
must not confound the essentials of saintliness, which are those general passions of which I have spoken, with its accidents, which are the special determinations of these passions at any historical moment. In these determina: tions the saints will usually be loyal to the temporary idols of their tribe. Taking refuge in monasteries was as _ much an idol of the tribe in the middle ages, as bearing a hand in the world’s work is to-day. Saint Francis or Saint Bernard, were they living to-day, would undoubt- edly be leading consecrated lives of some sort, but quite as undoubtedly they would not lead them in retirement. Our animosity to special historic manifestations must not lead us to give away the saintly impulses in their essential nature to the tender mercies of inimical critics.
The most inimical critic of the saintly impulses whom I know is Nietzsche. He contrasts them with the worldly passions as we find these embodied in the predaceous mili- tary character, altogether to the advantage of the latter. Your born saint, it must be confessed, has something about him which often makes the gorge of a carnal man rise, so it will be worth while to consider the contrast in question more fully.
Dislike of the saintly nature seems to be a negative resulé of the biologically useful instinct of welcoming leadership, and glorifying the chief of the tribe. The chief is the potential, if not the actual tyrant, the mas- terful, overpowering man of prey. We confess our in- feriority and grovel before him. We quail under his. glance, and are at the same time proud of owning so dangerous a lord. Such instinctive and submissive hero- worship must have been indispensable in primeval tribal life. In the endless wars of those times, leaders were absolutely needed for the tribe’s survival. If there were ay tribes who owned no leaders, they can have left no
372 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
issue to narrate their doom. The leaders always had gocd consciences, for conscience in them coalesced with will, and those who looked on their face were as much smitten with wonder at their freedom from inner restraint as with awe at the energy of their outward performances. Compared with these beaked and taloned graspers of the world, saints are herbivorous animals, tame and harm- less barn-yard poultry. There are saints whose beard you may, if you ever care to, pull with impunity. Such a man excites no thrills of wonder veiled in terror; his conscience is full of scruples and returns; he stuns us neither by his inward freedom nor his outward power; and unless he found within us an altogether different faculty of admiration to appeal to, we should pass him by with contempt. | In point of fact, he does appeal to a different faculty. Reénacted in human nature is the fable of the wind, the sun, and the traveler. The sexes embody the discrep- ancy. The woman loves the man the more admiringly the stormier he shows himself, and the world deifies its rulers the more for being willful and unaccountable. But - the woman in turn subjugates the man by the mystery of gentleness in beauty, and the saint has always charmed the world by something similar. Mankind is susceptible and suggestible in opposite directions, and the rivalry of influences is unsleeping. The saintly and the worldly ideal pursue their feud in literature as much as in real life. For Nietzsche the saint represents little but sneaking- ness and slavishness. He is the sophisticated invalid, the degenerate par excellence, the man of insufficient vitality. His prevalence would put the human type in danger. “The sick are the greatest danger for the well. The weaker,
not the stronger, are the strong’s undoing. It is not fear of our fellow-man, which we should wish to see diminished ; for
j-
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 373°
fear rouses those who are strong to become terrible in turn themselves, and preserves the hard-earned and successful type of humanity. What is to be dreaded by us more than any other doom is not fear, but rather the great disgust, not fear, but rather the great pity — disgust and pity for our human fellows. . . . Lhe morbid are our greatest peril—not the ‘bad’ men, not the predatory beings. Those born wrong, the miscarried, the broken —they it is, the weakest, who are undermining the vitality of the race, poisoning our trust in life, and putting hu- manity in question. Every look of them is a sigh, —-* Would I were something other! I am sick and tired of what I am.’ In this swamp-soil of self-contempt, every poisonous weed flourishes, and all so small, so secret, so dishonest, and so sweetly rotten. Here swarm the worms of sensitiveness and resentment ; here the air smells odious with secrecy, with what is not to be acknowledged ; here is woven endlessly the net of the meanest of conspiracies, the conspiracy of those who suffer against those who succeed and are victorious; here the very aspect of the victorious is hated — as if health, success, strength, pride, and the sense of power were in themselves things vicious, for which one ought eventually to make bitter expiation. Oh, how these people would themselves like to inflict the expiation, how they thirst to be the hangmen! And all the while their duplicity never confesses their hatred to be hatred.’’?
Poor Nietzsche’s antipathy is itself sickly enough, but we all know what he means, and he expresses well the clash between the two ideals. The carnivorous-minded ‘ strong man,’ the adult male and cannibal, can see nothing but mouldiness and morbidness in the saint’s gentleness and self-severity, and regards him with pure loathing. The whole feud revolves essentially upon two pivots: Shall the seen world or the unseen world be our chief sphere of adaptation ? and must our means of adaptation in this seen world be aggressiveness or non-resistance ?
1 Zur Genealogie der Moral, Dritte Abhandlung, § 14. I have abridged, and in one place transposed, a sentence.
374 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
The debate is serious. In some sense and to some degree both worlds must be acknowledged and taken ac- count of; and in the seen world both aggressiveness and non-resistance are needful. It is a question of emphasis, of more or less. Is the saint’s type or the strong-man’s type the more ideal ? |
It has often been supposed, and even now, I think, it is supposed by most persons, that there can be one intrinsically ideal type of human character. A certain kind of man, it is imagined, must be the best man abso- lutely and apart from the utility of his function, apart from economical considerations. The saint’s type, and the knight’s or gentleman’s type, have always been rival claimants of this absolute ideality ; and in the ideal of military religious orders both types were in a manner blended. According to the empirical philosophy, how- ever, all ideals are matters of relation. It would be absurd, for example, to ask for a definition of ‘the ideal horse,’ so long as dragging drays and running races, bearing children, and jogging about with tradesmen’s packages all remain as indispensable differentiations of equine function. You may take what you call a general all-round animal as a compromise, but he will be inferior to any horse of a more specialized type, in some one particular direction. We must not forget this now when, in discussing saintliness, we ask if it be an ideal type of manhood. We must test it by its economical relations.
I think that the method which Mr. Spencer uses in his Data of Ethics will help to fix our opinion. Ideality in conduct is altogether a matter of adaptation. A society where all were invariably aggressive would destroy itself by inner friction, and in a society where some are aggres- sive, others must be non-resistant, if there is to be any kind of order. This is the present constitution of soci-
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 375
ety, and to the mixture we owe many of our blessings. But the aggressive members of society are always tending to become bullies, robbers, and swindlers; and no one believes that such a state of things as we now live in is the millennium. It is meanwhile quite possible to con- ceive an imaginary society in which there should be no aggressiveness, but only sympathy and fairness, — any small community of true friends now realizes such a so- ciety, Abstractly considered, such a society on a large scale would be the millennium, for every good thing might be realized there with no expense of friction. To such a millennial society the saint would be entirely adapted. His peaceful modes of appeal would be effica- cious over his companions, and there would be no one extant to take advantage of his non-resistance. The saint is therefore abstractly a higher type of man than the ‘strong man,’ because he is adapted to the highest society conceivable, whether that society ever be con- cretely possible or not. The strong man would immedi- ately tend by his presence to make that society deteriorate. It would become inferior in everything save in a certain kind of bellicose excitement, dear to men as they now are.
But if we turn from the abstract question to the actual
situation, we find that the individual saint may be well or ill adapted, according to particular circumstances. There \
is, in short, no absoluteness in the excellence of saint-
hood. It must be confessed that as far as this world-
goes, any one who makes an out-and-out saint of him- self does so at his peril. If he is not a large enough man, he may appear more insignificant and contemptible, for all his saintship, than if he had remained a world- ling.’ Accordingly religion has seldom been so radically
1 We all know daft saints, and they inspire a queer kind of aversion. ‘But in comparing saints with strong men we must choose individuals on
a
Qe
876 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
taken in our Western world that the devotee could not mix it with some worldly temper. It has always found good men who could follow most of its impulses, but who stopped short when it came to non-resistance. Christ himself was fierce upon occasion. Cromwells, Stonewall Jacksons, Gordons, show that Christians can be strong men also.
How is success to be absolutely measured when there are so. many environments and so many ways of looking at the ‘adaptation ? It cannot be measured absolutely ; the verdict will vary according to the poimt of view adopted. From the biological pomt of view Saint Paul was a failure, because he was beheaded. Yet he was magnificently adapted to the larger environment of his- tory; and so far as any saint’s example is a leaven of righteousness in the world, and draws it in the direction of more prevalent habits of saintliness, he is a success, no matter what his immediate bad fortune may be. The greatest saints, the spiritual heroes whom every one acknowledges, the Francises, Bernards, Luthers, Loyo- las, Wesleys, Channings, Moodys, Gratrys, the Phillips Brookses, the Agnes Joneses, Margaret Hallahans, and Dora Pattisons, are successes from the outset. They show themselves, and there is no question; every one perceives their strength and stature. Their sense of mystery in things, their passion, their goodness, irradiate about them and enlarge their outlines while they soften them. They are like pictures with an atmosphere and background ; and, placed alongside of them, the strong men of this world and no other seem as dry as sticks, as hard and crude as blocks of stone or brickbats.
the same intellectual level. The under-witted strong man, homologous in his sphere with the under-witted saint, is the bully of the slums, the hooligan or rowdy. Surely on this level also the saint preserves a certain superiority. ‘
THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 377
In a general way, then, and ‘on the whole,’ our abandonment of theological criteria, and our testing of religion by practical common sense and the empirical method, leave it in possession of its towering place in history. Economically, the saintly group of qualities is indispensable to the world’s welfare. The great saints are immediate successes; the smaller ones are at least heralds and harbingers, and they may be leavens also, of a better mundane order. Let us be saints, then, if we can, whether or not we succeed visibly and temporally. But in our Father’s house are many mansions, and each of us must discover for himself the kind of religion and the amount of saintship which best comports with what he believes to be his powers and feels to be his truest mission and vocation. There are no successes to be guar- anteed and no set orders to be given to individuals, so long as we follow the methods of empirical philosophy.
This is my conclusion so far. I know that on some of your minds it leaves a feeling of wonder that such a method should have been applied to such a subject, and this in spite of all those remarks about empiricism which I made at the beginning of Lecture XIII.’ How, you say, can religion, which believes in two worlds and an invisible order, be estimated by the adaptation of its fruits to this world’s order alone? It is its truth, not its utility, you insist, upon which our verdict ought to depend. If religion is true, its fruits are good fruits, even though in this world they should prove uniformly ill adapted and full of naught but pathos. It goes back, then, after all, to the question of the truth of theology. The plot inevitably thickens upon us; we cannot escape theoretical considerations. I propose, then, that to some
7 1 See above, p. 327. 2 Above, pp. 327-334.
378 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
foes we face the responsibility. Religious persons have often, though not uniformly, professed to see truth _ ina special manner. That manner is known as mysti- _ cism. I will consequently now proceed to treat at some . \ length of mystical phenomena, and after that, though more briefly, I will consider religious philosophy.
LECTURES XVI AND XVII MYSTICISM
VER and over again in these lectures I have raised points and left them open and unfinished until we should have come to the subject of Mysticism. Some of you, I fear, may have smiled as you noted my reiterated postponements. But now the hour has come when mys- ticism must be faced in good earnest, and those broken threads wound up together. One may say truly, I think, \ that personal religious experience has its root and centre | in mystical states of consciousness; so for us, who in/ these lectures are treating personal experience as the exclusive subject of our study, such states of conscious- ness ought to form the vital chapter from which the other chapters get their light. Whether my treatment of mystical states will shed more light or darkness, I do not know, for my own constitution shuts me out from their enjoyment almost entirely, and I can speak of them only at second hand. But though forced to look upon the subject so externally, I will be as objective and re ceptive as I can; and I think I shall at least succeed in convincing you of the reality of the states in question, and of the paramount importance of their function.
First of all, then, I ask, What does the expression ‘mystical states of consciousness’ mean? How do we ° part off matic states from other states ?
The words ‘ mysticism’ and ‘ mystical’ are often fad as terms of mere reproach, to throw at any opinion which we regard as vague and vast and sentimental, and with:
380 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
out a base in either facts or logic. For some writers a ‘mystic’ is any person who believes in thought-transfer- ence, or spirit-return. Employed in this way the word has little value: there are too many less ambiguous syn- onyms. So, to keep it useful by restricting it, I will do what I did in the case of the word ‘ religion,’ and simply propose to you four marks which, when an experience has them, may justify us in calling it mystical for the purpose of the present lectures. In this way we shall save verbal disputation, and the recriminations that gen- Fore go therewith. 1. Ineffability. — The handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The \ \ eed of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words. It follows from this that its quality must be directly experienced; it cannot be imparted or trans- ferred to others. In this peculiarity mystical states are more like states of feeling than like states of intellect. No one can make clear to another who has never had a certain feeling, in what the quality or worth of it con- sists. One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd. The mystic finds that most of us accord to his experiences an equally incompetent treatment. © 2. Noetic quality. — Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. They are illuminations, revelations, full of sig- nificance and importance, all inarticulate though they
MYSTICISM 381
remain; and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority for after-time.
These two characters will entitle any state to be called mystical, in the sense in which I use the word. Two other qualities are less sharply marked, but are usually found. These are: —
3. Transiency.— Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. Except in rare instances, half an hour, or at /
most an hour or two, seems to be the limit beyond which they fade into the light of common day. Often, when faded, their quality can but imperfectly be reproduced in memory ; but when they recur it is recognized ; and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and impor- tance.
4, Passivity.— Although the oncoming of mystical _ states may be facilitated by preliminary voluntary opera- /
tions, as by fixing the attention, or going through certain bodily performances, or in other ways which manuals of mysticism prescribe; yet when the characteristic sort of consciousness once has set in, the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power. This latter peculiarity connects mystical states with certain definite phenomena of secondary or alternative person- ality, such as prophetic speech, automatic writing, or the mediumistic trance. When these latter conditions are well pronounced, however, there may be no recollection whatever of the phenomenon, and it may have no sig- nificance for the subject’s usual inner life, to which, as it were, it makes a mere interruption. Mystical states, strictly so called, are never merely interruptive. Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance. They modify the inner life
882 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
of the subject between the times of their recurrence. Sharp divisions in this region are, however, difficult te make, and we find all sorts of gradations and mixtures.
These four characteristics are sufficient to mark out a group of states of consciousness peculiar enough to deserve a special name and to call for careful study. Let it then be called the mystical group.
Our next step should be to gain acquaintance with some typical examples. Professional mystics at the height of their development have often elaborately organized experiences and a philosophy based thereupon. But you remember what I said in my first lecture: phenomena are best understood when placed within their series, studied in their germ and in their over-ripe decay, and compared with their exaggerated and degenerated kindred. The range of mystical experience is very wide, much too wide for us to cover in the time at our disposal. Yet the method of serial study is so essential for interpretation that if we really wish to reach conclusions we must use it. I will begin, therefore, with phenomena which claim no special religious significance, and end with those of which the religious pretensions are extreme.
/ The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a \maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. “T’ve heard that said all my life,” we exclaim, “ but I never realized its full meaning until now.” ‘When a fellow-monk,” said Luther, “ one day repeated the words of the Creed : ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins,’ I saw the Scripture in an entirely new light; and straightway I felt as if I were born anew. It was as if I had found the door of paradise thrown wide open.” * ‘This sense
* Newman’s Securus judicat orbis terrarum is another instance.
MYSTICISM 383
of deeper significance is not confined to rational proposi-
tions. Single words,’ and conjunctions of words, effects /
of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. Most of us can remember the strangely moving power of passages in cer- tain poems read when we were young, irrational door- ways as they were through which the mystery of fact, the wildness and the pang of life, stole into our hearts and thrilled them. The words have now perhaps become mere polished surfaces for us; but lyric poetry and music are alive and significant only in proportion as they fetch these vague vistas of a life continuous with our own, beckoning and inviting, yet ever eluding our pursuit. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical sus- ceptibility.
A more pronounced step forward on the mystical lad- der is found in an extremely frequent phenomenon, that sudden feeling, namely, which sometimes sweeps over us, of having ‘ been here before,’ as if at some indefinite past time, in just this place, with just these people, we were already saying just these things. As Tennyson writes:
“ Moreover, something is or seems, That touches me with mystic gleams, Like glimpses of forgotten dreams —
* Of something felt, like something here ; Of something done, I know not where ; Such as no language may declare.” ?
1 ¢Mesopotamia’ is the stock comic instance. — An excellent old German lady, who had done some traveling in her day, used to describe to me her Sehnsucht that she might yet visit ‘ Philadelphia,’ whose wondrous name had always haunted her imagination. Of John Foster it is said that “ single words (as chalcedony), or the names of ancient heroes, had a mighty fasci. nation over him. ‘At any time the word hermit was enough to transport him.’ The words woods and forests would produce the most powerful emo. tion.” Foster’s Life, by RyLanp, New York, 1846, p. 3.
2 The Two Voices. In a letter to Mr. B. P. Blood, Tennyson reports of himself as follows : —
/
384 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Sir James Crichton-Browne has given the technical name of ‘dreamy states’ to these sudden invasions of vaguely reminiscent consciousness. They bring a sense of mys: tery and of the metaphysical duality of things, and the feeling of an enlargement of perception which seems im- minent but which never completes itself. In Dr. Crich- ton-Browne’s opinion they connect themselves with the perplexed and scared disturbances of self-consciousness which occasionally precede epileptic attacks. I think that this learned alienist takes a rather absurdly alarmist view of an intrinsically insignificant phenomenon. He follows it along the downward ladder, to insanity ; our path pursues the upward ladder chiefly. The divergence shows how important it is to neglect no part of a phe nomenon’s connections, for we make it appear admirable or dreadful according to the context by which we set it off.
Somewhat deeper plunges into mystical consciousness are met with in yet other dreamy states. Such feelings
“‘T have never had any revelations through anesthetics, but a kind of waking trance — this for lack of a better word —I have frequently had, quite up from boyhood, when I have been all alone. This has come upon me through repeating my own name to myself silently, till all at once, as it were out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words — where death was an almost laughable impossibility — the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life. I am ashamed of my feeble description. Have I not said the state is utterly beyond words ?”
Professor Tyndall, in a letter, recalls Tennyson saying of this condition ; *‘ By God Almighty ! there is no delusion in the matter! It is no nebulous ecstasy, but a state of transcendent wonder, associated with absolute clear- ness of mind.” Memoirs of Alfred Tennyson, ii, 473.
1 The Lancet, July 6 and 13, 1895, reprinted as the Cavendish Lecture, on Dreamy Mental States, London, Bailliére, 1895. They have been a good deal discussed of late by psychologists. See, for example, BERNART~ Leroy: L’Ilusion de Fausse Reconnaissance, Paris, 1898.
\
MYSTICISM 385
as these which Charles Kingsley describes are surely far from being uncommon, especially in youth : —
** When I walk the fields, I am oppressed now and then with an innate feeling that everything I see has a meaning, if I could but understand it. And this feeling of being surrounded with truths which I cannot grasp amounts to indescribable awe sometimes. . . . Have you not felt that your real soul was imperceptible to your mental vision, except in a few hallowed moments?” }
A much more extreme state of mystical consciousness
is described by J. A. Symonds; and probably more per- sons than we suspect could give parallels to it from their
own experience.
** Suddenly,” writes Symonds, “at church, or in company, or when I was reading, and always, I think, when my muscles were at rest, I felt the approach of the mood. Irresistibly it took possession of my mind and will, lasted what seemed an eternity, and disappeared in a series of rapid sensations which resembled the awakening from anesthetic influence. One rea- son why I disliked this kind of trance was that I could not describe it to myself. I cannot even now find words to render it intelligible. It consisted in a gradual but swiftly progressive obliteration of space, time, sensation, and the multitudinous factors of experience which seem to qualify what we are pleased to call our Self. In proportion as these conditions of ordinary consciousness were subtracted, the sense of an underlying or essential consciousness acquired intensity. At last nothing remained but a pure, absolute, abstract Self. The universe became without form and void of content. But Self persisted, formidable in its vivid keenness, feeling the most poignant doubt about reality, ready, as it seemed, to find existence break as breaks a bubble round about it. And what then? The apprehension of a coming dissolution, the grim conviction that this state was the last state of the conscious Self,.the sense that
1 Charles Kingsley’s Life, i. 55, quoted by INcz: Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 341.
386 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
I had followed the last thread of being to the verge of the abyss, and had arrived at demonstration of eternal Maya or illusion, stirred or seemed to stir me up again. The return to ordinary conditions of sentient existence began by my first recovering the power of touch, and then by the gradual though rapid influx of familiar impressions and diurnal interests. At last I felt myself once more a human being; and though the riddle of what is meant by life remained unsolved, I was thank- ful for this return from the abyss— this deliverance from so awful an initiation into the mysteries of skepticism.
“ This trance recurred with diminishing frequency until I reached the age of twenty-eight. It served to impress upon my growing nature the phantasmal unreality of all the circum- stances which contribute to a merely phenomenal consciousness. Often have I asked myself with anguish, on waking from that formless state of denuded, keenly sentient being, Which is the unreality ?— the trance of fiery, vacant, apprehensive, skeptical Self from which I issue, or these surrounding phenomena and habits which veil that inner Self and build a self of flesh-and- blood conventionality ? Again, are men the factors of some dream, the dream-like unsubstantiality of which they compre- hend at such eventful moments? What would happen if the final stage of the trance were reached ? ” 4
In a recital like this there is certainly something sug- gestive of pathology.” The next step into mystical states carries us into a realm that public opinion and ethical philosophy have long since branded as_ pathological, though private practice and certain lyric strains of poetry
1H. F. Brown: J. A. Symonds, a Biography, London, 1895, pp. 29-31, abridged.
2 Crichton-Browne expressly says that Symonds’s “highest nerve centres were in some degree enfeebled or damaged by these dreamy mental states which afflicted him so grievously.” Symonds was, however, a perfect monster of many-sided cerebral efficiency, and his critic gives no objective grounds whatever for his strange opinion, save that Symonds complained oceasionally, as all susceptible and ambitious men complain, of lassitude and uncertainty as to his life’s mission.
MYSTICISM 387
LC I
consciousness produced by intoxicants aaa “anesthetics, especially by alcohol. The sway of alcohol over man- kind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the — mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober
hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; /(_.’,
drunkenness expands, unites, and says. yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radi- ant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the y, poor and the unlettered it-stands.inthe place of sznphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper, y) mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleet- ing earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poisoning. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the
mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.
Nitrous oxide and ether, especially nitrous oxide, | when sufficiently diluted with air, stimulate the mystical consciousness in an extraordinary degree. Depth beyond depth of truth seems revealed to the inhaler. This truth fades out, however, or escapes, at the moment of coming to; and if any words remain over in which it seemed to clothe itself, they prove to be the veriest nonsense. Never- theless, the sense of a profound meaning having been there persists; and I know more than one person who is persuaded that in the nitrous oxide trance we have a genuine metaphysical revelation.
Some years ago I myself made some observations on this aspect of nitrous oxide intoxication, and reported
388 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
them in print. One conclusion was forced upon my mind at that time, and my impression of its truth has ever since remained unshaken. It is that our normal wak- ing consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence ; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of conscious- ness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the ques- tion, — for they are so discontinuous with ordinary con: sciousness. Yet they may determine attitudes though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. Looking back on my own experiences, they all converge towards a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing some metaphysical significance. The keynote of it is invariably a reconciliation. It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficul- ties and troubles, were melted into unity. Not only do they, as contrasted species, belong to one and the same genus, but one of the species, the nobler and better one, is itself the genus, and so soaks up and absorbs its opposite into itself. This is a dark saying, I know, when thus expressed in terms of common logic, but I cannot wholly escape from its authority. I feel as if it must mean something, something like what the»hegelian philosophy means, if one could only lay hold of it more clearly. Those who have ears to hear, let them hear;
MYSTICISM 389
to me the living sense of its reality only comes in the artificial mystic state of mind.!
I just now spoke of friends who believe in the anzxs- thetic revelation. For them too it is a monistic insight, in which the other in its various forms appears absorbed into the One.
“ Into this pervading genius,” writes one of them, “ we pass, forgetting and forgotten, and thenceforth each is all, in God. There is no higher, no deeper, no other, than the life in which we are founded. ‘The One remains, the many change and pass ;” and each and every one of us is the One that remains.
. This is the ultimatum. ... As sure as being — whence is all our care — so sure is content, beyond duplexity, antithesis, or trouble, where I have triumphed in a solitude that God is not above.” 2
1 What reader of Hegel can doubt that that sense of a perfected Being with ali its otherness soaked up into itself, which dominates his whole philosophy, must have come from the prominence in his consciousness of mystical moods like this, in most persons kept subliminal? The notion is thoroughly characteristic of the mystical level, and the Aufgabe of making it articulate was surely set to Hegel’s intellect by mystical feeling.
2 BenyAMIN Paut Bioop: The Anesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, pp. 35, 36. Mr. Blood has made several attempts to adumbrate the anesthetic revelation, in pamphlets of rare literary distinction, privately printed and distributed by himself at Amsterdam. Xenos Clark, a philosopher, who died young at Amherst in the ’80’s, much lamented by those who knew him, was also impressed by the revelation. “In the first place,” he once wrote to me, “ Mr. Blood and I agree that the revelation is, if anything, non-emotional. It is utterly flat. It is, as Mr. Blood says, ‘the one sole and sufficient insight why, or not why, but how, the present is pushed on by the past, and sucked forward by the vacuity of the future. Its inevitableness defeats all attempts at stop- ping or accounting for it. It is all precedence and presupposition, and questioning is in regard to it forever too late. It is an initiation of the past.’ The real secret would be the formula by which the ‘ now’ keeps exfoliating out of itself, yet never escapes. What is it, indeed, that keeps existence exfoliating ? The formal being of anything, the logical definition of it, is static. For mere logic every question contains its own answer — we simply fill the hole with the dirt we dug out. Why are twice two four? Because, in fact, four is twice two. Thus logic finds in life no propulsion, only a mo- mentum. It goes because it is a-going. But the revelation adds: it goes
390 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
This has the genuine religious mystic ring! I just now quoted J. A. Symonds. He also records a mystical experience with chloroform, as follows : —
because it is and was a-going. You walk, as it were, round yourself in the revelation. Ordinary philosophy is like a hound hunting his own trail. The more he hunts the farther he has to go, and his nose never catches up with his heels, because it is forever ahead of them. So the present is al- ready a foregone conclusion, and I am ever too late to understand it. But at the moment of recovery from anesthesis, just then, before starting on life, I catch, so to speak, a glimpse of my heels, a glimpse of the eternal pro- cess just in the act of starting. The truth is that we travel on a journey that was accomplished before we set out ; and the real end of philosophy is accomplished, not when we arrive at, but when we remain in, our destina. tion (being already there), — which may occur vicariously in this life whe, we cease our intellectual questioning. That is why there is a smile upow the face of the revelation, as we view it. It tells us that we are forevey half a second too late — that’s all. ‘You could kiss your own lips, and have all the fun to yourself,’ it says, if you only knew the trick. It would be perfectly easy if they would just stay there till you got round to them, Why don’t you manage it somehow ? ”
Dialectically minded readers of this farrago will at least recognize the region of thought of which Mr. Clark writes, as familiar. In his latest pamphlet, ‘ Tennyson’s Trances and the Anesthetic ern ee Mr. Blood describes its value for life as follows : —
“The Anesthetic Revelation is the Initiation of Man into the Immemo- rial Mystery of the Open Secret of Being, revealed as the Inevitable Vor- tex of Continuity. Inevitable is the word. Its motive is inherent — it is what has to be. It is not for any love or hate, nor for joy nor sorrow, nor good nor ill. End, beginning, or purpose, it knows not of.
“Tt affords no particular of the multiplicity and variety of things ; but it fills appreciation of the historical and the sacred with a secular and inti- mately personal illumination of the nature and motive of existence, which then seems reminiscent — as if it should have appeared, or shall yet appear, to every participant thereof.
“Although it is at first startling in its solemnity, it becomes directiy such a matter of course —so old-fashioned, and so akin to proverbs, that it inspires exultation rather than fear, and a sense of safety, as identified with the aboriginal and the universal. But no words may express the imposing eertainty of the patient that he is realizing the primordial, Adamic surprise of Life.
“Repetition of the experience finds it ever the same, and as if it could not possibly be otherwise. The subject resumes his normal consciousness only to partially and fitfully remember its occurrence, and to try to formu- late its baffling import, — with only this consolatory afterthought: that he
*
MYSTICISM 391
“ After the choking and stifling had passed away, I seemed at first in a state of utter blankness; then came flashes of intense light, alternating with blackness, and with a keen vision of what was going on in the room around me, but no sensation of touch. I thought that I was near death; when, suddenly, my soul became aware of God, who was manifestly dealing with me, handling me, so to speak, in an intense personal present reality. I felt him streaming in like light upon me.... I cannot describe the ecstasy I felt. Then, as I gradually awoke from the influence of the anesthetics, the old sense of my rela- tion to the world began to return, the new sense of my relation to God began to fade. I suddenly leapt to my feet on the chair where I was sitting, and shrieked out, ‘ It is too horrible, it is too horrible, it is too horrible,’ meaning that I could not bear this disillusionment. Then I flung myself on the ground, and at last awoke covered with blood, calling to the two sur- geons (who were frightened), ‘ Why did you not kill me? Why would you not let me die?’ Only think of it. To have felt for that long dateless ecstasy of vision the very God, in all purity and tenderness and truth and absolute love, and then to find that I had after all had no revelation, but that I had been tricked by the abnormal excitement of my brain.
has known the oldest truth, and that he has done with human theories as to the origin, meaning, or destiny of the race. He is beyond instruction in ‘spiritual things.’
‘“‘ The lesson is one of central safety : the Kingdom is within. All days are judgment days: but there can be no climacteric purpose of eternity, nor any scheme of the whole. The astronomer abridges the row of bewildering figures by increasing his unit of measurement: so may we reduce the distracting multiplicity of things to the unity for which each of us stands.
“This has been my moral sustenance since I have known of it. In my first printed mention of it I declared: ‘The world is no more the alien terror that was taught me. Spurning the cloud-grimed and still sultry battlements whence so lately Jehovan thunders boomed, my gray gull lifts her wing against the nightfall, and takes the dim leagues with a fearless eye.’ And now, after twenty-seven years of this experience, the wing is grayer, but the eye is fearless still, while I renew and doubly emphasize that declaration. I know —as having known — the meaning of Existence : the sane centre of the universe —at once the wonder and the assurance of the soul — for which the speech of reason has as yet no name but the Anes thetic Revelation.” —I have considerably abridged the quotation.
892 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
“Yet, this question remains, Is it possible that the inner sense of reality which succeeded, when my flesh was dead to impressions from without, to the ordinary sense of physical relations, was not a delusion but an actual experience? Is it possible that I, in that moment, felt what some of the saints have said they always felt, the undemonstrable but irrefragable certainty of God ?”}
1 Op. cit., pp. 78-80, abridged. I subjoin, also abridging it, another interesting anesthetic revelation communicated to me in manuscript by a friend in England. The subject, a gifted woman, was taking ether for a surgical operation.
‘“‘I wondered if I was in a prison being tortured, and why I remembered having heard it said that people ‘learn through suffering,’ and in view of what I was seeing, the inadequacy of this saying struck me so much that I said, aloud, ‘ to suffer is to learn.’
“With that I became unconscious again, and my last dream immediately preceded my real coming to, It only lasted a few seconds, and was most vivid and real to me, though it may not be clear in words.
“A great Being or Power was traveling through the sky, his foot was on a kind of lightning as a wheel is on a rail, it was his pathway. The light- ning was made entirely of the spirits of innumerable people close to one another, and I was one of them. He moved in a straight line, and each part of the streak or flash came into its short conscious existence only that he might travel. I seemed to be directly under the foot of God, and I thought he was grinding his own life up out of my pain. Then Isaw that what he had been trying with all his might to do was to change his course, to bend the line of lightning to which he was tied, in the direction in which he wanted to go. I felt my flexibility and helplessness, and knew that he would suc- ceed. He bended me, turning his corner by means of my hurt, hurting me more than I had ever been hurt in my life, and at the acutest point of this, as he passed, I saw. I understood for a moment things that I have now forgotten, things that no one could remember while retaining sanity. The angle was an obtuse angle, and I remember thinking as I woke that had he made it a right or acute angle, I should have both suffered and ‘seen’ still more, and should probably have died.
“He went on and I came to. In that moment the whole of my life passed before me, including each little meaningless piece of distress, and I understood them. This was what it had all meant, this was the piece of work it had all been contributing to do. I did not see God’s purpose, I only saw his intentness and his entire relentlessness towards his means. He thought no more of me than a man thinks of hurting a cork when he is opening wine, or hurting a cartridge when he is firing. And yet, on wak- ing, my first feeling was, and it came with tears, ‘Domine non sum digna,’ for I had been lifted into a position for which I was too small. I realized
MYSTICISM B93
_-* With this we make connection with religious mysti- | eism pure and simple. Symonds’s question takes us back to those examples which you will remember my quoting in the lecture on the Reality of the Unseen, of sudden realization of the immediate presence of God. The phenomenon in one shape or another is not uncommon.
“‘T know,” writes Mr. Trine, “an officer on our police force who has told me that many times when off duty, and on his way home in the evening, there comes to him such a vivid and vital realization of his oneness with this Infinite Power, and this Spirit of Infinite Peace so takes hold of and so fills him,
that in that half hour under ether I had served God more distinctly and purely than I had ever done in my life before, or than I am capable of desiring to do. I was the means of his achieving and revealing something, I know not what or to whom, and that, to the exact extent of my capacity for suffering.
“While regaining consciousness, I wondered why, since I had gone se deep, I had seen nothing of what the saints call the love of God, nothing but his relentlessness. And then I heard an answer, which I could only just catch, saying, ‘Knowledge and Love are One, and the measure is suf- fering’ —I give the words as they came to me. With that I came finally to (into what seemed a dream world compared with the reality of what I was leaving), and I saw that what would be ealled the ‘cause’ of my expe- rience was a slight operation under insufficient ether, in a bed pushed up against a window, a common city window in a common city street. If I had to formulate a few of the things I then caught a glimpse of, they would run somewhat as follows :—
“ The eternal necessity of suffering and its eternal vicariousness. Tho veiled and incommunicable nature of the worst sufferings ;— the passivi, ’ of genius, how it is essentially instrumental and defenseless, moved, noi moving, it must do what it does ;— the impossibility of discovery without its price ;— finally, the excess of what the suffering ‘seer’ or genius pays over what his generation gains. (He seems like one who sweats his life out to earn enough to save a district from famine, and just as he staggers back, dying and satisfied, bringing a lac of rupees to buy grain with, God lifts the lac away, dropping one rupee, and says, ‘ That you may give them. That you have earned for them. The rest is for ME.’) I perceived also in @ way never to be forgotten, the excess of what we see over what we can demonstrate.
‘“ And so on ! — these things may seem to you delusions, or truisms ; but for me they are dark truths, and the power to put them into even such words as these has been given me by an ether dream.”
394. THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
that it seems as if his feet could hardly keep to the pavement, so buoyant and so exhilarated does he become by reason of this inflowing tide.” ?
Certain aspects of nature seem to have a peculiar power of awakening such mystical moods.” Most of the striking cases which I have collected have occurred out of doors. Literature has commemorated this fact in many passages of great beauty—this extract, for example, from Amiel’s Journal Intime : —
“Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in
1 In Tune with the Infinite, p. 137.
2 The larger God may then swallow up the smaller one. I take this from Starbuck’s manuscript collection : —
“T never lost the consciousness of the presence of Goa until I stood at the foot of the Horseshoe Falls, Niagara. Then I lost him in the immen- sity of what I saw. I also lost myself, feeling that I was an atom too small for the notice of Almighty God.”
I subjoin another similar case from Starbuck’s collection : —
“In that time the consciousness of God’s nearness came to me some- times. I say God, to describe what is indescribable. A presence, I might say, yet that is too suggestive of personality, and the moments of which I speak did not hold the consciousness of a personality, but something in myself made me feel myself a part of something bigger than I, that was control-. ling. I felt myself one with the grass, the trees, birds, insects, everything in Nature. I exulted in the mere fact of existence, of being a part of it all — the drizzling rain, the shadows of the clouds, the tree-trunks, and so on. In the years following, such moments continued to come, but I wanted them constantly. I knew so well the satisfaction of losing self in a perception of supreme power and love, that I was unhappy because that perception was not constant.” The cases quoted in my third lecture, pp. 66, 67, 70, are still better ones of this type. In her essay, The Joss of Personality, in The Atlantic Monthly (vol. lxxxv. p. 195), Miss Ethel D. Puffer explains that the vanishing of the sense of self, and the feeling of immediate unity with the object, is due to the disappearance, in these rapturous experiences, of the motor adjustments which habitually intermediate between the constant background of consciousness (which is the Self) and the object in the fore- ground, whatever it may be. I must refer the reader to the highly instrue- tive article, which seems to me to throw light upon the psychological con- ditions, though it fails to account for the rapture or the revelation-value of the experience in the Subject’s eyes.
MYSTICISM 395
youth, at sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny ; and again in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a tree and visited by three butter- flies ; once more at night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon the sand and my vision ranging through the milky way ;— such grand and spacious, immortal, cosmo- gonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one owns the infinite! Moments divine, ecstatic hours; in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the blue firma- ment; .. . instants of irresistible intuition in which one feels one’s self great as the universe, and calm as a god. . . . What hours, what memories! The vestiges they leave behind are enough to fill us with belief and enthusiasm, as if they were visits of the Holy Ghost.” 1
Here is a similar record from the memoirs of that interesting German idealist, Malwida von Meysenbug : —
“‘T was alone upon the seashore as all these thoughts flowed over me, liberating and reconciling; and now again, as once before in distant days in the Alps of Dauphiné, I was impelled to kneel down, this time before the illimitable ocean, symbol of the Infinite. I felt that I prayed as I had never prayed before, and knew now what prayer really is: to return from the soli- tude of individuation into the consciousness of unity with all that is, to kneel down as one that passes away, and to rise up as one imperishable. Earth, heaven, and sea resounded as in one vast world-encircling harmony. It was as if the chorus of all the great who had ever lived were about me. I felt myself one with them, and it appeared as if I heard their greeting : ‘ Thou too belongest to the company of those who overcome.’ ”’ 2
The well-known passage from Walt Whitman is a classical expression of this sporadic type of mystical ex- perience.
1 Op. cit., i. 43-44.
2 Memoiren einer Idealistin, 5te Auflage, 1900, iii. 166. For years she had been unable to pray, owing to materialistic belief.
396 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
“I believe in you, my Soul...
Loaf with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat;...
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice.
I mind how once we lay, such a transparent summer morning.
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers and the women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love.” !
I could easily give more instances, but one will suffice. I take it from the Autobiography of J. Trevor.’
“One brilliant Sunday morning, my wife and boys went to the Unitarian Chapel in Macclesfield. I felt it impossible to accompany them — as though to leave the sunshine on the hills, and go down there to the chapel, would be for the time an act of spiritual suicide. And I felt such need for new inspiration and expansion in my life. So, very reluctantly and sadly, I left my wife and boys to go down into the town, while I went further up into the hills with my stick and my dog. In the loveliness of the morning, and the beauty of the hills and val- leys, 1 soon lost my sense of sadness and regret. For nearly an hour I walked along the road to the ‘ Cat and Fiddle,’ and then returned. On the way back, suddenly, without warning, I felt that 1 was in Heaven —an inward state of peace and joy
1 Whitman in another place expresses in a quieter way what was prob- ably with him a chronic mystical perception : “ There is,” he writes, “ apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all educa- tion deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness, we call the world ; a soul- sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however mo- mentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter. [Of] such soul-sight and root-centre for the mind mere optimism explains only the surface.” Whitman charges it against Carlyle that he lacked this perception. Speci- men Days and Collect, Philadelphia, 1882, p. 174.
2 My Quest for God, London, 1897, pp. 268, 269, abridged.
MYSTICISM 397
and assurance indescribably intense, accompanied with a sense of being bathed in a warm glow of light, as though the external condition had brought about the internal effect — a feeling of having passed beyond the body, though the scene around me stood out more clearly and as if nearer to me than before, by reason of the illumination in the midst of which I seemed to be placed. This deep emotion lasted, though with decreasing strength, until I reached home, and for some time after, only gradually passing away.”
The writer adds that having had further experiences of a similar sort, he now knows them well.
“ The spiritual life,” he writes, “ justifies itself to those who live it; but what can we say to those who do not understand ? This, at least, we can say, that it is a life whose experiences are ' proved real to their possessor, because they remain with him when brought closest into contact with the objective realities of life. Dreams cannot stand this test. We wake from them to find that they are but dreams. Wanderings of an overwrought brain do not stand this test. These highest experiences that I have had of God’s presence have been rare and brief — flashes of consciousness which have compelled me to exclaim with sur- prise — God is here / — or conditions of exaltation and insight, less intense, and only gradually passing away. I have severely questioned the worth of these moments. To no soul have I named them, lest I should be building my life and work on mere phantasies of the brain. But I find that, after every questioning and test, they stand out to-day as the most real experiences of my life, and experiences which have explained and justified and unified all past experiences and all past growth. Indeed, their reality and their far-reaching signifi- cance are ever becoming more clear and evident. When they came, I was living the fullest, strongest, sanest, deepest life. I was not seeking them. What I was seeking, with resolute determination, was to live more intensely my own life, as against what I knew would be the adverse judgment of the world. It was in the most real seasons that the Real Presence
398 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
eame, and, I was aware that I was immersed in the infinite ocean of God.” }
Even the least mystical of you must by this time be convinced of the existence of mystical moments as states of consciousness of an entirely specific quality, and of the deep impression which they make on those who have them. -A Canadian psychiatrist, Dr. R. M. Bucke, gives to the more distinctly characterized of these phenomena the name of cosmic consciousness. “Cosmic conscious- ness in its more striking instances is not,” Dr. Bucke says, “‘ simply an expansion or extension i the self-con- scious mind with which we are all familiar, but the su- peraddition of a function as distinct from any possessed by the average man as se/f-consciousness is distinct from any function possessed by one of the higher animals.”
“The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a con- sciousness of the cosmos, that is, of the life and order of the universe. Along with the consciousness of the cosmos there occurs an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the individual on a new plane of existence — would make him almost a member of a new species. To this is added a state of moral exaltation, an indescribable feeling of elevation, elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully as striking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual power. With these come what may be called a sense of immortality, a consciousness of eternal life, not a con. viction that he shall have this, but the consciousness that he has it already.” 2
It was Dr. Bucke’s own experience of a typical onset of cosmic consciousness in his own person which led him to investigate it in others. He has printed his conclu- sions in a highly interesting volume, from which I take the following account of what occurred to him : —
1 Op. cit., pp. 256, 257, abridged.
2 Cosmic Consciousness : a study in the evolution of the human Mind. Philadelphia, 1901, p. 2.
MYSTICISM 399
‘“‘T had spent the evening in a great city, with two friends, reading and discussing poetry and philosophy. We parted at midnight. I had a long drive in a hansom to my lodging, My mind, deeply under the influence of the ideas, images, and emotions called up by the reading and talk, was calm and peaceful. I was in a state of quiet, almost passive enjoyment, not actually thinking, but letting ideas, images,.and emotions © flow of themselves, as it were, through my mind. All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a ~ flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an im- mense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly after- ward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellec- tual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence ; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a conviction that I would have eternal life, but a conscious- ness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any per-
-adventure all things work together for the good of each and
all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quar- ter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that con- viction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost.” ?
We have now seen enough of this cosmic or mystic consciousness, as it comes sporadically. We must next 1 Loe. ecit., pp. 7,8. My quotation follows the privately printed pam-
phlet which preceded Dr. Bucke’s larger work, and differs verbally a little from the text of the latter.
400 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
pass to its methodical cultivation as an element of the religious life. Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and Christians all have cultivated it methodically.
In India, training in mystical insight has been known
from time immemorial under the name of yoga. Yoga ~ means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline vary slightly in the different systems which teach it. The yogi, or disciple, who has by these means overcome the obscurations of his lower nature sufficiently, enters into the condition termed samadhi, ‘“‘and comes face to face with facts which no instinct or reason can ever know.” He learns —
“That the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond reason, a superconscious state, and that when the mind gets to that higher state, then this knowledge beyond reasoning comes. .. - All the different steps in yoga are intended to bring us scientifically to the superconscious state or samadhi. . . . Just as unconscious work is beneath consciousness, so there is another work which is above consciousness, and which, also, is not ac- companied with the feeling of egoism. . . . There is no feeling of 7, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness, objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full efful- gence, and we know ourselves — for Samadhi lies potential in us all—for what we truly are, free, immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite, and its contrasts of good and evil alto- gether, and identical with the Atman or Universal Soul.”’!
The Vedantists say that one may stumble into super- consciousness sporadically, without the previous disci- pline, but it is then impure. Their test of its purity, like
1 My quotations are from VIVEKANANDA, Raja Yoga, London, 1896. The completest source of information on Yoga is the work translated by Vr HARI Lata Mirra: Yoga Vasishta Maha Ramayana, 4 vols., Calcutta, 1891-99.
MYSTICISM 401
our test of religion’s value, is empirical: its fruits must be good for life. When a man comes out cf Samadhi, they assure us that he remains “enlightened, a sage, a prophet, a saint, his whole character changed, his life changed, illumined.” ?
The Buddhists use the word ‘samadhi’ as well as the Hindus; but ‘ dhyana”. is their special word for higher states of contemplation. There seem to be four stages recognized in dhyana. The first stage comes through concentration of the mind upon one point. It excludes desire, but not discernment or judgment: it is still intel- lectual. In the second stage the intellectual functions drop off, and the satisfied sense of unity_remains. In the third stage the satisfaction departs, and indifference begins, along with memory and self-consciousness. In the fourth stage the indifference, memory, and self-con- sciousness are perfected. [Just what ‘memory’ and ‘self-consciousness ’ mean in this connection is doubtful. They cannot be the faculties familiar to us in the lower life.| Higher stages still of contemplation are men- tioned — a region where there exists nothing, and where the meditator says: “ There exists absolutely nothing,” and stops. Then he reaches another region where he says: “There are neither ideas nor absence of ideas,” and stops again. ‘Then another region where, “ having reached the end of both idea and perception, he stops
1 A European witness, after carefully comparing the results of Yoga with those of the hypnotic or dreamy states artificially producible by us, says : “It makes of its true disciples good, healthy, and happy men. . . . Through the mastery which the yogi attains over his thoughts and his body, he grows into a ‘character.’ By the subjection of his impulses and propen- sities to his will, and the fixing of the latter upon the ideal of goodness, he becomes a ‘personality’ hard to influence by others, and thus almost the opposite of what we usually imagine a ‘medium’ so-called, or ‘ psy- chic subject’ to be.” Karu KELLNER : Yoga: Eine Skizze, Miinchen, 1896 p. 21.
402 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
finally.” This would seem to be, not yet Nirvana, but as close an approach to it as this life affords.’
In the Mohammedan world the Sufi sect and various dervish bodies are the possessors of the mystical tradi- tion. The Sufis have existed in Persia from the earliest times, and as their pantheism is so at variance with the | hot and rigid monotheism of the Arab mind, it has been suggested that Sufism must have been inoculated into Islam by Hindu influences. We Christians know little of Sufism, for its secrets are disclosed only to those initi- ated. ‘To give its existence a certain liveliness in your minds, I will quote a Moslem document, and pass away from the subject.
Al-Ghazzali, a Persian philosopher and theologian, who flourished in the eleventh century, and ranks as one of the greatest doctors of the Moslem church, has left us one of the few autobiographies to be found outside of Chris- tian literature. Strange that a species of book so abun- dant among ourselves should be so little represented else- where — the absence of strictly personal confessions is the chief difficulty to the purely literary student who would like to become acquainted with the inwardness of religions other than the Christian.