The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceto ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that nothing can be morestupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice, merely becausewe are incapable of taking part in anything like them ourselves.Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodisticconversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems toprove the existence of numerous persons in whom—at any rate at acertain stage in their development—a change of character for thebetter, so far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by officialmoralists, will take place all the more successfully if those rules beexactly reversed. Official moralists advise us never to relax our strenuousness.“Be vigilant, day and night,” they adjure us; “hold your passivetendencies in check; shrink from no effort; keep your will like abow always bent.” But the persons I speak of find that all this consciouseffort leads to nothing but failure and vexation in their hands,and only makes them twofold more the children of hell they werebefore. The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossiblefever and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all whenthe bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for byinnumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralisticmethod, by the “surrender” of which I spoke in my second lecture.Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now therule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resignthe care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferentas to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gaina perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particulargoods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvationthrough self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutherantheology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen writes.To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turnedwithin one. Something must give way, a native hardness must breakdown and liquefy; and this event (as we shall abundantly see hereafter)is frequently sudden and automatic, and leaves on the Subjectan impression that he has been wrought on by an external power.Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainlyone fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacityor incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely104