The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencetechnic school, young Gratry fell into a state of nervous exhaustionwith symptoms which he thus describes:—“I had such a universal terror that I woke at night with a start,thinking that the Pantheon was tumbling on the Polytechnic school,or that the school was in flames, or that the Seine was pouring intothe Catacombs, and that Paris was being swallowed up. And whenthese impressions were past, all day long without respite I sufferedan incurable and intolerable desolation, verging on despair. I thoughtmyself, in fact, rejected by God, lost, damned! I felt something likethe suffering of hell. Before that I had never even thought of hell.My mind had never turned in that direction. Neither discourses norreflections had impressed me in that way. I took no account of hell.Now, and all at once, I suffered in a measure what is suffered there.“But what was perhaps still more dreadful is that every idea ofheaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of anythingof the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It waslike a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows lessreal than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in inhabitingit. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love— all these words werenow devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have talked of allthese things, but I had become incapable of feeling anything inthem, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anythingfrom them, or of believing them to exist. There was my great andinconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived any longer theexistence of happiness or perfection. An abstract heaven over a nakedrock. Such was my present abode for eternity.”7777 A. Gratry: Souvenirs de ma jeunesse, 1880, pp. 119-121, abridged.Some persons are affected with anhedonia permanently, or at any ratewith a loss of the usual appetite for life. The annals of suicide supply suchexamples as the following:—An uneducated domestic servant, aged nineteen, poisons herself, andleaves two letters expressing her motive for the act. To her parents shewrites:—“Life is sweet perhaps to some, but I prefer what is sweeter than life, andthat is death. So good-by forever, my dear parents. It is nobody’s fault, buta strong desire of my own which I have longed to fulfill for three or four136