The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesour heads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathicindividual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote thesincere Suso’s account of his own self-tortures. Suso, you will remember,was one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography,written in the third person, is a classic religious document.“He was in his youth of a temperament full of fire and life; andwhen this began to make itself felt, it was very grievous to him; andhe 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, untilthe 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 theundergarment he had strips of leather fixed, into which a hundredand fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp, were driven, and thepoints of the nails were always turned towards the flesh. He had thisgarment made very tight, and so arranged as to go round him andfasten in front in order that it might fit the closer to his body, andthe pointed nails might be driven into his flesh; and it was highenough to reach upwards to his navel. In this he used to sleep atnight. Now in summer, when it was hot, and he was very tired andill from his journeyings, or when he held the office of lecturer, hewould sometimes, as he lay thus in bonds, and oppressed with toil,and tormented also by noxious insects, cry aloud and give way tofretfulness, and twist round and round in agony, as a worm doeswhen run through with a pointed needle. It often seemed to him asif he were lying upon an ant-hill, from the torture caused by theinsects; for if he wished to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, theyvied with one another.183 Sometimes he cried to Almighty God inthe 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 is183 “Insects,” i.e. lice, were an unfailing token of mediaeval sainthood.We read of Francis of Assisi’s sheepskin that “often a companion of thesaint would take it to the fire to clean and dispediculate it, doing so, as hesaid, because the seraphic father himself was no enemy of pedocchi, buton the contrary kept them on him (le portava adosso) and held it for anhonor and a glory to wear these celestial pearls in his habit. Quoted by P.Sabatier: Speculum Perfectionis, etc., Paris, 1898, p. 231, note.277