The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious ExperienceI spare you the recital of poor Suso’s self-inflicted tortures fromthirst. It is pleasant to know that after his fortieth year, God showedhim by a series of visions that he had sufficiently broken down thenatural man, and that he might leave these exercises off. His case isdistinctly pathological, but he does not seem to have had the alleviation,which some ascetics have enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibilitycapable of actually turning torment into a perverse kind ofpleasure. Of the founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, weread that“Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable… . She said thatshe could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided shemight always have matter for suffering for God; but that tolive a single day without suffering would be intolerable. Shesaid 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 continuallysaid in her letters, ‘makes my life supportable.’”185So much for the phenomena to which the ascetic impulse will incertain persons give rise. In the ecclesiastically consecrated characterthree minor branches of self-mortification have been recognizedas indispensable pathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity, obedience,and poverty which the monk vows to observe; and upon theheads of obedience and poverty I will make a few remarks.First, of Obedience. The secular life of our twentieth century openswith this virtue held in no high esteem. The duty of the individualto determine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequencesseems, on the contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporaryProtestant social ideals. So much so that it is difficulteven imaginatively to comprehend how men possessed of an innerlife of their own could ever have come to think the subjection of itswill to that of other finite creatures recommendable. I confess thatto myself it seems something of a mystery. Yet it evidently corre-185 Bougaud: Hist de la bienheureuse Marguerite Marie, Paris, 1894, pp.265, 171. Compare, also, pp. 386, 387.280