The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamessponds to a profound interior need of many persons, and we mustdo our best to understand it.On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency ofobedience in a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to itsbeing viewed as meritorious. Next, experience shows that there aretimes in every one’s life when one can be better counseled by othersthan by one’s self. Inability to decide is one of the commonest symptomsof fatigued nerves; friends who see our troubles more broadly,often see them more wisely than we do; so it is frequently an act ofexcellent virtue to consult and obey a doctor, a partner, or a wife.But, leaving these lower prudential regions, we find, in the natureof some of the spiritual excitements which we have been studying,good reasons for idealizing obedience. Obedience may spring fromthe general religious phenomenon of inner softening and self-surrenderand throwing one’s self on higher powers. So saving are theseattitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utility, they becomeideally consecrated; and in obeying a man whose fallibility wesee through thoroughly, we, nevertheless, may feel much as we dowhen we resign our will to that of infinite wisdom. Add self-despairand the passion of self-crucifixion to this, and obedience becomesan ascetic sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of whatever prudentialuses it might have.It is as a sacrifice, a mode of “mortification,” that obedience isprimarily conceived by Catholic writers, a “sacrifice which man offersto God, and of which he is himself both the priest and thevictim. By poverty he immolates his exterior possessions; by chastityhe immolates his body; by obedience he completes the sacrifice,and gives to God all that he yet holds as his own, his two mostprecious goods, his intellect and his will. The sacrifice is then completeand unreserved, a genuine holocaust, for the entire victim isnow consumed for the honor of God.”186 Accordingly, in Catholicdiscipline, we obey our superior not as mere man, but as the representativeof Christ. Obeying God in him by our intention, obedienceis easy. But when the text-book theologians marshal collec-186 Lejuene: Introduction a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaustsimile goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola.281