The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William James“which grew upon her daily, rendering her more and more incapableof attending to external duties. They tried her in the infirmary,but without much success, although her kindness, zeal, anddevotion were without bounds, and her charity rose to acts of sucha heroism that our readers would not bear the recital of them. Theytried her in the kitchen, but were forced to give it up as hopeless—everything dropped out of her hands. The admirable humility withwhich she made amends for her clumsiness could not prevent thisfrom being prejudicial to the order and regularity which must alwaysreign in a community. They put her in the school, where thelittle girls cherished her, and cut pieces out of her clothes [for relics]as if she were already a saint, but where she was too absorbed inwardlyto pay the necessary attention. Poor dear sister, even lessafter her visions than before them was she a denizen of earth, andthey had to leave her in her heaven.”204Poor dear sister, indeed! Amiable and good, but so feeble of intellectualoutlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with ourProtestant and modern education, to feel anything but indulgentpity for the kind of saintship which she embodies. A lower examplestill of theopathic saintliness is that of Saint Gertrude, a Benedictinenun of the thirteenth century, whose “Revelations,” a well-knownmystical authority, consist mainly of proofs of Christ’s partiality forher undeserving person. Assurances of his love, intimacies and caressesand compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort, addressedby Christ to Gertrude as an individual, form the tissue ofthis paltry-minded recital.205 In reading such a narrative, we realizethe gap between the thirteenth and the twentieth century, andwe feel that saintliness of character may yield almost absolutely204 Bougaud: Op. cit., p. 267.205 Examples: “Suffering from a headache, she sought, for the glory ofGod, to relieve herself by holding certain odoriferous substances in hermouth, when the Lord appeared to her to lean over towards her lovingly,and to find comfort Himself in these odors. After having gently breathedthem in, He arose, and said with a gratified air to the Saints, as if contentedwith what He had done: ‘see the new present which my betrothedhas given Me!’309