The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesdifferently) I confess that my only feeling in reading her has beenpity that so much vitality of soul should have found such poor employment.In spite of the sufferings which she endured, there is a curiousflavor of superficiality about her genius. A Birmingham anthropologist,Dr. Jordan, has divided the human race into two types, whomhe calls “shrews” and “nonshrews” respectively.206 The shrew-typeis defined as possessing an “active unimpassioned temperament.” Inother words, shrews are the “motors,” rather than the “sensories,”207and their expressions are as a rule more energetic than the feelingswhich appear to prompt them. Saint Teresa, paradoxical as such ajudgment may sound, was a typical shrew, in this sense of the term.The bustle of her style, as well as of her life, proves it. Not onlymust she receive unheard-of personal favors and spiritual graces fromher Saviour, but she must immediately write about them and exploiterthem professionally, and use her expertness to give instructionto those less privileged. Her voluble egotism; her sense, not ofradical bad being, as the really contrite have it, but of her “faults”and “imperfections” in the plural; her stereotyped humility and returnupon herself, as covered with “confusion” at each new manifestationof God’s singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typicalof shrewdom: a paramountly feeling nature would be objectivelylost in gratitude, and silent. She had some public instincts, it is true;she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church’s triumph overthem; but in the main her idea of religion seems to have been thatof an endless amatory flirtation—if one may say so without irreverence—betweenthe devotee and the deity; and apart from helpingyounger nuns to go in this direction by the inspiration of her exampleand instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her, orsign of any general human interest. Yet the spirit of her age, far fromrebuking her, exalted her as superhuman.We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of206 Furneaux Jordan: Character in Birth and Parentage, first edition. Latereditions change the nomenclature.207 As to this distinction, see the admirably practical account in J. M.Baldwin’s little book, The Story of the Mind, 1898.311