The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencesaintship based on merits. Any God who, on the one hand, can careto keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings,and on the other can feel such partialities, and load particular creatureswith such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a Godfor our credence. When Luther, in his immense manly way, sweptoff by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a debit and creditaccount kept with individuals by the Almighty, he stretched thesoul’s imagination and saved theology from puerility.So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual conceptionswhich might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit.The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. Intheopathic characters, like those whom we have just considered, thelove of God must not be mixed with any other love. Father andmother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distractions;for sensitiveness and narrowness, when they occur together,as they often do, require above all things a simplified world to dwellin. Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortableadaptation. But whereas your aggressive pietist reaches his unityobjectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out, yourretiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the worldat large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells himself andfrom which he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside of the churchmilitant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition methods,we have the church fugient, as one might call it, with its hermitages,monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches pursuingthe same object—to unify the life,208 and simplify the spectacle208 On this subject I refer to the work of M. Murisier (Les Maladies dusentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the mainspringof the whole religious life. But all strongly ideal interests, religiousor irreligious, unify the mind and tend to subordinate everything to themselves.One would infer from M. Murisier’s pages that this formal conditionwas peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparisonalmost neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust thatthe present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of materialcontent which is characteristic and which is more important by farthan any general psychological form. In spite of this criticism, I find M.Murisier’s book highly instructive.312