The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencewisdom, which makes one thing as indifferent to us as another, andthus leads to rest, to peace, and to Nirvana.218We find accordingly that as ascetic saints have grown older, anddirectors of conscience more experienced, they usually have showna tendency to lay less stress on special bodily mortifications. Catholicteachers have always professed the rule that, since health is neededfor efficiency in God’s service, health must not be sacrificed to mortification.The general optimism and healthy-mindedness of liberalProtestant circles to-day makes mortification for mortification’s sakerepugnant to us. We can no longer sympathize with cruel deities,and the notion that God can take delight in the spectacle of sufferingsself-inflicted in his honor is abhorrent. In consequence of allthese motives you probably are disposed, unless some special utilitycan be shown in some individual’s discipline, to treat the generaltendency to asceticism as pathological.Yet I believe that a more careful consideration of the whole matter,distinguishing between the general good intention of asceticismand the uselessness of some of the particular acts of which it may beguilty, ought to rehabilitate it in our esteem. For in its spiritualmeaning asceticism stands for nothing less than for the essence ofthe twice-born philosophy. It symbolizes, lamely enough no doubt,but sincerely, the belief that there is an element of real wrongness inthis world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but whichmust be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul’s heroicresources, and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering. Asagainst this view, the ultra-optimistic form of the once-born philosophythinks we may treat evil by the method of ignoring. Let aman who, by fortunate health and circumstances, escapes the sufferingof any great amount of evil in his own person, also close hiseyes to it as it exists in the wider universe outside his private experience,and he will be quit of it altogether, and can sail through lifehappily on a healthy-minded basis. But we saw in our lectures onmelancholy how precarious this attempt necessarily is. Moreover itis but for the individual; and leaves the evil outside of him, unredeemedand unprovided for in his philosophy.218 Oldenberg: Buddha; translated by W. Hoey, London, 1882, p. 127.324