The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experience“reliefs,” occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils eitherexperienced or threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments,religious happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares nolonger to escape. It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice—inwardlyit knows it to be permanently overcome. If you askhow religion thus falls on the thorns and faces death, and in the veryact annuls annihilation, I cannot explain the matter, for it is religion’ssecret, and to understand it you must yourself have been a religiousman of the extremer type. In our future examples, even of the simplestand healthiest-minded type of religious consciousness, we shallfind this complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher happinessholds a lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre there is apicture, by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck.The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend’s figurebeing there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to hisbeing there—that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil init, so long as we keep our foot upon his neck. In the religious consciousness,that is just the position in which the fiend, the negativeor tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the religiousconsciousness is so rich from the emotional point of view.20 Weshall see how in certain men and women it takes on a monstrouslyascetic form. There are saints who have literally fed on the negativeprinciple, on humiliation and privation, and the thought of sufferingand death—their souls growing in happiness just in proportionas their outward state grew more intolerable. No other emotion thanreligious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass. And it is forthat reason that when we ask our question about the value of religionfor human life, I think we ought to look for the answer amongthese violenter examples rather than among those of a more moderatehue.Having the phenomenon of our study in its acutest possible formto start with, we can shade down as much as we please later. And ifin these cases, repulsive as they are to our ordinary worldly way ofjudging, we find ourselves compelled to acknowledge religion’s value20 I owe this allegorical illustration to my lamented colleague and Friend,Charles Carroll Everett.52