The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamesness, and which is therefore not only a possible and altogether properfeeling for us to have here below, but is the best and most indispensableproof of God’s reality. No other proof is equally convincing,and therefore happiness is the point from which every efficaciousnew theology should start.”In the hour immediately before us, I shall invite you to considerthe simpler kinds of religious happiness, leaving the more complexsorts to be treated on a later day.In many persons, happiness is congenital and irreclaimable. “Cosmicemotion” inevitably takes in them the form of enthusiasm andfreedom. I speak not only of those who are animally happy. I meanthose who, when unhappiness is offered or proposed to them, positivelyrefuse to feel it, as if it were something mean and wrong. Wefind such persons in every age, passionately flinging themselves upontheir sense of the goodness of life, in spite of the hardships of theirown condition, and in spite of the sinister theologies into which theymay he born. From the outset their religion is one of union with thedivine. The heretics who went before the reformation are lavishly accusedby the church writers of antinomian practices, just as the firstChristians were accused of indulgence in orgies by the Romans. It isprobable that there never has been a century in which the deliberaterefusal to think ill of life has not been idealized by a sufficient numberof persons to form sects, open or secret, who claimed all natural thingsto be permitted. Saint Augustine’s maxim, Dilige et quod vis fac—ifyou but love [God], you may do as you incline—is morally one of theprofoundest of observations, yet it is pregnant, for such persons, withpassports beyond the bounds of conventional morality. According totheir characters they have been refined or gross; but their belief hasbeen at all times systematic enough to constitute a definite religiousattitude. God was for them a giver of freedom, and the sting of evilwas overcome. Saint Francis and his immediate disciples were, on thewhole, of this company of spirits, of which there are of course infinitevarieties. Rousseau in the earlier years of his writing, Diderot, B. deSaint Pierre, and many of the leaders of the eighteenth century anti-Christian movement were of this optimistic type. They owed theirinfluence to a certain authoritativeness in their feeling that Nature, ifyou will only trust her sufficiently, is absolutely good.77