Varieties of Religious Experience: a study in Human Nature, Centenary Edition
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THE VALUE OF SAINTLINESS 271
and “imperfections” in the plural; her stereotyped humility and return upon herself, as covered with “confusion” at each new mani- festation of God’s singular partiality for a person so unworthy, are typical of shrewdom: a paramountly feeling nature would be objec- tively lost in gratitude, and silent. She had some public instincts, it is true; she hated the Lutherans, and longed for the church’s triumph over them; but in the main her idea of religion seems to have been that of an endless amatory flirtation — if one may say so without irreverence — between the devotee and the deity; and apart from helping younger nuns to go in this direction by the inspiration of her example and instruction, there is absolutely no human use in her, or sign of any general human interest. Yet the spirit of her age, far from rebuking her, exalted her as superhuman. We have to pass a similar judgment on the whole notion of saint- ship based on merits. Any God who, on the one hand, can care to keep a pedantically minute account of individual shortcomings, and on the other can feel such partialities, and load particular creatures with such insipid marks of favor, is too small-minded a God for our credence. When Luther, in his immense manly way, swept off by a stroke of his hand the very notion of a debit and credit account kept with individuals by the Almighty, he stretched the soul’s imagination and saved theology from puerility. So much for mere devotion, divorced from the intellectual con- ceptions which might guide it towards bearing useful human fruit. The next saintly virtue in which we find excess is Purity. In theopathic characters, like those whom we have just considered, the love of God must not be mixed with any other love. Father and mother, sisters, brothers, and friends are felt as interfering distrac- tions; for sensitiveness and narrowness, when they occur together, as they often do, require above all things a simplified world to dwell in. Variety and confusion are too much for their powers of comfortable adaptation. But whereas your aggressive pietist reaches his unity objectively, by forcibly stamping disorder and divergence out, your retiring pietist reaches his subjectively, leaving disorder in the world at large, but making a smaller world in which he dwells himself and from which he eliminates it altogether. Thus, alongside of the church militant with its prisons, dragonnades, and inquisition methods, we have the church fugient, as one might call 272 THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE it, with its hermitages, monasteries, and sectarian organizations, both churches pursuing the same object — to unify the life, 1 and simplify the spectacle presented to the soul. A mind extremely sensitive to inner discords will drop one external relation after another, as interfering with the absorption of consciousness in spiritual things. Amusements must go first, then conventional “society,” then busi- ness, then family duties, until at last seclusion, with a subdivision of the day into hours for stated religious acts, is the only thing that can be borne. The lives of saints are a history of successive renuncia- tions of complication, one form of contact with the outer life being dropped after another, to save the purity of inner tone. 2 “Is it not better,” a young sister asks her Superior, “that I should not speak at all during the hour of recreation, so as not to run the risk, by speak- ing, of falling into some sin of which I might not be conscious?” 3 If the life remains a social one at all, those who take part in it must follow one identical rule. Embosomed in this monotony, the zealot for purity feels clean and free once more. The minuteness of uniformity maintained in certain sectarian communities, whether monastic or not, is something almost inconceivable to a man of the world. Costume, phraseology, hours, and habits are absolutely stereotyped, and there is no doubt that some persons are so made as to find in this stability an incomparable kind of mental rest. 1 On this subject I refer to the work of M. M URISIER (Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux, Paris, 1901), who makes inner unification the mainspring of the whole religious life. But
everything to themselves. One would infer from M. Murisier’s pages that this formal condi- tion was peculiarly characteristic of religion, and that one might in comparison almost neglect material content, in studying the latter. I trust that the present work will convince the reader that religion has plenty of material content which is characteristic, and which is more important by far than any general psychological form. In spite of this criticism, I find M. Murisier’s book highly instructive. 2 Example: “At the first beginning of the Servitor’s [Suso’s] interior life, after he had purified his soul properly by confession, he marked out for himself, in thought, three circles, within which he shut himself up, as in a spiritual intrenchment. The first circle was his cell, his chapel, and the choir. When he was within this circle, he seemed to himself in complete security. The second circle was the whole monastery as far as the outer gate. The third and outermost circle was the gate itself, and here it was necessary for him to stand well upon his guard. When he went outside these circles, it seemed to him that he was in the plight of some wild animal which is outside its hole, and surrounded by the hunt, and therefore in need of all its cunning and watchfulness.” The Life of the Blessed Henry Suso, by Himself, translated by K NOX
, London, 1865, p. 168. 3 Vie des premières Religieuses Dominicaines de la Congrégation de St. Dominique, à Nancy; Nancy, 1896, p. 129. Yüklə 1,7 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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