The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 311contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary Protestant social ideals. So much so that it is difficult even imaginatively to comprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their own could ever have come to think the subjection of its will to that of other finite creatures recommendable. I confess that to myself it seems something of a mystery.

Yet it evidently corresponds to a profound interior need of many persons, and we must do our best to understand it. On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency of obedience in a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as meritorious. Next, experience shows that there are times in every one's life when one can be better counseled by others than by one's self.

Inability to decide is one of the commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves ; friends who see our troubles more broadly, often see them more wisely than we do ; so it is frequently an act of excellent virtue to consult and obey a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these lower prudential regions, we find, in the nature of some of the spiritual excitements which we have been studying, good reasons for idealizing obedience.

Obedience may spring from the general religious phenomenon of inner softening and self-surrender and throwing one's self on higher powers. So saving are these attitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utir ty, they become ideally consecrated ; and in obeying a man whose falhbility we see through thoroughly, we, nevertheless, may feel much as we do when we resign our will to that of infinite wisdom.

Add self-despair and the passion of self-crucifixion to this, and obedience becomes an ascetic sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of whatever prudential uses it might have. It is as a sacrifice, a mode of * mortification/ that 3p. 312obedience is primarily conceived by Catholic writers, a " sacrifice which man offers to God, and of which he is himself both the priest and the victim. By poverty he immolates his exterior possessions ; by chastity he immolates his body ; by obedience he completes the sacrifice, and gives to God all that he yet holds as his own, his two most precious goods, his intellect and his will.

The sacrifice is then complete and unreserved, a genuine holocaust, for the entire victim is now consumed for the honor of God." ^ Accordingly, in Catholic discipline, we / obey our superior not as mere man, but as the representative of Christ. Obeying God in him by our intention, obedience is easy. But when the text-book theologians marshal collectively all their reasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds to our ears rather odd.

" One of the great consolations of the monastic life," says a Jesuit authority, " is the assurance we have that in obeying we can commit no fault.

The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you to do this thing or that, but you are certain that you commit no fault so long as you obey, because God will only ask you if you have duly performed what orders you received, and if you can furnish a clear account in that respect,, you are absolved entirely.

Whether the things you did were opportune, or whether there were not something better that might have been done, these are questions not asked of you, but rather of your Superior. The moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your account, and charges,' it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome well exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience, ' Oh, sovereign liberty !

Oh, holy and blessed security by which one becomes almost impeccable ! ' " Saint John Climachus is of the same sentiment when he calls obedience an excuse before God. In fact, when God asks why you have done this or that, and you reply, it is because I 1 Lejeune : Introduction k la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 277. The holocaust simile goes back at least as far as Ignatius Loyola.