The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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p. 364by any thinking man as a serious solution. Phrases of neatness, cosiness, and comfort can never be an answer to the sphinx's riddle. In these remarks I am leaning only upon mankind's common instinct for reality, which in point of fact has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. In heroism, we feel, life's supreme mystery is hidden.
We tolerate no one who has no capacity whatever for it in any direction. On the other hand, no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.
Inferior to ourselves in this or that way, if yet we cling to life, and he is able ' to fling it away like a flower ' as caring nothing for it, we account him in the deepest way our born superior. Each of us in his own person feels that a high-hearted indifference to life would expiate all his shortcomings.
The metaphysical mystery, thus recognized by common sense, that he who feeds on death that feeds on men possesses life supereminently and excellently, and meets best the secret demands of the universe, is the truth of which asceticism has been the faithful champion. The folly of the cross, so inexplicable by the intellect, has yet its indestructible vital meaning.
Representatively, then, and symbolically, and apart from the vagaries into which the unenlightened intellect of former times may have let it wander, asceticism must, I beheve, be acknowledged to go with the profounder way of handling the gift of existence. Naturalistic optimism is mere syllabub and flattery and sponge-cake in comparison.
The practical course of action for us, as religious men, would therefore, it seems to me, not be simply to turn our backs upon the ascetic impulse, as most of us to-day p. 365turn them, but rather to discover some outlet for it of which the fruits in the way of privation and hardship might be objectively useful.
The older monastic asceticism occupied itself with pathetic futilities, or terminated in the mere egotism of the individual, increasing his own perfection.^ But is it not possible for us to discard most ' of these older forms of mortification, and yet find saner channels for the heroism which inspired them ?
Does not, for example, the worship of material luxury and wealth, which constitutes so large a portion of the * spirit ' of our age, make somewhat for effeminacy and unmanliness ?
Is not the exclusively sympathetic and facetious way in which most children are brought up today— so different from the education of a hundred years ago, especially in evangelical circles — in danger, in spite of its many advantages, of developing a certain trashi- l^j-^J ness of fibre? Are there not hereabouts some points of appHcation for a renovated and revised ascetic discipline ?
Many of you would recognize such dangers, but would point to athletics, militarism, and individual and national enterprise and adventure as the remedies. These contemporary ideals are quite as remarkable for the energy with which they make for heroic standards of life, as contemporary religion is remarkable for the way in which it neglects them.^ War and adventure assuredly keep all who engage in them from treating themselves too tenderly.
They demand such incredible efforts, depth ' " The vanities of all others may die out, but the vanity of a saint as regards his sainthood is hard indeed to wear away. Eamakrishna, his Life and Sayings, 1899, p. 172. ", 2 « When a church has to be run by oysters, ice-cream, and fun," I read ' in an American religious paper, " you may be sure that it is running away r^"' _f rom Christ. Such, if one may judge by appearances, is the present plight / of many of our churches.
p. 366beyond depth of exertion, both in degree and in duration, that the whole scale of motivation alters. Discomfort and annoyance, hunger and wet, pain and cold, squalor and filth, cease to have any deterrent operation whatever. Death turns into a commonplace matter, and its usual power to check our action vanishes.
With the annulling of these customary inhibitions, ranges of new energy are set free, and life seems cast upon a higher plane of power. The beauty of war in this respect is that it is so congruous with ordinary human nature.
Ancestral evolution has made us all potential warriors ; so the most insignificant individual, when thrown into an army in the field, is weaned from whatever excess of tenderness towards his precious person he may bring with him, and may easily develop into a monster of insensibility. But when we compare the military type of self-severity with that of the ascetic saint, we find a world-wide* difference in all their spiritual concomitants.
" * Live and let live,' " writes a clear-headed Austrian officer, " is no device for an army. Contempt for one's own comrades, for the troops of the enemy, and, above all, fierce contempt for one's own person, are what war demands of every one. Far better is it for an amiy to be too savage, too cruel, too barbarous, than to possess \ too much sentimentality and human reasonableness.
If the soldier is to be good for anything as a soldier, he must be exactly the opposite of a reasoning and thinking man. The measure of goodness in hun is his possible use in war. War, and even peace, require of the soldier absolutely peculiar standards of morality. The recruit brings with him common moral notions, of which he must seek immediately to get rid. For him victory, success, must be everything. The most barbaric tendencies
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