The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James
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through mysticism and philosophy, to where we were before : the uses of rehgion, its uses to the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to the empirical philosophy : the true is what works well, even though the qualification * on the whole ' -^ may always have to be added. In this lecture we must revert to description again, and finish our picture of the religious consciousness by a word about some of its other characteristic elements. Then, in a final lecture, we shall be free to make a general review and draw our independent conclusions. The first point I will speak of is the part which the aesthetic life plays in determining one's choice of a religion. Men, I said awhile ago, involuntarily intellectualize their religious experience. They need formulas, just as they need fellowship in worship. I spoke, therefore, too contemptuously of the pragmatic uselessness of the famous scholastic list of attributes of the deity, for they have one use which I neglected to consider. The eloquent passage in which Newman enumerates them ^ puts us on the track of it. Intoning them as he would intone a cathedral service, he shows how high is their aesthetic value. It enriches our bare piety to carry these exalted and mysterious verbal additions just as it enriches ^ Idea of a University, Discourse III. § 7.
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OTHER CHARACTERISTICS 45& a church to have an organ and old brasses, marbles and frescoes and stained windows. Epithets lend an atmosphere and overtones to our devotion. They are like a hymn of praise and service of glory, and may sound the more sublime for being incomprehensible. Minds like Newman's ^ grow as jealous of then- credit as heathen priests are of that of the jewelry and ornaments that blaze upon then' idols.
Among the buildings-out of religion which the mind spontaneously indulges in, the aesthetic motive must never '""^ V be forgotten. I promised to say nothing of ecclesiastical j^* jr^. systems in these lectures. I may be allowed, however, to put in a word at this point on the way in which their 1^ ctc^*^^ satisfaction of certain aesthetic needs contributes to their hold on human nature.
Although some persons aim l4' UaA* most at intellectual purity and simphfication, for others q richness is the supreme imaginative requirement.^ When ^'^'^'^ one's mind is strongly of this type, an individual religion will hardly serve the purpose.
The inner need is rather U-cx- Mt^w^ 1 Newman's imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that he can write : " From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion : I know no other religion ; I cannot enter into the \ . idea of any other sort of religion.
And again, speaking of himself about Yii/i/v. >^ Kvv^ the age of thirty, he writes : " I loved to act as feeling myself in my / ^^ — Bishop's sight, as if it were the sight of God. Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50. " 2 The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical importance with the analogous difference in character.
We saw, under the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 280 &.). For others, on the contrary, superabundance, over-pressure, stimulation, lots of superficial relations, are indispensable.
There are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their debts, bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered, their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling.
So with ease, elegance, trib- \ utes of affection, social recognitions — some of us require amounts of these i things which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication. / p. 460i*" ^\/ of something institutional and complex, majestic in the hierarchic interrelatedness of its parts, with authority descending from stage to stage, and at every stage objects for adjectives of mystery and splendor, derived in the \5 last resort from the Godhead who is the fountain and ^ * '^ culmination of the system.
One feels then as if in pre- :; sence of some vast incrusted work of jewelry or architec- ' o* ture ; one hears the multitudinous liturgical appeal ; one gets the honorific vibration coming from every quarter.
J. ^ t Compared with such a noble complexity, in which asfi*>>v^ V scending and descending movements seem in no way to "v w '^ j^^ upon stability, in which no single item, however humble, is insignificant, because so many august institutions hold it in its place, how flat does evangelical Protestant- -. <, ism appear, how bare the atmosphere of those isolated re- 1 ligious lives whose boast it is that " man in the bush with ^ God may meet." ^ What a pulverization and leveling of "^ what a gloriously piled-up structure !
To an imagination ^ used to the perspectives of dignity and glory, the naked I > gospel scheme seems to offer an almshouse for a palace. \^Cs? It is much like the patriotic sentiment of those brought up in ancient empires.
How many emotions must be ^ r j- frustrated of their object, when one gives up the titles of dignity, the crimson lights and blare of brass, the gold embroidery, the plumed troops, the fear and trembling, . and puts up with a president in a black coat who shakes ' J|^* ■ hands with you, and comes, it may be, from a ' home ' ^ upon a veldt or prairie with one sitting-room and a Bible on its centre-table. It pauperizes the monarchical imagination !
The strength of these aesthetic sentiments makes it ^ In Newman's Lectures on Justification, Lecture VIII. § 6, there is a splendid passage expressive of this sesthetic way of feeling the Christian scheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote.
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