The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 11We are surely all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of mind for which we have shrinks from dogmatic general statement and expresses itself only partially and by innuendo. It seems to me that few conceptions are less instructive than this re-iuterpretation of religion as perverted sexuality.

It reminds one, so crudely is it often employed, of the famous Catholic taunt, that the Reformation may be best understood by remembering that its fons et origo was Luther's wish to marry a nun ; — the effects are infinitely wider than the alleged causes, and for the most part opposite in nature.

It is true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are undisguisedly amatory — e. g., sex-deities and obscene rites in polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few Christian mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration of the digestive function, and prove one's point by the worship of Bacchus and Ceres, or by the ecstatic feelings of some other saints about the Eucharist ?

Religious language clothes itself in such poor symbols as our life affords, and the whole organism gives overtones of comment whenever the mind is strongly stirred to expression. Language drawn from eating and drinking is probably as common in religious literature as is language drawn from the sexual life. We 'hunger and thirst ' after righteousness ; we ' find the Lord a sweet savor ; ' we ' taste and see that he is good.

' Spiritual milk for American babes, drawn from the breasts of both testaments,' is a sub-title of the once famous New England Primer, and Christian devotional literature indeed quite floats in milk, thought of from the point of view, not of the mother, but of the greedy babe.

Saint Fran^oii? de Sales, for instance, thus describes the * orison of quietude ' : "In this state the soul is like a little child still at the breast, whose mother, to caress him whilst he is still in her arms, makes her milk distill into his mouth without his even moving his lips. So it is here. . . .

Our Lord desires that our will should be satisfied with sucking the milk which His Majesty pours into our mouth, and that we should relish the sweetness without even knowing that it cometh from the Lord. And again: "Consider the little infants, united and joined to the breasts of their nursing mothers, you will see that from time to time they press themselves closer by little starts to which the pleasure of sucking prompts them.

Even so, during its orison, the heart united to its God oftentimes makes attempts at closer union by movements during which it presses closer upon the divine sweetness. Chemin de la Perfection, ch. xxxi. ; Amour de Dieu, vii. ch. i. i In fact, one might almost as well interpret religion as a perversion of the respiratory function.

The Bible is full of the language of respiratory oppression : " Hide not thine ear at my breathing ; my groaning is not hid from thee ; my heart panteth, my strength faileth me ; my bones are hot with my roaring all the night long ; as the hart panteth after the water2p. 12an antipathy. We all use it to some degree in criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained.

But when other people criticise our own more exalted soul-flights by calling them ' nothing but ' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities, our mental states have their substantive value as revelabrooks, so my soul panteth after thee, O my God.

God's Breath in Man is the title of the chief work of our best known American mystic (Thomas Lake Harris) ; and in certain non-Christian countries the foundation of all religious discipline consists in regulation of the inspiration and expiration. These arguments are as good as much of the reasoning one hears in favor of the sexual theory. But the champions of the latter will then say that their chief argument has no analogue elsewhere.

The two main phenomena of religion, namely, melancholy and conversion, they will say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which the retort again is easy. Even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life which awakens during adolescence.

One might then as well set up the thesis thi t the interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, philosophy, and sociology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual instinct : — but that would be too absurd.

Moreover, if the argument from synchrony is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that the religious age par excellence would seem to be old age, when the uproar of the sexual life is past ? The plain truth is that to interpret religion one must in the end look at the immediate content of the religious consciousness. The moment one does this, one sees how wholly disconnected it is in the main from the eontent of the sexual consciousness.

Everything about the two things differs, objects, moods, faculties concerned, and acts impelled to. Any general assimilation is simply impossible : what we find most often is complete hostility and contrast.

If now the defenders of the sex-theory say that this makes no difference to their thesis ; that without the chemical contributions which the sex-organs make to the blood, the brain would not be nourished so as to carry on religious activities, this final proposition may be true or not true ; but at any rate it has become profoundly uninstructive : we can deduce no consequences from it which help us to interpret religion's meaning or value.

In this sense the religious life depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys as on the sexual apparatus, and the whole theory has lost its point in evaporating into a vague general assertion of the dependence, somehow, of the mind upon the body.