I've been reading a book by William James called "The Varieties of Religious Experience". I've only read about 1/3 of it, but here's a bit of what I've learned so far. First, I've learned that James was absolutely brilliant. And that has made the book a joy to read.
Portrait of William James
James gave a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902 where he had been invited to lecture on Natural Religion. The book is a collection of his twenty lectures given during that appointment and attempts to explore humanity's religious appetites or man's religious constitution. After reading through his initial lectures in which he bounds the problem and sets up metrics for analyzing various human experiences, he begins to survey what he calls 'The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness'. It is a kind of mindset that sees the world as wholly good, ignores the evil, and strives by optimism, faith, etc. to achieve happiness. The two lectures he dedicates to this topic are well worth reading and remind me of my friend the
Witch Doctor and his oriental-inspired healthy mindedness. I see a lot of value in this kind of mentality.
Once-Born
Quoting Francis W. Newman, James says, " 'God has two families of children on this earth, ...
the once-born and the twice-born,' and the once-born he describes as follows: 'They see God, not as a strict Judge, not as a Glorious Potentate; but as the animating Spirit of a beautiful harmonious world, Beneficent and Kind, Merciful as well as Pure. The same characters generally have no metaphysical tendencies: they do not look back into themselves. Hence they are not distressed by their own imperfections: yet it would be absurd to call them self-righteous; for they hardly think of themselves
at all. This childlike quality of their nature makes the opening of religion very happy to them: for they no more shrink from God, than a child from an emperor, before whom the parent trembles: in fact, they have no vivid conception of any of the qualities in which the severer Majesty of God consists. He is to them the impersonation of Kindness and Beauty. They read his character, not in the disordered world of man, but in romantic and harmonious nature. Of human sin they know perhaps little in their own hearts and not very much in the world; and human suffering does but melt them to tenderness. Thus, when they approach God, no inward disturbance ensues; and without being as yet spiritual, they have a certain complacency and perhaps romantic sense of excitement in their simple worship.'"
The twice-born is not defined until later. As the quintessential representative of the once-born mentality, James offers us Walt Whitman. An extract of his comments about the poet: "Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of an expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good."
Portrait of Walt Whitman
Having read Whitman's '
Leaves of Grass' fairly recently, I enjoyed reading James' characterization of Whitman and have to agree. His writings fill me with wonderment, awe, and joy. He is truly a great poet. And his mentality seems to pattern itself after the 'once-born' description by Newman.
James also describes something he calls the mind-cure movement and gives several examples of how positive thinking and other mystical things seems to restore people to health. Once again, I was reminded of my Witch Doctor friend. He has helped me to be healthier through means that I can't really explain. But I can't deny the positive effect on my health and my life.
Twice-Born
After surveying the once-born, James takes us into the dark by describing what he calls 'The Sick Soul'. I suppose if I had never experienced depression, I wouldn't have enjoyed reading those two lectures. But something inside me thrills when I read of others who have faced similar darkness and attempt to wrap some meaning around their experiences. I first encountered this thrill in the midst of my own depression when
I read Tolstoy's "Confession". So I was thrilled once again when James used Tolstoy and his book as an example of the opposite of healthy-minded religion. He begins his lecture talking about depression generally and cites examples of religious people who become torn and depressed, failing to see their connection to anything of lasting value.
Portrait of Leo Tolstoy
In addition to Tolstoy, James uses such notable persons as Goethe, Martin Luther, Solomon (author of Ecclesiastes), and John Bunyan (author of Pilgrim's Progress) as examples of highly religious people who represent this mentality so opposed to the healthy-mindedness described above. After describing some elements of this opposite mentality, James tells us, "The surest way to the rapturous sorts of happiness of which the twice-born make report has as an historic matter of fact been through a more radical pessimism than anything that we have yet considered. We have seen how the lustre and enchantment may be rubbed off from the goods of nature. But there is a pitch of unhappiness so great that the goods of nature may be entirely forgotten, and all sentiment of their existence vanish from the mental field. For this extremity of pessimism to be reached, something more is needed than observation of life and reflection upon death. The individual must in his own person become the prey of a pathological melancholy. As the healthy-minded enthusiast succeeds in ignoring evil's very existence, so the subject of melancholy is forced in spite of himself to ignore that of all good whatever: for him it may no longer have the least reality."
Quoting a less well known character, Father Gratry, we read "... every idea of heaven was taken away from me: I could no longer conceive of anything of the sort. Heaven did not seem to me worth going to. It was like a vacuum; a mythological elysium, an abode of shadows less real than the earth. I could conceive no joy, no pleasure in inhabiting it. Happiness, joy, light, affection, love - all these words were now devoid of sense. Without doubt I could still have talked of all these things, but I had become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything from them, or of believing them to exist. There was my great and inconsolable grief! I neither perceived nor conceived any longer the existence of happiness or perfection. An abstract heaven over a naked rock. Such was my present abode for eternity."
Speaking of such states of mind, James tells us "there are some subjects whom all this leaves a prey to the profoundest astonishment. The strangeness is wrong. The unreality cannot be. A mystery is concealed, and a metaphysical solution must exist. If the natural world is so double-faced and unhomelike, what world, what thing is real? An urgent wondering and questioning is set up, a poring theoretic activity, and in a desperate effort to get into right relations with the matter, the sufferer is often led to what becomes for him a satisfying religious solution."
He continues later, "When disillusionment has gone as far as this, there is seldom a
restitutio ad integrum. One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes again. The happiness that comes, when any does come - and often enough it fails to return in an acute form, though its form is sometimes very acute - is not the simple, ignorance of ill, but something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements, but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block and terror because it now sees it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before."
Now we have a definition of 'twice-born' religionists. Those who pass through the valley of darkness come out of that darkness with a renewed perspective, broader than the simple healthy-mindedness that dismisses or ignores evil, these twice-borns recognize evil as part of a larger whole, but subject to a more powerful good. This seems to me more of a mature faith whose seeds germinated in darkness, despair, and doubt, but lead the sufferer to a greater understanding of light and joy.
Speaking again of the once-borns, James says, "The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because
the evil facts which it refutes positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they
may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly
the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth." [emphasis mine]
Wrapping up his lectures on 'The Sick Soul', James says, "The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life."
In a weird way, that last quote reminds me of the movies "The Matrix" and "Inception". The process of a second birth, as James describes it, seems crucial to transcending the vain and transitory aspects of this life to be awakened to a new, more complete reality. Pretty cool.
