I now want to engage with the very heart of James’s discussion,
which I identify with the description of the plight of the ‘twice-born.’ Their
contrast case, the ‘once-born,’ are healthy-minded. They have a sense that all
is well with the world and/or that they are on the right side of God. After
citing numerous cases, James comments: “one can but recognize in such writers
. .
. the presence of a temperament organically weighted on the side of
cheer and fatally forbidden to linger, as those of the opposite temperament linger,
over the darkest aspects of the universe”.
As against these, there are the ‘sick souls,’ who cannot
help but see the pain, the loss, the evil;, the suffering in the world. Of
course, a typically Jamesian playfulness and irony is running through these
passages. Once the distinction is made with a contrasting classification like ‘healthy’
and ‘sick,’ it would seem axiomatic that the former is to be preferred. But in
fact James stands on the other side; he identifies with the sick. Not just that
this is where he classifies himself, without, of course, explicitly saying so.
(Research has shown that one of the examples he quotes of deep metaphysical depression,
attributed to a ‘Frenchman,’ actually describes his own earlier experience.)
But also in that he sees the sick as being more profound and insightful here.
As he moves from describing the healthy-minded “to the
unpleasant task of hearing what the sick souls . .
. have to say of the secrets of
their prison-house, their own peculiar form of consciousness,” he declares: “Let
us then resolutely turn our backs on the once-born and their sky-blue
optimistic gospel; let us not simply cry out, in spite of all appearances, ‘Hurrah
for the Universe! – God’s in his Heaven, all is right with the world.’ Let us
see rather whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness
may not open a profounder view and put in our hands a more complicated key to
the meaning of the situation.”
What do the sick souls see that their healthy cousins don’t?
We might summarize that they see the abyss over which we stand. But as we
follow James’s discussion, we can distinguish three forms that this
consciousness can take.
The first might be called religious melancholy. “The world
now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny.” Things seem unreal, distant, as
though seen through a cloud. Another way of putting this would be to speak f a
loss of meaning. In describing Tolstoy’s experience, James says of him that “the
sense that life had any meaning whatsoever was for a time wholly withdrawn.”
The second. Which James also calls ‘melancholy,’ is
characterized by fear. The intentional object here is the world not so much as
meaningless, but rather as evil. And as we get to the more severe forms, what
threatens is “desperation absolute and complete, the whole universe coagulating
about the sufferer into a material of overwhelming horror, surrounding him
without opening or end. Not the conception or intellectual perception of evil,
but the grisly blood-freezing heart-palsying sensation of it close upon one
. .
. Here is the real core of the religious problem: Help! Help!” (This is
incidentally the form of melancholy experienced by James’s “Frenchman.”
The third form of the abyss is the acute sense of personal sin.
Here he is talking about, for example, people reacting to standard Protestant
revival preaching and feeling a terrible sense of their own sinfulness, even
being paralyzed by it – perhaps to be later swept up into the sense of being
saved.
James speaks again here of the superiority of the “morbid-minded”
view. The normal process of life contains many things to which melancholy (of
the second kind, the fear of evil) is the appropriate response: the slaughter
house, death.
Crocodiles and
rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as wee: their
loathsome experience fills every minute of every day that drags its length along;
and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly
horror which the agitated meloncholiac feels is literally the right reaction to
the situation.
The completest religions
would therefore seem to be those in which pessimistic elements are best developed.
Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are best known to us. They are
essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before
he can be born into a real life.
Those who have been through this kind of thing and have come
out the other side are “twice-born.” Just as religious experience is the more authentic
reality of religion, so this experience is the deeper and more truly religious one.
It is thus at the heart of religion properly understood. It is an experience of
deliverance,. It yields a “state of assurance,” of salvation, or the
meaningfulness of things, or the triumph of goodness. Its fruits are a “loss of
all worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony,
the willingness to be, even though the
outer conditions should remain the same.” The world appears beautiful and more real, in
contrast to the “dreadful unreality and strangeness” felt in melancholy. We are
also empowered; the inhibitions and divisions that held us back melt away in the condition James calls “Saintliness.”
It gives us a sense of being connected to a wider life and greater power, a
sense of elation and freedom, “as the outlines of confining selfhood melt down,”
a “shifting of the emotional center towards loving and harmonious affections.”
This is at the heart of religion for James, because this
experience meets our most dire spiritual needs, which are defined by the three
great negative experiences of melancholy, evil, and the sense of personal sin.
Some of the perennial interests of James’s book comes from his identifying
three zones of spiritual anguish, which continue to haunt our world today.
The third one, the sense of personal sin, may be less common
among James’s readers. Who generally belong to the educated classes, which are
disproportionately nonbelievers and, when they have some faith commitment, are
unlikely to find it in those modes of evangelical Protestantism in which this
sense is most acuter. And yet who can fail to notice that this kind of
religion, and the experience of personal evil and deliverance which makes it
central, is alive and in full expansion in our day. This is true not only in
the United States, but even more so in Latin America, Africa, and even in parts
of Asia. Some have estimated that evangelical Christianity is the fastest-rowing
form of religious life, faster than or as fast as Islam –but this is the more
remarkable in that its expansion is largely the result of conversion, whereas
Islam’s comes mainly from natural growth.
The surge of evangelical Protestantism often occurs in
contexts where community has broken down, in Third World countries, where
people have been pitched into urban life, often in Chaotic circumstances and
without support systems. They can be overwhelmed by a sense of personal incapacity
or evil, but find that they can overcome crippling failings and weaknesses,
drink or drugs or drifting or whatever, by surrendering themselves to the
conversion experience. It would appear that entering the Nation of Islam has
wrought a similar change in the livers of some African-Americans. Here is a
very important religious phenomena, whose incidence seems to be growing with
developing modernity and which figures in James’s account.
Melancholy is, of course, a phenomena long recognized. It
goes back well into the premodern world. But its meaning has changed. The sudden
sense of the loss of significance, which is central to melancholy, or accidie
or ennui, used to be experienced in a framework in which the meaning of things
was beyond doubt. God was there, good and evil were defined, what we are called
cannot be gainsaid; but we can no longer feel it. We are suddenly on the
outside, exiled. Accidie is a sin, a kind of self-exclusion, for which there
can be no justification.
But in the modern context, melancholy arises in a world
where the guarantee of meaning has gone, where all its traditional sourced,
theological, metaphysical, historical, can be cast into doubt. It therefore has
a new shape: not the sense of rejection and exile from an unchallengeable cosmos
of significance, but rather the intimation of what may be a definitive emptiness, the final dawning
of the end of the last illusion of significance. It hurts, one might say, in a
new way.
One might argue which mode of melancholy hurts more: my
exile from the general feast of meaning, or the threatened implosion of meaning altogether But there is no doubt which has the
greater significance. The first pain touches me, the second everyone and
everything.
The shift to the new mode and context is clearly marked in
the life and work of Baudelaire. Against a backdrop of a real cosmic significance
which I am perversely incapable of rejoicing in, talking the side of evil seems
pointless; but where the threat is the
ground zero of all meaning, even the recovery of evil is a gain. Baudelaire’s “spleen”
poems accomplish a paradoxical liberation: in describing the empty world, the
lowered, leaden sky, they lift its weight from my shoulders, by giving this burden
a visage and a shape. The ground zero of melancholy has always been one that
loses even the sense of what has been lost, even awareness of the source of the
pain. To the extent that melancholy has
a place in the cosmic order, as one of the “humors,” which is in turn connected
by “correspondences” to other realities, one can escape the ground zero by
portraying its characteristic symbols, as Durer does.
But by the time of Baudelaire, where even the correspondences
have to be reinvented, our only course is to paint the lack, the evil itself.
Hence the new spiritual power of something that can be described as “les fluers
du mal.”
' Les Fluers du mal' by Melanie Aimo-Boot
Melancholy, modern style, in the form of a sense of perhaps
ultimate meaninglessness, is the recognized modern threat. We readily see it as
a danger that menaces all of us. We even see our philosophies and and spiritual positions addressed to this
threat, as attempts to rebut or thwart a sense of meaninglessness. It is common
to construe the history of religion through this prism, as though from the
beginning we could see it as an answer to the inherent meaninglessness of
things. This view is implicit in Weber, I would argue, made more explicit in
Gauchet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Gauchet
I think this is a serious distortion, but there is obviously
some truth in it. And once more, we see James identifying a crucial area of
modern spiritual malaise.
But how about the third version of the abyss, the sense of
enveloping evil? This is less widely recognized. Awareness of it can be
eclipsed by the sense that our great problem in a secular age, after the “death
of God,” is meaninglessness. The sense of evil seems to partake too much of the
metaphysical dimension that we are supposed to have lefty behind us in modernity.
But I believe that it defines just as important a threat, if not more urgent
than the loss of meaning. As a sense of a guaranteed order in which good can
triumph recedes, the sense of the surrounding evil, within us and without,
which James so well describes, faces no obvious defenses. It cannot but deeply
disturb us. Indeed, one can suspect that we sometimes take flight into the
meaninglessness of things in order to avoid facing it, just as Baudelaire in a
sense moved in the opposite direction, while aestheticizing evil to make it
bearable. But beyond that, the fierce, often violent, moralism of the modern
age constitutes one of our important defenses against this sense of pervasive
evil.
Even if some of this were true, we can once more credit
James with an extraordinary insight into the spiritual needs of the modern
world.
