The Varieties of Religious Experience | Page 7

between them and the sexual life. Conversion is a crisis of puberty and
adolescence. The macerations of saints, and the devotion of
missionaries, are only instances of the parental instinct of self-sacrifice
gone astray. For the hysterical nun, starving for natural life, Christ is
but an imaginary substitute for a more earthly object of affection. And
the like.[1]
[1] As with many ideas that float in the air of one's time, this notion
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-interpretation 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 Savior 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 Francois 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.

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
water-brooks, 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 that 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