The "twice-born"

I want now 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 the sense that all is well with the world and/or that they are on the right side of God. After citing a number of 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 darker aspects of the universe" (83).

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 a 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 here. Not just that this is where he classes 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's 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 into our hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation" (135-136).

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 (151-152). Another way of putting this would be to speak of a loss of meaning. In describing Tolstoy's experience, James says of him that "the sense that life had any meaning whatever was for a time wholly withdrawn" (151).

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!" (162). (This is incidentally the form of melancholy ex-perienced by James's "Frenchman" [160-161]).

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 slaughterhouse, death.

   Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment
   vessels of life as we are; their loathsome existence 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 an agitated melancholiac feels is literally the right
   reaction to the situation. (163-164)

   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. They are
   essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal
   life before he can be born into the real life. (165)

Those who have been through this kind of thing and come out on the other side are the "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 ultimate 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" (248). 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" (271). It gives us a sense of being connected to a wider life and a greater power, a sense of elation and freedom, "as the outlines of confining self-hood melt down," a "shifting of the emotional centre towards loving and harmonious affections" (272-273).