I am one of those who finds the word and the doctrinal ideal of saintliness "off-putting," at least when miracles are alleged.
But Robert Richardson is right, it is possible to understand people like HDT as secular or naturalistic "saints" in a non-supernatural sense. Their emotional center is "religious" only in that generous Jamesian big-tent way that admits "whatever they may consider the divine"… even the "higher power" of Henry's gentle rain and Pine needles.
So I'd prefer to leave the likes of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards out of it. But I'm not James.
Richardson:
""Saintliness" is an ill-chosen, off-putting word for many people, and the position of these lectures deep in the Varieties, which is already filled with attractive (and now of course famous) subjects—the religion of healthy-mindedness, the sick soul, conversion, and mysticism—means that the chapters on saintliness are apt to get less attention than the others. But it should be remembered that the five saintliness lectures constitute a full quarter of the entire two-year project, and that what James means by saintliness is how religious experience affects practical everyday life.
From the point of view of James the pragmatist, then, these chapters are the clincher; the whole venture stands or falls here, where James proposes that we judge religious experiences by their fruits, by their value for living. This is, in the old language of Calvinism, the question of sanctification, saintliness, the idea that if you were indeed saved, you would thereby be enabled to lead a good life here and now. It is one more idea James found he shared with Jonathan Edwards. "Old fashioned hell-fire Christianity well knew how to extract from fear its full equivalent in the way of fruits for repentance, and its full conversion value." 6
James dives in by declaring simply that "the best fruits of religious experience are the best things that history has to show." Put in personal, psychological terms, "the man who lives in his religious center of personal energy, and is actuated by spiritual enthusiasm differs from his previous carnal self in perfectly definite ways." The saintly character, then, is "the character for which spiritual emotions are the habitual center of the personal energy," and such a person seems to James to possess, on the whole, four fundamental inner conditions. First is "a feeling of being in a wider life than this world's selfish little interests." Second is "a sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender to its control." Third is "an immense elation and freedom, as the outlines of the confining self-hood melt down." Fourth is "a shifting of the emotional center towards loving and harmonious affections," a shifting toward the yes! yes! of emotional impulses and away from the no! no! of our inhibitions. 7
These inner conditions, taken together, have, says James, "characteristic practical consequences," which are asceticism, strength of soul, purity, and charity. With this rough scheme—just an armature, really, not an argument but something to hold up an argument—James proceeds to flesh it out with examples. His first example of the practical effect of a feeling of the presence of a higher and friendly power is from Henry Thoreau, who recorded the following experience in Walden:
Once, a few weeks after I came to the woods, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But in the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again…"
— William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism by Robert D. Richardson
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