Religious melancholia

Religious melancholy is explored in depth by Rubin. In his Preface, Rubin explains and defines religious melancholia as follows:

Melancholy here refers to an affect, a distinctive stance toward life, a grieving over the loss of GodÆs love, and an obsession and psychopathology associated with the spiritual itinerary of conversion. The religious melancholiac desired, above all, else, to foster . . . an inward devotional life marked by a warm, personal relationship with God. Yet, those who would know God in moments of rapture and contemplation so frequently found themselves forsaken by God (vii).

Rubin goes on to explain that he had encountered cases of religious melancholia during his doctoral research in sociology, when he read the records and correspondence of mental patients during the era of the religious revival called the Second Great Awakening, in 1820s to 1840s. His investigation of this phenomenon led him to realize that the concept of religious melancholia, first coined by Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), had been ôcommonplace among Americans but by the early twentieth

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A person in severe depression may be completely immobilized by it. incapable of attending to any of lifeÆs necessities. A slightly less depressed person may be a ôball of fire,ö since incessant activity, especially if the activity is felt to be inherently significant, can serve as a bulwark against descent into a deeper depression. Persons suffering from this degree of depression thus often evolve distinctive life strategies for coping with their condition, and this would explain the drivenness and amazing productivity of a William James or a W. E. B. DuBois. Before attention is directed onto DuBois, one might comment that RubinÆs excellent study stops short of dealing with an important modern approach to the phenomenon of religious melancholia, in that he does not touch upon Jung or the ôTwelve-Stepö movement (although this is understandable, in that analysis of that movement would require a book in itself). Rubin does mention Christian inspirational literature (227), but does not place it in the much broader context of ôrecovery literature.ö Suffice it to say here that Bill WilsonÆs founding of Alcoholics Anonymous was facilitated by a remark by Jung that only a religious conversion could ôcureö severe alcoholism. W. E.
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2219
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)