umanists,ö rages on. He reports the battle capably, and without taking a side in it. What he reports is that the advocates of reason have won a battle (though not the war) by imposing their vocabulary on the dialogue, which is why he has needed to rediscover the concept and vocabulary of religious melancholia.
He succeeds in his effort not to simply assume the correctness of the assumptions on either side of the debate. That is, he does not grant the skepticsÆ definition of religion as being entirely a symptom of mental illness, nor does he accept traditional religious concepts as being necessarily sophisticated enough to describe the present human condition entirely accurately. What he does seem to implicitly advocate is that a judicious and open-minded blend of these two opposing understandings of the phenomena of melancholia would allow people to have a more effective and more socially acceptable approach to dealing with them. His own position would thus seem to be closer to the views of Jung (whom he does not mention) than to those of Freud.
The book builds largely, though far from solely, on the work of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. He says that James ôargued that the existential condition of the unconverted in a religion [specifically, New England Protestantism] demanding rebirth necessarily engendered a religious melancholy among the faithfulö (18) and defined religious melancholy as follows:
If the individual be of tender conscience and religiously quickened, the unhappiness will take the form of moral remorse and compunction, of feeling inwardly vile and wrong, and of standing in false relations to the author of oneÆs being and appointer of oneÆs spiritual fate. This is the religious melancholia and ôconviction of sinö that have played so large a part in the history of Protestant Christianity (Rubin 19).
Rubin comments that James including a biographical sketch of his own ...