The God Within
Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion.
by R. A. Knox.
Oxford University Press. 622 pp. $6.00.
For thirty years, off and on, Monsignor Ronald Knox, distinguished Catholic chaplain at Oxford, has been working on a book telling the story of “enthusiastic” movements in Western Christendom. The result is this volume, long but never boring; urbane, entertaining, and informative.
Monsignor Knox tells his story episodically and the connective tissue of the historical filiation of movements is little explored. He begins with a brief reference to the strange doings in the early Christian church (see Paul’s letters) and goes on to the Montanists and the Donatists, who insisted on prophecy and martyrdom in an age that had “outgrown” them. He next considers the various medieval heresies, primarily with the purpose of tracing the pre-Reformation roots of Anabaptism and other “enthusiastic” movements of Protestant times. But all this is merely by way of introduction. The bulk of the book is given over to the 17th and 18th centuries. Jansenism and Quietism in France, Quakerism and Methodism in England, are examined at some length and from many angles. A brief chapter on “Some Vagaries of Modern Revivalism” and another on “The Philosophy of Enthusiasm” complete the volume.
It is clear that the book was written as a work of love, and it can be read with pleasure, for it tells some strange and fascinating stories and tells them well. Father Knox knows how to make the escapades of a Molinos sound like a mystery tale (he has, in his “spare time,” written several) and the marital adventures of a Wesley like a satirical memoir. Even the 17th-century disputes over grace and mystical doctrine—in their day, the preoccupation of court and salon as well as of the schools—become something lively, almost amusing, in his hands.
But how does this book rate as a serious study of “enthusiasm,” of those religious movements and tendencies that again and again break through the bounds of tradition, authority, and custom to startle the world? Here one’s judgment must be somewhat more reserved. For all its fullness of detail, the book is fragmentary. It tells stories, but it does not tell a story.
Father Knox makes no more than a perfunctory effort to relate the extravagances of “enthusiasm” to the normal life of the time. However queer the antics of the “enthusiasts” may appear to the sober, respectable churchgoer, it is amazing (as Father Knox himself notes) what a thin line often divides the “enthusiast’s” theology from the orthodox faith of the age. Greater attention to social and cultural factors, and a more sustained effort to set the various “enthusiastic” movements in the context of the history of their time, would have immensely added to the significance of this study. Father Knox does sometimes allude to such factors—he notes, for example, that “it is neither among the richest nor among the poorest that enthusiasm recruits its most faithful converts; the lower-middle class . . . gives it the most promising welcome”—but he makes nothing of these insights. Indeed, only too frequently such comments merely convey his prejudices.
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For despite first appearances, the prejudice is there, subtle, hard to pin down, yet, in a way, quite pervasive. Father Knox is a Catholic and one expects him to write as a Catholic. But a Catholic approach is one thing and Father Knox’s belittling manner is another. Jansenism, a profoundly serious religious movement removed as far as possible from “enthusiasm,” is dragged into the story by main force in order to subject it to a devaluating treatment from which it emerges as a rather miserable family affair of the Arnaulds, promoted mainly out of pride and egomania. Very much the same treatment, though without the bitterness, is given the Quakers and the Methodists. (Thirteenth-century Franciscanism and 17th-century Spanish mysticism are ignored by him, presumably because they happen to be approved by the church.) Father Knox’s easy, good-natured, well-bred manner is admirably calculated to convey his wry distaste for the heretics and visionaries who disrupt the “ordinary decencies of ecclesiastical order.” Pascal was “insincere”; Jonathan Edwards (mentioned in passing) was “flinty-minded”; John Wesley was “unashamedly a retailer [purveying] culture on reduced terms at secondhand”; George Fox’s manners were “boorish” and his style “barbarous.” And how those “enthusiasts” were dominated by women!
Father Knox makes an effort to interpret “enthusiasm” theologically, but the effort is not a particularly happy one. “Enthusiasm,” he finds, is a kind of “ultra-supernaturalism,” “basically . . . the revolt of Platonism against the Aristotelian mise en scène of traditional Christianity.” This sweeping pronouncement fairly takes one’s breath away. Aristotelianism, which as a philosophy has dominated the official Christian thinking of only a section of Christendom for hardly a third of Christian history, is confidently proclaimed to be the “mise en scène of traditional Christianity.” And with equal assurance it is assumed that Aristotelianism and Platonism just about exhaust human thinking, so that if a man is not committed to one philosophy he must necessarily be committed to the other. But where does this bare dichotomy leave Pascal, Kierkegaard, Barth, or Niebuhr? Father Knox, like so many in the scholastic tradition, simply ignores the possibility of a third world outlook, of what might be called the Biblical-existential view, equally distinct from both Aristotelianism and Platonism.
The clue to the meaning of “enthusiasm,” it seems to me, is given by the etymology of the word itself. An “enthusiast” is one who has a god within him, and this form of mystical self-deification is precisely what typical “enthusiasm” is, even though it does not characterize some of the movements which Father Knox, rather improperly, includes in his account. To claim to have God within is to ignore the radical discontinuity between God and man. In Biblical faith, the gulf is not to be bridged by man, but to bridge, to overleap, this gulf is precisely the purpose of the “enthusiast.” “Enthusiasm,” therefore, so far from being “ultra-supernaturalism,” as Father Knox suggests, is actually a denial of the distinction between nature and God. Like mysticism, of which it is one aspect, “enthusiasm” is an assertion of the continuity between the natural and the supernatural orders. It is thus basically naturalistic. “Natural religion,” G. Ernest Wright has acutely noted, “works itself out into philosophy or mysticism.” In its essential meaning, “enthusiasm” is an attempt of the human spirit to reach out and encompass God. (This will be found to be as true of the Moslem, Jewish, and Eastern Orthodox “enthusiasm,” which Father Knox does not mention, as of the Western Christian varieties he discusses.) It is one branch of an enterprise of which another is philosophy, Platonic and Aristotelian alike. Against both, against philosophy as well as against mysticism, there is a voice that says: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
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