β Scribed by George I. Mavrodes
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
As many of you know, John Locke seemed to be much troubled by something which he called enthusiasm. He devotes chapter XIX of book 4 of the Essay to his animadversions against it. And in this paper I hope to consider some of his views. But this is not primarily a historical study. We can take Locke and his troubles as a convenient starting point for our own reflections on the topic which so interested him.
Who are the enthusiasts? Locke, I suppose, may have sometimes gotten enthusiastic himself about something, in the modern sense of "enthusiasm." But of course it is enthusiasm in a somewhat different, though not unrelated, sense which roused the ire in his soul. Philologists tell us that the thus in enthusiast is derived from the Greek word for God, theos. And the en means in. It looks as though, etymologically, an enthusiast is either a person who is in God, or else one in whom God is.
Locke himself characterizes the enthusiasts in various ways. Early on in the relevant: chapter he says that some people "persuade themselves that they are under the peculiar guidance of heaven in their actions and opinions, especially in those of them which they cannot account for by the ordinary methods of knowledge and principles of reason. ''1 And, he continues, they "have often flattered themselves with a persuasion of an immediate intercourse with the Deity and frequent commu-* This paper, here slightly revised, was delivered as the Presidential Address at the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy of Religion, in Charleston, South Carolina, on 4 March 1988. It was written during my tenure of a fellowship in the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame.
π SIMILAR VOLUMES
**"When someone asks for a reading suggestion, *Enthusiasm* is the first word off my tongue." βStephenie Meyer, author of *Twilight*** "There is little more likely to exasperate a person of sense than finding herself tied by affection and habit to an Enthusiast." Julie knows from bitter ex