All of this marks the negative light in which Hume, like most of his enlightened peers, saw claims to direct divine inspiration, prophetic states, or rapturous trances. To be an enthusiast was decidedly not a good thing.
Even those among the religious who claimed to experience God in some direct way carefully demarcated themselves from the enthusiasts–or at least from the wrong kind of enthusiasts. Hume’s contemporary, John Wesley, argued that if enthusiasm was taken to mean “a divine impulse or impression, superior to all the natural faculties,” which for a brief time suspends reason and the other senses, then:
both the Prophets of old, and the Apostles, were proper enthusiasts; being, at divers times, so filled with the Spirit, and so influenced by Him who dwelt in their hearts, that the exercise of their own reason, their senses, and all their natural faculties, being suspended, they were wholly actuated by the power of God, and “spake” only “as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.”
But this, Wesley notes, is not what most of his contemporaries meant by enthusiasm. Instead, they meant by it a kind of madness, a specifically religious madness, in which the sound mind preserved by true religion was destroyed. The enthusiast, for Wesley, is the person who believes he has grace when he does not, or who understands herself to be a Christian when she is not. Enthusiasm is a kind of self-deception against which Wesley must warn those to whom he preaches. For Wesley the criteria for distinguishing between what we might call true and false enthusiasm, or between true religion and enthusiasm, are themselves spiritual. They are available only to those who have experienced God in their hearts. In the words of the historian Ann Taves, for Wesley, “if one could not see the distinction, one by definition had not had the experience.”
This emphasis on spiritual knowledge and the sort of circular reasoning to which it seemed to give rise is precisely the kind of thing against which Hume and his enlightenment colleagues argued. So it is somewhat surprising that in Hume’s essay on “Superstition and Enthusiasm,” enthusiasm doesn’t come off too badly. For Hume, remember, enthusiasm is generated by an elevation of spirits. Superstition, on the other hand, is the result of “certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions, proceeding either from the unhappy situation of private or public affairs, from ill health, from a gloomy or melancholy disposition, or from the concurrence of these circumstances.” Hume here reverses many earlier accounts of enthusiasm, for sixteenth and seventeenth century critics of enthusiasm routinely associated it with melancholy. That Hume does not is, we will see, a part of the story I am interested in here.
So Hume goes on to explain that although his “first reflection is, that religions, which partake of enthusiasm are, on their first rise, much more furious and violent than those which partake of superstition,” he goes on to argue that over time, such religions become “much more gentle and moderate.” In their boldness and resoluteness, enthusiasts refuse to be beholden to others—and in particular to priests. They have “contempt of forms, traditions, and authorities” that Hume seems positively to admire. The superstitious, on the other hand, in the intensity of their fearful melancholy, turn to others for guidance, giving themselves over willingly to the authority of priests and religious institutions.
And so while in the first flush of excitement, the enthusiast leaves reason behind, after this infusion cools, she remains unwilling to serve any religious master and might then become a freethinker. Because it enables the believer to hold herself solely accountable to the divine, enthusiasm is as resistant to the mediations of a priest or ecclesiastical institution as “reason and philosophy.” Unlike the superstitious person, whose terrors and apprehensions enslave him to religious authorities, the enthusiast’s independence lasts long after his rapturous visions have dissipated. Enthusiasm, then, is a friend to civil liberty; just as the enthusiast demands his right freely to experience God himself, so also he demands civil liberty.
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