I run in Nike Free, divinely inspired running shoes. In them I am, I am able to be, spiritual.

Nike (Νικη) names an ancient Greek goddess or spirit, a divine courier who delivers Zeus victoriously via his chariot. She is a winged intermediary, moving and transporting through the air between here and there, between mortal and divine. The daughter of a titan and a river, she is a force of nature, a numinous being, a kind of angel, who bears deep bonds to Athena, goddess of wisdom. In Nike, wisdom is related to movement, transit, and to air.

Nike moves unencumbered—which is to say, freely. In many ways, then, Nike Free is redundant, particularly when Free suggests not, or not only, an enlightened free agent who is “free to” but a bareness that is “free from” unnecessary embellishment. In running shoes, such freedom often translates into a modern fetishization of technology, of progress (new = better) and excess (more = better). Nike Free running shoes, however, resist this fetish, opting for a different equation: new = less, and that less = better. These shoes promise freedom by using technology to strip away as much encumbering technics as possible. Introduced in 2005, Nike Free got back to basics and hence to the elements, coming two steps away from being barefoot (thanks to their extremely thin and flexible sole). Running in them, unlike running in almost any other kind of running shoes, my feet feel the ground’s contours, its textures and striae.

Running in them, I become more bodily, more aware of my bodily movements, since I can feel those kinetic effects in my feet as they contact a solid surface and then lift themselves into air: contact, release, contact, release; earth, air, earth, air. Unlike nearly all other running shoes, Nike Free do not overcushion and overcorrect. They do not permit bad technique or incorrect form. Instead, they insist on corporeal sensitivity, reconnecting my bodily parts to one another by reminding me of action-reaction relations. They silently suggest kinesthetic corrections, modifications in motion. They, like other spiritual exercises, are praxial rather than simply practical: they are transformative, perhaps even transfiguring.

Running in them, I am my most bodily, hyperaware of my bending knees and elbows, of my foot stride and impact, of the angles of my head and chest, of my heart and lungs as they invigoratingly move air, resuscitating—almost resurrecting—my sense of my corporeality. Running in them, I move and move through air. Thus I am, in a seeming paradox, simultaneously my most spiritual and my most bodily, most spiritual because most bodily. This seeming paradox exposes itself as illusory as I re-member spirit: a matter of breath, of air. Spirit—as ruach, as psuchē or pneuma, as anima or spiritus—names breath, wind, air with movement. It is elemental, sensible, mobile, dynamic, animating, vital and vitalizing. It is divine, as Nike’s domain or as ruach elohim (a Hebrew name of god), as well as human, even fundamentally so in tripartite anthropologies, including Stoic and Pauline, that conceive of humanity as body, soul, and spirit. Spirit, as a matter of breath—as the (literal or figurative, biological or religious) breath of life—is humanly necessary, and that necessity ties spirituality to corporeality, bound together by air. My body cannot live for long without air, without respiring.

Running makes me acutely aware of that need; it makes me intensely sensitive to my breathing—that is, my relationship with air. Running is all about breath, air, spirit, since it involves respiration, perspiration, and, for me, inspiration. When I run, and my body is continually in motion, moving and moving me from here to there like Nike in transit, I am most receptive to inspiration, to thoughts and perceptions that I take in like air. I am, body and soul (however those words signify), my most porous, and I do my best thinking and my best contemplating while running. I, like my stripped-down shoes, feel less encumbered, more flexible, most free. Respiration and inspiration meld as body and spirit mingle.

I breathe in air rhythmically, and with it comes…well, that depends. Sometimes while running I work through intellectual puzzles. Sometimes I ponder personal predicaments. Occasionally I stumble upon wisdom (recalling Nike’s relation to Athena). Sometimes I experience an airy stream of conscious perception. Sometimes I am simply free, free from distracting concerns or laborious thoughts or conscious monologue—free, that is, from a certain reflexive self, in an experiential zone (sometimes dubbed simply “the zone”) to which many spiritual or religious praxes aspire. Running can inspire or even be what others label meditation, moksha, prayer, contemplation, communion, ecstasy, enlightenment.

My Nike Free are akin to an athletic sajjāda or tallith or prayer beads (whether japamala or rosary or otherwise): they become the medium, the apparatus, the tool or supplement, that enable my running, which engenders what I experience as and am calling spirituality. If I am spiritual, I am so while running, sensitively breathing in the world.

“As I go back in spirit and recall that noble sea, reposing among the snow-peaks six thousand feet above the ocean, the conviction comes strong upon me again that Como would only seem a bedizened little courtier in that august presence.”
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

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Mark Twain was a watery soul. It was water, whether flowing or standing, that quickened his spirit and nourished his words.

Two years after the end of the Civil War, Samuel Clemens embarked on a five-month tour of Europe and the Middle East on the steamship Quaker City. He inherited the V.I.P. berth aboard the Quaker City when Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman, busy in his new capacity as commander of the U.S. Indian wars, opted out of the tour. Clemens’ newspaper in California, the Alta, purchased his ticket and paid his other expenses in exchange for travelogue articles. Mark Twain wrote the above words at Lake Como in Italy, in the course of the months-long tour that he would later reshape into his 1869 subscription-service best seller, The Innocents Abroad. The noble sea is Lake Tahoe. Twain, Clemens’ author-persona, mentions it twice: first, in connection with the Italian leg of his tour, and then, a second time at the culmination of his depiction of Syria and Palestine. In both cases, Twain breaks out of his character as a skeptic who satirizes the lands and peoples he visits and his fellow passengers who romanticize them.

In both, spirit contends with spleen directed against “Digger Indians.” The first reverie on the noble sea competes with annoyance over a name (145-6):

Sorrow and misfortune overtake the legislature that still from year to year permits Tahoe to retain its unmusical cognomen! Tahoe! It suggests no crystal waters, no picturesque shores, no sublimity. Tahoe for a sea in the clouds: a sea that has character and asserts it in solemn calms at times, at times in savage storms; a sea whose royal seclusion is guarded by a cordon of sentinel peaks that lift their frosty fronts nine thousand feet above the level world; a sea whose every aspect is impressive, whose belongings are all beautiful, whose lonely majesty types the Deity!”

The curse on the legislature is mild compared to what follows: “Tahoe means grasshoppers. It means grasshopper soup. It is Indian, and suggestive of Indians. They say it is Pi-ute—possibly it is Digger. I am satisfied it was named by the Diggers—those degraded savages who roast their dead relatives, then mix the human grease and ashes of bones with tar, and “gaum” it thick all over their heads and foreheads and ears, and go caterwauling about the hills and call it mourning. These are the gentry that named the Lake.” Mourning [italics Twains’] elicits his passion. What is that he mourns?

Nor do Diggers know poetry, he continues, except for those imagined by his favorite foil, James Fenimore Cooper. “I know the Noble Red Man . . . I have roamed with them, scalped them, had them for breakfast. I would gladly eat the whole race if I had a chance,” he adds in a mock Whitmanesque voice of universal man.

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In significant ways, Innocents was written as and has been received as two separate books. The back-jacket blurb of the Penguin edition calls it a “caricature of the sentimental travel books popular in the mid-nineteenth century” and states that in his irreverent treatment of hallowed European landmarks Twain “was as mocking about American manners (including his own) as it was about European attitudes.” Twain’s account of Palestine is not mentioned.

For others, it is the Palestine account that stands out. That account was translated into Hebrew, and published in Israel as a self-standing book: Pleasure Excursion to the Holy Land. It inspired parts of Leon Uris’s 1958 bestseller, Exodus. In his 1973 Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine, Shmuel Katz used excerpts taken from Innocents and the impressions of European travelers to argue that Palestine was a wasteland prior to the arrival of European Zionist pioneers. Ruth Peters did the same in her 1984 book From Time Immemorial (157-61); as did Benyamin Netanyahu in his 1993 A Place Among the Nations (38-41), which was updated in 1999 and retitled A Durable Peace; as did Alan Dershowitz in his 2003 The Case for Israel (23-24). The pastiches from Twain in Dershowitz and Netanyahu contain many of the same ellipses, grammatical anomalies, and spelling page-citation errors as in Peters, though neither author cites Peters as a source for his Twain quotes.

Twain, a former riverboat traveler and a devotee of the California lake that shall not be named is, unsurprisingly, unawed by the waters of the old world. “It is popular to admire the Arno,” Twain writes of the river that runs through Florence, Italy (177). “It is a great historical creek with four feet in the channel and some scows floating around. It would be a very plausible river if they would pump some water into it. They all call it a river, and they honestly think it is a river, do these dark and bloody Florentines.”

No surprise also that he is unimpressed with the rivers Albana and Pharpar in Damascus, the river Jordan, and the Sea of Galilee, but in this case his disdain takes a sharply different direction. In Italy, he pokes fun at the Italians and their water, and in the process of comparing Como unfavorably to Tahoe, he digresses on the savagery of Diggers. In Palestine, by contrast, his rumination on the Sea of Galilee and Tahoe takes place amid a portrayal of Arabs as Diggers.

Like those near Tahoe, the Indians near the Sea of Galilee provoke thought of extermination (352): “They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes the white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.” Of his visit to the plain of Jezreel, he recalls (411): “We met half a dozen Digger Indians (Bedouins) with very long spears in their hands, cavorting around on old crowbait horses, and spearing imaginary enemies; whooping, and fluttering their rags in the wind, and carrying on in every respect like a pack of hopeless lunatics.”

After reading “Grimes”—his nickname for the travel-guide author William C. Prime—extol the Madonna-like women of Nazareth, Twain sets the record straight (400). “That is the kind of gruel which has been served out from Palestine for ages. Commend me to Fennimore Cooper to find beauty in the Indians, and to Grimes to find it in the Arabs.” Of the daughter of a bedouin sheikh near Galilee, Twain remarks (354), “She was the only Syrian female we have seen yet who was not so sinfully ugly that she couldn’t smile after ten o’clock Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath.” After complaining that “squalor and poverty are the pride of Tiberias,” Twain notes that some relatively prosperous Tiberias women “wear their dower strung upon a strong wire that curves downward from the top of the head to the jaw—Turkish silver coins which they have raked together or inherited. Most of these maidens were not wealthy, but some few had been very kindly dealt with by fortune. I saw heiresses there worth, in their own right—well, I might venture to say, as much as nine dollars and a half. When you come across one of these, she naturally puts on airs. She will not ask for bucksheesh.” The refusal of the woman to ask for “bucksheesh” (roughly, tips expected for any service, no matter how small) exasperates him (378-9). “She will not ask for bucksheesh. She assumes a crushing dignity and goes on serenely practicing with her fine-tooth comb and quoting poetry just the same as if you were not present at all. Some people cannot stand prosperity.” He tells us nothing of the verses recited by the woman and throughout the Palestine-leg of his tour refrains from asking his dragomans (guide-translators) to facilitate in conversation with local inhabitants.

Twain breaks out of his wise-cracking character in Palestine one time before his Tahoe reverie in the Galilee. “I looked upon the place where the true cross once stood, with a far more absorbing interest than I had ever felt in any thing earthly before,” he writes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (432). Despite all of its “clap-trap side-shows,” the church “is still grand, reverend, venerable—for a god died there.” Centuries of pilgrims wet its shrines with tears and gallant soldiers “wasted their lives away in a struggle to seize it and hold it sacred from infidel pollution.” In his own day, he notes, two rival nations expended “millions in treasure and rivers of blood” in a war over which nation would build its new, golden dome. “History is full of this old Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” he concludes, “full of blood that was shed because of the respect and the veneration in which men held the last resting-place of the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle, Prince of Peace!”

Two nations expended millions of treasure and rivers of blood in another war of his time and far closer to home, but nowhere in Innocents does Twain recall it, at least not directly.

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In A Place Among the Nations Netanyahu offers a digest of observations by nineteenth-century travelers on Palestine, and then hones in on Innocents with a full two-page set of pastiches (39), some of them identical to those found in Peters. One pastiche reads:

These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounts of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines . . . ; the melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funeral [sic] palms. . . . A desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and actions. . . . We reached Tabor safely. . . . We never saw a human being on the whole route.

The lines excerpted are intensely poetic. Note the iambic, for example, in “that néver, néver, néver / do sháke the glare,” and the alliterative beat in “slumbering under its six funereal [plumes of] palms.” Or take this pastiche found in Netanyahu (Twain 462 Netanyahu 40), which is itself a slightly condensed version of a pastiche in Peters: “Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago . . . [Bethlehem,] the hallowed spot where the angels sang, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men,’ is untenanted by any living creatures.” The first sentence carries a haunting echo:

Twain: “Jé-ri-cho / the ac-cúrsed / lies a móld / (e)ring rú(i)n / todáy.”

Echo: “ John Brown’s/ bódy / lies a-móld / (er)ing in / the gráve.”

In evoking the rhythm and vocabulary of the famous marching song “John Brown’s Body” that inspired the Civil War anthem, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, what is Twain mourning?

Or take the Netanyahu pastiche that begins (40, Twain 462): “Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energy. . . . Palestine is desolate and unlovely. . . It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land.” The phrase “sackcloth and ashes,” from the King James Bible, is embedded within a strong, almost singsong rhythm, which is then extended out in the second sentence in a metrical chant.

Pá-le-stine / Síts in / Sáck cloth and / Ásh-es

over it Broóds the Spéll / of a Cúrse / that has Wíth / ered its Fíelds / and Fét tered its / Énergy.

The melancholy is both poetic and theological. In place of the creative spirit that brooded over the deep is the spell of a curse that broods over the land. “A hope / less, dréa / ry, / héart bró / ken lánd”: Twain’s incantation calls into being the reality it would describe. As Twain remarks near the end of his Palestine reminiscence (462), “Palestine is desolate and unlovely. And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the deity beautify the land?” [Emphasis Twain’s].

Twain mourns the loss of the pre-lapsarian noble sea in California. He mourns the death of a god, Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. He mourns a land that, by theological necessity, he knows must be wasted. And he pines as well for certain “stirring scenes.”

Stirring scenes . . . occur in the valley [Jezreel] no more. There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent—not for thirty miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride ten miles, hereabouts, and not see ten human beings.

This passage appears with identical ellipsis and identical brackets in Peters (159), Netanyahu (39), and Dershowitz (23), with the suggestion that Twain is pining for scenes of joyous harvests and verdant fields.

Not so much. The words “such as these,” excised through shared ellipsis, refer to something different (361-2). “This campground of ours by the Waters of Merom was the scene of one of Joshua’s exterminating battles,” Twain explains. “Jabin, King of Hazor, (up yonder above Dan,) called all the sheiks about him together, with their hosts, to make ready for Israel’s terrible General who was approaching.” Their effort was in vain, however, as “Joshua fell upon them and utterly destroyed them, root and branch. That was his usual policy in war. He never left any chance for newspaper controversies about who won the battle.”

In a second scene, the prophetess Deborah orders her general, Barak “to take ten thousand men against King Jabin.” Barak triumphs and applies “the usual method of exterminating the remnant of the defeated host,” but Sisera, Jabin’s general, finds refuge with a woman named Jael. Sisera begs for water, but she brings him milk instead. “He drank of it gratefully and lay down again, to forget in dreams his lost battle and his humbled pride. Presently, when he was asleep, she came softly in with a hammer and drove a hideous tent-pen down through his brain!” Twain then quotes the King James Bible (Judges 5:24-7):

Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kennite be, blessed shall she be above the women of the tent.

He asked for water and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.

She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workman’s hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote of his head when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.

At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed, there he fell down dead.

The words “Stirring scenes such as these occur no more” follow then directly.

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In 2003, Norman Finkelstein pointed out that Dershowitz used pastiche-quotes of Twain identical to those found in Ruth Peters’ From Time Immemorial and numerous identical errors, but without any acknowledgement of Peters as their source. Dershowitz responded by stating that he had long been citing these passages from Twain to make his case for Israel, and by quoted two distinguished academics that defended Dershowtiz’s scholarly integrity in attributing the passages in question to Twain without mentioning Peters.

My interest here does not rest with the ethics of scholarly citation. Taking Dershowitz at his word, let us assume he had long quoted the same passages he found in Peters to make his case on behalf of Israel. I know of no comments by Netanyahu on his own unattributed use of Peters’ Twain pastiches, but whether or not he came to the ellipsis in question on his own or took from Peters, the same questions apply. Did Peters, Netanyahu, and Dershowitz not notice that Twain’s “stirring scenes” had more to do with sheik-extermination and the milk of Jael than they did with and milk-and-honey and happy valleys?

Did they not sense that by validating Twain as a reliable observer on the Palestine in his day, they validated his observations on its Digger Indians and homely women, for example? Or (378-9), the “the particularly uncomely Jews, Arabs, and Negroes of Tiberias” and “the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking, body-snatchers, with indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear” that resemble—“verily,” Twain tells us—resemble “the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures.”?

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Twain’s Palestine account lacks the geographical precision of his account of Europe. When a batch of his original letters on Palestine were reported lost, he was forced to write new ones aboard the Quaker City on his return trip across the Atlantic under a looming deadline, and once back home, had to rewrite and expand them to more than double their length in only six months. He confined himself to a room with his journals, his guidebooks, and his King James, and wrote in a white heat. The resulting narrative, circles vaguely but obsessively around the Sea of Galilee until finally coming to rest at its shores. There Twain delivers a hymn to the majestic solitude of Lake Tahoe, a caustic rebuke to the repellent solitude of the Galilee, and a lamentation on the sepulchral desolation of Palestine.

In deflating the enthusiasms of his fellow tourists, Twain remarks (384) that he knows “what they will say when they see Tabor, Nazareth, Jericho, and Jerusalem—because I have the books they will ‘smooch’ their ideas from. These authors write pictures and frame rhapsodies, and see with the author’s ideas instead of their own and speak with his tongue.” The authors were Presbyterians “who came to find a Presbyterian Palestine” and Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, or Episcopalians coming to find a Palestine in line with their creeds, and they “entered the country with the verdicts already prepared.”

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In California, Diggers polluted the name of the noble sea and betrayed the majesty of its environs. In Palestine they embodied a land cursed by the Deity to be wretched, according to Twain’s reading of the Bible. Like his contemporaries, Twain arrived with verdict in hand and found the Palestine he knew beforehand. “Palestine is no more of the work-day world,” he wrote in concluding his account (463). “It is sacred to poetry and tradition—it is a dream land.”

A later Mark Twain would confront an ingrained reading of the Bible as well as some of the racist stereotypes that he evoked with profusion. In Huckleberry Finn, he would allow Nigger Jim to become Jim and to speak and would allow Huck and the reader to hear what Jim said and to change; a transformative moment in American literature.

As for the Digger denizens of Palestine, if they had a story to tell, the protagonist wasn’t listening, the narrator wasn’t recording, and the reader can’t hear. Twain was not yet there.

I love my iPhone. I hate my iPhone. My iPhone has saved my life. My iPhone is stealing my soul.

The attractions are so clear. The loathing so ready.

It is stealing my soul: whole swaths of my life are in that cosmos of a machine. Names, addresses, phone numbers, messages of friends and frenemies and others are secreted away in it. It’s connected to a “cloud” and would make Jung blanch at any claims to synchronicity. After all, how could he have dreamt (yes, dream) of connections rendered with such ease, such style, such ceaseless seduction?

Ease, style, and seduction are surely part of the package. The sleek form lets us forget that with every tap someone is watching us, following us, tracking us. With each update, our frustrations with technology evaporate until the next glitch, until the next excruciatingly slow download. The delight at the sight of that silvery once-bitten apple makes the mind go blank to the very worldly reality of the hands that put the little machine together, and the corporate interests that want us wanting more. We get to leave our pathetic “dull” phone selves behind when we secure the services of the wondrous iPhone.

Sure my iPhone will give me the false confidence that I can do anything. It’s supposed to give me superpowers – or at least apps that make me feel like I have superpowers. Look: I can read your mind (or at least Google info about you)! Look: I can see the future (or at least tell you what the weather will be like for the next few days). Look: I hear voices! (sure, it’s the iPod or a voice memo, but still….). I am lost, and now I am found (well, I’m still waiting for Google Maps to load…). It’s not the stuff of gospel songs, but it is surely amazingly graceful.

My iPhone is magical, it connects me to a cosmos. And yet, of course, it constantly frustrates my desires to connect. For every wish I make to and through it, it reminds me of my all-too-human longings to be somewhere other than where I am at the present moment, to be with folks that are not the ones right by me, at my side. I am looking at a screen not quite 5 inches tall and less than 3 inches wide for hope, for possibility, for a little info on salvation. How can I not help but feel that it takes a little piece of me, of my soul, of my spirit with each gaze into its bright, shiny glare.

What to do with this magical device that makes me ask questions I didn’t know I had or needed to ask? Why keep touching that screen of desire, that pad of delights?

What will it give me? What will it keep taking from me? Too much, I’m afraid. I hate my iPhone. I love my iPhone. I kinda want my life back.

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We lost Steve Jobs last week. When I wrote these ruminations a few months back, I couldn’t have anticipated the passing of this master innovator. I suspect that Jobs was very much aware of the mixed emotions around the array of technologies of enchantment that he introduced to us over the last decades. In the wake of his death, many of us will ask how long Apple will be able to keep this stream of wonder going without the pitch of that Steve of the uncanny savoir faire. Where did he learn to enchant like that? As it turns out, we have now come to find out that Jobs was a seeker himself, looking for, and sometimes finding clues and paths in Buddhism and other traditions of enlightenment. Did Zen give Jobs the way to entice us to see the future in those marvelous designs, those portals of digitized wisdom? After all, we are now legion who find ourselves stuck in the cycle of birth, death, and renewal that the master marketer Jobs so convincingly led us to believe was not only necessary but actually unavoidable. We who call ourselves lovers of all-things Mac have found ourselves enduring through the obsolescence of what we have in hand (“yeah, it’s an iPhone 3…”), suffering the increasing futility that is the “OS X” or the “iOS” performing the charms we come to rely on, and waiting for the end of our yearning in the form of the little death that comes with “the next release”–the new version that will free us from the all-too-worldly and usher in a new material nirvana, priced just so, glistening just right. It’s hard to think of a wizard of capitalism that was more effective than Jobs in beguiling so many in thinking that consuming new products with such regularity meant that we were on the path to the good, and not just mere fools for the cunning of the market. And yet the market is cunning, and it has lost one of its masters, not quite Zen yet extraordinary nonetheless.

So, let us be decent, let us be good and give Steve Jobs his due, his praise, and our thanks.

D. K. K. (a rather ambivalent owner of an iPad 2…)

In German, there are two words—three even. Enthusiasmus, like the English enthusiasm, is rooted in the Greek “en theos,” to have the god within, to be inspired by god or the gods. But Enthusiasmus was inadequate to contain the sixteenth-century German reformer Martin Luther’s rage against those who purported to receive direct divine inspiration. For them, he coined the term Schwärmer, from the verb schwärmen, to swarm, as in the swarming of bees. The Schwärmer were those, like the so-called Zwickau prophets, Nicholas Storch, Thomas Drechsel, and Marcus Thomas Stübner, who claimed to have direct revelations from the Holy Spirit, or Thomas Müntzer, who insisted that direct revelation and prophecy continued to occur in history. For Müntzer religious radicalism and political radicalism went hand in hand; the new prophecies and apocalyptic revelations he proclaimed called for the re-ordering of society, and not just of the church. In denouncing Müntzer, the Zwickau prophets, and others as Schwärmer, Luther rejected not only claims to continuing revelation, but also the forms of religious and political agitation to which he believed such claims gave rise. To be a Schwärmer, most often translated as enthusiast or fanatic, was to be ungovernable by either human or God.

But if Luther called his inspirited enemies Schwärmer when the word Enthusiast was available to him, is it a mistake to conflate the two terms? Why assume that the German Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus, as substantives denoting the state of the Schwärmer or Enthusiast, are the same? In the years after Luther, during which the use of Schwärmerei and Schwärmer as invectives spread throughout German-speaking lands, the terms were often used interchangeably with Enthusiasmus and Enthusiast–and both sets of terms were used to translate the English-language enthusiasm and enthusiast. This is likely in part because the Anabaptists, whom many contemporaries saw as the direct descendents of the Schwärmer against whom Luther inveighed, were described in 1560 by Heinrich Bullinger as Enthusiastae and Extatici, the Latinate forms of originally Greek terms erupting into his German text. As an international language of the elites, Latin was likely the means through which a certain kind of religious and political refusal was transmitted across a range of European vernaculars.

What is likely most striking to modern English-language speakers is the exclusively negative connotations of the terms Enthusiasmus and Schwärmerei in early modern German sources, an intonation that continues through the early modern period and into the Enlightenment, when an increasingly heterogeneous set of thinkers and practices are so named–and so dismissed. To take just one famous example, one that provides further evidence for the close links between the German term Schwärmerei and the English enthusiasm, in his essay “Superstition and Enthusiasm” (1741), the philosopher David Hume argues that enthusiasm is a disorder of the imagination, “an unaccountable elevation and presumption, proceeding from prosperous success, from luxuriant health, from strong spirits, or from bold and confident disposition.” When the essay was translated into German in 1756, its title was given as “Von dem Uberglauben, und der Enthusiasteren.” Throughout the body of the essay itself, enthusiasm is translated as both Schwarmeren and Enthusiasteren. Forms derived from Schwärmer, moreover, appear in places where Hume does not write specifically of enthusiasm; hence Hume’s “fanatic madman” becomes “der schwarmerische Narr.”

In the “strong spirits” that gave rise to enthusiasm, Hume argued, the imagination is given free reign, giving rise to “raptures, transports, and surprising flights of fancy.” The enfettered person may eventually take leave of all of her faculties and attribute her own fancies “to the immediate inspiration of the Divine Being who is the object of devotion.” It is just here that the danger of enthusiasm lies, for if left unchecked:

the inspired person comes to regard himself as the chief favorite of the Divinity; and when this frenzy once takes place, which is the summit of enthusiasm, every whimsy is consecrated: human reason, and even morality are rejected as fallacious guides: and the fanatic madman delivers himself over, blindly, and without reserve, to the supposed illapses of the spirit, and to inspirations from above.

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.

Hume is here, of course, rewriting the history of English sectarianism and simultaneously marking his solidarity with the anticlerical spirit of the French philosophes. But we are on our way to the more thoroughgoing re-evaluation of enthusiasm that will occur in England and in Germany during the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century. We have seen the beginning of the movement in England, although in very divergent sites. On the one hand, Hume sees in the English sectarian spirit demands for independence from external authorities. On the other, Wesley suggests that enthusiasm, rightly understood, is true religion. At the turn of the 18th century, English literary critics begin to argue for what John Dennis calls “poetic Enthusiasm.” Although for Dennis, poetic enthusiasm remains deeply religious, the slide from God to nature as the site of enthusiastic poetic rapture will occur very soon after.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as Anthony J. La Vopa has demonstrated, a host of German philosophers, poets, and critics also attempted to deploy the distinction between Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus in order to allow for a revaluation of the latter. In the process, Enthusiasmus would be deprived of much of its religious content. It would become, instead, a site of human imagination and the animating force behind human creative projects. Yet for the philosopher Immanuel Kant, at least, the sticky relationship between Schwärmerei and Enthusiasmus will be very hard to shake. This is the reason, perhaps, for the three terms available in German, for there are places in Kant’s work, particularly in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, where English erupts into his German—hence Kant’s Enthusiasm.

This is a story to be continued–and to be set beside another project in linguistic genealogy, one that examines the terms mysticism, mystical, and mystic as they continue to capture the strong spirits and an individual’s pursuit of them.