The single-page list of possible terms circulated to contributors to the Frequencies project on a genealogy of spirituality has the clean feeling that comes courtesy of the alphanumeric. All those capital Hs in a row; all that happy cacophony, from Horatio Alger to LSD to the White Dog Café (Philadelphia, PA), contained by the stuttering letter. Jarena John John John Johnny Jonathan Joseph. One is enjoined widely—“what comes to mind when you think of spirituality”—while sensing that one’s flights of association will be easily contained. You left out (speaking of them) John-John.

One could say that this is what spirituality itself does. It is elastic, while expressing common rules of order. It contains everything, while conforming to strict limits. As the curators note in their invitation, with some understatement: “Few incidents or characters in the history of spirituality can be contained within national borders.” But do we—yet—know what contains spirituality? Do we yet know if anything does, and thus whether there can be history (or genealogy) here, rather than simply classification?

These questions are not intended to threaten the project. One would be hard pressed, I suspect, to advance a preemptive critique of a history of spirituality—of the very idea of such a thing—that was not already considered in the Frequencies conference room. Of course such a history is impossible. That is why it must now be attempted.

I would like to contribute to this attempt, if not a preemptive critique, then something like the question of whether or how one could be disobedient to its terms—the question of the project’s concept. Like the question to spirituality itself, one asks: is there really anything that could not go on the list? This might seem a playful or obnoxious intervention. It is playful in tracking the spirit of the call while taking its investigative thrust to potentially absurd lengths; it is obnoxious in pretending serious engagement while revealing the project itself to be absurd. I mean the question in neither sense.

In elucidating what I do mean, it is instructive to bring to mind the late metaphysical work of spirituality connoisseur William James. James spent the better part of his career as psychologist and philosopher attempting to debunk metaphysics of its spiritualist pretensions, while also, not incidentally, carrying on with theosophists and occultists. After achieving notice for his essays on religion, pluralism, and belief, and at the same time as he was honing his pragmatic theory of truth, James developed his own metaphysical theory, which he called radical empiricism. Fascinating as a historical document, radical empiricism is distinguished mainly by the claim that the world is composed—not of mind and body, or temporality and eternity, or indeed any of the other famous dualisms in the metaphysical water, then and now. Radical empiricism was to be a monism, whose basic unit is experience.

James’s theory has the advantage of cohering with his pragmatist commitment to make truth something we can see, feel, taste, practice, do. His rejection of standard (in his view, “Hegelian”) metaphysics was that it posited a world (“Spirit”) subject to none of these things, a world therefore useless in providing a framework for the investigation of what really does exist and matter, among which James’s empiricism stressed the relations between things as much as things themselves. It is also worth noting that the “incident or character” of James’s philosophy always toyed with, and was consistently received in the light of, a fairly explicit nationalism. America would be the land of a properly grounded, empirically contained, pragmatic philosophy, cutting itself loose from the decadence of an ethereal European spirit forever spilling out into tyrannical and sloppily conceived social and political projects. James’s solution, a radical empiricism, makes such a spirit subject to the containment of American knowhow: experiment, revisability, and an overall temper of constructive, this-worldly optimism. Dams and railroads would be built; souls and their sicknesses studied, diagnosed, and allayed, if not cured.

I call James to the task of considering the nature of a history of spirituality since he was himself so aggressively interested in the spiritual—in both fertilizing and disciplining it. But I also call on him for the scope of his philosophical ambition. James’s metaphysical system, unlike those of the Idealists he loved to lampoon, has as one of its features that, as with our list of terms concerning spirituality, everything, presumably, can be contained within it. It is a theory of everything.

Is this a problem? First to the task of what it means. A thinker like Spinoza has often been called a monist. By this, readers mean that he sews up all of life’s particularities into one, single, existing substance. This reading can still afford to acknowledge that Spinoza understood substance to be infinitely modified. For the point, so it goes, is that its modifications are nevertheless, finally, of this one thing. James was against such pictures of the universe. His appeal to experience was precisely meant to give us the “blooming, buzzing” confusion of life—the smell of a dog’s nose, the angle of a roof as it is about to collapse, the agony of guilt over a failed connection with someone, the moments of longing for death. Finally, American readers have always felt, in turning to James after a spell in the archives of the Germans and the French: someone to give us the sense and taste of the damned gorgeous springtime in Cambridge MA, and not merely, as Schleiermacher vaguely promised, the sense and taste of the infinite.

And yet. Does James really get around the problem of how to have, while also theorizing what it is to have, experience? Does James really give us a theory of everything that marks what that everything shall smell and taste like? To do this question justice would take us deep into the bowels of modern philosophy—into, at the very least, the curious logic of an apriori worldview centered elsewhere than in the mind. Kant thinks, for example, that we meet up with the world of blooming experience with a mind that already orders it; James thinks we meet up with singular objects in the world with a self that is already experiencing, or better, a self that already is experience. There is a critical difference in the shape of the two positions. For Kant, we are limited to experience, and the work is to make this limitation and its structure as pellucid as possible. What it leaves out. What it leaves in. For James, we are limited by nothing, whose name (the thing, the nothing) is experience. It is noteworthy, then, that James’s theory of experience, in leaving nothing out, has a harder time than Kant’s at specifying what is left in—what it is, in short, that we are having an experience of.

It is enough in this context to suggest something like the following about James, concluding with some questions to a history of spirituality. What James was evidently after with his concept of a radical empiricism was a way to resolve the call of spirituality. As a sick-souled, genealogically-stressed denizen of the Cantabrigian beau monde at the turn of the twentieth century, James was fascinated by the more colorful of spirit’s possibilities. But in his philosophical commitments, he was a critic of spirit, Hegelian, Bradleyian, Blavatskian, and otherwise. James wanted to give us the real, and he felt sure that this real was both empirical and absolute—that the empirical was not simply the place of experiment and Baconian habit, but was also mind. This might seem a surprising claim in the light of James’s insistence that the turn to the empirical saves us from all forms of rationalism. But it is one that makes sense both of his various personal commitments and of his inheritance of a Kantian seriousness with respect to the integration of the person. James, like Kant, felt it important to admit that there were cracks in existence. He simply thought he knew how they could be philosophically, which for him meant empirically, resolved. That this resolution in a thinker like James comes couched in the language of open-endedness only serves to underscore the maddening sleight of the apparently decisive thing that nevertheless has no borders.

So again: is this a problem? The problem I want to draw attention to is that James comes up with a theory of the way things are that—by virtue of the decision to resolve dualisms before they arise—gives us no insight into its logic of inclusion. This would be as if a moral philosophy or psychology proposed a theory of what to do or how to live without reckoning with the obstacles (psychical, social, intellectual, animal) to doing so. James’s theory of radical empiricism cools our desperation over being split—mind from body, higher from lower, Jew from Greek or male from female, if you want to go that route. In doing so, however, it abandons us to a different problem. Put simply, everything can count as experience. But what is the concept of everything? The problem is not that everything can count. The problem is: what is an everything? What do I have when I have it? What are the grounds of distinction within it, or between it and itself, if not some other? How might everything (or anything) fail (to be everything)? What is or what could be failure? I scramble for the simplest of images here: a queue for a roller coaster, say, in which the gate keeper is checking that the prospects meet a list of qualifications, a list of qualifications that everyone happens to meet. Who is that gate keeper? And: must she keep checking?

The list supplied for the genealogy of spirituality has this quality of an itemization that requires continued checking even as everything could be included in it. This is not to say its curators imagine themselves gate keepers. Just the opposite. The call makes clear that the charge is to roam as far and wide as possible. Still, those possibles would—I suggest—be exceedingly unlikely to fail inclusion on the list. Let me amend. They could not do so. Like James’s reading of the metaphysical tradition, the list excludes only what it does not desire (what does not exist); of things desirable, all are present. Everything is—however implicitly—present. And yet there is no account of what this everything tears itself loose from. Experience—or spirituality—as opposed to what? In this silence, James ironically mirrors the logic of his own bête noir, an otherworldly spirit struggling to make the world fit reason (the monistic Spinoza, the benighted Bradley), while evading the logic of his ostensible quarry, an immanence of spirit, which is present, pace James, in the dialectical Spinoza, who locates spirit in creaturely life, in the pragmatic Hegel, who culls reality redolent with smells, in the mechanic Kant, who knows the difference between an engine we make and our fantasy of one. James confuses the universal (all) with finite inclusion (everything), failing both spirit and its histories, both what spirit is and what it isn’t. With a universal, one could say, the gate keeper is the position that founds the all on a primary exclusion (choice); with an everything, the gate keeper is simply the delirious confusion of not having to choose—the confusion of redundancy. Although James’s radical empiricism promises to subordinate spirit to experience, it yields what looks like nothing so much as spirit augmenting itself infinitely through the undifferentiated logic of its suppression.

Is the Frequencies list a sign that its call is caught in this same confusion?

I pose the following final questions:

What is the relationship between the call to consider spirit and the provision of a list of spirit’s projects, the implication being that this list, like the alphabet, could come to an end while being, in its inner nature, expansive to infinity (JJJJJJ…)?

What has this gambit already decided about spirit in imagining its projects alphanumerically, and not in substance and subject?

What is a history of the alphanumeric if history is already (is it not?) the alphabet’s undoing—the decision (expository, creative, poetic) to count Jarena and not John-John? What is the nature of such a decision in this project? Would it, like the list itself, get its own line on the list?

The project of Frequencies hints—against conventional wisdom—that spirituality can be contained by its manifold histories; by a history of the manifold. Might there also be a value in ascertaining whether spirituality is not already contained, a list of lists, a theory of when and where its own decisions make distinctions, apriori, as it were—before we assimilate it to the White Dog Café in Philadelphia, PA? Might there not be something in spirit itself—and not simply in our alphabets—that finds it(self) everywhere? Might this not be spirit’s own creative history of us?

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.