Vern: What does it look like?

Davis: Well, like nothing actually.

Vern: I can look at the lake and our Chicago skyline while I walk. Isn’t that enough?

Davis: I’m glad I ran into you. My four-year old heard someone mention the spiritual and asked me what it was, I mean what it is.

Vern: Tell him it’s the wind through the trees.

Davis: I don’t think he’s going to buy that.

Vern: You’re a lawyer, you should be able to come up with something persuasive.

Davis: You would think so, but he just doesn’t let it go with my vague declarations. It’s like he can smell uncertainty.

Vern: What did you try?

Davis: Something about the trinity…

Vern: And you didn’t get very far?

Davis: Then I tried something about a state of mind…

Vern: I’m not sure that this was just a communication problem.

Davis: I know, that’s why I’m glad I ran into you.

Vern: I’m no guru.

Davis: Still, you get paid to think.

Vern: Let’s start there, then.

Davis: Where?

Vern: Getting paid. No, with thinking. And let’s walk. [pause] What do you think spirit, or spirituality, is?

Davis: Some kind of awareness of the ineffable, I suppose. Spirit can’t be known, spirituality is our awareness of something that can’t be known.

Vern: That’s a funny thing to say. It sounds like an inability, something mute.

Davis: I mean, if you could communicate it, it wouldn’t be what it is. There wouldn’t be any point to the word spirit if it were some object like any other.

Vern: But if we’re talking about it, we aim to understand. There are limits to what we can understand, but we can talk about these limits, and experiment with them. So you think spirituality is a kind of consciousness, something in you?

Davis: It’s like we’re the access point, but there should be something outside us that stands against us but speaks to us.

Vern: I mean, you can always point beyond yourself. There’s the horizon, right there, beyond which I cannot see. You say, I’m not the one, there’s something bigger than me, bigger than any one of us. But you’re just negating something, most likely yourself. You’re judging, doing something, not receiving.

Davis: But the spiritual is different. We already know Michigan is out there. But we don’t know what’s beyond us, the material.

Vern: Okay, that’s our opposite then. We might define the spiritual against the material. That’s one of the main lines in history. Turn against the material, fasting and abstaining, mortifying the flesh and all that. There’s the worry though that you’re actually obsessed with the material in trying to escape from it. But I don’t suppose you have much sympathy with the anti-body, self-flagellation idea, do you?

Davis: I wouldn’t teach it to my kids, anyway.

Vern: How about the Great Father idea, then, if you’re so worried about the little ones?

Davis: They already have a father. And a mother. Let’s not go there.

Vern: So you want the wonder, the mystery, the awe, and you also want to say something memorable, without too much double-talk. Let’s take a step back. How do you say anything about anything?

Davis: Uh-oh.

Vern: You asked for it. And I mean it.

Davis: I was looking for something that could appear on Elmo, not a seminar on semantics.

Vern: That’s a cop-out. Go back to what you said about materiality. You said it because you need some kind of limit or wall. Your kids know this—if it’s not a square, not a circle, it’s a triangle. Everything is a contrast, or a negation. That’s how you mean anything.

Davis: What?! I see things that are ugly, like the Borg Warner building on South Michigan. I don’t need anything else to see it, or to say what I mean.

Vern: That’s a comparative judgment. Of course you’re contrasting it at some level. I can always ask why you made this or that judgment, and the content of your answer negates some other possible contents.

Davis: Even if it is a judgment, I don’t have to deliberate. It’s more like a conviction, an intuition.

Vern: You can’t appeal to brute feeling. That’s just to refuse the question. To me that refusal would be the denial of the spiritual.

Davis: So spirituality is just a willingness to answer why? Or do you have to do it well?

Vern: I’m not talking about something subjective.

Davis: A refusal is something done by a subject.

Vern: It’s not just you who reasons, though. There’s reason all around you.

Davis: Reason? We were talking about spirituality. When did you change the subject?

Vern: I didn’t. That’s what I’ve been getting at. They’re the same.

Davis: Reason and spirit? Rationality and spirituality? Another pair of opposites, if you ask me, or anybody else.

Vern: Why? Since you don’t know what spirit is, it must be reason that’s confusing you. It’s nothing mysterious.

Davis: I know, that’s exactly what I’m worried about. It’s cold, exact, hygienic.

Vern: That sounds like formal logic, not reason. It’s not mathematical, or even like your LSAT games.

Davis: What is it then?

Vern: No, how not what. When you say something follows from something else, you’re reasoning.

Davis: Who says “follows from”? Even lawyers don’t talk like that.

Vern: You don’t literally have to say those two words to do what they say.

Davis: But where’s the power, the force?

Vern: It’s in us. Where else would it be?

Davis: Sometimes, Vern, you want to interrupt aggression with reason, logic.

Vern: That’s interesting. In my business, we’re often accused of masking power plays with reason, assuming reason is something other than power when it is just used to hide the real interests behind it. So I’m surprised, though I guess I shouldn’t be, that you want more power than I’m giving you with the word.

Davis: At least give me something I understand—a binding law.

Vern: God-given, you mean?

Davis: That would be a good start. But you don’t have to put it like that. Something like addition, or mathematical proof, that people can’t deny without being called insane.

Vern: That works in math class, but it’s not much good off campus. And anyway, spirit can’t be clean-cut, or the kind of force that’s one-way. If everything worked by mathematical equations, the meaning might go missing.

Davis: All right, go back to Church, then. Whatever definition we give would have to at least cover those worshippers.

Vern: Some of them, anyway.

Davis: Well, what do they have to do with reason?

Vern: Don’t think of them as just bowing to an idol.

Davis: Who says I was?

Vern: Well, the preacher in the pulpit is giving reasons, revealing reason. The stories you hear in Sunday school tell of reasons.

Davis: It’s more about ethics… and love is not reason or some sort of negation.

Vern: There wouldn’t be jealousy if love wasn’t a negation.

Davis: But I’m pretty sure jealousy is a sin. Think Jesus, love of your neighbor.

Vern: No one has ever loved everyone. Our ethics have to be more personal, even if we do believe in the incarnation.

Davis: I suppose you’re going to tell me that self-sacrifice is just another opposition? That even if we think we are going against reason, it’s still got us cornered.

Vern: Here I stand. I can do no other, nothing else. I negate every other option. That’s an ethics of reason.

Davis: And God?

Vern: The last reason.

Davis: That’s it?

Vern: No. That’s it. What more do you want?

Davis: I don’t know. Should it matter what I want?

Deathbed Conversion

I am not a secular man, but in moments of crisis I turn to agnosticism for the comfort it gives in freeing me from superstition. Once, when gravely ill and sure I would die at any minute, I embraced agnosticism, and, with Nietzsche in hand, swore I would remain an agnostic even if I recovered. But once I did recover, I lapsed again into religious belief, feeling the danger was over and it was safe to return to my old ways. Still, the fear of dying under the veil of dogma still grips my soul late in the night and I yearn for the courage to embrace reality without prophylactics.

⁂

Flawed Design

The Theory of Flawed Design is not a scientifically proven alternative to evolution. It is based on the everyday life experience that natural selection could not have produced such a catastrophic outcome. Optimists and the religiously inclined will naturally prefer evolution as an explanation, since ascribing design to the state of humanity is almost unbearable. For the rest of us, we must continue to insist that the Theory of Flawed Design be taught cheek and jowl, neck and neck, mano a mano, with Mr. Darwin’s speculations.

The Theory of Flawed Design postulates a creator who is mentally impaired, either through some genetic defect or because of substance abuse, and is predisposed to behave in a sociopathic manner; although some Benign Flawed Design theorists, as they call themselves, posit the radical alternative that the creator was distracted or inattentive and the flaws are not the result of malevolent will but incompetence or incapacity.

⁂

Observant Jew

I’m an observant Jew. I look closely at the things around me, as if they were foreign.

Despite his well known status as a staunch—if friendly—atheist, the radio producer and iconic black-framed-glasses wearer Ira Glass has used his program This American Life to delve into people’s spiritual lives with a sensitivity unique in media coverage of religion. As specific and eclectic as its stories are, the show’s frequent treatment of religious subjects seems to bring out in Glass a desire for transcending particular beliefs that approaches an orthodoxy all its own.

Beginning with the premiere episode of the program that would become This American Life, broadcast on November 17, 1995, Glass framed his new enterprise in explicitly nostalgic terms. Even the show’s name—at the time it was called Your Radio Playhouse—self-consciously tweaked the anachronism that storytelling on the radio already evokes. Complete with tinny jazz music that sounded as though it were playing on vinyl, Your Radio Playhouse was every bit as backward-looking in its appeal as Charles Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour had been sixty years before. And Glass, likewise, used this first episode of his fledgling program to deliver a sermon of sorts.

“One great thing about starting a new show,” he says in his distinctive rapid-fire nasal delivery, “is that it’s an unchartered little world…”

No one hearing my words is saying, “Remember that show back when it used to be good?” Actually, that force, that human desire to say that, to say “I was there when the show was good,” is so strong, is so basic to who we are as people, that I know that, two minutes into the new show, there are one or two people out there who are saying, “Sure, I used to listen to that show in the first thirty seconds, back when it was good.”

It is a cheeky, knowing sort of monologue, full of stammers and reversals that at the time—before Glass’s awkward delivery became the lingua franca of public broadcasting—would have made most radio professionals cringe. But it establishes immediately a mode of storytelling perfectly suited to the kinds of spiritual narratives This American Life would tell.

For the first act of this first episode, Glass offers something of an upended conversion tale, the story of a young man lost and found. “Kevin Kelly spent most of his twenties wandering around Asia,” Glass explains. “He was a freelance photographer. And he found himself photographing a lot of religious ceremonies. He found himself drawn to religious ceremonies. He was confused about what he believed.” Kelly’s voice then comes in:

I would get twisted and caught up, and these things were sort of in the background, consuming me. And actually I found that I could think about little else, for many many months. That behind all that I was doing there was always this unresolved question: Was God real? If he was real, then how could we ignore him? And if we were trying to not ignore him, what would we do?

While pondering these questions, Kelly finds himself in Jerusalem, where he falls asleep inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on the night before Easter. When he wakes up, he is convinced of two things: first, that Jesus Christ died and rose again, and, second, that he has just six months to live. From that moment on, he explains, he acts as if his days are numbered. When Kelly’s story reaches its climax, it is six months later. After living daily with the feeling that his death was near, he returns to his parents’ home to spend what he thinks will be his last night on earth.

I went to bed that night—which was a very difficult thing to do, because I was fully prepared at that point never to wake up again. I had been praying, I’d gotten everything arranged. At that point I’d fully gone through in my own mind, my own soul, all the things I might have regretted, and I had righted as many of those as I thought I could, through letters, and I was prepared, as much as anybody could be prepared to die.

The next twenty seconds of airtime seem as orchestrated for spiritual uplift as any of Charles Fuller’s old hymns could be. As Kelly speaks, long breaks follow each word, letting the emotion he feels come through.

And, the next morning I woke up… And… The next morning I woke up and it was as if… The next morning I woke up and it was as if I had the entire, my entire life again… I had…The next morning I woke up and I had my entire life again… I had my future again.

Like Glass’s framing of the episode, it is a poignantly awkward narrative, suspended often by silence, second-guessing, and repetition, all of which serve to heighten the drama of the telling.

“There was nothing special about the day. It was another ordinary day,” Kelly concludes. “I was reborn into ordinariness. But…” Here Kelly’s voice breaks audibly, as if he is fighting tears until finally he lets out the story’s closing words with a small sob: “What more could one ask for?”

After a beat, Glass provides a coda about what became of Kelly. “Nearly two decades after that happened,” Glass says, “Kevin Kelly is now the executive editor of a magazine about the future, Wired Magazine.” Like a puzzle piece dropped into place, identifying Kelly this way highlights the apparent contradiction of the editor of a forward-looking technology publication choosing to tell this story on a self-consciously nostalgic radio show. Only then does the listener realize that the conversion narrative just experienced through Kelly was not what was expected. As framed by Glass, Kelly’s story is not of a conversion into belief, but out of it, a rebirth “into ordinariness.” Kelly begins with confusion, finds faith, and then moves beyond it. The narrative arc of religion on This American Life may run through particular beliefs, but it ends with the non-sectarian sanctification of the everyday.

In this and in other religion stories featured on This American Life, it is clear that Glass is not after Come-to-Jesus moments. The point of Kelly’s story was not to tell how a young man found God. Rather, Glass creates radio experiences that, in current NPR lingo, have become known as a “Driveway Moments”: suspenseful epiphanies that forge such a bond through the airwaves that the listener cannot pull away. As explained on NPR.org: “What is a Driveway Moment? You’re driving home, listening to a story on NPR. Suddenly, you find yourself in your driveway. Rather than turn the radio off, you stay in your car to hear the piece to the end.” A Driveway Moment occurs when one wants nothing more than to be alone with the radio.

As ordered as any liturgy, This American Life leads inevitably to this kind of communion. As Glass once explained:

This is the structure of the stories on our show: There’s an anecdote, a sequence of events. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And the reason why that’s powerful… is because there is something about the momentum, especially in a medium where you can’t see anything… that you just want to know what happens next. It’s irresistible…

Then, there’s the part of the story where I make some really big statement like, “There’s something about the kindness of strangers.” Because you can’t just have an anecdote. It’s got to mean something. You can have people read the little story from the Bible, but unless you tell them, you know, the lesson they’re trying to draw from it, it’s not a real sermon.

A Driveway Moment is a perfect cocktail of anecdote and meaning. Considering that the creation of such moments has also become a measure of a radio program’s success, it may be that while broadcast technology promises to relieve one type of isolation, it simultaneously increases another. “The mission of public broadcasting,” Glass once said, is “to tell us stories that help us empathize and help us feel less crazy and less separate.” It may be that stories of other people’s lives can be told so well that we never need to leave the car to hear them.

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.