Religion: Enthusiasm

“There is a kind of book about which you may say, almost without exaggeration, that it is the whole of a man’s literary life, the unique child of his thought . . . Such a thing, for better or worse, is this book which follows. I have been writing it for 30 years and a little more; no year has passed but I have added to it, patched it, rewritten it, in the time that could be spared from other occupations.”

The other occupations of Msgr. Ronald Arbuthnott Knox during the past 30 years have earned him an international reputation as the urbane and witty chaplain-litterateur at Oxford’s Trinity College, as the author of both brittle whodunits (The Body in the Silo) and brilliant essays in Roman Catholic theology, and as perhaps the ablest modern translator of the Bible. His new book, three decades in the making (“mastering my authorities in trains, or over solitary meals, taking notes on rough pieces of paper and losing them . . .”) is titled Enthusiasm (Oxford; $6). In it, Author Knox brings all his wit and scholarship to bear on the many groups in church history which have, from time to time, bypassed ecclesiastical authority to claim direct contact with the divine.

The Devout Sex. Far from being an “enthusiast” himself, Msgr. Knox is sometimes unable to suppress a faint shudder at the uncouth excesses with which his subject compels him to deal. But for the most part he treats his material with the warm antiquarian relish of a jurist whose hobby is delving into the idiosyncrasies of safecrackers.

Knox describes “the enthusiastic movement” as a “clique, an élite of Christian men and (more importantly) women, who are trying to live a less worldly life than their neighbors; to be more attentive to the guidance … of the Holy Spirit. More and more, by a kind of fatality, you see them draw apart from their coreligionists, a hive ready to swarm. There is provocation on both sides . . . Then, while you hold your breath and turn away your eyes in fear, the break comes; condemnation or secession, what difference does it make? A fresh name has been added to the list of Christianities.”

Enthusiasm is almost as old as Christianity itself. Author Knox detects the seeds of it in the Corinthian church to which Paul wrote his famed epistles. Here, as among the frenzied followers of Montanus (about 175 A.D.), he notes the growing importance of women. From the Montanist movement on, “the history of enthusiasm is largely a history of female emancipation, and it is not a reassuring one . . . The sturdiest champion of women’s rights will hardly deny that the unfettered exercise of the prophetic ministry by the more devout sex can threaten the ordinary decencies of ecclesiastical order.”

Enthusiasm, Knox thinks, only came into its full flower a century after Luther “shook up the whole pattern of European theology.” The Quakers were the first of this flowering, and Knox “cannot resist the impression” that there is a direct line of influence upon them from the Anabaptist movement that ended in a bloody civil uprising at Münster 18 years after Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Early Quaker simplicity strikes Knox as “almost . . . boorishness,” and he takes fastidious note of Founder George Fox’s “barbarous” style of writing. But he nonetheless pictures Fox as a potent prophet.

Platonic Revolt. Knox is impressed too, though sometimes amused, by John Wesley, founder of Methodism. “Wesley,” he writes, “was unashamedly a retailer; his societies formed a kind of cooperative movement, acquiring their culture on reduced terms at secondhand.” But, although the gatherings Wesley addressed were often seized with the cacophony of shouts, sobs and groanings that are associated with enthusiasm, Knox feels that Wesley himself was no enthusiast. He finds the appeal of Wesley’s sermons was “to the head, not primarily to the heart.”

Enthusiasm, Knox decides, is basically the “revolt of Platonism against the Aristotelian mise en scene of traditional Christianity . . . Your Platonist, satisfied that he had formed his notion of God without the aid of syllogisms or analogies, will divorce reason from religion . . . the God who reveals Himself interiorly claims a wholly interior worship as his right” instead of observing traditional Christianity’s balance of doctrine and emphasis.

But Knox confesses that, though he originally conceived of his book as “a trumpet-blast … a kind of rogues’ gallery, an awful warning against Illuminism . . .” his attitude changed through the years. Even the Roman Catholic Church, he feels, sometimes needs warming at the fires of enthusiasm. “How nearly we thought we could do without St. Francis, without St. Ignatius! Men will not live without vision; that moral we do well to carry away with us from contemplating, in so many strange forms, the record of the visionaries. If we are content with the humdrum, the secondbest, the hand-over-hand, it will not be forgiven us.”