An age in thrall to enthusiasm

The insistence on orthodoxy and the punishment of heretics in previous times was motivated by a desire to protect both the individual and society from getting it wrong. Our understanding that religion is a matter of individual choice would have been incomprehensible in a previous age because it opened the way to heterodox belief that was an actual danger to the believer and society. This is because heresy (from the Greek root for choice) was understood to be a corruption of the truthful vision of the world represented by orthodoxy.

This would be like trying to design an airplane without knowledge of aerodynamics. Orthodoxy was the road map of life along which the believer could safely travel. Enthusiasm was seen as a threat to this order ordained by God for man’s own good.

It might not surprise the reader that enthusiasm is not the exclusive domain of the religious.

The latest crop of Christian persecutors display all of the marks of enthusiasm as Edmund Burke noted: “These atheist fathers have a bigotry of their own and they have learned to write against monks with the spirit of a monk.”

Dawkins et al steadfastly refuse to have conversations with professional theologians in order to preserve their distorted view of the faith. They have a mission, to expose all religion as ignorance and superstition. They qualify as enthusiasts because they are motivated by this one idea and are deaf to any discussion about whether this idea fits all religious phenomena.

The inscription on that gravestone flagged something that is increasingly prevalent in our own time, not only in religious services but in the mainstream of our public life. It seems that our society privileges those individuals who demonstrate enthusiasm, perhaps mistaken for passion. You will often hear in the media that someone has a passion for such and such or you will hear individuals pronounce that they have a passion for a certain public good. This is the language of enthusiasm wedded with emotion. We are only given credibility if we are emotionally involved in promoting our particular cause.

This can be the road to celebrity as Steven Irwin must have known at some level of consciousness. We love the enthusiast, we love that they are passionate, it is even better than that other weasel word of Don Watson’s “commitment” because it comes from somewhere that we can trust, the gut.

So beware of the person in public life, or the salesmen who boast of their passion or enthusiasm. Why, we ask, would they need to do that? What does it mask? The English enlightenment may have been a response to enthusiasm but modernity has produced its own secular version embodied in the myth of eternal progress and eternal improvement.

We will hear about “agents for change”, of men and women “making a difference”. Strategic plans will be laced with the latest buzz words: excellence, innovation, best practice, bench mark, international, ground breaking. To what do these words refer? Is this not just the language of enthusiasm used to make us all feel powerful?