Enthusiasm Quotes

“Let us note, from the first, that traditional Christianity is a balance of doctrines, and not merely of doctrines but of emphases. You must not exaggerate in either direction, or the balance is disturbed. An excellent thing to abandon yourself, without reserve, into God's hands; if your own rhetoric leads you into fantastic expressions of the idea, there is no great harm done. But, teach on principle that it is an infidelity to wonder whether you are saved or lost, and you have overweighted your whole devotional structure; you have ruled out a whole type of religious self-expression. Conversely, it is a holy thing to trust in the redeeming merits of Christ. But, put it about that such confidence is the indispensable sign of being in God's favour, that, unless and until he is experimentally aware of it, a This content downloaded from man is lost, and the balance has been disturbed at the opposite end; you have condemned one type of religious mind to despair.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“Sin, the Fall, salvation, grace, election-how is it that they loom so large in the vocabulary of a movement which should have been Platonist, should have been theocentric? It is due, I think, to the overmastering influence of one man, St. Augustine. A Platonist if ever there was one, yet Fenelon quarried no material from him in writing the Maximes des saints. St. Augustine was a man in whom the moral struggle had become inextricably entwined with the search for God; further, he had to enter the lists against the great heresy of Pelagius, which sought to by-pass the mystery of redemption. Consequently, the doctrine of grace became a major preoccupation with him, and he darkened in, perhaps too unsparingly, the outlines of St. Paul's world-picture. Moreover, he sought to pluck the heart out of a mystery by his theory of the two rival delectations. If you avoided sin, it was only because conscious love for God then and there neutralized the attraction of it; your decision was made on a balance of motives. Exaggerated now from this angle, now from that, St. Augustine's theology has provided, ever since, the dogmatic background of revivalism.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“… something may be written about enthusiasm by way of epilogue; if you will, of epitaph. There may even be a moral in it; history teaches us our lessons, more often than not, obliquely. Not what happened, but the meaning of what happened, concerns us. At what sources do they feed, these torrents which threaten, once and again, to carry off our peaceful country-side in ruin?

Basically it is the revolt of Platonism against the Aristotelian mise en scene of traditional Christianity. The issue hangs on the question whether the Divine Fact is something given, or something to be inferred. Your Platonist, satisfied that he has formed his notion of God without the aid of syllogisms or analogies, will divorce reason from religion; it is a faculty concerned with the life of the senses, and nothing assures us that it can penetrate upwards; he is loth to theologize. Correspondingly, in his prayer, he will use no images, no mental images even, as a ladder to reach the unseen; the God who reveals himself interiorly claims a wholly interior worship as his right. Nor will this directness of access be merely one-sided; the soul's immediate approach to God finds its counterpart in an immediate approach of God to the soul; he issues his commands to it, reveals his truth to it, without any apparatus of hierarchies or doctrinal confessions to do his work for him. Finally, since God, not man, is his point of departure, the Platonist will have God served for himself alone, not in any degree for the sake of man's wellbeing; an Aristotelian trick, to make happiness, in this world or the next, the end of man! In a word, he is theocentric; he quarrels with the theologian, for supposing that God can be known derivatively; he quarrels with the liturgist, for offering outward worship; he quarrels with Church authorities, for issuing Divine commands at secondhand; he quarrels with the missionary, for urging men to save their souls, when nothing really matters except the Divine will.

This is the direction Platonist thought will take, if left to itself; the resultant spirituality, it will be seen, is in line with that of the Quakers and of the Quietists. But at one very important point it is not in line with those revivalist enthusiasms which are more familiar to us. The salvation of your own soul is a business which the Quaker takes in his stride, the Quietist elaborately ignores; to the revivalist, it is everything. Aristotelian on this one point, Jansenism, Moravianism, Methodism (not all alike, but all equally) are obsessed with soteriology. For the mystic, the Cloud of Unknowing will tell us, God is so much the unique object of regard that a man's own sins will only appear as a dark speck in the middle distance, as a thing within view but not focused. Whereas Pascal will not even let us ask whether God exists, until he has forced us to admit that our need of salvation is desperate-you must not separate the two problems. There are two spiritualities; one which is too generous ever to ask, and one which is too humble ever to do anything else; at this cross-roads the mystic parts company with the revivalist, and either is tempted to exaggerate his own attitude. On the one side, we shall hear the Quaker talking dangerously about 'the Christ who died at Jerusalem', and the Quietist discouraging all meditation about the Sacred Humanity. On the other side, the figure of a Divine-Human Saviour will so fill the canvas that Zinzendorf and Howell Harris can find no real place in their system for the Eternal Father. The child's phrase, 'I love Jesus, but I hate God', is the too-candid expression of a real theological tendency”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“If I have dealt at some length with this single side of Wesley's character-I mean his preoccupation with strange psychological disturbances, now commonly minimized-it is because I think he, and the other prophets of the Evangelical movement, have succeeded in imposing upon English Christianity a pattern of their own. They have succeeded in identifying religion with a real or supposed experience. I say 'real or supposed', because in the nature of things you cannot prove the validity of any trance, vision, or ecstasy; it remains something within the mind. Still less can you prove the validity of a lifelong Christ-inspired attitude; in the last resort, all it proves is that certain psychological influences are strong enough to overcome, in a given case, all the temptations towards backsliding which a cynical world affords. But, for better or worse, the England which weathered the excitements and disappointments of the early nineteenth century was committed to a religion of experience; you did not base your hopes on this or that doctrinal calculation; you knew. For that reason the average Englishman was, and is, singularly unaffected by reasonings which would attempt to rob him of his theological certainties, whatever they may be. For that reason, also, he expects much (perhaps too much) of his religion in the way of verified results; he is easily disappointed if it does not run according to schedule. It must chime in with his moods, rise superior to his temptations; a decent average of special providences must convince him that it works. Otherwise, though without rancour, he abandons the practice of it. He is not prepared for that unrewarded adventure of naked faith which is, for the Quietist, the common lot of Christians. Not on the scale, but in the spirit, of those eighteenth-century pioneers, he demands 'heart-work'. And, in days when we are apparently less moved by the crowd-appeal, it is hard to come by.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“The biography of John Wesley is surely unique. Here is a man born in the first decade of his century, who sees it through into the last; a man so far in reaction from the tendencies of his age that he seems a living commentary on them, yet so much the child of his age that you cannot think of him as fitting in with any other. A High Churchman in his youth, he makes for himself in the unsympathetic surroundings of Oxford an enclave of primitive observance and of ascetic living; such is his personal influence that he seems destined, if that were possible, to shake Oxford out of its long dream. Dis aliter visum; he undergoes an experience of conversion before his lifetime has reached its mid-point. A sensational conversion; the finished product of the schools becomes the disciple of a foreign visitor to our shores, by no means his match in intellect. Thenceforward, he must fight by other methods, and for the most part with other companions, that battle against irreligion to which he has dedicated his youth. He has made his own soul, but the battle is not yet over; he finds himself in conflict with the men who had been his closest comrades in arms, and who still share his own beliefs but exaggerate their emphasis in a degree which he thinks dangerous. A man who once seemed likely to do great things for the Church of England, yet whose influence, on the whole, was to damage her position in the eyes of his contemporaries; a man, nevertheless, who lived to see something of the old bitterness against him die down, whose age was cheered by public recognition at once welcome, unsought, and unexpected.

So far, however, there is nothing unique about John Wesley. A careful reperusal of the foregoing paragraph will show that it all applies equally to the career of Cardinal Newman.

Wesley and Newman-you might think that some elfin fate had arranged this odd consent between the stars of the two men, just so as to throw into relief the vast difference there was between them. Newman, so sensitive, so warm in his attachments, so revealing in This content downloaded from his literary confidences, Wesley, so unruffled by opposition, so half-hearted in his familiarities, so circumspect in his admissions; Newman, the recluse, Wesley, a lifelong vagabond in the service of his gospel; Newman, painstaking in his judgements, fastidious in his style, Wesley, leaping to infallible conclusions and throwing them at you with the first words that came to hand; Newman, such a child of the Renaissance, Wesley, so fundamentally a Puritan. And, deeper down, Newman the apostle of religious authority, Wesley, a cheerful experimentalist who in all the hesitations of a lifetime never asked himself by what right he ruled, or on what basis of intellectual certainty he believed.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“It was the old tragedy of the Englishman and his foreign guests; a spectacle continually re-enacted, from which neither side ever learns. The Englishman with all the warmth of his heart applauds the foreign revolutionary whose enemies are his own enemies; amid much public enthusiasm an expedition is sent out in support of the plucky under-dog. But this warmth of heart is not matched by clearness of head; the Englishman in his generous mood of applause forgets to ask whether the foreign revolutionaries he is supporting are really nice people; and when the expedition has bungled and the disappointed survivors of the movement tum to the generous country which has befriended them, as to their natural asylum, there is inevitable disappointment on both sides.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“I have referred to the air of drama which meets you everywhere in the pages of Sainte-Beuve. He sometimes gets the credit for having dramatized the situation. I wonder, was it he who dramatized the situation or was it the people who were actors in the story? And in particular, was it not Mother Angelique? That great woman was not without her faults; Bremond (who compares her unfavourably throughout with her sister Agnes) writes of her imperiousness, her prodigious freedom in passing judgements on her neighbour; there was no dealing with a woman who was at once up in the clouds and scrupulous. 1 But it is not of her faults that I would write here; they were personal to herself What is more important, it seems to me, is a single weakness which she contrived to hand on to her spiritual children. She was incurably self-conscious; she was always dramatizing situations. She herself said that the object of humiliations was to destroy self and my own will, and the I and the my; St. Cyran, Pascal, Nicole did the same. Of their supernatural achievements it is not for us to judge; but as a matter of plain earthly fact it seems clear that no one of the four ever got rid of that self-consciousness which makes you see yourself out of the comer of your eye at every turn in life.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“This danger is all the more real because of a peculiar fantasy to which the illuminist temper is liable. The prophet may come to think that he (or she) is Jesus Christ. Nor should we pronounce, without further consideration, a verdict of blasphemy. For, after all, it is the experience of some mystics that their own personality seems more and more to disappear, more and more to be replaced by the divine presence dwelling in them, identifying themselves with it. How far can this process go, heft-re the mystic claims that his own personality has disappeared entirely, to give place to a fresh Incarnation of the Divine Being? And if the prophet has become an Incarnation of the Divine Being, why hesitate to bestow divine titles upon him? We have seen that this difficulty beset the Montanists; 'I am the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost', said Montanus, and according to another account, 'Neither an angel, nor an ambassador, but I, the Lord, the Father, am come.'

Catholic mysticism is protected from such delusions, because we know that the union of the Divine and the Human in our Lord was a hypostatic union, a union of two Natures under a single Person; whereas the most highly privileged of the saints can only enjoy a mystical union with God, the human personality remaining unabridged.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“In the early stages of any schism, its promoters find themselves obliged to hold by outworn traditions, because they have no central authority which can initiate, and sanction, disciplinary developments. Hence they seldom fail to reproach the Catholic Church with a spirit of innovation. 'It is a common trait among the heretics and schismatics of all ages; schism and heresy have almost always, for their point of departure, a regret for the past, the claim or the dream of going back to the fountain-source of a religious idea, to the discipline or the faith of an apostolic age.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“It is in the nature of things that Christian thought should always divide itself into a party of mildness and a party of sternness. To cite (not for the last time) the admirable remark of St. Francis de Sales to Mere Angelique, there will always be those who want to draw the meshes tight, so as to bring the little fishes in too, and those who want to leave the meshes wide, so that every catch shall be really worth catching.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

“If we ask why such a man lapsed into heresy, the psychological answer, for what it is worth, lies on the surface. He was incurably a logician, his whole temper was impatient of compromises, of halfway houses. And in the debate which probably went on in his age, as it does in most ages of the Church, between the people who want to screw up the standard of Church discipline and the people who would adjust it to the weakness of human nature, he inevitably found his true home among the extremists. Not because he was a saintly idealist, with Wesley's distrust of the 'almost Christian', but because his intellectual bias impelled him towards the party of consistency; he preferred rigorism, not because it was a harder rule to live by, but because it was an easier principle to defend. Where was the sense in belauding martyrdom, yet allowing Christians to take refuge in flight when persecution threatened? Why should absolution be refused to the man who had denied his faith under torture, and then granted to the adulterer, who could make no plea of duress? We do not know what personal or accidental motives may have contributed to his false decision; but it is not difficult, I think, to see that decision as congenial to the bent of his mind.”
― Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion