Natural History of Enthusiasm

by Isaac Taylor

This practice was, in the first place, the natural fruit of a life like that of the recluses; for the Bible is a directory of common life; it is the heavenly enchiridion of those who are beset with the cares, labors, sorrows, and temptations of the world. To the anchoret it presents almost a blank page: a style of existence so unnatural as that which he has chosen, it does not recognize; his imaginary troubles, his frivolous duties, his visionary temptations, his self-inflicted sufferings, and his real difficulty of maintaining virtue under the galling friction of a presumptuous vow, are all absolutely unknown to the Scriptures, which therefore to the recluse, are not profitable for reproof, or correction, or for instruction in the false righteousness which he labors to establish.

To adapt the Bible to the cell, it must of necessity, be allegorized. Then indeed it becomes inexhaustibly rich in the materials of spiritual amusement. It was thus that the Jewish doctors, the authors of the Talmudical writings, found the means of diverting the heaviness of their leisure; and it was thus, though in a different style, that the Essenes of the wilderness of the Jordan whiled away the hours of their solitude; and thus, yet again after another pattern, that the Christian monks, especially those of Palestine[10] and Egypt, transmuted the words of truth and soberness into a tangled wreath of flimsy fable.

The doctrine of a mystical sense has invariably been espoused by every successive body of idle religionists; that is to say, by all who, spurning or forgetting the authority which the Scriptures assert over the life and conscience, convert them into the materials of a delicious dream. The mask of allegory imposed on the Bible, serves first as a source of entertainment, and then as a shelter against the plain meaning of all passages directly condemning the will-worship, the fooleries, and the extravagances to which persons of this temper are ever addicted. So did the rabbis make void the law of God; so did the monks; so have all classes of modern mystics; so do modern Antinomians: all have asserted a double, a treble, or a quadruple sense; a mystery couched beneath every narrative, and every exhortation, or even hidden in single words: or they have descried a profound doctrine packed in the bend of a Samech or a Koph. Not one of the absurdities of the ancient monkery has been so long-lived as this: nor is there to be found a more certain symptom of the existence of fatal illusion in matters of religion.

VI. The monkish system recommended itself by astonishing feats of devotedness, and by great proficiency in the practices of artificial and spontaneous virtue.

The excitements of enthusiasm are so much more congruous with the uncorrected impulses of human nature, than are the principles of genuine piety, that the former have usually far surpassed the latter, as motives, in the difficult and mortifying achievements of self-denial. In proportion as a system of fanaticism is remote from truth, its stimulating force is found to be great. Thus the fakirs of India have carried the feats of voluntary torture far beyond any other order of religionists. Mohammedans, generally, are more zealous, devout, and fervent than Christians. Romanists surpass Protestants in the solemnity, intensity, and scrupulosity of their devotional exercises. In conformity with this well-known principle, the monastic orders have had to boast, in all ages, of some prodigious instances of mortification, as well as of charitable heroism. And the boast might be allowed to win more praise than can be granted to it, if there were not manifest, invariably, in these exploits, a ferment of sinister feelings, quite incompatible with the simplicity and purity of Christian virtue.

For example, let a comparison be drawn between a daughter who, in the deep seclusion of private life, and without a spectator to applaud her virtue, cheerfully devotes her prime of years to the service of an afflicted parent;—and the nun, who inveigles beggars daily to the convent, where she absolves them, against their will, from their filth, dresses their ulcers, and cleanses their tatters. Assuredly the part she performs is more seemingly difficult, and far more revolting than that of the pious daughter; yet it is in fact more easy; for the inflated "sister of charity"[11] is sustained and impelled by notions of heroism, and of celestial excellence, and by a present recompense of fame among her sisterhood, of all which the other does not dream, who, unless she were actuated by the substantial motives of true goodness, could never in this manner win the blessing of heaven.

Self-inflicted penances, wasteful abstinences, fruitless labors, sanctimonious humiliations, and all such like spontaneities, may fairly be classed with those painful and perilous sports, in pursuing which it often happens that a greater amount of suffering is endured, and of danger incurred, than ordinarily belongs to the services and duties of real life. But these freaks of the monastery, or these toils of the field, deserve little praise, seeing that they meet their immediate reward in the gratification of a peculiar taste. In both instances the adult child pleases himself in his own way, and must be deemed to do much if he avoids trampling down the rights of his neighbor.

Fictitious virtue, if formed on the model of the Koran, naturally assumes the style of martial arrogance, of fanatical zeal and of bluff devotion. But if it be the Gospels that furnish the pattern, then an opposite phase of sanctity is shown. Abject lowliness, and voluntary poverty (which is no poverty at all,) and ingenious austerities, and romantic exploits of charity, and other similar misinterpretations of the spirit and letter of New Testament morality, are combined to form a tawdry effigy of the humility, purity, and beneficence of Christian holiness. But compel the imitator to relinquish all that is heroic, and picturesque, and poetical in his style of behavior: oblige him to lay aside whatever makes the vulgar gape at his sanctity; let him uncowl his ears, and cover his naked feet: ask him to acquit himself patiently, faithfully, Christianly, amid the non-illustrious and difficult duties of common life, and he will find himself destitute of motive and of zest for his daily task. Temperance without abstinence will have no charm for him; nor purity without a vow; nor self-denial without austerity; nor patience without stoicism; nor charity without a trumpet. The man of sackcloth, who was a prodigy of holiness in the cloister, becomes, if transported into the sphere of domestic life, a monster of selfishness and sensuality.

Time, which insensibly aggravates the abuses of every corrupt system, does also furnish an apology, more and more valid from age to age, for the conduct of the individuals who spring up, in succession, to act their parts within its machinery. While ancient institutions rest tranquilly on their bases, while venerable usages obtain unquestioned submission, while opinion paces forwards with a slumbering step upon its deep-worn tracks, men are not more conscious of the enormity of the errors that may be chargeable upon their creeds and practices, than a secluded tribe is of the strangeness and inelegance of the national costume. This principle should never be lost sight of when we are estimating the personal character of the members of the Romish church before the period of the Reformation; or indeed in later times, where no free and fair conflict of opinions has taken place. The system and its victims are always to be thought of apart.

The recurrence, by a people at large, to abstract principles of political or religious truth, is a much less frequent event than the rarest of natural phenomena. It is only in consequence of shocks, happening in the social system by no means so often as earthquakes do in the material, that the human mind is rent from its habitudes, and placed in a position whence it may with advantage compare its opinions with universal truth. The Christian church underwent not once the perils and benefits of such a convulsion during the long course of fifteen hundred years. Throughout that protracted space of time the men of each age, with few exceptions, quietly deemed that to be good which their fathers had thought so; and as naturally they delivered it to their successors, endorsed with their own solemn approbation. In forming an opinion, therefore, of the merits of individuals, justice, we need not say candor, demands that the whole, or almost the whole amount of the abstract error of the system within which, by accident of birth, they move, should be deducted from the reckoning. This sort of justice may especially be claimed in behalf of those who rather acquiesced in the religious modes of their times, than appeared as its active champions. Thus we excuse the originators and early supporters of a bad system, on the ground of their ignorance of its evil tendency and actual consequences; and again we palliate the fault of its adherents in a late age, by pleading for them the influence of that natural sentiment of respect which is paid to antiquity.