enthusiasm

I grew up in a house divided: my stepfather wasn’t a reader and actively resented and even punished me for the time I "wasted" with books, which he saw as unbefitting any boy who wasn’t lazy and hoped to grow up to be a real man, while my mother was an avid reader who dreamed of authoring young adult novels.

So it was a curious, surreal time when my stepfather not only ceased his near-daily ritual of forcing me out of my favorite chair and away from whatever book I’d lost myself in but began reading (routinely!) from a small, but growing, stack of (his own!) books.

Our detente ended when my stepfather’s bookish excitement dwindled as quickly as the dreams of Amway riches that inspired it, but among the titles that were a step beyond even my word-addicted, cereal-box-reading attention—How to Win Friends and Influence People, Think and Grow Rich and The Greatest Salesman in the World—were two titles from which I’ve derived some of my own intermittent inspiration: Enthusiasm Makes the Difference! and Enthusiasm! The Action Handbook by Norman Vincent Peale.

I was reminded of Peale’s enthusiastic pair while reading, of all things, Stephen Fry’s Mythos, the first volume of his delightful re-telling of Greek myths, where he writes of the sculptor Pygmalion, who

For days and nights … laboured on in a frenzy of creativity, of literal enthusiasm. Generations of artists in all media since might have recognized the agonized, breathless ecstasy of inspiration that had seized him.

Fry’s use of the phrase "literal enthusiasm," not to mention italicizing the second word, caught my attention. What does it even mean to be literally enthusiastic? Why mark enthusiasm as you would a foreign borrowing? Why did the minister Norman Vincent Peale, famous for his book The Power of Positive Thinking (a volume I’ve assiduously avoided reading for more than three decades because my stepfather was so enthusiastic about it) find enthusiasm so important?

As it turns out, the word enthusiasm comes to us from the Greek roots en (in) + theos (god), or entheos, to have god within, or to be possessed, more-or-less literally, by a god. As Fry observes in a footnote employing a rarely-heard but entirely apt synonym:

The Greek for ‘divine possession’ is enthusiasmos — enthusiasm. To be enthused or enthusiastic is to be ‘engodded’, to be divinely inspired.

Despite the happy ending for Pygmalion, divine possession in Greek myth—enthusiasmos—wasn’t usually great for the mortals involved. This ultimately contributed much to Plato’s philosophy, which would exert heavy influence on later use of the word. For example, Plato asks Ion, a Rhapsode or performer of Epic poetry:

…when you give a good recitation and specially thrill your audience, either with the lay of Odysseus leaping forth on to the threshold, revealing himself to the suitors and pouring out the arrows before his feet, or of Achilles dashing at Hector, or some part of the sad story of Andromache or of Hecuba, or of Priam, are you then in your senses, or are you carried out of yourself, and does your soul in an ecstasy suppose herself to be among the scenes you are describing, whether they be in Ithaca, or in Troy, or as the poems may chance to place them?

Poets may be mere mortals, but for Plato their dalliance with the divine, their frenzied ecstasy—their enthusiasm—is suspicious because in the throes of writing, or even reading, a poem, their sense, self and identity–the foundations of reason—are lost. This suspicion would inform and characterize the concept of enthusiasm for the next 2000 years!

Though the idea of literal divine possession faded away, the word enthusiasm remained closely intertwined with its religious roots and metaphorically with the most intense kind of feelings: inspiration characterized by frenzy, delirium, ecstasy or, a feeling I wish I experienced more often, "poetic fury."

The definition of enthusiasm in English became increasingly pejorative over time. Various 16th and 17th century Protestant sects were called enthusiastic—and not in a good way—and being enthusiastic came to be synonymous with being a fanatic to the extent that those demonstrating such behavior were called enthusiasts and blamed for the English civil war.

So it makes sense that in the mid-1600s the Puritans—determined as always to demonstrate why we can’t have nice things—brought this idea with them to the new world. Well into the 1800s the label enthusiast was, as the OED notes:

…applied disparagingly to Quakers, Methodists, and members of other widespread Christian movements emphasizing direct private communication with God, or rejecting established church government, doctrine, liturgy, etc., as well as to adherents of more radical religious beliefs, such as millenarians and self-proclaimed prophets.

In fact, the earliest recorded use of enthusiasm in the usually positive (and relatively tame way) we understand it today, as secular passion, eagerness or zeal, dates back only to 1717!

Which isn’t to say the current use of the word is without controversy. Being called enthusiastic, or the back-formation enthused, is usually positive nowadays, something as likely claimed for oneself as attributed to one by others. But there can be too much of a good thing.

In her essay "The Chill of Enthusiasm," Agnes Repplier put it succinctly:

Like simplicity, and candour, and other much-commended qualities, enthusiasm is charming until we meet it face to face, and cannot escape from its charm.

Enthusiasm—and its various effects—can inspire all kinds of emotion in others. At the heart of contemporary ideas including mansplaining and Lit Bros—not to mention the eternal adolescent (and beyond) rebellion against popular entertainments–lies an unshared, or deeply unequal, and thus naturally overbearing enthusiasm. Or as Madame de Staël put it poetically way back in 1807:

Enthusiasm, though the seed
Of every high heroic deed,
Each pious sacrifice—its lot
Is scorn, from those who feel it not.

For his part, in the enthusiastic! books that charted the course for both my own interest in—and my occasional allergic reaction to—the idea, Norman Vincent Peale defined enthusiasm as "faith that has been set afire." I probably have an idea of faith as different from Peale’s as the Puritans was from the inhabitants of Greek mythology, but enthusiasm remains both possession and possessed, a fire that powers passion but also, unchecked, can burn.