The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr. Henry More: Religious Meaning and the Psychology of Delusion (review)

In this detailed examination of Henry More’s psychological explanation of enthusiasm, Daniel C. Fouke persuasively argues that previous discussions of seventeenth-century attitudes toward enthusiasm have been marred by misplaced attempts to categorize them in terms of “rationalism,” “empiricism,” and the “new science.” As he says, “a central problem in every account is that anti-enthusiasts and their targets simply refuse to ally themselves according to commitments which, to our eye, should sort them into well-defined genealogies, neat schools, and clear enmities. Clear battle-lines fail to emerge, and any portrait of the typical ‘enthusiast’ never gets so far as a bare outline” (122). The ample evidence he offers to support this point appears in the three main sections of his book, in which he analyzes More’s attack on two types of scientific “enthusiasm,” alchemy, represented by Thomas Vaughan, and the mechanical philosophy, and on the religious and political enthusiasm of radical sects, represented primarily by the Quakers.

Fouke points out how similar More’s own views are in many respects to the enthusiasts he excoriates, and he illustrates how tendentious and often unfair his criticisms are. For example, More viciously attacks Thomas Vaughan for his vitalistic, organic view of the natural world when he himself holds similar views. And he later attacks the mechanical philosophers for rejecting the kind of vitalism he had earlier attacked in Vaughan, while chiding them for ignoring the sympathetic effects he had detected with such repugnance in Vaughan.

The same inconsistencies and misrepresentations hold true of More’s attack on the Quakers. He criticizes them for relying on the “Inner Light,” when he himself had used the same expression and adhered to the same conviction that religion was a matter of inner experience not outward observance.

In both his attack on scientific and religious enthusiasm, More descends, as Fouke amply shows, to a level of ad hominem vituperation at odds with his professed tolerance and good manners. By attributing all enthusiasm to physical disorders, which, in More’s view, arise primarily from carnality and lust, More effectively stigmatized and even demonized his opponents (since the devil was masterful at using physical disorders for his nefarious purposes).

What accounts for More’s harshness and inconsistencies? Fouke argues, again persuasively, that one must view More’s attacks on enthusiasm in the context of the political and religious upheavals of the time and in terms of his own metaphysical and cultural outlook. As Fouke points out, all attacks on enthusiasm involved the larger issue of authority. Where should one look for guidance—to the State, the Church, the individual? More was a traditionalist, who deplored the political and religious anarchy of the Civil Wars and Interregnum. But although he was a political conservative and traditionalist, he too had been influenced by religious radicals and believed that an individual’s religion must be heartfelt and not a matter of ritual compliance. In essence More’s attack on enthusiasm was basically an attempt to legitimize his own theology, anthropology, and natural philosophy in the name of an indisputable, higher, religious authority. The irony of More’s position was that in vilifying enthusiasm and attributing it to insanity, More’s writings became a useful resource in the armory of the deists, materialists and atheists, who were his real targets.

Fouke is especially interested in analyzing what he describes as the “poetic source” of More’s attack on enthusiasm. As he says at the beginning of his book:

I will argue that More and his “enthusiastical” opponents were offering competing ideals of religious meaning which they expressed by singling out particular kinds of experience as types of religious and moral cognition. I will also show that they differed in their account of the “crisis” experience which provides entry to the spiritual life, grounding this experience in competing theoretical, narrative, and poetical contexts. I will...