John Locke’s Enthusiasts

This chapter focuses on John Locke's approach to enthusiasm. From the start, he considered revelation as dependent upon reason and rejected as enthusiastic any account that would grant revelation an authority independent of reason. Beneath Locke's consistency of approach to enthusiasm, however, one observes in his writings a shift in the understanding of the Enthusiast as a figure. The Enthusiast, in Locke's hands, splits the difference between its familiar guise as a humoral demoniac or devout mad person and a new guise as an all-too-common human type: the abuser of reason and language, passionately convinced by some real or purported private experience that they alone know the truth. The bifurcation in Locke's conception of the Enthusiast solidified over time. However, one finds its seeds in his first mature attempts to define enthusiasm, in his 1680s correspondence with Lady Damaris Masham, daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, and its flowering in the 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding and its 1700 expansion. Locke's approach to the Enthusiast culminates in his last major writing project, the Paraphrase of the Epistles of St. Paul. Ultimately, his bifurcation of the Enthusiast into rare and common varieties laid the groundwork for an important evolution of the figuration of the Enthusiast in early eighteenth-century Britain, the pivot to what can be called the Universal Enthusiast.