Jonathan Swift’s Enthusiastic Personae

This chapter addresses Jonathan Swift's approach to the character of the Enthusiast. For Swift, as for Mary Astell, enthusiasm was not merely a malady associated with sectarian fanaticism. It was further and more deeply associated with the Wits of the world and their favored philosophy: Epicurean materialism. Like Henry More, Swift saw the bedrock error of enthusiasm to be the substitution of a part of creation for the Creator. Like John Locke, he understood this error to ramify as a sort of forced spiritual solipsism for two—a determination to make other minds recognize the unique deific character of one's own mind. But where More, Locke, and Astell approached these problems directly and discursively, Swift handles them most effectively when he is at his most ironic, slippery, and enigmatic. The chapter then presents a comparison of Swift's best-known satires: Modest Proposal (1729) and Argument against Abolishing Christianity (written 1708, published 1711). It also looks at Swift's most polemical eviscerations of enthusiasm: A Tale of a Tub (1704), his early satirical allegory of Christian history, and the brilliantly engineered literary hoax known as The Bickerstaff Papers (1708). Finally, the chapter considers the texts that more clearly show Swift's True Enthusiast voice, focusing on his pseudo-doggerel poem “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.”