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Counter-Enthusiasms: the Rationalization of False Prophecy In COUNTER-ENTHUSIASMS: THE RATIONALIZATION OF FALSE PROPHECY IN EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT ENGLAND By William Cook Miller A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland May, 2016 ABSTRACT This dissertation focuses on the historical problem of false prophecy—or, more generally, the need to distinguish legitimate from illegitimate forms of contact with the divine—as it influences then-innovative and now-pervasive attitudes toward language and knowledge in early enlightenment England. Against the prevalent senses that the history of popular religion can be characterized either in terms of false consciousness or disenchantment, I argue that the vernacular Bible empowered unauthorized subjects (the poor, women, heterodox thinkers) to challenge dominant English culture in the theological vocabulary of the prophet. This power led to a reaction—which I call counter-enthusiasm—which both polemicized popular prophets as “enthusiasts” beyond the reach of reason, and developed new categorical understandings of experience in order to redefine relations of spirit, body, and word so as to avoid the problem of unlicensed spiritual authority. I concentrate on three counter-enthusiasms—as articulated by Henry More, John Locke, and Jonathan Swift—which fundamentally rethink the links between humanity, divinity, and language, in light of--and in the ironically occupied guise of—the figure of the enthusiast. I argue further that the discourse of enthusiasm contributed centrally to the process known as “the rationalization of society,” which involved the distinction of the categories of self, society, and nature. KEYWORDS: prophecy, enthusiasm, rationalization, enlightenment, language theory, religion, mimesis, hermeneutics, materialism, totality, irony, satire, English Civil War, Interregnum, Restoration, Henry More, Cambridge Platonism, John Locke, Jonathan Swift, Jürgen Habermas. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to acknowledge three people in particular without whom I cannot imagine this project existing. First, I must thank Sharon Achinstein for her guidance in bringing this dissertation from conception to fruition. I am flooded by gratitude for her patience, knowledge, wisdom, warmth, generosity, and brilliance. Thank you immensely, Sharon, for everything. This project began with a remark by Frances Ferguson. In a seminar during my first semester at Johns Hopkins, she observed that the rise of the novel might be explained in terms of a cultural transition from prophecy to prediction. This sentence caught so many of my interests at once—including some I did not recognize as mine until that moment—that I knew I had to write about it. I never made it to prediction, or to the rise of the novel, but I owe the impetus of this account of prophecy to Frances, and wish to express my gratitude for that and the many other insights into history and language that she has shared. Here’s to more! Chris Westcott has been for me, for years, an interlocutor from another dimension. His insights into class, nature, representation, and ethics have been deeply important for my thinking in this project and well beyond. This thesis could not have taken shape without his willingness to hear my inchoate thoughts and his quickness to seek and find the heart of the matter. I am extremely grateful to many others at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere who have improved my project in too many ways to enumerate. I would like to acknowledge, with gratitude, Yaser Amad, Amanda Anderson, Isobel Armstrong, Hadji Bakara, Pearl Brilmyer, Jacob Chilton, Drew Daniel, Taylor Daynes, Jonathan Dollimore, Simon During, Joe Haley, Richard Halpern, iii Jared Hickman, Jonathan Kramnick, Chris Latiolais, Paul Lewakowski, Molly Lynch, Roger Maioli, Doug Mao, Chris Nealon, Katarina O'Briain, Ben Parris, Jesse Rosenthal, Grant Shreve, Andrew Sisson, Dustin Stewart, Mark Thompson, Maggie Vinter, and Mande Zecca. iv CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXTS 1. Prophecy and Rationalization 2 2. What Was Enthusiasm? 42 II. THREE VERSIONS OF COUNTER-ENTHUSIASM 3. Allegories of Enthusiasm: Incarnation and Inspiration in Henry More and the Cambridge Platonists 87 4. The Arbitrary Word: Locke Reads Paul 136 5. Swift’s Two Enthusiasms 190 III. EPILOGUE 6. Enthusiasm, History, and Secularity 234 IV. BIBLIOGRAPHY 248 V. APPENDICES 267 VI. CURRICULUM VITAE 274 v LIST OF FIGURES 2.1 Frontispiece to The Great Bible (1539) 268 2.2 Frontispiece to Daniel Featley, The Dippers Dipt (1645) 269 2.3 From John Taylor, A Swarme of Sectaries (1641) 271 2.4 From John Taylor, A tale in a tub (1641) 271 2.5 From Anon., A Nest of Serpents discovered (1641) 272 2.6 From Anon., The ranters religion (1650) 272 2.7 From Anon., A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderful Monster (1646) 273 2.8 From George Horton, The ranters monster (1652) 273 vi LIST OF TABLES 2.1 The frequency and percentage-to-total publications of “Enthusias*” in Seventeenth-Century English: A search conducted through EEBO, Dec. 2, 2013 270 vii I. INTRODUCTION AND CONTEXTS 1 1. PROPHECY AND RATIONALIZATION And the LORD said unto Moses, See, I have made thee a god to Pharaoh: and Aaron thy brother shall be thy prophet. (Exodus 7.1)1 1. Prophet Hunt On May 7, 1640, a lay preacher named James Hunt appeared before the Court of the High Commission—the supreme Ecclesiastical court in England from its founding under Henry VIII until its violent dissolution in 1641 in the first throes of the English Civil Wars. Prophet Hunt, as he was known, was described by his arresting officer as “a fanatiq, frantiq person … a husbandman, & alltogether illiterate … [who] tooke upon him to … preach and expound the Scriptures, & was lately taken absurdly preaching on a stone in Paulls Churchyard.”2 The court sentenced Hunt to an indefinite term in Bridewell. Within the year he was out again preaching, and now publishing unlicensed sermons, starting with The Sermon and Prophecie of 1641, which (according to its subtitle) “hee hath endeavoured to deliver in most churches in and about London, but since delivered in the Old-Baily.”3 Prophet Hunt’s many accusers habitually emphasize his ludicrous insignificance: his low birth, his illiteracy (which only meant that, like most academics today, he didn’t know Latin and Greek), and (as one contemporary puts it) “the weake madnesse of his giddy-braine.”4 But these accusations of weakness confess the opposite. Hunt—and many religious dissidents like him— had tremendous power at his disposal, and this power was expressly decoupled from traditional 1 I cite the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible (King James Version) throughout, unless otherwise noted. Specifically, I use The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha, introduction and notes by Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 2 Ian L. O’Neill, “Hunt, James (bap. 1591?, d. 1649x66),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/74524, accessed 12 March 2015] Subsequent uses of this resource cited as DNB. 3 James Hunt, The sermon and prophecie of Mr. James Hunt of the county of Kent. Who professeth himselfe a prophet, which hee hath endeavoured to deliver in most churches in and about London, but since delivered in the Old-Baily (1641). Accessed using Early English Books Online. Subsequent uses of this database – which has proved invaluable for this project – cited as EEBO. 4 O’Neill, “Hunt, James,” DNB. 2 politics and learning. When the Mayor of London, Richard Gurney, asked Hunt in a heated interrogation “how he dare presume to preach having no warrant for the Ministeriall function,” Hunt declared “he had sufficient warrant from God, for he knew that he was his Messenger.”5 He was, in brief, a prophet—and thus that weak vessel, his body, was lifted up by God to the lofty task of reforming England and preparing the way for the Kingdom of God. This is a central motif of Biblical prophecy—apparent, for example, in the well-known cadences from Isaiah, later echoed in Luke: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”6 Hunt’s writings are full of celebrations of the strength of his apparent weakness, framed in the institutional vocabulary of his particular historical moment. Hunt writes: “For you have so many false doctrines rais’d, / By your Latine tongue and Greeke phrase, / That now I trust in our glorious God, / The plaine English tongue will win the praise. / […] / For the deepest scholler in Cambridge Schoole, / May be taught wisdom by Christs foole.”7 For Hunt, church, state, and school were institutions of the dead letter, conducted in dead languages. His own body, moved by the spirit of God, vocalizing in “the plaine English tongue,” was better fitted to give life to the sacred word. He was a living sign of a new dispensation of spirit. So this is what made this self-proclaimed fool of Christ, and others like him, at once such a laughing-stock and such a threat. This is what made his doggerel bark. This study begins with the simple observation that the rhetorical power of unlicensed preaching stems—as Hunt’s nickname suggests—from the self-authorized assumption of the role of prophet. This title signals an attempt to appeal to other human beings through a language touched and licensed by God, 5 An order from the high court of parliament, which was read on Sunday last, in every church, being the 19 day of December, 1641. Cited in O’Neill, “Hunt, James,” DNB. 6 Isaiah 40.4; Luke 3.5. 7 James Hunt, The spirituall verses and prose of James Hunt concerning the advancment of Christ his glorious and triumphing church: which by degrees shall flourish over the face of the whole world, which will be to the overthrow of the Divill, and the false church (1643).
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