Miller applied the “Page 99 Test” to his first book, The Enthusiast: Anatomy of the Fanatic in Seventeenth-Century British Culture, and reported the following:
On page 99 of The Enthusiast, we see Henry More, the most famous English philosopher of his era, investigating the “enthusiasm,” that is, the false prophetic emotionality, of Henry Nicholis, the founder of the sixteenth-century mystical movement known as the Family of Love. (More refers to Nicholis, for complicated reasons, by his initials, H. N.) More describes H. N.’s enthusiasm as consisting in his (false) revelation that Christ is not an external but an internal figure—a sort of allegory of personal rebirth. More registers his disgust at this position in his literary style. He describes H. N. “riveting” and “thwacking” Christ’s hands and feet onto his own—replaying the Crucifixion, now with H. N.’s body as the cross. On the basis of H. N.’s example, More launches into a more general condemnation of “blind Enthusiasm,” which he calls “the Triumphal Chariot of the Devil.” Finally, More repeats a point he often makes in his writings: that he has discovered the “condition” of H. N.’s “Spirit” because he has explored this spirit in his “own heart.” He has experienced something like H. N.’s enthusiasm and survived to tell of it—hence he is trustworthy as a prophetic vehicle, an author capable of understanding, comprehending, and transcending the limitations of false prophets, thus of subjecting their errors to his own higher reality.Visit William Cook Miller's website.
So—is this most representative page in The Enthusiast? Not really. But it opens a window in certain ways. For one thing, it concerns Henry More—probably the protagonist of The Enthusiast. More’s importance is easy to miss, because almost nothing he wrote, aside from his correspondence with Descartes, holds much interest for scholars. But he was someone who deeply influenced Locke, Shaftesbury, and Swift, to choose a few names, and was particularly important for the project at the heart of my book: how to distinguish true from false prophets without relying on heresy courts or episcopal proclamations. On this page, he is battling the final boss of false prophecy: “H. N.,” the “Homo Novus” (new man), who declares Jesus Christ relevant only insofar as he sets up a pattern for personal and private illumination. One sees in this encounter an eerie foreshadowing of currents we still cannot escape: for instance, the dialectical relationship of enlightenment secularity and reactionary fundamentalism, which are often seen as stark opposites but which we might more clearly see as codependent twins born from the same early modern matrix.
This page also reflects how false prophecy was internalized and ironized in the course of the seventeenth century, which is the main argument of the book as a whole. During stabler times, false prophets were reliably cast as demonic idolators. With the Protestant Reformation, another sort of fear creeps in as well: that one’s neighbor, one’s mother or father, or even an earlier, more immature version of oneself might be a false prophet. A surprising twist followed: those who confessed and explored their false prophetic humors, their “enthusiasm,” tended to find thereby an ironic prophetic authority. Those who insisted they weren’t enthusiastic, on the contrary, were increasingly suspicious. This paradox helped to give a peculiar ironic flavor to later writers of the period—that hint of a new sort of prophet of Enlightenment who denied prophecy. The Enthusiast tries to catch this maneuver in the moment of its execution. One feels it, for sure, on page 99.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
