From divine inspiration to social sin: a (brief but fun) history of enthusiasm
Like an old actor on the run, enthusiasm has lived many a life. Here’s a brief history of enthusiasm through time…
The modern word enthusiasm started life as enthousiazein, which breaks down (in a very non-academic way) as en=in + theos=god + zein=being, state of, to altogether mean ‘be inspired or possessed by a god, be rapt, be in ecstasy’. This then morphed into enthusiasmus in Late Latin, or enthousiasmos in Greek, with the same meaning of divine inspiration.
Circa 1600, the spelling changed for the final time, with enthusiasm entering via French enthousiame. But the meaning still has a couple of iterations: for example, in the 1650s, enthusiasm was taken to be ‘excessive religious emotion’. That addition of excessive is a subtle difference, but a sign of what’s to come.
Towards the end of that century, ‘enthusiasm’ then became a pejorative term for anyone advocating not only religious but political causes in public. In fact, around 1700 enthusiasm was seen as a social sin, because it was seen to be a reminder of the English Civil War (in fact, it was seen to be the cause of it.) People were broadly wary of emotion, and enthusiasm came hand in hand with that. Adam Smith even called enthusiasm a “poison” to which science was the antidote - hand in your pom poms, and fire up your Bunsen burners.
Luckily, the 19th century saw the tides turning on this – viva la Romantic Revival, that’s what I say! – and the modern day meaning eventually eclipsed the original, leaving us with an understanding of enthusiasm entirely separate from religion or spirituality.
That’s not to say that the meaning has lost all of its history, though; enthusiasm today is so often still tied to this notion of excess, and of being opposed to rationality. How many times, for example, have you been told you(r enthusiasm) is too much? How many times have you been told that your enthusiasm is embarrassing, childish, or irrational?