By Ronald Knox

Enthusiasm, in the religious sense, is more akin to fanaticism than fervor. As Monsignor Ronald Knox describes, it is that recurring situation in Church history in which men and women, seek to be less and less “of the world” and more and more attentive to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Their assumption is audacious yet simple: grace does not perfect nature; it destroys and replaces it. The inevitable result: separation, secession, schism.

In twenty-three informative and entertaining chapters, Knox presents various enthusiastic movements: the first-century Corinthians, Montanists, Donatists, Albigenses, the Reformation sects, Jansenists, Quietists, Convulsionaries, Quakers, and Methodists—with special reference to those episodes from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Under Knox’s perceptive pen, religious history is interpreted as com­pelling drama, in which fascinating characters—like St. Paul and Tertullian; Martin Luther and the French Prophets; Madame Guyon and J.-B. Bossuet; Blaise Pascal and François Fénelon; George Fox and John Wesley; and many others—grapple and quarrel as much with themselves and their fellow Christians as with God himself. 

“The zeal of thy house hath eaten me up…” (Psalm 68:10)

First published in 1950, the fruit of thirty years of research and writing, Enthusiasm is “The Book” in Knox’s impressive bibliography—the whole of his literary life, he said. In subject and style, it makes for a fitting masterpiece: a survey of centuries of religious achievement which meets squarely the undeniable truth that “men will not live without vision”—a meeting haunted by these strange words: “the only vice is inertia and the only virtue, enthusiasm.”

Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was an English Catholic priest, theologian, and author, and one of the most prominent twentieth-century converts from Anglicanism to Catholicism. Best known for his contemporary English translation of the Scriptures (the “Knox Bible”), he wrote numerous works of apologetics and collections of ser­mons, retreat conferences, and lectures, as well as six detective novels.

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Paperback: 648pp.

ISBN: 978-1685953898

Publisher's Note: Enthusiasm, in its first edition text, included copious quotations and references in French (as well as a limited number in Latin) which were customarily left untranslated. Since these quotations and references are usually critical to the sense of the relevant passage, for its edition of Enthusiasm, Cluny has provided English translations of these French phrases and passages. The translations have been placed in corresponding footnotes and are indicated by the enclosure of brackets.