# Synodical Conference Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1894_S8
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

8 Proceedings of the fifteenth convention

even if not always raging with the same fury and the same outward symptoms.

As to the expression *Schwarmgeisterei* ("enthusiasm"), it must be said that Scripture, to be sure, does not give us a formulated definition of this concept, but in many places does give a description of the thing. The word is a church word. Luther, in whom no trace of an enthusiast's vein is to be found, speaks most copiously of Schwärmer [enthusiasts], Schwarmgeister, Schwärmer-Geister, also Geist-Schwärmer. He also brings in characterizing traits from sayings of the Church Fathers. For example, one of Basil the Great: that the enthusiasts swarm with their tongues like bees. The ancient Greek and Roman teachers of the Church used, to designate these people, chiefly the word Enthusiasts, also Phantasts. The Romanists also use the word Fanatics. Both expressions are found, of course, in the Latin ecclesiastical writings of our Lutheran Church. The Apology speaks in its Thirteenth Article of fanatical people who teach like the ancient Enthusiasts. Likewise the Third Part of the Smalcald Articles. As in the Confessions, so we find the expression also used in private writings. Luther also uses as equivalent the expressions: sects, sectarian spirits, heavenly prophets, sacramentarians, Anabaptists; also, after their leaders: Schwenkfeldians, Zwinglians, etc. In his last Confession concerning the Holy Supper he shows that he regards them as essentially alike. He says: "I count them all into one cake, that is, as sacramentarians and enthusiasts."

One may ask what Luther relates the "swarming" to. It might seem as if he related it to the great multitude in which they swarm through the world without fixed place and seat. Thus Luther says in one passage that Paul emphasizes the Scripture so carefully in 1 Cor. 15:3 in order to resist the mad spirits who despise Scripture and external preaching and seek instead other, heavenly revelation, "as it now swarms everywhere with such spirits, deranged by the devil." And in the exposition of the 5th and 7th chapters of St. Matthew he indeed also presents as a very plain mark of the enthusiasts and false preachers that, without a fixed parish in which they stand by divine call, they swarm about in the world and creep through all parishes: "Those who go forth without office and commission are vagabonds." (Leipzig edition IX, 307.)

But Luther surely does not, in earnest, give so external a meaning to "swarming." In the passage on 1 Cor. 15:3 cited above we have probably only an occasional allusion. We heard earlier that Luther refers to the saying of Basil about the enthusiasts: "They swarm with their tongues like the bees." This has been understood as referring to the surging of the feelings by which the enthusi-