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Most often, ‘fanaticism’ is a pejorative designation applied to others. Especially since the Enlightenment, it has become a polemical stereotyping and defamation of the person thus represented. Too often, the criticism being leveled would suit the person(s) making the criticism as well. Unlike the historical denotations of the term—which is derived from fanum (Lat., ‘sacred precinct’), and was applied in Christian antiquity to any of various enthusiastic, non-Christian forms of religion, and then, in the post-Reformation era, to ‘delusory’ piety—fanaticism in the West today stands not for the content of any particular religious position, but for a mentality and attitude, which can attach to the content of any ideal or ideology: an attitude of radicalism, rigor, and extremism. Features of this mentality are (a) psychological: an exaggeration of and passionate over-identification with, the content of a given (religious or political) ideology, group, charismatic leader, and so on, tied to intolerance vis-à-vis other thinking; (b) sociological: authoritarian and repressive group structures; (c) philosophical: an absolute claim to truth, shutting out critical reflection and doubt; (d) political: ‘ideological self-empowerment’ for the success of one's own claim to importance with respect to all social, juridical, and political areas; here, the end justifying every means; (e) religious: assurance of the establishment of belief through dogmatic and moral legalism, often founded on a fundamentalist positivism in matters touching revelation.
1. The word ‘revelation’ (in Gk., apokalypsis; in Lat., revelatio) is a category of reflection and abstraction, belonging to theological ‘second-order discourse.’ It can denote either the occurrence, or the content of a manifestation of the divine, by which, not infrequently, it performs a function of legitimization. After all, anyone professing to have received a revelation claims to be able, and to have the right, to make authoritative pronouncements concerning God or other things of faith. In this form, of course, the concept of revelation is foreign to the Bible or to the ancient Church. Only in the theological epistemology of medieval scholasticism is it elevated to the rank of a source for supernatural knowledge that transcends reason, and perfects it. With the Enlightenment, this intellectualist understanding of revelation entered a crisis. Immanuel Kant postulated: it shall no longer be the appeal to the authority of revelation, but only a critical examination by reason, that is to guarantee the validity of philosophical and theological propositions.