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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 for…

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—…