From James Wood's review of his book, here in The New Yorker:
There is a certain type of mind, he writes elsewhere in this book, that is attracted to radical doctrines. “The more opposed it is to common sense, the more that proves its truth. The harder it is to believe, the more deserving you are. Paul personified this type of mind—which could be called fanaticism. Luke, as I imagine him, didn’t.”
While it seems almost a necessity for religious founders to be fanatics and radicals, madmen of sorts, the question remains why the rest of us follow them in the numbers that we do.
As scholars of religion have long posited since Rudolf Otto, this element of fascination could be constitutive of being religious, but more so of simply being human. It expresses itself in a range, from something as ordinary as when everyone slows down to gawk at the car crash on the side of the road to that rare individual who is driven to take vows of poverty and silence.
Where one falls on the spectrum is a subject of the examined life.
