My son, give me your heart…
Proverbs 23:26
When I was younger and more naïve, I assumed that when somebody identified as a Christian, he meant it. That is, I assumed that his professed faith shaped his entire life; that he sought, as did Elder Sophrony of Essex, to make God’s “commandments ... the sole law of [his] being on this earth and in all eternity.”1 But in this age of lukewarm Christianity, many seem to live by some variant of the saying, “It’s good to have a religion, but one shouldn’t be fanatical about it.”
This common advice is quite reasonable, of course, depending on how one defines “fanaticism”. Consider how St. Porphyrios of Kafsokalivia employed the term:
“Fanaticism has nothing to do with Christ. Be a true Christian. Then you won’t leap to conclusions about anybody, but your love will ‘cover all things’...You will care for a Muslim when he is need, speak to him and keep company with him.”
Here fanaticism seems to be understood as a tendency to judge or to withhold love from others, including nonbelievers, and it is certainly necessary that we resist these inclinations. But immediately prior to that excerpt, St. Porphyrios taught that “we should be zealots,” and he defined a zealot as “a person who loves Christ with all his soul.”3 When formulated abstractly, the principle that we ought to love Christ with all one’s soul is acceptable enough, but when we apply this principle in concrete situations, it inevitably strikes our more worldly friends and family as excessive, as “fanatical”. It is the zealous application of this principle that—in my experience, at any rate—is discouraged in the advice with which I began this essay. To be a fanatic, per this understanding, is to treat religion as an objectively true path to a transfigured life, instead of a safer, less transformative self-help strategy or recreation.
Now, why should you be a “religious fanatic” (or, if you prefer, a zealot)?
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