Emotionally overheated intuition leads to a state of fervour. This is the inspiration so highly prized in the arts. Inspiration is that fever in the artist when his thoughts and feelings, heightened, wholly fill, unsettle and rouse his being, and long with irresistible force to be expressed. This aesthetic dimension is surpassed by the theological one: religious inspiration is a glow, a transfiguration and an ardour of a very high degree, a being filled with God.
Many think that emotional saturation and ardour, raptus, are overly emotional notions and have nothing to do with calm enlightenment, while others believe unequivocally in the primacy of the feelings, indeed of pure feelings for God. Whether reason or feeling is the more important, well, this debate has perhaps gone on for thousands of years, and since tastes are not worth disputing, it probably cannot be settled either. We can find our bearings by examining the essential nature of man, and since we find reason beyond biology, beyond existence, and the living being endowed with reason also feels, it seems that feeling is a higher achievement than mere existence or consciousness. Aristotle sets up the same order when he says that truth is bound up with existence, that the unchanging eternal reality can only be a purely spiritual being, and that to this pure spiritual being we can attribute nothing but purely spiritual activity: thinking, awareness. Knowledge free of all lack fills God, this purely spiritual absolute existent, with eternal and unsurpassable happiness. We may consider the feelings stronger, more important than anything else. We have heard of someone losing his senses for love, even throwing his life away, but one finds it hard to bear being loved intellectually and not from the heart.
In the inspired state a strange magnetism takes possession of a man. It is a mood far surpassing the everyday disposition, one that spurs, oppresses, uplifts and crushes, often sweeps him into stormy deeds, and may even lead, quite literally, to a self-forgetful state. The fervent man we may also call a fantasist. He lives in his own world of fantasy, which fills his life and his thinking, and it is this that kindles his fervour.
Opposite the fantasist stands the enthusiast, who is likewise filled, swept away by something, by someone. The word comes from the Greek entheos, which means: filled with God, one into whom the spirit of God has entered, and who is thus beside himself. Rapture is a rare gift. According to Rabindranath Tagore, meditation is an entry into some great truth that in the end takes complete possession of a man. Given the right spiritual charge, fervour is a practice of the soul, and still more the soul's attainment, an experience.
It is of this experience that the mystical authors write. Rapture does not depend on region or on any religious process: the Christian mystics knew rapture just as surely as the Sufi saints or the mystical practitioners of yoga. This state of being almost beside oneself, or raptus, they describe as divine madness, and in the bridal mysticism turned towards Christ as a rapture of love, as ecstasy. In other cultural settings they present it as sudden enlightenment, as satori, as a kundalini experience or nirvikalpa samadhi, but the essence is similar: it brings a vision of fullness, an experience of love, a transcendent lived experience, far surpassing all that man experiences in everyday life.
For many, fervour is only a passing malaise, and dejection often follows the peak experiences. The manic-depressive emotional roller coaster is like a straw fire: the flame flares up and flares again, but it has no embers and does not glow for long. A man quick to fervour is quick to collapse. Being filled with God, however, brings an inner fire, a glow – it is no passing wave of emotion, and its fire can be fanned at any time.