FANATICISM. - Fanaticus is usually connected etymologically with fanum "temple," so that fanaticus would be equivalent to "belonging to a sacred temple" (CIL, V, 3924).
F. in today's sense is the condition of those who, believing themselves invested with a religious, civil or social mission, in addition to a singular obstinacy in their ideas, resort to every means, even violent, to make them triumph.
The first, as far as is known, to be called fanatici in Latin were the priests of Bellona (CIL, VI, 490 etc.), who on certain days of the year danced furiously, lacerated their flesh and finally, having fallen into delirium, predicted the future to those present. The same title was later attributed to the Galli of Cybele (Juvenal, Sat., 2, 112), and of other divinities (CIL, IV, 2155; VI, 2234). The term was then also applied to indicate one who was possessed by some numen or subject to a divine inspiration (Cicero, De divin., 2, 57).
As a consequence of the claimed divine inspiration, it follows that these subjects uphold their ideas to the point of wanting to impose them by force and violence. Two concepts therefore meet in the same initial meaning of f.: one essential, the other consequential. Fanatics are essentially people inspired by the divinity, visionaries, illuminati. Fanatics uphold their visions or their inspirations by all the means at their disposal, to the point of reaching the worst extremes. The strictly religious use of the word broadened in common usage to mean being possessed by an idea, not only in the religious field but also in the profane, and acting in accordance with it whether appropriately or inappropriately.
In the study of this phenomenon, which affects the individual but more often a group of people or a sect, medicine, history, psychology and theology meet on mixed ground.
To classify it within the schemes today in use in forensic medicine, the fanatic is a paranoiac, in whom the content of the delusional idea is constituted by the mystical or religious representation in general, patriotic, reformatory or revolutionary. As a common foundation of all these varieties there is always a delusion of grandeur, megalomania, egocentrism, from which derive errors of judgment and conflict with one's environment; and furthermore there is the uncontrolled use of means to make one's own idea prevail. In the religious field this individual already has his name consecrated in the Gospel, pseudo-prophet, and a recent historical image is the well-known Davide Lazzaretti of Arcidosso (cf. E. Lazzareschi, David Lazzaretti, il Messia dell'Amiata, Brescia 1945).
Of f. there can exist historical, environmental, physiological and psychic causes. But a perennial element of causality is alive and powerful in every kind of f., and consists in passion, which is always in itself intolerant.
Also in mental contagion, which often sows this kind of religious, political or social delirium, so much so that f. is more a social than an individual phenomenon, passion can do much, it being demonstrated that those particularly inclined to contagion, after paranoiacs and paranoid personalities, are the so-called passional types, according to Heymans' characterological classification.
This explains how, remaining in the truth, if the individual is normal, the phenomenon is not possible. And if accusations of f. could even be directed at the Catholic Church by its adversaries, to the point of making the very development of Christianity in the first three centuries, the martyrs, the great mystics and ascetics, the rise and development of the Crusading movement, the punishment of heretics by recourse to the secular arm and other phenomena of the collective life of the Church be believed products of f. (cf. G. Mascherini, L'intolleranza e i suoi presupposti, Turin 1909, pp. 31, 150, etc.; Dictionary of philosophy and psychology, ed. J. M. Baldwin, I, p. 223), this is explained only by an arbitrary interpretation of the facts, by the abnormality of individuals or generically by heterodox deviations, doctrinal or practical, of some members of the Church.
Sects, on the other hand, secret societies, factions, particularistic groups, not open toward more general ideals and visions, almost mysterious in their procedures, are the suitable ground for manifestations of f. Here we speak not only of religious sects or factions, but also civil and political ones. A kind of f. is chauvinism, a degeneration of patriotism.
Manifestations of f. in politics are linked to the various forms of "rightism" and "leftism," demagogic and for the most part merely verbal exasperations of the politico-social positions of left-wing parties. Thus in "subversivism," that is, in the negative aspect of revolutionarism, marked by an attitude of systematic opposition to the government, of hostility to the powers of the State, of activating a state of tension among the masses, of violence in act or at least potentially threatened, of disintegration of public order; in "statolatry," an attitude of overvaluation of the functions and powers of the State, surrounded by an idolatrous myth of the State itself, as an absolute entity to which all must be subordinate; in nihilism, in anarchist movements, in terrorism of any hue whatsoever that aims at the effect both destructive and intimidating of a systematic violence, pushed to its extreme consequences.