Mind your language
FRANK Sinatra had it and so did Hitler. It is charisma, and we have just celebrat- ed its 51st birthday. I hope it does not live much longer, because it has become one of those empty labels that mean no more than hooray. What happens in such cases is that a new meaning gets attached to an old word that is seldom used. The next step is the dilution of the new meaning, and we end up with a word that signifies neither the old, rare concept nor much else.
In the New Testament the Greek charisma is often used by St Paul. It means a gift of grace, and derives from charis, meaning grace, as used in the angelic salutation to the Virgin Mary. The plural is charismata. In English charisma was first used in the 17th century, though normally the singular was charism, and the plural charisms or charismata. It was always quite a learned word.
The volume of the OED covering the letter C was published in 1893. It illus- trates the biblical usage with a quotation from Bishop Colenso, then a controver- sial, innovative media figure, as they wouldn't have put it. But James Murray in his dictionary gave no hint of the modern meaning of charisma.
The new meaning came from Max Weber, the sociologist. He died in 1920, but his Theory of Social and Economic Organisation was only translated into English (by Henderson and Palmer) in 1947. There it says: 'The term charisma will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, super-human or at least specifically excep- tional powers.'
Within 20 years of its introduction in English it took on a debased life of its own. (In this sense the form is always charisma, never charism, for the singular; as an abstract quality, like whiteness, the plural is seldom used.) Then a funny thing happened. Just as the English word charisma was being applied to every television star or football player, a movement in the Church grew up which made great use of singing, sway- ing, extempore prayer, speaking in tongues, healing and sometimes falling about. These were seen as gifts from the Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit as he was renamed). They were identified with the gifts mentioned by St Paul, and so this movement appropriated the label charis- matic.
The two new meanings of charismatic live happily, each in its own semantic field, insulated from the other. A clergy- man of the charismatic movement may have less charisma than a rock singer who has never read St Paul.
Dot Wordsworth
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