Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun Emotion excited by the contemplation of God; piety, or a sense of piety.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun Capacity for religious affections or worship.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The capacity of a person to worship, or to experience a religious belief

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

theo- + -pathy

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Examples

  • [4] surely it is a fine one. a soul of quick feelings & ardent passions absorbed in theopathy. an infatuation — I may say a drunkenness of devotion — which we must love.

    Letter 267 1797

  • The various emotional states (“pleasures and pains”) we experience structure themselves into “six classes”: imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense.

    David Hartley Allen, Richard 2009

  • For the person for whom sympathy and theopathy are primary pursuits, imagination and ambition remain modes of interaction, but modes that are transformed.

    David Hartley Allen, Richard 2009

  • The second group combines sympathy, the orientation of personal intersubjectivity, and theopathy, the person's relationship with the divine.

    David Hartley Allen, Richard 2009

  • Sympathy and theopathy replace imagination and ambition as “primary pursuits,” the fundamental modes of experience and interaction.

    David Hartley Allen, Richard 2009

  • In some, these modes are pathological, and theopathy is often only rudimentarily developed.

    David Hartley Allen, Richard 2009

  • Hartley's model of the self in terms of imagination, ambition, and self-interest, and then of sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense, is dynamically complex.

    David Hartley Allen, Richard 2009

  • This “annihilation” is not quasi-mystical obliteration; rather, it is a reorientation toward, or discovery of, a higher self of sympathy, theopathy, and the moral sense.

    David Hartley Allen, Richard 2009

  • Rate It this kind of hateful religious extremism is a symptom of the theopathy endemic in the USA

    OpEdNews - Quicklink: Adoption Agency Rejects Catholic Parents; 2005

  • Sénancourt had found his way through a vague theopathy to autumnal brightness, late-born hope, and tranquil reconcilement with existence.

    A History of French Literature Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. Edward Dowden 1878

Comments

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  • Emotional experience brought on by religious belief. (from Phrontistery)

    May 24, 2008