Book explores hearing as a spiritual sense
Yvonne Chiu Hays
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Leigh Schmidt is the author of
"Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the
American Enlightenment." Photo: Denise Applewhite
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He started looking at the cultural confusion about the relationship between the roles of preachers and charlatans, prophets and impostors. That research surprisingly led him to ventriloquists in 18th-century France.
Schmidt discovered that in 1772, philosopher Joannes Baptista de La Chapelle published a 572-page opus on ventriloquism. La Chapelle described how he recruited a ventriloquist to terrify superstitious people, only to expose the fraud afterward to those tricked. His goal was to prove the gullibility of ordinary people and show how there were more rational explanations for religious experiences like hearing voices.
"I thought this was odd," Schmidt said in an interview. "Why would you turn to a ventriloquist to establish your suspicions about religion?"
In researching his newly published book, "Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment," Schmidt found that hearing has long been marked as a spiritual and emotional sense. However, experiences like hearing heavenly or demonic voices came under particular attack during the Enlightenment, a philosophical movement of the 18th century marked by a rejection of traditional social, religious and political ideas, and the embracing of rationalism instead. To men like Thomas Jefferson and Ethan Allen, reason was the only trustworthy oracle.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment were threatened by the unstable power that immediate revelation possessed, especially when combined with the unruly passions and proclamations of the devout. In order to establish a civil society governed by reason and not religious authorities, it was necessary for the natural philosophers to place sharp limits on divine speech.
In many ways, the campaign succeeded. Schmidt traces the ascendancy of sight and the fall of hearing as a reliable source of information, a process that produced phrases like "seeing is believing." Hearing voices increasingly became associated with trickery or insanity.
"Humorist Lilly Tomlin has remarked, 'Why is it when we talk to God we are said to be praying, and when God talks to us we're said to be schizophrenic?'" Schmidt writes in his preface, providing an example of the long shadow that the Enlightenment cast on spiritual arts of listening.
Schmidt's research delves into speaking statues, staged oracles, magic shows, ventriloquism and the skepticism they fanned among the learned who, in turn, made advances in anatomy, acoustic technology, scientific precision and medical psychology in order to debunk what they saw as pious frauds.
Schmidt points to such figures as physician Benjamin Rush, who graduated from Princeton in 1760. In his "Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind," he wrote on the religious illusions of those who "fancy they hear voices" and pinpointed the ear as the primary organ of false perceptions.
Schmidt, however, is not trying to reinforce the popular notion that mystical hearing has been successfully muffled. In fact, he is saying quite the contrary. The rationalism and skepticism ushered in by the Enlightenment reshaped our sense of hearing but failed to contain the "disruptive" voices that the devout experienced.
"What I wanted to do is take seriously that myth that the Enlightenment destroyed the enchantment of the divine world but also to critique it. We can't keep saying we live in a world in which the angels, prophets and oracles are dead quiet when one of the fastest growing religious movements is Pentecostalism. In that movement, people speak in tongues and receive special gifts to interpret the Spirit's utterances. God speaks among them as a regular part of worship," Schmidt said in an interview.
He notes that the desire for "holy listening" has hardly subsided in American culture. "If anything, the noisier and more frenetic the contemporary world is perceived as being, the stronger that spiritual longing becomes," Schmidt writes.
He cites the popularity of music therapies among alternative healers and the increased attention on "contemplative silences" pursued through various forms of spiritual retreat.
"One of the most striking aspects of contemporary American spiritualities is how much they invest in the gifts of the patient listener and the voicings of feeling and memory," he writes.
In scrutinizing the history of how certain Christian experiences came to be discredited, Schmidt said he hopes he has fostered a better way to think about the sensuous aspects of religion.
"Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment" was published by Harvard University Press.
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