Ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice.
—DEUTERONOMY 4:12
In the winter of 2002, in response to a flyer that the administration of a New York psychiatric hospital had agreed to post on its walls, I received a phone call from a man named Richard K.1 A Queens native in his late thirties, Richard was an outpatient at the hospital, where he was receiving treatment for schizoaffective disorder, a subset of schizophrenia that takes into account a pattern of depression or manic depression. He was calling, he said, to tell me about his voices. He had heard them for nearly twenty years.
Richard first began to hear voices when he was fourteen years old and in junior high school. He was sitting at a desk toward the front of his class when he heard laughter and mumbling coming from somewhere behind and to the left of him. Richard, who was by nature a shy, awkward boy and accustomed to being made fun of, turned around to confront what he presumed was a bully. All he found, however, were the silent, bewildered faces of his classmates. It was, he recalls, a terrifying episode, and one that began to repeat itself with unnerving frequency both inside and outside of school. Walking home in the afternoons, Richard would hear someone calling his name from across the street. Invariably, the voice had a tinny quality, as if someone were speaking through an old microphone.
He worried that he was going insane. Richard knew that voices were a symptom of insanity, and to learn what he should do, he confided in his older brother, the only person in the world whom he thought he could trust. His brother assured him that he was not crazy, but he advised Richard not to tell anyone else about his voice. “If you do,” his brother warned, “they’ll pump you full of Thorazine and lock you away forever.” In the late 1970s, this was still a possibility, and Richard remained silent. But the voice continued to speak, and it proved to be both a distraction and a liability. The following year Richard entered a public high school, and in the harsh social atmosphere he was teased mercilessly for his odd, detached demeanor, the result of his attendance to the voice. The cruel treatment only increased his sense of paranoia and isolation. “High school,” Richard told me, “messed up my voices bad.”
High school also caused Richard’s voice to multiply. When he was in the tenth grade, the teasing became so painful that a second voice emerged to help him cope. This voice was different in quality from the first. For one thing, it was internal. Richard could hear it vividly, but only within the confines of his own skull. For another, in contrast to the metallic anonymity of the first voice, this new voice spoke in a tone so specific that Richard could easily visualize its source. It was, he was sure, a tall man in a dark suit and tie, with a shiny ring on his finger. He gave the voice a name to match its image. It was “the Executive,” and its purpose was to order the disorder inside Richard’s head—to counsel him when he needed advice and to soothe him when he became overwrought.
The Executive gave Richard a much-needed sense of psychological security. For the first time he felt he had some guidance on how to think and behave. But at the same time that comfort came at a price, for true to the Executive’s title, he soon began to attract an administration. Before long there emerged a complex political structure inside Richard’s head. First, there was the Troika, a three-member cabinet that advised the Executive on the daily strategy of conducting Richard’s life. Next there was the Full-Movement Council, a legislative body comprised of several hundred members that was called to order whenever an important life decision needed to be made.2 Finally, there was the Anti-Executive, an opposition leader who sought to undermine the beneficent work of his counterpart. Though these voices had begun as a way to structure Richard’s thoughts and emotions, they soon became even more of a distraction to Richard than his first voice had been. When they all spoke at once, he said, it was as if a “symphony of untuned instruments was playing very loudly inside my head.”
Richard’s voices persisted after he graduated from high school, and they continued to play a destructive role in his life. They contributed to the breakup of his marriage (he had not told his wife about them, and she became terrified when he heard voices coming from a radio that was not on) and to a psychotic breakdown, for which he was admitted to the hospital at which he is still being treated, both with psychotherapy and with antipsychotic medication. Richard’s treatment, he told me, has made his voices less frequent, and he is now able to function well. For the past eight years he has worked as a case worker for a city welfare agency, a job of unusually high stress. Yet the treatment has not erased the voices altogether. He still hears them, and he still communicates with them when he is alone.
In at least one case, Richard is grateful that the success of his treatment has been limited. Several years ago he began to hear a voice that he finds neither troubling nor distracting, and he wishes to maintain it at all costs. This voice is distinct from its predecessors, he says, both in origin and in kind. It is so distinct, in fact, that despite his experience with the phenomenon, he is unable to explain what it is like to hear it. When pressed, he resorts to metaphor: “It is like a sign. It is like an impression in my soul. I listen to the impression and I give words to it. I verbalize the impression.” As opposed to his previous voices, this voice does not make Richard feel tainted with madness. On the contrary, it makes him feel gifted. “It is not easy to hear the voice,” he told me. “The universe that we live in screens it out, like a prism refracts light. And so what I hear is almost like prophecy itself.”
This voice, Richard said, is the voice of God.
For the past two hundred years, religion has often felt threatened by medical science in regard to how to interpret religious experiences. This conflict is somewhat different from what is sometimes said to exist between religion and science in general. Those two monolithic forces, with all they include, are often pitted against each other, but in the final analysis their problems can be resolved by banishing religion to its own camp. By all definitions, the domain of science is physical; it searches for empirical facts. The domain of religion, by contrast, is metaphysical; it reaches for causes and ultimate meanings. The skirmishes that characterize the contemporary struggle between science and religion—evolution versus creation, Africa versus Eden, and so on—are therefore best thought of as instances of religion breaching its proper borders. Held to the transcendental, religion is not threatened by science.
With religious experience, however, it is not so easy to draw a neat division of interests. Phenomena such as trances, ecstasies, visions, and voices can be considered to have a metaphysical claim—that they come from God—but they manifest themselves in the physical world, in the realms of biology, chemistry, neurology, and genetics. Even as they gesture toward the heavens, religious experiences stand rooted in the world of science, which can touch them, feel them, examine them, and attempt to explain them. The threat that the religious sometimes feel comes not so much from the success of these investigations as it does from their inevitable effect. In the estimation of religion itself, religious experiences are exceptional and unusual. When passed through the lens of science, these qualities often become pathology. From the perspective of the believer, the result is the degradation of a divine entity.
In most cases this couldn’t be further from the point of medical science’s interest in religious experiences, which is clinical. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James observed that many of the notable men and women in history who have heard religious voices and seen religious visions have also been prone to fits of depression, anxiety, obsessions, and compulsions. They have been the reclusive, the anguished, the neurotic, and the maladjusted among us, people who today would likely attract a psychiatric diagnosis. What is more, religious experiences have often been the direct cause of mental pathology. Direct contact with God, if there is such a thing, appears to be one of the more painful experiences known to humankind.3
No figure offers a better example of this than Muhammad, who Islamic tradition states received his revelation from Allah atop Mount Hira in 610 CE. According to Muslim belief, Muhammad climbed Hira to partake in a series of spiritual exercises, and on the seventeenth night of Ramadan he was visited in a cave by the Archangel Gabriel, who descended from heaven and ordered Muhammad with a single word: “Recite!” As a rule, prophets are initially resistant to their calling. Muhammad didn’t flout this tradition. “I am not a reciter!” he protested. Like all prophets, however, he was ultimately overwhelmed by the divine presence. Against his will he found himself speaking what was to become the ninety-sixth sura, or chapter, of the Holy Quran:
Recite in the name of the Lord who created!
He createth man from a clot of blood.
Recite: and thy Lord is the Most Bountiful
He who hath taught by the pen,
taught man what he knew not.
Muhammad reportedly received and spoke these words in a trance, and when he came to, he was in a state of utter turmoil. Hearing the divine voice had been so wrenching, so out of the realm of ordinary experience, that it drove him to despair. He couldn’t be a prophet, he thought. He must be possessed or a madman—or, worse, a poet. Hysterical, he ran to his wife for protection, cowering in fear. In a panic he nearly threw himself from the mountain to his death. In time, the early Islamic historians wrote, his anguish lessened, but it never fully disappeared. Each time he was visited by Gabriel—and he was for a period of several years, as the text of the Quran accumulated—Muhammad was also visited by an all but intolerable psychological pain. “Never once did I receive a revelation,” he reportedly said, “without thinking that my soul had been torn away from me.”4
Stripped of their religious elements, Muhammad’s experiences are strikingly similar to those of many voice-hearers today who are under psychiatric care. Marius Romme and Sandra Escher, the psychologists whose research inspired the formation of the Hearing Voices Network, have described three phases that characterize a typical course of voice-hearing: the “startling phase,” in which the sudden onset of voices causes anxiety, confusion, and fear; the “phase of organization,” in which the hearer struggles to find a way to cope with his experience; and “the phase of stabilization,” in which the hearer develops a more consistent way of living alongside his voices.5 In the way that it caused what a psychiatrist today might call panic attacks, suicidal ideation, and mood lability, leading to a partial recovery, Muhammad’s revelation fits neatly into this scheme.
And yet an appropriate reply to this kind of medical interpretation is that an experience such as Muhammad’s cannot be stripped of its religious elements without, so to speak, losing its soul. Divine voice-hearing and other religious experiences are able to withstand physiological analyses. They would even be able to withstand the elucidation of their causes, if science could find them. What they can’t withstand is the popular assumption that in being investigated and described by science, as they have been for several centuries now, religious experiences have lost their claims to spiritual veracity. The imposition of science’s interest in pathology onto religion’s interest in value and meaning does a sort of annihilative violence. It kills the very thing it wishes to understand.
This, at any rate, has been a frequent refrain of modern religious writers for whom scientific thought has been interpreted as a thick barrier against belief. For instance, in 1995 the religious philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff published a book-length study of divine speech based on the assumption that since the eighteenth century the claim that God speaks has become disreputable among civilized people. “What we want to know,” he explained, “is whether we—intelligent, educated, citizens of the modern West—are ever entitled to believe that God speaks.” Wolterstorff is solidly on the side of divine voice-hearing, but that he believes his is the minority position is clear from how mightily he labors. Under the forbidding gaze of Enlightenment philosophy, particularly the work of John Locke (“Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything”), Wolterstorff consumes nearly three hundred pages mounting a vigorous defense, marshaling a torrent of complex linguistic theory to the task. After much difficulty he finally decides that, yes, we moderns are “entitled” to believe that God speaks.6
For other writers the “voice of reason” has posed less of a philosophical than a spiritual problem. In his book Hearing Things, about “spiritual arts of listening” during the American Enlightenment, the historian Leigh Eric Schmidt traces this current of emotion through the work of late-twentieth-century intellectuals. What he illuminates is a deep sense among many that we are living through a period of spiritual “hearing loss”—“a predicament of listening, a fracturing of words and revealer, a loss of God’s living voice.” This sense of loss, which is often visceral and anguished, is in Schmidt’s estimation tied up with a popular narrative that pits religious faith against all the currents of “modernization.” In the words of the Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau, whom Schmidt quotes, the West has suffered irreparable spiritual damage at the hands of industrialization and commercialization and overpopulation and secularization. “Progress” has muzzled God:
Before the “modern” period, that is, until the sixteenth or seventeenth century, [Holy Scripture] speaks. The sacred text is a voice…. The modern age is formed by discovering little by littlethat this Spoken Word is no longer heard, that it has been altered by textual corruptions and the avatars of history. One can no longer hear it…. The voice that today we consider altered or extinguished is above all that great cosmological Spoken Word that we notice no longer reaches us: it does not cross the centuries separating us from it. There is a disappearance of the places established by a spoken word, a loss of identities that people believed they received from a spoken word. A work of mourning.7
This sense of nostalgia for a time in which the heavenly sounds—the “music of the spheres”—could be more easily heard is not difficult to identify in popular culture as well. Its notes can be heard in the backlash against pervasive advertising, in the popularity of contemplative havens such as meditation classes and yoga studios, and even in the phrase noise pollution. And by the strange physics of sentiment, it is real because it feels real. Modernity has achieved a measure of victory because many perceive that it has. As Richard K. said to me, it is difficult today to hear the voice of God. The universe that we live in screens it out.
But as Schmidt correctly points out, when looked at from a different vantage point, this mournfulness can seem misplaced. Not everyone, it seems, has been playing by the rules of the Enlightenment. Richard is a case in point. Though raised as a Jew, when he first heard the voice of God, he converted to Christianity and began to attend a Lutheran congregation on the western end of Long Island. The congregation he joined was charismatic; it emphasized the importance of direct religious experiences such as prophesying, faith healing, and a second baptism in the Holy Spirit. Charismatic churches grew out of an even more ecstatic strain of evangelical Christianity known as Pentecostalism. It is a form of worship that adds speaking in tongues to the spiritual mix and, in little more than a hundred years of existence, has become one of the most robust faiths in the country. There are now an estimated twenty million self-described Pentecostals in the United States. Globally, the faith’s rise has been even more remarkable. It has been projected that there will be more than one billion Pentecostals by 2050. “For better or worse,” the historian Philip Jenkins has written, “the dominant churches of the future could have much in common with those of medieval or early modern European times.”8
Even those Western churches that discourage charismatic religious experiences tend in practice to encourage it. Most mainstream evangelical congregations, whose members make up a significant proportion of the American population, are overtly hostile to religious enthusiasm, feeling that it distracts from the spiritual authority of Scripture. But as the anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann has recently shown, by placing an emphasis on the spiritual resonance of the Bible these congregations foster the very experiences they seem to reject. In a study of a typical evangelical church in southern California, Luhrmann found that nearly half of the congregants reported some type of sensory hallucination. These experiences were produced, she argues, through the simple act of prayer, which when pursued in an intensive enough manner can lead to a psychological state perfectly suited to unusual sensory experiences. Like Schmidt, Luhrmann concludes that the modern world is not quite so modern after all. In mainstream American churches, she writes, prayer “becomes the conduit of anomalous psychological experience it was for the early 19th century reformers, the medieval ecstatics, and the early pastoralists who sought to be still and hear the voice of God.”9
Even further, prayer becomes the conduit for an anomalous experience that, in historical terms, is not anomalous at all. To be sure, a glance back at the history of Western religion reveals a buzzing hive of religious experiences: visions, ecstasies, trances, tongues, faith healing—and that’s just in the Bible. But the voice of God has always had pride of place as the most constant and common of religious experiences. Some of this can be explained in terms of imitation, of course—that is, because prophets and saints described their religious experiences as the voice of God, others do as well. But this explanation has an inadmissible circularity: What about those whom William James called the “pattern-setters” of religious experience? Why did those original prophets and saints hear or claim to hear the voice of God? Why, since the age of the pagan Greeks, has divine voice-hearing been so intimately intertwined with the dedicated religious life? Why has it been the emblem of a personal communion with God?
John Bunyan, the preacher and author, first heard the voice of God in the early 1650s while he was gambling on the village green in Elstow, a small town in the south of England. He was playing a game called cat, in which an oval piece of wood is struck with a bat on one end, made to spin into the air, and then struck again. He had just made his first hit when, as the cat rose, he heard a voice “dart from heaven into [his] soul.” He tells the story in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, his spiritual autobiography. “Wilt thou leave thy sins, and go to heaven?” the voice asked. “Or have thy sins, and go to hell?” Reviewing the cost of the many sins he had committed thus far—fornication, inebriation, blasphemy—Bunyan concluded that leaving them now couldn’t possibly save his soul. He stayed in the game. But the voice wouldn’t relent. In the days and weeks that followed, it continued to harangue him:
Now about a week or fortnight after this, I was much followed by this scripture, Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you… and sometimes it would sound so loud within me, yea, and as it were call so strongly after me, that once above all the rest, I turned my head over my shoulder, thinking verily that some man had behind me called to me, being at a great distance methought he called so loud.
…Suddenly there was, as if there had rushed in at the window, the noise of wind upon me, but very pleasant, and as if I heard a voice speaking, Didst ever refuse to be justified by the blood of Christ?
Then breaking out in the bitterness of my soul, I said to myself, with a grievous sigh, How can God comfort such a wretch as I? I had no sooner said it, but this returned upon me, as an echo doth answer a voice, This sin is not unto death.
…Those words did sound suddenly within me, He is able: but methought the word able was spoke so loud unto me, it showed such a great word, it seemed to be writ in great letters, and gave such a jostle to my fear and doubt (I mean for the time it tarried with me, which was about a day) as I never had from that, all my life either before or after that.10
The history of Western religion as we know it today is about three thousand years old. It stretches from biblical Judaism, which considered Yahweh to be a sort of muscular tribal god, better and stronger than that of its enemies, to the myriad spiritual innovations of the modern world. Throughout this history, God has been purported to speak to man in a dizzying array of forms. Reluctant Moses heard God in a bush and immediately tried to squirm out of his prophetic mission. Samuel, during a time when “it was rare for Yahweh to speak,” heard God calling his name as he lay in bed; it took him three times to realize that it was not his boss calling him. Augustine heard a child’s singsong voice leading him toward Scripture as he paced nervously in his garden. “Tolle lege!” it cried. “Take it and read!” Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, claimed to have been visited by an angel named Moroni, who directed him toward a record, inscribed on golden plates, of God’s presence in America. But for all the ways in which God’s voice has purportedly spoken, it is striking how consistently, across broad theological and ecclesiastical divides, the experience has been described in indirect and even downright paradoxical terms. Again and again, people who claim to hear the voice of God bracket the experience in quotation marks, as though the experience is real but not in the way we might imagine, as though it is forceful but not quite a normal perception.
John Bunyan’s experience exemplifies this descriptive obliqueness. In the many instances of divine voice-hearing that he recounts in his autobiography, he never quite hears something. It is always “as if” he hears something. He does not hear God; he “thinks” he hears God. The voice does not come to his ear or to his mind; it comes to his “soul.” Each time Bunyan describes the heavenly voice, he removes it from the physical world by deliberate qualification.
In this careful linguistic maneuvering, Bunyan has illustrious companions. Those who directly equate divine voice-hearing with the human senses are outliers in the history of religion. The majority have taken a detached, metaphysical approach. Sometimes, as in the case of Antoinette Bourignon, a seventeenth-century Flemish mystic, the gulf between God’s voice and the human sense of sound is expressed with a Bunyanesque “as if.” One passage in her autobiography reads:
She spent whole nights in prayer, oft repeating: Lord, what wilt thou have me to do? And being one night in a most profound penitence, she said from the bottom of her heart: “O my Lord! What must I do to please thee? For I have nobody to teach me. Speak to my soul and it will hear thee.” At that instant she heard, as if another had spoken within her: Forsake all earthly things. Separate thyself from the love of the creatures.Deny thyself.
At other times writers have devised their own, often quite poetic, formulations of the asensory quality of the divine voice. To the author of the book of Kings, God’s message came to Elijah as a “still small voice.” To Saint Ambrose, in the fourth century, it came “without utterance…without the sound of words.”12 To Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century German mystic, the voice of God spoke words that were “not like those which sound from the mouth of man, but like a trembling flame, or like a cloud stirred by the clean air.”13 Thomas à Kempis, a fifteenth-century German monk, wrote in his influential Imitatio Christi, “Blessed are those ears that receive the whispers of the divine voice, and listen not to the whisperings of the world. Blessed indeed are those ears that hearken not to the voice which soundeth outwardly, but unto the truth which teacheth inwardly.”14 Finally, in sixteenth-century Spain, Teresa of Ávila, the most articulate and gifted of devotional writers, described what she referred to as the “locution”—in the words of one scholar, “supernatural words that fall upon the inner ear with the authenticity of actual speech.” Teresa wrote:
The words are perfectly formed, but they are not heard with the physical ear. Yet they are received much more clearly than if they were so heard; and however hard one resists it is impossible to shut them out. For when, in ordinary life, we do not wish to hear, we can close our ears or attend to something else; and in that way although we may hear we do not understand. But when God speaks to the soul like this, there is no alternative; I have to listen whether I like it or not, and to devote my whole attention to understanding what God wishes me to understand.15
Why has the language of divine voice-hearing been so frequently and scrupulously removed from the language of the bodily senses? One answer to this question is that the experiences are reflections of religious doctrine. Mystics are often assumed, incorrectly, to be individualistic in the extreme, revolutionary followers of their own spiritual consciences. But even for those for whom this is remotely true, the religious atmosphere has already been set in place by thinkers of such persuasiveness that their interpretations of Scripture and faith have become impossible to avoid inside or outside of the cloister. As the classicist Gilbert Murray once noted, religious development occurs by a process of agglomeration. New ideas settle upon the old, like sand on a coastal shelf.16 And one of the fundamental sedimentary layers of Western faith is the conception of God as an exclusively metaphysical force—a being incompatible with the human body.
Some theologians have expressed this idea in terms that leave no room for misunderstanding. Maimonides, the twelfth-century rabbi and philosopher, argues in his Guide for the Perplexed that even the biblical prophets did not hear God by way of the physical senses, as they so often purport. Rather, they used the language of the senses to refer to the idea of God. How else can man explain his spiritual connection with the deity, Maimonides asks, than to use the language of the senses? The senses are all man knows; they are how he understands and refers to the world. But to think that man could actually receive a physical visitation from heaven runs counter to the divine separateness of God.17
Maimonides’s viewpoint has more conventionally been expressed in terms of a sensory hierarchy, with the metaphorical, spiritual senses placed at the top of the heap and the literal, bodily senses placed at the bottom. A fifth-century analysis of Genesis by Saint Augustine exemplifies this scheme. Taking the act of reading as his starting point, Saint Augustine divided the sense of vision into three parts: “When we read this one commandment: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ we experience three kinds of vision. One through the eyes, by which we see the [written] letters; a second through the spirit, by which we think of our neighbor even when he is absent; and third, through an intuition of the mind, by which we see and understand love itself.” The psychologists Theodore Sarbin and Joseph Juhasz have termed these three classes of sensory experience the “corporeal,” the “imaginative,” and the “intellectual,” and it is their understanding that the religiously devout tend to value them in ascending order. “The mystical world-view regards these three types of [experience], from corporeal to intellectual, as progressively more real, since they relate to objects progressively less subject to change,” Sarbin and Juhasz write. “Thus a basic duty of man is to struggle for ever higher levels of [experience], ever greater detachment from the world, regardless of the content of the experience.”18
That the Augustinian hierarchy has remained an apt and influential model for divine sensory experience is suggested by Richard K.’s voice-hearing, which fits the scheme both in kind and in valuation. Even today, Richard hears all three classes of voices, and although he has come to accept them all, the only one he cherishes is what he calls his spiritual “gift.”
Nevertheless, doctrine alone can’t explain why descriptions of divine voice-hearing have so often been metaphorical. After all, theology is written by men and women who have had their own encounters with faith, and in the overwhelming majority of cases those encounters were in the metaphorical mode. Experience, in other words, precedes and dictates doctrine. What is more, doctrine can’t explain why hearing, and not some other sense, has been the metaphor of choice for mystics and saints in search of a way to describe a direct perception of God’s presence. Why is sound so suitable as a spiritual metaphor?
Two twentieth-century philosophers, both Jesuits, have tried to answer this question. The late Walter Ong, of Saint Louis University, wrote of the ear as if it were the primary organ of the spirit. To Ong, hearing was primal to faith because it is the most intimate and existential of senses. “Sight isolates, sound incorporates,” he wrote in Orality and Literacy, the book for which he is best known. “Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer…. By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense…. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is a harmony, a putting together.”19 It was an argument he had made fifteen years earlier in The Presence of the Word:
Sound is more real or existential than other sense objects, despite the fact that it is also more evanescent. Sound itself is related to present actuality rather than to past or future. It must emanate from a source here and now discernibly active, with the result that involvement with sound is involvement with the present, with here-and-now existence and activity…. Moreover, since sound is indicative of here-and-now activity, the word as sound establishes here-and-now personal presence. Abraham knew God’s presence when he heard his “voice.” (We should not assume that the Hebrews necessarily thought of a physical sound here, only that what happened to Abraham was more like hearing than anything else.) “After these events God put Abraham to a test. He said to him, ‘Abraham.’ He answered, ‘Here I am’” (Gen. 22:1). As establishing personal presence, the word has immediate religious significance, particularly in the Hebrew and Christian tradition, where so much is made of a personal, concerned God.20
Jacques Ellul, of the University of Bordeaux, wrote in similar terms about the holiness of sound. In The Humiliation of the Word, Ellul decried the visuality of the modern West as having resulted in a “rupture with God” and produced what can be read most profitably as a prayer for the spoken word as an evanescent spiritual force, the object of belief itself: “Thus speech is basically presence. It is something alive…. The word is never an object you can turn this way and that, grasp, and preserve for tomorrow or some distant day when you have time to deal with it…. The word exists now. It is something immediate and can never be manipulated. Either it exists or it doesn’t.” Like Maimonides, Ellul reduced divine voice-hearing to a metaphor for God’s presence:
It goes without saying that when we read that God speaks, it does not mean that he pronounces words and that he has a vocabulary and follows syntactical rules. This comparison is used of course to help us understand the action and person of God. Only a very obtuse and rankly materialistic person could fail to understand what the Bible says so clearly. He would have to refuse to accept this language for what it is: metaphorical, an analogy, not an anthropomorphism.21
For those of us who are not devout, who have no experience with the search for the meaning of God or for a spiritual presence in human life, arguments such as these can be taken either as fodder for skepticism or as the illumination of a foreign sphere of experience. What it cannot be taken as is the final word. Couched in metaphorical terms, divine voice-hearing does not wither away but remains, however removed from the sense of sound, as an experience. Something happens when a believer claims to hear the voice of God.
In 1964, the psychologists Theodore Barber and David Calverley asked seventy-eight secretarial students to close their eyes and listen to a recording of Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” at the time the best-selling single in history. The subjects did as they were asked, but Barber and Calverley never placed the needle on the record. Instead, after thirty seconds of silence, they asked the volunteers to rate the vividness of their experiences. Nearly half stated that they had clearly heard the song in their head; 5 percent stated that they had actually heard the song playing in the room. An “auditory image” could be generated from suggestion alone, Barber and Calverley concluded.22
The White Christmas test, as it is known, has been replicated several times and in several different ways, both with psychiatric patients and with “normals,” and it is often cited in support of the point that, as the psychologist Richard Bentall has written, “many more people at least have the capacity to hallucinate than a strictly medical model implies should be the case.”23 More specifically, however, it has helped highlight the point that a person’s state of mind can play a critical role in the production of hallucinations. The subjects of the experiment were neither schizophrenics nor professed hallucinators, but Barber and Calverley were able to make several of them hear a song simply by telling them that they should expect to hear one. By way of a suggestion, a group of nonhallucinators were temporarily made into hallucinators.
The role of mental state had been noted in the literature of hallucination before Barber and Calverley. Indeed, it has always been the most sensible way to explain why the content of hallucinations varies according to the time and place in which a person lives. For example, visions of the Devil are more often reported in the developing world than in the West. Today, most hallucinations reported by psychiatric patients have technological themes (for example, the CIA planting a radio receiver in a person’s fillings), but in the Middle Ages they were invariably religious. People living in tribal cultures are more susceptible to hallucinations of ancestors than people living in industrialized cultures. The superstitious Victorians even saw ghosts more frequently than people of other eras.
But the White Christmas test suggests the importance of a more specific and more personal state of mind than that which is dictated by cultural atmosphere. It suggests that people who hallucinate are more credulous than people who do not. It suggests that the capacity to hallucinate is directly related to the tendency to believe.
The hypothesis that hallucinators are uncommonly credulous was tested more explicitly in 1985 by Murray Alpert, a psychiatrist at New York University. Alpert told three groups of patients—hallucinating schizophrenics, nonhallucinating schizophrenics, and hallucinating alcoholics—that they would hear voices as they listened to white noise. The results of the experiment supported the results of the White Christmas test. Alpert’s hallucinating subjects were much more likely than the nonhallucinators to report hearing voices and were even more likely to do so if the instructions Alpert gave them were detailed.24
Studies such as these have helped underscore the importance of suggestibility in human experience. They have also played a key part in the search for a universal model of hallucination, something that researchers have been attempting to devise for several decades without much consensus. The psychologists Peter Slade and Richard Bentall, for example, have used the evidence spurred by the White Christmas test in support of an argument that hallucinators suffer from a dysfunction of the ability to distinguish between public and private events, a skill that they refer to as “reality discrimination.”25 But although the lack of this skill is clearly related to the subject of divine voice-hearing, the credulity of hallucinators can lead to a psychological state that is perhaps even more closely related to the phenomenon and more directly evocative of the experience to which it refers: passivity.
The subject of passivity has been raised in relation to hallucinations by the philosopher Daniel Dennett. In his popular book Consciousness Explained, Dennett observed that hallucinators often claim to be in some sort of reverie when they hear their voices or see their visions. Indeed, a passive state of receptivity seemed to Dennett to be so endemic to reports of the phenomenon that it had to be critical. “Hallucinators usually just stand and marvel,” he wrote. “Typically, they feel no desire to probe, challenge, or query, and take no steps to interact with the apparitions. It is [therefore] likely…that this passivity is not an inessential feature of hallucination but a necessary precondition for any moderately detailed and sustained hallucination to occur.”26
There are a couple of reasons not to take Dennett’s conclusion at face value. The lack of objective scrutiny on behalf of hallucinators might, after all, be due to the simple fact that the experience can be terrifying and therefore hardly conducive to a clinical stance. There is also the influence of culture to consider; as contemporary voice-hearers well know, hallucinations are a psychiatric phenomenon meant to be feared, not observed. And yet there is also a great deal of evidence in support of Dennett’s observation. Hallucinators usually do “just stand and marvel.” My father, for example, was often in a pseudohypnotic state when he heard his voices. During hallucinatory episodes, my mother remembers, he would stare off into the middle distance, “lost to the world.” And if this is true of voice-hearers such as my father, who was not religious, for divine voice-hearers it is nearly definitive. From Saint Paul on the road to Damascus to Richard K. in his charismatic church, believers who have claimed to hear the voice of God or his messengers have claimed to do so in a state of psychological surrender, if not outright trance.27
Several prominent scholars of religion have drawn the conclusion that passivity is the psychological state that lends the literature of divine voice-hearing its indirect quality. “True auditions,” Evelyn Underhill wrote in her classic Mysticism, using the traditional term for voices, “are usually heard when the mind is in a state of deep absorption without conscious thought.”28 William James argued similarly in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “[W]e cannot, I think, avoid the conclusion that in religion we have a department of human nature with unusually close relations to the transmarginal or subliminal region.”29
And yet, as both Underhill and James knew and lamented, it is just this state of absorption or passivity or trance—whatever one wants to call it—that has made the saint, the prophet, and the mystic seem to be natural subjects for psychiatry. It was a territorialism that angered Underhill almost as much as what was attempted by the literal-minded on the opposite side. Fighting on the “eternal battle-ground” of religious experience, she saw the dogmatic forces of science and religion foolishly duking it out:
On the one hand we have the strangely named rationalists, who feel that they have settled the matter once and for all by calling attention to the obvious parallels which exist between the bodily symptoms of acute spiritual stress and the bodily symptoms of certain forms of disease…. French psychology, in particular, revels in this sort of thing: and would, if it had its way, fill the wards of the Salpêtrière with patients from the Roman Calendar…. As against all this, the intransigent votaries of the supernatural seem determined to play into the hands of their foes. They pin themselves, for no apparent reason, to the objective reality and absolute value of visions, voices, and other experiences which would be classed, in any other department of life, as the harmless results of a vivid imagination.30
The armies of science and religion are still fighting, of course. But the people about whom they fight remain largely noncombatants, doing their best to attend to the sounds beyond the fray and then straining past those into a world of silent messages, which they deliver to the world in words we can understand.