Paul in Ecstasy: The Neurobiology of the Apostle’s Life and Thought (review)

In a provocative, long-overdue correction of a primarily cognicentric approach to Paul, Shantz charts a finely nuanced course through the texts in which Paul’s ecstatic religious experience plays a major role in the life and thought of this Apostle, his communities, and the reception of his communities in the broader Greco-Roman social milieu (1 Corinthians 14:18; Romans 8:26; 1 Corinthians 14–15; Romans 15:18–19; 2 Corinthians 12:12; 2 Corinthians 12:1, 7; 1 Corinthians 9:1, 15:8; 2 Corinthians 12:2–4; 2 Corinthians 3–5). These passages touch on ecstatic modes of worship, mention visions and auditory experiences, spirit possession, glossolalia, ecstatic prayer, singing in the spirit, take note of the “signs and wonders” that Paul performed, and refer to being ecstatic for God—an impressive repertoire of Paul’s ecstatic religious experience. Shantz notes the cultural biases against religious ecstasy and their influence on New Testament studies, the consequence of which has minimized or altogether downplayed Paul’s ecstatic religious experience. This resistance, for example, has manifested itself in a variety of confessional polemics—Catholic or Protestant—that observe that Paul opposes ecstatic religious outbursts in his communities, for he downplayed his own ecstatic experiences and dismissed the ecstatic experiences of his community members as divisive and not worth considering; in the notion that Paul’s ideology and theology arose directly from a singular conversion moment—a sole ecstatic experience that explained his use of language that bordered on the ecstatic (transformation, mysticism, intimate union with Christ, his claims of having visions and hearing voices); and in the admission that while Paul had a number of ecstatic experiences in his life, they are nevertheless beyond precise comprehension and analysis because they are experience—a notoriously tricky term to define, and difficult, if not impossible, to capture from textual descriptions of it.

Eschewing these cognicentrically driven obstacles, Shantz moves to a discussion of the cognitive neurology of ecstasy and what that might reveal about Paul’s brain, his ecstatic religious experience, and the ecstatic details in his letters. She develops a neurobiological model of religious ecstasy that she applies to Paul’s brain (chapter 2), voice (chapter 3), and practice (chapter 4). Why this approach? One, it shows that Paul’s experience was not unique or unusual but in line with religious ecstasy in general. Two, his religious experience was not simply of secondary importance to his conscious, rational thought patterns. Three, Paul actively sought these ecstatic experiences and participated in them—they were not the product of later reflections in order to correct ecstatic abuses or downplay them as secondary to his rational thought. Four, the disturbances in bodily equilibrium (deafferentation) Paul underwent are telltale signs of an ecstatic religious experience (whether in body or out of the body). Humans are not bodies encompassed by brains but brains encompassed by bodies—bodies are not secondary to brains but integral to the way both body and brains assess/experience the world. Paul knows what he knows through his bodily experiences of ecstasy. And five, auditory experience of ineffability is the result of neural tuning.

Shantz proceeds to the experiential bases of Paul’s speech by presenting a more complete picture of religious ecstasy that includes a larger set of sensory-cognitive phenomena and a more finely nuanced set of triggers and contexts for ecstatic states than previous studies of Paul’s such states have presented. Shantz argues that a large number of Paul’s comments come under the purview of his ecstatic experiences and, therefore, suggests that ecstatic speech was a common and regular occurrence in his daily affairs and that ecstatic experience habitually informed his thoughts, even when he was not describing an ecstatic event. While not promoting the idea of Paul as shaman, the category is nevertheless helpful in giving an account of Paul’s mixed record of apostolic [End...