Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment (review)

Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. By Leigh Eric Schmidt. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. xiii + 318 pp. $37.50.

"You called up in the sky
You called up in the clouds
Is there something you forgot to tell me . . .
tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me."

(from Joan Osborne, "St. Teresa," 1995).

For much of Christian history, the ear was the way to God. "Hearing things" meant hearing God's voice directly, without mediation. One could not see God, but one could hear the voice of the divine. Now, of course, "hearing things" is a colloquialism that suggests mental instability, and perhaps the need for a quick dose of some psychotropics. The street people I encountered every morning during graduate school on my way to the campus of the University of California at Berkeley heard things, and talked back in response, but everyone else ducked their heads and walked along quickly, at once embarrassed and disheartened at the collapse of state mental health services and the consequent intrusion of psychoses into the public square.

Along the way, as well, God has stopped speaking—or at least it seems that way to many, both Christians and non-Christians. The street corner St. Teresa, the drug-dealing angel of Joan Osborne's Grammy-winning song, cries out to the sky, vainly importuning God for leaving her in her situation, without so much as a sentence of explanation or comfort. The "talkative" God of the Bible has fallen silent, frustrating those who await the still, small voice. "Is there something," we want to ask God, "you forgot to tell me?"

But of course Christians and others still hear the voice of God. God has not fallen silent for everyone, even if the presence of God might be represented in Hollywood by the avuncular George Burns or the hipster Alanis Morissette. Meanwhile, postmodern theorists have "unmasked" the ethnocentrism implicit in the valorization of the eye over the ear, the visual over the auditory, which came as part of the whole package of false promises of the Enlightenment. Reliance on the ear was characteristic of the primitive and the African, Enlightenment thinkers asserted, hence the western emphasis on the visual as the surer road to knowledge. The eye could not be fooled as the ear could—by ventriloquists, spiritualists, and all manner of illusionists who delighted in deception, and whose relentless assault on the unreliable ear is chronicled in fascinating detail in Schmidt's brilliant book.

Leigh Schmidt gives an extended and wonderfully entertaining intellectual history of how "hearing things" underwent such a transformation. Along the way, we learn a great deal about fascinating but relatively unknown characters from the Enlightenment era and the nineteenth century, who developed the field of acoustical studies, delighted audiences with Mickey-Mouse voice effects produced by inhaling hydrogen gas, and played around with sound trumpets and other means of transmitting sound. In western thought, hearing the voice of God moved from being a divinely spiritual moment to being inevitably trapped in the world of illusion (at best) or the asylum, the home for those who heard things. Schmidt traces the evolution of our contemporary understanding of hallucination (defined in the 1880s as "perception without an object") and illusion (a false perception). "It is this breakage of the sign, the loss of any presence in these experiences," he argues, "that marks the real undoing of God's listeners . . . disembodied voices . . . had no actuality except in the memories, imaginations, desires, and agonies of those who heard them." In sum, Schmidt's work explains the process of the "normalization of God's silence" (198). "What would you ask if you had just one question," Joan Osborne sings in another tune about God, suggesting again that God's silence is so normal that asking God a question is a fantasy along the lines of "what would you do if...