Tongues of Men and Angels: Assessing the Neural Correlates of Glossolalia

TONGUES OF MEN AND ANGELS: ASSESSING THE NEURAL CORRELATES OF GLOSSOLALIA John J. McGraw The accelerating popularity of Charismatic Christianity has brought with it a host of new sensibilities and ritual practices. Glossolalia, or ‘speaking in tongues,’ stands out among these as a particularly dramatic innova- tion. Typically staid churchgoers, once touched by the Holy Spirit, begin to utter strings of syllables that some claim to be the ‘language of angels.’ Recent neuroimaging studies have highlighted differences in the brains of subjects performing glossolalia in comparison to those same subjects sing- ing a Church hymn. An investigation of the neural correlates of glossolalia highlights the importance of studying the bodily dimensions of ritual practice. But an informed analysis does not reduce social and behavioral complexities to physiological changes; rather, juxtaposing the correlates of human action from a variety of perspectives—in this case the social, the bodily, and the behavioral—suggests productive new approaches to the study of ritual. Having received the attentions of numerous scholars during the 20th and 21st centuries, glossolalia provides an excellent test case for this correlational approach to human action. Glossolalia probably derives its inspiration, and much of its scriptural support, from episodes in Acts of the Apostles and in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians.1 Therein lay examples of glossolalia and xenoglossia. Considered to be the language of angels2 or even the pre-Babel ‘original’ human language,3 glossolalia comes out as a set of unintelligible utterances by the inspired speaker. Sometimes another member of the con- gregation may attempt to translate this speech into the vernacular but mostly it is left to flow out uninterpreted and free of denotative meaning.4 Xenoglossia, in contrast, is the vocalization of a foreign language unknown to the speaker.5 1 Coogan, Michael David, et al. The new Oxford annotated Bible. 2 1 Corinthians 13:1. 3 Mills, Watson E. Speaking in Tongues, 2. 4 Samarin, William. Tongues of Men and Angels, 159–173. 5 Goodman, Felicitas. Speaking in Tongues, xv.; Malony, H. Newton and Lovekin, A. Adams, Glossolalia, 8. © John J. McGraw, 2011 | doi:10.1163/9789004225343_005 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. John J. McGraw - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:51:11PM via free access 58 john j. mcgraw To the outsider who stumbles upon a Pentecostal revival, the sight of a flailing mass loud with moaning and cryptic utterances can be disori- enting, to say the least. But for the Pentecostal himself, this once arcane practice has become doctrinal fixture and a uniquely beloved expression of faith, sure evidence of ‘baptism with the Holy Spirit.’6 A source of considerable conjecture, numerous ‘explanations’ of these practices have been suggested since Biblical times. In Acts, the writer recounts an episode when the Holy Spirit came upon the followers of Jesus and manifested ‘tongues of fire’ upon their heads causing them to speak in foreign languages: . they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and aston- ished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language?’7 The bestowal of this ‘gift of tongues’ by the Holy Spirit on the feast of Pentecost lends the modern sect its name. But even at the beginning, during the height of the Pentecostal miracle, skeptical witnesses were willing to shrug it off as nothing more than drunkenness.8 Paul thought of glossolalia as just one of many spiritual gifts, gifts he considered to be superfluous in comparison to more fundamental Christian virtues: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”9 Paul’s poetic discussion of love in First Corinthians has become a mainstay of Christian wedding cele- brations though few wedding-goers appreciate the polemical nature of the passage. While Paul valued the gift of tongues enough to declare his own superiority at it compared to the Corinthian hacks whom he chastised, he also warned them against taking the practice too seriously. Far better, says Paul, to speak five intelligible words than ten thousand in a tongue.10 6 Mills, Watson E. Speaking in Tongues, 5; Spittler, Russell. Glossolalia, 670; Synan, Vinson. The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 254–255. 7 Acts 2: 1–8. 8 Acts 2: 13. 9 1 Corinthians 13: 1–2. 10 1 Corinthians 14: 18–19. John J. McGraw - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:51:11PM via free access tongues of men and angels 59 During the two millennia that have passed since Paul wrote these words, glossolalia has persisted in the Christian tradition as an undercurrent—an occulted river—that has only bubbled to the surface on rare occasions. But with the rise of Pentecostalism in the early 20th century United States, glossolalia would gush forth to attract renewed attention. A great many scholars would attempt to explain this arresting phenomenon, an apparent atavism in the century of Metropolis and relativity. William Samarin, a linguist who studied glossolalia at length, defined it as “a verbal behavior that consists of using a certain number of conso- nants and vowels in the constitution of a limited number of syllables that in turn are organized into larger units that are taken apart and rearranged pseudogrammatically.”11 Samarin came to the conclusion that none of the instances of glossolalia he analyzed possessed the structure of a viable language. He maintained that “glossolalia is fundamentally not language. All specimens of glossolalia that have ever been studied have produced no features that would even suggest that they reflect some kind of com- municative system.”12 This is in direct contrast to the claims of xenoglossia in Acts 2 and the instances of apparent xenoglossia witnessed by early adherents of Pentecostalism such as Charles Parham and the students of his Bethel Bible School: “A remarkable claim made during these meetings was that the students, Americans all, spoke in twenty-one known languages, including French, German, Swedish, Bohemian, Chinese, Japanese, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Russian, Italian, Spanish, and Norwegian.”13 Parham and his students were the first to identify the gift of tongues as evidence of baptism with the Holy Spirit, thus sparking the Pentecostal conflagration. One of these students, William Joseph Seymour, was responsible for the 1906 Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles which many see as the inaugura- tion of modern Pentecostalism.14 The phenomenon that these proselytes experienced a century ago was proof positive to them of divine interven- tion; some would begin missions to far flung parts of the globe without any language training, fully convinced that the Holy Spirit had supplied them with the necessary tools for speaking to any group.15 Many contem- porary Pentecostals are unwilling to make strong claims about the valid- ity of xenoglossia; for them, it is enough that glossolalia serve as a ‘private 11 Samarin, William. Tongues of Men and Angels, 120. 12 Ibid., 227. 13 Synan, Vinson. The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 90–92. 14 Ibid., 97–100. 15 Parham, Charles. Kol Kare Bomidbar, 31–32. John J. McGraw - 9789004225343 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 05:51:11PM via free access 60 john j. mcgraw prayer language.’16 But according to Samarin’s work, even this must be an illusion. Glossolalia does not possess the necessary elements of language and simply could not function as a system of communication.17 If this speech practice is not a language then why do its practitioners engage in it? Pentecostals ritually induce glossolalia because it provides a ‘religious experience’ and because “. it is evidence of ‘being filled with the Holy Spirit’.”18 Glossolalia serves as both a demonstration of divine favor and as a powerful, and uncanny, experience. Psychological studies have provided varying interpretations of glossolalia. Some consider it to be indicative of a mental disease,19 while others think it promotes psychological well-being.20 This chapter will avoid such normative judgments and proceed from a novel approach, namely that glossolalia promotes neural and behavioral disinhibition, specifically disinhibition resulting from selective downregulation of circuits in the prefrontal cortex of the brain.21 Further, this neurologically significant property—its ability to engender a typically mild altered state of consciousness—helps to illuminate the ritual purpose of speaking in tongues. Glossolalia creates a state of mind that facilitates transitions between oppositional cultural values. These include control/spontaneity, individual/group, and sacred/ profane. The ability of glossolalia to facilitate transitions between such values suggests it to be liminal in nature.22 Glossolalia and the Brain One of the most recent investigations of glossolalia, by Andrew Newberg and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Spirituality and the Mind, employed neuroimaging in order to clarify what occurs in the brains of glossolalists during the ritual practice.23 Newberg and 16 Liberman, Mark. “Private Prayer Language.” 17 Samarin, William.

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