Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment

"Faith cometh by hearing" - so said Saint Paul, and devoted Christians from Augustine to Luther down to the present have placed particular emphasis on spiritual arts of listening. In quiet retreats for prayer, in the noisy exercises of Protestant revivalism, in the mystical pursuit of the voices of angels, Christians have listened for a divine call. But what happened when the ear turned to God's voice found itself under the inspection of Enlightenment critics? This book takes us into the ensuing debate about "hearing things" - an intense, entertaining, even spectacular exchange over the auditory immediacy of popular Christian piety. The struggle was one of encyclopaedic range, and Leigh Eric Schmidt conducts us through natural histories of the oracles, anatomies of the diseased era, psychologies of the unsound mind, acoustic technologies (from speaking trumpets to talking machines), philosophical regimens for educating the senses, and rational recreations eleborated from natural magic, notably ventriloquism and speaking statues. "Hearing Things" enters this labyrinth - all the new disciplines and pleasures of the modern ear - to explore the fate of Christian listening during the Enlightenment and its aftermath. In Schmidt's analysis the reimagining of hearing was instrumental in constituting religion itself as an object of study and suspicion. The mystic's ear was hardly lost, but it was now marked deeply with imposture and illusion.

Review :
In this intriguing, heavily researched study, Schmidt considers the interaction between American Christianity and the Enlightenment with regard to hearing in an era when ventriloquism became a popular entertainment and Thomas Edison invented his phonograph. The very tools that had been developed to debunk spiritism were now being used to advance it. The author studies hearing as a cultural phenomenon, both scientific and religious, in this fine interdisciplinary study that sheds much light on a particular period of American history.--Augustine J. Curley "Library Journal " interdisciplinary study that sheds much light on a particular period of American history. showman William Frederick Pinchbeck and his Pig of Knowledge. Schmidt's study offers an important chapter in the genealogy of the modern religious imagination. Who silenced the angels? For an answer, Schmidt turns back to the 18th and 19th centuries to look at Enlightenment philosophers and traveling ventriloquists, at acoustic engineers, anatomists and alienists, each of whom demonstrated in his own way the structures that undergirded claims of the miraculous...This densely argued, fascinating story features a panorama of colorful characters, from the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg to the traveling showman William Frederick Pinchbeck and his Pig of Knowledge. Schmidt's study offers an important chapter in the genealogy of the modern religious imagination.