Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [67]
Paul is not the only religious leader to have been retrofitted with epilepsy. Neurologists have speculated that Muhammad’s visual and auditory “hallucinations” were complex partial seizures. The voice of the angel and the white light that inspired Joan of Arc, they say, did not come from heaven but from her daily ecstatic seizures. Joseph Smith’s pillar of light and two angels—a vision that birthed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism)—may have boiled down to a complex partial seizure. Ditto for the mystics Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux, for Emanuel Swedenborg, who founded the New Jerusalem Church, and Ann Lee, who led the Shaker movement. Even Moses, who led the children of Israel through the wilderness and authored the Pentateuch, does not escape a troubling diagnosis. What, after all, are doctors to make of that encounter with the burning bush?
I called Orrin Devinsky, who directs the New York University epilepsy center, for his perspective. Part of the problem, he said, is that complex partial seizures, the most common form of adult epilepsy, were not medically understood until the mid-1800s. This particular parlor game involves people who lived scores or hundreds of years before that.
“So we’re left with little shards, little fragments of descriptions,” Devinsky said.“Moses at the burning bush.What was happening at the burning bush? He was looking at a bush that was burning but not consumed. Assuming a more rational scientific view, Moses was having a visual hallucination and then he heard ‘God’s’ voice. As a physician, can I say that was consistent with a temporal lobe seizure? Yes. Can I say Moses had a temporal lobe seizure at that time? All I can say is it’s a possibility. It also could have been a genuine religious experience. Or perhaps both.”
For me, at least, a few things do not sit well with the saint-as-epileptic hypothesis. First, there is the imperious snobbery of scientific materialism, which implies that if a person’s brain acts a little bit differently from the “average” brain—slow brain-wave activity or the occasional electrical surge—then anything that person believes is probably distorted, illegitimate, just a little bit crazy. This troubled psychologist William James as well. We would never think of dismissing van Gogh’s art because in his madness he cut off his ear, James said, or throw Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in the trash because its author suffered from epileptic seizures.
And yet,“medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic,” James observed in his famous Gifford Lectures in 1901.“It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate. George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon. . . . And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.”6
My second reservation about reducing spiritual experience to a seizure is this: epilepsy is a horribly debilitating disease, punctuating one’s life with random fits of unconsciousness, short-term memory loss, and often eventual psychosis. It is hard to imagine epilepsy appearing frequently on the résumés of great religious leaders who traveled the Roman Empire with a new religion as did Paul, guided a nation in the wilderness for forty years as did Moses, or led troops into battle as did Muhammad.7
And yet, scientists have identified a connection between the temporal lobes and religiousness. Some say, only half joking, that the temporal lobe is a “God spot.” While this mass of tissue is not the sole trafficker in spiritual experience—many other parts of the brain light up during transcendent moments—it appears to be a major player, necessary but not sufficient.
The God Spot
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