Holy Madness

Abstract

In Chapter 9 I discussed predictive prophecy and its problematic relationship to history and human freedom within a Book and a plot ascribed to a divine Author, the end of whose story is contained in its beginning. Now I want to turn my attention to prophecy as a cover term for a cluster of phenomena that in ancient thought constituted the “prophetic experience” and manifested a state of mind variously referred to as holy madness, divine folly, the foolishness of God, and crazy wisdom. These “mad”¹ phenomena include prophecies, dreams, visions, oracles, divination, and ecstasy—all grounded in the figure of a talking deity. Debate, ancient and modern, swirls around the epistemological implications of the prophetic experience. As Laura Nasrallah shows, at the center of debate are questions of “how the divine communicates with humans” and “how to understand [such communications] properly”—their intelligibility:

Arguments about the phenomenon … to which I shall refer using the term “prophetic experience(s)” … are launched in contexts of struggle and debate. These struggles are especially concerned with epistemology, with what can and cannot be known, and with the authority gained and religious identity constructed from claims to perceive the communication and intervention of the divine….

Nasrallah 1–2

The prophet is a fool, the man of spirit is mad….

Hosea 9:7

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men….

1 Corinthians 1:25

As things are, the greatest of good things come into being for us through madness, when, that is, it is given with a divine giving.

Plato, Phaedrus 244a

My argument is that grasping [the] concept [of the overlap of psychosis and spirituality] fully … lies at the heart of making sense of the universality of the sacred and religion in human culture.

Clarke 110