Hearing Voices

by John Wijngaards

Some years ago I was consulted by a business executive who told me she had heard God speaking to her. It happened inside her, she said, but clearly it was a voice. Her story was all the more remarkable because she was an eminently sensible person, not someone given to fantasising. I became convinced she was hearing her conscience, more peremptorily perhaps than we normally do.

Conscience is nothing else than God speaking in our heart, we are often told. Cardinal Henry Newman expressed this view clearly in his writings. I quote a passage from his novel Callista.

“I feel God within my heart.
I feel myself in his presence.
He says to me: ‘Do this. Don’t do that.’
You may tell me that this command is a mere law of my nature, as it is to rejoice or to weep.
I cannot agree to this.
No.
It is the echo of a person speaking to me.
Nothing shall persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from a person external to me . . .
My nature feels towards it as towards a person. When I obey it, I feel satisfaction; when I disobey a soreness - just that which I feel in pleasing or offending some revered friend . . .
An echo implies a voice, a voice a Speaker.
That Speaker I love and fear.”

Now we all know that conscience arises from a mixture of cultural persuasions, parental training and our own rational judgment. And yet, Newman seems to have a point. We are often aware that conscience has an external component. Conscience affects us even if no other person knows what we have been up to. Could God himself/herself actually be speaking to us? If that is true, then we are all mystics. For all normal people seem to have a conscience.

To explore this further, it may be worth our while to reflect on an extreme case of conscience manifested in France.

‘God himself ordered me . . . ’

On the 30th of May 1431 a French woman was burnt at the stake in the city of Rouen. It was the tragic end of a short and dramatic life. Joan of Arc, who was only 19 years old when she died, had proved a formidable general at the service of the French King Charles VII. In two short and tempestuous years, she had lifted the siege of Orléans, defeated the army of the English King Henry VI and his ally the Duke of Burgundy at Patay, and led Charles to his coronation in Reims. Her execution as a heretic was the outcome of a scandalous political plot, the connivance of the English commanding officer, the Earl of Warwick, and Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais. It was a ploy to get rid of a troublesome charismatic woman.

Was Joan a mystic?

I believe she was. For everything she did was in response to ‘voices’ which she claimed to hear, voices which she attribued at times to the Archangel Michael, to St. Margaret or St. Catherine, but which she always interpreted as commands ultimately coming from God. God spoke in her heart, she said. It was God who urged her to take up arms in defence of her country. It was God who forced her to enter the polluted world of politics and to raise her sword in battle.

Joan was a pious girl.

In her birth place Domrémy she had often been observed spending long hours absorbed in prayer in the local village church, her bare knees firmly planted on the hard slabs before the altar. It was a practice she would continue wherever she found herself. On more than one occasion she exasperated her professional military colleagues by insisting that the whole royalist army should go to confession before engaging in combat. She refused to pursue a fleeing enemy on Sundays or feastdays.

Inspiration or illusion?

There is much worthy of exploration in such a paradoxical and complex saint who was canonised by Pope Benedict XV in 1920. The question that fascinates me is: was it really God who spoke to her? And does the same thing happen to me?

Predictably, historians have tried to ‘expose’ the source of Joan’s visions. Rightly so. For the records of any mental hospital document the extent of human fantasies and delusions. I myself recall visiting such an institution and meeting a gentleman who was convinced he had fought Napoleon at Waterloo. Small wonder that some historians speculate that Joan could have suffered a mental illness. Perhaps she suffered from a tumour in the brain, they say, or from tuberculosis that impairs brain functions.

The evidence is not in their favour. Mental illness usually leaves symptoms on the body, but Joan was healthy and strong until the day she died. Neither did she display any sign of intellectual decline during her days in military service or during her trial. She proved a competent general. She handled intricate political situations with sensitivity. She was astute and intelligent in answering the prepostorous questions put to her by her clerical judges. Her subtle replies deftly evaded the traps put her by her interrogators. None of this fits the picture of someone who is mad.

Moreover, her contemporaries were aware of the danger of self deception. When Joan approached the royal court for the first time, the king’s counsellor Jacques Gélu cautioned the king: “Do not lightly alter your policy because of having talked to a a girl, a peasant, so susceptible to illusions.”

The king’s own father, in fact, had suffered bouts of madness. One day he had announced he was made of glass, a delusion no one mistook for a religious revelation. King Charles VII was so much aware of the risk of illusion that his first action was to send Joan to Poitiers where the scholars of the day tested her spiritual and mental sanity. They gave her a bill of good health.

Most important for us, perhaps, is the simple fact that no historian doubts Joan’s sincerity. She really believed that she had heard those inner voices. She committed herself to constant danger on account of that belief. Among the charges brought against her by the ecclesiastical court the principal ones were that she claimed to have received revelations and commands from God, and even claimed that God’s voice had spoken in French and not in English. In the face of death, she never retracted her belief, except for a brief moment when under extreme duress she seemed to waver. But after a night’s anguish, she re-affirmed her claim knowing it meant certain death.

Joan, it seems, was no mental case. At a time her country was in turmoil and her people were at the mercy of murdering and pillaging invaders, she heard the voice of her conscience. “You can do something about it’, she was told. ‘Get up from your knees. Save your king and your nation! Drive the English out! Don’t leave it to others. You yourself are responsible!”

She was convinced these were instructions from God.

Is God our teacher?

We find an intriguing parallel in St. John’s Gospel where Jesus states that God speaks to us. He does so in the so-called eucharistic sermon of John 6, when the Johannine Jesus counters the unbelief of his Jewish listeners. ‘The reason why you do not accept my message’, he tells them, ‘is because you do not listen to what God is saying to you in your hearts.’

These are the exact words:

“No one can come to me
unless he [or she] is drawn by the Father who sent me . . .
It is written in the prophets [Isaiah 54,13]:
They will all be taught by God.
To hear the teaching of the Father
and learn from it
is to come to me.” (John 6,44-45)

The meaning of Jesus’ protest seems clear: “Unless you are spiritual persons, you will never be able to perceive the divine in me. You will not accept me if you do not respond when the Father draws you ‘with the leading-strings of love’ [Hosea 7,4]. Do you not remember that the Prophet Isaiah said: ‘They will all be taught by God’? If you hear the teaching of my Father, if you listen to what the Father says in your heart, then you will not find it hard to come to me and believe in me.”

The phrase ‘They will all be taught by God’ may be compared to a parallel promise in Jeremiah. There God promised that the new covenant of the future would not be one based on external obligations, but a covenant springing from interior knowledge and love.

“I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts . . . None of them will have to teach friend or neighbour to know he Lord because all will know me, from the least to the greatest.” (Jeremiah 31,34)

In the messianic future there will be no need of human teachers and instructors because God himself will teach people by speaking to their hearts. They will know God by their own interior experience of him. This is how they shall be ‘taught by God’.

Scholars point out that the phrase ‘being taught by God’ or, as it was expressed in Jesus’ language Aramaic, ‘to be God’s disciple’, was well known and widely used in Jesus’ day. We find it in Rabbinical texts, in the Qumran documents, in the so-called psalms of Solomon and in the letter of Barnabas. A study of its proverbial use confirms that the phrase was understood as referring to instructions which God gives in the soul.

In the letter of Barnabas (98 AD) the phrase is equivalent to ‘listening to one’s conscience’.

“Again and again I admonish you: become good legislators for yourselves. Give yourselves reliable advice. Cast away all traces of evil. May God, who rules the whole universe, give you wisdom, insight, understanding, knowledge of his commandments and patience. Become then disciples of God by examining what the Lord is asking you to do, and by doing it, so that you may be found just on the day of judgment” (Barnabas 21, 4-6).

We ‘learn from the Father’ by listening to our conscience, by responding to what God is saying to us in the depth of our hearts. This is confirmed by the parallel expression ‘hearing the Father’ which Jesus uses in the same paragraph. We become a disciple of God by listening to him/her day by day.

“Each morning he wakes me to hear, to listen like a disciple. The Lord Yahweh has opened my ear. ” (Isaiah 50,5).

Mystics of conscience

Yes, conscience does arise from cultural imperatives, parental injunctions and the application of our own reason. But God is in it too. God always works through secondary causes. Others may have made us aware of a code of ethics and our own mind may have passed judgment on its validity. In the end we know that we face ultimate Truth and Justice in the demands of our conscience. Through its dictates God does speak to us.

Jesus himself, like Joan of Arc, must have heard the interior voice of his Father when living as a carpenter in Nazareth. He started his public ministry because of an inner commission he heard in his heart. The vision of the Spirit descending from heaven at his baptism in the Jordan was a personal vision. It included hearing his Father speak. It is a vision we only know because Jesus himself must have spoken about it.

It gives me hope.

For if we are sensitive to what our conscience is telling us, we are in touch with God. We have a mystic experience. We feel God’s pull. Somehow, we hear his voice.