BMCR 2004.10.11, Laura Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly

Laura Nasrallah, An Ecstasy of Folly: Prophecy and Authority in Early
Christianity. Harvard Theological Studies, 52.  Cambridge, MA:  Harvard
University Press, 2004.  Pp. 310; figs. 20.  ISBN 0-674-01228-3.
$25.00 (pb).

Reviewed by Stephen Felder, University of California, Irvine
(swfelder@xxxxxxx)
Word count:  1538 words
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As the subtitle suggests, this is a book that explores the relationship
between the discussion of prophecy in early Christianity and struggles
over identity, power, and knowledge. On one level, Nasrallah's argument
revolves around the differing ways Tertullian and a contemporary source
in Epiphanius' Panarion responded to Christian prophets in the early
third century. But, on another level, Nasrallah is challenging one of
the conventional meta-narratives of early Christian history, the idea
that prophecy/charismatic experience of the early church was replaced
by institutional and hierarchic forms in subsequent generations. Max
Weber's model of religious development, largely based on Adolph Von
Harnack's history of early Christianity which emphasized charismatic
origins followed by routinization and institutionalization, is the
primary target for her critique, but she also seems to want replace the
role of meta-narratives in modern analyses of early Christianity. In
her case, she advocates a "model of struggle" which sees the debate
over prophecy as rhetorical maneuvering by specific individuals
attempting to articulate a Christian identity based upon specific
notions about epistemology, in particular, notions about how, and how
much, we can know of the divine.

In analyzing this struggle over prophecy, Nasrallah argues that two
discourses, the discourse of rationality and madness, and the discourse
of the periodization of history, structure the debate. That is to say,
in the sources she examined, each of the authors takes a position on
"ecstasy" and madness, attempting to define the relationship between
charismatic Christian experience (specifically prophecy) and
"madness"/reason. Similarly, these same authors attempt to place
themselves, and their community, into some sort of historical framework
that articulates the role of the Spirit in that epoch. By placing
Christianity within a certain position vis a\ vis "rationality" and by
defining their present moment within a larger historical narrative,
each polemicist hoped to define the source of true knowledge of the
divine as a means of establishing his community's authority and
constructing a self-identity identity as the "true" Christian.

In her first chapter, Nasrallah surveys the various "taxonomies" of
dreams, madness, and ecstasy current in this era (1st-3rd centuries
C.E.). She engages in a relatively brief survey of Artemidorus'
Oneirokritikon and then moves on to a more lengthy treatment of Plato's
taxonomy of "madness." According to Nasrallah, Plato saw four kinds of
madness: manic-mantic, a madness that provides release in times of
crisis, poetic madness, and the madness of the soul trying to ascend to
God. Obviously where one places a prophetic experience in this taxonomy
would have implications for the relative spiritual value of any
prophetic utterance produced in such a state. She then moves on to
outline the debate between Tertullian and what she calls the
"Anti-Phrygian source" (Ephiphanius, Panarion 48.1.4-13.8). In the
Septuagint version of Genesis 2:21 we read that the "Lord cast an
ecstasy upon Adam and he slept." In a nutshell, the Anti-Phrygian
source asserts that this "ecstasy" was a kind of "divine anaesthetic"
to keep Adam from feeling pain, but according to Tertullian, "god
brought sleep to the body but ecstasy to the soul," allowing Adam to
"prophesy" upon his return to consciousness. For Tertullian prophecy
arises, or at least can arise, out of ecstatic experience, but for the
Anti-Phrygian source, prophecy is a more rational phenomenon.

In the second chapter she evaluates what is probably the earliest
written treatise on Christian prophecy, I Corinthians. Nasrallah argues
that Paul is not thinking of prophecy as irrational per se, but he does
deploy the discourse of madness, albeit using the terms "wisdom" and
"foolishness," to side with the foolishness of God against the wisdom
of the world. This is part of his larger strategy to get the
Corinthians to reevaluate their own self-assessment as "spiritual"
people. He also uses the "periodization of history" to make this point,
arguing that prophecy, tongues, and spiritual gifts, all of which the
Corinthians possessed, are valuable but limited in this age in the
knowledge of the divine they can reliably produce. While the
Corinthians think of themselves as pneumatikoi, they are really
psychikoi, and perhaps even sarkikoi. So Paul's treatment of prophecy
is not designed to provide an overall theory of religious epistemology
but to get the Corinthians to redefine their own spiritual status,
which he does by siding with the "foolishness" of God against the
"wisdom" of this age, devaluing the ecstatic experience of the
Corinthians as a marker for spirituality, and insisting that this
present age knowledge of the divine is limited ("now I know only in
part ..." I Corinthians 13:12).

In the third and fourth chapters Nasrallah examines Tertullian's
arguments about prophecy, resisting the tendency to scour de anima for
signs of "Montanism" and instead deploying her "model of struggle" to
understand how his comments on prophecy reflect his positions on larger
issues of identity and epistemology. She argues that Tertullian's model
of the soul is central to his exposition of prophecy. Tertullian
rejected the Platonic idea of the tripartite soul, along with Plato's
preference for the intellect in the pursuit of knowledge. Tertullian
argued against the opposition between body and soul, claiming instead
that the soul was created at the same moment as the body. For him
prophecy takes place in a kind of ecstasy, and this is positive, a sign
of God's activity. He also believed that he was living in a period of
spiritual gifts and prophecy, and he was not surprised that prophets
were continuing to speak for God in his age; this is what he would
expect in an epoch in which the Spirit's activity was at its apex.

In the fifth chapter, Nasrallah explores the critique of the "New
Prophecy" propounded in Epiphanius' Panarion. In one section of
Panarion (48.1.4-13.8), Nasrallah detects a source that seems to be
contemporaneous with Tertullian and responds to the kind of prophetic
activity Tertullian was endorsing. Nasrallah chose her monograph's
title from this source, "ecstasy of folly" being a label applied by the
Anti-Phrygian sources to the new Christian prophets, whose ecstatic
experience seemed not only irrational but at odds with other sources of
divine knowledge. Still, Nasrallah acknowledges, they are not claiming
that the Christian prophets are engaged in some kind of Bacchic frenzy;
rather they are people lacking in sound judgment, and it is this sound
judgment, or rationality, which characterizes true prophets.

Nasrallah concludes that these texts are not interested in defining
reason or "madness" or in offering a theory of the periodization of
history, rather they are "using these discourses . ... to shore up
their own authority and that of their community, to establish a
community's identity and borders over and against others, and to
delimit realms of knowledge -- to fix the boundaries of what can be
known and how it can be known." (p. 198)

To sum up, Nasrallah refutes the (stereo?)typical narrative of early
Christian prophecy. Instead of seeing I Corinthians as a an example of
the vibrancy of first-century prophecy that will fade into "rational"
institutional Christianity by the third century, Nasrallah suggests
that Paul was arguing for an inferior role for prophecy in the first
century and that in the third century we find a still-vibrant debate
over the role of prophecy in the local church, with various parties
claiming other groups' prophets are not legitimate or authoritative.

Along these lines, this book makes several important contributions to
the study of early Christianity. First, and probably most important,
Nasrallah demonstrates the centrality of prophecy, visions, dreams, and
ecstatic experience in the epistemological debates of the ancient
world. While some sociological models tend to see these experiences as
marginal, in the ancient world this was not the case. Access to
knowledge of the divine was mediated through such experiences, at least
for many people, and discussion over which of these experiences were
reliable was an important component of any identity construction.

Secondly, Nasrallah's emphasis on "periodization" in the narratives she
explores helps to articulate the centrality of historical perspective
in early Christian self-definition. In other words, Nasrallah
demonstrates that Christians' self-understanding was (and is?)
dependent on how they understood their place within a larger Christian
history. Her approach serves as a critique for those Christian
histories that have too readily followed Eusebius' paradigm of the
inevitable growth and triumph of Christianity.

This leads me to Nasrallah's final contribution, her emphasis on
"struggle" as a model for exploring Christian history. While her
approach is, itself, still a "model," it overcomes some of the
teleological tendencies of modern interpretations of ancient
Christianity. She does this first by underscoring the role of
periodization in a Christian community's self-understanding and then by
exploring the nature of the struggle (for identity, authority, etc.)
taking place in individual moments of history rather than trying to fit
it into some grand narrative.

Nasrallah's book should be read, not only by those interested in
prophecy in early Christianity, but by all those struggling to describe
the nature of ancient Christianity without succumbing to the
meta-narrative of Christianization. Those interested in a philosophical
treatise on ancient epistemology will not find it here, but they will
find an exploration of a kind of "popular" epistemology current in the
ancient world and a valuable source for those interested in the social
and cultural history of the ancient world.