Gift of Tongues

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A sound rises in a gathering that no grammar will hold. The syllables come fast and fluent, shaped like speech, weighted like speech, yet they decode to nothing the speaker could write down or translate afterward — and the speaker, asked what was said, will say only that the words were given. This is the gift of tongues: a flow of vocalization taken, in several strands of Christianity, to be language granted by the Holy Spirit and not produced by the will. Scholarship names the phenomenon itself glossolalia, compounding the Greek glossa, “tongue,” with the verb lalein, “to speak” — a clinical-sounding label for an experience its participants describe in the opposite register, as the most intimate possible loosening of the tongue. Ecstatic vocalization of this kind recurs under many names and far beyond any single religion, but within Christianity it carries a charter, a controversy, and a long argument with itself that begin in the same two documents.

The descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, with tongues of fire above each figure, in El Greco’s painting (c. 1600), Museo del Prado, Madrid — El Greco, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The two charters

The Christian warrant for tongues rests on two New Testament passages that do not describe the same event, and the gap between them has organized every later dispute. The first is Pentecost. In the second chapter of Acts the apostles, gathered fifty days after the resurrection, are filled with the Holy Spirit and begin, in the King James rendering, to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gives them utterance; the crowd of pilgrims drawn from across the Mediterranean diaspora is astonished to hear, each in the language of his own birth, the mighty works of God. The miracle here is one of comprehension. The barrier broken is between peoples, the reversal of Babel’s scattering of tongues: the apostles speak, and Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and the rest each receive the message whole in their own speech. Read strictly, this is not unintelligible utterance at all but its opposite — real languages, understood. The technical term for speaking a genuine human language one has never learned is xenoglossy, and the Pentecost account, taken at its word, is the founding instance of it.

The apostles receiving the Spirit at Pentecost, in Titian’s altarpiece (c. 1545), Santa Maria della Salute, Venice — Titian, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The second charter points the other way. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul addresses a congregation in which a gift of tongues is being exercised in the assembly, and the problem is precisely that no one present can follow it. Here the utterance is unintelligible by nature: it requires a second, distinct gift — interpretation — before the gathering can know what has been said. Paul does not forbid the practice; he prizes it, and reports that he himself speaks in tongues. But he ranks it, and ranks it low, against the gift of prophecy. Prophecy edifies the whole church because it is understood; tongues, uninterpreted, edify only the one who speaks. The one who speaks in a tongue, Paul writes, speaks not to men but to God, for no one understands him. His verdict in the fourteenth chapter is blunt and has been quoted against enthusiasm ever since: yet in the church I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue. The criterion is communal benefit. An utterance that leaves the assembly no wiser, however genuine its source, has failed the one test Paul applies to every charism: does it build up the body.

So the tradition inherits two incompatible pictures under one name. In Acts the gift is heard as known foreign languages and serves to gather the nations; in Corinth it is intelligible to no one without translation and threatens to fracture the very gathering it visits. The history of tongues in Christianity is largely the history of reading these two together — sometimes by treating Corinth as the ordinary case and Pentecost as a unique founding sign, sometimes by reading Pentecost as the pattern and demanding that true tongues be real languages, sometimes by collapsing the distinction altogether. The word glossa sits inside both accounts and refuses to mean one thing.

Recession and survival

After the apostolic generation the gift did not vanish from Christian memory, but it receded from the center of church life. The second-century New Prophecy movement that gathered around Montanus in Phrygia — the movement later called Montanism — made ecstatic utterance central again and drew the suspicion of the emerging episcopate precisely on that account, the bishops distrusting a prophecy that spoke in the first person as the voice of the Spirit and could not be cross-examined. Across the patristic and medieval centuries scattered reports of inspired or unknown speech attach to particular saints and revival movements, but the mainstream churches, having institutionalized prophecy into scripture and office, treated free glossolalia as marginal, the property of sects and enthusiasts rather than of the ordinary sanctified life. The gift was never quite extinguished and never quite normal. It surfaced in the radical Reformation, among the Camisards of the Cévennes, in early Quaker meetings, in the Irvingite congregations of the nineteenth century — each time as a sign that the apostolic age had broken back in, and each time read by the surrounding church as evidence of either a fresh outpouring or a disorder to be contained.

The modern revival

The practice returned to the center of a whole movement at the turn of the twentieth century, out of the American holiness revivals that were already teaching a baptism in the Holy Spirit as a second work of grace beyond conversion. The decisive reframing belongs to Charles Fox Parham. At his Bethel Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, on the first day of 1901, a student named Agnes Ozman spoke in tongues, and Parham drew from the episode a doctrine that would define a tradition: that tongues is the “Bible evidence,” the initial physical proof, that a believer has received the baptism of the Spirit. The experience was not merely a gift among gifts but the necessary outward sign of an inward event.

William J. Seymour, the preacher who led the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles from 1906, photographed in the early twentieth century — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

From Topeka the teaching passed to one of Parham’s hearers, William J. Seymour, and through him to Los Angeles. In April 1906, at a house on Bonnie Brae Street and then in a former livery building at 312 Azusa Street, Seymour led the revival that became the seedbed of worldwide Pentecostalism. The Azusa Street mission ran for years as a continuous, multiracial, frequently chaotic outpouring in which speaking in tongues was the signature manifestation, and its participants carried the fire outward across the United States and overseas. From those revivals grew the Pentecostal denominations, for whom tongues remained, in much teaching, the evidentiary mark of Spirit baptism. From the mid-twentieth century a second wave — the charismatic movement — carried the practice across the denominational walls into Catholic, Anglican, and mainline Protestant churches, where it was received as a renewal gift and a sign of “baptism in the Spirit” without necessarily the older insistence that it be the initial proof. In its charismatic and Pentecostal forms together, glossolalia became one of the most widely practiced ecstatic phenomena in the modern religious world, and the single most distinctive thing the tradition does with the body in worship: the gift is sought, welcomed, and in many congregations taught as something into which a believer may grow.

The structure of an utterance

Researchers who have recorded and analyzed glossolalic speech with the tools of linguistics and anthropology have reached a convergent description of what the sounds are, considered as sound. The two founding studies appeared in the same year. Felicitas Goodman’s Speaking in Tongues: A Cross-Cultural Study of Glossolalia (1972) drew on fieldwork among apostolic congregations in Mexico City, Maya Pentecostals in the Yucatán, and a church in Hammond, Indiana, and argued that the utterance is an artifact of a hyperaroused mental state — in the vocabulary of the period, a trance — its rhythm and intonation patterned by the arousal itself rather than by any semantic content. William Samarin’s Tongues of Men and Angels, published the same year out of a five-year sample of recordings made in Europe and North America, reached the linguistic conclusion directly: glossolalia is phonologically structured but meaningless as language — it is not internally organized as a grammar, carries no stable vocabulary, and bears no systematic relation to the world the way a natural language does. What it does instead is recombine the sound-patterns the speaker already commands; the inventory of consonants and vowels in a person’s glossolalia tracks the inventory of the languages that person speaks. Samarin’s later analysis named the phenomenon a kind of regressive speech, fluent and confident but stripped of the grammatical machinery of ordinary language.

Several further findings of this literature, surveyed in Watson Mills’s research guide of 1986, have held. Glossolalia is learned and communally cued: it is acquired in settings where it is modeled and expected, and produced most readily in the heightened arousal of corporate worship. It is not, in Samarin’s account, simply a symptom of dissociation or loss of self-command; practitioners typically remain aware of their surroundings, can begin and end the utterance, and describe the experience not as seizure but as release — a loosening rather than an overthrow of the will. The sound requires no special endowment: the vocal apparatus everyone already has is sufficient to produce it, which is part of why it can be taught and caught.

None of this settles what the speaker takes the utterance to be, because the two descriptions answer different questions. To establish the phonological structure of a sound is to describe its surface; it is not to identify what, if anything, moves the tongue. The believer’s claim is not that glossolalia is a natural language with a grammar waiting to be found — Paul already granted that it is unintelligible without interpretation — but that its source is the Spirit, and the source is precisely the thing a phonetic transcript cannot register. The linguistic account and the charismatic account can both be wholly correct at once, because they are not rival answers to one question; one maps the form of the utterance, the other names its origin, and the map of a form is silent about its origin.

Inspired speech elsewhere

Ecstatic and inspired vocalization is not peculiar to Christianity, and the tradition has never claimed it was. The comparative phenomenology of prayer gives such speech a settled place: in Friedrich Heiler’s typology the spontaneous, formula-free outpouring born of inner urgency is the mark of prophetic piety as against the wordlessness toward which contemplative mysticism tends, and tongues sit squarely at that prophetic pole, where the words come faster than the will can compose them. In the mediumistic traditions consolidated by Allan Kardec — the Spiritism that became the broader movement of spiritualism — a speaking medium voices what is taken to be a discarnate intelligence, and the utterance is read as the speech of another. Among the Siberian and Central Asian practitioners that Western scholarship gathered, often misleadingly, under the single word shaman, inspired speech is woven into a negotiated traffic with spirit-helpers in an altered state. In the ecstatic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia, the discipline of the divine Names aims at a prophetic influx received in a state of heightened concentration. What separates these settings is the account each gives of who or what is speaking — the risen Spirit, the dead, the helping spirits, the Active Intellect — and that account, not the acoustic surface, is what the practice is about. The directed intention of Jewish prayer treated under kavvanah, or the silent tracing of the I to its source in atma-vichara, are not ecstatic speech at all, but they share with tongues the conviction that the deepest prayer moves through a faculty the ordinary will does not govern.

What the gift keeps insisting on

The two charters never reconciled, and the tradition has not needed them to. Pentecost holds out a gift that gathers the nations because it is understood; Corinth holds out a gift that scatters the assembly unless a second gift restores its sense. Between them stands Paul’s single demand — that what the Spirit gives must build up the body — and that demand has done more to shape the practice than any settling of the textual question could. A congregation may prize the gift as the very evidence of the Spirit’s baptism and still place an interpreter beside the speaker, still rank the understood word above the unintelligible one, still measure the fluent rush of syllables against the plain five words that teach. The phonetician can transcribe those syllables to the last consonant and will have caught everything except the one thing the speaker means by them. That is not a defeat of the analysis; it is the boundary the analysis was always going to reach. The gift offers no grammar to be cracked and no language to be matched, only a tongue moving faster than its owner — and the whole weight of the practice rests on the claim that the speed comes from somewhere, a claim no transcript was ever built to hear.

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