REACTIONS TO PSYCHO-CHRISTOLOGY

REACTIONS TO PSYCHO-CHRISTOLOGY

 (BY KOENRAAD ELST )

In Flanders, the Catholic-dominated press has kept very quiet about Dr. Somers approach to Jesus.  Most theologians have kept mum.  The Vatican has not reacted.  It had put some Jesuits to work on this theory, but they did not publicly speak out.  Perhaps they are aware of its explosive potential.  Perhaps they are, on the contrary, not worried at all, because earlier psychopathological studies about Jesus had also not toppled Christianity.

But those earlier theories had been put forward by staunch atheists who had been a bit intemperate and triumphalistic in the presentation of their case, which made it sound less scientific and less convincing.  Moreover, psychology then was not what it is now. Then, there was an Albert Schweitzer to write an in-depth reply which had convinced many believers that there was nothing to worry, that this was just another of those far-fatched hypotheses that anti-Christian skeptics used to come up with.1 But now, no man of the stature of Albert Schweitzer has come forward with a reply.  And this time, the psycho-analysis of Jesus is being presented sobrely by a man who was a faithful servant of the Church for most of his life, and who knows not only psychology, in a more advanced form, but also the philological and theological aspects of Bible research.

A comment on Dr. Somers work was written by the KUL (Catholic University Leuven) theologian Leo Kenis, who denounced the book as assuming the Bible text to be historical, and as not understanding the Biblical language game, etc.2 A leftist weekly has collected a few more reactions, notably those of Prof.  Etienne Vermeersch, another ex-Jesuit, now staunch opponent of Church and religion; and of Prof.  Edward Schillebeeckx, the famous Flemish theologian teaching in Nijmegen, Holland.  Let us have a brief look at their objections.

To be continued......

REACTIONS TO PSYCHO-CHRISTOLOGY (BY KOENRAAD ELST ).....2

1. Paraphrenia does not exist.  It is an outdated category in psychopathology, not even mentioned in American manuals of psychiatry.

It is a fact that in the US, the paraphrenia syndrome has been subsumed under the more general category of paranoia.  But in continental Europe, the fine distinction between the two is certainly being maintained.  Even otherwise, it would only be a change in name-tag: the diagnosis of at least a psychopathological condition of the paranoia family would remain in place.  The symptoms remain symptoms, even if the condition they indicate gets a less precise definition or another name.

2. This approach forces modern categories on ancient cultural phenomena.  What would now be considered a disease was something divine in those days.  Vincent Van Gogh was considered a madman in his time, but a genius today.

Just like physical diseases have been diagnosed on the leftovers of people who died one hundred or ten thousand years ago, because physical diseases have remained the same all along, mental afflictions can also be diagnosed because they have also remained the same.  In fact, terms like epilepsy and paranoia were coined by Greek doctors, so these diseases were known in their time, and were considered as diseases.  They were not that precisely defined and only known to very few initiates (not to Jesus audience), but at least they indicate that human psychopathology has not fundamentally changed over the millennia.  The fact that the same psychological phenomena were interpreted differently, not as disease but as ghost-possession or god-inspiration, only goes to confirm the thesis that what was deemed a sign of divinity by Jesus (and other prophets) followers, may in reality have been a pathological symptom.

The best proof that the diagnosis remains the same in spite of cultural differences, is the fact that contemporaries of Jesus considered him mentally disturbed.  The pharisees say: Now we know that you are possessed by a devil (John 8:52).  According to the Gospel of the Hebrews, an apocryphal text (i.e. kept out of the Church canon, not because of unreliability but because of theological inconvenience), Jesus family wants him to get baptized, because they hope that this ritual may purify him from the impure spirit that troubles him.  And the canonical Gospels confirm that Jesus own family members considered him mentally afflicted: when they hear that his public life has started they want to take him back home, because they thought he had gone out of his mind (Mark 3:21). One could ask: but why have the Gospel editors not scrapped this hint at a mental affliction?  The answer is that they had to counter precisely this allegation from their audiences, so they roundly admitted that people could consider mad what was in fact divine.

As for Van Gogh, if he was a mental patient in the 19th century, he would still have been one today.  It so happens that there is a lot of debate about the correctness of the diagnosis of Van Gogh.³ At any rate, his condition did not prevent him from being a genius in painting.  The point is that between functioning non-mad people and non-functioning mad people, you have shades of gradual mental affliction, which allow people to be somewhat mad and yet function.  This unease may even act as an incentive to remarkable achievements, like a peculiar inspiredness in painting, or a kind of charisma in a wandering god-man.  Nevertheless, the revelations such people get, no matter how creatively they integrate them, are at any rate the products of their own minds, not messages from God.

3. The Bible stories do not give a historical report about Jesus doings and sayings.  Therefore, no diagnosis of a historical character can be extracted from them.

This stand, taken by modem theologians like Schillebeeckx, is in fact dangerously undermining the foundations of the Christian faith.  As Prof. Vermeersch, another ex-Jesuit who renounced Christianity, commented on Prof.  Schillebeeckx reaction: if all these Bible stories are only stories, do you think that the common faithful will remain Christians if they are told the truth about these mere stories?  The crux of the Christian faith is precisely that God has intervened in history, by sacrificing his Only-begotten Son and resurrecting Him.  If the report in the Gospels is not history, then the Christian myth is at best of the same order as all the Pagan myths, and Christianity must forsake its claims to uniqueness and finality.

What is worse from the scholarly angle: this hiding behind the postulated non-historical character of the Gospel stories fatally leaves important features of the Gospel unexplained.  Quite a few episodes cannot possibly be explained as post-paschal glorification or any other of the difficult concepts which the exegetes keep on inventing.  They can only be understood as the report (even if distorted and reworked) of a historical reality.

Prof. Schillebeeckx has said that Dr. Somers should study literary genres and narrativity before he can speak about Gospel interpretation.  As a negative authority argument this is quite ludicrous, since dr. Somers is a Ph.D. in theology with a lot of research publications to his credit, plus a number of other academic titles and achievements besides, and he can talk circles around most theologians, who are a class of specialists not taken seriously by most fellow academics.  He rejects narrativity not because of ignorance, but because on the contrary he has found that classifying the Gospel episodes as different types of narrative does not add up to any explanation and understanding worth the name.  In contrast to the theologians, a number of psychiatrists have declared they could not find any fault with Dr. Somers methodology and conclusions.

To be continued............