Religion and Spirituality in Psychiatry

Theological Perspectives 25of meaning, is best known for his Discourse onMethod (1637). In response to the emergence ofa widespread dissatisfaction with the Aristotelianmethodology undergirding the intellectual discourseof that day, Descartes sought to developan alternative philosophical method based on afoundation of absolute certainty.(23) Beginningwith a determination to “reject as absolutelyfalse everything in which I could suppose theslightest reason for doubt,” Descartes set out toestablish an “entirely indubitable” remainder onwhich certain knowledge might be established.(24) Descartes believed he had found such afoundation in the human psyche ; his conclusionwas that he, Descartes, was “a substance, of whichthe whole essence or nature consists in thinking,and which, in order to exist needs no place anddepends on no material thing.” (24) Hence wehave Descartes’ nearly universally recognizeddictum: “I think, therefore I am.”Perhaps because much of what he says echoedthe then two-thousand-year-old legacy of Plato,Descartes’ ego – the “I” – came over time to beidentified with the soul. The human essence –the thing that made humans unique – was anineffable, immaterial, and immortal res cogitans, a “thinking thing.” The body, meanwhile,was ultimately nothing more than a temporary,passive extension of the soul, a res extensa . Inpart because of its explanatory power and inpart because of its surface resemblance to somestrands of biblical anthropology, Cartesian dualismbecame the dominant paradigm for thinkingabout what it meant to be human. Some versionof Descartes’ anthropology became axiomaticfor all fields of inquiry, including theology and,less directly, medicine. The suppositions of theCartesian model also shaped the translation andinterpretation of scripture and popular piety,such that it became common for Christians toassume that the biblical account of the humanperson was essentially dualistic – that humanswere immortal, immaterial souls temporarilyinhabiting mortal, material bodies.Yet, as biblical scholarship and theologicalscholarship have shown, Christianity has virtuallyno stake in defending Cartesian (or any othervariety of) dualism. Dualism was in fact at thecenter of some of the earliest and most persistentheresies faced by nascent Christianity. Theseheresies are collectively referred to as varieties ofGnosticism , which, generally speaking, maintainsthat the material creation, including the humanbody, is unimportant except in a temporary,strictly utilitarian sense. The limits inherent inmaterial corporeality are to be ignored, struggledagainst, or fled, as often, as intensely, and as soonas possible. This earthly life is ultimately illusory;many Gnostics have gone so far as to likenit to a fleshy prison. But Gnosticism is patentlyinconsistent with the biblical narrative, whichfrom the beginning insists on the goodness ofcreation and the significance of embodied humanlife, which the second-century Church FatherIrenaeus called “the glory of God.” Contrary tothe Gnostic insistence that women and men ultimatelyare immaterial souls, the biblical portrayalof humanity is conspicuously corporeal; from theperspective of scripture, we are in this life andthe next never less than our bodies. As WendellBerry so succinctly explains the biblical story ofthe creation of Adam:The formula given in Genesis 2:7 is notman = body + soul; the formula there issoul = dust [earth] + breath. According tothis verse, God did not make a body andthen put a soul into it, like a letter in anenvelope. He formed man of dust [earth];then, by breathing His breath into it, hemade the dust live. The dust, formed asman and made to live, did not embody asoul; it became a soul. “Soul” here refersto the whole creature. Humanity is thuspresented to us, in Adam, not as a creatureof two discrete parts temporarily gluedtogether but as a single mystery.(25)Thus, the categories so typical of modernthought, such as the distinction between thespiritual and the physical, or the body and thesoul, or the natural and the supernatural, arefrom the perspective of scripture deeply problematicand useful only in a limited heuristic