Non-Jews Are Dogs

 Don't shoot the messenger. Jesus says so.

Mental Illness Is a Nonsense Concept

 

An Asian demon.

My Chinese student immediately sees the absurdity of the term “mental illness.” Like a physical illness?

“Mental illness” is a euphemism. We have sadly come to take it literally, and have even come to treating the thing with pills. Given this approach, the problem is incurable.

Older terms are more accurate. The various experiences we call mental illness are experienced subjectively as oppression, obsession, or possession by some will which either inhibits, distracts, or completely suppresses our own. Often, people actually “hear voices” in their head. You could say “out of your mind” or “beside yourself” or “driven to distraction.” But that is only half the equation. If you are out of your mind, who is in it? Who or what is distracting you? The best, most lucid description of the experienced reality we euphemistically call “mental illness” is demonic possession, or demonic affliction.

We refuse to use the terms only because we arbitrarily refuse to accept the existence of demons. Despite the overwhelming evidence—the evidence of “mental illness” itself. People are experiencing demonic wills interfering with their own, and fairly commonly.

Understand this simple truth, understand the problem in these terms, and the cure becomes obvious. You need spiritual assistance. The shamanic approach is to negotiate peace terms with the demon, the “voice in your head.” It does nothing to simply ignore it and pretend it does not exist. The Judeo-Christian approach, more effective, is to cast the demon out, supplanting it with the imminent presence of the one true God.

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first.”

Therefore, it is necessary to occupy the spirit with a “strong man.” 

“if it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. Or how can someone enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house.”

In other words, with a faith in the one true God.

And this approach, unlike that of modern psychiatry, actually works. It is scientifically proven to work.

Mad Canada

I don’t know if you’ve noticed it yet, but most Canadians are mad.

You might object. Who am I to make such a judgement? Isn’t it more likely, if everyone else thinks differently, that I am the insane one? Orwell said, “Madness is a minority of one.” 

And this is indeed how modern psychiatry tends to frame it.

An example of the current madness: this is the ad populum fallacy. Reality is not determined by popular vote. We cannot vote to make the earth flat. 

I believe I have some perspective on this, from studying philosophy, comparative religions, and history, and from living abroad in diverse cultures: China, Korea, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, not to mention across Canada and in the US. I also married into a Pakistani family. 

Surely this allows me to see beyond the common consensus, and judge it.

Canadians are mostly mad.

To be fair, not just Canadians. Koreans are also mad. Americans are mad. Brits are mad. Japanese are mad. Filipinos are sane. Arabs are mostly sane, if you step away from mentioning Jews or Israel. 

What makes the difference? Wealth seems to be part of it: rich people go crazy. And we have always known this: large manor homes are always haunted. There are skeleton closets.

But that, I think, is not the key. Wealth drives you crazy because, as the Gospel warns, wealth drives you away from God. It turns your focus towards the world.

And belief in God, the necessary first premise, is required for sanity. 

In Filipino or in Arab culture, the existence of God is taken as a given.

In Canada, Korea, America, Britain, Japan, even when nominally acknowledged, God is mostly ignored. He seems at most an abstract concept.

You will object that in America there is a distinct and lively evangelical element. There is indeed; that is why there is hope for America. But even in America, this is a counterculture. In the Philippines or Saudi Arabia, monotheism is the mainstream.

In the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles spend most of their time casting out demons. This is their initial mission. In the early church, exorcist was a common ecclesial rank. It was assumed that any pagan converts needed to be exorcised. The rapid spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire, the rest of Europe, and today across Africa, was due to its famed ability to cast out demons.

And the classical gods were demons, as the early Christians indeed identified them. Each was or represented an obsession that could possess the mind.

Broadly, what we now call mental illness.

Now that faith in Christianity is waning, the demons are returning.

God is not just the ground of being, but also the ground of reason; he is the necessary first premise from which anything else and everything else is deduced. This, I think, is evident in Descartes’ Meditations: our warrant that anything else is real is that God is real, and would not deceive us.

Pull that anchor, and we know nothing. We do not even know, contra Descartes, that we ourselves exist. Buddhism challenges this very premise.

This is why in Buddhist and Hindu Asia, without a strong tradition of ethical monotheism, everything is seen as illusion, a moving sea of dreams. Not just the physical universe, either; but chains of induction, systematic philosophy, do not form. Only gnomic aphorisms, bursts of insight.

And the rapid growth of insanity in the developed world is due to the collapse of faith in God. The demons are returning.

On a social level, to give an example of how we have come untethered—without the anchor of God, we no longer understand what human equality means.  Many—it seems most—now think it means people are the same, or even that they all deserve the same life outcomes. There is, for example, the feminist doctrine that men and women are the same and should perform all the same roles in equal proportions.

We can see this is obviously wrong, in athletics. Yet many deny it even here.

Human equality really means equal moral worth; equal worth in the eyes of God. And therefore equal treatment by the law. This is founded on Descartes’s reasoning: God exists; God is perfect goodness; God is just. It follows that God values us equally, in principle, judging us only on our own volitions. For this reason, for God’s sake, we must treat our neighbour as our equal.

Pull God from that equation, and it does not work. If we are not seeing it from God’s view, we are seeing it only from our own. Human worth, good and evil, is then based on our neighbour’s usefulness to us, or to the society as a whole.

One can immediately see how this has led to some of the worst mass murders and social upheavals of the last century and more; the worst cases of social madness.

Without the anchor of God, we similarly no longer understand freedom. Freedom is now just freedom to be selfish: self-indulgence, being able to do what we want, when we want.

Yet this is obviously wrong. The alcoholic wants to have another drink. Yet being an alcoholic is the opposite of freedom: it is enslavement to a want. 

So too with most other wants. There is a truth to the old joke, “everything I want to do is either immoral, illegal, or fattening.” Most wants are addictions that, indulged too often, soon enslave us and do us harm.

True freedom is freedom to do what God wants. It is freedom of conscience: the freedom to do what our conscience tells us we ought to do.

Because we no longer understand this, social policy has become warped. It has actually been suppressing freedom of conscience, for the sake of feeding addictions.

Without the anchor of God, we cannot even agree on what is real. “Once people stop believing in God, they will believe anything.” Science is breaking down, along with public morality and civil discourse.

America, at least, now looks as though it might be regaining lucidity. I credit this to that evangelical remnant in the culture.

What We Lose by Losing Our Christian Faith

 

Jesus exorcises the Gerasene/Gadarene demoniac

The latest column by my left-wing friend Xerxes was unremarkable. But I found some of the reader comments on a previous column most interesting, and concerning. They illustrate the current prejudice against ethical monotheism.

“It's easier to hate a monolithic category of people (‘Christians’) than to admit that many people in the category actually believe in much of the same liberties and freedoms these anti-religious folk do.”

That is an attempt to play nice with Christianity, but it is pretty off base. Our concepts of human rights and personal freedoms come from Christianity. Christians necessarily believe in them more than non-Christians. John Locke based his philosophy of human rights on the Bible and the story of creation in Genesis; the Declaration of Independence argues that our rights come from God. Human rights and human dignity are based on the concept of free will as the divine spark in mankind.

The decay in belief in Christianity is the great threat to our liberties. 

Note how well human rights were observed in Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, or Nazi Germany; all anti-Christian regimes.

On paganism—condemning missionary activity in the Americas as cultural imperialism:

“All the people whom they encountered, who had a different belief system, were deemed to be pagan.  The word pagan is a word that is used to demean, belittle, and negate the value of the other.  By labelling these people as ‘pagan’ it enabled the colonizers to abuse, enslave, and slaughter these newly encountered humans.  By calling them pagan it took away their humanity.”  

 To which Xerxes responds: “I apologize. ‘Pagan’ was a shorthand way of saying ‘other,’ and I should have been more careful.”

“Pagan” is a critically meaningful term. Christians do not refer to Muslims or Jews as pagans; nor do Muslims refedr to Christians or Jews as kaffirs, the equivalent Arabic term. “Pagan” refers to the older, more primitive shamanic practices which have been supplanted by the great universalist religions.

And polytheism/shamanism is as unlike religious faith as darkness is to light, magic is to science, or madness is to sanity. Asians, still familiar with both, will immediately insist that shamanism is not a religion; Buddhism or Christianity are.

Paganism not only allows, but endorses and requires, such practices as human sacrifice, infanticide, self-mutilation, and slavery. The pagan gods are not morally good; they are at best indifferent to mankind, and usually hostile. Recall the myth of Prometheus, the concept of hubris, and the many rapes of Zeus.

In India, where there is residual paganism (although devotional Vaishnavism is now dominant, and an ethical monotheism) the British had to suppress human sacrifice by sects like the Thuggi, suttee (the immolation of widows), and the caste system. These are things that would be unthinkable under ethical monotheism; but considered a necessary religious observance by pagans.

This is why the ancient Hebrews felt they needed to exterminate the Canaanites, and forbid even dining with them. This is why the Quran says you are supposed to kill a kaffir on sight. Paganism is fundamentally immoral.

And this is why paganism quickly evaporates wherever one of the ethical monotheisms makes contact. The pagan gods are demons; monotheisms exorcise them. So people flock quickly to the new faith; it is their refuge from demons. This is why Christianity, under active repression, spread rapidly to take over the Roman Empire, and then Europe beyond. It was their reputation for successful exorcisms. This is clearly documented in the ancient manuscripts; and in the New Testament. The order of exorcists was larger in the early church than the priesthood. This was indeed Jesus’s commission to the apostles: to go about casting out demons. Which were common, clearly, in the largely pagan society of ancient Palestine. Especially in non-Jewish areas, such as among the Gerasenes.

For the same reason, Christianity spread rapidly in the Americas, with little opposition, once it arrived. It protected against the demons of the night. In South India, Saint Francis Xavier was able to personally baptize 50,000 people in ten years, despite the requirement to first be properly catechized. Today across Africa, exorcisms are common, and Christianity is sweeping the continent.

Unfortunately, with the waning of Christian commitments in North America and Europe, the demons are returning. So we are seeing a rising tide of mental illness, addictions, infanticide, child mutilation, self-mutilation, pedophilia, and suicides. 

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last….

News from Hell

 

I do not trust Father Chad Ripperger. Just an instinct; I feel what he says does not cohere. Rather like Jordan Peterson: everything must be taken on his personal authority.

But I am interested to hear him claim that exorcisms take less time recently. In the Sixties, he says, a typical exorcism took a couple of days. Five years ago, a typical exorcism took years. Now the times are declining rapidly: currently about a month or so.

This sounds right to me. We are entering a period of general disillusionment.

The Canaanite Woman

 

At that time, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.
And behold, a Canaanite woman of that district came and called out,
"Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David!
My daughter is tormented by a demon."
But Jesus did not say a word in answer to her.
Jesus' disciples came and asked him,
"Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us."
He said in reply,
"I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."
But the woman came and did Jesus homage, saying, "Lord, help me."
He said in reply,
"It is not right to take the food of the children
and throw it to the dogs."
She said, "Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps
that fall from the table of their masters."
Then Jesus said to her in reply,
"O woman, great is your faith!
Let it be done for you as you wish."
And the woman's daughter was healed from that hour. - Mt 15:21-28

This, the Gospel reading at last Sunday’s mass, makes Jesus look racist. No service for Canaanites? Isn’t that like no service for negroes?

First, this must be understood as a matter of religion, not ethnicity. The people of Tyre and Sidon were polytheists. 

Second, Jesus’s denial of service may have been a simply practical matter. Unless you put your faith in God, you cannot be cured of a demonic possession. If one demon is cast out, another will soon take their place.

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, but finds none. Then it says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when it comes, it finds the house empty, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and brings with it seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there, and the last state of that person is worse than the first.” – Matthew 12:43-45.

The house must not be left empty. For it is as Bob Dylan said, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody. It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord, but you’re gonna have to serve somebody.” 

Or as Chesterton said: “Those who do not believe in God will believe in anything.”

The pagan gods are demons. To be possessed by any of them is demonic. Only possession by the loving God is proof against demonic possession.

Next point: demonic possession is what we now, incorrectly, call “mental illness.” It follows that no mental illness can be cured except through turning to God in faith. 

So how is it that the faith of the mother, in this passage, heals the daughter?

Final point: “mental illness” is never an individual problem. The demon exists in the family relationship. When one member of the family is possessed by the demon, generally the parent, the other member is oppressed by it--and is more likely to manifest the symptoms. Cast the demon from the possessed parent, and you heal the oppressed child as well.

Hearing Voices and Casting out Demons

 

John said to him, "Teacher, we saw someone who doesn't follow us casting out demons in your name; and we forbade him, because he doesn't follow us." 39 But Jesus said, "Don't forbid him, for there is no one who will do a mighty work in my name, and be able quickly to speak evil of me. 40 For whoever is not against us is on our side.

 Mark 9: 38-40

This first part of today’s mass reading suggests that anyone is capable of casting out demons and qualified to exorcise—even a non-Christian—so long as it is done in the name of Christ.

This does not seem to be the common understanding in the Catholic Church. A formal Catholic exorcism requires special permission from a bishop, is done only by a designated exorcist in each diocese, and often requires a lengthy bureaucratic process designed to find some reason not to do it. By canon law, the Church will not sanction an exorcism until and unless something uncanny happens, that seems to rule out any physical cause.

This is not logical. Demons are intelligent beings. Why would a demon make their presence obvious in order to get exorcised?

One suspects the Church is primarily concerned here with bad publicity—about being accused of being “unscientific.”

Yet from the point of view of someone hearing demonic voices, it makes much sense to try being exorcised. At worst, it will not work; but, unlike the various psychiatric treatments, exorcism is entirely non-invasive and has no side-effects. And it does not require avoiding any other treatment.

The good news is that we need not rely on the Church for exorcism. The Bible itself says that anyone can exorcise. All that is strictly necessary is to call upon the name of Jesus Christ. 

Origen writes:

For it is not by incantations that Christians seem to prevail (over evil spirits), but by the name of Jesus, accompanied by the announcement of the narratives which relate to him; for the repetition of these has frequently been the means of driving demons out of men, especially when those who repeated them did so in a sound and genuinely believing spirit. Such power, indeed, does the name of Jesus possess over evil spirits, that there have been instances where it was effectual, when it was pronounced even by bad men…

The Practical Value of Christianity

 

A random plaque at the AGO reminds us why the native people of Canada embraced Christianity. Contrary to modern myth, it was not somehow imposed on them in the residential schools. When the missionaries came, they were able to drive away all the evil spirits that troubled the daily life of the Inuit.

This is also why Christianity spread so fast over the Roman Empire, and over the rest of Europe. It was able to cast out demons.

As we let it wane, the demons return.

Our New Religion and Its Failure

Over the last couple of years or so, I have been working on two books on the topic of depression and anxiety. Working titles: The Truth about Dragons and The Book of Consolation.

In the course of research and writing, I have sadly apparently lost two of my oldest and most valued friends.

The first will not respond to my emails since I disagreed with him over Freud. I do not clearly recall what the exact point of disagreement was; I disagree with Freud on almost everything. I believe it was on Freudianism calling itself “depth psychology.” Since it saw everything psychic/spiritual as a direct reflection of physical things, I think I argued that it actually greatly lacked depth in comparison to a religious approach.

My second friend to shun me actually accused me of moral mendacity for dissenting from Abraham Maslow’s existential psychiatry. Since then he will not respond to emails. My point was that, in saying concurrently that the key to mental health was finding a meaning in your life, and that there is no meaning in human existence, Maslow had no place to lead a patient but permanent despair. A meaning you just make up is meaningless. This is why existentialism has mostly evaporated as a philosophy.

That they would end a friendship of many years over such matters made me wonder. What is going on here?

And here is what I think is going on. Modern psychiatry or psychology is a religion. To them, I had become a heretic. People now rely on their psychologies as their world views, and so feel deeply disturbed if they are challenged. The entire universe is at stake.

Psychology/psychiatry generally pretends to be scientific, but that was never true. Broadly speaking, there has never been any decent scientific evidence for any of the psychiatries or psychologies we have seen come and go over the last century or so. They are visibly held to for reasons other than evidence or experiment. Nor do they work as philosophies: their approach is automatically ad hominem. Anyone who dissents from them is, in effect, declared insane. So they are adhered to neither for logic nor evidence, and cannot be challenged on either ground.

So the proper question is, how well do they work as religions; as comprehensive world views?

And the immediate evidence is, not well. Since we have generally shifted, as a society, away from traditional religious views and towards the psychiatries as substitutes, the incidence of mental illness has, by most accounts, skyrocketed. Suicide is also up. An international survey undertaken by the WHO suggests that rates of recovery for all kinds of “mental illness” are significantly better in the “underdeveloped” world—where folks are more apt to rely on religion rather than a pricey therapist. Other studies show therapists produce a worse or a no better cure rate than a layperson.

Some deficiencies of psychiatry or psychology are obvious. To begin with, they deny the reality of the psyche. Where do you go from there? They deny moral considerations, and morality is, according to long philosophical and religious tradition, if it is not self-evident, a key concern of human existence. They broadly avoid any consideration of a God, which is to say, of any inherent meaning in the universe.

It is a meagre, despairing worldview.

But it is our real religion nowadays, and not our nominal religions anymore.

In writing the first book, I contacted the Toronto Catholic archdiocese to see if I could get a nihil obstat—an official statement by the bishop that there was nothing in the book that ran counter to Catholic doctrine. They wrote back offering to have it looked over by a priest who was also a psychiatrist, to ensure that it was sound in psychiatric terms. When I specified that it was Catholic doctrine with which I was concerned, they said they could not help me. Nobody there was interested.

The New Testament understanding of mental illness is plainly that it is generally a matter of demonic possession. Casting out demons was the precise mission on which Jesus first sent out the apostles, and much historic evidence suggests that it is its legendary ability to cure mental illness that was the primary cause of Christianity’s spread through Europe, later through the Americas, and even today through Africa.

Yet the current protocol for exorcism in the Catholic Church is clear and firm that no exorcism may be contemplated until and unless all “natural,” that is, psychiatric, explanations have been ruled out, by the patient displaying some impossible supernatural knowledge. By, for example, suddenly being fluent in a foreign language, or showing knowledge of some secret matter. Or at least showing a violent aversion to religious objects.

This makes no sense in theological terms. Catholic doctrine holds that demons are real beings. Yet why would a real demon be so stupid as to do something to prove he is there? In order to get exorcised?

In other words, in case of doubt, faith is assigned to psychiatry and psychology, not to Catholicism. Even by the Catholic Church.

This is perhaps one reason for the rapid growth of the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements within Christianity. They are the branch that still takes it all most seriously. And that performs exorcisms and healings.

By Their Fruits You Shall Know Them

Like the Greek myths and legends, the Old Testament seems full of dysfunctional families and appalling parenting. Starting, of course, with the first family, that of Adam and Eve.

You might have heard of Cain and Abel. But what about Noah, who curses one of his sons? Abraham tries to kill one, and abandons the other in the wilderness. Lot sleeps with both his daughters. Isaac grossly favours one son, Esau, over the other, Jacob. So does Jacob, driving his children to try to kill one another. David and his son go to war.

These are not attractive polaroids for the family album.

Yet there is a difference, and it is a disturbing one. The Greek myths and Greek gods are amoral in principle. One might expect Biblical patriarchs, on the other hand, to be models of righteousness. These, after all, are supposedly the men chosen by God for their moral fibre. Noah was the only man worth saving from the deluge.

So does the Bible endorse child abuse? Is child abuse righteous?

Surely not. For there are many other sins that can also be counted against the patriarchs. And not trivial ones. Moses was a murderer. Abraham’s marriage to Sarah was incestuous (Genesis 20:1-11). Everyone had concubines. Everyone had bonded servants—some would say “slaves.” Solomon put his brother to death, for no decent reason. David killed Uriah to take his wife.

Surely the Bible does not endorse any of this. It is simply honestly reporting things as they were. No sugar coatings.

The proper lesson to take away is surely that everyone is flawed. The upright man is not the one who never sins; he is the one who at least acknowledges God’s ultimate authority. If he sins, he at least understands this as a failure, an error, a flaw, not something he is entitled to do. When a prophet scolds him and points this out, he feels bad about it. He does not have the prophet beheaded. Anything more than this is probably unrealistic, dealing with actual human beings.

If there is to be hero worship of the patriarchs here, it is not sanctioned by the Bible. One is to worship only Yahweh, remember?

When Elijah, hiding out in fear for his life, experiences depression, the Bible reports:

“He came to a broom bush, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. ‘I have had enough, Lord,’ he said. ‘Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors.’” (1 Kings 19).

Elijah in the wilderness.

 This suggests a certain lack of awe for ancestors. None were all that admirable. None were purely worthy of emulation. They actually all deserved to die; and we deserve to die if we are no better.

In their defense, this was a rougher, less civilized time, a tribal time, with fewer restraints on human self-will. In a simple tribal culture, the head of each family and tribe is more or less a law unto himself. Absolute power does funny things to people.

If the Bible is an accurate account—and it has no reason to exaggerate the patriarchs’ transgressions—the next lesson to learn is that child abuse is a natural part of family life. Most parents, with nothing to stop them, will treat their kids as chattels, and will abuse. They will play favourites. They will sacrifice the child’s interests to their own. We see it, after all, in animals: most critters will, with little provocation, eat their young. Maternal or paternal instinct only gets you so far; it is not something that can be relied on.

The pressing issue of the time when the Old Testament was written was actual child sacrifice, of a brutal sort: burning children alive. Except among the Hebrews, Moloch, in his various versions, was lord of the land.

The prophets were solidly in opposition to the clear and present temptation he represented. But that moral fight was probably about as much as they could manage in the climate of opinion. Even Abraham perhaps had to go through the motions of sacrificing his child, or nobody, including him, was going to take his newfangled God seriously.

Ezekiel cites it as a common saying, a proverb, among the Hebrews, that “The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezekiel 18:2). Jeremiah cites the same truism (31:29). Job seems to refer to a similar aphorism: “You say, 'God stores away a man's iniquity for his sons.'” (Job 21:19). Repeatedly, God himself, Yahweh God, is quoted as saying “the sins of the father are visited upon the son”:

“He punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation” (Numbers 14:18). “He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 34:7; Exodus 20:5; Deuteronomy 5: 9-10).

This is obviously unfair. Our conscience tells us so, and the ancient Hebrews had the same innate conscience we do.

So is God unjust?

Surely the Bible did not want to believe so. It was simply, again, reporting the obvious truth of the world: some children suffer for the sins of their parents, suffer brutality, loss, and permanent harm from their upbringing, through no fault of theirs; while other children benefit unjustly from their parents’ generosity or hard effort. It is the problem of evil: there is evil in the world. Necessarily, if there is evil in the world, God has permitted it. One may ask why, but this a given.

If the Bible is simply describing the obvious reality, that children suffer when their parents are bad, surely what it is referring to primarily is child abuse. That, at least would be the most extreme and obvious example of the saying.

The Bible does not accept this as just. Ezekiel, for example, after citing the proverb, goes on to prophecy a better time:

“As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die” (Ezekiel 18: 3-4).

Jeremiah says, of the coming time,

“In those days people will no longer say,
‘The parents have eaten sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’
Instead, everyone will die for their own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—their own teeth will be set on edge” (Jeremiah 31: 29-30).

Jeremiah

This is also what God demands by the Mosaic law: the child must not be punished for the sin of the father. And Proverbs writes: “Discipline your son while there is hope, and do not desire his death.” (19:18). Apparently, then, a familiar temptation.

The prophet Malachi makes a similar prediction of a time to come:

“See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction” (Malachi 4:5-6).

This is a fallen world: kids with bad parents suffer through no fault of their own. That is the point, and it is to be lamented. Is that not the essential idea of original sin?

The New Testament assumes the same dynamic:

“And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man who was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, ‘Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?’” (John 9: 1-2).

The Bible does not clearly and straightforwardly show that child abuse leads to mental illness. But that is largely because it has a different conception than we moderns do of what mental illness is.

Saul in his depression

In the Bible, mental illness is caused by the action of evil spirits. It is demonic possession. The clearest example is that of Saul in the Old Testament, who pretty plainly suffered from what the DSM would call depression:

“Now the Spirit of the Lord had departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him. Saul’s attendants said to him, ‘See, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. Let our lord command his servants here to search for someone who can play the lyre. He will play when the evil spirit from God comes on you, and you will feel better.’” (1 Samuel 16: 14-6).

“ … Whenever the spirit from God came on Saul, David would take up his lyre and play. Then relief would come to Saul; he would feel better, and the evil spirit would leave him” (1 Samuel 16:23).

In the New Testament, Jesus comes upon two men whom we would today surely call schizophrenic or manic, living in a graveyard:

“When He got out of the boat, immediately a man from the tombs with an unclean spirit met Him, and he had his dwelling among the tombs. And no one was able to bind him anymore, even with a chain; because he had often been bound with shackles and chains, and the chains had been torn apart by him and the shackles broken in pieces, and no one was strong enough to subdue him. Constantly, night and day, he was screaming among the tombs and in the mountains, and gashing himself with stones. Seeing Jesus from a distance, he ran up and bowed down before Him; and shouting with a loud voice, he said, ‘What business do we have with each other, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I implore You by God, do not torment me!’ For He had been saying to him, ‘Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!’” (Mark 5: 2-8).

The Gadarene demoniacs

The Pharisees at one point say of Jesus himself, “He is demon-possessed and raving mad. Why listen to him?” (John 10:20)

This evil spirit idea may sound alien to modern ears, weaned on Freudian psychoanalysis. But it is an obvious and almost a self-evident interpretation. Even some of the terminology of psychiatry (“obsession” is really a lower-grade version of “possession”: being besieged by some outside force) implies the activity of evil spirits.

Consider the facts: you hear an internal voice telling you that you are worthless, and you ought to go jump off a bridge. Surely it is forced and an unnecessary complication to call the invisible speaker anything but an evil spirit: an independent consciousness or will acting upon you. It takes a mental contortion worthy of a circus side show to suppose or say instead that it is a part of yourself of which you are “unconscious,” otherwise unaware, a part of your will that has an independent will that works against your own.

How much sense does that make? Isn’t it clearer to simply see it as an independent entity? Only a doctrinaire materialism, surely, would deny this.

Very well; so please accept for a moment that mental illness is the action of evil spirits.

Modern Catholic authorities usually make a distinction here between garden variety mental illnesses and demonic possession. But this looks like an attempted modus vivendi with modern psychiatry. In the Bible, there is no clear concept of any “mental illness” apart from demonic possession; unless, say, you want to include anger as a mental illness.

But then what makes one person subject to the actions of evil spirits, and not another? Is their action simply random?

The Bible assumes not. Nothing is random in a world governed by God.

So the evil spirits may come to test us, or to open up to us our need for God. Job experienced this.

“Amid disquieting dreams in the night, when deep sleep falls on people, fear and trembling seized me and made all my bones shake. A spirit glided past my face, and the hair on my body stood on end. It stopped, but I could not tell what it was. A form stood before my eyes, and I heard a hushed voice: ‘Can a mortal be more righteous than God? Can even a strong man be more pure than his Maker?’” (Job 4: 13-7).

Job being scourged by the devil.

Jesus experienced this too, being tempted in the desert.

In the case of Saul, however, the spirits are sent as a punishment for sin.

If they can come as a punishment for sin, again, as we have seen, said sin need not be on the part of the sufferer: it may be a sin of the parents. This may, for that matter, be the usual case.

In other words, mental illness is or can be caused by child abuse: the Dymphna Complex.

The New Testament seems to confront the issue of mental illness, of demonic possession, face on, almost as its dominant theme. The first miracle recorded of Jesus in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the first act by which he announces himself and his mission to the world, is the casting out of a demon; the healing of a mentally ill man.

“They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. Just then a man in their synagogue who was possessed by an impure spirit cried out, ‘What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!’

‘Be quiet!’ said Jesus sternly. ‘Come out of him!’ The impure spirit shook the man violently and came out of him with a shriek.

The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, ‘What is this? A new teaching—and with authority! He even gives orders to impure spirits and they obey him.’ News about him spread quickly over the whole region of Galilee” (Mark 1: 21-7).

The possessed man in the Capernaum synagogue.

“That evening after sunset the people brought to Jesus all the sick and demon-possessed. The whole town gathered at the door, and Jesus healed many who had various diseases. He also drove out many demons” (Mark 1:32-4).

This is clearly the new dispensation that Ezekiel foretold.

Luke more or less says so, and isolates the issue of child abuse:

“And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; to make ready a people prepared for the Lord” (Luke 1:17).

Next, we note the Beatitudes. They are Jesus’s description of his intended audience, those for whom he has come and for whom he will shed his blood.

They read almost like a standard diagnosis of depression.

“Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them.
He said: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.
You are the salt of the earth...” (Matthew 5).

Beatitudes 1, 2, 3, 4 are right on target: symptoms of depression, and specifically depression caused by abuse, include “low self-esteem,” that is, meekness and poverty of spirit, and a pervasive sadness. As we have seen in the literature, in the hero legends, and Oedipus Rex, and Hamlet, depressives also hunger and thirst after righteousness, after justice. They are, like Hamlet, especially disturbed by hypocrisy, by attempts to manipulate, and by double-dealing; they are, in other words, “pure of heart.” The word translated as “peacemakers” may refer to anxiety: the depressed crave peace and quiet. Soon after in the same speech, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus indeed gives specific advice on how to handle anxiety (“Consider the lilies of the field...”; Matthew 6:25-34).

And as to being persecuted, and spoken against, surely here Jesus is giving the Dymphna diagnosis for where these other symptoms come from: from being abused; and emotional abuse is the worst sort.

Jesus, it is often said, is primarily a healer; that is the essence of his ministry. People come to him for healing. Some of their ailments are physical; but most often his sphere of operations seems to be psychiatry: the healing of the psyche. Even some of the physical ailments sound like things Freud said were commonly symptoms of “hysteria”: blindness, paralysis, uncontrolled bleeding.

Charcot displays a hysterical patient.

Jesus himself describes this casting out of demons (read: healing depression and mental illness) as his signature, the core proof that he is who he says he is:

“But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matthew 12: 28).

According to St. Paul, this remains the core of the Christian mission:

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12).

Clement of Alexandria sees exorcism, as much as the forgiveness of sins, as the point of Christian baptism:

“I would have you know for certain, that everyone who has at any time worshipped idols, and has adored those whom the pagans call gods, or has eaten of the things sacrificed to them, is not without an unclean spirit; for he has become a guest of demons, and has been partaker with that demon of which he has formed the image in his mind, either through fear or love. And by these means he is not free from an unclean spirit, and therefore needs the purification of baptism, that the unclean spirit may go out of him, which has made its abode in the inmost affects of his soul” (Clement, Recognitions, Book 2 Chap. 71).

Saint Clement of Alexandria

A formal exorcism remains part of the Catholic baptismal rite today.

This ability to cast out demons—to cure depression and mental illnesses—may account for the rapid success of Christianity, a despised and persecuted foreign sect, in conquering the Roman Empire. It seems more recently to account for the rapid spread of Christianity among the native peoples of the Americas, and in Africa. In A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity, Francis Young writes,

“Exorcism was a defining feature of early Christianity. Peter Brown described exorcism, without exaggeration, as ‘possibly the most highly rated activity of the early Christian church’. Whilst exorcism was not unique to Christianity, it found an unprecedented flowering in the new faith” (Young, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 28).

It may not be coincidental, then, that Jesus also makes a special point of warning against harming children.

“He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!’” (Matthew 18: 2-7).

“See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven. What do you think? If a man owns a hundred sheep, and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the ninety-nine on the hills and go to look for the one that wandered off? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he is happier about that one sheep than about the ninety-nine that did not wander off. In the same way your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should perish” (Matthew 18:10-14).

This passage is commonly read as referring to parenting that causes children to sin; and the “lost sheep” of the passage are taken to be sinners.

"Suffer the little children come to me..."

But this interpretation is not theologically tenable. Note that the passage makes the point that these are “little” children. Children below the age of seven or so, below the age of reason, cannot sin. Their consciences are not sufficiently developed to make this possible. Moreover, nobody can ever make another sin: for something to be sinful, it must be done with consciousness, understanding, and intent. To the extent, therefore, that a parent ever “causes” a child to sin, that sin is always simply the parent’s, and not the child’s.

Accordingly, Jesus must here actually be referring to child abuse: to a more literal “stumbling,” to a more literal child abandonment, and to a more literal and physical “perishing.” Granting that such abuse, and perhaps the worst sort of such abuse, is teaching the child falsehoods, “gaslighting,” modeling and advocating a false morality. But as we have seen, that is a usual and even an inevitable part of child abuse. It is almost always required to shield the actions and intent of the parent. Polonius has a forked tongue.

There are, of course, other themes in the New Testament; but this theme of casting out demons seems to be central. In Luke, Jesus announces his mission in the synagogue as

“good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, and to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:33).

That sounds a good deal broader than just the issue of mental illness.

But immediately after this, he casts out a demon, as if to illustrate by this what he means.

And Jesus’s sermon on not mistreating children seems to mesh with another element of the New Testament which might otherwise seem strikingly odd.

The Old Testament includes, as one of the Ten Commandments, “Honour your father and your mother.”

Yet Jesus, it must be noticed by anyone who actually reads the Bible, has little patience for “family values.” Besides not forming a family himself, he sends out his disciples with this instruction:

“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10: 34-7).

He tells a prospective disciple not to bury his father:

“Another disciple said to him, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus told him, ‘Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.’” (Matthew 8: 21-2).

When his own mother, Mary, asks him for something, he answers “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” (John 2: 4). When he is told that she and his brothers have come to see him, but cannot make it through the crowds, he answers “My mother and brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice” (Luke 8:21). As an adolescent, he disowns his parents in the Temple (Luke 2: 48-9).

Family values indeed.

The calling of St. James and St. John

When he calls James and John to be his apostles, they are out in a boat with their father Zebedee:

“When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him” (Mark 1: 19-20).

Is this not odd? They maroon their aged father at a word. Is it not making a point?

What then, you may ask, about the Old Testament commandment to “Honour your father and your mother?”

St. Paul parses it carefully:

“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother’—which is the first commandment with a promise—‘so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.’ Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6: 1-4).

The phrasing suggests that the commandment requires an explanation. You are to honour your parents as repayment of a debt: they looked after you when you were young, so you look after them when they are elderly, and then you have a right to expect your own children to look after you when you are elderly in turn, “so that your days may be long in the land.” This is a social contract. It follows that without a tit, there is no tat: the parents have a responsibility, not to exasperate their children. If they do not do their part, the contract is broken, and the child is released from the obligation. Note too that Paul adds the phrase “parents in the Lord.” Not everyone who is a biological parent, then, qualifies. Only those who act in the Lord.

To clarify, the New Testament is not saying families are evil. Neither is it, in condemning scribes and Pharisees, saying that writing and education are evil. All are good and necessary. Yet there is also and always a great danger that an educated elite, or a parent, will abuse the abundant power each gives them. The danger is comparable in either case. And this should always be taken into account.

In sum, both the New Testament itself, and Jesus speaking in the New Testament, represent their teaching as being there expressly or primarily for the mentally ill and for the depressed.

This, to be clear, is apparently a quality it shares with the other great world religions. Both Judaism and Islam have similar reputations in earlier times of being effective at casting out demons. The Buddha makes the same point in the first of the Four Noble Truths that Jesus does in the Beatitudes, that his teaching is for those who mourn: who experience life (correctly) as “dukkha,” “ill-being.”

It was the key proof of the superiority of the ethical monotheisms and universal religions to paganism; this ability to overcome mental illness.

How does this work? Not, surely, by convincing parents to truly love their children. Certainly the New Testament makes exactly this call; love, it says, is the answer. But this still leaves the sins of the father with at least some sons. It may have reduced the incidence of mental illness for the last few hundred generations, but it can hardly account for a sudden cure of an existing possession, as described in the Bible itself.

Jesus gives a hint of an explanation in this passage:

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. Then it goes and takes with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there. And the final condition of that person is worse than the first. That is how it will be with this wicked generation” (Matthew 12: 43-5).

In other words, demonic possession requires a soul that has somehow been “emptied.” It must, to prevent possession, be “filled” with something else.

There are obvious possibilities here. It can be filled, for example, as we have seen with our heroes, with a drive for the good, the true, and the beautiful—for the Logos, in Christian terms. It can be filled, many Christians would say, with the personal presence of Jesus. It can be filled with faith, hope, and charity, or knowledge of truth, or meaning—and then the demon must stay away.

This could indeed be nearly instantaneous: a sudden insight as to the meaning of it all, like the instant when one solves a puzzle. A revelation on the road; the moment of dawn on a mountaintop; an insight while sitting under a tree.

Saul gets the picture

Again, there is a need to clarify. There is no doubt some danger here that some might conclude that people are mentally ill or depressed because they are lacking in faith. If they had more faith, surely, they would not be mentally ill.

This would be true in cases when the evil spirit came of their own fault. But the Bible is insistent that the sins of the father are visited on the son. In that case, it would not be the son (or, of course, daughter) who “lacked” faith. It is rather that they have a greater capacity and a greater need and craving for faith, or meaning, or righteousness, than others, due to their upbringing.

It almost sounds like a cure.

What might Robert Burton have to say to that?

Old Democritus Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy, for all that he is trying to make out that the world and its every idea are folly, is surprisingly weak in dismissing this religious option. Of which, of course, he had to be aware.

“A gentleman in Limousin,” he reports at the end of one chapter, “saith Anthony Verdeur, was persuaded he had but one leg, affrighted by a wild boar, that by chance struck him on the leg; he could not be satisfied his leg was sound (in all other things well) until two Franciscans by chance coming that way, fully removed him from the conceit. Sed abunde fabularum audivimus,—enough of story-telling.”

Burton here ends the chapter (Subsection III: Particular Symptoms from the influence of Stars, parts of the Body, and Humours).

If this report is true, it is a compelling example of a religious cure. But Burton can only dismiss it by calling it “story telling”--at the same time conceding that such reports are “abundant.” But the fact that he offers no further rebuttal is itself telling.

St. Francis Borgia performing an exorcism

Further along, he reports,

“The papists on the one side stiffly maintain how many melancholy, mad, demoniacal persons are daily cured at St. Anthony’s Church in Padua, at St. Vitus’ in Germany, by our Lady of Loretto in Italy, our Lady of Sichem in the Low Countries: … twenty-five thousand in a day come thither; ... our eyes and ears are full of her cures, and who can relate them all? … Read but ... Coster and Gretser's Tract de Cruce, Laur. Arcturus Fanteus de Invoc. Sanct. Bellarmine, Delriodis. mag. tom. 3. l. 6. quaest. 2. sect. 3. Greg. Tolosanus tom. 2. lib. 8. cap. 24. Syntax. Strozius Cicogna lib. 4. cap. 9. Tyreus, Hieronymus Mengus, [a fine example of Burton’s painstaking scholarship here] and you shall find infinite examples of cures done in this kind, by holy waters, relics, crosses, exorcisms, amulets, images, consecrated beads, &c. Barradius the Jesuit boldly gives it out, that Christ’s countenance, and the Virgin Mary’s, would cure melancholy, if one had looked steadfastly on them. P. Morales the Spaniard in his book de pulch. Jes. et Mar. confirms the same out of Carthusianus, and I know not whom, that it was a common proverb in those days, for such as were troubled in mind to say, eamus ad videndum filium Mariae, let us see the son of Mary, as they now do post to St. Anthony’s in Padua, or to St. Hilary’s at Poitiers in France. In a closet of that church, there is at this day St. Hilary’s bed to be seen, to which they bring all the madmen in the country, and after some prayers and other ceremonies, they lay them down there to sleep, and so they recover. It is an ordinary thing in those parts, to send all their madmen to St. Hilary’s cradle.”

But Burton is writing in England in the heat of the Protestant Reformation. He does not have the option of pilgrimage to Dymphna’s shrine. Indeed, as a matter of personal security, he is probably obliged to scoff at all such reports, or face trial for heresy. Burton’s Protestant response is to point out that there were similar pagan shrines to various gods and goddesses who supposedly healed diseases. Beyond that, “for their catalogue of examples, we make no other answer, but that they are false fictions, or diabolical illusions, counterfeit miracles.”

Possible, of course; but not evidence nor argument, just an assertion of opinion. It could hardly he a weaker response. There is, as he himself relates, a prodigious amount of evidence otherwise. As the title of his chapter suggests (“Memb. III. Whether it be lawful to seek to Saints for Aid in this Disease”), Burton’s legally obligatory Protestant faith simply requires him to say this.

This, on the other hand, the religious option, is an obvious possible content for Burton’s image of solitude, which he seems to advocate. When one retires to the wilderness, what is one going to think about? Game of Thrones?

Perhaps “get thee to a nunnery” is the best advice.

Why in Heaven's Name...

... is this reported in the UK as a "scandal"?

The Exorcism of Emily Rose

This one's real.

This is another reasonably recent (2005) movie with a Catholic theme. Although fictionalized, it is based on a true story. And it raises troublesome questions.

The real Emily Rose was Anneliese Michel. She starved herself to death, believing herself possessed by demons. The priests who tried to exorcise her, at her request, were convicted of manslaughter for not forcing her to undergo conventional medical treatment against her will.

A Catholic exorcism.

The fundamental question raised here Is whether the “scientific” explanation of and treatment for a life and death situation should be privileged above all others, superseding the individual’s religious beliefs.

To my mind the answer is obviously not. This is a violation of freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, and freedom of religion. It is the establishment of scientism as state religion. But in the real world, the answer arrived at in the court was, yes, it should. Religion is fine only so long as you don’t really believe it when it comes to the crunch.

St. Francis Borgia performs an exorcism.

In that sense, the film is deeply troubling. It is not, in the end, deeply troubling in the sense of a conventional horror movie. There are jolts, certainly, but these do not become the real centrepiece of the film. It is in the genre of the courtroom drama rather than the horror film.

It raises another yet more troubling possibility, which concerns me generally. What if our modern theories of “mental illness” are completely wrong, and all other societies that have ever existed are correct in seeing such phenomena generally as the work of spiritual forces? And what if the anthropologist in this film is right that modern psychiatric medicines actually prolong the illness and prevent healing?

St. Benedict's exorcism.

After all, the statistics, as noted in another recent post, suggest precisely that?

Then what evil are we doing when we make the real cure illegal?

Like all good Catholic films, it has proven far more popular among audiences than among critics. Rotten Tomatoes critics give it 44%--a bit higher than others, but it is ambiguous enough that it can be read as anti-Catholic—while audiences give it 65%.

Exorcism by St. Exupere.

It does get some things wrong. The weird stark Dorothy-in-Kansas home life of Emily looks far more Calvinist than Catholic; Catholics are big on beauty. So does her mother’s reported fear of Emily dancing in college. But if you want to see what a real exorcism looks like, I hear this film is pretty authentic.

It says a lot about redemptive suffering.