Physician, Heal Thyself

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PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF!

MEDIEVAL AND MODERN PSYCHIATRY

Google videos show a four part BBC series, The Century of the Self, by Adam Curtis on psychiatric manipulation by governments and corporations of their peoples in both America and England: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2637635365191428174. A similarly devastating critique can be found in the Guardian's broadcast of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: http://books.guardian.co.uk/video/2007/sep/07/naomiklein. I had myself become increasingly aware of this problem, coming to America in 1953 when it was under the spell of Anna Freud and it was of the utmost importance to conform to 'normalcy', then witnessing the explosion wrought by Wilhelm Reich at Berkeley and elsewhere, myself finding neither to be about freedom or happiness. Meanwhile, my father and my husband had fallen into the Adlerian camp. Years later, I found Viktor Frankl's criticism of Freud, for sex, of Adler, for power, to be less valid than our quest for meaning as creating happiness. Seeing this series, and being a medievalist, had me ponder on the role of psychiatry.

The word 'Psychiatrist' means the 'healer of the soul'. Christ said, 'Physician, heal thyself!' (Luke 4.23). A surgeon with an infected wound should not operate on his patient. Nor should a psychiatrist attempt to heal another's soul without first having healed her own.

Julian, as for centuries before her had been hermits in deserts, in graveyards, was a psychiatrist, a healer of the soul. She was also, from the evidence, a wounded healer. For Isaiah contradicts Christ, saying 'By his wounds you shall be healed' (Isaiah 53.5). There needs to be the healing of one's own wounds to heal those of another. But the wounded healer shares doubly in the cure, both self and other. The physician can heal herself through the other.

Julian had first written her serene and splendid theology in a time of relative peace and freedom in England, when good Queen Anne reigned, when scholars were respected, when the Gospel was lived. But between her fiftieth year and her seventieth, England changed. Henry IV, whom Chaucer calls 'Albion's Conqueror', usurped and murdered the anointed King, Richard II, then had the Archbishop of York, Richard le Scrope, beheaded. Together with the Chancellor of the Realm/Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Arundel, Henry IV ruthlessly put down the Lollards who espoused the Gospel and its teaching, instituting a state of political terror in the name of Christ. 'Heretics' were doubly executed as also 'traitors'. Lay people, and particularly women, were forbidden to teach. Theology was forbidden to be in English. Particularly translations of the Bible into our language were not to be tolerated. Only the rote learning of Latin of the Pater, the Ave, the Credo, was allowed on pain of death by burning at the stake. The Church and the King had seized control. Through programmes of terror. So Julian rewrites her splendid text, which had translated the Bible directly from Hebrew into English, before the King James Version, now excising from it most scriptural references, underlining and enlarging these Latin words. But in this Short Text, written it says in 1413, she also crystallizes her inclusive theology, ending it with the Lollard term, our 'even Christian', our equal Christian, recalling that time of freedom and peace. She obeys - and disobeys - in holy disobedience. The smell of burning flesh from the Lollard pits outside Norwich would have reached her cell at St Julian's Church. Her own fate could have been this. A medieval Auschwitz. But she writes. Though no longer allowed to teach one on one towards the end of her life, her words now teach down the centuries and across Continents.

The Gospel Christ gave is most precious, it is the privilege of poverty St Clare espoused. Delicate, fragile, tenaciously held, particularly by the women martyr saints listed in the Canon of the Mass, 'Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia', the Gospel's message, its 'Good News', spelled freedom from the controlling unjust power of the world, spelled felicity, happiness. The foredoomed lascivious pagans remarked to each other about the Early Christians' love for each other and their joy.

The Church, as Christ, is the healer of our souls. But the Church's soul needs healing from the un-Christian quest for power and sex to bring about that healing in the souls of its flock. Birgitta of Sweden, speaking in the persons of Christ and the Virgin, most particularly spoke to this concern, John Paul II citing this passage when proclaiming her Co-Patron of Europe.

Similarly, today, the State can abuse power and infect the people it should most serve. At the French Revolution, under Napoleon and in Marxism, the Church is destroyed to punish its abuse of power, in yet another abuse of power. The State usurps the Church.

Both State and Church abuse power where they terrorize their people, their flock. They usurp the people. Tolstoy notes how States need enemies for armies and criminals for police, the army and police really being to protect the State from its own people. Terror is seen as desirable in order to control. But the Gospel is the medicine against control and terror. The Resurrection that follows the Crucifixion. The wounded healer who heals us when we quest God, not self. When we free ourselves from power and sex.

Pelagians and Quakers do not believe in Original Sin, invented by Augustine in his dialectic against the obese British theologian Pelagius. Yet Augustine observed that sin, that evil, is the tending to non-being. A contradiction. Similarly the Gospels are not for hierarchies, a word invented by Pseudo-Dionysius, who plagiarized that he was the Dionysius who heard St Paul preach on Mount Areopagus, pretending he had also witnessed the Crucifixion, but who actually lived several centuries later. Pseudo-Dionysius was conveniently capitalizing on Plato's 'Myth of the Metals', the necessary fiction, the lie, for the Monarchy that is his Republic, that the king is gold, the nobles silver, the slaves iron, modelled not on Athenian democracy but upon Sparta's military slave state oppressing and exploiting its helots. Emperors and kings, Popes and bishops, loved his teaching. Manuscripts proliferated of his writings both in the Greek East and the Latin West, shaping the Church and the State into Plato's pseudo-Republic.

I used to think that people who travelled on buses, because they were poor, were inferior. Now, when I visit America, I prefer her buses to her planes. In the airports and on the planes for the rich, for the powerful, there is loneliness and fear and humiliation as one takes off one's shoes, is separated from one's belongings. On the buses there is none of this, instead friendliness, compassion and profound good sense. If America rules the world, then it is that strata of her society I would choose for our kings of gold. One finds that ordinary people outside of power are inherently good. It is education, indoctrination, brain washing, that makes them otherwise. People have to be forced, terrorized, into evil, into cruelty. Little Spartans of the Ruling Class of silver were taken from their mothers, brought up in boot camps, deprived of natural affection, so that they could control their slaves, their helots. Just so in England little boys of the Ruling Class of silver are taken from their mothers and deprived of affection and placed in 'Prep' schools, then 'Public' schools, to control a now-lost Empire. Julian's word 'Kindness' actually means 'Natural'. Darwin and the National Geographic have changed that for us into thinking of Nature as 'red in tooth and claw', the 'survival of the fittest'. But look at any mammalian mother nurturing her child, any marsupial, any nest-building bird. This is Mother Nature.

The abuse of power by Church or State is the 'opiate of the masses'. Providing a fake religion, a fake politics, a fake war, a fake heresy. But the love of God and neighbour is that which heals, which frees. He who heals another, heals himself, she who frees another, frees herself. We, together, create the City of God, the Kingdom of Heaven 'tenting' within us.

Boethius, awaiting a most brutal execution as a political prisoner, on Death Row, created a work to heal us, and in so doing himself - of his immense misery at the grave miscarriage of justice. Philosophia comes to him, as will Beatrice to Dante, and she tells him to get rid of the 'whores of the theatre', the self-pitying, lust-filled, opiating sonnets he has been writing, and instead listen to reason, be restored to reason. She laughs at him. Then tells him of Time and Eternity. Which she describes as like a medieval Rose Window, on the outside in grey stone and black-seeming glass, the Wheel of Fortune, grasped at by Kings who ride to the top, then are inexorably dashed and crushed beneath it, but which inside is seen to be the great Wheel/Rose in brilliant colours, the Virgin and Child at the centre, the twelve Apostles about its edge.

She explains that at the centre is God, on the outside is Man. At the centre is Eternity, all Time ingathered, at the outside Time is further and further dispersed and scattered into less and lesser amounts of Time. At the centre is all Being, at the outside the tending to non-being. At the centre is all Good, at the exterior the diminishing and loss of good to evil. At the centre is Freedom, at the outside increasing bondage. At the centre is Felicity, at the outside, misery. It is a geometric theology that shaped medieval architecture and psychiatry. We, today, are trapped in linear time, an even longer line for eternity, sensing ourselves to be insignificant, lacking hope. For too many today the only return to meaning seems to be snatched at in blowing oneself and others up in a suicide bombing, like Samson in his blindness at Gaza bringing down the pillars of the temple. The medieval shape of Time and Eternity, instead, allows each of us to quest that centre of God, of Eternity, of Being, of Good, of Freedom, of Felicity. Instead of tumbling headlong into the slade of despair. When 'hende Nicholas' in Chaucer's Miller's Tale feigns madness, the good carpenter John makes all these arguments to him.

The Gospel is that God is in littleness, not in power, but in a child, in a woman. The Gospel is that God is in the one who is despised, feared and rejected, the Samaritan, the leper. Today the gypsy, the Roma. Julian, like Benedict, says God's Creation in the presence of the Creator is like a hazlenut lying in the palm of my hand. But God loves it. And ever shall. The Gospel is that all persons are our 'even-Christians', God despising nothing and no one whom he has ever made.