Given the personality problems presented in the immediate previous post we thought the comments by Elder Sophrony were an appropriate follow up. –editor
By Archimandrite Sophrony Sakharov
Those who want to pray with a cleansed mind (nous) must not concern 
themselves with the latest news from the newspapers, or read books that are irrelevant to our spiritual life – especially those books that arouse the passions – and they must not strive to learn out of curiosity whatever pertains to the lives of others. All these things bring foreign thoughts to mind, and when a person attempts to elucidate them, they confound his mind even more.
When the soul is taught love by God, then it will feel sorrow for all of Mankind, all of Creation, and will pray that everyone might repent and receive the grace of the Holy Spirit. But, should the soul lose this grace, love will abandon it (because without the grace of God, it is impossible to love one’s enemy) and that is when wicked thoughts will issue from the heart, as the Lord had said (Matthew 15:19, Mark 7:21-22).
Without the humility of Christ, Man’s nous (mind) will not be cleansed and his soul will never feel reposed in God, but will always be agitated by various thoughts that will hinder his “theory” (sighting) of God. Ah, the humility according to Christ! Those who have tried it, rush towards God, insatiably, day and night!
Ah, but what a weakling I am! I have been writing for just a short while, and yet I have quickly become tired, and my body yearns to rest. But even the Lord Himself, when He was on earth “in His flesh”, was familiar with human frailty. He, the Merciful One, would also feel weary after His journeys on foot, and He had also slept on board a boat during the tempest; and, after the disciples had roused Him from His sleep, He commanded the sea and the wind to become still, and a great calm followed. So it is with our soul, whenever we call upon the most Holy Name of the Lord: a great calm follows.
Allow us, o Lord, to glorify You, until our dying breath…..
can fall into deception, either out of inexperience, or out of pride. And if it is out of inexperience, the Lord heals the deceived one very quickly; however, if it is on account of pride, then the soul will be struggling for a very long time, until it has learnt humility and will then be healed by the Lord.
We fall into a deception, when we consider ourselves more prudent and experienced than the others – even our own spiritual father. This is what I myself had thought -in my inexperience- and this was the reason that I suffered. And I thank the Lord from my heart, because in this way, He humbled me and admonished me, and did not revoke His mercy from me. Now it occurs to me that without confessing to our spiritual father, it will not be possible to avoid deception, because it was to the spiritual father that God gave the gift of “binding and unbinding”.
If you sense light inside you or around you, do not believe in it unless you also have a deep solemnity within you for God and a love for your fellow man. However, do not be afraid; only humble yourself, and that light will disappear.
Should you see a certain vision or dream, do not trust it, for if it was from God, the Lord Himself will inform you about it. A soul that has not tasted of the Holy Spirit cannot discern where the vision comes from. The enemy will give the soul a “sweet sensation” combined with vainglory, and it is from this, that deception will have become evident.
The Fathers say that when a vision is a hostile one, the soul feels confusion or fear; but this will happen only to the humble soul that considers itself unworthy of a vision. The vainglorious person however, may not feel either fear or confusion, because he is desirous of visions and regards himself as worthy of them, which is why the enemy can easily deceive him.
Celestial things are recognized through the Holy Spirit and terrestrial things through one’s physical state. Whosoever attempts to know God through the physical mind is deceived, because God can only be known via the Holy Spirit.
If you see demons with your mind, then humble yourself and try not to look, and run as fast as you can to your spiritual Geron (Elder), to whom you have surrendered yourself. Tell him everything, and the Lord will then show His mercy on you and you will be rescued from that deception. But if you believe that you know more about spiritual matters than your spiritual father and you cease to tell him whatever is happening to you, then, because of this act of pride, inevitably, a certain trial will “befall” you, in order to restore your prudence.
Fight your enemies with humility.
When you see another mind struggling with your mind, then humble yourself and the struggle will cease.If you happen to see demons, do not be afraid, but humble yourself and the demons will disappear. But if fear does overcome you, you will not avoid suffering some harm. Be brave. Remember that the Lord can see you, if you have hinged your hopes on Him.
But, for the soul to acquire respite from the demons, it must humble itself and say: “I am worse than all the others; I am more wretched than every beast and every wild animal”.
Just as people enter a house and leave it, so do thoughts come from demons and they can leave, provided we do not hold on to them. If your thought says: “steal” and you obey, you are in this way giving the demon power over you. If your thought says: “eat as much as you want, until you are full”, and you do eat excessively, then again the demon will hold power over you. Thus, if the thought of every passion conquers you, you will end up a dwelling-place of demons. However, if you commence with the appropriate repentance, then the demons will begin to quake and be forced to leave.”
Hattip: Orthodox Outlet for Dogmatic Enquiries website
Related Article: Concerning Thoughts by St. Nicodemus of Mt. Athos
IN THE IMAGE OF GOD
Published December 15, 2008 Commentary , Human Dilemma Leave a CommentA Summons to the Good Fight
By Seth Farber, Ph.D.
from the archives of the now defunct Orthodox journal
The Christian Activist 1995 v.5
But we all, with unveiled face beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18).
No one can be Christ’s until he has, first, faced evil, and then become ready to fight it. (Alexander Schmemann)1
I am an Orthodox Christian (of secular Jewish upbringing), the author of Madness, Heresy and the Rumor of Angels; The Revolt Against the Mental Health System2 and a psychologist who is an activist in the movement against the mental health system. This movement used to be referred to as the mental patients’ liberation movement but is now more frequently termed the psychiatric survivors movement; this latter term should be qualified to note that this movement includes as activists a small number of dissident mental health professionals.
I am writing to explain why I think it is imperative for Christians to be aware of, support and participate in this movement, and to help create Christian “asylums” for individuals in crisis as an alternative to psychiatric facilities. The revolt against the mental health system is an integral part of the evangelical movement for spiritual-social transformation which could potentially draw many of its participants from the ranks of former “mental patients.” This movement is essentially an effort to create the conditions necessary for the realization of the Kingdom of God in each person which was described by the 19th century Russian Christian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov as a “collective divinely-human process.” Solovyov understood well that, “Christianity consists in the fact that God’s work has become the work of man also.”3
If Christ were among us now in person, He would realize that the dogmas and actions of mental health professionals were an obstacle to His ministry, to the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. Christ would not define adjustment to the present social order —an order based on the denial and negation of everything that He lived and died for — as a sign of spiritual well-being (i.e., “mental health”). On the contrary, I believe He would affirm that those who find it most difficult to adjust to the current state of affairs—those who are most troubled—are often among those most spiritually inclined, those most ready to make the transformation to a completely different mode of existence, to be reborn in the Spirit.
“The Spirituality of “Mental Patients”
Every time I have visited a friend, an ally or a client in a psychiatric facility I’ve been struck by how spiritually oriented the patients are and how oblivious, if not outright hostile to spiritual concerns, the staff is. This is not surprising considering the fact that surveys conducted have shown that 95 percent of psychologists and 98 percent of psychiatrists consider themselves atheists.4 Any manifestation of spirituality arouses anxiety in the staff and is typically described in patients’ charts as “religious delusions,” “delusions of grandeur,” “manic episodes”5 i.e., invariably interpreted as “symptoms” of “psychopathology” or “mental illness.”6
Psychiatrists and psychologists, of course, interpret the fact that mental patients are suffering as a sign that they are flawed or damaged in some way. The argument that suffering is a symptom of mental illness, i.e., of an unnatural occurrence, would be more plausible if the world we lived in constituted a natural order, rather than a world that has fallen away from God, a society based on the denial of the existence and relevance of God to human life. I believe that most “mental patients” sense, far more than most people, the relevance of spiritual issues to their daily lives and that much of their suffering is related to their keen awareness of the ungodly nature of the world in which we live.
In my book, Madness, Heresy and the Rumor or Angels, I tell seven stories about seven individuals who had what I term emotional and spiritual breakdowns but who, contrary to the predictions of the mental health authorities are not now disabled by symptoms of “chronic mental illnesses.” None of them takes psychiatric drugs (“medication”) today. All of them either work or are involved in demanding activities (several are active in the movement against the mental health system) and all of them have a number of intimate friends and associates. Each of them had been told repeatedly by psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers that he or she had a chronic mental illness and that he or she would never be able to lead a normal life again—to work or to have intimate relationships. Each of them was given stupefying drugs, drugs that blunt the emotions and paralyze the higher cortical centers of the brain that govern creativity and spiritual experience.
Each of the subjects in my book were examined and diagnosed by several or more psychiatrists or other mental health professionals as suffering from “severe mental illness.” During their “breakdowns” six out of the seven subjects in my book experienced not only distress and despair but also transcendental experiences that included feelings of euphoria, a blissful sense of the presence of God, a mystical unity with all beings.
Space permits me to briefly capitulate a story of only one of my subject’s here. Ellen’s crisis occurred shortly after she began college in Vermont. It might aptly be described as an “identity crisis” since it started after she entered into the unfamiliar terrain of college, a transitional point for young souls where they are initiated into the world of adults. Ellen was faced with the challenge of defining her identity; she became overwhelmed with self-doubts and anxiety. During this period she also had many sublime, transcendental experiences: on one occasion she felt Jesus was talking to her and telling her that she had something important to contribute to humanity.
As the semester progressed, her anxieties increased and she dropped out of school and shortly thereafter placed herself in a psychiatric ward hoping to find relief. Ellen spent over ten years in the mental health system, following the mental health professionals’ advice, taking lithium, a drug that dampened her spirits, and slowed down her metabolism so that the strikingly attractive young woman she had been became in her words, “a round ball.” After ten long years, suddenly, over a period of weeks, Ellen summoned up her courage and resolved to get out of the mental health system. She discontinued taking psychiatric drugs, returned to graduate school, went on a sojourn to India, and has been engaging in many other demanding activities. She has had several boyfriends and numerous friends. Her accomplishments are not supposed to be within the grasp of a person suffering as a “manic depressive,” her official “scientific” diagnosis. Today it is almost eight years since Ellen extricated herself from the mental health system and she has had no “symptoms” of “mental illness.”
I met Ellen through a mutual friend and interviewed her over several weeks for my book. In one interview Ellen described the resolution she finally reached that allowed her to escape the “mental health” system and to become a spirit confident in her own God given mission. She described the effort made by all the mental health experts to convince her that she would never be normal, and the effort made in the “day treatment centers” to discourage her from returning to the world, from going to work or school, from doing anything to escape from the clutches of the career professionals. She stated, “My spiritual sense was so strong it kind of shot through the rest and said to myself, ‘I won’t let this happen to you. I’m going to take care of you, I’m not going to let your mind and body be destroyed by jerks out there.’ It’s strange that I waited that long—until the stakes were at the highest, when my body was used to years of psychiatric drugs, when it was the most dangerous time in a way because if I faltered who knows if I would have survived. It was as if my soul waited until I was restricted to the most confining space one can be in other than being gagged and tied. I mean to be chemically induced for so long. To stop that and to say, ‘No, it’s my time to free myself.’ In one way it was the easiest time because the situation was so severe that there was no other choice. In my heart there was no other choice. On the other hand, it would have been easier if I had made the decision earlier before eight years of psychiatric history, stigma and drugs. But my own awakening took place at a very crucial fork in the road. . . . And it is interesting to see how that rebirthing is so much more powerful and integrated when there’s so much against you. It’s like a concentration-camp inmate fleeing—when the thing got so bad that it would have been better to be shot in a field than live on like that. You know you have to break free, affirm your spirit, and try. In a way, that’s what it was like.”
I want to remind the reader, who may lack familiarity with psychiatric ideology, that the woman I have been quoting is, by the standards of the psychiatric priesthood, a “mentally ill” individual. When Ellen regained her equilibrium, she felt the responsibility to lead other people out of the hell into which she had been cast. She said, “I have a fire . . . I’m supposed to be flaming in this life.” She said that she went through “this living hell on earth for a very meaningful purpose, to be able to touch people and hear their pain and to help them get through it.”
The individuals in my book are not different from the hundreds of thousands of other individuals who languish today in mental hospitals or in halfway houses or in single room occupancy hotels or on the streets. The only difference between my subjects and the rest of those who have been relegated to the cast of pariahs by the psychiatric priesthood7 is that the individuals in my book, through the grace of God, were given the opportunity to realize that the mental health professionals were not really their saviors. They thus were able to resist becoming inducted into full time careers as professional mental patients.
An Ungodly World
Unfortunately, Christians have come to forget that the world that we live in today is not natural. It is a world in which humanity has turned away from God, in which God has become exiled. We live in “the valley of the shadow of death.” To quote Father Georges Florovsky: “Satan rules the world. Universal harmony, willed and established by God, is really decomposed. The world is fallen. The entire world is surrounded by a dismal twilight of nothingness . . . Chaos rules; there is a decomposition constantly in progress, a disorganization of the entire structure of being . . . The vocation of primordial man, innate in his very nature, is to love God with filial devotion and to serve him in the world of which man was designated to be prophet, priest and king. . . According to St. Athanasius, the human fall consists precisely in the fact that man limits himself to himself, that man becomes, as it were, in love with himself. And through his concentration on himself, man separated himself from God and broke the spiritual and free contact with God. It was a kind of delirium, a self-erotic obsession, a spiritual narcissism… it was a despiritualization of human existence. All the rest came as a result—the death and decomposition of the human structure.”8
From the perspective of Christ, St. Paul, the Greek Church Fathers and the Eastern Orthodox tradition, human mortality is not a natural occurrence, but a tragic consequence of our estrangement from God. As Father Florovsky observed, “The very structure of man becomes unstable. The union of the soul and the body becomes insecure. The soul loses its vital power, it is no more able to quicken the body. The body is turned into the tomb and prison of the soul. And physical death becomes inevitable.”9
“For the wages of sin is death . . .” (Romans 6:23). “Even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God, or give thanks; they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened . . . for they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who was blessed forever” (Romans 1:21, 25).
Is equanimity in the face of this catastrophe warranted? Can we as Christians continue to accept the dogma promulgated by the secular priesthood, the “mental health professionals,” that adjustment to the rule of Satan is a sign of spiritual well being and that maladjustment is a symptom of “mental illness?” Will we Christians continue to abandon those most distressed by the godlessness of our society to the ministrations of those godless, soulless apostles of the mental health religion?
Modern secular culture and its outgrowth, the “mental health” system, are based on the lie that human beings can live contentedly without God. However, according to the Fathers, we are not autonomous beings but beings ontologically rooted in God. The mental health “experts” construe human autonomy, i.e., apostasy—the denial of God—as normative and view religion at best as an avocation, a hobby, a diversion. Emotional stability, “mental health,” founded as it is on the delusion of human autonomy, is in fact a state of trance in which one has forgotten one’s origin and destiny, an ephemeral state of obliviousness to the suffering endemic to the present human dilemma, a condition of mediocrity and deprivation characterized by resignation to the senseless dull round of activities necessary for survival, a loss of the sense of the fullness of life, a loss of the awareness of God and eternity. The Church teaches that our vocation is to love and give thanks to God, our destiny is to be restored to communion with God, and thus to finally realize ourselves by “reaching out into infinity, extending ourselves into eternity,”10 and experiencing once again the fathomless depths of an authentic existence. “For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” (Heb. 13:13).
More often than not, it is those individuals labeled the “mentally ill” who have the greatest hunger for transformation, who sense that true sanity, true equanimity, can be attained only by returning once again to God, only by surrendering to the spirit of Christ, only by serving the Holy Spirit. Accordingly, to the Church these longings make perfect sense. In a world ruled by death and sin, an individual cannot be saved apart from the community of believers.
Preparing for the Kingdom of God
Christians (or Jews, Moslems or Buddhists for that matter) never should have delegated the care of souls in crises to the atheistic mental health system. Reassuming this task is not only a positive end in itself but is an integral part of the paramount work we face as Christians: creating the necessary conditions for the realization of the Kingdom of God in each human heart. Within the bosom of Satan’s Kingdom, the reign of sin and of death, we must form an alternative Christian community, a community that is united not by its conformity to the customs and laws of the secular world, but by its conformity to the will of God, a community that will allow each person, all of humanity to find God. This is the raison d’etre of the Church: “to introduce [individuals] into this New Life to which it bears witness.”11 In heaven this community will be the perfect realization of the ideal of human unity and it will annul what Thomas Szasz termed the principle of “existential cannibalism” that currently characterizes the society in which we live, a society where each seeks to enhance his own esteem and well being by denigrating the worth and destroying the life possibilities of others. However even here on earth the community of believers can begin to restore man to God.
Christ says, “Neither pray I for these alone but for them also which shall believe on me through their word. That they all may be as one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, they may also be one in us; that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me. And the glory which Thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one . . .” (John 17:21).
In order to fully receive the plentitude of God’s grace, and consequently to overcome the forces of divisiveness and death, and act as a catalyst for the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, the Church, the community of believers, must foster the ability of the individual to give and to receive love, to share, and consequently, this community must be grounded in an authentic and genuinely Christian understanding of what it means to be a human being. It must consequently counter the predominant Zeitgeist.
Christian centers of asylum, in other words, centers of monastic life, should be set up for individuals in crisis, places where individuals can be initiated into a genuinely Christian way of life and finally integrated into the Church. Had the subjects in my book had the opportunity to retreat to genuine asylums they probably would have been spared years of suffering. If the thousands of individuals labeled severely mentally ill were granted this opportunity, they could be spared years of suffering. In the sanctuaries, monasteries and church communities that I am proposing, individuals who are having breakdowns would be given the opportunity to be reborn, not as schizophrenics, manic depressives, borderline personality disorders, etc., but as children of God.
The “diagnoses” of mental health professionals are not genuine scientific descriptions. They usually reveal less about the patient than they do about how the apostles of the atheistic religion of Mental Health interpret the experiences and behaviors of those individuals who experience difficulty adjusting to this world, ruled as it is by sin and death. Contrary to popular opinion, it is not determined on scientific grounds, that is to say on objective or biological grounds, that a person has a “biochemical imbalance.” This phrase is a metaphor: chemicals are not weighted. A physician determines on objective biological grounds if a person has tuberculosis. A psychiatrist deems a person to have a “biochemical imbalance” if that person manifests “behavior” which indicates distress and/or “deviation” from social norms. In other words, an ascription of pathology is made on the basis of the presence of behavior which the psychiatrist regards as undesirable. This diagnosis is completely subjective and determined by his or her own personal and cultural biases.12
Individual unhappiness or distress—in whatever manner it manifests itself—is not a product of a psychiatric disorder but is a result of having to contend with the problems of life in a fallen universe. In all my years working with people, I have always found that they are disturbed for a reason. It certainly does not help them to contend with their problems by defining them as mentally ill. Frequently, individuals are distressed because they fear they do not deserve to be loved. This fear is aggrandized by mental health experts who typically inform individuals that it has been determined scientifically that they are mentally ill, i.e., unlovable. The mental health industry’s continued existence and growth depends upon convincing growing numbers of individuals that their unhappiness is a sign that they suffer from psychiatric “disorders.”
At a time of crisis of identity, an individual is susceptible to taking on a new identity. “Who am I?” is the unvoiced question that typically resounds in his or her mind. The mental health priests have the answer. “You are a mentally ill victim. This is the secret of who you are, the core of your identity.” The individual trusting in the authority of the mental health priest, obligingly accepts this answer, willingly assumes the identity of a mentally ill person and acts consciously and subconsciously in conformity with the expectations of the role as it is conveyed to him by the cues of the mental health experts with whom he or she interacts. By this procedure the patients’ worst fears are relieved since their compliance earns them the assurance by the “experts” that these fears will not come to pass as long as they continue to follow the doctor’s orders and regularly re-enact a variety of rituals designed to thoroughly impress upon them that they are mentally ill and in need of further treatment.
From a Christian perspective, identity crises or breakdowns, ought not to be regarded as a cause for lamentation. “Truly, truly, I say to you unless one is born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God” (John 3:3). Spiritual rebirth must be preceded by spiritual death, i.e. repentance. A psychotic crisis is often a spiritual death which bears the potential for rebirth, a fact first noticed by psychiatrist R. D. Laing in the 1960’s.
This point is corroborated by anthropological data. The anthropologist Victor Turner has demonstrated that in pre-modern societies, crises or “liminal phases,” are regarded as integral to the process of growth, “Here the cognitive schemata that give sense and order to everyday life no longer apply but are, as it were, suspended.”13 This is the precondition for the rebirth experience. What Turner calls the liminal phase is identical to what the subjects in my book experienced during their breakdowns. In pre-modern society the liminal state is ritualized and regarded as a preliminary phase in a rite of passage (e.g., a transition from youth to adulthood) that leads finally to the restructuring of the person’s life and his or her reintegration into the community. Turner notes that life’s transitions are not merely marked but effected by rituals. In the modern world, as demonstrated above, the liminal state is regarded not as a phase in a process but as a rupture of the order of nature, i.e., a symptom of a “mental illness,” and the ritual of initiation, (repentance, rebirth and sanctity) is replaced by a pseudo-medical degradation ritual that effects the individual’s transition to the caste of virtual untouchables, possessing sub-human status and permanently excluded from society.
Julian Silverman has documented that the ordeal that the novice shaman undergoes as an initiation rite is in effect behaviorally and phenomenologically identical to what in our society is termed a psychotic episode.14 The distinguished historian of religion Mircea Eliade also compares the initiatory ordeal to psychosis, “The future shaman before becoming a wise man, must first know madness and go down into darkness.”15 Eliade notes that the return to “primordial chaos” is the act which makes possible a new creation. In pre-modern cultures madness signifies the death—the dismemberment—of the old self.
The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is, of course, an archetype of the death and rebirth of the soul—as well as the body. Another powerful symbol of this return to the primordial chaos, and an analogue for madness itself, is the blindness that struck the old Saul on the way to Damascus. This is probably why the new Paul spoke so eloquently about the process of spiritual rebirth. “This I say therefore, and affirm together with the Lord, that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk, in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart . . . In reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self, which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and . . . you be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and the holiness of the truth” (Ephesians 4:17-18, 20-24).
Unlike virtually all of the psychiatric facilities run in this country, in Christian sanctuaries individuals would have the opportunity to talk about their spiritual or religious experiences—and most importantly, these experiences would be appreciated rather than dismissed as “religious delusions” and interpreted as “symptoms” of “mental illness.” They would also have the opportunity to reveal their fears and unhappiness (confession) without these emotions being seized upon as “proof” that they are “mentally ill.” These sanctuaries would not be run by “professionals” as this practice only perpetuates the mystique of the professional and fosters the illusion that distress is alleviated by professional expertise rather than by the grace of God. The staff would act rather as mediums for the grace of the Holy Spirit, not their own “wisdom.”
In Christian sanctuaries, the individual’s crisis would be viewed as a liminal phase in his transition to a new life, a life in Christ, which would be effected by the rituals of baptism, chrismation, communion and all the other rituals and acts of a liturgical life. These rites would provide a new order for life and would integrate the individual into a new community, into the Church.
Though the individual in crisis may experience new life through the Church, obviously our salvation has not yet been completed—death and Satan still reign, the Church is still on her pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God. The individual initiated into a new life has responsibilities as well as privileges within the context of their continuing spiritual journey toward God and theosis.
But herein lies the opportunity for the individual to appreciate his or her own value as a person who can contribute to the liberation of humanity from sin. Her identity crisis is resolved not by becoming a professional mental patient, a parasite on society, but by becoming a daughter or son of the Kingdom of God. “Sons of the kingdom of freedom are called to conscious and independent cooperation in the work of the Father.”16 It is humanity’s universal task to realize the kingdom of God in their hearts and on earth: “All work unconsciously and involuntarily for this but to participate freely and consciously is the morally social duty of every enlightened Christian.”17
This World or the Kingdom to Come?
Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza wrote, “The power of God’s kingdom is realized in Jesus’ table community with the poor, the sinners, the tax collectors and prostitutes—with all those who ‘do not belong to the holy people,’ who are somehow deficient in the eyes of the righteous. . . The future can be experienced in the healings, the inclusive discipleship, and the parabolic words of Jesus, but Jesus still hopes for and expects the future inbreaking of God’s basileia, when death, suffering, and patriarchal marriage will be no more. Jesus’ praxis and vision of the basileia is the mediation of God’s future into the structures and experiences of his own time and people.”18 (emphasis added)
I believe that it is now the mission of the Orthodox Church to mediate this future—and thus to continue the work begun by Christ—and to create the conditions for the future inbreaking of God’s basileia. Father Schmemann wrote, “The whole newness, the uniqueness of the Christian leitourgia was in its eschatological nature as the presence here and now of the future parousia, as epiphany of that which is to come, as communion with the ‘world to come.’”19
The decadence of the Church today which Schmemann criticized lies in its surrender to the spirit of secularism and its blind acceptance of this world. Schmemann notes that secularism does not necessarily deny the existence of God, it denies necessarily the sacramentality of human beings and of the world. “It is the negation of man as a worshipping being.”20 “It denies that the world is a epiphany of God, a means of His revelation, presence, and power.”21 Schmemann succinctly articulates the fundamental philosophical motif of secularism: “Honesty demands that we recognize that we must live in the world as if there were no God.”22
Secularism is the Weltanschauung (under it are subsumed both modern and post-modern philosophies) that dominates the modern world, engenders and shapes a mode of existence that is almost entirely profane. Religion is tolerated as a means of consolation in a universe ravaged by death. Christianity is welcomed as long as it does not threaten to transform human life. Secularism is based on the assumption—and who doubts this even among the religious?—that our current mode of existence is natural. It does not even consider that there is an alternative to this mode of existence in which we are estranged from God. Secularism assumes—of course—that death is our inexorable fate.
The modern secular world is a world divested of soul, a “cosmic cemetery,”23 an “iron cage,” (Weber), a machine administered by one dimensional men (Marcuse), by soulless bureaucrats, by “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” (Weber), it is a world dominated by men consumed by the blind pursuit of power and money, a world where human beings secretly driven by the fear of death seek continuous stimulations to distract them from their pain, a world where the culture industry’s continuous production of pornographic images is a grotesque manifestation of men and women’s tragic estrangement from each other, a world where the excitement of recreational “sex” has become a pathetic substitute for the sacramental union of man and woman, a world where the masses seek constant reassurance and guidance on how to “adjust” from secular priests and pundits who write pop psychology books and regularly appear on TV talk shows, a world in which the ones who are having trouble adjusting are taken away, locked in institutions (and spiritually destroyed) when their cries of despair threaten to disturb the illusory and ephemeral security the rest of us have managed to purchase at the cost of our own transformation and salvation.
And where is the Orthodox Church in the midst of this tragic debacle of humankind? Although in the last decade there have been some hopeful harbingers of change, for instance, a renewed interest in monastic life, for the most part the Church has capitulated to the spirit of secularism. She seeks not to change this order but to find a comfortable niche within it. How else to explain the Orthodox Church’s silence on the incompatability of psychiatry and Christianity. Those of us who are aware of the terrible loss this constitutes must seek to arouse the Church from her torpor and remind her again of her lofty calling. As Schmemann put it, the surrender to secularism “must be corrected, if we love the Church and want her to become again the power which transforms the life of man.”24
Nowhere is this surrender more blatant and pernicious than in Christians’ deference to the “scientific expertise” of the psychiatric establishment. In fact, some “Orthodox” even call us to “learn” from secularized psychiatry. The question must be raised, will the Orthodox Church continue to abandon souls in crisis to the ministrations of the apostles of the mental health religion? Why have we so succumbed to the idolatry of science, of “professional” expertise? Do we have so little faith in the living power of Christianity? Do we not believe that the experience of the Kingdom of God, “communion with the world to come,” has more power to transform a human being than all the scientific expertise in the universe? Do we think that Christianity warrants the assumption that the person who does not feel at home in this world, would not feel at home in Christ’s kingdom? Scripture and logic and a great deal of modern evidence, including the data presented in my book, points in the opposite direction, that those who desperately seek the city which is to come, frequently are the ones most likely to be deemed severely mentally ill by the psychiatric establishment precisely because they are the ones most disturbed by this world—this world in which the servant of Love was crucified, this world which abides in the valley of the shadow of death.
The Psychiatric “Priesthood” and the Idolatry of Science
Although psychiatry existed before Sigmund Freud, it was Freud above all others, who successfully asserted the will to power of the secular priesthood who ostensibly reveals the “Truth” to humanity as conveyed to them by Medical Science. According to Freud, the psyche of man has been damaged not by original sin, but by the misdeeds perpetrated by parents on their young children. The Freudians, then and now, pronounced the curse of mental illness for all but an elite of privileged “neurotics” who are qualified to take the psychoanalytic sacraments and thus be saved by Science. The rest of the unwashed masses (schizophrenics,” “bipolar disorders,” etc.) can at best be offered “supportive therapy” to help them live with their “mental illnesses.” These prognoses become self-fulfilling prophecies.
The Augustinian motif, of original sin and the loss of free will, persists in Freudianism and other schools of therapy and has become part of the modern world view in secular form: the soul was damaged, no longer deserving of God’s love, the person is “mentally ill.” This is not explicated; rather the medical terminology serves to conceal the evaluation that is being made, the metaphysical position that is being taken, it is presented as if it is a neutral “scientific” description of a phenomenon rather than an interpretation influenced by personal and cultural biases.
The psychoanalytic model has in the past decade been eclipsed but not replaced by a newer model that lacks even its messianic resonances. This model has been in the ascendancy since the late 1970s when the American Psychiatric Association decided to accept financial contributions from the pharmaceutical companies. Human beings are biochemical units, machines as it were. Capricious Nature frequently makes mistakes and numerous individuals are endowed with “genetic defects” that makes them ill equipped to compete with their fellow human beings in the struggle for survival. These misfits are disturbed by the world around them and commit strange and “dysfunctional” acts that interrupt the smooth operation of the social machinery. When these dysfunctional people question whether there are social or spiritual causes of their distress, their psychiatrists assure them that their problems are purely genetic and while their inadequate machinery can never be totally repaired, if they regularly consume the appropriate medication, their biochemical imbalances will be partially corrected so that they do not fall to the wayside in the struggle for survival. They are told repeatedly that they are like diabetics who require insulin in order to survive.
The Image of God
From a genuinely Christian perspective, each individual is created in the “image of God,” no one is “mentally ill.” Although obscured by sin the image of God remains intact in the soul. The idea of mental illness is a secularized version of Augustine’s (and Luther’s and Calvin’s) dogma that since the Fall, the soul is without worth. From the perspective of the “Augustinian” mental health system, love is a delusion: since the soul is without worth, it is by definition undeserving of reverence or adoration, but at best of pity. This idea is repudiated by Orthodoxy. As Florovsky states, “The image of God, obscured by the infidelity of sin, is nevertheless preserved intact, and that is why there is always, even in the abyss, an ontological receptacle for divine appeal, for the Grace of God.”25
From a Christian perspective love is not a delusion, not purely subjective, not a mere feeling, but a mode of cognition of the Absolute, of God. There can be no knowledge of God without love of God. The doctrine that human beings are created in the image of God suggests that there can be no true knowledge of other human beings also without love, without reverence.
To understand what a human being is, one must first understand something about the energies of God. Gregory of Nyssa writes: “God by His nature is goodness itself. Or rather, God transcends in goodness everything that man can conceive or comprehend. Consequently, he made human life from no other impulse than because he is good. . . . Man was made in God’s image. For this is like saying God made human nature a communicant of everything good . . .”26 By saying that man was made in the image of God, it is thus implied that it is man’s destiny to participate “in the plentitude of the Divine Being, in the abundance of Divine Goodness.”27
This explains why the adoration and infinite devotion of the lover is not subjective but possess cognitive value, is the key to revealing the nature of the human being who is the object of his love. However, a problem remains. We are no longer conformed to our divine nature. Since the fall, “the God-like beauty of the soul which came into being in imitation of the archetype has been discolored like some iron implement by the rust of evil,”28 as Gregory of Nyssa put it. He urges us to wash this image by a pure way of life, as if “with water” so that “the beauty of the soul stands revealed once more.”29 Though the image of God has been obscured by sin, it has not been destroyed. Thus, though its beauty is not resplendent, it may be still be perceived beneath the worldly dross that covers it, it remains as a receptacle for Divine grace. One might say that the lover is granted the grace to perceive the original pristine image of God, the “divine particle”30 in the soul of the beloved. Thus the lover seems the beloved as a manifestation of God and appropriately feels adoration. His love consecrates her, purifies the image and restores its luster.
Vladimir Solovyov, the Russian Orthodox philosopher, wrote profoundly on this topic in the 1890s. He views romantic love as the key to transcending the egoism that keeps us isolated from each other and separate from God. It enables the person to live not just for himself but for the other and to recognize “not just in abstract thought, but in inner feeling and vital will, the absolute significance of another person for us.”31 He acknowledges that there is an element of idealization in romantic love but it is not accurate to describe this as a distortion or a misconception. It is in fact “the truth of the object, unrealized as yet in the sphere of outward existence” and we are granted the grace to perceive this truth precisely so that we can “transform the reality that falls far short of it in accordance with that true image, and embody the idea in actual fact.”32 “The complete realization, the transformation of an individual feminine being into a ray of the divine eternal feminine, inseparable from its radiant source, will be the real—both the subjective and objective—reunion of the individual human being with the Deity, the reinstatement of the living and immortal image of God in man.”33
To use a different formulation one could say that my female other and I are mediums and receptacles for the grace of God for each other. The Greek Church Fathers made it clear that it is through the grace of the Spirit that human beings become like God. In his book on St. Gregory Palamas, G. Mantzaridis wrote “By receiving the deifying grace of the Spirit, the human intellect is itself deified and communicates this grace to the body, so that the whole man partakes of this deifying gift.” Through the regenerative power of grace, the individual “shares in God’s uncreated life which is without beginning and without end.”34 To the extent to which the person accepts the premise of Augustine or the mental health priesthood, he or she is resistant to accepting the love of the other and fails to act as a vessel for God’s love. Thus the diffusion of grace through created nature is prevented, thus keeping us subject to the bondage to death.
The Good Fight
The mental health priesthood, with its cramped vision of human possibility, its contempt for humanity and its denial of God, today dominates our country. Its dogmas are accepted as scientific truth, its priests as infallible scientists of the human soul and its torture chambers for souls in crisis are accepted as psychiatric “treatment” facilities for the “mentally ill.”
There is a conflict between the Kingdom of God and the Prince of this World, and as Christians we must be ever vigilant “The new Christian is about to be sent into the world to be . . . a witness of Christ, a promoter of the Kingdom of God and therefore a fighter against the Prince of this World . . . For we know from the Gospel that the Enemy, defeated as he is by Christ’s victory, is staging an ultimate and desperate battle against those whom Christ has ‘won over’ from him so as to deceive, if possible even the disciples of Christ.”35
We are losing in this battle, we have been deceived by the Prince of this World. We have betrayed our priestly calling—to consecrate all existence and to remember always our Creator—and have succumbed to the idolatry of Science. Instead of heeding Christ’s injunction and fighting for the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth, instead of affirming Christianity as a way of life and as eternal communion with God, we have made peace with the forces of secularism in exchange for the establishment of an Office of Religion formally sanctioned by Medical Science and safely lodged in the Institute of the Ministry of Death. Seduced by the intellectual allure of secularism, infatuated by the worldly glamour of its esteemed doctors and philosophers, its illustrious universities and centers of higher education, deceived by its false messiahs like Freud who promise salvation in the name of Science, our faith in God and Christ has been weakened. We have credulously followed the guidance of the high priests of Mental Health and have tragically failed to recognize that their theories and practices inevitably destroy the ability to love fully, based as they are on the denial of God and the refusal to accept that the image of God is inherent in every human soul.
Solovyov wrote, “In our material environment, it is impossible to preserve love except through understanding and accepting it as a moral task.”36 In 1976, Philip Sherrard, Orthodox philosopher, wrote, in his seminal book Christianity and Eros that in order for the union of man and woman to lead to the transformation of each and to become “the living embodiment” of the sacrament, there is one “absolutely indispensable” condition: “Ultimately each must look upon each as created in the image of God and as having received the summons to be perfect through bringing this image into full and active radiation at the center of their beings. Neither must look upon the other as a means to . . . any end, however exalted, beyond the realization of their unique created personalities.”37 This cannot be accomplished by men and women who have been indoctrinated to regard themselves as mentally ill or as dysfunctional—or functional—machines. By stifling and thwarting the power of love, the secular (mental health) priesthood delivers us over to the dominion of death. Only the fullest development of the capacity for love can free us from the reign of death.
It is time for us to return to a truly Christian perspective—as revealed in the Gospels, the writings of St. Paul, in the Greek Church Fathers and in some of the brighter lights in modern Orthodox theology—on the nature, origin and destiny of human beings. It is time for us to return to our spiritual roots and discover once again the infinite possibilities that are revealed there. I appeal to the Church to again become a beacon of light in a world in darkness, to lift up those pariahs who are condemned and exiled by the psychiatric Pharisees, and to act in accord with her nature as the Bride of Christ. Let us heed Florovsky’s words, “The task of a complete re-creation or reshaping of the whole fabric of human life cannot or must not be avoided or declined38.” For too long have we avoided this task. Let us begin the work now. I appeal to my fellow Christians not to be deceived by the cunning of the mental health priesthood, to oppose its debased concept of human nature with our own understanding of the power of God which can perfect the human soul. Let us respond to our Father’s summons to return, follow Christ’s example, take up the “good fight,” and preach again the good news. Therein lies our hope for salvation.
Endnotes
1. A. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973, p. 71.
2. Farber, Madness, Heresy and the Rumor of Angels; The Revolt Against the Mental Health System, Chicago: Open Court, 1993.
3. “The Essence of Christianity,” in S.L. Frank (Ed.) A Solovyov Anthology, New York: Charles Scribner Sons, 1950, p. 48.
4. D. Larson, “Systematic Analysis of Religious Variables,” American Journal of Psychiatry, 143 (3), March 1986, pp. 329-334.
5. Abraham Heschel points out, “The Greek word for prophecy mantike and the word for madness (manike) were really the same and the letter “t” is only an insertion.”
6. A. J. Herschel, The Prophets, New York: Harper & Row, 1962, p. 392.
7. I use the term “priesthood” not to refer to individuals who are formally priests but to that elite whose claim to have privileged access to God or Science is socially recognized and validated.
8. Georges Florovsky, Creation and Redemption, Belmont, MA: Norland Publishing Company, 1972, p. 85. 9. Ibid. p. 104.
10 P. Nellas, Deification in Christ, New York: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1987, p. 42
11. Georges Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition; an Eastern Orthodox View, Belmont, MA: Norland Publishing Company, 1972, p. 69.
12. In this paper I have interpreted madness as a phase in a potential spiritual death-rebirth process. There are other manifestations of madness that lie beyond the scope of this paper. For example, certain forms of self expression that deviate from culturally sanctioned—yet arbitrary—conventions of discourse. In any case, the interpretation of madness as mental illness is based on a failure to recognize the universality of the human dilemma and is motivated by the will to power of a corrupt secular priesthood which pretends to profess medical scientific expertise. The phenomenon interpreted as mental illness is more accurately and fairly termed madness: and thus rendered its due as a source throughout history of awe, confusion, fascination, fear and poetic and artistic inspiration.
13. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theater, New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982, p. 84.
14. Julian Silverman, “Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia,” American Anthropologist, 69, 1967, pps. 21-31
15. Ibid, p. 225-226.
16. Vladimir Solovyov, “The Essence of Christianity,” op. cit. p. 47-48.
17. Ibid, p. 47.
18. Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1980, p. 121.
19. Alexander Schmemann, The Eucharist, New York: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1988, p. 43.
20. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World, op. cit., p. 118.
21. Ibid, p. 120.
22. Ibid, p. 111.
23. Ibid, 100.
24. Alexander Schmemann, Of Water and Spirit, New York: St. Vladimir Seminary Press (1974), p. 11.
25. G. Florovsky, Creation and Redemption, op cit. p. 90.
26. Cited in Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology New York: St. Vladimir’s Press, p. 123.
27. Ibid, p. 124.
28. St. Gregory of Nyssa, From Glory to Glory, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979, p. 113.
29. Ibid, p. 114.
30. Cited in Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology, p. 130.
31. “Beauty, Sexuality and Love” in Ultimate Questions, edited by A. Schmemann, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, p. 110.
32. Ibid, p. 118
33. Ibid, p. 127.
34. G. Mantzaridis, The Deification of Man, p. 103.
35. A. Schmemann, Of Water and the Spirit, op. cit., p. 125.
36. Vladimir Solovyov, Beauty, Sexuality and Love, op. cit. p. 130.
37. Philip Sherrard, Christianity and Eros. London: SPCK, 1976.
38. G. Florovsky, Bible, Church, Tradition; an Eastern Orthodox View, op. cit., p. 71.
About Seth Farber, Ph.D.
My name is Seth Farber. On April 28, 1994 I was chrismated and received into the Orthodox Church. (I was raised in a secular Jewish home.) I had reached the decision to become Orthodox only three months before that, although I had been moving for several years in the intellectual-spiritual orbit of Orthodoxy. Starting in January 1994 the idea began to grow increasingly stronger in my mind that it was my destiny to be a member of the Church and that the Church is the agency for the salvation of humankind, i.e., that it is the body of Christ.
Before I convey a few of the milestones along my journey to Orthodoxy, I want to briefly describe another trajectory of mine. Several years after graduating college in 1974 with a degree in history, I decided to become a psychologist. I received my Masters from the New School for Social Research and subsequently my doctorate in counseling from the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. I subsequently studied family therapy with several of the leading pioneers in the family therapy movement, including Salvador Minuchin and Jay Haley.
Although when I began my studies in psychology, I imagined I would eventually settle into a comfortable middle class career as a more or less conventional therapist, today I have another agenda. Although I still accept clients, I have invested hardly any time in sustaining a career as a therapist. Instead, I spend most of my time and energy in an attempt to fulfill what I believe is my mission: to educate the American public about the destructiveness of the mental health system and to expose the fraudulence of its claims and its dogmas. To sit contentedly in an office, smoking a pipe, and talking to clients when one knows the house is on fire—and few people seem to notice—would be insane.
Although seeds of disaffection were there when I began graduate school, my awareness of the magnitude of the problem increased greatly over the years. In 1987 my first article, a critique of the idea of mental illness in the tradition of dissident psychiatrists Thomas Szasz and R. D. Laing, was published in The Journal of Mind and Behavior. That same year I met George Ebert, a leader in the mental patients’ liberation movement. Ebert was (and is) a happily married man; at the time he was in his late 40’s and the father of two sons in college. His activism began shortly after he had a breakdown ten years previously (he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic) and was released from a mental hospital. Ebert’s dedication to social activism (he went to jail numerous times for civil disobedience in protest against electroshock treatment) was an inspiration for me. At his suggestion I founded the Network Against Coercive Psychiatry, an organization comprised of both dissident professionals and victims of psychiatric oppression. In 1989 I finished writing a book, Madness, Heresy, and the Rumor of Angels; the Revolt Against the Mental Health System, which was finally published in 1993 by Open Court Press. (Thomas Szasz wrote the foreword to the book.)
In 1989, after ten years of studying Indian philosophy and religion, I commenced the study (which continues to this day) of Christian philosophy and theology. In addition to Scripture, most of my reading was in Orthodox philosophy and theology. During 1989 to 1992 I had a number of extraordinary spiritual experiences which confirmed for me the veracity of the (authentic) Orthodox understanding of the human situation and calling. (Many of the books I read were generously loaned to me by Father David Kossey, a priest in the Carpatho-Russian Orthodox Church, who had become a close friend after I serendipitiously met him in the New York Public Library in 1987.)
Although I thought about becoming Orthodox, I was reluctant for a number of reasons—primarily because the contemporary Orthodox Church did not strike me as a force for spiritual-cultural transformation. Nevertheless, the Church continued to exercise its pull on me in myriad ways. In the summer of 1993 I discovered the writings of Father Alexander Schmemann. I was amazed: this was clearly a visionary and a man of great spiritual-intellectual force who had the courage and compassion to excoriate—from within the Church itself—his fellow Christians for their capitulation to secularism and their failure to take seriously the mission of the Church. At about the same time, on an excursion to St. Vladimir’s Seminary library, I fortuitously discovered the magazine Epiphany which indicated to me that there was a spirit of genuine revival within Orthodoxy. One of the editors of Epiphany sent me a copy of The Christian Activist newspaper. I was impressed by Frank Schaeffer’s willingness to pit himself against the culture of secularism. In vigorous and eloquent prose Schaeffer described the way in which secularism and the “abortion mentality” led to the degradation of women. “In a horrible irony, the reduction of women to the status of tissue banks has been achieved in the name of women’s rights!… The ‘feminist’ agenda has weirdly converged with that of the pornography industry… The medical practitioner’s career has become indistinguishable from the concentration camp guard.”
The final occurrence that led to my decision to become Orthodox was a series of rhetorical questions Philip Sherrard posed to me in response to a letter I sent him expressing my ambivalence about the Church. (I had corresponded with Sherrard from time to time after I read his important book, Christianity and Eros, in 1989.) He wrote, “Then there is the question of enlisting the support of Christians [for the battle against the spirit of secularism]. Can this be done in, so to speak, a vacuum? Central to the Christian tradition and the spiritual life of Christians is the Church, and I don’t see how you can enlist the support of Christians apart from the Church… You may think that this is wishful thinking and that every institutionalized form of the Church is too ‘sclerotic’ (to use your own word) to launch any offensive against secularism. Again, I’m not saying you are not right: but I don’t see that the situation is not far worse when it comes to launching such an offensive outside the Church. Who is going to do it and in the name of what? The devil can’t cast out the devil. And to say that every institutionalized form of the Church is now in the hands of the devil would be to say that the Holy Spirit no longer manifests Himself through any such form and consequently there cannot be any question of holiness or sanctity among those who are its members. Ultimately the sole standard is holiness; and I would have thought one has to be very cautious before one affirms that there is no manifestation of holiness among those who participate in the liturgical and sacramental life of the ‘visible’ Church. And if there is such a manifestation, then that Church is not in the hands of the devil, but God is operative through it. And where God operates, anything can happen!”
Shortly after I decided to join the Orthodox Church, Father David Kossey introduced me to Bishop Seraphim, a man of profound piety and catholic understanding who encouraged my conversion and volunteered to be my godfather.