Who is insane?

  • I recently took in a great Illu­mined Heart pod­cast at Ancient Faith Radio enti­tled “Insan­ity or Demonic Pos­ses­sion?(*)” To give away the punch­line a lit­tle bit, there isn’t some patent laun­dry list that a layper­son can tell insan­ity from demonic pos­ses­sion (thank good­ness, right?), but the Church acknowl­edges that both exist. They are dis­tinct states (so insan­ity doesn’t always have demonic ori­gin), and diag­no­sis and treat­ment can only be done by a gifted elder.

    I’m glad to know we’re on the case. I’ve been won­der­ing for some time: If men­tal dis­or­ders were some­times a sick­ness of the soul as much as the mind, is it any won­der that sec­u­lar treat­ments gen­er­ally don’t work?

    Well, I’m being harsh to say they don’t work. I sup­pose it depends on how you define things. Psy­chi­atric med­ica­tions can quiet peo­ple down; they can treat the symp­toms. But is that all we want to do? There’s an old insane asy­lum near us in St. Joseph that’s been partly con­verted into a psy­chi­atric museum(**). You get a look at the nos­trums, con­trap­tions, weapons and what­not that the sane have used over the cen­turies to try to deal with the insane. There’s a lot there to chill the blood, but as bad as some of that stuff is, at least some­times they were try­ing to cure them. We don’t really do that any more. The best drugs we have seem mostly about just dead­en­ing a per­son, or a part of them. We take it for granted that they can’t be cured. But what if we didn’t just find new way to silence parts of their brain?

    We say that peo­ple who hear voices or bab­ble inco­her­ently are out of touch with real­ity, but I think it makes more sense to say that they’re out of touch with one real­ity but in touch with another. And we make judg­ments some­times based on soci­etal stan­dards that aren’t part of the ear­li­est Chris­t­ian under­stand­ing. In the Illu­mined Heart pod­cast, Kevin Allen asks Mother Mela­nia what it means to be insane in the patris­tic sense, and she answers:

    Basi­cally I think in a very broad sense you can’t per­ceive or respond cor­rectly to real­ity, and in the case of your basic West­erner of our day and age, we only think of that in terms of every­day real­ity. So if you think that you’re a gorilla, well, you’re insane. But if you think that you can go to heaven by crash­ing into the World Trade Cen­ter and killing your­self and many, many inno­cent peo­ple in the process, you’re not insane, because your sub-culture not only holds that to be sane but actu­ally laud­able. Now, the Fathers would say that both of those peo­ple were insane.

    And lest we think that these labels only refer to non-Christians, Mother Mela­nia also men­tions that “the Church Fathers con­sid­ered every­one but a saint insane.”

    I found this part of the dis­cus­sion espe­cially inter­est­ing, because ear­lier in the week I had come across a short essay in “Patris­tic The­ol­ogy”**** by Pro­to­pres­byter John S. Romanides enti­tled “Who is men­tally ill accord­ing to the Church Fathers?” that agreed and gave more specifics:

    Every­one is men­tally ill accord­ing to the Patris­tic mean­ing of men­tal ill­ness. You do not have to be schiz­o­phrenic in order to be men­tally ill. The def­i­n­i­tion of men­tal ill­ness from a Patris­tic point of view is that peo­ple are men­tally ill when the noetic energy they have insider them is not func­tion­ing prop­erly. In other words, being men­tally ill means your nous is full of logisi­moi.

    Your what is full of what? If you haven’t heard the term ‘nous‘ before, an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion would be ‘the eye of your soul’ (fuller under­stand­ing HERE). But I had never heard ‘logisi­moi‘ before. The foot­note explains that it is the tech­ni­cal term in ascetic lit­er­a­ture for thoughts com­bined with images. (sin­gu­lar: logisi­mos). I thought this was fas­ci­nat­ing. Doesn’t this describe the sad state of all of us in this over­stim­u­lated, over­sat­u­rated cul­ture? We’ve got mem­o­ries and imag­in­ings and old com­mer­cials and pos­si­ble con­ver­sa­tions going on in our heads all the time! (I think about my patron saint who was tor­mented for years when she went out into the desert by such remembrances.)

    And these logisi­moi don’t even have to be immoral or unseemly in nature to pol­lute the eye of your soul…

    It makes no dif­fer­ence whether these thoughts are moral, extremely moral, immoral or any­thing else. In other words, accord­ing to the Church Fathers, any­one whose soul has not been puri­fied from the pas­sions and who has not reached the state of illu­mi­na­tion through the grace of the Holy Spirit is men­tally ill, but not in the psy­chi­atric sense. (“Patris­tic The­ol­ogy,” pg. 24).

    I don’t know if that is depress­ing to some peo­ple or not, but I found it very lib­er­at­ing. It’s not to say that we’re not all still respon­si­ble for try­ing to avail our­selves of all the means at our dis­posal to over­come our spir­i­tual sick­nesses and draw closer to God. But maybe it helps me under­stand why I feel a strange kin­ship with those sad souls who suf­fer so pub­licly and exhibit their inner chaos fla­grantly enough for all of us to see. I don’t cringe because I don’t under­stand them — I cringe because I do.

    One last note: To get back to the sub­ject of demonic pos­ses­sion for a moment, Kevin men­tions that in the Chris­t­ian charis­matic tra­di­tion, exor­cisms are per­formed quite com­monly and by peo­ple that cer­tainly don’t fit the Ortho­dox require­ments of a ‘gifted elder.’ Mother Mela­nia com­ments that such activ­ity is not only fool­hardy, but dan­ger­ous — spir­i­tu­ally and occa­sion­ally even phys­i­cally. It’s so tempt­ing for peo­ple who are hun­gry for mys­tery to go blun­der­ing in where they have no busi­ness going, and more tempt­ing — unfor­tu­nately — for those who have been badly or incor­rectly taught about such things to think that they can do any­thing as long as they remem­ber to say ‘in Jesus’ name’ at the end. I watched an absolutely hor­ri­fy­ing doc­u­men­tary once of one lit­tle Protes­tant church whose con­gre­ga­tion came to believe that one woman’s father was a Satan wor­ship­per who had per­formed child sac­ri­fice and impreg­nated girls, in spite of a total lack of evi­dence. They started per­form­ing exor­cisms and only found more and more demons that had pos­sessed parish­ioners. It didn’t seem to occur to any of them that they might be under demonic influ­ence. I can’t imag­ine where some­thing like this ends.

    And those kinds of activ­i­ties are not, thank God, our way in the Ortho­dox Church. But I remem­ber that story to warn myself as much as any­one. The only thing I’ve fig­ured out where demons are con­cerned is that it’s best not to try to acquire exper­tise. Their abil­ity to twist thoughts, emo­tions and words to their own ends have taken in many peo­ple much wiser and more accom­plished than I am. Because — to bring things full cir­cle — they can make ample use of the men­tal ill­ness that I have, and fan that ember into a destroy­ing fire.

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    (Thanks and a plug: Fr. Luke Har­tung was so kind as to send me a copy of “Patris­tic The­ol­ogy” when he sent “The Bound­less Gar­den.” I don’t know what I did to deserve such nice­ness, but it’s turn­ing out to be the favorite of my cur­rent Ortho­dox read­ing mate­r­ial. And peo­ple should know that in spite of that title, these aren’t supremely dif­fi­cult or inac­ces­si­ble essays. They were given by Fr. John Romanides to col­lege fresh­men in the ’80s, and they’re sim­ply writ­ten, but pro­found and rel­e­vant. Inter­ested Ortho­dox (and non-Orthodox?) folk def­i­nitely ought to look at some of the sam­ples HERE.)


    Related posts:

    1. Read­ing the lives of the saints
    2. Bright Fri­day and my wooden heart
    3. Is Ortho­dox con­ver­sion on the rise?
    4. About med­i­ta­tion
    5. Three quotes

    July 12th, 2009 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • s-p 07.12.2009

    That was indeed an inter­est­ing pod­cast (since my pre­con­struc­tion work was in the men­tal health field). A shame­less plug: For more on “logi­so­moi” etc. the inter­views I did with Mp Jonah on Our Life in Christ’s audio archives has some good stuff on “thoughts” in the con­text of the Jesus Prayer and monas­ti­cism. The inter­view with Papa Demetrios is on the “nous”, and is also good.

  • Erica

    I’m gonna have to check this out! How interesting!

  • Fr. Anthony Perkins

    Glory to Jesus Christ!

    Nice pre­sen­ta­tion. I really enjoyed that inter­view and have lis­tened to it sev­eral times. Is the work that Mother Mela­nia did pub­lished anywhere?

    God bless,

    Fr. Anthony

    PS I just found your blog and enjoy it very much — thank you for shar­ing this min­istry. FWIW, your remarks on Stephen King are what I really like about Flan­nery O’Connor (and Charles Williams is much bet­ter than Paretti). The encoun­ters seem more “mun­dane” than King’s, but that is only when seen through the world’s eyes. If you haven’t read much of hers, “The River” is a great exam­ple of what hap­pens when the inno­cent go into spir­i­tual bat­tle unarmed.

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