Anatomy Of Madness Vol 1

W F Bynum, Michael Shepherd, Roy Porter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781136524929
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is a collection of essays on the history of Psychiatry. Volume I of three, offers works around people and ideas including those of Samuel Johnson, Jon Conolly, Descartes, Freud, Darwin and Hamlet. Most of the papers in these volumes arose from a seminar series on the history of psychiatry and a one-day seminar on the same theme held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, during the academic year 1982-83.

CHAPTER ONE
Good madness in Christendom

M.A. Screech

Are Christians mad?

MADNESS AND CHRISTIANITY go hand in hand. That has been true at least since the earliest surviving accounts of the central events of Christianity in the Greek New Testament. Until very recently (if that), at no time since the first century has it been possible to draw a sharp line between several kinds of Christian other-worldliness and diabolical or organic madness.

This is partly because of the way in which the four Gospel writers – especially St Mark – wrote of Jesus and his disciples; partly, also, because of the way in which the disciples themselves – especially St Paul – strove to account for the experiences which had revolutionized their lives. They had to account, too, for their startling religious certainties. What were they based upon?

The principal teachings of Christianity (the resurrection of Christ from the dead and the future resurrection of all mankind) flew in the face of mature philosophical and religious thinking in the wider world of the Roman Empire. Moreover, the resurrection of the dead of the New Testament was, from the very outset, thought of by many Greek Christians as the resurrection of the body. Yet to wish to resurrect the body once the immortal soul had got rid of it through death would be plain madness for most Greek and Roman philosophers.

That was one of the reasons why ‘the Greeks’ found Christianity to be ‘foolish’. But it is not the only one. Other Christian beliefs, especially those concerned with ecstasies and raptures of many sorts, were held to be thoroughly compatible with Platonic notions of mania. They were connected with ‘madness’, but in another, very desirable, sense.

This is a short contribution on a very large matter. To make it manageable I shall look at this subject mainly through the eyes of Erasmus. Some of the ideas expressed here are treated in greater detail elsewhere; others will find their place in another book to appear in a few years’ time.¹

Erasmus is a good guide. He was a Christian humanist of subtlety, erudition, and complexity. He edited the first printed Greek New Testament to be placed on sale (Basle, 1516); over the years he wrote copious annotations to show the inadequacies of the traditional Latin rendering of it; he devoted his life to exegesis, to explanation, and to humanist Christian propaganda generally; he was highly indebted to Plato and to the often Platonizing Fathers of the Church. His influence was widespread and long-lasting. And, as much as any Christian writer who ever lived, he was convinced that, at least for a chosen few, Christianity is a ‘certain kind of madness’.²

Erasmus treats Christianity as madness, paradoxically, in the Praise of Folly (1511, with important subsequent expanded editions); he returned to the subject, without the paradoxes, in one of the most widely read books of the Renaissance, his ever-expanding Adagia; his own fundamental recension of the Latin Vulgate New Testament is marked by it; his New Testament Annotationes are impregnated with it in all their various editions; his other voluminous writings return to the topic again and again.³

Erasmus was so convinced that Christianity at its highest is a form of good madness that he put his own convictions into the very mouth of Christ, not only in paradoxical works of ‘literature’ but in his recension and in the accompanying Annotationes. When, in Matthew 11:25 and Luke 10:21, Jesus thanked the Father for hiding the ‘mystery of salvation from the wise’ and for having ‘revealed it to nēpiois’ (‘infants’; ‘babes’), Erasmus rendered nēpioi by stulti (‘fools’). He defended this in his Annotationes. Pressure eventually made him give way, but it did not make him change his mind. He remained convinced that Jesus wanted his followers to be, in some sense, like ‘fools’.⁴

Already in the first edition of the Praise of Folly (1511) Erasmus wrote, with a kind of bantering earnestness, that Christianity at its best is ‘nothing other’ than ‘a kind of madness’ (insaniam quandam). Are not enraptured Christians ‘demented’ – deprived of their mens, their mind? Do they not enjoy an experience ‘very like dementedness’ (dementiae simillimum)?

‘As long as the soul uses its bodily organs aright a man is called sane; but, truly, when it bursts its chains and tries to be free, practising running away from its prison, then one calls it insanity. If this happens through disease or a defect of the organs, then by common consent it is, plainly, insanity. And yet men of this kind, too, we find foretelling things to come, knowing tongues and writings which they had never studied beforehand – altogether showing forth something divine. There is no doubt that this happens because the mind, a little freer from polluting contact with the body, begins to use its native powers.’⁵

The implications of all this for the history of psychiatry and madness are profound; a closer look at Erasmus within the context of his time shows that his ideas were shared by professional men in all the main disciplines.

The classical basis for Christian ‘madness’

Whenever and wherever Plato’s teachings are taken seriously it is quite impossible to separate inspired genius entirely from organic madness. This conviction, firmly rooted in Greek philosophy since Socrates, was adopted by the Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria (29 B.C.–A.D. 54) in his exegesis of the Old Testament. His interpretation of the Jewish scriptures was so deeply in accord with Platonic other-worldliness that early Christians were stirred to wonder whether ‘Philo had Platonized or Plato Philonized’. From Philo onwards, because of the widespread use of allegory, it was possible to interpret a surprising amount of the Old Testament in accordance with Platonic assumptions. And St Jerome, among others, welcomed Philo as a guide, despite his remaining outside the Church.

Faced with the contempt of philosophical Gentiles, Christians went on to the offensive. When they were called mad in a contemptuous sense and dismissed as fools and idiots, they revelled in the accusations: it is good to be condemned by the hostile standards of this transitory life. In I Corinthians 1, Paul is quite prepared to accept that the ‘preaching of the Cross’ should be ‘foolishness’ to them that are perishing – a stumbling-block for most of his fellow Jews, ‘and unto Gentiles foolishness’.

Such reactions are humanly understandable. But long custom can weaken the force of what Paul is saying. He is not simply exulting in the fact that Christian truths seem mad to many. He is going much further: Christianity is, he insists, foolish in a very real sense. It is ‘the foolishness of God’ (to mōron tou theou).

St Paul may have meant these words to be taken quite literally; that is for New Testament scholars to try and decide. Some of the Fathers of the Church certainly believed that they meant what they bluntly said: that God, having despaired of saving the world by his wisdom, decided to save it by an act of divine ‘madness’. God’s ‘mad’ action was the crucifixion of his only Son.⁶

Christians also act in odd ways which are in conformity with this ‘foolishness of God’. This may be seen in the selfless acts of charity of the Christian convert; it is to be found in the ecstasies and raptures experienced by Christian visionaries and mystics.

As Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire, religious ecstasy (including the ‘ecstasy’ of selfless charity) was increasingly interpreted with the help of Platonic philosophy. This was so at least since Origen among the Greeks (A.D. 185–254) and since Tertullian among the Latins (A.D. 155–200). Because of this, these startling claims made for divine madness became, to some extent, almost commonplace; but never entirely so, since it was only too possible to follow such ideas from acceptable Platonizing within Catholic orthodoxy into Platonizing error. It was eventually seen that Plato’s teachings must be modified before Christians can accept them all. Under the influence of Plato, both Origen and Tertullian fell into heresy – Tertullian resoundingly so. Nevertheless, over a thousand years later, in the Renaissance, Plato still remained for Christian humanists, including Ficino and Erasmus, one of the most vital sources to which thinkers were compelled to turn to explain charismatic ‘madness’. Theologians, poets, mystics, philosophers, lawyers, and doctors all had to come to terms with the linking of the great charismata vouchsafed to Plato’s superior geniuses, and the gifts of charity, prophecy, and rapture enjoyed by the Christian elect. The link is a direct one.

The main source of Platonic teaching about charismatic madness is what Socrates taught in the Phaedrus (sections 244–45; 265). Socrates denied that mania is, in itself and in all cases, an evil. Sanity is indeed to be cherished – but only up to a point. This is because the greatest of blessings come to men through charismatic manias sent from the gods. These blessed manias are four in number (though sometimes reduced to three, by classifying the first and second together). They are:

(1) prophesying – the mantic art which, Socrates asserts, was originally called the manic art (without the interpolation of that ‘tasteless t’);

(2) mystical initiations and revelations;

(3) poetic inspiration; and

(4) the ‘madness’ of mutual lovers.

All these privileged states are characterized by frenzy. Divine spirits – or the soul of the beloved – enter the chosen vessel whose own soul is then at least partially detached from its body in ecstasy and rapture. These manias, being above mere earth-bound concerns, constitute man’s greatest blessings and happiness. No ecstatic ever wishes to return to mundane matters, once he has experienced ek–stasis – what it is to be ‘displaced outside himself. Nor, it was thought, did the organically insane either; they too were ‘rapturously’ happy in their demented fantasies. Intense happiness was one of the many characteristics shared by both main kinds of ‘maniacs’, the merely mad as well as the divinely so.

Plato’s theories depend on man’s being a compound creature, earthbound through his body, heaven-seeking through his soul. (Intermediate between soul and body is the spirit, which forms the link between them.) When a man is a maniac from natural causes the defect is not normally thought of as being in the soul but in its organ, the body; the soul, for whatever reason, cannot use this organ aright and partially escapes from its restraints. But even at the best of times the philosophic soul also yearns to quit the ‘prison’ of the body and to soar aloft towards its heavenly home. Whenever the soul succeeds in freeing itself somewhat from the body’s fetters – even through merely organic madness, but especially through the divine kinds – something divine may be glimpsed by it in its frenzied wanderings. The charismatic maniac is more favoured than the organic maniac, of course, but he too is ‘mad’ and so may share a great many signs and symptoms with the organic madman. He may even share some of his divinely privileged gifts with him. That is because, in all cases of mania, the basic mechanics (as it were) are the same: the soul is striving to leave the body. Insofar as it does so, it is exposed to extra-mundane influences.

The frenzies of both medically and charismatically insane people arise from the soul’s quest for freedom. In the case of privileged ‘maniacs’ this may result from what was termed ‘enthusiasm’ or ‘inspiration’ – that is, when good daemons ‘possess’ the favoured prophet, philosopher, or poet. It may also result from the ‘amazement’ caused when the soul glimpses, even indirectly, divine truth or beauty. In erotic mania souls are exchanged between the two lovers, who therefore live in a state of permanent ecstasy, permanently, that is, ‘outside’ themselves and ‘in’ the beloved. This ecstasy is caused by divine beauty reflected in the beloved.

All the values yearned for by the divinely manic enthusiast – who is the true philosopher – are invisible ones. They derive from realms higher than our material world (Phaedo, sections 78A–80E, etc.). As far as he can, the true philosopher spurns the body and those things which are akin to it, since they chain hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Contents of companion volume
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements xiv
• Introduction
• 1 Good madness in Christendom
• 2 Descartes, dualism, and psychosomatic medicine
• 3 ‘The Hunger of Imagination’: approaching Samuel Johnson’s melancholy
• 4 The nervous patient in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain: the psychiatric origins of British neurology
• 5 A Victorian alienist: John Conolly, FRCP, DCL (1794–1866)
• 6 Darwin and the face of madness
• 7 Obsessional disorders during the nineteenth century: terminological and classificatory issues
• 8 Degeneration and hereditarianism in French mental medicine 1840–90
• 9 Psychical research and psychiatry in late Victorian Britain: trance as ecstasy or trance as insanity
• 10 Contracting the disease of love: authority and freedom in the origins of psychoanalysis
• 11 Freud’s cases: the clinical basis of psychoanalysis
• 12 Hamlet on the couch
• Name index
• Subject index