Disability in the Christian Tradition

A Reader

Brian Brock, John Swinton, Brian Brock, John Swinton

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781467435833
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

For two millennia Christians have thought about what human impairment is and how faith communities and society should respond to people with perceived impairments. But never has one volume collected the most significant Christian writings on disability. This book fills that gap.
Brian Brock and John Swinton's Disability in the Christian Tradition brings together for the first time key writings by thinkers from all periods of Christian history - including Augustine, Aquinas, Julian of Norwich, Luther, Calvin, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Hauerwas, and more. Fourteen contemporary experts in theology and disability studies guide readers through each era or group of thinkers, offering clear commentary and highlighting important themes.

1 The Patristic Era: Early Christian Attitudes toward the Disfigured Outcast

ALMUT CASPARY

To explore the situation of disability in late antiquity and in the writings of the early church, one might start by recalling how different today’s Western social practices are from ancient Greek or Roman societies in relation to the vulnerable at the fringes of their cities — the newborn, the elderly, the diseased, the injured, and the disfigured, as well as the poor. Greek philosophy valued order, balance, and harmony in nature and society; disorder, as represented by morbidity and poverty, indicated a menace or curse to nature and society. Disorder originates on another plane: that of the gods. In a world where diseases, injuries, malformation, and material misfortunes were often seen as signs of the ill will of the gods, scant public resources were allocated to disfigured citizens, and then first of all given to impaired and impoverished war veterans. Institutionalized medical care was largely absent in ancient societies, again with the possible exception of care for injured soldiers and veterans, which took place in Roman valetudinaria (cf. Stiker 1999; Miller 1985).

In a time of raging epidemics, famines, and wars taking enormous death tolls, the most vulnerable, disabled, impaired, and chronically ill within the societies of late antiquity did not constitute a group substantial enough to be reckoned with politically and institutionally. Medico-historical sources and skeletal finds document the frequent occurrence of life-threatening epidemics: types of fever such as viral influenza, typhoid fever, and malaria were widespread. Outbreaks of typhus and cholera were common not only in times of war. Meningitis together with diseases such as mumps and measles were frequent causes of death (cf. Hippocratic Writings, Epidemics; Lloyd 2003). Newborns as well as children and the elderly were among the most vulnerable, being less physically robust, along with those weakened by poverty.

Leaving aside causes of death largely beyond people’s control, there is nonetheless a marked difference between the social practices of late antiquity and, if not today, certainly the Middle Ages as regards the attitude shown to babies born with disabilities. While in late antiquity (as in most pre-industrial and pre-clinical societies) both adult and infant mortality were generally high, the social practices of the time ensured a virtual death sentence for those born with a disabling condition. The exposure of both healthy and defective newborns was widely practiced in classical Greece and Rome. While the former were exposed for economic reasons and as a means of population control, the latter were left to die for social and eugenic reasons. The disfiguring conditions of monsters, as they were called (prodigia in Latin, terata in Greek), were largely ascribed to supernatural powers that needed to be exorcised and purified for the benefit of society as a whole. Often such monsters were seen as manifestations of supernatural powers foreboding danger for the community; divine signs, portents, or bad omens for their families and the polis at large (cf. Stiker 1999, ch. 3).

It is crucial to understand in this context that a person’s value in antiquity was largely defined as social value: A human being was considered to be of value in view of his or her potential to contribute both materially and through acquired virtue to the good of the family and of society. Children were generally considered of value only to the extent that they had potential to make a virtuous contribution to the public good as adults. According to John Rist, “It was almost universally held in antiquity that a child has no intrinsic right to life in virtue of being born. What mattered was being adopted into a family or some other institution of the society” (Rist 1996, 141). The value of embryonic, newborn, or indeed infant human life was solely potential. “With the exception of a few late Stoics, there is little appreciation in the writings of the philosophers that childhood has any value of its own, that it might be judged on its own terms” (Rist, 142).

The advent of Christianity marked a turning point in late antiquity in its appreciation of human life as having intrinsic value. Following Christ’s message and example, early Christian theologians gave testimony to a decidedly different attitude toward human life from beginning to end. Christians’ countercultural social practices paved the way for public institutions of charity for the socially excluded. They reacted to, and often against, the dominant attitudes toward the body and toward life more generally as valuable only in terms of its contributions to the public good. They attacked the practice of exposure of infants, including defective newborns. They showed little interest in particular disabilities or diseases; the interest they did show (as in the case of leprosy) was in connection with a more general concern with social exclusion. Disabled or “crippled” people were of interest only because all social outcasts were of interest — be they children, the lame, the blind, the poor, or prostitutes. And while the Church Fathers of the late third and fourth centuries showed little if any theoretical interest in the physiological origin or moral nature of physical differences, they adamantly recommended pastoral care and philanthropy as exemplary responses to social exclusion as enjoined in the New Testament.

This introduction is divided into two sections and explores the writings of third-century and fourth-century Fathers from both West and East. The first section looks at the condemnation of the exposure of newborns through excerpts from writings of the North African Fathers Clement of Alexandria (d. ca. A.D. 215), Tertullian (ca. A.D. 155-230), and Lactantius (ca. A.D. 210-320). The second section examines the public care practiced by the three Cappadocian Fathers: Basil the Great (A.D. 329-379), his friend Gregory of Nazianzus (A.D. 329-389), and his brother, Gregory of Nyssa (A.D. 335-394). While both strands of these traditions take their orientation from the New Testament’s message of God’s love for humanity and of the intrinsic goodness of human life, the first strand refers more explicitly to the value of human life, whereas the second is more explicitly practical and pastoral in orientation, centering on the works of philanthropy that allow Christians to identify with Christ both as individuals and as participants in their communal liturgical practices. Given their greater length and conceptual development, excerpts from this second stream will make up the primary texts for this chapter.

Early Christian Attitudes toward Disfigured Newborns

It is beyond the scope of this introduction to undertake a detailed examination of ancient Greek and Roman attitudes to defective newborns, but a few comments will provide the background to the scattered comments made by Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Lactantius in relation to early human life and the practices of abortion and exposure.

Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, and Soranus’s treatise Gynecology allow us to assume “that the care of defective newborns simply was not a medical concern in classical antiquity” and that “the morality of the killing of the sickly or deformed newborns appears not to have been questioned, at least not in extant sources, either by non-medical or by medical authors” (Amundsen 1996, 55). According to Darrell Amundsen, “It can be categorically asserted that there were no laws in classical antiquity, Greek or Roman, that prohibited the killing, by exposure or otherwise, of the defective newborn” (Amundsen, 55). The reason for such rejection of deformed newborn life seems to have been the negligibility of its contribution to the future public good.

Despite the growing humanitarianism of late antiquity, a by-product of broader philanthropic sentiments within Stoicism, the practice of exposure of both healthy and defective newborns was still common in the early Christian centuries. This practice now met with a theologically founded disapproval. Written testimonies to such disapproval are frequent, though made in passing and fragmentary in nature. The Christian writer Minucius Felix writes in a condemnatory tone in Octavius that “newly begotten sons [are] at times exposed to wild beasts and birds, or dispatched by the violent death of strangulation,” and that women, “by the use of medicinal potions, destroy the nascent life in their wombs, and murder the child before they bring it forth” (Octavius, 30; cf. also Clement, Paidagogos, 173-74).

Arguments against these practices by Christian authors are not very detailed. Comments are situated primarily in the context of the prohibition of the taking of human life (or the shedding of human blood), even of animal life (or animal blood) more generally: “We however are not allowed either to witness or to hear of human slaughter, and the awe we have of human blood is so great that we do not even taste that of animals for food” (Minucius Felix, Octavius, 30). Similarly, Lactantius makes this argument in The Divine Institutes: “Therefore (when God forbids killing) no exception whatsoever must be made. It is always wrong to kill a man whom God has intended to be a sacrosanct creature. Let no one, then, think that it is to be conceded even that newly born children may be done away with, an especially great impiety! God breathes souls into them for life, not for death.” In the context of killing, Lactantius also addresses the exposure of infants for economic reasons and recommends chastity as the only morally acceptable means of birth control. “Parricides,” he says, “complain of the narrowness of their opportunities and pretend that they are not able to provide for bringing up several children, as if in truth, the opportunities are in the power of those possessing them, or as if God does not daily make the rich poor and the poor rich. So, if someone is not able to bring up children on account of poverty, it is more satisfactory that he refrain from intercourse with his wife rather than that he corrupt the works of God with defiled hands” (Divine Institutes, 20).

A general appreciation of the goodness of the body regardless of its state and of our responsibility toward it, as well as its spiritual inferiority to the soul, provides another context for early Christian arguments against abortion and exposure. When Tertullian attacks both practices for children healthy or defective, he underlines that there is no difference between an embryo, a baby, a child, or an adult as regards their humanness, based on the union of body and soul. “The fruit is present in the seed” (Tertullian 1950, Apology, 9), and the conceptus is a “human being from the moment when its formation is completed” (Tertullian, On the Soul, 37/2), by which Tertullian means “the joining of the seeds” (37/5), which for him is also the beginning of the union of body and soul. A degree of potentiality remains in that “the power of the soul which contains all its native potentialities gradually develops along with the body.” Yet there is “no change in the initial substance which it received by being breathed into the man in the beginning” (37/5). Such a view clearly differs from the Roman view of human value as acquired gradually through training and education.

The hierarchical view of body and soul often also yields a downplaying of concern with bodily appearance. Clement of Alexandria says in The Paidagogos, “It is not the appearance of the outer man that should be made beautiful but his soul with the ornament of true virtue” (202). He condemns both female “decoration of body” and male attempts at “improving the ageing body” (212), and he finds it “absurd to those who have been made to the image and likeness of God to adopt some unnatural means of ornamentation, disfiguring the pattern by which they have been created, and preferring the cleverness of man to that of their divine Creator” (250). In a similar vein, Tertullian exhorts both men and women not to be overly concerned with their appearance. “By a defect of nature, there is inborn in men because of women (just as in women because of men) the desire to please; the male sex also has its own peculiar trickeries for enhancing their appearance: for instance, cutting the beard a bit too sharply, trimming it too neatly, shaving around the mouth, arranging and dyeing our hair, darkening the first signs of gray hair, disguising the down on the whole body with some female ointments, smoothing off the rest of the body by means of some gritty powder, then always taking occasion to look in a mirror, gazing anxiously in it. Are not all of these things quite idle and hostile to modesty once we have known God, have put aside the desire to please others and foresworn all lasciviousness?” (Tertullian 1959, The Apparel of Woman, 8). Might it follow from scorn for concern with bodily appearance that disfigurement was rendered also of no great concern? No direct references are made.

How then should humans meet bodily impairment and the suffering it might cause? One response can be found in Tertullian, who commends patience both in flesh and in spirit as the attitude humans should display in the face of what he understood to be an attack by the devil. With reference to Job, he explains, “Thus did that hero who brought about a victory for his God beat back all the darts of temptation and with the breastplate and shield of patience soon after recover from God complete health of body and the possession of twice as much as he had lost” (Tertullian 1959, Patience, 14). In general, Tertullian took the body to be the stage on which nature and the supernatural meet and interact. This view, in combination with his hierarchical understanding of the body’s union with the soul, allowed him to recognize medicine as a means of health and at the same time to limit it by pointing out the greater importance of spiritual health, defined as relationship with God, the Creator.

Philanthropy to Disfigured Adults

“The hand is mutilated but it is not insensitive to assistance. The foot is gangrenous but always able to run to God; the eye is missing, but it discerns invisible goodness nonetheless, to the enlightenment of the soul” (Gregory of Nyssa, 1.10).

The second strand in early church attitudes toward disability is a concern with the attitude that humans show to the social outcast more generally, an issue approached from the perspective of communal responsibility. These theologians are less interested in how individuals are to face their own suffering (for instance, through patient endurance, as Tertullian recommended) and more concerned with how Christians should meet the suffering of others. Their orientation is pastoral. Following New Testament examples, they commend an attitude of love of humanity (philanthropy) as a response to disability (or disease or poverty). Philanthropy was not a new concept in the Hellenistic context, especially within the Stoic tradition (Daley 1999, 434), but with the advent of Christianity it was invested with new force through the connection “between an active, socially radical concern for humanity and all serious religious observance” (Daley, 436).

I will now focus on three Cappadocian Fathers: Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea; Gregory of Nazianzus, his friend; and Gregory of Nyssa, his brother. Each continued the work of the Alexandrian Father Athanasius (A.D. 295-373) by seeking the overthrow of Arian doctrines in Asia Minor in defense of Nicean faith and the unity of the church. Although the three are united by their common theological and ecclesiastical interests as well as “by the bonds of a close and life-long friendship . . . Basil is known as the man of action, Gregory of Nazianzus as the master of oratory, and Gregory of Nyssa as the thinker” (Quasten 1994, vol. III, 203).

The great project that seems to have underlain most of their preaching and letter-writing was the promotion of a way of life “characterized on the civic, public level in dramatically concrete ways by Christian philanthropia, specifically by the care of the poor” (Daley 1999, 439). Such an idea of life and Christian action was best realized in or near cities, Basil said, rather than in the silence of the desert (Daley, 439). They shared a belief in the reclamation of social outcasts. The social integration of the weak, the ill, the lame, the old, and the poor was seen as integral to the way of Christ and therefore of human redemption. In the words of Gregory of Nazianzus, philanthropy is “the single way towards the salvation both of our bodies and of our souls” (1.16).

Such an attitude is, of course, bound up with particular definitions of the body and soul and, crucially, of humans as created in the image of God. Indeed, Gregory says, the kindness that we show to physically disfigured people reminds us that we are clothed in the same “lowly body.” He continues, “They have been made in the image of God in the same way you and I have, and perhaps preserve that image better than we, even if their bodies are corrupted. . . . Christ died for them as he did for us, taking away the sin of the whole world” (1.21). According to Gregory of Nyssa, disfigurement belongs to our material nature (“common nature,” “life under the common biological law,” and “common reality” are other terms Gregory uses), which is destined to die: “There is for all only one entrance into life: one way to live, to drink, to eat, only one physical make-up, a common biological law, only one physical death, only one return to dust. All are similarly bound to decomposition” (1.10).

This section, then, centers on the philanthropic activities reported by and about Basil the Great, and the sermons exploring the importance of philanthropy for a Christian life written by Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus and preached around the time of Basil’s project of building a new city for the social outcast. Brian Daley suggests that both Nyssa’s homilies and Nazianzus’s sermon can best be understood “if we suppose they were originally delivered in Caesarea during the years that Basil was developing and carrying out his philanthropic program” (Daley 1999, 448).

Basil’s letters, his rule for monks (“The Long Rules,” readings 1.1 to 1.7), and Gregory of Nyssa’s two homilies on the poor and disfigured lepers give us closer views of these men’s account of philanthropy. Gregory of Nazianzus’s Oration 14 will focus our discussion, an oration written during 369-371 and most likely as an ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Disability and the Quest for the Human
• 1. The Patristic Era: Early Christian Attitudes toward the Disfigured Outcast
• 2. Augustine’s Hierarchies of Human Wholeness and Their Healing
• 3. Aquinas on the corporis infirmitas: Broken Flesh and the Grammar of Grace
• 4. A Ravishing and Restful Sight: Seeing with Julian of Norwich
• 5. The Human Condition as Seen from the Cross: Luther and Disability
• 6. John Calvin and Disability
• 7. To Develop Relational Autonomy: On Hegel’s View of People with Disabilities
• 8. Between Necessity and Possibility: Kierkegaard and the Abilities and Disabilities of Subjectivity
• 9. People Are Born from People: Willem Van den Bergh on Mentally Disabled People
• 10. “My Strength Is Made Perfect in Weakness”: Bonhoeffer and the War over Disabled Life
• 11. This Ability: Barth on the Concrete Freedom of Human Life
• 12. Women, Disabled
• 13. Being with the Disabled: Jean Vanier’s Theological Realism
• 14. The Importance of Being a Creature: Stanley Hauerwas on Disability
• Acknowledgments
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture