Dynamis of Healing

Patristic Theology and the Psyche

Pia Sophia Chaudhari, Ashley M. Purpura, Aristotle Papanikolaou

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780823284665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

This book explores how traces of the energies and dynamics of Orthodox Christian theology and anthropology may be observed in the clinical work of depth psychology. Looking to theology to express its own religious truths and to psychology to see whether these truth claims show up in healing modalities, the author creatively engages both disciplines in order to highlight the possibilities for healing contained therein. Dynamis of Healing elucidates how theology and psychology are by no means fundamentally at odds with each other but rather can work together in a beautiful and powerful synergia to address both the deepest needs and deepest desires of the human person for healing and flourishing.

CHAPTER

1

PSYCHE AND CREATION: INITIAL REFLECTIONS ON ORTHODOX THEOLOGY AND DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY

God’s word is not separable from God’s being. God’s action is not separable from God’s being. So where God’s word and action are, there God is, invading us as an event, invading human will and human imagination, rearranging all the ways we see and picture who we are, who others are, who God is. This invasion is no violation of our integrity but a liberation. This advent is no mere proffering of possibilities, among which we will then decide. It is not a well-mannered offering of choices. No, this invasion of power alters the entire force field in which we live, making a new creation for us, not a small change of direction.

—Ann Belford Ulanov, Picturing God

In this chapter, I wish to make the case for the inherent connection between reflection on the workings of the psyche and Orthodox theological reflection. As I noted in the introduction, I am privileging theology and ontology over psychology, but with the full expectation that depth psychology further enfleshes—gives substance and texture—to the ontological insights of Orthodoxy.

I will therefore, in this relatively brief chapter, highlight Orthodox understandings of creation as sacramental and posit the inclusion of the psyche in this understanding. I will also spend some time on areas of diverging goals and possible conflicts so as not to overlook substantial difference in the disciplines. These conflicts will not form a core part of my reflections, as I am more focused on tracking energies and experiences than comparing specific values and ideals, but there are areas of specific import that deeply inform the unfolding of our own innate natures—namely, around sexuality and gender—that need to be named and the differences held in appropriate tension.

Creation as Sacrament

In Orthodox Christianity, as well as more broadly in the Christian tradition, the Holy Spirit, as one of the Persons of the Holy Trinity, is proclaimed as the “Lord and Giver of Life.”¹ Orthodox daily prayers offer worship to “the Spirit of Truth, who [is] present everywhere, filling all things Treasury of Good and Giver of Life.”² God is recognized in the Divine Liturgy as “the Existing One.”³ In these utterances, it is taken as a matter of truth that there is no life, nor indeed any engagement with any of creation, without God. God is present in all being; without God’s ever-existing presence we would vanish into nonbeing. We have, of our own, no existence. This was profoundly articulated by St. Athanasius in the fourth century: “Evil is non-being, the good is being, since it has come into being from the existing God.”⁴

This statement, stunning in both its simplicity and its ramifications—if we let it take hold of our imaginative capacities—already serves to dismantle the perceived possibility of “splitting” the conversation between theology and psychiatry, or between religion and science, as though God were present in one sector but not in the other. If we define sacrament, or mysteria, overarchingly as a locus of encounter with the presence and energies of God, then indeed, wherever those energies are present we have the possibility of sacramental encounter.⁵ As cited earlier, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople has said “all of creation is a sacrament.”⁶ Additionally, as Orthodox theologian John McGuckin has noted:

Orthodox thought resists a dominant aspect of Western religious philosophy that has tended to elevate so-called supernatural revelation over and against “natural religion.” For Orthodoxy the two things are so intimately woven together in the very substrate of creation, and most particularly in the constitution of the human creature, that there can never be anything, in relation to either the human or angelic orders, that is simply “natural.”⁷

There is thus no ontological split within the person between the natural and the spiritual and, following on the above, the experiential. We see this in the theology of St. Maximus the Confessor in his articulation of the doctrine of the logoi of being (to which I will return in Chapter 3), the “principles” of being that form the basis of all creation as divinely known and willed by God. This natural, innate potential is then manifested in how we experience, as well as self-determine, our tropoi, modes, of being.⁸ Orthodox theologian Elizabeth Theokritoff sees the logoi of St. Maximus as the place of “interface” between God and creation.⁹ She makes the important point that these logoi “never form an autonomous realm between God and actual creatures. They are divine energies—God himself active in the world. They therefore place no restriction on God’s creative freedom, or on creatures’ absolute dependence on him.”¹⁰

Our existential trajectory is hence never capable of full dissociation from our ontological roots and potentialities, however much it may become distorted away from what is naturally created and life-giving. As we will also see, through the lens of St. Maximus, our ability to experience, and hence perceive, is a critical part of how we come to true knowledge, which is union, with God. This faculty of perception and experiencing of the sensory world, aisthesis,¹¹ is a locus of healing rather than something to be dissociated.

Thus, psychology, with all of its relatively recent clinically based revelations about the inner workings of the psyche, is also held in this greater reality. The presence and influence of the unconscious, the importance of relationships in our personality formation and basic sense of self and other, our eros, aggression, envy, fear of destructiveness, conflicts, narcissism, neuroses, and even psychoses, as well as the engagement with dreams, images, and fantasy or symptom as communications from the psyche—none of these fall outside the realm of God’s creative and life-giving presence. I argue they are all, in some way, “assumed” into the life of God.

It is important to clarify here that I do not intend that sin is condoned by God. But if we understand sin as resulting in a negative distortion of that which is originally good, then my argument is that the preexisting psychic faculties, which can then tend toward sin or toward life, are assumed by God in Christ. In Christ our natural faculties find their proper telos. Without that assumption, there would be no possibility for transformation of sinful states; we would be left attempting to simply split them off, to the detriment of our psyche’s integrity, an attempt akin to Freud’s notion of repression resulting in a God image also akin to Freud’s superego. (More on this in the next chapter.)

As St. Athanasius (from whom we will also hear more in the next chapter) proclaimed, God, though not previously distant, “for no part of creation is left void of him … he has filled all things in every place” now, out of love, “comes into our realm.”¹² He comes to “recreate the universe,”¹³ taking on the body of a human, dying in order to abolish death, that we might be rescued from death and corruption and not fully perish.¹⁴ God recreates us from within.

This is important because it means that the healing that can be found in the engagement with psyche must also part of a life of faith, though not its totality. Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement wrote beautifully of such a grand and generous vision of the Church:

The Spirit abounds most plentifully in the sacramental body of Christ, but wherever the Spirit is at work in history and in the universe, the Church is secretly present. There is not a blade of grass that does not grow within the Church, not a constellation that does not gravitate toward her, every quest for truth, for justice, for beauty is made within her (even if the prophets and great creative spirits have sometimes been persecuted by the ecclesiastical institution), every scrap of meditation, of wisdom, of celebration is gathered in by her.¹⁵

Additionally, akin to much of depth-psychological reflection, Orthodoxy emphasizes that which is “experience-near” in spiritual praxis rather than speculative or primarily constructed through narrative. The life of faith is lived out sacramentally, through fasting, bodily and sensory engagement during prayer and worship, beauty-filled liturgies aglow with candlelight and incense, community, repentance, confession, and, centrally, participation in the Eucharist—all with the joyful expectancy and deep desire of increasing union with God and love for others. At present, there is also a great deal of use of language around becoming one’s “true self,” becoming a “person,” also used in Orthodox circles.¹⁶ Regular spiritual direction is an integral part of this process.

To put ontological reflection as found in Orthodox Christianity in conversation with depth psychology means to take the sacramental nature of creation, and our place in it, very seriously as part of that dialogue. The sacramental reality of Orthodoxy must engage the symbolic discourse of depth psychology. Ann and Barry Ulanov touch on this, in their classic text Religion and the Unconscious:

Another way to understand this difference is in terms of the distinction between the symbolic life—a life that can move simultaneously among several zones of meaning—and the sacramental life, where the symbol and the reality symbolized are the same, not flattened into literal univocal meaning, but transmuted into a radiant whole that defies logical analysis.¹⁷

Orthodox tradition, while fluent in symbols¹⁸, is sacramental above all and lives out of this “radiant whole.” Orthodoxy, as McGuckin writes, is not a “system of doctrines.… Orthodoxy is the living mystery of Christ’s presence in the world: a resurrectional power of life. It cannot be understood, except by being fully lived out.”¹⁹ He continues: “Our God is the One Who Is. When the disciple is in ontological harmony with this God, the disciple also comes into life.”²⁰

The “One Who Is” grounds and defines the terms of existence, out of which constructive reflection on that existence can flow. Ulanov and Ulanov are also clear on the limits of psychoanalysis in this regard: “It is not part of any school or movement in depth psychology to unite or attempt to unite the psyche and the ground of all order and being.”²¹ Psychological work can clear confusing thickets away in order to help a person more fully find the ontological harmony that McGuckin describes, but it is not a substitute for it any more than subjective experience can find its true origin and telos outside of ultimate reality.

Yet, in the space of attention to the psyche and its workings, there is possible the meeting between the Creator and created, and of the transformation of creation through this ongoing exchange. This is possible because Orthodox theological anthropology proclaims the image of God inherent in every person. As McGuckin writes so beautifully:

At the end of the day, Orthodoxy insists on the perennial freshness and beauty of the human being, even in the fallen condition, not for the sake of human pride or self-confidence but in order to ensure that the essential truth of the human person is never forgotten: their luminous energeia as a song of God’s mercy and philanthropy and, because of that, a mysterious entity who is innately beautiful, glorious, and alluring.²²

As seen, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Half Title
• Introduction
• 1. Psyche and Creation: Initial Reflections on Orthodox Theology and Depth Psychology
• 2. “That Which Is Not Assumed Is Not Healed”
• 3. An Ontology of Healing?
• 4. Eros: Healing Fire
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Series Page