Medicine and the Church: Being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick
Religion
Medicine and the Church: Being a series of studies on the relationship between the practice of medicine and the church's ministry to the sick
Medicine -- Religious aspects; Pastoral medicine
(iv) The value of what is called ‘mental therapeutics’ is no longer
contested; it receives, and has received for some time, the careful
attention of the medical profession.[33] We approach the subject from
the religious standpoint, we base our study of it upon the teaching
and practice of Jesus Christ. Accordingly, we must discriminate
between psychic treatment and spiritual treatment. The former term,
if applicable to religious treatment, can also denote forms of mental
cure which are unconnected with religion, e.g. the use of hypnotism.
But Christ addresses Himself to the Spirit (πνευμα), that highest
element of our nature, through which the mystics hold that we have
kinship with God, and in unison with which the Holy Spirit attests
our Divine sonship. His miracles are works of _spiritual_ healing,
they are wrought for the whole man, not only for soul, and certainly
not only for body. Christ’s view of healing is relative to His view
of disease, His view of disease to His view of human nature. Had
he attached to bodily health the supreme importance which it is the
tendency of our day to assign to it, and regarded bodily pain as a
thing at all costs to be effaced, we must suppose that His whole
Life upon earth would have been devoted to the relief of sickness
and pain, and that the ‘Healing Ministry’ of His Church would have
been far more clearly defined. But no more does He abolish disease
than He abolishes pauperism. The tendency of His teaching is to
inculcate self-sufficingness (the αὐταρκεία, of St. Paul[34] and the
Greek philosophers) in the face of all temporary evils and ailments,
the conquest of things material by the spirit, its supremacy in the
hierarchy of human nature; in a word, the principle of inner control or
autonomy, as the birthright of the human spirit. In his great picture
of the Transfiguration, Raphael has caught this contrast between
the calm of the heavenly Mount above and the ineffective, agonised
distraction of suffering humanity here below, in the person of the
lunatic boy and his father. But that heavenly calm of spirit is not the
self-centred aloofness of the Stoic. The doctrine of the Incarnation
brings the Divine Saviour down to men, lifts man up to the peace of
heaven,[35] and at the same time bids him find that peace in fulfilling
the bodily duties of his corporate Church life. It will not admit of a
selfish quietism. But before this peace of God which Christ proclaims,
the worry and ‘fear-thought’ of our overstrung modern age, its neurotic
sensationalism and morbid self-analysis, would retire abashed. Christ
would teach us that human nature is itself only when it is itself in
its completeness, when the physical is truly the instrument of the
spiritual. There is no dualism, no schism in human nature as Divinely
planned. The voluptuary and the ascetic are both at fault, the former
more so because he sins against the higher self. Christ is the Saviour
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