Angelism and bestialism: a division of the soul

We must now consider that modern psychiatry and its descent into pharmacology has failed us. The medical model of mental health with its focus on brain pathology has dismissed the mind (read soul) as irrelevant. It has dismissed the broader question of the sources of the self. While our educators stress excellence and potential, the Church equips us with a truthful anthropology and an understanding of what life is for. Psychiatry lacks such a grand narrative of the self and has to resort to the surface manifestation of symptoms.

Being, with a capital B, is the focus of theologians and philosophers and should be the focus of educators. We find ourselves in danger of producing excellent sheep who are highly skilled but do not know what life is for.

It is time to ask about whether the Church knows more about the human soul than scientists or the medical fraternity. Unlike psychiatry, theology has a well-defined metaphysical foundation derived from a rational appreciation of what it is like to live in the world. It is informed by the stories and legends, the poetry and songs of centuries. As such it is excellently placed to carry out the cure of souls, the traditional description of its work.

The Church's long conversation with heresy is really a conversation about the health of the soul, about certain ideas that lead a person into dead ends and bone biting traps and which bring death to the soul while the body still breaths.

Don't get me wrong. It is obvious that when a mentally distressed person comes into the priest or minister's office something more than prayer is required. It may be reasonable to call the psych emergency team. But this does not belie the point that the mind is more likely to be disturbed by experience or dangerous ideas than by brain pathology. It seems obvious that severe mental disturbance will effect brain chemistry. To see the brain chemistry as the original cause of mental distress and to attempt to alter it with drugs may be a temporary measure but it does not get to the seat of the problem.

What I am saying is that robust Christian practice is still the best weapon we have against mental disturbance. When we inspect the fallout from secular humanism in which the individual can only look forward to reaching his own potential, in which there are no signposts to indicate how the grain of human existence runs, which turns its back on the nurture of the soul in favour of entertainment and distraction, then you will come to understand that perhaps the Church is onto something.