Angelism and bestialism: a division of the soul

I suspect that the term "Angelism" was first coined by the Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain. He certainly used the term as a description of abstract painting since such art corresponds to no earthly object and thus could be called "angelic".

The next contact I have had with the term is in Walker Percy's novel "Love in the Ruins" (1970). Percy uses the term to denote a disease of the soul. He gives some definitions. A person suffering from angelism may be described as, "Being like god in one's freedom and omniscience," or suffering from "abstraction of the self from the self"

Being "totally abstracted from himself, totally alienated from the concrete world, and in such a state of angelism that he will fall prey to the first abstract notion proposed to him and will kill anybody who gets in his way, torture, execute, wipe out entire populations, all with the best possible intentions, in fact in the name of peace and freedom etc etc."

One of the symptoms of angelism is that one rejects the idea of original sin as applied to oneself. In our rush to overturn the old order and to claim a new freedom from guilt we have abolished the idea that no matter what we do, something at the heart of our lives is broken.

This leads directly to a triumphalist humanism that dangerously underestimates our capacity for evil. We find ourselves singing along with the Beatles "All you need is love." Under these lights all of history is a simple mistake because the solution to the human dilemma is to mean well and act with love. This discounts the darkness we find in our own hearts and the powers and principalities that exist in the world.

We see ourselves as angels, as creatures of pure thought unfettered by bodily existence even though the evidence of history and our own lives argues against it. We exist as angels exist, orbiting the earth but with no place to land and be incarnate. This leaves us with a feeling that we are not actually attached to the lives we live.

Severe angelism can make us slaves to ideas, sporting clubs, service organisations, good intentions and patriotism. People thus infected will try to get you to read books like The Celestine Prophecy or join groups whose aim is to make the world a better place. They think themselves spiritual.

The Church in the West was infected by angelism by one of its greatest founders, Augustine of Hippo. His Platonism gave him an uncertain relationship to the body. He was worried about sex. After a life of concubinage and indulgence before his conversion, he found the celibate life a trial. What he worried about was the loss of control that he had felt in the act of sex. Augustine famously made the analogy between the three persons of the Trinity as representing, power, memory and will. That is what God was like for Augustine, especially will. The act of sex was a threat to the will; it represented a loss of control. He speculated that if it were not for the Fall, men would be able to move the phallus as they moved their limbs and thus could impregnate women unpassionately. The women thus impregnated would do so intacta.

This is obviously a form of abstraction. Augustine could not quite reconcile that God was incarnate in an actual body with all that entailed and hence he was embarrassed for God.

Platonism leads to angelism because it emphasises the idea over the material. But the chief protagonist for us in all of this is our old friend Descartes who, as Percy describes, produced "the dread chasm that has rent the soul of Western man ever since the famous philosopher Descartes ripped body loose from mind and turned the very soul into a ghost that haunts its own house."

This is how we have become aliens within our own selves, abstracted, like the character Angela in John Updike's "Couples" who would wander among the stars from life to life and who conceals the death of her children's pets from them.

Angelism has a mirror image, bestialism. Persons who are abstracted in the other direction, towards the material, suffer this. This malaise is common among scientists who see life as a very complicated mechanism and who are suspicious of feelings such as longing because they are a danger to their objectivity.

The split in the Western mind thus divides us along the lines of Descartes body mind dualism. We split between angelism and its opposite bestialism and this is reflected in the political split between the left and the right. While the left is besieged by ideas the right worries about the budget.

On the angelic side never before have we had so much faith in the human potential to do all things, heal all things, understand all things. Never before have we had such high ideals and aspirations. Our humanism is unbounded, triumphalist. We are addicted to a positive anthropology and to the idea that we may simply lift ourselves from the earth by sheer cleverness and willpower. We believe that we can do anything if only we put our mind to it.

On the bestial side our psychiatrists have reduced mental health to brain chemistry as our politicians have reduced the nation to the economy and our biologists reduce human nature to evolutionary adaptions.

The effect of these two movements is disastrous for the soul, on the one hand we are exalted above the creaturely to the godly or angelic and on the other we are reduced to the level of the animal.

The church insists that human beings are ensouled creatures, neither angels nor beasts. Humanity is that creature into which God breathed life and who exists as an integrated whole in the grace of God. It is the Church that is able to heal the chasm that has been generated in the West by witnessing to the reality of a humanity unified in Christ. For, as we read in Galatians: "There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." We could add, no longer bestial or angelic, left or right. Surely we would welcome the dissolution of partisan politics that has made government an infantile circus.

The specific cure for angelism and bestialism is to be found in the rites of the Church.

Eucharistic worship ensures that we do not fancy ourselves as angels because eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Christ ensures that we do not get lost in the world of ideas; we are anchored in the body of Christ. In doing so we become Church, another body.

We are cured in the Ash Wednesday service in which we hear the words "You are dust and to dust you will return, repent and believe in the gospel" following which our forehead is smeared with ash. We are reminded that we are not angels but men and women who inhabit mortal bodies.

Angelism can be cured by the act of confession. In this we admit that we are beset by sin and the truth is not in us, and that, subsequently our lives are intolerable. Any idea that we are at one with sinless angels is dispelled.

On the other hand, bestialism is removed from us by the Church insisting that our lives are not our own and that to be alive is to die to the beast within with all its urges and demands. It is only when we realise this that our neighbour comes into view and completes us as whole human beings.

In short, it is only the Church that stands against outbreaks of angelism and bestialism because only the church works with an accurate anthropology that marries the two.

The Church's long meditation on the diseases of the soul has been almost completely replaced by the discipline of psychiatry. It is no secret that lacking any theoretical substrate after the fall of Freud, that psychiatry has largely become psychopharmacology in which symptoms are treated with drugs. The lack of any substantial unifying theory is displayed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM, or as some wag has renamed, it the Damn Silly Manual that is a systematic catalogue of symptoms of mental disturbance. This is purely an empirical effort that has no metaphysical or causal foundation whatsoever. It contains no consideration of the state of the mind.

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.