Angelism and bestialism: a division of the soul

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.