Evans's main concern is whether the historical truth of biblical ... 1 Refer to as: G. Glas, Introduction to historical and conceptual issues. .... solution. This suggestion leads to the question where psychotherapy ends and counseling and pastoral.
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INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ISSUES 1
Gerrit Glas University of Leiden, The Netherlands
The next two chapters are devoted to historical and conceptual issues. They address the issue of the possible interactions between psychiatry and religion from two completely different angles. Herman van Praag, retired professor of psychiatry of the Universities of Utrecht and Maastricht (the Netherlands) and Albert Einstein College of Medicine (New York), investigates the complicated relationship between psychiatry and religion. His contribution serves as a general introduction to the subject, by reviewing, first, the evidence for positive and possible negative effects of religion on the course of depressive disorder. Van Praag, then, explores the boundaries between normalcy and pathology as may be teased out of the details of the stories of Moses, Saul, David, Job, and Samson. This leads, thirdly, to the field of religious psychopathology of which he gives an impression of possible topics of interest: productive maladies; religion as a ‘cause’ for psychopathology; overlap with culturebound syndromes; and finally, the role of religion in psychotherapy. He concludes that religion is increasingly relevant to the behavioral sciences and pleads for collaboration both on a practical and a scientific level. Throughout, van Praag speaks as a psychiatrist and intellectual with strong convictions about the naturalness of religion. Religion, he suggests, is one of the great gifts to humanity, like creativity and other forms of inspiration. Religious longing is of all times. It is an indispensable element, if not the core, of man’s search for meaning. The great divide between psychiatry and religion should be considered as a sign of intellectual and spiritual poverty – not merely of psychiatry but of our culture and its intellectual climate. Psychiatrists, he insists, have to accept and respect ‘that there is more between heaven and earth than meets the eye, than the ear can catch and logos can digests and explain’. Steve Evans, who is university professor of philosophy and the humanities at Baylor University (USA), speaks as a philosopher of religion who is equally convinced of the naturalness of religion. However, his focus is different. Evans’s main concern is whether the historical truth of biblical narratives does matter for understanding the nature of religion, or, at least Christian religion. Van Praag does not seem to be troubled by this question. For van Praag, the eminence of the biblical narratives and the inspiring qualities of religious experience are obvious and sui generis, irrespective of whether the narratives and experiences refer to ‘real’ historical events. Evans admits that biblical narratives exert considerable literary imaginative, moral and mythic-poetic power, even if they are not understood as
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Refer to as: G. Glas, Introduction to historical and conceptual issues. In: G. Glas, M.H. Spero, P.J. Verhagen, H.M. van Praag (Eds.) (2007). Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices. Psychological Aspects of Biblical Concepts and Personalities. Dordrecht: Springer [323 pp.], 1-6.
Preprint version historically true. So, would anything be lost were we to read Biblical narratives as historical? Does history add any value to these narratives, he asks? In a lucid exposition, Evans first argues for an affirmative answer to these questions and then proceeds with a review of how this position could be defended in view of two dominant epistemological approaches, the evidentialist (or: internalist) approach which holds that beliefs should be justified by evidence and the non-evidentialist (externalist) approach which argues for the priority and validity of processes of knowing which precede philosophical and scientific reflection. According to the internalist view a person is justified to hold a belief if this belief is sufficiently supported by relevant pieces of evidence. Evidence of sufficient relevance is provided by sensory perception and/or by logical reasoning. According to the externalist view a person is warranted to hold a particular belief or conviction if the cognitive faculties of this person are functioning properly and are rightly related to the external world. The externalist observes that we often know much more than we ever may be able to justify on the basis of relevant available evidence. We are nevertheless warranted to claim that we know, provided that our cognitive faculties function properly and are rightly linked to the world. The main point of divergence, here, is about the nature of religion, and not about epistemology, I suspect. By affirming that history does matter, Evans does not take the stance of a scientist arguing for the factualness of certain events. Historicity is not identical to factualness (which can be verified or falsified), but to actuality; i.e., the immediate awareness that something ‘real’ or substantive is going on, something that matters and that happens between me and someone (or: a power) different from me. This ‘something’ can not be contained within the private soul; it should be conceived as a dynamic between me and a power or reality outside me. By taking this stance, Evans empathizes with the position of the believer, for whom it does very much matter that God – once, and now – has acted in particular ways; and for whom it is of utmost importance that deliverance from sin is not merely an internal, psychological process but a transforming action on the part of God, one that changes man and his relationships with everything else in the world, including God and the self. The notion of historical truth is often, and wrongly, understood as referring to ‘objective facts’ that are ‘gained through adherence to a scientific discipline’, in Evans’s definition. This understanding is objectivistic. Historical faith in the sense in which Evans uses the term ‘is not merely historical, but the vehicle for an ongoing relation with the person who is most crucial in understanding human life and the human task’ (Jesus of Nazareth). So, for Christians, historical truth refers to an ongoing dynamic between God and man and not ‘merely’ to a truth which can be observed and verified from a detached position. Religion is primarily about what God has done toward me and us. Christianity thus claims that there is ‘really’ something to lose or to win in the world, because in some way all people take part in this dynamic between God and man and the world. If this is true, there is an important point of convergence between the position of Evans and that of the great Jewish thinker Abraham Joshua Heschel. In his classical study The Prophets Heschel (1962) fulminates against a similar detached and metaphysical view of God and his actions in the world. God, for Heschel as for Evans, is not an idea; He is not the inhabitant of a totally transcendent and unknowable world. God is driven by pathos (not: passion), which is a ‘living caring’; and a commitment which is ‘moved and affected by what happens in the world’. Nevertheless, like in Evans’s chapter, this stance does not lead to a subjectivist conception in which religion is equated with a particular aspect or quality of human experience and behavior. For Heschel, ‘The essential meaning of pathos is ... not to be seen in its psychological denotation, as standing for a state of the soul, but in its theological connotation, signifying God as involved in history’.1 These words of Heschel could have been Evans’s. Divine pathos is responded to with an understanding that is both immediate and comprehensive. This immediacy is not far from the externalist’s emphasis on the immediacy (or – as they phrase it – ‘proper basicality’) of certain beliefs, among which religious beliefs. It is tempting to proceed with this line of inquiry by comparing Heschel’s position with the externalist approach to religious knowing and these two with Kierkegaardian thinking on the subject.2 This, however, would far exceed the limits of this introduction. With respect to Heschel’s thinking we are in the lucky circumstance that Neil Gillman’s contribution to this book is entirely devoted to the notion of divine pathos in the work of Heschel.
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Van Praag and Evans concur with respect to the emphasis on dynamics and on liberation from selfcenteredness. However, they differ with respect to where they locate the source of sense of wonder, awe and reverence that so often characterize the religious experience. For van Praag this sense of wonder seems to be an integral part of the acts and experiences of believers. It is not a feeling, or opinion, of believers about their acts and experiences, but an attitude and receptivity that is expressed by and in their acts and experiences. For Evans the source of wonder cannot be found in religious experience itself. He puts the emphasis elsewhere, i.e., in the totally undeserved, incomprehensible, and perhaps even ‘insulting’ act of God by which redemption is gained by the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. If this is true, then, wonder, awe and reverence could still form the heart of religious experience, but these experiences, and the attitudes behind them, would be part of a larger reality, i.e., the history of God’s love and frustration with men. I might suggest that the difference I have pointed out here may be somewhat overstated and due to the fact that van Praag’s main focus is on religion and mental pathology and on the need to see the spiritual realm as integral part of human existence, issues which Evans only mentions in passing. One concluding remark. At the end of his chapter van Praag briefly touches upon the subject of spiritual therapy, that is, therapy by a professional who is ‘not bound to particular techniques’ and who aims at reaching a state of ‘soulfulness and spirituality’ in the patient. Van Praag is quoting Byram Karasu (1999) here, who admits that even after successful psychotherapy there may remain a sense of emptiness and loss of meaning. Spiritual psychotherapy could supply the missing component, Karasu suggests, and it could at least address the existential needs for which formal psychotherapies have no solution. This suggestion leads to the question where psychotherapy ends and counseling and pastoral care begin. Apart from the more technical aspect of how and where to draw boundaries between the professions, there is the substantive issue of what are the implications of our ontological definition of the religious dynamic for the definition of professionalism – which, to be sure, always has been identified with possession of knowledge and mastery of certain skills. A traditional answer would be that psychotherapy is concerned with psychological and interpersonal aspects of the patient’s behavior and that religion becomes an issue in so far as religion affects these aspects. Such an answer would draw the boundary in a manner that dictates that religious activities, attitudes, and experiences would fall outside the scope of psychotherapy, at least with respect to their religious meaning. It is interesting to notice that van Praag leaves an opening for another conception of psychotherapy, a conception which does not bother too much about the boundaries of conventional approaches and opens the space for an approach in which all kinds of existential issues are on the agenda of the psychotherapist. Of course, this idea has to be worked out, as has been done by Richard & Bergin (1997), West (2000), Karasu (1999) and others. We may discern a parallel here between the epistemological debate on the nature of religious knowledge, which as we saw could not be reduced to a simple dichotomy between objectivist and subjectivist approaches. Religion in this view would not be referring to either a reality outside the mind (a transcendent reality) or a reality in the mind (religious attitudes, desires or feelings). The previous paragraphs suggested that religion should be viewed as the expression of a relational dynamic between a person (or persons) and a power they cannot encompass or comprehend, a dynamic that is primordial with respect to any of its interpretations. If this is the case, the study of religion is itself not immune for this dynamic. The entire collection of essays contained in this volume, in fact, in one way or another, reflects some of the basic attitudes and responses to this dynamic. From this perspective, attempts to keep the scientific arena as clean as possible as far as religious insights and values are concerned, could themselves be understood as expressions of such a basic attitude. They are futile and neglect the religious nature of their own motivations. (Similar statements can be found in Evans’s chapter, when he speaks about knowledge of history and about biblical criticism). The parallel is this: If science can never fully depart from religious influences, and instead, in its global approach, needs to be viewed as responding to existing, religiously colored images of man and of the world, then psychotherapy as well cannot protect itself hermetically against all forms of religious
Preprint version influence. Instead of fleeing from this influence, it would be better to face it. The dichotomy between the subjective and the objective does not hold up any better in psychotherapy than it does in religion. Religion is not either a reality in the mind of the patient (and therefore open for the same kind of scrutiny like any other fantasy or image) nor an objective reality outside the mind of the patient (and therefore no topic of concern for the psychotherapist). If it is true that religion can be better understood from a third, relational-dynamical perspective than it is the task of science, and of the psychotherapist, to not withdraw but to investigate this dynamic, to articulate its different aspects and its influence upon the feelings and behaviors of the person, or group, under investigation. We, for our part, will return to this core issue in the introductions to the five sections of this volume and also in the concluding chapter.
NOTES 1 2
Heschel (1962), pp. 291-292. See (among others): Kierkegaard (1985; 1992); Evans (1992; 1996; 1998, chapter 6 and 7); Glas (2000).
