“19 Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own.” (1Cor. 6:19, RSV)
About John Gravino
John Gravino is the author of The Immoral Landscape of the New Atheism, which was the topic of a health and spirituality seminar at Duke Medical School. He continues to explore the intersection of health and religion and the other big questions of life right here at Patheos.
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About SOUL SCIENCE
The Temptation of St. Anthony of the Desert
St. Anthony’s harrowing exploits as a desert hermit have been a popular theme for artists over the centuries. My message at SOUL SCIENCE is that St. Anthony has much to teach us. For starters, artistic depictions of his life show us what success looks like in the spiritual life! Yes, that is a picture of success. You might think that it looks more like a scene from the movie The Shining. And that is also true. In episodes 23 & 24 of SOUL SCIENCE, I describe how Stephen King actually thought of Jack Torrance as an everyman character. The saints would agree with King on that score. For all people, life is indeed a spiritual struggle, as we read in Scripture:
“For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places”—Eph. 6: 12, RSV.
“ Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour. 9 Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same experience of suffering is required of your brotherhood throughout the world”—1Pt. 5: 8–9, RSV.
St. Anthony Vs. Jack Torrance
Sacred Scripture is clear that spiritual struggle is a universal fact of life. St. Anthony shows us how to succeed, while Jack Torrance provides an excellent fictional example of how to fail miserably.
But one might wonder whether Jack’s problems were truly spiritual. That was Stanley Kubrick’s question. And this is where the director disagreed with the author. While the former viewed Jack’s problems as largely psychological, the latter always intended to present Jack as a character truly haunted and tormented by the spiritually demonic.
The Spiritual Vs. the Psychological
Is Jack Torrance really tormented by spirits and demons? Or is he suffering, instead, from some form of mental illness? The Bible shows us that the answer is not necessarily either/or. In Galatians 5, St. Paul enumerates the fruits of the Spirit, and, when you look at them, you can see that they are actually the fruits of good mental health. The implication is that good mental health depends on good spiritual health.
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control . . . (Gal. 5:22–23, RSV)
The Evolution of Psychology
With the advent of academic psychology in the late 19th century, the Christian and Biblical worldview took a terrible hit. The sociologist Philip Rieff argued that psychology had effectively replaced Christianity as the dominant cultural influence of the 20th century.
Indeed, the harmony of the spiritual and psychological that we find in the Bible disappears, thanks in large part to the influence of Sigmund Freud.
Psychology ignored the Bible and went in its own direction. After more than a century, it is worth asking how this psychological project has turned out. That’s what Dr. Marcia Angell did in a two-part essay for the New York Review of Books. How is it, the Harvard Medical School professor wondered, that mental illness should be skyrocketing to epidemic levels at the same time that physical health is improving? Her answer is quite logical. Science understands the human body; but the human mind remains largely a mystery. I’ll pause for a moment to let you absorb the pregnant implications of that impeccable reasoning. . . .
The Theology of the Body
A strong empirical case can be made, then, for the argument that modern psychology’s departure from Biblical wisdom has not met with resounding success. And this argument is further supported by the latest groundbreaking research from Harvard showing that church attendance is linked to dramatically superior mental health outcomes. Thus, a growing body of research links mental health to spiritual health, resurrecting all kinds of philosophical questions about the nature of the mind and its possible connection to a spiritual soul.
Is the study of mental health leading scientists to the discovery of the human soul? That was the question I explored in my first book, The Immoral Landscape of the New Atheism. But I was not the first person to raise these questions. Pope John Paul II predicted in Theology of the Body that science would eventually discover what he termed ” the moral psychology of the Bible.” I have been arguing here at SOUL SCIENCE, as I did in my first book, that the present paradigm shift in mental healthcare that acknowledges the value of religious and spiritual practices is confirming the late pope’s prediction.
Fear and Trembling
I have just laid out for you the basic tenets of the SOUL SCIENCE Catechism. We are spiritual beings, temples of God’s Holy Spirit, as we read in 1Cor. 6: 19. As spiritual beings, the spiritual state of our souls is integral to the maintenance of sound mental health. This is so because the mind and soul are intimately connected. Thus the key to sound mental health is sound spiritual health. And so a principal cause of mental illness is the abandonment of authentic religious and spiritual practices.
As spiritual beings, we face a daily struggle against spiritual forces. This is a Biblical teaching. But another important teaching is that this struggle does not need to end badly, as it did for Jack Torrance. We can conquer our spiritual demons just as St. Anthony did. What the many works of art depicting St. Anthony’s struggle teach us is that, although victory is possible, it is by no means a guarantee. As St. Peter wrote:
“If the righteous man is scarcely saved, where will the impious and sinner appear?” (1Pt. 4:18, RSV)
In fact, the spiritual life can be so fraught with struggle that it can be difficult to distinguish success from failure. The artworks depicting St. Anthony make him superficially to appear no different from Jack Torrance. The same is true with our Lord, Jesus Christ. He was crucified with common criminals. On the surface, all of them appeared to suffer the same fate.
We have, all of us, entered into a great spiritual struggle. So great a struggle it is, that no one can afford to take it lightly. The only way to approach this battle is with fear and trembling, as the Scriptures teach us. And humility. JG. November 26, 2024
Book Reviews
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“A clear and principled defense of the church that is arguably superior to anything the institution has offered on its own behalf.”—Kirkus Reviews
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