Old Believer icon (from the 19th century) of the "Blessed Silence Saviour,"
red, as it is a reflection of the Holy Sophia
These days -- and I'm not sure why -- there is a lot of discussion about despondency and anxiety within the Orthodox and wider community of Christianity. The discussion -- which can get pretty heavy-handed, let me tell you -- oscillates between emotional/physical difficulties (sometimes with clinical diagnostic categories) and theological challenge.
I have thought, ever since 1991 when I entered Orthodoxy, that our eastern community possessed a robust "theory of personality" (or "theological anthropology") that lay at the basis of an effective treatment method: i.e., the psychotherapy of the Hesychastic Fathers, especially as outlined by Met Hierotheos Vlachos in "Orthodox Psychotherapy." I thought this model far better than older "insight" theories like the Analytic tradition, or the client-centered program of Rogers, Truax, Carkhuff et al. I even thought it better than my own training in Adler's individual psychology, Frankl's logotherapy, the Big 5 Factor Model and my favorite, Beck's Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy.
It was exciting, years back, when I read Fr Alexis Trader's book that outlined the commonalities shared by the Hesychastic psychotherapy and Beck's model. And I should note that I, and my colleagues in child and adolescent psychiatry, were not averse to utilizing various treatment methods from Rogers and Skinner.
I say this because there is a central weakness in secular psychotherapeutic philosophy: the method, and the theory, is mostly reactionary and negative. We treated many pathologies well with a toolbox of re-intrepretation work, coping skills, problem-solving, rehearsal of improved behavior skills, and yes, even pharmacology.
But the lion's share of the therapeutic energy lay in responding to negative challenges.
I remember long discussions with my friend and atheist-hippy supervisor about this central weakness. He and I thought the term "Mental Health" was uproariously ironic -- simply because there was nothing about health in the mental health business we worked so hard at. Our business was about disease. And we both said, from an atheistic and theistic perspective, that it would have been nice for treatment had we had a better grasp of what health looked like.
Of course, this is probably not a new insight (it isn't). But after my adoption of the Hesychastic program (and I keep it still), I wonder whether the same thing isn't true of Orthodox psychotherapy as it is of the secular array of models.
So to the point: I do not think that Orthodox psychotherapy is sufficient for daily life.
It is always necessary, as there is always the potential for pathology. But its utilization as a framework for general pastoral practice may produce unintended applications for believers living in a non-monastic environment. One example is clergy supplanting the decision-making process of a father and mother who are making career choices, or how much money to give to church and charity, or what car to purchase or what color they should paint their house. Another example is clergy attempting to impose a monastic discipline upon families who cannot and should not profess vows of poverty, abstinence and radical obedience.
I am troubled by the dismal place given to the imagination in much ascetical literature. I do not accept the equation of imagination with demonic fantasia, nor do I believe that Scripture and Tradition come close to requiring this equivalence. Further, I suspect that Wisdom calls humanity to imagination precisely to perceive transcendence, and the "suspended" nature of Creation. In this note, it is more troubling to detect how univocal and secularist is the typically ascetical condemnation of imagination. After all, allegory requires the imaginative faculty: it is only a culture sworn to immanence that suppresses allegory (the way this present culture has). It is enough to understand that Wisdom requires imagination, the perception of being that "leaps over the wall" (Ps 17.29 LXX) of the immediate material present.
These examples (along with others) proceed from the hyper-application of psychotherapy outside of the framework of obvious pathology. When there is not an obvious manifestation of a passion objectively observed or simply discerned, then psychotherapy (i.e., "soul-healing") is not required. The sacraments are always required: spiritual direction and psychotherapy are not simply because pathology, I would hope, is not always there (unless, of course, one believes in "total depravity").
The Orthodox Church is more than a hospital, more than a psychotherapy. Someone once suggested that were Orthodoxy to arrive on the scene today without any antecedents (as if that were remotely possible, even in a hypothetical sense), then it would not be seen as a religion, but rather a new psychotherapeutic science.
I used to like that idea. Now I do not. I think, for Wisdom's sake, that we should make better friends with the word "religion."
How much pathologizing I -- and my colleagues -- have been guilty of because we did not heed this boundary line of confining psychotherapy to pathology over the last few decades. And we failed to notice this boundary because we forgot that psychotherapy (in the old religious sense of the term) is only the negative (though necessary) part of pastoral work.
The positive part is nothing other than, and nothing less than, wisdom. Wisdom, obviously, extends light-years beyond the mundane-seeming advice dictated by Solomon and others in what we call "wisdom literature" in Scripture (to be fair, the everyday, common tone of this advice is a superficial mask that veils, on first glance, the real depth of this "advice").
Wisdom, in general, is the ability to perceive transcendence apparent in even the lowest, most demotic levels of experience. It defeats reductionism and an analysis that holds everything to the same program of quantification. The thought of wisdom comes to you and you arrive simultaneously at the same moment, and you are convinced then that wisdom is no mere stuff of subjectivity or sheer immanence.
Wisdom is the permeation of divinity into human consciousness. By it, we escape from the reactionary fight and leap into the true freedom of deified "expanse": "He [i.e., Christ] led me into spaciousness, he will deliver me because he delights in me" (Ps 17.19 LXX). I should note here that this "delight" is nuptial, and is rooted in the eros of the Wedded Lamb with His Bride (a nuptial union that is "iconified" in every marriage).
Pardon that little sermon, but I want to emphasize the fact that the pastoral work of the full Gospel, the church of Holy Tradition, can only be structured by Wisdom, and informed by sophianic content.
Priests must be wise, and the people must be wise. Wisdom alone is the vision without which the people will perish. (I dare you to associate Theoria with Sophia: you'll survive if you try.) The people do not have to succeed as a business or as an institution. But they must certainly gain Wisdom --
-- especially in the critical moment of language, when the particular, absolute Word of Wisdom is revealed and communed. Then, in Divine Liturgy, Wisdom is climactically seen as the only ethic, the only narrative cosmology. Then religion leaps beyond prophylaxis and soars into its adult perfection: the yearning and becoming toward telos, the discernible Will of "Thy Will be done."
I say this only as an introduction. Surely, Wisdom for our moment is a work that should be done in volumes. This argument pleads only, and negatively, for its articulation. It suffices as but a preface.
But I end with this urgency: too many of our clergy suffer a condition that is known, for better or worse, as "burnout." They have encountered chronic levels of frustration and conflict because their situation often requires what they cannot give. Often, the parish wants many things that conflict with the priest's ethic: but sometimes, the parish wants something that goes beyond the usual negative framework of "psychotherapy."
On the other hand, parishioners, too, experience "burn-out," because they are understood only as pathological: they are not given the positive content of transcendental, beautiful Wisdom that alone can help them discover the Good Will of God.
"Burn-out," you know, is a quite useless diagnostic term. But beyond the framework of clinical pathology, and into the brighter space of Sophia, the phenomenon of "burnout" may simply be a sign of an urgent necessity.
Yes, if you cry out for insight
and raise your voice for understanding,
if you seek it like silver
and search for it as for hidden treasures;
then you will understand the fear of the Lord
and find the knowledge of God.
-- Proverbs 2.3-5 RSV --
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