Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices: Psychological Aspects of Biblical Concepts and Personalities

HEARING VISIONS AND SEEING VOICES

Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices Psychological Aspects of Biblical Concepts and Personalities Edited by

Gerrit Glas University of Leiden, The Netherlands

Moshe Halevi Spero School of Social Work, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel Weinstock Oncology Day Hospital, Shaare Zedek Medical Center, Jerusalem, Israel

Peter J. Verhagen Meerkanten GGZ Flevo-Veluwe, Ermelo, The Netherlands

Herman M. van Praag University of Maastricht, The Netherlands The Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, U.S.A.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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CONTENTS

Contributing Authors

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgements

xvii

PART 1. HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ISSUES 1.

Introduction to Historical and Conceptual Issues Gerrit Glas

3

2.

Psychiatry and Religion: An Unconsummated Marriage Herman van Praag

9

3.

Biblical Narratives as History: Biblical Persons as Objects of Historical Faith C. Stephen Evans

21

PART 2. PROPHECY: THEOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS 4.

Introduction to Prophecy: Theological and Psychological Aspects Gerrit Glas

5.

The Dynamics of Prophecy in the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel Neil Gillman v

37

41

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CONTENTS

6.

The Prophets as Persons Bob Becking

53

7.

Jeremiah Interpreted: A Rabbinic Analysis of the Prophet Bryna Jocheved Levy

65

PART 3. MARTYRDOM: THEOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS 8.

Introduction to Martyrdom: Theological and Psychological Aspects Gerrit Glas

9.

Martyrdom: Theological and Psychological Aspects. Martyrdom in Judaism Hyam Maccoby, Z.L.†

10. The Martyrdom of Paul Jakob van Bruggen 11. Spiritual, Human, and Psychological Dimensions of St. Paul’s Martyrdom Msngr. H.W.M. Ta´jra´

89

93

105

115

PART 4. MESSIANISM: THEOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS 12. Introduction to Messianism: Theological and Psychological Aspects Gerrit Glas

127

13. Casting a Psychological Look on Jesus the Marginal Jew Antoine Vergote

133

14. The Land of Israel: Desire and Dread in Jewish Literature Aviezer Ravitzky

153

15. The Person of Jesus Abraham van de Beek

169

16. Imagining Jesus: To Portray or Betray?: Psycho(-patho)logical Aspects of Attempts to Discuss the Historical Individual Peter J. Verhagen

183

CONTENTS

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PART 5. INTERDISCIPLINARY ISSUES: PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE 17. Introduction to Interdisciplinary Issues: Prospects for the Future Gerrit Glas

207

18. The Hidden Subject of Job: Mirroring and the Anguish of Interminable Desire Moshe Halevi Spero

213

19. Biblical Themes in Psychiatric Practice: Implications for Psychopathology and Psychotherapy Samuel Pfeifer

267

20. The Bible and Psychology: New Directions in Biblical Scholarship Wayne G. Rollins

279

21. Searching for the Dynamic ‘Within’. Concluding Remarks on ‘Psychological Aspects of Biblical Concepts and Personalities’ Gerrit Glas

295

Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311 Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

Bob Becking Professor of Old Testament Studies, Department of Theology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Abraham van de Beek Professor of Systematic Theology, Department of Theology, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Jakob van Bruggen Professor (Emeritus) of New Testament Studies, Theological University of Kampen, The Netherlands C.Stephen Evans University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Department of Philosophy, Baylor University, Waco, USA Neil Gillman Aaron Rabinowitz and Simon H. Rifkind Professor of Jewish Philosophy, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York Gerrit Glas Professor of Philosophy and Psychiatry Leiden University Medical Centre Professor of Philosophy in the Reformed Tradition, Department of Philosophy, Leiden University Director of Residency Training, Zwolse Poort, Zwolle, The Netherlands Hyam Maccoby, Z.L.† Research Professor, Centre for Jewish Studies, Leeds, United Kingdom (Professor Maccoby died in 2004) ix

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CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS

Bryna Jocheved Levy Senior Lecturer, Women’s Institute for Torah Studies, Jerusalem, Israel Samuel Pfeifer Psychiatrist and Director, Klinik Sonnenhalde, Riehen, Switzerland Herman van Praag Professor Emeritus of the Universities of Groningen, Utrecht, Maastricht, the Netherlands, and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, NY, U.S.A. Aviezer Ravitzky Sol Rosenblum Professor of Jewish Philosophy, Department of Jewish Thought, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel Wayne G. Rollins Professor (Emeritus) of Theology, Assumption College; Worcester, Massachusetts Hartford Seminary; Hartford, Connecticut, USA Moshe Halevi Spero Professor and Director, Postgraduate Program for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, School of Social Work, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat, Gan, Israel. Senior Clinical Psychologist and Research Scholar, Weinstock Oncology Day Hospital, Shaare Zedek Medical Center and Sarah Herzog Psychiatric Hospital, Jerusalem, Israel Harry W. M. Ta´jra´ Bishop, Ordre de Sainte Marie la Vierge, Paris, France President of the Marial Museum of Sacred Art Antoine Vergote Professor (Emeritus) of Psychology of Religion, Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium Peter J. Verhagen Psychiatrist, Theologian, Meerkanten GGZ, Flevo-Veluwe, Ermelo, The Netherlands

PREFACE

The chapters in this book are based on papers that were presented at the international conference Psychological Aspects of Biblical Concepts and Persons, 4–6 March 2002 in Amsterdam. The conference was organized by the Dutch Foundation for Psychiatry and Religion (in Dutch: Stichting Psychiatrie en Religie) a small, but active and lively organization, which organizes conferences and post-graduate education for mental health professionals and which offers a platform for interdisciplinary research and discussion in the field of mental health and religion. The organizers of the conference – Gerrit Glas, Herman M. van Praag, and Peter J. Verhagen – are members of the board of the Foundation. All three are psychiatrists; two of them are also professionally occupied in another discipline: theology (Verhagen) and philosophy (Glas). The primary aim of the conference was to create a space for scientific dialogue between two disciplines with a troubled and complex relationship: psychiatry and theology. The exchange of opinions and viewpoints between specifically these two fields has dried up in the course of the past century and has virtually been absent from around 1960 till at least the early nineties of the previous century. I need to clarify that we were quite specific in isolating theology and psychiatry; instead of focusing on theology and psychology, or biblical studies and psychology, or theology and psychoanalysis. Psychology and psychoanalysis do not seem to have lost all contact with theology, at least not to such an extent as have psychiatry and theology. To be sure, there has been a resurgence of interest in religious and spiritual issues in psychiatry in the past fifteen years, and much research on a wide variety of topics. Religious coping, the health-promoting effects of religion, forgiveness, and the neural underpinnings of religious experience are a few of the many subjects that are high on the research agenda at the present moment. Professional organizations like the World Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Psychological Association each have divisions devoted to psychiatry (or: psychology), spirituality and religion. These divisions xi

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organize meetings, support publications, and have elevated the professional level of this interdisciplinary field. However, in spite of all these efforts the voice of theologians and the tenets of theology are hardly ever heard on these matters. That is to say, theology has not been made co-responsible for the construction of a research agenda. In short, while psychologists and psychiatrists have been talking about theology; it is far less likely to find the sequence reversed. A brief comment is in order about the main title of this collection, Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices. It is the outcome of a suggestion by one of our authors, Bryna J. Levy and one of the co-editors, Moshe Halevi Spero. The reader will undoubtedly have noticed, and perhaps felt somewhat disturbed or disquieted by the fact that we seem to have erred in crossing the specific sensory metaphors and the verbs appropriate to them. Typically, one hears voices and sees visions and not the other way around. Of course, there exists a peculiar neurological condition known as synesthesia, which accompanies certain kinds of tumors, epilepsies, and the ingestion of psychostimulant agents, that is indeed characterized by the appearance of hallucinatory visions in response to olfactory stimuli and auditory hallucinations in response to optical stimuli, but it was not exactly this that we had in mind. Rather, and in the light of the dimensions of our Conference (outlined more clearly by the more modest subtitle), we sought to highlight the multiple pathways that religious and psychological experience might take, pathways that, more than occasionally, are far more complex than even the atypical possibilities alluded to in the title. The first reference to this possibility appears in the Bible, from whence the title of our book derives. At that epiphany, according to the Writ, ve-kol ha-am ra’u et ha-ko’lot, “And all the people saw the sounds of the thundering,” the sound of the shofar horn, and other auditory experiences. (Exodus, 20:15).1 Here again: seeing sounds. Many editors have avoided confusion by translating the text as “and all the people perceived the sounds of thundering,” which certainly preserves the central intent of the description, but at the cost of underemphasizing the types of complexities that our authors have chosen to address. For if we assume that the “heart” of the religious individual is fed by multifarious tributaries, including neural, psychic, and spiritual, it is obvious that any effort to chart the wide range between normative and non-normative, and between pathological versus inspired moral perception will require the willingness to hear visions, see voices and many additional atypical qualities of psychological experience. Some words should also be devoted to the subtitle of this book. One might inquire: Why refer to “psychological” aspects of biblical concepts and persons if it is the relation between psychiatry and theology which is at the centre stage? I will make two remarks on this question. First, and almost needless to say, psychiatry does not exist apart from psychology. Psychoanalysis has greatly contributed to the understanding of what is going on between doctors and patients, and between patients and the religious figures and symbols that play central roles in their lives. Psychiatry can, indeed, profit from what already has been accomplished in the field of psychology and biblical studies.2

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There is no doubt that psychiatry and psychology, though distinct, are close enough in their bearing upon the spirit or psyche to learn from one another with respect to the issue of religion. This may serve as a partial justification for the choice of the broader term “psychological” instead of “psychiatric” in the title of the conference. So, when utilized here by most of our contributors, the term “psychology” is taken as denoting a more global perspective, encompassing both normal and abnormal aspects of human functioning. With this, I come to the main reason, which is prudence. For, the debate between psychiatry and theology is vulnerable and its subject is often very sensitive. By focusing on “psychiatric” aspects of biblical concepts and persons – at least, as far as the term is usually understood in its strictly clinical connotations – the attention could tend to become directed in a one-sided way toward abnormality, toward psychopathological aspects of biblical figures. This focus, then, would lead to a preoccupation with the issue of normalcy and the boundaries of the concept of disease. It is beyond doubt that this dimension is important. One may even expect theology to make important contributions to this debate. However, the organizers felt it was too early to put this issue as first at the agenda of the conference. The unraveling of the nature and dynamics of religion, and of religious phenomena and events in the lives of biblical persons needs a context of tranquility in which different interpretative options can be kept open as long as possible. Such a context is not served by a premature debate about normalcy and abnormality of the phenomena under investigation. It is for this reason that the more neutral term “psychological” was favored above the adjective psychiatric. The focus of the present text is trained upon biblical concepts like prophecy, martyrdom and messianism and on the persons or personalities who represent the reality at which these concepts aim. By concentrating on these typical biblical notions theological input becomes essential. Moreover, such an approach, ideally, shapes the conditions for a theological analysis and critique of common frameworks of understanding in psychiatry and psychology. If a prophet is not deluded, what kind of reality must one presuppose in order to make sense of his or her experiences and announcements? If martyrdom differs inherently from pathological masochism, what does this imply for the almost self-evidentiary character of man’s striving for pleasure and happiness? If messianism is more than just a mass hysterical phenomenon of people in need of hope and leadership, what salutary effects does it offer in the light of the pessimistic and repetitious elements that characterize the human condition? The common guiding idea behind the essays that follow is the wish to enrich and deepen our understanding of biblical concepts and persons, in order to improve the understanding of the psychological reality in which patients (and others) live. In clinical discourse as well – as if thereby to highlight a practical value in this kind of analysis – patients may identify with a particular biblical person or story, and expositions such as to be found herein may help us to comprehend the patient’s inclination and transmitted meanings. Even when religious patients do not make specific reference to their beliefs during treatment, the biblical images they maintain, or

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which comprised their cultural background, may enrich the understanding of the existential reality in which they live and in which psychiatrists, psychotherapists and pastors fulfill their jobs. This brings us to the second aim of the present text, which is to gain insight into biblical perspectives on human psychological (or cognitive-affective) conditions such as anguish, suffering, hope, resentment, passion, awe and reverence. These biblical perspectives, then, could appear to differ in important respects from modernist conceptions of man and of life, which prevail also in psychiatry and psychotherapy. An example of this is the concept of life as a project of individual self-realization. For theology such an endeavor would not only lead to a deepened understanding of biblical concepts and persons, but also to a heightened awareness of how theology could be brought into contact with contemporary psychological and existential issues and tensions, both in individuals and in society. For psychiatry such an approach could be of considerable importance as well. The open-mindedness which is required to enable a better understanding of the biblical world may prove to be helpful in the expansion of one’s understanding of persons with different cultural and religious backgrounds. It may also lead to better definitions and a more refined view on unusual behavior and abnormal mental states. Such an understanding could also exert an implicit criticism on common frameworks of psychiatric understanding of the patient and his inner world. For, ultimately, no matter how one defines and categorizes the contents and objects of religious faith and theology, and to whatever quadrant of reality one relegates these, they remain essentially components of the semiotic codes which begin to influence human behavior from the dawn of consciousness, on an individual, family, and group level. To the degree that the biblical personality plays a role within these codes – as hero, exemplar, symbol, or linguistic structure – the depth of our understanding enhances the versatility of our use of these symbols in every day life as well as during the clinical interview. The book is divided into five sections. The middle part consists of three sections devoted to the main subjects of the conference: prophecy, martyrdom, and messianism. Each of these sections contains both Christian and Judaic (or: rabbinic) interpretations of the concept and offers one biblical figure as representative of the relevant concept, Jeremiah, Paul, and Jesus, respectively. These three sections are sandwiched between a section on historical and conceptual issues, and a section devoted to select interdisciplinary issues. Each section begins with an introduction by the first editor in which some of the main points of the subsequent chapters are summarized and compared with approaches in other chapters. Points of convergence are outlined and unresolved issues are spelled out. The conference was unusual in more than one respect. The contributors came from diverging fields and had different religious backgrounds (mainly Jewish and Christian). Many of them had not met at earlier occasions, whereas others had already established creative channels of communication at earlier Conferences such as Psyche and Faith conferences in 1994 and 1998 in Dalfsen (The Netherlands).3

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This, together with the diversity and quality of the presentations and the format of the conference which operated within the framework of plenary sessions followed by discussion, contributed to an atmosphere of wonder, fascination and tense expectation. We hope that this volume will reflect this atmosphere and, by doing so, contribute to further dialogue and understanding. It is with sadness that we have to ascertain that one of the authors, Hyam Maccoby, will not see this volume in its final form. Maccoby passed away on May 2, 2004. We remember him with gratefulness as a dedicated scholar and friendly personality. Much has happened in the world we live in since our conference. These events give a special meaning to what was said in the introduction of the program book. Let me quote some passages from this introduction: Apart from these professional reasons, the encounter between psychiatry and theology might also prove to be illuminating for ... society in a broader sense. Today’s society is multicultural. Western society hosts immigrants from countries all over the world. Psychiatry has always operated at the cutting edge of individual suffering and societal pressures and needs. Therefore, psychiatry is particularly sensitive for the underlying tensions in society. Exploring these tensions from a religious and theological point of view promises to be fruitful for a clearer understanding of what is going on beneath the surface. The influx of new religions and new forms of spirituality not only heightens the awareness of religiosity and of the spiritual roots of Western society itself. It also increasingly sensitizes one towards the issue of tolerance. Religious tolerance has never been and probably never will be self- evident – even in the so-called developed countries. Today, more than ever, scientists are challenged to widen the limits of their understanding by investigating the way other religions deal with the tensions of a globalizing world. Tolerance does not begin with rationalism and/or intellectual criticism, but with an attitude of wonder, reverence and awe.

It is in this spirit, we hope, that this volume will be read. One brief editorial note will be useful: Our authors have employed many different editions of the Old and New Testaments in their references (e.g., Soncinco, Zondervan, NIV, Anchor Bible), and the reader is thus cautioned to expect small differences in the location of verses depending upon which editions of these texts he or she consults. The book aims at clinicians, scholars and students of human behavior. It is hoped that it will re-kindle their interest in religion and religiosity as fundamental aspects of the human condition. The book should also be of interest for pastors and theologians, if only to demonstrate and illustrate the importance of psychological processes for a proper understanding of how theological concepts, in real life, are “translated” into individual religiosity. Gerrit Glas Moshe Halevi Spero Peter J. Verhagen Herman M. van Praag (Eds.) NOTES 1

This citation follows the 1947 Soncinco Edition Translation of the Pentateuch and the Books of the Prophets, Writings, and Scrolls. In the The King James and NIV translations the text can be found in Exodus 20:18.

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See Rollins, 1999; Kille, 2001; and most recently Ellens and Rollins (2004). See Verhagen and Glas (1996).

REFERENCES Ellens, J. H., & Rollins, W. G. (Eds.). (2004). Psychology and the Bible: A new way to read the Bible. Westport: Praeger Publishers. Kille, A. D. (2001). Psychological biblical criticism. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Rollins, W. G. (1999). Soul and psyche: The Bible in psychological perspective. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers. Verhagen, P. J & G. Glas (Eds.). (1996). Psyche and faith. Beyond professionalism. Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to acknowledge our gratitude to the organizations which provided the financial support that enabled us to organize the conference at which the contributions to this book initially were presented: Center for Brain Sciences and Metabolism, Charitable Turst (Cambridge MA, USA), Stichting Sint Annadal (Maastricht, The Netherlands), Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschapelijke Onderzoek (The Netherlands), Evangelische Omroep (Hilversum, The Netherlands), Stichting Makaria (Naarden, The Netherlands) and, most notably, Protestant Fonds voor de Geestelijke Volksgezondheid (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). The editors would like to thank the publishers, Floor Oosting and Ingrid van Laarhoven, for their encouragement and continued interest in the project We also thank Jetty Strijker for her enduring secretarial support and humor in the production of this book.

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PART I HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

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 culture-bound 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 3 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 1–8. © 2007 Springer.

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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 mythicpoetic power, even if they are not understood as 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 nonevidentialist (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

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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. Van Praag and Evans concur with respect to the emphasis on dynamics and on liberation from self-centeredness. 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.

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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 Richards & 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

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protect itself hermetically against all forms of religious 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).

REFERENCES Evans, C. S. (1992). Passionate reason. Making sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Evans, C. S. (1996). The historical Christ and the Jesus of faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, C. S. (1998). Faith beyond reason. A Kierkegaardian account. Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans Publ. Glas, G. (2000). Heeft het theïsme eigen gronden? Alvin Plantinga over de ‘proper basicality’ van religieus geloof. Philosophia Reformata, 65, 170–182. Heschel, A. J. (1962). The prophets. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Karasu, T. B. (1999). Spiritual psychotherapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 53, 143–162. Kierkegaard, S. (1985). Philosophical fragments (H. V. Hong, & E. H. Hong, Ed. & Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1844). Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Concluding unscientific postscript (H. V. & E. H. Hong, Eds. & Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1846). Richards, P. S., & Bergin, A. E. (1997). A spiritual strategy for counseling and psychotherapy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. West, W. (2000). Psychotherapy and spirituality. Crossing the line between therapy and religion. London: Sage Publications.

CHAPTER 2 PSYCHIATRY AND RELIGION An unconsummated marriage

HERMAN M. VAN PRAAG University of Maastricht, The Netherlands

1. THE GREAT DIVIDE The Symposium of which this book renders an account is organized by the (Dutch) Foundation for Psychiatry and Religion, an organization set out to forge tighter links between those two domains. Those connections used to be more or less self-evident. For many centuries both Christianity and Judaism preached that mental pathology had its ultimate origin in sin, in a path of life discrepant with God’s commandments. Certain psychiatric schools, e.g. that of Heinroth in Germany, considered “moral treatment” to be the royal road to recovery. Moral treatment implied such activities as praying, confession of guilt and exorcism. In the USA “moral treatment,” practiced a good part of the 19th century in many a psychiatric asylum, referred to a very different approach. According to Taubes (1998) it was an offshoot of the Protestant revival movement known as the Second Great Awakening. It emphasized good works and volunteer activities in the community as a means toward salvation, and held strong beliefs in man’s perfectibility. In fact, it reacted against the Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and the idea of the depraved nature of mankind. Based on this philosophy, Taubes (1998) reports, American asylums provided occupational therapy, amusement designed to distract patients from their pathological preoccupations, and a structured agricultural life built around Christian virtues of self-discipline and work. The capacity of religious worship to inspire self-control and rational behavior was emphasized. Moral treatment in the American sense, though strongly influenced by religious premises, was a precursor of the approaches to be taken, half a century later, by the fully secular movements known as social and community psychiatry. Therapeutically, both clergy and the medical profession were engaged in the management of mental disorders. In the last century, however, the partners for so long 9 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 9–20. © 2007 Springer.

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became increasingly estranged. Particularly after the second world war the Western world secularized in high gear. Religion evoked boredom, or even worse, disdain; the latter particularly among psychiatrists. Many of them identified religion with intolerance, repression and persecution. Religious belief, so they argued, is irrational, almost delusional, a manifestation of immaturity, inability to relinquish infantile desires to identify with a powerful, patronizing father-figure. Religion, it was argued, is antithetical to mental health. It should be fought not cherished. Freud (1927) and his disciples (e.g. Ellis, 1980, 1983) propagated these notions and for many decades the psychiatric profession accepted them as pronouncements ex cathedra. Even after the decline of Freudian influence from the seventies and beyond, this theory lingered on. No wonder, then, that psychiatrists appeared to be less religious than the general population (Neeleman & Persaud, 1995), and that no more then 2.5% of quantitative studies in psychiatry contain a religious variable, in most cases no more than a notation of religious denomination (Larson et al., 1992; Larson, Pattison, Blazer, Omran, & Kaplan, 1986). Indeed, there were counter-currents. Jung (1969), Maslow (1962) and in The Netherlands Rümke (1965) considered religiosity to be an essential component of mental health and a necessary prerequisite for self-actualization. These views, however, were not embodied in mainstream psychiatry. This a-religious up to anti-religious viewpoint has not benefited psychiatry. Practitioners of this profession have to deal with the subject and come to terms with it. Atheism is not as pervasive as has been suggested. It is prominent among (would-be) liberal intellectuals, but the common man has not abjured religion. The National Opinion Poll U.K. Survey (1985), for instance, reported that 71% of the people interviewed expressed belief in God. Psychiatrists, thus, are not done with religion by declaring it out of date, just a remnant of an archaic stage of human development. They have to accept and above all to respect the conviction that there is more between heaven and earth than meets the eye, than the ear can catch and logos can digest and explain. It seems logical, moreover, that prior to rejection one defines carefully that which one proposes to reject. What is meant by the terms “atheistic” or “agnostic” if one defines oneself as such? Is it the belief in God, be it in a personified shape or conceived as an abstract unimaginable Principle? Is it the irresistible want of human beings to search for life’s meaning and for a spiritual, irrational dimension of the human condition? Is it the rituals, the outward manifestations of devotion? Is it the overwhelming amount of literature, philosophy, art, music that has been accomplished in honor of God and to enlighten what a religious belief system in essence implies? The old psychiatric adage that one should know oneself, before one can understand others, still holds. Otherwise it will be problematic to bring out and discuss without rancor and prejudice themes oneself is not receptive to. I add as an aside that having no patience with the concept of God, no interest in irrational constructs like spirituality, no affinity with religious rituals should not automatically imply rejection and neglect of the awesome intellectual and artistic harvest of millennia of religious thinking. Yet, this is often the case. Rejection of the

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divine principle generally means disregard for its beautiful apparel. To cut oneself of from that heritage, however, means grave intellectual and artistic impoverishment. To phrase it paradoxically, one does not need to believe in God, to be religious. Be this as it may, psychiatrists are not philosophers. The latter may contemplate whatever they like. Psychiatrists cannot. Their philosophies will penetrate their daily work, which is treating other individuals. Many of these have retained religiosity and cherish it as a precious gem. It should be held in true esteem by their therapists as well. 2. SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGION I emphasize that in this chapter I speak about religion, not about spirituality. As organized religion lost ground, the need for spirituality grew. The latter concept is badly delineated and hard to define. It refers to a need for and fascination with the metaphysical, the transcendent, the mystical, the mysterious, the occult, to a longing for the lofty, the august, the spiritual, that what exceeds the material aspect of the human life. Religion is different. It is based on the assumption of and belief in the concept of God, in whatever way it is conceived: be it as a concrete anthropomorphic Agency, or as an abstract, non-visualizable, non-imaginable Power. Whatever the image may be, the underlying notion holds that the divine Principle constitutes a steering, directional force that provides not only direction but also meaning to life. God is for the believer the Symbol of spirituality in its most perfect form. He has no need for spiritual substitutes. By definition they would be of a lower order (Van Praag, 2007). 3. MEETING POINTS BETWEEN PSYCHIATRY AND RELIGION Psychiatry and religion are connected on several levels and in various ways. Hereafter some of those meeting points will be discussed. 3.1

Religion and Mental Health

Stress is a popular concept in psychiatry; one might say, for modern society in general. Many in our societies are supposedly over-stressed and stress is considered to be a causative factor in several major mental disorders. Clearly stress-buffering and stress-intensifying mechanisms should receive due attention, and they do with one notable exception, i.e. religion. Can religious beliefs ease mental distress or prevent it altogether, or are belief systems of this nature more a burden, making life dreary and insecure and thus increasing the risk of mental breakdown or worsening its outcome. Studies into these questions are surprisingly scarce, certainly compared with those focusing on other variables such as social circumstances and traumatic life events and their impact on preservation or disruption of mental health. A priori it seems plausible that religion might decrease vulnerability for psychic maladies. Religious life generally revolves around a community of like-minded

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people who mutually care and will provide support in times of spiritual hardship. Religion, moreover, if internalized and practiced in freedom and not out of fear, fosters hope, repose, and patience. It acts as a counterpoise to loneliness, despair, feelings of superfluity, states of mind that are known to undermine the ability to withstand adversity. Several studies do indeed indicate that religiosity may provide a degree of protection against depression and may further remission, in particular in elderly people with few social contacts and little self-confidence (Koenig, 1997; Koenig, McCullough, & Larson, 2001; Braam et al., 1998; Braam et al., 1999; Braam, Sonnenberg, Beekman, Deeg, & Van Tilburg, 2000). Religiosity was measured on two levels. Extrinsically, registering frequency of church visits and regularity of praying, and intrinsically, trying to gauge the genuineness of religious feelings and the import they have in someone’s life, relative to other concerns, such as earning a good income, building satisfactory family life, enjoying good health, and having risen to a high post. It appeared to be the plenitude of inner religious life rather than the more formal aspects of religiosity that correlated with the risk of depression and its prognosis. The results so far mainly concern depression and seem encouraging, but much work remains to be done: the concept of stress has to be defined in greater detail; those elements of intrinsic religiosity with protective potential have to be established; better instrument to assess religiosity have to be developed; subtypes of depression which are particularly susceptible for the influences of religion have to be determined, and mental disorders other than depression have to be studied as to responsiveness to religious contemplation. It seems also conceivable that religiosity might influence mental health in the reverse direction: undermining rather than improving mental health. Religion may act as a straight jacket, thwarting spiritual growth, inducing fear and emotionally “empty” preoccupation with religious precepts (Van Scheyen, 1975; Schilder, 1987). Instead of lightening and illuminating life religion then becomes a burden, a source of worry. Religious beliefs may shrink to remorseful waiting until death arrives. Just as for individuals, religion may become a negative force in society. Religious fanatics might force their belief system upon others, if need be with fire and sword. Respect for the individual, for individuality, for personal freedom, for alternative points of views is wanting. Quite often they strive not only for spiritual hegemony but for worldly power as well. Fundamentalists they are called, but I reject this qualification. For me a religious fundamentalist is someone searching for the fundamentals of the religious belief system he adheres to, not someone who rides roughshod over the ethical foundations not only of a civilization but of civilization in general. Civilization and spreading death and destruction are incompatible. Indeed, the border between true religiosity and delusion, though not always easy to mark, should be drawn, for the sake of mankind and for the sake of credibility of religion. Over the centuries clergy often failed as to that. Some of them were even tempted to incite destructive religious fervor, failed to quench it, or looked, not even remorseful, to the other side. It is hard to understand why religious institutions have been so

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permissive towards intolerance and disrespect up to enmity towards others in the name of God. Here lies one of the roots of unbelief in Western societies, and a field in urgent need of study. Religion and violence, how did they become enmeshed, how can they be disengaged? 3.2 The Bible and Mental Health The Bible, particularly the Hebrew Bible presents a galaxy of real-life figures. No idealized or demonized figures, no saints or monsters, but recognizable people in their strength and weakness, in triumph and in defeat (Van Praag, 1986; 1988; 1991). By way of illustration I will give two examples. They concern two imposing figures: Moses and David, venerated over the ages in particular by the Jews. Moses is considered as the foremost prophet: “And there hath not risen a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deuteronomy 34:10). Shortly before his death God informs him that he shall not enter the Promised Land. He is desperate, does not acquiesce, but enters into an argument, a true disputation with God. A midrash tells that God spoke to Moses: “You seek life, but as for you yourself, did I ever command you to kill the Egyptian (taskmaster)?” Moses replies: “But you, God, killed all the first-born of Egypt!” God answers: “You dare compare yourself to Me? I am the Giver of life, I am the Creator” (Riskin, 1999). The pain Moses had to bear he considers not to be his own fault. His people are to blame. “The Lord was wroth with me for your sakes, and hearkened not unto me” (Deuteronomy 23:26). At a supreme moment in his life even the greatest of all prophets was unable to recognize where he himself had failed. David, the second king over the people of Israel, a man who became one of its greatest leaders and from who’s house, according to tradition, the Messiah will arise, as a young man betrays his people. He fears, quite rightly, the envy of King Saul, his initial patron. He flees, surrounds himself with a bunch of desperados and enters the service of the Philistine king, Israel’s arch enemy. To flee was the right thing to do, to desert to the enemy an outrage. While reading the Bible, one enters in places the realm of pathology. King Saul, for instance, figures as a man unable to cope with the tension brought on by the divine charge to assume the Kingship on the one side, and on the other side inner doubts about his abilities reinforced by the scepticism of God’s ambassador Samuel. He breaks down and eventually commits suicide. Job is another example. Job looses everything he possesses and develops a depression (Van Praag, 1988), or, alternatively, Job suffers from a psychotic depression to begin with and exhibits in this context both delusions (of poverty, and physical deterioration) and hallucinations: the voices of the “advisors” who accuse him of a sinful life. I mention, as a last example Samson, a hero with Shakespearean airs, shoot of a long-time barren women, begotten via intervention of a heavenly figure or, more likely, offspring from a adulteress relationship; a loner who dedicates his life to a solo war against the Philistines. A man whose life represents a classic example of a Freudian concept: the compulsion to re-enact the same situation again and again

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though previous experiences have shown it to be distinctly counterproductive (Kutz, 1989). Three times in a row he let himself be seduced by daughters of Israel’s mortal enemy: the Philistines, i.e. the woman from Timnah, the prostitute from Gaza and finally Delila. All three had clearly hinted that they intended to betray him. With his eyes wide open he steers for his own destruction. Generally, people are neither immaculate nor entirely stained, neither perfect nor thoroughly bad. The Bible stages them as such. For this reason alone the Bible is for psychologists and psychiatrists a fascinating book, one that lends itself admirably for psycho-exegesis; also in this respect, a true gold-mine. 3.3 Religious Psychopathology Psychopathological phenomena with a religious charge are by no means rare, though less frequent than they were before the “cultural revolutions” of the 60’s and 70’s during which the process of secularization was catalyzed so strongly, at least in the Western world. Delusions may have a religious content (e.g. the delusion of being Jesus, a biblical prophet, or having a divinely commissioned mission in life) and so do hallucinations (e.g. hearing voices of divine creatures such as angels, or seeing scenes from hell) and obsessive-compulsive symptoms (e.g. the urge to swear, followed by the inner coercion to execute penitential rituals). Cognitions, perceptions and corresponding emotions of this kind raise several fundamental questions. First of all the border issue: where does normality end and pathology begin? What can still be considered as sound religious experiences and considerations and what are clearly morbid elaborations? How, for instance, has the mental state of the prophets to be defined? They hearkened to the voice of God, they felt to be His spokesperson. Modern psychiatrists would consider this to be psychotic symptoms. On the other hand, they spoke in a magnificent language; formulated social precepts and ethical directives of great import, and were more or less accepted by their contemporaries. To qualify these figures properly, the term psychoses seems but a bleak and inappropriate simplification. They towered high above the ordinary, were engrossed with a sense of mission, felt divinely inspired and used to express their state of mind in metaphors of such poetic beauty that it was not difficult to believe that they really were. That provided their argument with powerful, undying expressiveness, until this very day. If one wants to adhere to the term psychotic, then one has to acknowledge that psychosis evidently can produce insights of great philosophical, ethical and artistic value. At this point, I want to insert a contemporary example taken from actual practice. A 60 year old, deeply depressed lady, living in an orthodox Protestant setting is convinced of her sinfulness and feels deeply guilty. Piety toward God should imply compassion toward other people, she stated. She has utterly failed in this respect. God has punished her by making her immortal. She will outlive everyone and live a life of utter solitude. She is admitted to a psychiatric ward. Her minister does not think she is sick, her psychiatrist maintains she is. According to the minister her state of mind can be attributed to genuine flaws in her concept of God, in her religious

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beliefs, and that these errors give rise to feelings of guiltiness. The psychiatrist thinks that she lives in a delusional state, that her sins are largely imaginary, the products of a diseased mind. Who is in the right? Both, I would say. Undoubtedly, the woman is depressed, suffers, and thus is in need of treatment. On the other hand, she delivers a message worth to be listened to: The sin of leaving one’s fellowman to his fate. It would be foolish to dismiss it as a figment of a wandering mind. In this context another question looms. Can thoughts, experiences that by themselves are pathological, be to such a degree coherent and directional that groups of people come to believe them? The answer is probably in the affirmative. Psychopathological symptoms are not necessarily regressive in that they injure, diminish the richness of a personality. They may be enriching, adding dimensions to a personality that were not detectable before. In psychiatry one may come across productive maladies (Van Praag, 2003). In Jewish history Sabbatai Zwi is a gripping example. From a young age on he suffered from depressive and manic episodes. While manic he considered himself to be the Messiah, commissioned by God to bring the Jews back to Zion, to rebuild the Temple, to establish a society based on God’s precepts and to provide the Jews a national home, freedom, autonomy and a safe existence. He, in collaboration with his “prophet” Nathan of Gaza, was able to convince almost the entire Jewish community of his days that he, Sabbatai Zwi, was indeed the one he pretended to be. The turmoil they stirred up was tremendous; the disappointment, the despair Sabbatai Zwi brought on by his conversion to Islam, so forced by the sultan of the Ottoman empire, was no less dramatic. In a manic state Sabbatai Zwi was able to enthrall an entire nation. Again the question looms up where to draw a line between fancy and frenzy, between creative novelty and grotesque chimera’s. Another fundamental question is, whether the religious themes have played a role in the causation of the disorder. Are they consequences of the disorder, just “coloring” its presentation, or have they contributed to its occurrence? A related question is whether religious reflections are culture- or nature-bound. Is religious psychopathology restricted to patients raised and steeped in a religious milieu or do they also occur in those averse to religion or ignorant of the religion that produced the ideas which were more or less caricatured by the patient? Phrased on a more fundamental level: can illnesses of the mind give rise to novelty, or are morbid contents always derived from memory traces stored in the archives of our brain? Is it possible that under certain conditions themes can be generated that do not rest on previous experiences, of which there is no original in the experiential and cognitive files of that individual? The questions raised permit no answer and, unfortunately, among psychiatrists the ambition to study them is presently negligible. This is for two reasons. First, psychiatry today wants to be strictly evidence-based, and the only data considered to be “evidence” are those derived from controlled studies of as large groups of patients as possible. The questions raised above do not lend themselves for this type of research. They require detailed case-studies, leading to individualized probability statements, and not to more or less definitive conclusions which can be generalized.

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Second, these issues are theoretically interesting because they further insights into the relations between the phenomenology of mental disorder and the social / religious milieu in which the patient was raised, and his life history. Modern psychiatry, however, does not hold such exercises in high esteem. They have, so it is claimed, no direct practical relevance. This a questionable view. Detailed knowledge of individual development and social/religious context are preconditions for psychological interventions to exert lasting beneficial effects. Psychoanalysis may have lost favor with a majority of psychiatrists, several of its basic principles stand still upright and will, I predict, never crumble. Moreover, to write of so called philosophical notions as practically irrelevant is a sign of serious scientific short-sightedness. Without philosophical fertilizers this profession would whither. 3.4 Psychotherapy and Religion Does religion have a role to play in psychotherapy? On face value I am inclined to answer this question in the affirmative. The reasoning is as follows. Mental disorders are the product two complex processes. First of all a set of dysfunctions in brain systems involved in behavioral regulation. They lay at the root of disturbances in particular psychological domains such as that of cognition, perception, emotional regulation and many others. The brain dysfunctions underlying abnormal behavior and experiences in their turn are caused by a variety of agents, biological and psychological in nature. The former category includes both acquired factors, such as brain injuries induced by trauma or infection, and genetic influences, leading, for instance, to a particular enzyme being in short supply. Psychological factors, too, can exert a major influence on brain development and brain functioning. Severe psychological traumatization, striking acutely or of a more chronic nature, has measurable and often lasting effects on the brain (Van Praag, de Kloet, & Van Os, 2004). Strong evidence suggests that, for instance, adversity during early development may increase the sensitivity for stress and lead to an increased risk for depression and maladaptive behavior (Bremner & Vermetten, 2001). Conversely, stress-reduction and strengthening of coping-skills may reduce the risk of mental breakdown in trying days, or limit their impact. Religiosity forms part of man’s psychological fabric. It seems plausible to assume that, if experienced positively, it could promote mental repose and stability, while exerting opposite effects if religious notions are experienced as repressive and frightening. As mentioned, research, though still scarce, seems to confirm this a priori view. Yet mutual consultation and collaboration between pastor and psychiatrist regarding treatment of individual patients is a rare occurrence. Until the 70ties communication used to take place regularly, at least in The Netherlands, and that was useful in several respects. The psychiatrist obtained a better idea about the world view of his (religious) patients, and the social climate in which they were raised. Problems with a religious connotation – thoughts about sin, guilt, punishment, grace, questions about afterlife, atonement, redemption, meaning of life, and the like – were approached in

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dialogue with the pastor. In these domains he, not the psychiatrist, radiates authority, and thus can operate more effectively. This practice ceased, and this did not benefit mental health. The issues at stake have not shriveled and regularly break through the armor of secularization. The psychiatrist would seriously err to avoid them, play them down, or to conceive them as manifestations of a neurosis. Should the psychiatrist (even a secular one) take a religious history of his patients as Glas (2000) calls it? Definitely, I believe. The spiritual / religious realm of life is foundational. It cannot be moved away with impunity. Should a psychiatrist deal with religious subjects? Yes, I think, provided the patient has given evidence to be bothered by them, the psychiatrist disposes of sufficient denominational knowledge, feels at least some affinity to the spiritual needs of his patient and appreciates his lack of spiritual authority. Karasu’s (1999) remarks are important in this context. He points out that even after a successful psychotherapy, “when psychological conflicts are relatively resolved, deficits filled, and defects corrected, ultimately patients still experience post-therapeutic dysphoria, a loss of meaning or sense of emptiness, a non-luminous hollow.” He conceptualizes the, what he calls spiritual psychotherapist, as someone not bound to particular techniques, emphasizing not so much individuation of the patient but reaching a “state of belonging and believing” and guiding him to a state “of soulfulness and spirituality.” Soulfulness, he states, requires love; love of others, love of work and love of belonging. The required ingredient for spirituality is belief. This belief is not so much a belief in God as He is portrayed in theological conceptions, but believing in the sanctity of everything around us. Yet “formal religion will always remain a common ground toward spirituality.” The spiritual therapist, then, Karasu summarizes is “one who is concerned with man’s anguish of isolation and alienation, sense of meaninglessness and existential guilt over forfeiting one’s potentials.” Karasu, thus, defines superbly what is lacking in today’s treatment of psychiatric patients: brains are being treated and so are psyches. The spiritual existence remains out of range. An essential ingredient of the human condition is simply left offside. This amounts to an essential failure. This is not to say that I think spirituality should be the domain of a separate caste of therapists; it should be a concern of all psychiatrists. It thus seems appropriate to include religion – as a potential source of concern and of spiritual strength – in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic training programs. 4. CONCLUSION It may have become clear that religion is not irrelevant to the behavioral sciences, foremost psychology and psychiatry. On various levels these two domains interface and overlap. Yet over the past 40 years or so the two partners became estranged. This has impoverished psychiatry both in its diagnostic and therapeutic efforts. The (Dutch) Foundation for Psychiatry and Religion was established with the very objective to bridge that gap and further renewed rapprochement. At the

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symposium on which this volume is based, only one religious/behavioral interface was discussed: the psychological significance of three basic concepts in religious thinking: prophecy, martyrdom and messianism. How have they been conceived by theologians, of Jewish and Christian persuasion; in what way have they influenced the life of individuals and communities, and by which biblical figures are they most typically exemplified. Students of the transcendent aspects of the human condition, and those studying its immanent aspects, i.e. those elements knowable through our senses, our logos and our emotional receptiveness, should take cognizance of each others viewpoints and findings and collaborate. They have a lot to talk about. So, may that come to pass. 5. SUMMARY The bonds between religion and psychiatry have been strong over many years but loosened in the last century to the point of virtual estrangement. Of course the tangents remained, but they are not exploited anymore. This is wasteful, both from a practical and a more fundamental point of view. Practically, because we know much too little about the stress-buffering or stress-generating, the disease-producing or health-promoting potential of religion. Religious variables, moreover, are only rarely included in psychotherapeutic interventions. Is this a missed chance? We don’t know. The role of religion in mental health is poorly studied, and this void should be filled. Also, from a more theoretical vantage point, psychiatry and religion interface in many respects. What, for instance, has been and still is the impact of theological concepts on individual and societal development. For psycho-exegesis, moreover, the Bible is a goldmine (and not only for that). In particular the Hebrew Bible is populated with real-life figures in whom weakness and strength are inextricably intertwined. Psychological and psychiatric studies will throw light on the Book and on its writers. A final interface being discussed in this paper is the occurrence of religious psychopathology. Those phenomena raise fundamental questions such as what the border is between normal religious life and pathological interpretations. Psychiatry and religion show consanguinity. Neglect of this kinship is detrimental to both parties. REFERENCES Braam, A. W., Beekman, A. T. F., Knipscheer, C. P. M., Deeg, D. J. H., Van den Eeden, P., & Van Tilburg, W. (1998). Religious denomination and depression among older Dutch citizens: Patterns and models. Journal of Aging and Health,10, 483–503. Braam, A. W., Beekman, A. T. F., Van den Eeden, P., Deeg, D. J. H., Knipscheer, C. P. M., & Van Tilburg, W. (1999). Religious climate and geographical distribution of depressive symptoms in older Dutch citizens. Journal of Affective Disorders, 54, 149–159. Braam, A. W., Sonnenberg, C. M., Beekman, A. T. F., Deeg, D. J. H., & Van Tilburg, W. (2000). Religious denomination as a symptom-formation factor of depression in older Dutch citizens. International Geriatric Psychiatry, 15, 458–466.

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Bremner, J. D., & Vermetten, E. (2001). Stress and development, behavioral and biological consequences. Developmental Psychopathology, 13, 473–489. Ellis, A. (1980). Psychotherapy and atheistic values: A response to A. E. Bergin’s Psychotherapy and religious values. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 48, 635–639. Ellis, A. (1983). The case against religiosity. New York: Institute for Rational Emotive Therapy. Freud, S. (1927). The future of an illusion. In: The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud Vol. 21 (pp. 3–57). London: The Hogarth Press. Glas, G. (2000). De religieuze anamnese. Psyche en Geloof, 11, 71–85. Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychology and Religion. In C. G. Jung Collected works, Volume 11. Psychology and religion: West and east (pp. 5–111). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Karasu, T. B. (1999). Spiritual psychotherapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 53, 143–162. Koenig, H. G. (1997). Is religion good for your health? Binghamton: Haworth Pastoral Press. Koenig, H. G., McCullough, M., & Larson, D. B. (2001). Handbook of religion and health: A century of research reviewed. New York: Oxford University Press. Kutz, I. (1989). Samson’s complex: The compulsion to re-enact betrayal and rage. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 62, 123–134. Larson, D. B., Pattison, E. M., Blazer, D. G., Omran, A. R., & Kaplan, B. H. (1986). Systematic analysis of research on religious variables in four major psychiatric journals, 1978–1982. American Journal of Psychiatry, 143, 329–334. Larson, D. B., Sherrill, K. A., Lyons, J. S., Craigie, F. C., Thielman, S. B., Greenwold, M. A., et al. (1992). Associations between dimensions of religious commitment and mental health reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry and Archives of General Psychiatry, 1978–1989. American Journal of Psychiatry, 149, 557–559. Maslow, A. (1962). Toward a psychology of being. Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand. National Opinion Poll UK Survey. (1985). London: HMSO. Neeleman, J., & Persaud, R. (1995). Why do psychiatrists neglect religion? British Journal of Medical Psychology, 68, 169–178. Riskin, S. (1999). Why a warrior can’t bless. International Jerusalem Post, July 23rd. Rümke, H. C. (1965). Karakter en aanleg in verband met het ongeloof. Amsterdam: Ten Have, 7th Edition. Schilder, A. (1987). Hulpeloos maar schuldig: Het verband tussen een gereformeerde paradox en depressie. Kampen: Kok. Taubes, S. (1998). Healthy avenues of the mind: Psychological theory building and the influence of religion during the era of moral treatment. American Journal of Psychiatry, 155, 1001–1008. Van Praag, H. M (1986). The downfall of King Saul or the neurobiological consequences of losing hope. Judaism, 35, 414–428. Van Praag, H. M. (1988). Job’s agony. A biblical evocation of bereavement and grief. Judaism, 37, 173–187. Van Praag, H. M. (1991). Against Josephus Flavius? The struggle of a Jew with multiple loyalties. Journal of Psychology and Judaism, 15, 213–230. Van Praag, H. M. (2003). De scheppende ziekte. Over (Joods) religieuze elementen in het gestoorde zieleleven. Psyche en Geloof, 14, 54–65. Van Praag, H.M. (2007). God en Psyche. De redelijkheid van het geloof. Amsterdam: Booma. Van Praag, H. M., de Kloet, E. R., & Van Os, J. (2004). Stress, the brain, and depression. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Van Scheyen, J. D. (1975). Bezwaard gemoed in de regio. Tijdschrift voor Psychiatrie, 17, 776–788.

CHAPTER 3 BIBLICAL NARRATIVES AS HISTORY Biblical persons as objects of historical faith

C. STEPHEN EVANS Baylor University, USA

1. INTRODUCTION There is much debate and much skepticism about the historical truth of Biblical narratives, both in the Old Testament and New Testament.1 There is, however, a good deal more consensus that these writings contain many narratives that at least as literature purport to represent actual doings. The late theologian Hans Frei argued, particularly for the New Testament, that the gospel narratives belong to the genre of “realistic narrative.”2 Even the miracle stories of the gospels are narrated, for the most part, in a sober, realistic manner. Frei thus argued that the gospel narratives are history-like, regardless of the degree to which they are historically accurate. Such Jewish scholars as Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg have made similar arguments for Old Testament narratives.3 They have argued that looking at the religious meaning of the narratives does not require that scholars ignore the history-like character which the narratives possess on their sleeve, so to speak, and in fact a literary understanding of these texts does not rule out the possibility that one of the tasks the texts accomplish is to communicate historical information. They have, in other words, forcefully called our attention to the fact that in English terms like “story” and “narrative” are ambiguous. Not all stories and narratives are about what really happened in history, but some of them are. Fictional stories can be told as if they were historical and thus be “history-like.” But genuinely historical stories are also “history-like.” Once we turn our attention to these history-like narratives, we find many memorable characters, for although the narratives are the narratives of a community, the overall story is carried by the stories of individuals. The stories of Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Saul, Solomon, David, and Elijah have abiding power as stories, whatever else they possess, and the characters portrayed in the stories exercise continuing power. 21 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 21–34. © 2007 Springer.

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The same is true in the New Testament for Peter and any of the disciples, for Paul, and pre-eminently for Jesus of Nazareth. (I will later say why I believe the narrative about Jesus has this pre-eminence for Christians, such that other Biblical stories are dwarfed in comparison.) 2. WHAT VALUE DO BIBLICAL NARRATIVES HAVE IF THEY ARE NOT HISTORICAL? What value do these Biblical narratives have for us today? In what ways is that value linked to historical truth? These are the fundamental questions I wish to address in this paper. A good way to begin is to look at the value such narratives can have even if they are devoid of historical accuracy. I shall dismiss without much comment the value such stories may have in providing us with materials for case histories and diagnoses. I certainly don’t deny that the Biblical stories can be treated in this way; that is shown by the work of such psychologists as Eric Altschuler, who has diagnosed Samson with “Antisocial Personality Disorder” and the prophet Elijah as suffering from temporal lobe epilepsy.4 I suppose that if we do not take the Biblical characters to be historical figures, such diagnoses lose some of their point, and would be akin to looking at cases of mental illness in contemporary novels. Still, there is a lot to be learned from literature, so the Biblical stories might still possess some value for this kind of thing even if they are not taken to be historical. Since I lack clinical expertise I will neither comment on the accuracy of such diagnoses of Biblical characters nor the value of the enterprise. Having set aside this clinical use of the narratives, there are three fundamental kinds of value that Biblical narratives might possess even if they are not historically true: literary, moral, and mythical. I shall examine each of these in turn. 2.1 Literary Value that does not Depend on Historicity A promising area to begin in order to see what value the Biblical stories may possess even if they do not contain historical truth is the field of literature. It would appear that the Biblical stories have whatever literary value good stories possess, whether they are historical or not. One can read the story of David and Goliath in the same way one reads the story of Hector and Achilles. I will leave it largely to the literary scholar to tell us what kinds of value such stories possess as literature. I assert only that such value is very great, and that such stories as stories lose little or nothing of this literary value if we do not take them to be historically true. Literature provides us with the incalculable value of imaginative possibilities. Without imaginative possibilities, each of us would be limited to the actualities we live and know about. Our ability to understand and judge the value of various ways of approaching human existence would be vastly limited. Through literature I can come to understand and empathetically grasp both the attractions and dangers of various kinds of lives. A great novel can give us insight into life possibilities that

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we could never actually enter, or that we could enter only at the cost of our own psychological or physical destruction. Such understanding of possibilities can foster wisdom in the deepest sense. 2.2 Biblical Narratives as Providing Moral Exemplars A second kind of value the Biblical narratives might retain for us even if we lack belief in their historical verisimilitude is the value of providing moral examples. Of course historically true narratives can provide moral examples as well, and it is even arguable that an example gains some kind of power by virtue of historicity. The historicity of the example, one might say, testifies that the moral possibility illustrated in the story is one that humans are really capable of exemplifying. Nevertheless, the moral possibility exemplified by a story can be powerful and inspiring even if the events narrated never occurred. One of Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus, the reputed author of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, actually argues that the historical actuality of a moral example has no positive value and can even be an ethical distraction: What is great with regard to the universal must therefore not be presented as an object for admiration, but as a requirement. In the form of possibility, the presentation becomes a requirement. Instead of presenting the good in the form of actuality, as is ordinarily done, that this person and that person have actually lived and have actually done this, and thus transforming the reader into an observer, an admirer, an appraiser, it should be presented in the form of possibility.5

Kierkegaard’s thought here is that if the example is provided as historically actual, the reader may become distracted by questions about the example instead of focusing on the existential possibility the character poses that is relevant for the reader. In effect, the actuality tempts the reader to adopt the guise of spectator. In the worst case, the reader of a narrative may be lulled to sleep by the example, confusing admiration for the historical person for the development of genuine character within himself or herself. “Ethically understood, there is nothing on which one sleeps so soundly as on admiration over an actuality.”6 I think the worry of Kierkegaard’s pseudonym here is somewhat exaggerated. It is true that people may deceptively judge themselves better than they are because of admiration for an outstanding individual, historical or contemporary. But admiration is not always morally deadening; it can also be an uplifting and inspiring passion. So I do not agree with Climacus that historical truth makes no contribution to a moral example. But he is certainly right to affirm that a story can exemplify in a powerful way a moral possibility without the story being historically true. Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant have argued that our judgments about the worthiness of an historical figure as a moral exemplar are rooted in prior judgments about the moral value of the possibility exemplified. Thus, Kant says that “even the Holy One of the Gospel must first be compared with our ideal of moral perfection before we can recognize him to be such.”7 Kant claims therefore that it is not essential to have a moral exemplar that is historical: “We need, therefore, no empirical example to make the idea of a person morally well-pleasing to God our archetype; this idea as an archetype is already present in our reason.”8 Someone who lacks such

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a robust faith in reason may value an historical exemplar more highly than did Kant himself. Perhaps we learn about goodness by observing good people and not merely through an innate a priori ideal. Nevertheless, it seems right to claim that a story devoid of historical truth can still possess considerable power as exemplifying a moral possibility. As moral exemplars, then, the persons of the Bible may gain something if we take their narratives as historical, but the stories would still retain considerable power even if this were not so. A good illustration of this is provided by C. S. Lewis, who, reflecting on his thoughts about the narrative of Jesus prior to his conversion to Christianity, says that “what I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now—except in so far as his example helped us.” Lewis here seems to offer some support to the view, contrary to Kant, that the historical truth of a moral exemplar, might be of some value to us. Nevertheless, the value does not seem vast, and it seems clear that a story can retain its core value as an illustration of a moral possibility even if it lacks historicity. 2.3 Biblical Narratives Viewed as Myths: Symbolic Expressions of Psychological Truth A third kind of value that narratives about Biblical characters might possess even if they lack historical truth lies in what we might call mythic expressive power. Many writers see ancient stories of gods and heroes, such as those preserved in the great Greek tragedies, as stories that express in a particular and imaginative way universal truths of a psychological and/or metaphysical nature. C. S. Lewis captures this view of myth nicely when he says that “in the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”9 Though, like Lewis, I would personally want to leave open the possibility that a story with mythic power could also be historically true, there is no question that the vast majority of myths are non-historical and that they do not lose this mythic expressive power because of this lack of historical actuality. For thinkers such as Joseph Campbell (1968), the mythic power of the Biblical stories overpowers any historical truth the stories might possess, just as is the case with other religious myths. The characters of the stories are mythical heroes, but for Campbell all the heroes are at bottom the same figure, “the hero with a thousand faces.” At bottom the hero of the myth is Everyman; each one of us is the hero, and the myth is the recounting of the quest each individual makes for salvation. For Campbell the quest is a search for the underlying unity between the self and God: “The two—the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found—are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known.”10 Not all thinkers will share Campbell’s monistic reading of the religious meaning of the great myths. It is possible to read the Biblical stories not as illustrating the truth that the “font of life is the core of the individual,”11 but as narratives that recount the

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paths individuals can follow to a personal God who is distinct from the self. On such a theistic reading the Biblical stories, while still possessing mythic power, retain a more pluralistic character; the various persons represented in the narratives may exemplify various psychological types whose paths to God are different because the obstacles they must surmount are different. However, whether we read the stories as myths in a monistic or theistic way, their mythical power lies in their ability to express in a dramatic and concrete fashion truths that are in themselves timeless. The myths convey to us the eternal nature of God and timeless and universal truths about how humans must relate to God. If the highest religious truths are of this nature, then I think little would be lost if we see the Biblical stories as non-historical. 3. THE VALUE OF THE BIBLICAL NARRATIVES THAT IS TIED TO HISTORY We have seen that the Biblical narratives may have significant value even if they are not viewed as historically true. It is worth asking, however, whether anything is lost when we do not read the narratives as historical. Does history add any value to these Biblical narratives? If so, how does it do so? If there is to be significant value in such narratives, taken as history, that value must be tied to the value of history itself. I take it to be a distinctive of traditional Christian faith, and—so it seems to me, of traditional Judaism too, though it is not for me to say what is or is not important for Judaism—that history is viewed as having fundamental importance. Christianity has traditionally taught that salvation is not merely something that is gained by the realization of some timeless, universal truth or truths, as might be the case if the narratives are viewed purely mythically or as moral exemplars. Rather, salvation is something to be achieved in history, something to be won or lost in time. On such a view, history is not merely a theatre for the illustration of moral truths or a place in which one recognizes some human status that is fundamentally an eternal possession. History is not merely the arena for acquiring timeless truths about God and the self. Rather, history is the place where God and human beings interact, the story of God’s actions to make salvation possible and the responses of human beings to those actions. On this view the Bible contains what may truly be called a “metanarrative,” a grand story that provides a meaningful frame for human history and human existence. The narrative is not in this case merely a symbolic expression of inner, psychological truths, for the truths are not merely about ourselves, and they are not merely symbolic, but bear on the actual course of human events. To turn our attention to the narrative is not to turn our attention solely within ourselves, but to learn to see ourselves in light of this larger story. As Hans Frei argued, the task is not to assimilate the Biblical narrative to our world, but to learn to understand our world in light of the Biblical narrative. The main outlines of the grand narrative are familiar to us as what is often called the major “acts” of the Biblical drama. The story begins with God’s creation and

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moves to the Fall which mars that creation. The third act, with which the Biblical narrative is mainly occupied, is God’s plan of action to redeem a fallen humanity and natural order. That redemptive plan begins with the calling and creation of a particular people, through whom God is to offer his salvation to the whole human race. That people is sent prophets and teachers, and its history is intertwined with the history of its covenantal relations with God. In the “fullness of time” God himself enters human history and acts decisively in Jesus of Nazareth, to defeat sin and death and establish a new people of God, an inclusive people drawn from every race and nation. God continues to deal with his people, sanctifying and purifying them as they struggle to actualise the redemption he has made possible. Through all the struggle God’s promise of final victory looms as the final act of the drama, the historical event that will inaugurate the unending banquet-feast of the kingdom of God. On this reading of the Bible, salvation is something to be gained (and perhaps, for some, lost) in history. History is thus invested with a crucial meaning and importance that is not to be found merely in the cycles of nature. God is seen as a being who acts in particular ways, particular times, particular places, lovingly seeking to restore a fallen humanity and natural order. Human choices are seen as leading to eternal joy or eternal ruin. On this view, the historical truth of the Biblical narrative assumes an importance that it could not possess if it functioned merely as literature exemplifying imaginative possibilities, exemplifications of moral ideals, or mythical symbolic expression of psychological or metaphysical truths. Of course the story can fulfil all these functions as well, but none of them rivals the crucial function the narrative plays. The story is the story of how God acted to deliver humans from a prison of sin and death; if the story is not historically true then they have not been delivered from the prison. It is important not to confuse the question of the value of historical truth with the different question as to how we have epistemological access to that historical truth. For many to speak of historical truth is to speak of objective facts, gained through adherence to a scientific discipline. If we are thinking of “history” in this sense, it is difficult to see how it might bear on our lives. The epistemological questions as to how we gain access to historical truth are indeed important, and I shall address them in this paper. However, a more fundamental question than the question of how we gain access to historical truth is the question of why historical truth matters to us at all, and this is the question I am now addressing. Christianity makes historical claims, but it does not regard those claims as “bare facts” without significance. Rather, it claims that the meaning of our own lives—indeed, the meaning of the universe—is bound up with God’s actions in history, particularly God’s actions in Christ. However we gain access to the story about what God has done in history— and I shall proceed to argue that we do not gain such knowledge through a detached scientific attitude—the truths the story contains are ones that claim to have the power to transform us and our world, and they thus challenge us to respond and reconsider the meaning of our lives. The events are not such that can merely survey them as a detached spectator, but events that challenge one’s sense of who one is and why one is living.

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The epistemological difficulties presented by historical truth claims seem daunting indeed. It is easy to see why we are tempted to focus instead on literary truth, moral truth, and mythical truth, which allow us to ignore those epistemological problems. However, if the true religious meaning of the story—its power to change human beings, human society, and even the whole natural order—is essentially tied to the occurrence of particular events in history, then we may have no choice but to confront those epistemological problems head-on. Otherwise, we may lose what is most valuable in the narratives, for it may turn out that in this case meaning and historical truth are not easily detached from each other. I shall say something about how these epistemological difficulties should be approached in my concluding section. 4. THE GRAND NARRATIVE, THE STORY OF JESUS, AND THE NATURE OF FAITH The question of historical faith in the Biblical narrative must then center first and foremost on the grand narrative. The narratives of individual persons and particular communities, of Joseph and Moses, Elijah and Elisha, James and John, Peter and Paul, take on their fundamental significance in light of the grand narrative in which they are embedded. That does not mean that such narratives cannot function in relative isolation by providing moral inspiration and psychological insight, but it means that when they do function in these ways questions of historical truth are of lesser importance. This means, I think, that the question of historical truth lies not in the accuracy of the details, but in the reliability of the overall thrust of the narrative. The historical details of individual stories are, by and large, not as important so long as the reader of the narrative gets a true impression of what God has done and is doing for human salvation, and what humans must do in response to God’s initiative. We can now understand why historical faith in Jesus of Nazareth is of pre-eminent importance for Christians. It is not that the narrative of Jesus can stand alone. Like all the other narratives in the Bible, its meaning must be understood in relation to what I am calling the grand narrative that is supposed to provide the answers to who we are and what life is all about. However, the story of Jesus is for Christians the absolute centerpiece of that grand narrative. Just as an epic film that contains many individual stories may yet hinge on one crucial, central story, so the Biblical narrative as a whole flows backward and forward from the story of Christ. Christ’s story is the central story of the grand narrative, the one that enables us to understand the beginning and the long period of preparation, as well as the existential struggles of people in every age and the final promise of victory at the time of time. For the beginning is the beginning of the story that hinges around Jesus; the preparation is the preparation for his coming. The existential challenge is the challenge of how to view Jesus, and the end is understood as the ending in which Christ’s kingdom will be fully realized. The centerpiece of the story of Jesus is of course the events of the passion and resurrection. Each of the gospels devotes a huge proportion of its material to the death

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and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus’ death is seen, already in the gospels and even more explicitly in the rest of the New Testament, as atonement for sin, a victory over death and Satan. Jesus’ resurrection is an affirmation that God did accomplish these things in Jesus. The resurrection has particular importance in differentiating the story of Jesus from the stories of other Biblical figures. The identity of Jesus is given by the historical narrative. We know him as the one who changed water into wine, who called fishermen to be his disciples, who taught in memorable parables such as the story of the good Samaritan and the prodigal son, and who freely went to his death on a cruel cross at the hands of the Romans. However, the resurrection implies that this historical figure is not merely historical. It is crucial that the one whom we identify through this historical narrative is alive today. The Christian Church proclaims him as a living reality, one whom we can know and love, and who can be present through the Spirit of God in the worship and lives of believers. In this case historical faith is not merely historical, but the vehicle for an on-going relation with the person who is most crucial in understanding human life and the human task. In one sense of the term “faith,” I would argue that from a Christian perspective, the person of Jesus is the only object of historical faith. Of course there are many senses of “faith.” I should like to distinguish what I will call “ordinary historical faith” from religious historical faith in a strict sense. (My distinction here overlaps somewhat but is not identical with that which Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus makes in Philosophical Fragments between “ordinary historical faith” and what he terms “faith in the eminent sense.”12) All historical beliefs that are based on evidence or other grounds are underdetermined by those grounds. We can conceive of even well-attested historical beliefs turning out to be false, though in some cases doubts about historical beliefs would be bizarre and pointless. Thus, following Kierkegaard, we can say that all historical beliefs involve faith in the sense that the belief involves a commitment that outruns the evidence and runs some risk, however slight, of being false. In this ordinary sense, historical belief in any Biblical characters requires “faith.” However, religiously, faith is more than belief. The most fundamental object of faith is not a proposition but a person, and faith in a person involves trust in that person. In this sense, the resurrection of Jesus implies the possibility of faith in Jesus in a special sense. Jesus is portrayed as one with whom I can have a living relationship, a person whom I can build my life around. I can trust Jesus to hear my prayers and fulfil his promises to me in ways that would make no sense in the case of a deceased historical figure. Such faith is far more than assent to historical propositions, though if I am right to say that the identity of Jesus is given through an historical narrative, it presupposes or includes such propositional belief. The narrative about Jesus is not merely the story that discloses the identity of Jesus, but also the vehicle for the creation of this faith. The New Testament claims that “faith comes by hearing,” and it is in an encounter with the narrative that the possibility of faith is offered. When I read or hear the story of Jesus, I find God himself speaking to me.13 God speaks in different ways: I hear commands, questions, promises, as well as assertions. In the story of the good Samaritan, for example, God

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commands me to love my neighbour, questions me as to whether I am acting as a neighbour, helps me see why I need the help of God to love my neighbour, and implicitly promises me the help of God to love my neighbour as myself. In the death and resurrection of Jesus I come to see the seriousness and depth of my own evil and the power of God to overcome that evil. We can say then that the narrative is one that has mythic power. It tells me who I am, what my condition is, what kind of world I inhabit, and how myself and that world can be restored and renewed. Just as is the case with non-historical mythical narratives, the story is one that is intertwined with my own identity. Christians believe that the story of Jesus gives me a picture of what it means to be human, and it gives me insight into what I should be, how far from that ideal I have strayed, and how I am to recover my true self. However, in this case the mythic power of the story is logically tied to its historicity. The story does not merely express in a symbolic way timeless truths, but discloses what God has actually done and is doing in history to overcome evil. The faith that the story engenders is not in myself or some power immanently present within the self, but faith in a living figure whose identity is grounded in history. The story turns my attention outside myself to an historical figure, not within myself to truths which I already possess. As Kierkegaard saw, the self on such a view is not something already whole, to be “re-collected,” but something that that must be “re-taken” (Danish Gjentagelsen, “repetition” or “taking again.”). The story does not symbolically express a truth I possess already but transforms me, establishes a relationship with one who is himself the Truth and can give truth to my life. Jesus is therefore uniquely the object of faith for the Christian. This conclusion underlines the profoundly historical character of human existence. If a narrative turns out to play a crucial role in the formation of our identity as selves, it is appropriate that the narrative be an historical narrative. The self is not an eternal possession but an historical achievement, at least when we consider it in terms of its ultimate destiny. For Christians the story of Jesus plays precisely this role, and therefore stripping the narrative of its historicity is also to strip it of much of its power. One might think, then, that my paper is mistitled. If Jesus is the object of historical faith in a unique sense, then I should not have promised to write about “Biblical persons as objects of faith” but only of a Biblical person. However, it should not be forgotten that even the story of Jesus is part of the grand Biblical story. While for Christians the story of Jesus is the centrepiece of this grand narrative, the centrepiece in turn must be seen in the context of that wider narrative. Without seeing God as the creator of the world and the human race, and the one who elected Israel to be the special vehicle of his salvation, one cannot understand who Jesus is or properly read his story. And that wider narrative contains many other memorable figures. Insofar as Abraham, Moses, David, Elijah, and others are crucial to that wider narrative, then it is proper to speak in a secondary sense of those figures as objects of historical faith as well. Without historical faith, at least in the ordinary sense, in these Biblical figures, the story of Jesus would lack intelligibility. And insofar as belief in this grand narrative is part of faith as trust in God, then these historical figures become objects

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of faith in a deeper way as well. They are not the objects of devotion and piety in the same sense as Jesus, but we have faith that God was at work in them and through them and we believe we can learn about God through their stories. 5. THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL QUANDARY: CAN RELIGIOUS FAITH BE HOSTAGE TO HISTORICAL INQUIRY? However, in arguing that historical faith in the narrative of Jesus (in the primary sense) and other Biblical figures (in a secondary sense) is vital, have I not made Christian faith hostage to the critical claims of contemporary historical scholarship? If faith in Jesus, as well as faith in the grand narrative, necessarily includes historical belief, then is not Christianity in the grip of an epistemological crisis? Is it possible to have good grounds for historical beliefs about events that occurred so long ago and for which the main sources for our knowledge are clearly interested parties? To have good grounds for such beliefs, must one adopt a scientific method that commits one to an objectivity that stands in tension with genuine faith? Certainly, the prevailing climate of opinion between the two world wars was that such historical beliefs were uncertain at best. The collapse of the original quest for the historical Jesus led to widespread skepticism about the New Testament as well as the Old Testament. However, the situation today appears different. I have attempted to describe our situation in some detail in my book The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith (Evans, 1996). Here I can do no more than sketch the outlines of the story I give there. There are, I believe, two strategies that have been developed for dealing with the question of how we can have access to the historical Jesus and other Biblical figures. I call these strategies the evidentialist and non-evidentialist strategies. Both strategies offer promising alternatives to the Christian who thinks it is vital to hold to the historicity of Biblical figures, especially the figure of Jesus. I shall sketch each strategy in turn. The evidentialist strategy is rooted in the traditional epistemological tradition that sees knowledge as justified true belief, and sees justification for our beliefs, whether they amount to knowledge or not, in terms of evidence. Traditional evidential apologetics has assumed this perspective, and attempted to give evidence for such things as the resurrection of Jesus and his divinity. With the onset of critical, supposedly scientific, historical methods, the historical credibility of the Biblical narratives was severely damaged for many. Those critical methods are perhaps best described in the work of Ernst Troeltsch, who summarizes them under three principles: the principle of criticism, the principle of analogy, and the principle of correlation.14 The principle of criticism implies, roughly, that the genuine historian must take a critical view of all sources and accept none as absolutely authoritative. The principle of analogy means that the historian must assume a kind of uniformity of natural processes; in particular, one must not believe that miraculous and supernatural events that do not occur today were prevalent in some past time. The principle of correlation implies that the historian must understand all historical events in terms of a web of immanent causes.

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Troeltschian critical history is still dominant in historical Biblical studies, but there have been some substantial changes. The underlying aim of Troeltsch seems to have been to have the historian take an independent, critical view, free from ecclesiastical control or bias. However, it is increasingly recognized that Troeltsch’s own critical principles are not free from bias either. As understood and practiced by many, these principles seem to embody, not a neutral, scientific perspective, but a perspective informed by a naturalistic worldview, one that dogmatically rules out the appearance of the transcendent in human experience. Thus, an historian who denies the possibility of miraculous events is no more “neutral” or “scientific” than the historian of a previous generation who affirmed the reality of such events. Even “critical” history is not in reality free from personal commitments. I am not a Biblical scholar myself, and so anything I say about this issue should be taken as the perspective of an outside observer. Nevertheless, it seems to me that recent Biblical scholarship has moved away from this dogmatic anti-supernaturalism towards a more genuinely open perspective. Biblical scholars such as John Meier, whom I take to be somewhat typical on this point, affirm that the historian must be guided by the canons of an imaginary “unpapal conclave,” a meeting of scholars of various ideologies who must seek consensus.15 Such an historical scholar may not be free, as historian, to affirm the reality of the miraculous, but he or she is also not free, as historian, to deny such events. In a postmodern world, we may still have doubts about the value of such a method. Who is to be included in the conclave? Can we really expect any agreement in such a situation? In a postmodern world, we may doubt whether absolute neutrality is really possible, and I share these doubts. Still, it still seems clear that Meier’s account of critical Biblical method is at least an advance on Troeltsch. The result has been a new appreciation of the role of miracles and the supernatural in the narrative of Jesus. There is surprising agreement among critical scholars today, not that Jesus performed miracles, because critical history, even as practiced by Meier, does not allow such an affirmation, but that he was believed by his contemporaries to have performed miraculous deeds. N.T. Wright even goes beyond this affirmation: “Many scholars from widely differing backgrounds now accept that Jesus did remarkable “mighty works”; this consensus is strong enough to sustain the point at least that Jesus’ contemporaries, friend and foe alike, believed him to be doing such things, and that the best and simplest explanation of this is that it was more or less true.”16 There is also a large consensus that Jesus’ followers believed from a very early time that God had miraculously raised Jesus from the dead. On such a view, the historian may not play the role of apologist, supplying the traditional historical “proofs” of Jesus’ divinity. However, the historian, at least the historian who has rejected the supposed neutrality of “scientific history” for a more genuinely open and modest perspective, can credibly inform us about the testimony of Jesus’ earliest followers, and we are free to form our own views about the character of that testimony. It appears that contemporary historical methods, unlike the dogmatic antisupernaturalism of Troeltsch, at least allows, even if it does not require, an interpretation of the historical Jesus that is consistent, in its major outlines, with what the Church has traditionally affirmed about the identity of Jesus.

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However, the evidentialist strategy is not the only option for the Christian who wishes to affirm the historical truth of the Biblical narratives. Many recent epistemologists have abandoned the “internalist” conception of knowledge as justified true belief in favor of an “externalist” epistemology, that focuses on knowledge as something that occurs when human persons are rightly related to the external world.17 Externalist epistemologies were originally developed by naturalistic philosophers who wished to see knowing as a natural process. The externalist sees knowledge as a true belief that is caused by external reality in the right way, or as a true belief that is the result of a reliably functioning faculty. Such epistemologies were thus developed independently of any religious motivation. The basic idea behind such epistemologies, as I see it, is that the attempt to achieve Cartesian certainty and vanquish scepticism once and for all should be given up. If we humans are being deceived by an evil demon, or if we are actually living in a virtual reality created by “The Matrix,” then too bad for us. Knowledge would just be impossible if such was our predicament. Rather, we should assume that we do know things and ask how we get our knowledge. The right answer seems to be that knowledge happens when we are rightly related to the world that we know, when our beliefs “track” that external world. Our ability to “track” the world in such a manner is not completely under our control, but depends on the facts about our cognitive equipment and our relation to the external world. From such a perspective, epistemology gives up any pretence of providing an absolute foundation or certification for all knowledge claims, but rather sees itself as reflection on a process of knowing that precedes philosophical reflection about that process. What is the relevance of epistemological externalism to the problem of historical religious knowledge? Simply this: such an epistemology raises the possibility that there might be a way of achieving the relevant kind of knowledge that is independent of the methods of the critical historian.18 If there are processes and events that reliably put humans in touch with the relevant reality and produce true beliefs, such beliefs may amount to knowledge, even if the knowers cannot justify such beliefs on the basis of common evidence. Reformed theologians have traditionally affirmed that there is indeed such a process. Suppose that Christianity is substantially true and that Jesus is the person whom Christians affirm him to be. If knowledge about the historical Jesus is religiously vital, then it seems exceedingly implausible that such knowledge could only be obtained through critical historical investigation. Surely God would not have become incarnate for the sake of saving the human race, and then limited the knowledge of such events to those who have the relevant knowledge of ancient events, languages, and texts. Rather, one would expect such knowledge to be available to ordinary people and not to be dependent on esoteric skills and learning. How might this be possible? John Calvin’s answer was that the knowledge is gained through what he called the “internal testimony” or “witness” of the Holy Spirit. When the individual reads or hears the story of Jesus, the Spirit of God acts within the person to produce an understanding of the person’s own need and how God has answered that need in Jesus. God creates faith within the individual, and

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that faith includes a conviction that the narrative is true. Jesus is a living reality whose identity is rightly given by the story. Calvin’s account has, I think, often been misunderstood because his talk of the internal testimony of the Spirit has been understood in internalist, evidentialist terms. From such a perspective, an appeal to the witness of the Spirit appears weak, a grasping at a mysterious, private form of evidence. Suppose, however, we do not look at the work of the Spirit as an experience being viewed as evidence, but as a truth-conducive process, the way in which God brings about a true conviction in the individual about who Jesus is and a trust in the power of Jesus to bring about real transformation. From this perspective, when God speaks to the individual through the narrative, through God’s questions, commands, promises, and claims, this is the Spirit of God witnessing to the individual. Perhaps we might term this whole process by which God induces true beliefs “faith” and thereby make sense of the claim of Calvin and other theologians that there is such a thing as knowledge that is gained by faith, rather than seeing faith and knowledge as mutually exclusive categories. Is the outcome of such a process knowledge? Certainly not from an internalist, foundationalist perspective, which insists on an evidential guarantee for knowledge. However, from an externalist point of view, if the beliefs formed in this way are true and the process by which they are created is a reliable, truth-conducive one, they may indeed be knowledge. The question as to whether we can know who Jesus is may then turn out to be logically tied to questions about the truth of the claims made about Jesus. Jesus, and by extension other Biblical figures, can be legitimate objects of historical faith if God was really present in them and their lives. There may be no neutral, risk-free way to decide whether such claims are true. My argument here parallels that made by Alvin Plantinga in his recent Warranted Christian Belief, where he argues that any objection to the claim that Christian belief is unwarranted must take the form of an argument that Christian beliefs are false (Plantinga, 2000). A decision about whether Christian beliefs are justified cannot be made independently of a decision about their truth. We human beings are finite, situated knowers. We are profoundly historical beings, and we cannot escape the risks of history even when we are doing history. NOTES 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8

I shall in this paper refer to those Scriptures often termed the “Hebrew Bible” as the Old Testament, mostly because this paper is written from an explicitly Christian point of view. Without in any way denying the fundamental Jewishness of these writings and that they belong first and foremost to Judaism, the Christian Church has traditionally accepted these writings as part of its canon as well, and have regarded the Christian Bible, including the Old Testament, as forming one body of revelation. See Frei (1974), p. 10. See, for example, Alter (1992) and Sternberg (1985). For a popular reference see Christianity Today, Jan 7 2002, p. 13. Kierkegaard (1992), p. 359. Ibidem, p. 360. Kant (1964), p. 76. Kant (1960), p. 56.

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14 15 16

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Lewis (1970), p. 66. Campbell (1968), p. 40. Campbell (1968), p. 191. Kierkegaard (1985), pp. 86–88. For a powerful account of what it means to say that God speaks to humans and a defense of this possibility, see Wolterstorff (1995). A fuller explication and criticism of these principles is provided in Evans (1996), pp. 170–202. See Meier (1991); see also Vergote, this book. Wright (1996), p. 194. Many New Testament scholars could be cited in favour of Wright’s claim here, including such unorthodox scholars as John Dominic Crossan (1991). For a clear account of the distinction see Alston (1989). The other essays in this volume are invaluable in understanding the contemporary situation in epistemology. I defend such a view in Evans (1996), chapter 11. The fullest account of how the Biblical narratives could be known to be true historically is found in Plantinga (2000). This volume is the culmination of Plantinga’s trilogy on “Warrant” that develops a “Reformed epistemology” that is externalist in character. See Plantinga (1993a, 1993b).

REFERENCES Alston, W. P. (1989). Internalism and externalism in epistemology. In W. P. Alston, Epistemic justification: Essays in the theory of knowledge (pp. 185–226). Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Alter, R. (1992). The world of biblical literature. London: Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). Campbell, J. (1968, 2nd Ed.). The hero with a thousand faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crossan, J. D. (1991). The historical Jesus: The life of a Mediterranean Jewish peasant. San Francisco: Harper & Collins. Evans, C. S. (1996). The historical Christ and the Jesus of faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frei, H. (1974). The eclipse of biblical narrative. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kant, I. (1960). Religion within the limits of reason Alone (Th. M. Greene & H. H. Hudson, Eds. & Trans.). New York: Harper and Row. (Original work published 1793/1794). Kant, I. (1964). Groundwork of the metaphysic of morals (H. J. Paton, Trans.). New York: Harper and Row. (Original work published 1785). Kierkegaard, S. (1985). Philosophical fragments (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Eds. and Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1844). Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Concluding unscientific postscript (H. V. Hong & E. H. Hong, Eds. & Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1846). Lewis, C. S. (1970). Myth Became Fact. In C. S. Lewis, God in the dock (pp. 63–67). Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Meier, J. P. (1991). A marginal Jew: Rethinking the historical Jesus, Volume I. New York: Doubleday. Plantinga, A. (1993a). Warrant: The current debate. New York: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, A. (1993b). Warrant and proper function. New York: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, A. (2000). Warranted Christian belief. New York: Oxford University Press. Sternberg, M. (1985). The poetics of biblical narrative. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Wolterstorff, N. (1995). Divine discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, N. T. (1996). Jesus and the victory of God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

PART II PROPHECY: THEOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS

CHAPTER 4 INTRODUCTION TO PROPHECY Theological and psychological aspects

GERRIT GLAS University of Leiden, The Netherlands

The section on prophecy begins with a chapter by Neil Gillman on Abraham Joshua Heschel, focussing especially on the latter’s famous work The Prophets. Gillman is Aaron Rabinowitz and Simon H. Rifkind Professor of Jewish Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York and studied with Heschel. Gillman’s treatment nicely captures the issues that emerged in the previous section and which were addressed briefly in the Introduction to that section. It describes Heschel as a masterful writer on religious experience, and emphasizes the notions of “radical amazement” and “insightful sensitivity” that are among the key terms Heschel uses to depict the essence of religious experience. Gillman’s main point is that Heschel’s notion of divine pathos is “both the impetus for his understanding of prophecy and also the core of his own mature theological inquiry.” Pathos refers to the intimate involvement and loving care of God for his creation. This relational dynamic has ontological priority. God will never appear as the endpoint of a chain of reasons; He is there at the outset. This position is reflected in the order of analysis of Gillman’s chapter, in which, just like in Evans’s chapter, epistemological concerns follow – instead of precede – the exposition of Heschel’s worldview with its notion of God as the “ontological presupposition.” From a systematic point of view, Gillman raises a number of theological and philosophical issues that would be interesting to pursue. I will limit myself to one issue which seems to be of importance for later discussions in this volume. The issue is theological, but with psychological and philosophical ramifications. It finds its background in Gillman’s suggestion of the embeddedness of Heschel’s notion of divine pathos in Polish Hasidism, with its even deeper background in 16th century Lurianic mysticism. Rabbi Issac Luria, a Palestine-born Jewish polymath, taught that creation is the result of emanation out of God’s own being. This position brought 37 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 35–40. © 2007 Springer.

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him close to pantheism, which is a heresy in Jewish thinking; a danger, however, that he tried to counterbalance by adopting another almost heretical thought, i.e., the assumption of a duality in God. According to this thought, as Luria composed it, God, on the one hand, transcends earthly reality; this is God as Ein Sof (“without end”), a transcendent and hidden God, Deus absconditus, independent of creation. On the other hand, there is the immanent God, usually referred to as She’khenah, who is present in and throughout creation. This reference to a mystical, pantheistic/dualistic background makes one aware of the intricacy of the notion of divine pathos and its close ties with systematic theological issues. It urges one toward a more clear view of the way God relates to His creations. Heschel describes God as the One, for whom human beings are significant. God needs human beings, and this “neediness,” so to speak, precedes our neediness. Humans are part of His world and, it seems, even of His existence. Formulations such as these could be interpreted as if Heschel is blurring the Creator/creation distinction. However, it is possible to argue that this quite traditional distinction in itself is the product of the rational and detached epistemic attitude which Heschel, and others, seeks to criticize. Thus, one may ask: What if the notion of pathos is not conceived as a bias toward immanence, but as referring to a reality beyond the split between transcendence and immanence? Traditional religious language is bound to the concept of border. Heschel’s approach may be interpreted as one with deep philosophical and practical implications by implying a divine reality that is always simultaneously possessed of immanence and transcendence. One could hardly imagine a greater difference in approach and atmosphere, than between the other two chapters in this section. In the first, Old Testament scholar Bob Becking, professor at the Theology Department of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, reviews contemporary scholarly approaches to prophecy and interprets the latter from the perspective of Ancient Near East systems of divination. This means that prophecy is seen as part of a larger, widely spread practice of reading signs and cultivating sensitivity to messages conveyed in dreams, visions, and ecstatic experiences. Becking analyzes this practice from the perspectives of hysterical frenzy, shamanism, and manic-depression (the latter term is taken in a broader sense than is usual in clinical practice). He construes an interesting connection between the degree of authority the prophet was allowed to have and socio-economic changes at the time. Prophecy flowered in times of uncertainty, especially when the domestic, kinship-oriented production and distribution of goods changed into a tributary system in which goods had to be produced for the ruling class. Jeremiah is a book that could be read through these lenses, however, as Becking also notes, this does not exclude that other approaches might be relevant too. One of the interesting facts about Jeremiah is, for instance, that it counts such a high rate of first person reports. With this the attention shifts to psychological factors. Elements in Becking’s account, like the theme of double loyalty and of the “prison within,” also emerge as important in the chapter of Bryna Jocheved Levy, who teaches at the Women’s Institute for Torah Studies in Jerusalem. Levy sketches a colorful, intriguing, and often moving portrait of the prophet Jeremiah. Her approach is a fine example of rabbinic

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interpretation in which textual sensitivity is used to improve psychological insight. Levy’s working hypothesis is that the psychoanalytic concept known as projective identification can illuminate how Jeremiah copes with his pain and his intense conflicts, and this in such a way that it does not detract him from his prophetic mission. Jeremiah was torn by his conflicting empathies to his people and to God. He suffered from his marginalization as priest of Ana‘tot (a village to which Abia‘tar the priest, and possible ancestor of Jeremiah, was banished after the former aligned himself with Adonijah’s unsuccessful revolt against Solomon). Jeremiah felt ashamed of his descent from a mother with a dubious, possibly adulterous life style. His ambivalence becomes eminently clear in the leitmotif of the womb/tomb – the womb as place of healing and comfort, but also a grave, a place of misery and woe. The ambivalence is, finally, also apparent in the transition from the theme of seduction (Jeremiah as the prophet who is enticed by the Lord to announce terror and destruction to his people) to the theme of fellowship and union. To support the latter theme, Levy reviews the many compelling midrashic passages in which Jeremiah and God are depicted as both weeping about the fate of the people of Israel. Jeremiah’s “crisis of confidence” finds its temporal solution in projective identification with his God. This type of projective identification can be seen as identification with the aggressor, at first glance, however, the midrashic texts go beyond this interpretation to suggest a total identification of Jeremiah with God, which would – also – imply a psychological unity with the sadness and tears of God. From this point on, it is only one step to speculate about the possibility of God identifying with Jeremiah. Textual hints in the Midrash and its medieval rabinic commentaries bring Levy to the conviction that God indeed identifies with Jeremiah. This identification means that God – “in the moment of destruction” – becomes one with his servant in his suffering and pain for those who are destined to suffer (Israel). Levy’s portrait of Jeremiah is lively, complex, and part of an impressive tradition of reading and meditating on the Book of Jeremiah. Levy’s re-reading occurs clearly in the context of this tradition. She does not separate the scholar from the believer. Equally pleasing is that she does not provide a specimen of reductionistic psychoanalytic reading, in which Bible stories and biblical personalities are deemed to be “nothing other than” illustrations of more general psychoanalytic insights. To the contrary, Levy’s use of the term projective identification gives it a wider and more existential meaning than is customary in the clinical context, while at the same time retaining the classical content of projection of psychic contents onto inner representations of the other and keeping these unwanted contents under control within these representations. Becking’s approach differs from Levy’s: he distinguishes sharply between the scholar and the believer. For the scholar component, as he sees it, the Old Testament prophets can and ought to be understood in the same light as other Near Eastern omen-readers and mantists. Yet as a believer, Becking has his faith preferences, but these preferences belong to “another discourse,” apparently private. The division is interesting, especially when compared to Heschel’s insistence on the “ontological” priority of divine pathos and the way this position affects one’s view about what is

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going on between the prophetic messenger and the audience of listeners and readers. How does the detached attitude of the scientist relate to the reality of the prophetic pathos and the existential responses to this pathos? Indeed, is a “calm” split between the scholar and the believer possible at all? Does such a split not suggest that there are places in the world (or in one’s mind) in which it is possible to be safeguarded from the “heat” of divine pathos? 1 Of course, there is no simple either/or formula for the dilemma of acceptance or denial of the claims of the prophets, and there exists a great number of ways to respond to these claims. However, I think it legitimate to probe the issue further, rather than merely accepting the simple assertion of a division between two discourses. The scientist can not withdraw from these claims, at least not without critical self-examination of how his or her scientific work relates to these claims and, also, how and in what sense scientific scholarship could modify the meaning of these claims. Part of this critical self-examination is a rethinking of the nature and conceptual underpinnings of the respective types of scientific inquiry on which biblical scholarship is based. Becking, to be sure, illustrates this type of conceptual selfexamination when he resists modern positivistic approaches according to which Jeremiah would “fade away into the dusky twilight of history.” Instead, he joins Brueggemann when he says that every historical presentation is both mediation and construction. The element of mediation is the part that manifests how normative and existential claims are present in the text and exert their influence on subsequent traditions and on the readers in these traditions. NOTE 1

This issue returns in another form in the chapter by Avi Ravitzky on the notion of the “holy land.” The believer who is considering going back to the holy land basically confronts himself with the question of what the conditions are under which it would be possible to stand the heat of divine presence.

CHAPTER 5 THE DYNAMICS OF PROPHECY IN THE WRITINGS OF ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL

NEIL GILLMAN Aaron Rabinowitz and Simon H. Rifkind Professor of Jewish Philosophy Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York

1. INTRODUCTION It was my privilege to study with Abraham Joshua Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 1954 to 1960. I was subsequently his colleague on the Faculty of that school until his death in 1972, and I have spent over four decades studying and teaching his thought. I have long been convinced that his early writings on prophecy, together with the Hasidic environment into which he was born, served as the major springboards for his mature theology. I have long wished for an opportunity to explore that relationship in a more rigorous manner. My paper will have three sections. I will begin by locating Heschel’s writings on prophecy in the context of his life’s work. Second, I will focus more narrowly on the theological core of his thought, namely the concept of God that, Heschel believed, served at the heart of the prophet’s self-awareness. Finally, I would like to speculate on how Heschel might have dealt with some of the epistemological issues raised by the phenomenon of prophecy. 2. HESCHEL’S THREE WORLDS Abraham Joshua Heschel was arguably the most insightful Jewish theologian of the twentieth century. He was born in Warsaw in 1907 and died in New York in late December, 1972 at the age of 65. His career can be divided into three separate phases, each of which can be identified with the three countries in which he spent his life: first, his early years in Warsaw from his birth until 1928 when he left his home as a young man of 21 to study first in Vilnius and later in Berlin; second, his stay in Germany from 1929 to 1938 when he was expelled by the Nazi regime and returned 41 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 41–52. © 2007 Springer.

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to Poland until 1940 when, literally weeks before the Nazi invasion, he left for America; and finally, the years of his maturity, teaching first at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati until 1946, and then at the Seminary in New York from 1946 until his death in 1972.1 Each of these three worlds – Warsaw, Berlin, and America – left a decisive imprint on his character and his thought. The hothouse world of Eastern European Hasidism shaped the mystical core of his theology. It can be claimed that Heschel began as a Hasid and remained a Hasid throughout his life. It was also there that he gained his incredible mastery of the entire corpus of traditional Jewish biblical and rabbinic learning together with medieval Jewish philosophy, kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and finally Hasidism, the latest incarnation of the Jewish mystical tradition. He simply knew it all. In Berlin, he was exposed to the world of Western scholarship, to philosophy, science, and the academic study of religion, and to what was arguably the most cosmopolitan Jewish community in Europe at that time. Finally, these two worlds fused with the America of the postwar years where he published an extensive series of scholarly and popular books in just about every area of Jewish thought in English, Hebrew and Yiddish, and at the same time, became the leading Jewish liberal activist on a wide range of social and political issues, pre-eminently the issues of race, Jewish-Christian relations, and the opposition to the Viet Nam War. It was in the second of these three periods, in Germany in the years 1930–1932, that Heschel first devoted himself to the subject of prophecy. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin was titled, Das Prophetische Bewusstsein. That dissertation was eventually published by the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kracow in 1936 as Die Prophetie, and later in America in an expanded English translation, in 1962, as The Prophets. These dates are significant. In 1930, Heschel was a 23 year-old doctoral student. His study of prophecy is his first extended scholarly work, and, apart from a popular biography of Maimonides which was published in 1936, it became his first published scholarly book, though his bibliography lists over thirty monographs and a number of Yiddish poems that were published between 1922 and 1936.2 As a doctoral dissertation, it was conceived of and written in the classic, western academic format, with extensive footnotes referring the reader to the scholarly literature, Jewish and otherwise, on the topic. Even in its later English version, The Prophets is strikingly different than the books that Heschel published during that same period and which established his reputation in the Jewish and Christian theological communities. It is strikingly different in tone and style than Man is Not Alone (1951) and God in Search of Man (1956), his two major theological statements, or The Sabbath (1951), still his most widely-read book, all written in the poetic style for which he became renowned. The Prophets, in contrast, remains the most classically academic of his books. But for all of its overtly scholarly format, The Prophets is a passionate book. It has a thesis, in the technical sense of that term, and this thesis is advanced with feeling and with power. It is also in its own way a highly personal book. It may have begun as an academic exercise but Heschel’s choice of that topic for his doctoral

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dissertation was far from accidental. In the television interview that Heschel granted just weeks before his death, he remarks that his decision to work on the expanded English version of the book, precisely in the 1960’s, at the height of the uproar over the Viet Nam war and in the midst of the racial crisis in America, was intended to be a calculated political and spiritual statement. He clearly felt that America needed to hear a prophetic voice and he was determined to serve as that voice. 3. THE GOD OF THE PROPHETS Heschel’s study of prophecy is an attempt to penetrate the prophetic consciousness on its own terms. He systematically rejects all attempts to reduce the prophetic experience to simple humanism, to self-delusion, or to a literary fiction. He insists that we take at face value, the prophets’ claim that they were speaking God’s word. What he provides is a phenomenology of the prophetic mind-set. But the work is also his first serious theological inquiry, and it touches upon just about every detail of his later theological writings. He places God at the heart of the prophet’s self-awareness, and then asks, what does this experience tell us about the God of Israel, about the prophetic image of God? At a certain point in Israelite history, over a span of about three centuries, a group of men claimed to be speaking in the name of the God of Israel and delivered God’s message to their community. How did they understand their role? And what kind of a God is it who appoints prophets? The term that Heschel settles upon to characterize the character of the God of the prophets is “the God of pathos.” The four central chapters in the English version of the book – a total of about 60 pages – deal with his understanding of that term. At least three other chapters allude to it, and the book as a whole concludes with an appendix titled “Note on the Meaning of Pathos,” in which the author reviews the history of the various uses of that term from Aristotle and Cicero through Hegel and Northrop Frye, most of which, he notes, differ from the way in which he uses the term.3 It is abundantly clear, then, that the term is central to Heschel and that he has a great stake in our proper understanding of what he means by it. What does he mean by the divine pathos? This is his first attempt at a definition. “To the prophet . . ., God does not reveal Himself in an abstract absoluteness, but in a personal and intimate relation to the world. He does not simply command and expect obedience; He is also moved and affected by what happens in the world, and reacts accordingly. Events and human actions arouse in Him joy or sorrow, pleasure or wrath. He is not conceived as judging the world in detachment. He reacts in an intimate and subjective manner, and thus determines the value of events. . . . (M)an’s deeds may move Him, affect Him, grieve Him . . ., gladden and please Him. This notion that God can be intimately affected, that He possesses not merely intelligence and will, but also pathos, . . . defines the prophetic consciousness of God.”4

Using a metaphor from music, Heschel claims that pathos is “the ground tone” of all God’s relationships to the world, the attitude or stance that underlies all other divine attitudes.5 To use a more popular term, underlying the prophetic consciousness and inspiring all prophetic activity is the assumption that God cares–God cares, personally and passionately, about the Jewish people, about humanity, about human civilizations and history, indeed about all of God’s creation.

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Heschel is very much aware of the scandalous nature of this image of God, particularly for the philosophical and conventional religious mind-set. He is amply aware of the distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and of the distinction between the “living” God and the “idea” of God. This awareness impels him to initiate a sustained inquiry into the history of how God has been imaged in the literature of philosophy and religion. This forms the scholarly core of his book; it remains the most sustained scholarly inquiry in all of Heschel’s writings and it exhibits the incredible range of Heschel’s philosophical learning. His purpose is to recover what he understands to be the “biblical God,” to claim that this image has to be taken seriously, and that this biblical image of God should enjoy the same serious consideration as the God of the philosophers. In effect, Heschel sends us back to the Bible and urges us to read the Bible on its own terms, not colored by our exposure to philosophical speculation. Why, he asks rhetorically, should we assume that the God of the prophets is inherently less sophisticated, less worthy of intellectual approbation, than the God of the philosophers? Allow me to outline briefly, the main arguments in this sustained inquiry. In trying to isolate these points, I encountered once again, my enduring frustration in trying to teach Heschel. Even in this, his most scholarly book, Heschel does not write in a classic academic style. He does not pursue a vectorial argument, going from point one to point two, then to points three and four, and onward. He does not write in a straight line, where the argument builds from assumptions to conclusions. Instead, he writes in a spiral form, where a central point is made early on, then is dropped, then reoccurs, then is dropped again, only to reappear in a new form, enriched by what has come in between. I advise my students who are reading Heschel for the first time: If you don’t understand a point, never drop out; just move on; it will return, again and again. Eventually, you will catch on! First, pathos is a relational term; it is a statement, not about God in God’s essence, but about God’s relation to humanity. It therefore locates the human person within the range of God’s concern. It also brings history into the heart of God’s concerns. The prophetic God is involved in human history. Instead of viewing God as the object of human inquiry, as it is in the philosophical enterprise, Heschel claims that in prophecy, humanity becomes worthy of serving as the object of God’s perception. The roles are reversed. Second, pathos is a dynamic term, in contrast, for example, to covenant which he claims is a static term. If covenant defines God’s relation with humanity, there are only two possibilities: either the covenant is upheld or it is dissolved. In contrast, pathos allows for a dynamic multiplicity of relationships, precisely the multiplicity of relations captured in the biblical narrative where God appears as in turn hopeful about humanity, then frustrated, then yearning, pleased, angry, resigned, and then hopeful again, only to become frustrated once again. Third, pathos separates the biblical God from the philosophical God as portrayed, for example in Aristotle. For Aristotle, God is the unmoved mover, “. . . pure form, eternal, wholly actual, immutable, immovable, self-sufficient, and wholly separated from all else.”6 In contrast, Heschel will argue, the biblical God is “the most moved mover.” “An apathetic and ascetic God would have struck biblical man with a sense,

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not of dignity and grandeur, but rather of poverty and emptiness.”7 The biblical God is needy, lonely, vulnerable. The God of the prophets can be hurt, for once we care about someone, we have left ourselves open to being hurt by that person. Fourth, the world ruled by the biblical God contrasts sharply with the notion of a world ruled by fate, by some supreme force to which even the gods are subject, a blind, primeval, determining power which ultimately governs all that happens on earth and upon which even the gods are dependent, as in all forms of pagan religion. In biblical religion, in contrast, nothing is predetermined. As God is free, so are we, and we have the power to compel God to change every divine decree. The plans of the biblical God can change, as people change. The biblical God creates the possibility of repentance and return. The fate of the world, the fate of history rests on human decisions. In the meantime, God waits. Fifth, and finally, the notion of pathos affirms the legitimacy of the emotions. Heschel undertakes an extended inquiry into the way in which philosophy has understood the place of emotion in human life and in God. With manifold references to the scholarly literature, he discusses the philosophical understanding of emotion as an expression of passivity and as undignified, the elevation of reason over feelings, the affirmation of apathy as more elevated than emotion, the history of mind-body dualism in philosophical literature, and the place of emotion in the Bible and its anthropological implications. He concludes with this passage which, I confess, I continue to find one of the most powerful in all of his writings: “Is it more compatible with our notion of the grandeur of God to claim that He is emotionally blind to the misery of man than profoundly moved? In order to conceive of God not as an onlooker but as a participant, to conceive of man not as an idea in the mind of God but as a concern, the category of divine pathos is an indispensable implication. To the biblical mind, the conception of God as detached and unemotional is totally alien.”8

In legitimizing God’s emotional life, Heschel at the same time legitimizes human emotions. If God can get angry, so can we. God’s anger poses a particular problem to many readers of the prophets and Heschel devotes two entire chapters (chapters 16–17) to this issue. He understands that our embarrassment at God’s anger stems from our discomfort with our own anger. Again, he traces the long cultural history of anger and again, he tries to understand the precise form in which anger appears within God’s pathos. For anger, he proposes to substitute the term “righteous indignation”9 which he opposes to indifference. He notes how thin is the line between anger and love, that in fact, anger is often an expression of love. The God of the prophets “. . . is not indifferent to evil.”10 But God’s anger is contingent, reactive, conditional, and always momentary–in contrast to God’s love which is abiding. 4. HESCHEL’S SOURCES Another of my enduring frustrations in studying Heschel’s writings is his reluctance to acknowledge the thinkers or the books that influenced his own thought. In trying to trace the influences that led him to formulate the notion of divine pathos, I am indulging in a measure of speculation.

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My sense is that there are three such influences, two of them from his earliest years and the third, from his maturity. The first of these lies in Lurianic mysticism which shaped the Hasidic world into which Heschel was born. Lurianic kabbalah is a rich and complex body of mystical speculation which I can only begin to capture in these brief remarks. Isaac Luria was a seminal thinker who lived in Safed, Palestine in the 16th century and who promulgated a myth of cosmology and redemption that transformed and transfixed the Jewish world for generations. One of the cornerstones of Lurianic cosmology is a myth of creation by emanation. Here, Luria departs radically from the apparent plain sense of the biblical notion of creation. In Genesis, God is described as creating a world that is separate and apart from God. Eventually, in the post-biblical tradition, this led to the notion that God created the world ex nihilo, literally “out of nothing,” though this is not precisely the plain sense of Genesis, chapter 1. An exploration of this issue would, however, take us far afield.11 In place of the biblical account of creation, Luria taught that God created the world by emanation out of what may crudely be called God’s own being. God does not abide outside of, apart from, or independent of the created world. Instead, creation as a whole is imbued with the presence of God. This notion skirts one of the classical Jewish heresies, namely pantheism. But Luria avoids that heresy by nearly tumbling into another possible heresy, namely that of dualism. He suggests that one dimension of God, God as Ein Sof, God as Infinity, the transcendent or hidden God, the deus absconditus, persists independently of that dimension of God that is identified with the created world and which is conventionally called the Shekhina, the immanent God, that aspect of God as present in and throughout creation.12 This notion of God as immanent in creation transformed Jewish thought and became one of the core theological assumptions of Hasidism which reigned among Eastern European Jewry from the 18th century to our own day. Heschel was born into this world; he traced his ancestry to the circle of Hasidic masters surrounding the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel Ba’al Shem Tov (roughly 1700–1760).13 Heschel’s father was a Hasidic rabbi and Heschel himself had been designated to inherit the leadership of his father’s community until he decided to leave Warsaw to study in Berlin. He imbibed Hasidism from the cradle. But the notion that God is everywhere to be perceived, in the most intimate and immediate dimensions of reality, is at the core of the notion of the divine pathos. The second influence is much easier to trace. It lies simply in Heschel’s study of Scripture, which he read from his infancy and which he encountered without any of the philosophical assumptions that guide the reading of those of us who begin with a western education. Heschel encountered western culture later in life. At the outset, he read the Bible on its own terms, and his encounter with the biblical image of God led him to the immediate conclusion that God was intimately involved with all of history, and that God cared passionately about the world and about all of creation. That conclusion required no great leap. It was simply obvious, present in every verse of the Bible. When we read these biblical passages, we have to overcome our

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philosophical assumptions. Heschel had nothing to overcome. He simply read what was there. What other conclusion could he possibly derive? The third influence was his own gradual, emerging passion for social justice. That message too he found in prophetic literature, but he also discovered it in himself during his stay as a Jew in Germany in the 1930’s, and it flowered in America in his encounter with American racism and with the Viet Nam war which he believed was nothing less than a holocaust perpetrated by America on innocent women and children. He used to ask in class, “What would Isaiah do if he lived in America in the 1960’s? What would he say about racism? What would he say about this war in which America was systematically killing widows and orphans? What would he say about poverty? About oppression?” As it was inconceivable to the young Heschel that he himself could be indifferent to what was going on in the world about him, it was simply inconceivable to him that God would be indifferent to the course of 20th century history. But then what does this tell us about God? 14 5. GOD’S PATHOS IN HESCHEL’S MATURE THEOLOGY I claimed, at the outset, that Heschel’s notion of divine pathos eventually served as the cornerstone of his later, mature constructive theology. In teaching Heschel, I insist that my students begin their reading of the later Heschel by studying the chapters on pathos in The Prophets. For evidence of that influence, simply look at the titles of his two major books, first Man is Not Alone (Heschel, 1951), and then, God in Search of Man (Heschel, 1955). Between these two, he published a collection of papers on prayer and symbolism which he titled Man’s Quest for God (Heschel, 1954). His very use of these titles assumes a God who is in intimate relationship with humanity. But it is not simply a matter of titles. The core of both of these studies is Heschel’s description of religious experience. He views it as transactional, as demanding both an active or aggressive revelatory role by God and an equally aggressive perceiving role by human beings. Heschel uses various terms to characterize these mutual roles – his terminology is never precise – but for the human role, he settles on “radical amazement,” and for the divine role, he reverts to “pathos.” By “radical amazement” he means, as the literal meaning of the term radical implies, a stance of “root” amazement, a stance that takes nothing in the world for granted, that views the world in perpetual wonder. In one of his formulations, he characterizes this stance as one of wonder over the fact that there are facts in the first place. Or, again, it is a stance that views a grain of sand as a drama. When we view the world through the eyes of radical amazement, what we perceive is a world infused with the presence of God, a God who stands not in detachment from the world, but who is present everywhere, who cries for attention – not only in history but even in nature as well, a God who pursues us, a God who is perpetually in search of human acknowledgment. This is partly the Shekhina of Lurianic kabbalah, that dimension of God present throughout creation. But it is also the divine pathos of The Prophets, now extended and reconceptualized into a driving,

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aggressive, forceful power that demands recognition – though for the better part of our lives, that divine presence is obscured, hidden, by the overwhelming grayness that is so characteristic of the way we are educated to encounter the world. To use another Hasidic metaphor, we have to learn to see through the shells that encase the natural world. The God that permeates all of creation is the same God that appoints prophets. The biblical God has this quality of self-transcendence which expresses itself both in the act of creation and in prophecy. If, as Heschel claims, man is not alone, then, neither is God alone. This God is in need of a world, in need of man, in need of recognition by humanity. This God is then also “in search of man” and the prophet is the most vivid expression of this divine need. Much of the time this divine need is frustrated. But then there are those rare moments of illumination, when “heaven and earth kiss . . .,” moments in which “. . . there is a lifting of the veil at the horizon of the known, opening a vision of what is eternal in time.”15 These moments are pre-symbolic, pre-conceptual, and universal because they precede verbal, cerebral, and hence creedal formulation. They are, simply put, intuitive to human nature as such. All of the institutions of religion are designed to create settings where these rare moments may occur and to treasure their memories through the grayness of the in-between.16 6. HESCHEL’S EPISTEMOLOGY A few words, now, on the epistemological issues raised by this understanding of prophecy and the religious experience. One cannot read prophetic literature without wondering how the community was to know who was the true prophet and who, the false prophet. The biblical test is articulated in Deuteronomy 18:21–22: “(I)f the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and the oracle does not come true, that oracle was not spoken by the Lord; the prophet has uttered it presumptuously: do not stand in dread of him.” That test is quite useless before the fact–but that is precisely when the question arises. Besides, we have at least one biblical prophet–Jonah–whose prophecy did not come true, precisely because his prophecy was attended to, i.e. he was Israel’s only successful prophet. Nineveh repented and God changed His mind. That Jonah was furious at God for making him look like a false prophet (Jonah 4:1–2), exposes the deuteronomic test as singularly futile. Heschel does not deal with this epistemological issue in The Prophets, but he does deal with it in his later theological writings in his typically unsystematic way. His view can be summarized in his claim that God has to be understood as an “ontological presupposition.”17 By this he means that God can never emerge as the conclusion of an inquiry, but rather as its assumption, as its presupposition. God’s very being–what we sometimes call crudely, “the existence of God”–has to be presupposed. If God is not present at the outset, God will never emerge at the end. Let us put this in another way. We never experience the outside world as it really is, objectively. We construct our experience of the world; we bring our own linguistic, educational, gender, and cultural backgrounds, even our biochemical

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make-up with us as we shape our experience of the world. To use some obvious examples, black Americans and white Americans literally see a different America, as do Israelis and Palestinians who see a different Middle-East. Which is the “real” America? Is there a “real” America? We never capture reality as it is. Rather, we construct reality. My sense is that believers and non-believers “see,” that is, construct, a different world out of the “out there.” To use another metaphor, they use a different set of spectacles. When Heschel refers to God as an ontological presupposition, he says that the believer– and primarily the prophet, for our purposes here–begins with the prior conviction that there is a God in the world, that this God cares about the world, and that God has selected this prophet to speak to the world on God’s behalf. The divine pathos, then, is one dimension of the spectacles with which the prophet constructs his reality. Or, to quote a Hasidic maxim, “Where is God? Wherever you let God in!” To seek to verify the claim that God cares for the world is precisely to miss the point; the experience of God’s presence, of God’s demand, is infinitely more overwhelming than any proof. The prophet’s experience of God’s call is self-verifying.18 I concede that this “constructivist” epistemology is much more my own extension of Heschel’s thought than his own personal conclusions. But as an attempt to justify this extension, it is clear that Heschel dismisses the entire issue of verification as simply illegitimate for anyone who has had the direct, unmediated, and overwhelming experience of God’s presence – as did the prophet. To question the objective reality of that experience, even to harbor the suspicion that it may be purely subjective or, even worse, illusory, is, however unwittingly, to deny the experience itself. “This then is the order in our thinking and existence: The ultimate or God comes first and our reasoning about Him second. Metaphysical speculation has reversed the order: reasoning comes first and the question about His reality second; either He is proved or He is not real. However, just as there is no thinking about the world without the premise of the reality of the world, there can be no thinking about God without the premise of the realness of God.”19

The prophet never questions the reality of the God who speaks to him. Nor should the believer. This notion of pathos is Heschel’s metaphor for God, his image of how this transcendent, fundamentally unknown and unknowable God, appears to the prophet. It is the prophet’s perception of God, more than God’s self-perception. My own theological assumptions force me to conclude that no human being knows what God is in God’s essence – that is what makes God, God, and me, a simple human being. But again, I hasten to add that on this point, I write more for myself, not for Heschel. In many ways, Heschel’s epistemology is an antiepistemology, a denial of the very possibility of human beings knowing anything objectively about God. It is one of those many issues that I would have loved to pursue with Heschel, possibly to encourage him to confront some of the many issues that this approach raises. The Bible records a rich, complex and fluid system of metaphors to capture God’s nature, reflecting the equally rich, complex and fluid nature of one community’s experience of God over many generations. Heschel’s divine pathos captures the

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ground tone of this system – the underlying image that underlies all of the remaining more specific images in which God appears to this community. All of these other images – shepherd, judge, parent, lover, spouse, rock, man-of-war and the rest – all of these assume what Heschel tries to capture in the term pathos. 7. CONCLUSION I suggested, at the outset, that Heschel’s notion of divine pathos is both the impetus for his understanding of prophecy and also the core of his own mature theological inquiry. Ultimately, these two functions are one, for the prophet’s self-understanding constitutes his own implicit theology and his implicit theology is Heschel’s. More than any other 20th century Jewish theologian – certainly more than Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, or Mordecai Kaplan, to isolate the three other theological giants of the period – Heschel compels us to return to the Bible, to recapture biblical categories and to take them seriously. Without the divine pathos, there would be no prophecy, but then, neither would there be a Bible, or a people of Israel, or Torah, or covenant, or Jewish religion. The foundation of the entire enterprise is the awareness of a God who cares passionately for the world, for humanity, even for the cosmos as a whole. Even more, my personal recollection of Heschel, traversing the country, speaking out against war, racism, poverty and oppression, enables me, in my imagination, to recapture the image of Amos or Isaiah preaching the identical messages, centuries ago. To many Americans who have only the slightest interest in theology, that image of Heschel endures to this very day – and because of that, the prophets remain alive. That may be his most enduring legacy. But this writer is interested in theology. At various points in this paper, I have suggested some of my personal frustrations with Heschel’s work, and there are others that I have discussed elsewhere. What remains for me, the very words with which I began, is his remarkably insightful sensitivity to religious experience. He was a creative theologian, a brilliant analyst of traditional Judaism, and a master of the classical literature. Above all, he was superb phenomenologist of religion. He is at his very best when he traces the contours of the religious experience, the wrestling that occurs when God and human beings search, find, lose and then rediscover each other once again. And nowhere does this skill emerge more clearly than in his work on prophecy. It displays Heschel at his very best. NOTES 1

2 3

See the first volume of a projected two-volume biography of Heschel’s life by Edward K. Kaplan and Samuel H. Dresner (Kaplan & Dresner, 1998). This first volume takes Heschel from his birth to his arrival in America in 1940. The second volume authored by Kaplan alone–Dr. Dresner passed away in 2000 – is in preparation. A “selected” bibliography of Heschel’s writings can be found in Kaplan and Dresner (1998), p. 364ff. All of my page references to The Prophets (Heschel, 1962) come from the original hardcover edition published by The Jewish Publication Society of America in 1962. The pertinent chapters are 12–18.

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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15

16 17

18

19

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The Appendix is on p. 498ff. Readers should note that the paper edition of the book is in two volumes and in this edition both chapter numbers and the pagination differ. Heschel (1962), pp. 223–224. Heschel (1962), p. 223. Heschel (1962), p. 234. Heschel (1962), pp. 258–259. Heschel (1962), p. 257. Heschel (1962), p. 283. Heschel (1962), p. 284. The plain sense of Genesis 1 seems to suggest that according to this version of creation, God’s creation was more a matter of bringing order out of a pre-existing anarchy, rather than creating something out of nothing. For a masterful overview of the teachings of Isaac Luria, see Gershom Scholem (1941), Seventh Lecture. Heschel’s Hasidic roots are traced in Kaplan and Dresner (1998), pp. xi–xiii and p. 2ff. An anthology of Heschel’s writings on social and political issues can be found in Heschel (1966). Heschel’s most extensive discussion of religious experience is in his God in search of man (Heschel, 1955). Heschel (1955), p. 138. The term appears in The prophets (Heschel, 1962), p. 260, and in God in search of man (Heschel, 1955), p. 114ff. The clearest statement of these claims is in God in search of man (Heschel, 1955), p. 114ff. See in particular, pp. 120–122. Ibidem. For a more extended discussion of this issue, see: Gillman (1998).

REFERENCES Gillman, N. (1998). Epistemological tensions in Heschel’s thought. Conservative Judaism Journal, 50(2–3), 77–83. Heschel, A. J. (1951). Man is not alone. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Heschel, A. J. (1954). Man’s quest for God. New York: Scribner. Heschel, A. J. (1955). God in search of man. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Heschel, A. J. (1962). The prophets. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America. Heschel, A. J. (1966). The insecurity of freedom: Essays on human existence. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kaplan, E. K., & Dresner, S. H. (1998). Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic witness. Volume I. New Haven: Yale University Press. Scholem, G. (1941). Major trends in Jewish mysticism. New York: Schocken Books.

CHAPTER 6 THE PROPHETS AS PERSONS

BOB BECKING Utrecht University, The Netherlands

1. INTRODUCTION What is a prophet? Many people have in their mind-set one of the two following concepts of a ‘prophet’. 1. The ‘Martin Luther King’-idea. A prophet is a person who – guided by divine inspiration, or allegedly so – is more than anyone else in his surroundings able to X-ray the current situation and – on that basis – to design the fabrics of a world to come. 2. The more traditional idea, held both by Jews and Christians that prophets are to be construed as mediators foretelling the future. To Christians prophets were of great importance since they were construed as persons who sketched the outline of the life and death of Jesus Messiah. Pivotal to both positions is the concept that prophecy is a religious phenomenon sui generis. In other words a prophet is seen as a special person and prophecy as a religious feature that has no connection with other religious features. Prophets are seen as unique persons. Modern research, both by biblical scholars and by orientalists, has broadened the scope on prophets and prophecy. Prophecy is now generally seen as part of the Ancient Near Eastern system of divination. (Cryer, 1994) It is not very easy to give a definition of divination. It is a set of elements based in a magic conception of the world. We, generally, construe the world as disenchanted. Persons living in the Ancient Near East believed that the world was full of signs and signals that hinted at the will of the gods. Prophecy was just one of the channels to these signs (see basically Cryer, 1994). This position has two implications. First, the somewhat biased view that in the Hebrew Bible we find the real prophets, while in Israel’s context we find a variety of astrologers, omen-readers, and other mantists, now has to be abandoned. Texts from the archives of the Old 53 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 53–64. © 2007 Springer.

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Babylonian city of Mari, some Neo-Assyrian inscriptions from the reign of the kings Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal (seventh century BCE), as well as some other texts have shown that prophecy is a common Ancient Near Eastern means of divine communication. On the other hand, within the Hebrew Bible traces of mantic practices can be found.1 Second, prophetic texts are not so much future related but should be construed as related to their own specific times including its troubles and needs. A basic feeling of uncertainty about one’s life has been the fertile ground for divination. This change of perspective implies that – from a scholarly point of view – I will treat all Ancient Near Eastern prophets alike. Whether they came from Mari, Arbela, Anathot or Jerusalem, they represent an intriguing phenomenon. When it would come to claims regarding my personal faith, I would prefer the prophets from the Hebrew Bible, but that would be another discourse. Although there are many differences to be found between the members of the ‘company of prophets’, various features are shared by them. Therefore, I dare to discuss them using three labels: ‘frenziness’, ‘shamanism’, and ‘(manic-)depressive’. In doing so, I am trying to uncover some psychological aspects from these Biblical (and Ancient Near Eastern) figures. 2. FRENZINESS At first sight, it might seem strange to talk about prophets and prophecy in terms of frenziness or possession. The aloofness to do so is caused by the fact that greater parts of the prophetic books in the Hebrew Bible contain oracles in poetic form. The message of the Israelite and Judaean prophets finally took the form of texts, or books if you prefer, with high literary quality. That feature is indeed far away from the idea of prophets as raving individuals receiving their divine revelations when in an ecstatic state. But the form of the final phrasing of the prophetic message does not hint at the character of the process that took place while receiving the ‘message’. The Old Testament is not very informative on this process. We are told about dreams and visions. Nevertheless, there are a few glimpses that hint at the presence of ecstatic forms of receiving the divine message. Isaiah 6, where Isaiah relates his prophetic call while in the Jerusalem temple, can be read as a text narrating the transformation of the prophet into a different mental situation. Jeremiah 31:26, in the middle of a series of oracles, reads: ‘Thereupon I awoke and looked, and my sleep was pleasant to me’. This text indicates that the prophet has been ‘elsewhere’. Elements of possession are narrated in 1 Samuel 10:10–13 (see also texts like Numbers 11:24–30; 1 Samuel 19:20; 1 Kings 22:10; Joel 3:1): When they were going from there to Gibeah, a band of prophets met him [= king Saul]; and the spirit of God possessed him, and he fell into a prophetic frenzy along with them. When all who knew him before saw how he prophesied with the prophets, the people said to one another, “What has come over the son of Kish? Is Saul also among the prophets?” A man of the place answered, “And who is their father?” Therefore it became a proverb, “Is Saul also among the prophets?” When his prophetic frenzy had ended, he went home.

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In texts from the context of scripture the theme of frenziness or possession is more explicit. This is especially true for the prophetic figures we come across in inscriptions from pre-Islamic Arabia (see most recently Hämeen-Anttila, 2000). Of great interest here are the designations for the prophets in the Mari letters and the Neo-Assyrian archive. The most common indicator in the Mari texts for a person with – what we would call – ‘prophetic behaviour’ is muhhum. In the neo-Assyrian texts these persons are mainly called mahhû/mahhutu or raggimu/raggintu the second word being the more colloquial variant. Etymologically these Akkadian words are to be derived from the roots mahû, ‘to become crazy; to go into frenzy’, and raga¯mu, ‘to cry out; to proclaim’.2 Etymology, though informative, is, however, a restricted supplier of meaning. The meaning of a word only comes into existence when used in an actual phrase. In the letters reporting prophecy from Mari, the phrase ‘(s)he went into a frenzy’ regularly occurs: Ahatum, a slave girl of Dagan-Malik, went into frenzy and spoke. . . .3

The exact nature of the frenzy in this case is, unfortunately, not revealed. From Mesopotamian and other Ancient Near Eastern texts, however, it becomes clear that a whole set of means were at hand: whipping oneself to the point of fainting; stinging oneself with pointed spindles; cutting oneself with swords and flint knives etc. All these acts could have an emotional outburst as their result. In the Neo-Assyrian archive we find, for instance, a report to the palace in which the verb raga¯mu, ‘to cry out’, occurs frequently as description of the ‘prophetic’ act. In a letter to King Esarhaddon, written 671 BCE by a certain Mar-Issar, then royal agent in Babylonia temporarily under Assyrian rule, mention is made of the death and burial of a substitute king. Substitute kings were appointed in order to cheat the gods and to protect the king from heavenly wrath and divine terror. But in this letter it is written that a prophetess had disturbed a meeting of the assembly of the country and had cried out in loud voice to the substitute king then still alive: ‘You will take over kingship!’. This message as well as the way it was delivered scared the inhabitants of Babylon. Mar-Issar, however, being a good diplomat found ways to calm down the emotions.4 The Neo-Assyrian prophets are best classified as persons living in an ambiguous double loyalty. On the one hand, the royal court whose interest it was to receive reliable and trustworthy messages from the divine realm employed them. On the other hand they were associated with persons in and around the temple of the goddess Ishtar of Arbela, whose more or less frenzied behaviour was perceived as odd by the majority of the people. They were torn between two lovers and it was, in my opinion, this double loyalty that should be seen as fertile soil for their frenzy behaviour (see also Nissinen, 2000). As said or implied all, or almost all, the Neo-Assyrian prophets were related to the goddess Ishtar of Arbela. The ‘odd behaviour’ of these prophets should be construed as based on a process of identification with this goddess. As Martti Nissinen puts it: ‘As proclaimers of the word of Isˇtar, the prophets acted as Isˇtar. The primary role of the prophets as intermediaries between the divine and the human spheres reflects the

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role of Isˇtar/Mulissu as the mediator between the gods and the king . . .’.5 (Nissinen, 2000: 96). In other words the final aim for all these ‘prophets’ would be a unification with Ishtar.6 (Parpola, 1998: xxxiv). So far, I have referred to Ishtar as a goddess, but basically she is an androgynous deity in which the differences of the sexes have been overcome. Throughout the three millennia of religious devotion known to us from Sumer and Akkad, from Babylonia and Assyria Ishtar is related to concepts of shifts in gender roles. In an ancient Sumerian hymn to Inanna we read: May she (= Inanna/Ishtar) change the right side into the left side Dress him in the dress of a woman Place the speech of a woman in his mouth And give him a spindle and a hair-clasp.7

In the phrase ‘to change the right side into the left side’ the words ‘right’ and ‘left’ should be construed as euphemisms for ‘male’ and ‘female’. The ‘he’ character in this strophe refers to a male cult functionary of Ishtar, a so-called kurgarru or asinnu. Such functionaries were known as being dressed and as acting like women. In the Neo-Assyrian archives some texts hint at a quite fundamental personal shift. Some prophets seem to change their gender-role during the period of ecstasy. The Neo-Assyrian prophets and prophecies are known to us, since they were collected and archived on large tablets. These tablets contain sets of prophecies with the name of the prophet included. I would like to pay attention to two persons here: Bayâ and Illusa-amur. There is something strange with them. Bayâ occurs in the following oracle: ˇsa pi-i MÍ.ba-ia-a DUMU URU.arba-ìl By the mouth of the woman Baya, son of Arbela.8

The female determinative MÍ before the personal name clearly hints at a female person. The name Bayâ is listed elsewhere as referring to women9 (Parpola, 1998:il) and to men.10 The logogram DUMU, ‘son’, marks Bayâ as a male person coming from the city of Arbela. He is of an unclear gender. With Illusa-amur – the name means ‘I have seen her godhead’, probably not a name given at birth – something comparable is at stake. Although the name is feminine, the grammatical construction indicating the place of birth, the gentilic adjective, refers clearly to a masculine person. This indistinctness of the gender of the prophets can be interpreted as a sign that they were ‘men turned into women’. Parpola offered the somewhat speculative view that this was the result of an act of self-castration.11 The state of ‘men turned into women’ could also be interpreted as an indication that they reached their aim of being an androgynous person, which makes them perfect for their role as mouthpiece of the goddess Ishtar. I am not implying that all prophets from the ancient Near East were cast in an indistinct gender role. That view would contradict the available evidence. I displayed the androgynous persons Bayâ and Illusa-amur as illustration of the deeper motifs behind the frenziness or ‘odd behaviour’ of so many ecstatics and prophets from the Ancient Near East: the wish to be a pure and adequate vessel for the divine message.

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3. SHAMANISM At first sight, it might sound strange to discuss Shamanism in a discourse on Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern prophets, since most of us would construe Shamanism as a feature from a culture quite different from the Ancient Near East. However, I will argue that the `îsˇ ha¯’elohîm, ‘the men of God’, Elijah and Elisha, performed roles that can be construed as analogous to the roles of the Shamans in Siberia and Alaska. Elijah and Elisha allegedly uttered their prophecies in the ninth century BCE. This implies that they operated during a period of great changes in Ancient Israel as can be detected from the archaeological evidence, in combination with the general knowledge on the Ancient Near East. On the level of longe durée a shift in the social organization in Ancient Israel is observable during Iron Age II. This shift basically is economic. The organization of the production of goods (e.g., food; clothing; tools) gradually changed from ‘domestic’ or ‘kinship-related’ into a more tributary system. In other words a situation in which people ‘raised what they ate and ate what they raised’ changed gradually into a production of surplus to satisfy the needs of a dominant ruling class that might have been subordinate to international power. A ‘domestic’ economy tends to be egalitarian, since that is an appropriate way to survive and to endure. Tributary societies are by implication not egalitarian. A minority group is dominant over the society and wants to continue and extend its control (see McNutt, 1999). The shift from one form to the other has been provoked by the contact that Israel had with competitive (e.g., Phoenicia and Syria) and dominant (Assyria) powers during Iron Age II. To use an obvious anachronism: Israel became part of a process of globalisation. I prefer to label this shift in socio-economic terms above a depiction of a more administrative character, such as a change from ‘segmentary society’ to ‘state’, or from ‘tribal organisation’ to ‘monarchy’, since changes in the organization of the production of goods is more fundamental than a shift in the accompanying administration. The latter can be seen as a consequence of the former. To both types symbol systems are related which do not match. I will come to that later. Before that I will have a quick look at the textual organization in 1 Kings 21, the well-known story on the vineyard of Naboth. This story contains two parts that are interrelated (Becking, 2000). 1 Kings 21:1–16 can be seen as a coherent and well-composed narrative. It is a story about acquisition. The main narrative program can be labelled as follows: The king, who at the beginning of the story is not the owner of the vineyard adjacent to his palace, acquires this piece of land. Just when Naboth loses both his vineyard and his life. He could have saved his life by agreeing to the proposal of the king to exchange his vineyard for another piece of land or for money. But he did not agree and that provoked the anguish of the king and the anger of Jezebel, the queen. It is very important to note an embedded narrative program. King Ahab wants to change the function of the vineyard into a gan ya¯ra¯q. This change implies that the piece of land will lose its agricultural function for a luxury one.12

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The prize for the acquisition is high: The loss of a man’s life and the shift in the economic function of the piece of land. The second part of the story shows that the prize for the acquisition has been too high. This part has, as can be easily seen, two elements: A prophetic announcement of doom (vss. 17–19) and royal repentance leading to a delay in the execution of the punishment (vss. 27–29). Elijah has to reproach the king for economic and social misconduct. The accusation in verse 19 runs: ‘Have you done murder and moreover taken possession?’ It is interesting to question on what the king’s repentance and humiliation are based. Is it mere self-defence? Is it solely an act to save one’s life? Or is there more at stake? The deuteronomistic editors of the Book of Kings have deliberately changed the point of the story. In the more original form of the story, Ahab’s misconduct was of a social character. In editing the story and adding a few verses they changed the character of the conflict into a religious clash. The stress is now on sin and idolatry. I already suggested that to societies based on different types of economic production, different belief-systems or symbol-systems relate. I don’t have time to elaborate on that here much. I will only make a few observations. In the more original version of the story on Naboth’s vineyard glimpses of two symbol-systems are observable. On the one side there are some features that function as symbols for a kinshiprelated traditional local market economy. Most characteristic is the denotation of the vineyard as a naha¯la¯ indicating that the piece of land belonged to the inherited acres of Naboth’s family. Within the story it is only in direct speech uttered by Naboth that the kèrèm is depicted as naha¯la¯. The symbol expresses tradition and continuity and the belief in God as the eventual owner of the land.13 Moreover, the depiction naha¯la¯, ‘ancestral property’, might suggest that the ancestors of Naboth were buried on this piece of land and that the veneration of the ancestors yielded prosperity.14 On the other hand, some features in the story refer to a tributary economy. To mention a few: (a) The concept of kèsèph, ‘silver; money’, used as a medium of exchange; (b) The shift of the vineyard into a garden. As for the characters in the story, apparently Naboth and Elijah are presented as representatives of the traditional society while Jezebel obviously is in the other camp. With regard to the role of Elijah, it is interesting to refer to an observation made by Overholt. When traditional societies were socially and politically disorganised after the initial contact with Europeans, native shamans more than once reached important positions in and from the traditional community helping them ‘to maintain their distinct identity and worldview.’15This, in my view, is the case with Elijah and Elisha too. Not only in the story on the vineyard of Naboth, but also elsewhere in the Book of Kings these prophets are portrayed as persons that deliberately defend the traditional values of a society that is slowly vanishing. 4. DEPRESSION AND THE CHARACTER OF JEREMIAH Jeremiah is one of the most intriguing prophets in the Hebrew Bible. Reading the Book of Jeremiah implies the encounter with a strong person. This impression is based on the fact that in the Book of Jeremiah not only oracles have been

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collected – some of doom and a few of salvation. The biblical book also contains stories on the prophet – for instance, on his encounters with the royal court, his imprisonment and his liberation. Very specific for the Book of Jeremiah is the presence of ‘first person reports’: texts in which the prophet is presented in the first person singular: ‘I did’; ‘I spoke’. Most famous are the ‘confessions of Jeremiah’. How to read and how to construe these first person reports? Various options emerge. We can read these reports in a naïve historical way: the texts are trustworthy reports on actual deeds and thoughts of the historical Jeremiah.16 The historical-critical approach advocates an interpretation in which a clear distinction is made between the historical kernel of the book and the present form that emerged out of a process of redaction and tradition. According to this approach we have to sift the text in order to dig up the historical Jeremiah. A recent trend in biblical scholarship more or less denies the possibility of reconstructing the historical Jeremiah. According to this trend we have to accept that the Book of Jeremiah is an ideological construct from the Persian Period (if not later). The picture of the prophet is not based on historical information about a person living around 600 BCE, but a product of the mind of the emerging Judaism. These modernistic, positivistic approaches seem to close the possibility to say anything about Jeremiah as a person since he seems to fade away into the dusky twilight of history. However, as Brueggemann correctly noted, ‘every historical presentation of a person is a mediation and a construction.’17 To phrase the same idea otherwise: any text is an interpretation of the past. This implies that the Book of Jeremiah, whether it was written by him, by his scribe Baruch, or the final product of complex redaction-history, is a specific perspective on the person, and since we cannot check the information wrapped in the specific perspective, we have to deal with the present text. So, when I use the personal name ‘Jeremiah’, it actually means: the prophet as represented in the biblical book. What portrait is pictured? The image of Jeremiah presented in this book is intriguing. Here we meet a person who was personally involved in the message he had to bring which is as such a characteristic of a ‘true prophet’. We meet a person who is suffering from the fact that he had to bring this message of doom to the people he construes himself as a part of. We meet a person who is full of emotions as regards his public appearance and the message he felt he had to convey. We do not meet a cool-hearted person who like an engineer in a factory is laboring the divine machinery as if he were not involved. I cannot display the portrait of Jeremiah in full here. I would like to pay your attention to one specific trait in the portrait. In Chapter 20 we read that Jeremiah is imprisoned as a reaction to his prophecies of doom (vss. 1–2): Now the priest Pashhur son of Immer, who was chief officer in the house of YHWH, heard Jeremiah prophesying these things. Then Pashhur struck the prophet Jeremiah, and put him in the stocks that were in the upper Benjamin Gate of the house of YHWH.

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Jeremiah is released the next morning. Jeremiah answers this release with a very bitter and unconditional prophecy of doom: Jerusalem will soon be captured and its leaders will be taken away into captivity. This prophecy is also applied to Pashhur in uncompromising words (vs. 6): And you, Pashhur, and all who live in your house, shall go into captivity, and to Babylon you shall go; there you shall die, and there you shall be buried, you and all your friends, to whom you have prophesied falsely.

After this encounter a poem written in a first person singular style is placed. Here we meet the inner world of the prophet since the emotions that were triggered by the experience of imprisonment are displayed. Moreover, it should be noted that within the composition of the Book of Jeremiah this poem (Jer. 20:7–20) is the concluding pericope of the first set of oracles of Jeremiah. This implies that the poem can also be read as some sort of hermeneutic key to the first part of the collection of Jeremiac oracles. The poem under consideration consists in three parts: • Utterance of acceptance: once and again YHWH has enticed Jeremiah in his ambivalence towards his ministry to carry on despite all opposition (vss. 7–10); • Exclamation of joy and faith: YHWH is with me (vss. 11–13); • Expression of bitterness: I wish I had died in my cradle (vss. 14–20). Jack Lundbom quite adequately labeled the first stanza as ‘the prison within’ (Lundbom, 1999: 851–59). The prison in which Jeremiah spent the night is mirrored by a prison within where Jeremiah is bound by his struggle between two loyalties: (a) a loyalty towards his friends and his people and (b) a loyalty towards YHWH. In this prison within as probably during the whole of his prophetic career, Jeremiah moves hither and tither between the two poles just mentioned (Jer. 20:8b–9). For the word of YHWH has become for me a reproach and derision all day long. If I say, “I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,” then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.

In this disbalance YHWH has forcefully enticed him to keep his prophetic role. This implies that Jeremiah makes a choice to be loyal to the divine impetus. This choice leads by itself to the theme of the second stanza. In the textual unit Jer. 20:11–13, YHWH is depicted with metaphors of governance: But YHWH is with me like a fearless warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, and they will not prevail.

But YHWH is also described in terms that hint at a personal relationship between the prophet and the divine being: O YHWH of hosts, you test the righteous, you see the heart and the mind.

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The encounter with this intimate but strong God that delivered Jeremiah from the prison within calls for a lyrical song of praise: Sing to YHWH; praise YHWH! For he has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.

This summons for praise would have been a perfect ending of the Pashhur-episode. If verse 13 would have been the final line of Chapter 20, then this episode could easily have been labeled: ‘From prison to praise’. However, the Psalm in Jeremiah 20 continues. In the beautiful, but bitter language of the last stanza word is given to an emotion: Cursed be the day on which I was born! The day when my mother bore me, let it not be blessed! Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, saying, “A child is born to you, a son,” making him very glad. Let that man be like the cities that YHWH overthrew without pity; let him hear a cry in the morning and an alarm at noon. [Let that day be like . . .]18 because he did not kill me in the womb; so my mother would have been my grave, and her womb forever great. Why did I come forth from the womb to see toil and sorrow, and spend my days in shame?

There exists a giant leap between verses 13 and 14: from praise to depression. This giant leap has been soothed by assuming that vss. 14ff. were part of a later redaction.19 Such an assumption, however, only postpones the problem to the redactor: how could he (or she) be so dumb to connect two unconnected pieces from the tradition? Moreover, there is no linguistic argument for the alleged literary-critical operation since both 7–13 and 14–18 are written in the same style and language. It would be better not to bring down the tension, but to see both parts of the poem as utterances of faith in tension,20 or even better: of a person in tension. This tension has been noticed by the Rabbis, e.g., in Pesikta Rabbati 26:3–4. They, however, argued in such a way that the tension is teased and in a way blurred in a complex network of references and cross-references to Israel’s sinful behavior, as has been displayed by Bryna J. Levy in her chapter in this volume. I have noticed that Jeremiah was a person with a double loyalty, as were the prophets from Mari and Assyria discussed above. This double loyalty is aggravated by the two-sidedness of Jeremiah’s prophetic self-understanding. According to his prophetic call in Chapter 1, he was appointed: See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.

In other words Jeremiah was not a prophet with a one-dimensional message, but a prophet who had to utter oracles of doom as well as oracles of salvation. All this leads me to the conviction that Jeremiah’s prophetic consciousness provoked a

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distortion of the balance inside. He himself was unable to restore this balance and therefore he had to go through seasons of trustful resolution and periods of bitter alienation. 5. CONCLUSION It is not easy to summarize what has been said, since I have only dealt with some of the problems involved. Had I chosen other examples, a slightly different picture might have occurred. But I hope that I have made clear that the prophets from Ancient Israel as well as from the Ancient Near East were persons of flesh and blood and not just emotionless transmitters of divine messages. I hope that I also have made clear that their being a prophet or being a diviner set them in a double loyalty that eventually provoked a distortion of their prophetic personality. I am not claiming that such a distortion took place as a rule, but I hope that my examples have been convincing. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20

Nissinen (1998); Petersen (2002), pp. 1–45. See most recently Weippert (2002), p. 32. ARM 26 214, pp. 6–7; see Durand (1988), pp. 442–443; Van der Toorn (2000), p. 78. ABL 347 = SAA 10 352; see Nissinen (1998), pp. 70–80; Parpola (1993), pp. 288–289. Nissinen (2000), p. 96. Parpola (1998), p. xxxiv. UM 29-16-229 ii 4f.; Sjöberg (1975), p. 224. SAA 9 1.4 ii:40; see: Parpola (1998), p. 6. Parpola (1998), p. il Nissinen and Perroudon (2000), p. 253. Parpola (1998), il; Van der Toorn (2000), p. 79; see, however, the criticism in Weippert (2002), p. 33. Halpern (1996), p. 50, interprets the gan ya¯ra¯q in view of Mesopotamian evidence not merely as a ‘vegetable garden’ but as a luxury one. He, however, slightly overcharges the evidence when he construes a ‘royal park filled with exotic import’. See Bendor (1996), pp. 129–133; Kessler (1996). Van der Toorn (1996), p. 199. Overholt (1996), p. 3. As has been done traditionally by Jews and Christians alike. For the Rabbinic position see the chapter by Bryna J. Levy in this volume. Brueggemann (1988), p. 11. For the reconstruction of this fourth strophe, see: Lundbom (1999), pp. 865–873. E.g. Holladay (1984), pp. 548–549. Brueggemann (1998), 185–187; Petersen (2002), pp. 114ó116; Polk (1984), pp. 152–162.

REFERENCES Becking, B. (2000). No more grapes from the vineyard? A plea for a historical-critical approach in the study of the Old Testament. In A. Lemaire & M. Saeboe (Eds.), Congress Volume Oslo, 1998 (pp. 123–141). Leiden: E. J. Brill. Bendor, S. (1996). The social structure of ancient Israel: The institution of the family (beit ’ab) from the settlement to the end of the monarchy (Jerusalem Biblical Studies, 7). Jerusalem: Simor.

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Brueggemann, W. (1998). A commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and homecoming. Grand Rapids, Cambridge UK: Wm. B. Eerdmans. Cryer, F. H. (1994). Divination in its ancient near eastern environment: A soci—historical investigation (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 142). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Durand, J. -M. (1988). Archives épistolaires de Mari I/1. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilisations. Halpern, B. (1996). The construction of the Davidic state: An exercise in historiography. In V. Fritz & Ph. R. Davies (Eds.), The origins of the ancient Israelite states (pp. 44–75). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Hämeen-Anttila, J. (2000). Arabian prophecy. In M. Nissinen (Ed.), Prophecy in its ancient near eastern context: Mesopotamian, biblical and Arabian perspectives (pp. 115–146). Atlanta: Scholars Press. Holladay, W. L. (1984). Jeremiah 1: A commentary on the book of the prophet Jeremiah chapters 1–25 (Hermeneia). Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Kessler, R. (1996). Gott und König, Grundeigentum and Fruchtbarkeit. Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, 108, 214 –232. Lundbom, J. R. (1999). Jeremiah 1–20 (Anchor Bible, 21A). New York: Doubleday. McNutt, P. M. (1999). Reconstructing the society of ancient Israel. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Nissinen, M. (1998). References to prophecy in neo-Assyrian sources (State Archives of Assyria Studies, Vol. VII). Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project. Nissinen, M. (2000). The socio-religious role of the neo-Assyrian prophets. In M. Nissinen (Ed.), Prophecy in its ancient Near Eastern context: Mesopotamian, biblical and Arabian Perspectives (pp. 89–114). Atlanta: Scholars Press. Nissinen, M., & Perroudon, M. –C. (2000). Ba¯ia. In H. D. Baker (Ed.), The prosopography of the neoAssyrian empire. Vol. 2, I. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Overholt, Th. W. (1996). Cultural anthropology and the Old Testament (Guides to Biblical Scholarship). Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Parpola, S. (1993). Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian scholars (State Archives of Assyria, Vol. X). Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Parpola, S. (1997). Assyrian prophecies (State Archives of Assyria, Vol. IX). Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Parpola, S. (1998). Letters from Assyrian Scholars to the kings of Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal. Lian : Mandodori. Petersen, D. L. (2002). The prophetic literature: An introduction. Louisville/London: Westminster John Knox Press. Polk, T. (1984). The prophetic persona: Jeremiah and the language of the self (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series, 32). Sheffield: JSOT Press. Sjöberg, Å. W. (1975). “i n – n i n sˇ à – g u r4 – r a. A Hymn to the Goddess Inanna by the en-priestess Enheduanna”. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, 65, 161–253. Van der Toorn, K. (1996). Family religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and change in the forms of religious life. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Van der Toorn, K. (2000). Mesopotamian prophecy between immanence and transcendence: A comparison of old Babylonian and neo-Assyrian prophecy. In M. Nissinen (Ed.), Prophecy in its ancient near eastern context: Mesopotamian, biblical and Arabian perspectives (pp. 71–88). Atlanta: Scholars Press. Weippert, M. (2002). König, fürchte dich nicht! Assyrische Prophetie im 7. Jahrhundert vor Christus. Orientalia Nova Series, 71, 1–54.

CHAPTER 7 JEREMIAH INTERPRETED A Rabbinic analysis of the prophet

BRYNA JOCHEVED LEVY Women’s Institute for Torah Studies, Jerusalem

The most vivid autobiographical portrayal in prophetic literature is that of Jeremiah. We are fortunate to have records not only of his oracles and pronouncements, but of his prayers and confessions. In those personal statements, Jeremiah shares with us his deepest anguish and most profound hopes, not only regarding the fate of the nation but also regarding his own personal destiny. More than any other prophet, Jeremiah allows us to peer into the inner chambers of his heart and witness his poignant struggles.1 We are afforded our first glimpse of the intensely human aspect of Jeremiah’s prophetic career at its very outset, in his description of God’s call to him. By definition, a prophetic call narrative defines for the candidate the mission he is to perform.2 But among the great seers of Israel, Jeremiah alone was not only informed what his mission would be, he was told who he was. His prenatal appointment was revealed to him in no uncertain terms: The word of the Lord came to me: Before I created you in the womb, I selected you; before you were born, I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet unto the nations (1:4).3

Seemingly, given this clear predestination, there is no room for Jeremiah to shirk his prophetic mission. Furthermore, we expect that Jeremiah will have the authority and power to carry out this mission: “Behold, I make you this day a fortified city and an iron pillar and bronze walls against the whole land” (Jeremiah 1:18). Nevertheless, Jeremiah turned out to be the most tortured and self-tortured of the prophets whose literary legacies are available to us. It is hard to imagine a more moving prophetic cri de coeur than Jeremiah’s plaint: I have become a constant laughingstock; everyone jeers at me. For every time I speak, I must cry out, must shout, ‘Lawlessness and rapine!’ For the word of the Lord causes me constant disgrace and contempt. I thought, ‘I will not mention Him, no more will I speak in His name’ – But [His word] was like a raging fire in my heart, shut up in my bones; I could not hold it in, I was helpless (Jeremiah 20:7–9).

65 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 65–86. © 2007 Springer.

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In this and many other passages in the book, we are granted precious perspectives on the experience of prophecy and its impact on the prophet’s life. Jeremiah’s confessions are grippingly human, and readers of the Bible throughout the generations have found in them spiritual inspiration and sources of strength. One group of readers deeply concerned not only with the preaching but with the life of Jeremiah were the Rabbis of the early centuries of the common era – the creators of the homiletic works known as Midrash.4 The Rabbinic interpretation of Jeremiah goes beyond the explicit statements of the prophet to identify textual nuances throughout the book that hint to the psychological factors affecting the persona of the prophet. In this chapter I would like to show how the Rabbis portray Jeremiah, the prophet of doom, as a man whose identity is forged not only by the preordained immutability of his call, but by his own doubts. The midrashic texts depict Jeremiah as undergoing a complex process of personal assertion and denial in which he identifies with both God, his source of strength and suffering, and with the people of Israel, whom he loved desperately and who failed him incessantly. In doing so, the Rabbis display sophisticated psychological insight and deep literary sensitivities which are of great value to all readers of the Biblical text.

1. JEREMIAH’S CONFLICTING EMPATHIES Classically, the triadic relationship between prophet, people and God is clear. The prophet’s calling is established by God, and relates to the situation of his people. In the case of Jeremiah, the mechanism is different. His all-consuming empathy and hence his effectiveness as a prophet remove all barriers and allows him, or perhaps forces him, to identify powerfully with his people and/or with the Lord. Take for example, Jeremiah’s confession of the sins of the people in first person plural: “Though our iniquities testify against us, act, O Lord, for the sake of Your name; though our rebellions are many and we have sinned against You” (14:7). And in speaking of the wrath of God, Jeremiah says: “But I am filled with the wrath of the Lord, I cannot hold it in. I pour it on the infant in the street and on the company of youths gathered together . . .” (6:11). These and other statements throughout the book testify to Jeremiah’s strong projective identification with God and Israel. A comment made in the Tannaitic Midrash, the Mekhilta5 sums up this notion. There, Jeremiah is contrasted with two other giants among the prophets, Elijah and Jonah. Each is labeled according to the banner which they raised. Elijah is said to have championed the cause of God, and Jonah to have championed the cause of his people. Jeremiah, however “Championed both the honor of the Father and the honor of the son.” This statement highlights the conflict which was endemic to Jeremiah’s long and frustrating prophetic career. It is easy to be a zealous firebrand or a compassionate draft-dodger; being torn by conflicting loyalties is by far the greatest burden.

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Let us now see how the Rabbis interpreted several passages in the book in keeping with their understanding of Jeremiah as a constantly conflicted personality in search of identity. 2. THE OUTSIDER AS ORACLE: JEREMIAH MARGINALIZED Rabbinic psychoanalysis of Jeremiah begins the moment the prophet is introduced in the text. The words of Jeremiah son of Hilkiah,6 one of the priests of Anatoth in the territory of Benjamin (1:1).

Jeremiah is a priest, a distinction liable to render him a man of esteem. Yet the rabbis have Jeremiah despairingly testify to the unfortunate nature of his priestly status, which has been undermined: One of the priests of Anatoth (Jeremiah 1:1) R. Berachyah said: Jeremiah asserted: My name is disparaged among the priests (ashuk shemi bacohanim). In Moses’ day, ‘May God bless you’ (Num 6:24); in my day, ‘May they represent a curse’ (Jeremiah 29:22). In Moses’ day, ‘And protect you’ (Num 6:24); in my day, ‘Those consigned to the plague to the plague’ (Jeremiah 15:2). In Moses’ day, ‘May God shine His countenance upon you’ (Num 6:25); in my day, ‘He made me dwell in darkness like those long dead’ (Lam 3:6). In Moses’ day, ‘And deal graciously with you’ (Num 6:25); in my day, ‘For I will show you no mercy’ (Jeremiah 16:13). In Moses’ day, ‘May God bestow His favor upon you’ (Num 6:26); in my day, ‘A ruthless nation that will show the old no regard and the young no mercy’ (Deut 28:50). In Moses’ day, ‘And grant you peace’ (Num 6:25); in my day, ‘For I have withdrawn my peace from this people, declares the Lord, My kindness, My compassion’ (Jeremiah 16:5). [Pesikta de-Rab Kahana 13:13].

The midrash begins with a contrast between Jeremiah’s prophetic role with what he would have preferred to have been doing as a priest. Instead of invoking the Aaronic priestly benediction, a vehicle of love and blessing, Jeremiah is forced to intone imprecations and predictions of disaster. There are numerous midrashic texts which portray Jeremiah bemoaning his regrettable fate as the prophet of destruction.7 This one, however, is different; the key phrase is ashuk shemi bacohanim, “my name is disparaged among the priests”. In other words: I have been barred from serving in the priestly capacity, in the beatific posture which I covet. This rabbinic formulation may be understood as a midrashic paraphrase and editorial comment on the phrase min hacohanim asher beAnatoth “Of the priests of Anatoth.” The city of Anatoth8 is located in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin, six kilometers north of Jerusalem. It is listed among the Levitical cities in Joshua 21:18, but becomes relevant to our story by way of the priestly line that dwelled there. In 1 Kings 2:27 we are told that Abiathar the priest was banished to Anatoth by King Solomon as a result of his political miscalculations, having backed Adonijah rather than Solomon as heir to the Davidic throne. He was not executed for this misdemeanor, rather banished to Anatoth. Presumably, Jeremiah’s family is from this line of banished priests.9 But the link with Abiathar and the priests of Anatoth is, in fact, a long-range link to the notorious line of priests from the house of Eli (1 Sam 14:3), who proved themselves unworthy custodians of the ark at Shiloh.10 The corruption and downfall of the house of Eli is described graphically in the Book of Samuel. Eli’s sons are accused of abusing their priestly privileges and engaging in audacious

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acts of sexual license. Their crimes against God and man resulted in their disenfranchisement as officiating priests, the capture of the ark by the Philistines and the ultimate crushing blow, the destruction of the sanctuary at Shiloh.11 All of this is Jeremiah’s priestly legacy. It is little wonder, therefore, that Jeremiah is the only prophet to mention Shiloh12 (7:12,14; 26:6,9). It was the destruction of Shiloh which served as a powerful image in the recesses of Jeremiah’s memory fueling the fires of his impassioned Temple Sermon: Therefore I will do to the House which bears My name, on which you rely, and to the place which I gave you and your fathers, just what I did to Shiloh (Jeremiah 7:14; cf. 26:6).

Although Jeremiah’s scathing words are directed to his constituency, who have abused the Temple and looked for cheap external forms of atonement, relying upon the cultic efficacy of the Temple rather than their own religious rehabilitation, there is a self-reflective dimension to this image as well. The repercussions of the fall of Shiloh began a process which, in effect, eventually lead to the banishment of Jeremiah’s family from Jerusalem and their exclusion from serving in the Temple. In Jeremiah’s prophecy, as well as his psyche, therefore, the fall of Shiloh and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem are paralleled not merely as historical events but as a catalyst for personal retrospective. The urgency and horror of the destruction of Shiloh may be temporally located in the distant past, but for Jeremiah of Anatoth they are part of his eternal psychological present. The breakdown in the infrastructure of religious leadership during the time of the Elides impacted upon Jeremiah’s family, ultimately stigmatizing Jeremiah as an outcast priest – min hacohanim asher beAnatoth – and subconsciously undermining his self-worth. Abiathar, founder of the priestly colony in Anatoth (1 Samuel 22:20, 14:3), was the sole survivor of the massacre of the priests of Nob ordered by Saul decades earlier.13 That macabre story, too, must have painfully reverberated in the soul of the prophet and in the recesses of his unconscious. The travesty of Saul, king of Israel, heinously murdering an entire city of priests was an act of unprecedented horror. Such a trauma doubtlessly left a scar on Jeremiah’s family of survivors. As a priest of Anatoth, a scion of that line, Jeremiah will relive the terror of carnage, not as victim but as the agent through whom destruction and violence will be proclaimed. Anatoth, therefore, serves as a constant reminder of the reality of territorial banishment for Jeremiah on a micro level. When publicly branded as an outcast, he is derisively labeled “the Anatothite”14 by the people of Judea – a Cohen rusticated to the fields of Anatoth, a priest unfit to serve in the Temple. On a macro level, Jeremiah of Anatoth has been chosen as the harbinger of the ultimate banishment – the exile. Jeremiah’s appellation as a “priest from Anatoth”, therefore, holds great significance in terms of his self-definition. It powerfully defines what he is not, the task he will not perform. The unrequited goals for which his soul yearns will remain pathetically beyond his reach – goals of religious leadership and of pristine spiritual ministry abounding in blessing and hope.

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Does Jeremiah identify with his ancestor Abiathar, an eyewitness to terror, a banished survivor? Does he psychologically compensate for the sins of his forbearers the Elides by prophetically imputing their guilt and lack of chastity to contemporary priests and prophets? It is hard to avoid drawing such a conclusion. Throughout the book, Jeremiah indignantly targets the priests as unworthy and contemptible.15 Yet in the eyes of the Rabbis, his disappointment with and disdain toward the priests is transposed into his own personal frustration that ashuk shemi bacohanim – “my name is disparaged among the priests.” This phrase becomes the reflection of the inner thoughts of Jeremiah as an outcast priest, a man whose hands are tied and who finds himself undermined and maligned at every juncture.16 Jeremiah’s marginalization is a defining feature of his prophetic identity. 3. EXPOSING HIS MOTHER’S INFIDELITY Recognition of Jeremiah’s priestly descent is present in another passage in the Pesikta, which grimly portrays him performing one of the priestly functions – with an unexpected twist: He (Jeremiah) was one of two who cursed and execrated the day on which they were born, Job and Jeremiah. Job said, ‘Perish the day on which I was born’ (Job 3:3); Jeremiah said, ‘Accursed be the day that I was born’ (Jeremiah 20:14). Said Jeremiah, ‘Let me tell you to what I can be likened. To a high priest who has been chosen to administer the bitter waters’ [to the Sotah, the wife suspected of adultery (Num 5)]. They bring him the woman, he uncovers her hair, takes the cup to give her to drink, looks at her and realizes that she is his mother. He begins to wail and says: Woe is me! My mother whom I tried to honor – I have shamed you! So said Jeremiah, ‘Woe unto you Mother Zion! I was certain that I would prophesy good tidings and consolation, and alas! I prophesy catastrophe’. [Pesikta Rabbati 26:4].

The image offered in the Pesikta portrays Jeremiah’s guilt, shame and distress in the presence of his harlot mother. Jeremiah’s wish has been granted, he may officiate as a priest, but little does he know what devastating task awaits! He is chosen to bring the bitter waters to the lips of his beloved mother who has been accused of infidelity. She, who represents comfort, loyalty and protection, is none of these things for Jeremiah. She herself is the personification of that from which he longs to escape! The prophet is destined to live a life of sorrow and a life of shame: “Why did I ever issue from the womb, to see misery and woe, to spend all my days in shame.” (20:18). The Rabbis did not choose by chance the image of the priest administering the bitter cup. The textual rubric for this description is Jeremiah 25:15–18: For thus said the Lord, the God of Israel, to me: ‘Take from My hand this cup of wine – of wrath – and make all the nations to whom I send you drink of it. Let them drink and retch and act crazy, because of the sword that I am sending among them.’ So I took the cup from the hand of the Lord and gave drink to all the nations to whom the Lord had sent me: Jerusalem and the towns of Judah, and its kings and officials, to make them a desolate ruin, an object of hissing and a curse as is now the case.

Jeremiah, a ‘prophet unto the nations’17 anticipated that his position would be to take the nations to task. He is notified by God that he is indeed to bring the poisoned chalice to the lips of the nations, yet he is rudely awakened to the discovery that the first in line is his beloved Jerusalem. Jeremiah 25 is not explicitly mentioned in

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the Pesikta previously cited but it is the basis of a parallel midrashic rendition in Eicha [Lamentations] Zuta 1:7: Since he did not want to prophesy such stringent prophecies upon them (Israel) until he was told: ‘Before I created you in the womb, I knew you; before you were born, I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet concerning the nations.’ Immediately, he took the prophetic task upon himself and Jeremiah assumed that he was designated for the nations. When Jeremiah accepted the task, God said to him: ‘Take the cup of wine of wrath . . .’ (Jeremiah 25:15). Immediately Jeremiah took it, as it says, ‘And I took the cup from the hand of the Lord’ (25:17) and he assumed that he was to give the nations to drink. Thus God said to him: ‘Take a lesson from what is customary; don’t we give the most important to drink first? Note who is first among the nations – give Jerusalem first, for she is first among all of the nations.’ To what can it be likened? To a Sotah who comes into the Temple court to drink of the bitter waters; the priest comes to administer them, only to see that she is his mother. Immediately, he is embarrassed and recoils, wailing and screaming about his mother. So Jeremiah, when God told him to give Jerusalem to drink, screamed and wailed and said to God, ‘Master of the universe, did you not tell me that I was appointed prophet of the nations? Now you have begun my prophecy to my own nation! ‘You have enticed me and I have been enticed, overpowered me and prevailed.’’ (20:7) God answered him: ‘You have accepted and there is no turning back.’ At this point he took the cup from His hand and drank it all down.

It is noteworthy how the two midrashic versions portray Jeremiah’s reaction at discovering his mother’s guilt. In Eichah Zuta this causes the prophet to be personally embarrassed and to recoil. He is informed, though, in no uncertain terms, that there is no turning back, that he must go through with the painful task. In contrast, in the Pesikta his sympathies are directed exclusively to his mother and his concern is for her dignity: “He began wailing and said: Woe unto you my mother, whom I tried to honor and instead I disgrace!”18 It is significant that the Pesikta switches direction in midstream. It turns from the Biblical text in which Jeremiah bemoans his fate into a vignette in which Jeremiah laments his mother’s fate. “Woe unto me that I was ever born” becomes “Woe unto you my mother, whom I wanted to revere and I must disgrace.” He does not speak of the shame which her action has brought upon him (as in Eichah Zuta), but of the pain he feels bringing shame upon his mother by exposing her as a wayward Sotah and by subjecting her to the ordeal of drinking the bitter waters. This midrashic transformation collapses the barriers between Jeremiah and his mother; her shame is his. Jeremiah projectively identifies with his mother. His degree of empathy bridges all identity gaps between them. One might expect that Jeremiah the son would be repulsed by his mother’s crime, yet what is evoked in him is a heightened sense of loyalty to her. Rather than being repelled by her, Jeremiah is drawn to her and longs to defend and protect his mother irrespective of her crime.19 Such an image is a psychologically compelling illustration by the Rabbis of what they sensed to be at the root of Jeremiah’s persona – self-doubts about his status, worth, and legitimacy. These are portrayed as radically undermined by a mother whose infidelity casts a deep, dark shadow and makes her unworthy of trust. Even those closest to the prophet are suspect. It is little wonder that lack of chastity and integrity become an overriding theme of his prophecy and are passionately decried by him at every juncture. The midrash itself unpacks its metaphor of the Sotah mother, making it clear that she is symbolic of Imma Zion – Mother Zion, Jerusalem personified. Jerusalem is

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Jeremiah’s spiritual matrix, but she has disappointed the prophet and betrayed her God. It will fall to Jeremiah to press the bitter cup of doom to her lips and to seal her fate. Though he accepts that her actions have made the outcome unavoidable, his pain at having to be the messenger of its advent is no less than if he were forced to pronounce his own mother’s death sentence. The midrash depicts Jeremiah, in the throes of this pain, draining the bitter cup himself, choosing to share the fate of his beloved city. Another confrontation between Jeremiah and his Sotah mother, one which is described as having taken place earlier on in the life of Jeremiah, appears in a different passage in the Pesikta. Here, too, Jeremiah’s mother is transposed into the character of Imma Zion – Mother Zion. It is she who is the target of Jeremiah’s devastating ministry and the designated object of Jeremiah’s intense projective identification. At Jeremiah’s coming forth into the world, he cried a great cry as though he were already a full-grown youth,20 and exclaimed: ‘My bowels, my bowels! I writhe in pain! The chambers of my heart are in agony. My limbs are all atremble. Destruction upon destruction! I am the one who will announce destruction to the whole world.’ And whence do we know that Jeremiah spoke thus? Because it is so written: ‘My bowels, my bowels! I writhe in pain! The chambers of my heart! My heart moaneth within me . . .’ (Jeremiah 4:19). Jeremiah opened his mouth, and reprimanding his mother, said: ‘Tell me, mother, isn’t it true that you did not conceive me in the manner of other women, and that you did not loose me from your bowels in the manner of other women who give birth? Have your ways been perhaps like the ways of all faithless women, and did you cast your eyes upon another? As one who has been faithless to her husband, why do you not drink the bitter waters? Or do you mean to brazen out your guilt?’ Whence do we know that Jeremiah spoke thus? Because it is written: ‘Yet thou hadst a harlot’s forehead’ (Jeremiah 3:3). When his mother heard his reprimand, she asked: ‘What makes this infant speak thus? Surely on account of no sins of mine?’21 Jeremiah opened his mouth and said: ‘I speak not of you, mother; I assure you, mother, not of you. I prophesy of [Mother] Zion – of [Mother] Jerusalem. [Pesikta Rabbati 26:3]

The roar with which Jeremiah enters the world is presented as expression of his excruciating pain. From the very moment of birth he is afflicted by his unbearable destiny; “I am the one who will announce destruction to the whole world!” Since God has appointed him to be a prophet while still in the womb (1:4), the Rabbis have no difficulty with portraying his prophetic career as beginning the minute Jeremiah issues forth into the light of day. Immediately, however, he perceives his mission as a punishment so severe that some terrible crime must have brought it about. Since he is a newborn babe, the responsibility cannot be his. And so he immediately accuses his mother, holding her accountable for his fate.22 Quickly, though, he explains that he is not speaking of her but rather of Imma Zion.23 He is presented as acutely aware that his mother is not to blame, his people are. These three midrashic texts portraying Jerusalem in the form of Mother Zion are unique to the Rabbinic exposition of the Book of Jeremiah. It is easy to understand why. Of all the prophets, Jeremiah’s empathy and identification with his city and people is the strongest and most profound. By metaphorically presenting Jerusalem as Jeremiah’s mother we can more fully understand his intense loyalty to her in the face of her repeated disappointments and betrayals.

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4. WOMB TO TOMB The Rabbis began the Pesikta passage with a comparison between Job and Jeremiah. Both bewailed their birth24 as a result of the unbearable pain life forced them to endure. But, whereas Job is generally viewed as the epitome of suffering, the portrait of Jeremiah’s pathos presented in this midrash is perhaps even more painful. Job’s suffering is personal, and despite his protestations, he endures and is granted a second life. Jeremiah, in contrast, is unconsolable, and bewails the suffering which he is forced to unwillingly inflict upon those closest to him. The textual springboard for the Pesikta is Jer 20:14–18, wherein Jeremiah fulminates about his ineluctable fate, using words unmatched in their harshness: Accursed be the day that I was born! Let not the day be blessed when my mother bore me! Accursed be the man who brought my father the news and said, ‘A boy is born to you’, and gave him such joy! Let that man become like the cities which the Lord overthrew without relenting! Let him hear shrieks in the morning and battle shouts at noontide! Because he did not kill me before birth, so that my mother might be my grave, and her womb big [with me] for all time. Why did I ever issue from the womb to see misery and woe, to spend all my days in shame?25

This image conflates the death wish with the healing and comfort offered by the mother’s womb.26 Such imagery is described by Freud as follows: To some people the idea of being buried alive by mistake is the most uncanny thing of all. And yet psycho-analysis has taught us that this terrifying phantasy is only a transformation of another phantasy which had originally nothing terrifying about it at all, but was qualified by a certain lasciviousness — the phantasy, I mean, of intra-uterine existence.27

The womb/tomb metaphor accentuates the analogy with Job, with which the midrash began. Job, too, speaks of returning to the womb when he is clearly talking about death: “He said, ‘Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’.” (Job 1:21).28 The irony in Jeremiah’s use of this metaphor, is, of course, that God has informed him that he has already been singled out for his mission in utero. Even staying in the womb will not save him from his excruciating destiny as the prophet of doom.29 5. AFTER THE STORM, A SEARCH FOR COMFORT The preceding midrashic homilies depict Jeremiah’s relationship with his city and people in the early stage of his career – when he labored at upbraiding the nation and warning them of the fate that awaited if they would not mend their evil ways. In Pesikta Rabbati 26:9, the character of Imma Zion30 appears once again, this time after her tragic fall. Jeremiah is now older and sated with tragedy; he finds no comfort in the fact that his predictions of disaster have come to pass. And so, his relationship with Mother Zion is different in this scene. Jeremiah said, As I ascended the mountain to Jerusalem, I looked up and saw a woman sitting alone on the mountain top, wearing black garments, her hair disheveled, screaming, imploring someone to comfort her. I, too, screamed and asked: ‘Who will comfort me?’ I approached her and spoke to her. I said, ‘If you are

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a woman – speak to me; if you are a spirit – be off with you.’ She answered, ‘Don’t you recognize me? I am the woman who had seven children. Their father disappeared, and before I was able to cry over him, I was told that my house collapsed and killed my seven sons. I do not know for whom to mourn and tear out my hair.’” I responded, ‘You are no worse than Mother Zion who was reduced to grazing land for the beasts of the field.’ She said, ‘I am your Mother Zion; I am the mother of seven, as it says: “She who bore seven is forlorn” (Jeremiah 15:9). [Pesikta Rabbati 26:9].

There are several notable similarities between this midrash and Jeremiah’s midrashic encounter with his mother the Sotah. Just like the Sotah was customarily dressed in black and her hair was disheveled,31 so too, this mysterious woman. He desperately seeks solace; how ironic to chance, unawares, upon a mother figure likely to afford it to him. Whereas in the initial passage Jeremiah does not recognize his mother until he uncovers her hair and looks at her, here, even with her hair uncovered, she is still unknown to him. In both midrashic texts, his obliviousness is pronounced. In this passage he gives it verbal expression, asking the woman whether or not she is a spirit or real. In fact, she is a spirit, of sorts: “I am your Mother Zion!” In a subsequent passage, Jeremiah says that her fate will be like that of the restoration of Job, bringing the midrash to a happy ending.32 But what is of concern to us is the final stage of the relationship between Jeremiah and Mother Zion which is played out in this midrash. By rights the prophet has finished his mission. The punishment has been administered, history has requited him. He is free to go back to Anatoth and never encounter this nation again. Yet Jeremiah happens upon Imma Zion and is naturally drawn to her. He offers her comfort; just as Jeremiah stood by his mother the Sotah, so he will stand by his people to the bitter end. These midrashic dramatizations do much to develop the picture of Jeremiah’s mother, and understandably so. Jeremiah, the celibate prophet33 had no wife and no daughter. While he, like the other great prophets of Israel,34 speaks of the people’s infidelity in terms of the adulterous wife and wayward daughter,35 the midrashic texts develop the image in terms of his mother. The mother-son relationship is the most psychologically powerful of the three. Ernest Jones has argued that “The central conclusion based on psychoanalytic research is that the religious life represents a dramatization on a cosmic plane of the emotions, fears, and longings which arose in the child’s relation to his parents.”36 These midrashic accounts give expression to this notion.

6. A SHADY PROGENITRESS In the initial midrashic homily, Jeremiah is depicted as being closely associated with a woman of questionable moral standing, that woman being his mother the Sotah. In another midrashic tradition, the Rabbis link Jeremiah to a different “woman of ill repute” – Rahab the harlot, who is presented as being an ancestor of the prophet. Whereas, at first glance, their clear exegetical agenda is to glorify Rahab37 the righteous gentile, by having her merit illustrious progeny, it can be understood in our context that they are again making a statement about Jeremiah’s

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identity and self-perception. Consider the following passage from Pesikta de-Rab Kahana 13:12: R. Samuel b. R. Nahman said, there were four who came from debased families . . . , Israel mocked Jeremiah and said: ‘Is he not from the sons of Rahab the Harlot?’, so scripture had to distinguish him: ‘The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah’ (1:1).

In this midrash it is not that Jeremiah happens upon the knowledge of his mother’s infamy by chance; it is hurled at him by the people. They ridicule him by way of his tainted pedigree and his forebears’ questionable status. The ignominious slurs are intended to discredit his own standing. The student of the midrash is left to ponder how this skeleton in Jeremiah’s closet was supposed to have impacted upon him. Did he view it simply as a personal assault, or as yet another penetrating and indelible stigma causing him additional insecurity? As the people call his integrity into question, does he begin to question it himself? Or was the opposite the case? Was it precisely Rahab’s shameful status, and by extension Jeremiah’s, which yielded greatness? Did memories of moral imperfection propel Jeremiah to overcompensate in the ethical sphere? Or was Rahab consciously or otherwise a heroine in Jeremiah’s mind’s eye, a sterling example of the successful actualization of far-reaching spiritual potentiality? Let us consider the rabbinic embellishments of these ideas. R. Samuel b. Nahmani taught, ‘But if you do not dispossess the inhabitants of the land, those whom you allow to remain shall be stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and they shall harass you in the land in which you live; so that I will do to you what I planned to do to them’ (Num 33:55). The Holy One Blessed be He said to Israel, ‘I told you: ‘You must proscribe them the Hittites and the Amorites . . .’’(Deut 20:17), and you did not do it, rather ‘Only Rahab the harlot and her father’s family were spared by Joshua’ (Josh 6:25), therefore Jeremiah came, and he was from the descendants of Rahab the Harlot, and does things to you like stings in your eyes and thorns in your sides, and so the text had to say ‘The words of Jeremiah’. [Eicha Zuta 1:34].

Israel will be castigated for their crimes and harassed incessantly by Jeremiah the son of Rahab, the pagan thorn whom they spared. Iniquity breeds iniquity; through their negligence in sparing idol worshipers they have been enticed by them, and brought punishment upon themselves. Might the midrash be implying, though, that it is Jeremiah’s punishment as well? This midrash lures us into the prophet’s unconscious. How, in the view of this midrash, does the prophet understand his link with Rahab? Is it simply that idol worship, a consequence of her survival, will be Jeremiah’s ongoing challenge; the trap in which his people will be constantly ensnared? Or, in terms of personal selfreflection, is Rahab a ghost, reminding Jeremiah of his negative origins, a constant thorn in his own side, the sting in the eyes of this great seer of Israel? Is she a blemish on his coat of arms? Due to her, will he always remain manqué? Will he, psychologically, on some subconscious level, perceive of himself as part idolater, as a prophet unworthy of sanction? Is Jeremiah an incarnation of Rahab, and is he, therefore, in some way responsible for the guilt of his people? Is he the thorn in the side of the people as was she? Or could it be that he will be the survivor, as was Rahab, and so his subconscious feelings of guilt are compounded, knowing that he will live as others will die? Through

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assuming guilt, Jeremiah again dissolves all barriers between himself and his charges. Powerful is the prophet who feels the guilt of his people; more powerful still is one who identifies with that guilt; more powerful yet is one who holds himself personally responsible for it. These midrashic nuances conjure up shadows past, and yield negative reverberations in the tortured prophetic soul of Jeremiah. However, the opposite is also true. Rahab is a symbol of much which is positive. The triumph of Rahab’s spirit may have, nonetheless, inspired Jeremiah to hope against hope. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, makes the following observation:38 But it is an important message, and Rahab is the oracle who declares that God has given Israel the land. She is the first of the prophets who appear in the historical books to announce to Israel the paths of their history and the first of the women who declare and pronounce the will of God. The lines of women and prophets begin with Rahab and converge again at the end of 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles in the figure of Huldah the prophetess, who announces the destruction of Judah.

Rahab is approached on the eve of the destruction of Jericho by Israelite spies. Rather than assuming an adversarial posture she gives reverential expression to her heartfelt preparedness to submit to the will of the God of Israel. She is thereby awarded life and posterity in the land. Frymer-Kensky depicts Rahab as the first oracle of God’s will and Huldah as the last. In contrast, the Rabbis stress the link between Rahab and her descendant Jeremiah.39 Rahab acknowledges the initial phase of entry into the land in keeping with Divine will and directives; Jeremiah, in the final stages, will bring this saga to a close. He will loudly bewail the discordance between the will of God and the devastating reality the people have created. He will eulogize all ideals and lay all dreams to rest. The attribution of Rahabite ancestry to Jeremiah highlights another profound tragedy in the life of the prophet. While Rahab was successful in bringing about a reprieve for her family, Jeremiah, descendant of Rahab, is not even able to secure for himself a safe haven in the land of Israel.40 There is, however, a positive lesson Jeremiah might have derived from his contemplation of his relationship with Rahab. Rahab, like Abiathar of Nob, is a survivor, who witnessed physical destruction but whose spiritual fortitude afforded her life and well being in the Land. The unlikelihood of Rahab, a pagan harlot, achieving a total turn-about may have inspired her offspring Jeremiah to optimistically aspire to the possibility of the spiritual rehabilitation of the wayward people of Israel, and to cling to hope for the averting of catastrophe to the very last.41 Jeremiah’s midrashic pedigree may once again highlight his utter suitability as prophet due to his ability to sympathize, empathize and become one with his abject people while never totally despairing of a possible turn-about like that of his forbearer. 7. THE PROPHET SEDUCED Let us return to the midrashic theater, to the scene of Jeremiah bringing the poisoned chalice to his mother’s lips. Beyond the shame, pain, and pathos highlighted in the midrashic texts we have explored, there is an additional barrage of feelings by which

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the prophet is overwhelmed. These include his feelings of being deceived, seduced and powerless. Surprisingly, through these emotions he was transformed from a vassal of the Lord into His vessel. Once again, both by way of Scripture itself and through the prism of midrashic exposition we are afforded insight into the prophet’s psyche. This time, though, the prophet’s identification is not with the people Israel, but rather with the Almighty Himself. Let us recall the midrash of Eichah Zuta cited above: So Jeremiah – when God told him to give Jerusalem to drink, he screamed and wailed and said to God, ‘Master of the universe, did you not tell me that I was appointed prophet of the nations? (1:5) Now you have begun my prophecy to my own nation!’ ‘You have enticed me and I have been enticed, overpowered me and prevailed’(20:7).

Realizing that he has been duped,42 Jeremiah flies into a rage knowing that he has been deceived by God. The midrashic drama is a heartrending illustration of Jeremiah’s most searing confession. You enticed me, O Lord, and I was enticed; You overpowered me and You prevailed. I have become a constant laughingstock, everyone jeers at me. For every time I speak, I must cry out, must shout, ‘Lawlessness and rapine!’ For the word of the Lord causes me constant disgrace and contempt. I thought, ‘I will not mention Him, no more will I speak in His name’ – but [His word] was like a raging fire in my heart, shut up in my bones; I could not hold it in, I was helpless. I heard the whispers of the crowd – ‘Terror all around: Inform against him!’ All my [supposed] friends are waiting for me to stumble: ‘Perhaps he can be entrapped, and we can prevail against him and take our vengeance on him . . .’ (20:7–10).

While Jeremiah’s other confessions43 poignantly move the reader, here we are jolted by violence. Not only by the violence of God seducing and overpowering the prophet, but by the frightening mode of expression Jeremiah uses to describe his experience.44 This confession is about assault. It begins with a description of Jeremiah being physically assaulted by Pashhur, the priest and chief officer of the House of the Lord, and proceeds to describe the violence and scorn of his mocking adversaries. He is a constant target of their contempt. They seek his ruin and await any opportunity for revenge. His response to Pashhur and to the belligerent multitude is to verbally return the assault. But his most intense wrath is directed not against the people or even against Pashhur but rather against God, whose unconscionable coercion has placed him in this baleful position. He wishes he could suppress and contain his prophetic impulse, but he cannot banish God’s controlling voice. A close reading of the passage highlights the prophet’s intense superego. He has been duped and experiences anger and impotence, but he is unable to shirk his responsibility. He feels that long ago he had been tricked into becoming a prophet, and now again he has been deluded. All of God’s assurances and reassurances have come to naught.45 Jeremiah, under attack, reacts to the collapse of trust in God’s promised protection. Yet the confessional framework into which this prophecy fits makes it clear that the prophet’s protestation is, in fact, his supplication: “Indirectly, implicitly, this accusation is his appeal. There is none in this prayer if it be not in the words with which it opens: ‘Thou hast enticed me’; ‘Thou hast overpowered me.’ If this is a plea by indirection, as indeed it appears to be, the plea is for release from an imposed task which has proved too burdensome to bear.”46

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But the image of seduction is powerfully suggestive. There is something else going on here, something far more intimate. A union is being forged between Jeremiah and God.47 John Skinner describes the process which takes place in chapter 20 as one in which force of circumstance actually compels Jeremiah to reject his nation. This phenomenon, in turn, catapults the prophet directly to God: “Disowned by men and driven in upon himself, he found in the truth of his rejected prophecy an indissoluble link of communion between his own soul and God. Amid all his tribulations and the defeat of his lifework, it was a blessedness of which nothing could rob him that the God of Israel, had spoken to him, and received him into His fellowship. And in this individual response to the voice of God he discovered an earnest of that instinctive and universal sense of the divine in which he recognized the permanent essence of religion.”48 This ‘fellowship’ is described at this stage in Jeremiah’s prophetic career, since he finds himself in a ‘crisis of confidence’. His utter vulnerability has been exposed through engendering direct altercations with the people and has, consequently, brought about what Michael Fishbane calls a reunification of his will with God’s: “This remarkable prayer reveals a tragic moment wherein a prophet despairs but cannot fully rebel. Jeremiah struggles to suppress God’s voice within him. But his realization that God’s word is in his bones, and his recognition of divine protection in v. 11, point to the reunification of his will with God’s. Jeremiah’s spiritual restoration lies in the full acceptance of his unique task in the world: to be a faithful and trusting divine messenger.”49 So much for what is explicit in the Biblical text. I would like to suggest that while in canonical context the incident with Pashhur, which serves as an introduction to the confession probably took place c. 605 BCE,50 in the midrashic context the seduction is placed at the very outset of his prophetic career, precisely because it is the psychical disintegration which results from becoming the object of God’s forcefulness that obliges Jeremiah to become one with Him, and it is this which transforms him into the prophet of God. Jeremiah’s identification with God may be understood in psychological terms as his identification with the aggressor. Let us consider several explanations of this idea. Among the classic psychological defense mechanisms, Anna Freud describes identification with the aggressor as follows: “Identification with the aggressor is succeeded by active assault on the outside world, which moves the person from passive to active role, this is a preliminary stage in the development of the superego. This defensive measure is a projection of self criticism and guilt.”51 Jeremiah’s ministry required of him to actively assault the outside world. Jeremiah, as prophet, assumed the admonitory role as the superego of the people Israel. But by identifying with God he could avoid some measure of self-criticism and guilt. Were he more similar to Elijah, exclusively defending the honor due the Father, he may have met with total success. Unfortunately, as the prophet who defended the honor due the son as well as the Father, self-criticism and guilt always lingered. James Clark Moloney describes Jeremiah’s identification with the Lord in far more radical terms: “Rather than kenosis being an emptying from the God (authoritarian)

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system into the self-system, I conceive it as being exactly the opposite: the memorial self-system empties into the memorial authoritarian-system. God does not, I feel, become man, but through the experiencing of God in theophany and related occurrences man becomes God or, through experiencing an inspiration, becomes God-like in the sense of becoming able to comprehend or achieve what was formerly felt difficult or impossible. It is the sudden release of bound energy noted above which constitutes the sense of emptying, and the flashes of light.”52 The possibility of the prophet becoming God-like through divine inspiration is, in truth, anchored in the biblical text itself. We have already mentioned the verse in which Jeremiah describes himself as pouring out wrath upon the people (6:11). In yet another passage, the prophet describes the unbearable heaviness of being which again turns him into a divine instrument. Oh, my suffering, my suffering! How I writhe! Oh, the walls of my heart! My heart moans within me, I cannot be silent; for I hear the blare of horns, my soul is the alarm of war (4:19).

This alarm of war is the vehicle employed by God Himself against His enemies: “When I will sound the alarm of war against Rabbah of the Ammonites, it shall become a desolate mound” (49:2). We see that Jeremiah‘s soul has now metamorphosed into the clarion call of the Lord of hosts. At first blush, it may appear audacious to claim that seduction yields total identification of the prophet with God. The overpowering of the prophet by the Lord has turned him into the aggressor. But midrashic hyperbole goes beyond this claim and describes a remarkable degree of interchangeability between Jeremiah and the Lord. Not only does Jeremiah take on the role of God; God, as it were, takes on the role of the prophet. This touching interchange is found, not in the context of the God of wrath but in the context of the God of mercy. One such example is the midrashic treatment of Jeremiah 8:23: “Oh that my head were water, my eyes a fount of tears! Then would I weep day and night for the slain of my poor people.” ‘Oh, that my head were water, my eyes a fount of tears! Then would I weep day and night for the slain of my poor people’ (Jeremiah 8:23) Jeremiah wails through the Holy Spirit and says, ‘Bitterly she weeps in the night’ (Lamentations 1:2). Who cried? Israel cried; some say: Jeremiah cried. [Eichah Zuta 1:17].

In context, it is clear that the verse from Jeremiah refers to his own tears. A second voice is introduced into the midrash by way of the verse from Lamentations. The tears of the prophet blend with those of the people. This midrash has condensed the image; Jeremiah and his people cry as one. But remarkably in Eichah Rabbah “Oh, that my head were water” is ascribed not to Jeremiah but to the Almighty Himself: ‘Oh that my head were water and my eyes a source of tears’. Who said this verse? If you say Jeremiah, did he not eat and not sleep, rather who said it? He who neither eats nor drinks as it says (Ps 121): ‘Behold the Guardian of Israel neither sleeps nor slumbers.’ [Eichah Rabbah 1:52].

The midrash debates whether Scripture describes the pathos of Jeremiah or that of God. The conclusion is that God has replaced Jeremiah as the devastated lamenter of the people. The identification is complete.

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When God takes on the role of the prophet he also takes on the experience of the people. Alan Mintz takes this process one step further, making the following observation: “This is an audacious appropriation indeed, and it is made possible by the confidence the Rabbis had in the powers of their exegetical instruments. . . . Transformed at the moment of the Destruction, the figure of God switches from the monitory enforcer of punishment to the dazed sufferer whose suffering derives in part from His own pain over the loss of His children and in part from his empathy with their affliction.”53 The possibility for which this interpretative ingenuity allows is astonishing. Not only does Jeremiah identify with God, God identifies with Jeremiah. Jeremiah identifies with Israel, and so does God. Jeremiah has risen to astounding spiritual heights in his role as a prophet. What he has not been able to accomplish is inspiring the people to identify with him or with the Almighty. Regrettably, without such spiritual momentum, they cannot be saved. Jeremiah’s relentless attempts did not succeed, and so, try as he did, his mission failed. We are reminded of the words of Lord Macaulay: “It is difficult to conceive any situation more painful than that of a great man, condemned to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede it’s dissolution and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one, till nothing is left but coldness, darkness and corruption.” How does the prophet deal with this devastation? How does he endure, overcome by disappointment, grief and failure? Jeremiah himself explains: When your words were offered, I devoured them: Your words brought me the delight and joy of knowing that Your name is attached to me, O Lord, God of Hosts (15:16).

The words of God have consumed the prophet and will consume the nation – in a different, destructive sense. Yet Jeremiah gladly devours and assimilates them. They allow him a degree of happiness, which he could not experience with his family or his nation. Hence, the name of the Lord is upon him and provides him with his singular identity. The Divine word serves as his touchstone with the eternal covenant and becomes his ongoing point of convergence with the Almighty. This union will bring the battle-weary prophet a modicum of solace. See, I appoint you this day over nations and kingdoms: To uproot and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant (1:10).

The burdensome task which was assigned to Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah was clearly outlined in terms of destruction and dissolution. Yet beyond the discourse of blame and predictions of doom, contained within it were constructive elements of building and planting. It is not only Israel who undergoes this process; we witness Jeremiah himself experiencing the same. He is broken down and dismantled by vehement attacks both physical and spiritual, as graphically described in Scripture. Yet it is the Rabbinic portrait of Jeremiah which focuses upon how those incidents in his life built his character and planted within him seeds of strength which blossomed into greatness. The midrashic images of the banished priest and the illegitimate son illustrate the process of psychic disintegration that allowed

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Jeremiah of Anatoth to ‘champion the honor due the son’ in a way no other prophet could. His seduction by the Master of the Universe, which the Rabbis place at the early formative stage of his prophetic career, produced a prophet who was not merely an intercessor, but a full partner with the Almighty. The prophet undermined, whose realities were denied, became a prophet who denied the realities of others. It was this process which gave rise to a giant among the prophets, a prophet of pathos and of wrath, of tears and of fire, whose love, justice and truth inspire and guide us to this very day. NOTES My thanks to Dr. Ora Elper and Dr. Pesach Lichtenberg for their useful comments. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my esteemed colleague and dear friend Prof. Moshe Halevi Spero whose important insights served as an invaluable catalyst for this paper. 1

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Other prophets who share glimpses of their personal struggles include Elijah, Jonah and Amos. In terms of the breath and depth of his own torment, however, Jeremiah most resembles Moses. The parallel is developed by the rabbis in Pesikta de-Rab Kahana 13:6 [ed. Braude & Kapstein, 1975], pp. 256–257. Moses, for example, is commissioned at the burning bush and told: “Come, therefore, I will send you to Pharaoh and you shall free My people, the Israelites, from Egypt” (Exodus 3:10). His mission is clearly delineated, yet he is never given the title ‘prophet of redemption’. The closest parallel to Jeremiah is Samson. Scripture is explicit as to who he is, in addition to what he will do. “For you are going to conceive and bear a son; let no razor touch his head, for the boy is to be a Nazirite to God from the womb on. He shall be the first to deliver Israel from the Philistines” (Judges 13:5). And yet the dissimilarity is also pronounced. Samson’s identity and calling are not reported to him directly, but rather to his mother who is instructed to begin the process of raising a Nazirite, in utero. In addition to the epithet ‘prophet unto the nations’ (navi lagoyim), the overarching terms of the task are outlined in 1:10: “See, I appoint you this day over nations and kingdoms: To uproot and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant.” For a general introduction to the midrashic literature, see Holtz (1984), pp. 177–211; Wright (1956). Mekilta de-Rabbi Ishmael [ed. J. Z. Lauterbach, 1961], Tractate Pisha, pp. 8–9. In his chapter ‘The Prophets as Persons’, Bob Becking (this volume) relates to Jeremiah’s divided loyalties, drawing the following conclusion: “He himself was unable to restore this balance and therefore he had to go through seasons of trustful resolution and periods of bitter alienation.” The prophet Ezekiel is identified as Ezekiel ben Buzi HaCohen (the priest) and it is generally agreed upon that he was a member of a priestly family who served in the sanctuary in Jerusalem. This is used to account for his interest in the Temple and his knowledge about its ordinances. It is unclear how old Ezekiel himself was when he was exiled in 597 and if he served as a priest prior to that time. Jeremiah, on the other hand, is identified only as Jeremiah ben Hilkiah, leaving open the question as to whether or not his father was an officiating priest in the Temple. Targum Jonathan on Jeremiah (the Aramaic translation composed in the early centuries of the common era) suggests that Hilkiah was a Temple priest; cf. Hayward (1987), p. 47, n. 1. The Rabbinic midrash Pesikta de-Rab Kahana 13:12, [ed. Braude, pp. 262–263] similarly suggests that his father was an officiating priest. The 13th century Provencal Jewish Biblical exegete Joseph Kimhi (quoted in his son David Kimhi’s commentary to Jeremiah 1:1, published in standard Rabbinic bibles) goes one step further and identifies Hilkiah with Hilkiyahu the Priest mentioned in 2 Kings 22:4 ff. as the priest involved in refurbishing the Temple at the request of King Josiah. The same notion is found in the commentary of Don Yizhak Abravanel to Jeremiah 1:1, Perush al Neviim Ahronim, (Jerusalem: Torah Vadaat, 1954), p. 304; cf. church fathers Clemens Alexandrinus (ca. 250) (1908), Stromata 1:21 and Hippolytus on Susannah 1:1 who considers Susannah the daughter of Hilkiah the high priest to be the sister of Jeremiah; cf. Louis Ginzberg

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(1911), p. 384, n. 10. Shemuel Yevin in his article, “Mishpachot U’Miflagot Bemamlechet Yehuda” [Heb.], Tarbiz 12 (1941) p. 258, presents a cogent argument distinguishing between the two Hilkiahs. He demonstrates that the high priest during the time of Josiah was a scion of the priestly house of Zadok whereas Hilkiah the father of Jeremiah, who was alive during the time of Josiah, was not the high priest. In fact it is indeed doubtful that he served in the Temple at all since he was from the priestly line of Abiathar and hence one of the banished priests of Anatoth. Cf. S. Yevin, “Anatoth”, Encyclopedia Mikrait [Heb.] Vol. 3, pp. 161–162. For a comprehensive genealogical outline of the respective priestly families, see Myers (1965), pp. 164–168. The possibility that Jeremiah’s family of Anatothite priests became official Temple priests after the Josianic reforms is explored by Holladay (1986), pp. 1, 16. One additional theory, suggested by S. Abramski, sees Jeremiah as an official priest in Jerusalem and not a descendant of Eli’s priestly family from Anatoth, see ‘The Connection Between Shiloh and Jerusalem: Echoes of Events and Historiosophy’[Heb.] in the B.-Z. Luria Festschrift (Jerusalem: The Society for Biblical Research in Israel, 1979), p. 337. E.g. Pesikta Rabbati 27:9 [ed. William G. Braude, 1968]: “. . . Jeremiah said: Master of the Universe, what iniquities have I committed that no other prophets before or after me were charged with destroying your Temple but I!” Albrecht Alt, ‘Anatoth’, Palestinajarbuch des deutschen evangelischen Institutes fuer Altertumswissenschaft Jerusalem 22 (1926), pp. 23–24, suggested that the biblical Anatoth is what is today called Ras el Harrubeh, which is a few hundred meters southwest of contemporary Anata. For more recent studies, see Biran (1985), Nedelman (1992) and Yevin (1971). See Haran (1972), p. 164, n. 34; Kimhi (1952), pp. 61–65. A dissenting opinion is voiced by Abramski (see above, n. 6). Ya’acov Gil (1988), ‘The Story of Eli and Samuel in the Book of Samuel’ [Heb.], Beth Miqra, 33, pp. 74–75. Cf. Psalms 78:60. See W. Holladay (1964), Jeremiah’s Self-Understanding: Moses, Samuel, and Psalm 22. Journal of Biblical Literature, 63, p. 163. In fact there are those who choose to explain Saul’s massacre not as related to Ahimelech’s assistance to David. They propose that the priests from the house of Eli fled Shiloh and settled in the vicinity of Nov and Givah, lands belonging to the family of Saul; see Schley (1990). Saul’s actions were intended to banish the Elide priests and reclaim the ancestral lands for the tribe of Benjamin. See also Regev (1988), pp. 53–66. In 29:27 the people use this pejorative term about the stark raving mad prophet, whom they wish to silence. Cf. 2:8, 4:9, 13:13. See chapter 29 for parallel allegations hurled against false prophets. Note that even when Jeremiah contests his initial calling on the grounds that he is a mere youth, he is reprimanded with the words: “And the Lord said to me: “Do not say, ‘I am still a boy!’” (1:7) – i.e. denying him the ability to achieve any self-definition whatsoever and undermining this aspect of his identity as well. The designation ‘a prophet unto the nations’ is presumably intended to describe Jeremiah’s role in proclaiming the downfall of the nations (see chapters 46–51) .Yet the Rabbis offer an alternate reading: that Israel is now no different than the other nations see. See Sifre on Deuteronomy, Shoftim 175 [ed. L. Finkelstein. NY: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1969], p. 221. Holladay (see above, n. 12) makes the following observation: “These references to birth and mother are unparalleled in the extant pre-Jeremianic prophetic literature.” Klein (1957), pp. 309–345; Moloney (1954) and Searles (1979), p. 31. Cf. the Rabbinic comment in Exodus Rabbah 1:24 that the infant Moses also had the voice of a lad, which is in keeping with the parallels between the two prophets. This translation is based on the reading ‘shelo beavonotai’, and is preferred by M. Ish Shalom, Pesikta Rabbati (Vilna, 1880) chapter 26, p. 129, note 11, and Pesikta Rabbati 26 [ed. Braude], p. 526, note 4. A different reading is offered by Leo Prijs, Die Jeremia-homilie Pesikta Rabbati Kapitel 26 (BerlinKoln-Mainz, 1966), p. 31, note 28: ’shelo b’onato’ ‘Before his time,’ referring to the precocious moral sense of the neonate Jeremiah.

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Underlying this portrayal is Hosea 2:4. For the relationship between Jeremiah and Hosea, see Lalleman-de-Winkel (2000), pp. 231–233. Pesikta Rabbati 27:9 depicts Jeremiah as convinced that some personal crime has brought his fate upon him. For an early parallel to this midrashic metaphor, cf. The Book of the Apocalypse of Baruch the son of Neriah 3:1–4 [in R. H. Charles (1977), p 482]: “And I said: O Lord, my Lord, have I come into the world for this purpose that I might see the evils of my mother? Not (so) my Lord. If I have found grace in Thy sight, first take my spirit vehemently constrain me: for I cannot resist Thee, and my soul, moreover, cannot behold the evils of my mother. But one thing I will say in Thy presence, O Lord. What, therefore will there be after these things for if Thou destroyest Thy city, and deliverest up Thy land to those that hate us, how shall the name of Israel be again remembered?” In this passage Jeremiah’s mother, the land, and the city are one. Jeremiah struggles with not being able to see the evils of his mother yet not being able to restrain himself from prophesying against her. The irony, in Jeremiah’s case is that he was singled out in utero, cf. Isaiah 49:1. Cf. 15:11, where Jeremiah’s mother alone is pitied: “Woe is me, my mother, that you ever bore me – a man of conflict and strife with all the land! I have not lent, and have not borrowed yet everyone curses me!” Gerhard von Rad says in ‘The Confessions of Jeremiah’: “One can say with caution, which here should be the first commandment of the interpreter, that physical death per se does not increase suffering, rather it provides a release.” (in L. Perdue and B. Kovacs [Eds.] [1984], p. 344). See also Mintz (1982), p. 3: “The serviceableness of the image of Jerusalem as an abandoned fallen woman lies in the precise register of pain it articulates. An image of death would have purveyed the false comfort of finality; the dead have finished with suffering and their agony can be evoked only in retrospect. The raped and defiled woman who survives, on the other hand, is a living witness to a pain that knows no release.” Freud (1955), p. 244. Elsewhere Job counterposes womb and grave: “Why did You let me come out of the womb? Better had I expired before any eye saw me, had I been as though I never was, had I been carried from the womb to the grave” (Job 10:18–19). See also Job 3:10–12: “Why did I not die at birth, expire as I came forth from the womb? Why were there knees to receive me, or breasts for me to suck? For now would I be lying in repose, asleep and at rest.” Cf. also the chapter of Moshe Halevi Spero, in this volume. The mother/womb image to describe the tomb/death is movingly used in Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) 40:1: “A great concern has God assigned, a heavy burden to the sons of men, from the day man comes forth from his mother’s womb until he returns to the Mother of all the living”. The image of the bereaved mother as personification of Zion has its source in Isaiah 49:21, and is also used in the apocryphal Book of Baruch 10:16. See Mintz (1982), pp. 8–9. Mishnah Sotah 1:5, 6; cf. also Heinemann (1982). “Jeremiah told her, ‘Your afflictions are like those of Job; Job’s sons and daughters were taken from him as were yours, Job’s riches were taken from him as were yours, Job was cast to the dump heap as were you. Yet just as I returned and comforted Job so too will I comfort you. Job’s sons and daughters were doubled; so too will yours be doubled, his riches were doubled so will your be, I raised him from the dumps and you too will be raised from the dust (Isaiah 52:2). Zion, you were built by man and destroyed by man, but in the future I shall build you, as it says, “He will build Jerusalem and gather the exiles of Israel” (Psalms 147:2), Amen. May it happen speedily in our day that the Holy One, Blessed Be He will uphold the verse, “And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and coming with singing to Zion, crowned with joy everlasting they shall attain joy and gladness while sorrow and sighing flee” (Isaiah 35:10). In keeping with the divine command recorded in 16:1–9. Cf. Falk (1972). E.g. Hosea 1:2–3 (wife); Isaiah 3:16, 4:4 (daughters). See Diamond and O’Connor (1999) and Bauer (1999). Quoted in C. G. Schoenfeld (1962). God the Father – and Mother: Study and Extension of Freud’s Conception of God as an Exalted Father. American Imago 19 (3), p. 230. See a plethora of sources cited by Ginzberg (1911), p. 386, n. 14. See Frymer-Kensky (1997).

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See: Peskita de-Rab Kahana 13:14: “As Benjamin was the last of the tribes, so too Jeremiah was the last of the prophets. But didn’t Hagai, Zachariah and Malachi follow him? R. Leazar . . . said: Theirs were abridged prophecies. R. Shmuel b. Nahman said: Their prophecies were rehashed traditions”. See also Wieder (1975). Ecclesiastes Rabbah 5:4 asserts that Rahab saved not only her own family but two hundred families related to her family by marriage. The resounding contrast between Rahab’s success and the failure of Israel is expressed in Pesikta deRab Kahana 13:4: R. Joshua of Sikhnin, citing R. Levi, began his discourse with the verse “A servant that dealeth wisely shall have rule over a son that doeth shamefully; and shall have a part of the inheritance among the brethren” (Proverbs 17:2). The words, “A servant that dealeth wisely” apply to Jeremiah; the words shall speak in prophetic parable of a son that doeth shamefully mean that Jeremiah had in mind Israel who brought shame on themselves through service to idolatry. R. Abba bar Kahana applied to Israel the verse “You are not as the harlot who made her deeds comely” (Ezekiel 16:31), and then said: Let the descendant of a shameless woman who made her deeds comely, present himself and reprimand the son of a comely woman who made her deeds shameless. You find that all those words of Scripture which are used in tribute to Rahab contain reproach of Israel. Thus Rahab is quoted as saying “Now therefore, I pray unto you, swear unto me by the Lord, since I have dealt kindly with you” (Joshua 2:12); and of Israel it is said, “Surely they swear falsely” (Jeremiah 5:2). Rahab is quoted as saying “Save alive my father and my mother” (Joshua 2:13) ; but to Israel it is said, “In thee have they made light of father and mother” (Ezekiel 22:7). Of Rahab it is said, “She had brought them up to the roof” (Joshua 2:6); but of Israel it is said, “They that worship the host of heaven upon the housetops” (Zephaniah 1:5). Of Rahab it is said that “She hid them with the stalks of flax” (Joshua 2:6); but of Israel it is said, “Who say to a stock: Thou art my father” (Jeremiah 2:27). Rahab is quoted as saying, “Get you to the mountain” (Joshua 2:16); but of Israel it is said, “They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains” (Hosea. 4:13). Rahab is quoted as saying “Give me a true token” (Joshua 2:12); but of Israel it is said, “Truth they speak not” (Jeremiah 9:4). You thus see that all those words in Scripture which are used in tribute to Rahab contain a reproach of Israel.” Another midrashic depiction of Jeremiah’s feeling of being deceived by God is given in Pesikta Rabbati 26 (ed. Braude, pp. 534–536): “In that time the Lord said to Jeremiah: ‘Rise, go to Anatoth and buy the field from thine uncle Hanamel.’ Thereupon, Jeremiah thought in his heart: ‘Maybe God means to turn Jerusalem over to its inhabitants and allow them to carry on their living as usual with it. Hence [to assure them of His intention], the Lord says to me: Go, buy the field for thyself.’ . . . In the meantime, the prophet Jeremiah left Anatoth to come back to Jerusalem. He lifted his eyes and saw the smoke of the temple rising up. So he said in his heart: ‘Maybe Israel has returned in penitence to bring offerings and now the smoke of incense is rising up.’ But when he climbed closer and stood upon the wall, he saw the temple overturned into heap upon heap of stones and the wall of Jerusalem broken down. Thereupon he cried out to God, saying: ‘Thou hast enticed me, and I was enticed; Thou hast overcome me, and hast prevailed’ Jeremiah 20:7).” Which include 4:19, 6:11, 11:18–23, 12:1–6, 15:5–21, 16:15–21, 17:9–18, 18:18–23; cf. Polk (1984). The harshness of prophetic rhetoric caused classical commentators to take issue with the metaphor of God the seducer; the imagery was considered provocative to the point of sacrilege. See e.g. the commentary of 15th century Spanish Jewish exegete Don Yitzhak Abravanel ad loc.: “The sixth question: It says, ‘You have enticed me, God and I have been enticed’. How can the prophet ascribe to the exalted God enticement and seduction, contemptible actions based upon lies and deceit? It is reminiscent of what the prophet [Ezekiel 14:9] said: ‘And if a prophet is seduced and does speak a word [to such a man], it was I the Lord who seduced that prophet; I will stretch out my hand against him and destroy him from among My people Israel.’” Indeed, the prophetic enticement in Ezekiel refers to false prophets; cf. 1 Kings 22:22–23. Modern commentators also made an effort to modify the harshness of Jeremiah’s accusation. See, for example, Clines and Gunn (1978), who translate the verse: “You tried to persuade me [to be a prophet] and I was persuaded; You [i.e. your arguments] proved too strong for me, and you overpowered me”. In contrast, A. J. Heschel stresses the full violence with which this image is communicated as being precisely what the prophet had in mind: “The meaning of this extraordinary confession

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becomes clear when we consider what commentators have failed to notice, namely, the specific meaning of the individual words . . . The words used by Jeremiah to describe the impact of God upon his life are identical with the terms for seduction and rape in the legal terminology of the Bible.” (Heschel, 1962, p. 114, n. 5); cf. Sheldon Blank (1949), The Confessions of Jeremiah and the Meaning of Prayer. HUCA, 21, p. 346. Michael Fishbane notes the structural analogy between Jeremiah and Jacob. The latter prevailed over man and God; the former was overwhelmed by both (Fishbane, 1979, p. 99). Fishbane (1979), pp. 94–95. Blank (1949; see n. 44), p. 347. Heschel (1962), pp. 114–115, talks not of entering into fellowship with God but of betrothal: “And yet, the life of Jeremiah was not all misery, tension or pressure. He also knew the bliss of being engaged to God, ‘the joy and delight’ of being as it were, a bride. ‘Thy words were found, and I ate them, Thy words became to me a joy, the delight of my heart, for I am called by Thy name, O Lord, God of hosts.’ (Jeremiah 15:16). The words ‘joy’ and ‘delight’ occur four other times in the book of Jeremiah, and always in connection with nuptial festivities (7:34; 16:9; 25:10; 33:11). The bearing of a name was a sign of betrothal. ‘Let us be called by your name,’ the unmarried women called to a man (Isaiah 4:1). The prophet’s situation was one of betrothal to the Lord, to the God of hosts.” Skinner (1963), p. 219. Fishbane (1979), p. 102. Bright (1965), 175. Freud (1937), p. 173. Cf. Merkur (1985), pp. 13–14, who suggests a different explanation to account for Jeremiah’s identification with the aggressor. Moloney (1954), p. 129. Mintz (1984), p. 58.

REFERENCES Alexandrinus, St. Clement. (1908). Stromata. O. Stahlin (Ed.), Berlin: Akademic Verlag, 1960. Alt, A. (1926). Anatota. Paletsinajarbuch des Deutscher evangelischen Institutes fier Altertum swissenschaft, Vol. 22 Jerusalem: R. Mass. Bauer, A. (1999). Dressed to be killed: Jeremiah 4.29–31 as an example for the functions of female imagery in Jeremiah. In A. R. P. Diamond, K. M. O’Connor, & L. Stulman (Eds.), Troubling Jeremiah (pp. 293–305). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Biran, A. (1985). Towards the problem of the identification of Anatoth [Heb.] Eretz Yisrael, 18, 209–214. Blank, S. (1949). The confessions of Jeremiah and the meaning of prayer. Hebrew Union College Annual, 21, 331–354. Bright, J. (1965). Jeremiah [Anchor Bible 21]. New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc. Charles, R. H. (1977). The Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. Volume II Pseudepigrapha. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clines D. J. A., & Gunn, D. M. (1978). You tried to persuade me and violence! Outrage! in Jeremiah XX 7–8. Vetus Testamentum, 28, 20–27. Diamond, A. R. P., & O’Connor, K. M. (1999). Unfaithful passions: Coding women coding men in Jeremiah 2–3 (4.2). In A. R. P. Diamond, K. M., O’Connor, & L. Stulman (Eds.), Troubling Jeremiah (pp. 123–145). Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Falk, Z. (1972). Jeremiah and marriage [Heb.]. In B. Z. Luria (Ed.), Iyyunim Besefer Yermiyahu I (pp. 129–151). Jerusalem: The Society for Biblical Research in Israel. Fishbane, M. (1979). Text and texture. Close readings of selected biblical passages. New York: Schocken Books. Freud, A. (1937). The ego and the mechanisms of defense. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1955). The uncanny. In J. Strachey, & A. Freud (Eds.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud Vol. XVII (pp. 219–252). London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

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Frymer-Kensky, T. (1997). Reading Rahab. In M. Cogan, B. L. Eichler, & J. H. Tigay (Eds.), Tehillah leMoshe: Biblical and Judaic studies in honor of Moshe Greenberg (pp. 57–67). Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. Gil, Y. (1988). The story of Eli and Samuel in the Book of Samuel [Heb.]. Beth Miqra, 33, 74–78. Ginzberg, L. (1911). Legends of the Jews. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Haran, M. (1972). Biblical eras and institutions [Heb.]. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Hayward, R. (1987). The targum of Jeremiah. Delaware: Michael Glazier Inc. Heinemann, J. (1982). A Homily on Jeremiah and the fall of Jerusalem (Pesiqta Rabbati, Pisqa 26). In R. Polzin & E. Rothman (Eds.), The Biblical Mosaic: Changing perspectives (pp. 27–41). Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Heschel, A. J. (1962). The prophets. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Holladay, W.L. (1964). “Jeremiah’s” self-understanding: Moses, Samuel, and Psalm 22, Journal of Biblical Literature, 83, 156–158. Holladay, W.L. (1986). A commentary on the book of the prophet Jeremiah chapters 1–25. Philadelphia: Fortress. Holtz, B. W. (1984). Back to the sources (pp. 177–211). New York: Summit Books. Kimhi, D. (1952). In Biblical paths [Heb.] Tel Aviv: Dvir La’am. Klein, M. (1957). On Identification. In M. Klein, P. Heimann, & R. E. Money-Kyrle (Eds.), New directions in psycho-analysis (pp. 309–345). New York: Basic Books. Lalleman-de-Winkel, H. (2000). Jeremiah in prophetic tradition. Leuven: Peeters. Mekilta de Rabbi Ishmael. (1961 ed.) J.Z. Lauterbach (Ed.) Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Merkur, D. (1985). The prophecies of Jeremiah. American Imago, 42, 1–37. Mintz, A. (1982). The rhetoric of lamentations and the representations of catastrophe. Prooftexts, 2, 1–17. Mintz, A. (1984). Hurban: Response to catastrophe in Hebrew literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Moloney, J. C. (1954). Mother God and superego. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 1, 120–154. Myers, J. M. (1965). I Chronicles [Anchor Bible 12]. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. Inc. Nedelman, Y. (1992). Test excavations in Hirbet Deir e-Sid-Anatoth [Heb.]. Eretz Yisrael, 23, 216–224. Perush al Neviim Ahronim, Don Yizhak Abravanel. (Ed. 1954). Jerusalem: Torah Vadaat. Pesikta de-Rab Kahana. (Ed. W. G. Braude & J. I. Kapstein, 1975). Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. Pesikta Rabbati. (Ed. W. G. Braude, 1968). New Haven: Yale University Press. Pesikta Rabbati. (Ed. 1880). Vilna. Polk, T. (1984). The prophetic persona: Jeremiah and the language of self [Journal of the the Study of the Old Testament, Suppl. 32]. Sheffield: JSOT Press. Rad von, G. (1984). The confessions of Jeremiah. In L. Perdue & B. Kovacs (Eds.), A prophet to the nations (pp. 339–348). Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. Regev, E. (1988). The crime of the priests of Nob according to Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum [Heb.]. Beth Miqra, 53, 53–66. Searles, H. (1979). Counter transference and the related subjects. Selected papers. New York: International Universities Press. Schley, D. G. (1990). Shiloh, a Biblical city in tradition and history [JSOT Suppl. 79] (pp. 87–100). Sheffield: JSOT Press. Schoenfeld, C. G. (1962). God the Father – and Mother: Study and extension of Freud’s conception of God as an exalted father. American Imago, 19, 213–234. Skinner, J. (1963). Prophecy & religion: Studies in the life of Jeremiah. Cambridge: The University Press. Wieder, A. A. (1975). Josiah and Jeremiah: Their relationship according to Aggadic sources. In M. A. Fishbane & P. R. Flohr (Eds.), Texts and responses: Studies presented to Nahum N. Glatzer (pp. 67–68). Leiden: E. J. Brill. Wright, A. G. (1956). The literary genre Midrash. New York: Alba House. Yevin, S. (1941). Mishpachot U’Miflagot Bemamlechet Yehuda [Heb.]. Tarbiz, 12, 258–266. Yevin, S. (1971). Anatoth. Encyclopedia Mikrait [Heb.], 6, 48–419.

PART III MARTYRDOM: THEOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS

CHAPTER 8 INTRODUCTION TO MARTYRDOM Theological and psychological aspects

GERRIT GLAS Leiden Universitey, The Netherlands

The three chapters in the forthcoming section on martyrdom may be viewed as three cautionary theological statements on a concept that, from a psychological point of view, generally is seen as single. According to the common, psychological reading, martyrdom refers to a situation in which the person sacrifices his existence, or at least gives up something important, for a greater cause. Martyrdom, in this sense, is sometimes met with approval and honour – in cases in which the cause is highly valued – and at other times encounters disapproval, disdain, and even anger and shame – in cases in which self-sacrifice is perceived as improper or even manipulative. The late Hyam Maccoby,1 who was a research professor at Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Leeds (UK), gives an introduction to the theological background of the concept of martyrdom, mainly from the perspective of Judaism. Jacob van Bruggen, research professor of New Testament at the Theological University of Kampen (the Netherlands), and Bishop H.W.M. Tájrá of the Ordre de Sainte Marie la Vierge in Paris, follow with chapters on Paul, the apostle. All three authors try to pull their exegetical work in tow with a larger, overarching framework of Christian understanding from which the possible spiritual and psychological implications for contemporary believing can be further investigated. The general impression that emerges is one of intense complexity. Our authors make it clear that there are apparently various sets of questions to be pondered. There are, first, a number of questions on the relation between martyrdom and religion. Is martyrdom a religious phenomenon at all? If it is, is it restricted to monotheistic religions? If not, is there still a way to distinguish religious martyrdom from non-religious martyrdom? Could one possibly be considered a martyr for an evil cause (e.g., sacrifice for the values of a dictatorial system)? 89 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 87–92. © 2007 Springer.

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Another series of difficulties relates to martyrdom, volition and psychopathology. Is self-initiated and/or self-achieved martyrdom still martyrdom? Where do we have to draw the boundaries between martyrdom, self-afflicted harm, and suicide? Do sufficient criteria exist for distinguishing martyrdom from masochism? Finally, there is also a set of queries around martyrdom and sacrificial atonement. How is martyrdom related to the concept of sacrifice? How are we to conceive the atoning meaning of sacrifice? What are the conditions of such atonement? How could a sacrifice, human or not, acquire the meaning and power of atonement? Maccoby does much of the conceptual work. He provides guidelines that help distinguish between martyrdom, excessive heroism, sacrifice, and suicide. He discusses differences between the Judaic and Christian attitudes toward martyrdom, and he makes a strong case for the distinction between martyrdom and sacrifice. The notion of sacrifice encloses the idea of dying for the sake of one’s own death. Such a death is regarded as having itself an effect on the salvation of others. In martyrdom, however, it is not death itself that acquires value, but the sake for which one dies. As Maccoby and Tájrá make clear, there is a difference between the Jewish and Christian conception of martyrdom. Judaism puts emphasis on what is called in Hebrew qiddush ha-Shem, which means ‘the sanctification of the name (of God)’. The martyr is a person who is totally devoted to God’s holiness, even at the cost of life. There are three classical situations in Judaism in which one’s life deserves lesser care than duty and which, therefore, require martyrdom. These situations concern the imperative need to prevent apostasy, the prohibition against taking the life of another person, and the prohibition against the worst forms of sexual depravity (incest, adultery). In the Christian tradition martyrdom is associated with the original meaning of the term martyr, which is ‘witness.’ The Christian martyr is a believer who bears testimony to the truth of Christianity, and as such might be called upon to accept martyrdom under a wide variety of applications that would not be acceptable under Jewish law. Overall, this missionary element is lacking in Judaism. These different conceptions of martyrdom are related to a different conception of Jesus. Jesus was undoubtedly a martyr, according to Maccoby. However, from the Jewish perspective, this does not mean that his death had a sacrificial meaning and still less that it had the effect of atonement of the sins of others. The notion of ‘vicarious atonement’ is in fact absent in Judaism, as Maccoby points out. So, Jesus was a martyr, but it was Pauline theology which provided the additional conceptual apparatus to transform his death into a sacrifice and to imbue the death of later ‘witnesses’ of Christ with a sacrificial meaning. This latter statement, I think, needs some further qualification. Material for such reflection can already be found in the chapters under discussion, so, I will highlight a few points from these chapters which bear relevance to this issue. It is interesting to notice that the Jewish scholar Maccoby and the Protestant New Testament expert van Bruggen both deny that Judaism and Christianity favour martyrdom as a state the believer ought to deliberately seek. Tájrá’s view is slightly more difficult to interpret, but is, I think, not very far from this position. Both traditions recognize martyrdom as valuable in cases in which it is the unintended and unavoidable

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result of the affirmation of one’s religious convictions. However, they do not glorify martyrdom as such, nor do they encourage the believer to suffer or sacrifice life when it is possible to avoid these outcomes. The individual who deliberately seeks martyrdom when it is possible to escape from it would thus be regarded as culpable, says Maccoby. Van Bruggen affirms that Paul did not glorify martyrdom as such, but only the effects of suffering on his own spiritual life. There is a slight difference between van Bruggen and Tájrá here, especially in their appreciation of the passage in which Paul describes how he is torn between the desire to depart and be with Christ (‘which is better by far’) and the necessity to remain alive and in the body in order to help the young church in its ‘progress and joy in the faith’ (Philippians 1:21–25). Van Bruggen emphasizes Paul’s choice for life, which is, indeed, undeniable on the basis of what Paul writes. Tájrá puts more emphasis on Paul’s spiritual growth during his period of imprisonment, most notably his ‘immersion’ in Christ and his psychological and spiritual identification with Christ’s sufferings. These sufferings are – by acts of identification with Christ – in fact a loosening of earthly ties. Death is the endpoint of this process and a transition to the indissolubly joining with Christ. The fluidity of this transition is nicely captured by the notion of libation (literally: drink offering). Tájrá, interestingly enough, underscores that Christian authors use the verb only in a passive voice – concurring, thereby, with the position of Van Bruggen and Maccoby that death by martyrdom should not be strived for as a value in and of itself. It is not Paul who offers his life as libation; rather, he is ‘called upon’ and ‘allowed’ to do so by the Almighty, according to Tájrá. The difference between these points of view can be best seen, I think, in the appreciation of death. Van Bruggen – we can only guess what Maccoby’s view here would be – would not resist Tájrá’s emphasis on what Paul is saying about the gain acquired by dying, but he would perhaps hesitate about the glorifying way in which Tájrá speaks about immersion and identification with Christ in the process of dying. This glorification has gradually become part of what Tájrá calls the Holy Tradition. Tájrá sketches a process of gradual spiritual and psychological appropriation in which initial stupefaction and silence about the death of the apostles Peter, Paul, and James in the first and early second century reside for eschatological interpretations and, later on, for liturgical celebrations. These celebrations began in simple and subtle ways, in the construction of a rudimentary niche or cella over St. Paul’s tomb; they became more exuberant and impressive later on, in the creation of the Basilica of St. Paul in Rome, for instance, and in the public acknowledgment of the days of commemoration of the martyrdom of St. Peter and St. Paul on June 29th. So, we end up with three totally different atmospheres: Maccoby’s sobering conclusions about the limited role of martyrdom in Jewish spirituality, van Bruggen’s emphasis on the overarching nature of Paul’s religious worldview (not allowing martyrdom to become an end in itself), and Tájrá’s both ardent and honorific account of the spiritual dimensions of Paul’s martyrdom. In spite of these differences, some unexpected similarities appear as well. These similarities underscore the enormous distance between Christian and Jewish martyrdom on the one hand and modern or

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secularized forms of martyrdom on the other hand – think for instance of the suicide bomber, or the social process of victimization, or the manipulative use of the role of the victim in legal cases, to mention only a few of the possible variants. With respect to suicide bombing one has to remind oneself that none of the monotheist religions allows for martyrdom in which the lives of innocent others might be involved. These three chapters show that a lot of work is still needed in order to illuminate in what way ‘martyr-like’ behaviours, psychopathological or not, are related to their original versions, and how meanings are derived, transformed and used in these behaviours. And, beyond the study of the individual as such, we still need to learn more about the manner by which we might establish contact with the minds and hearts of persons displaying these behaviours. Could it be that the anorectic patient with her (seemingly?) self-sacrificial behaviour could be better helped if we could uncover and articulate these transformed and distorted, hidden religious dimensions? Would it be helpful to address the sacrificial aspect (pseudo or not) of the masochistic patient with a vocabulary that is derived from the great religious traditions? In short, is there some validity to the hypothesis that these pathological behaviours represent closed and distorted variants or copies of behaviours originating in religious practices and would it be possible to ‘open up’ these behaviours by creatively making use of the vocabularies belonging to those practices? NOTE 1

Hyam Maccoby passed away almost a year after the completion of the revised version of this manuscript, on May 2, 2004.

CHAPTER 9 MARTYRDOM Theological and psychological aspects. Martyrdom in Judaism

HYAM MACCOBY Z.L.† Research Professor, Centre for Jewish Studies, Leeds, United Kingdom

1.

BIBLICAL BASIS

The biblical basis of martyrdom (according to Rabbi Akiva, a famous martyr himself) is the injunction ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy . . . soul’ (Deuteronomy 6:5; the Hebrew word for ‘soul’, nefesh, being also translatable as ‘life’). 2. DEFINITION OF MARTYRDOM: SOME DISTINCTIONS In the simplest sense, this envisages a context in which a person is given a choice by an oppressor between death and abjuring allegiance to his/her religion. Among the earliest examples of this are to be found in 2 Maccabees, 7, where a heroic mother sacrifices her life and urges her children to do likewise rather than abjure Judaism by eating forbidden meat. The figure of this heroic mother became an important model to the Christian martyrs of a later age, who died rather than offer incense before the statue of the divinized Roman Emperor. Integral to this definition of martyrdom is the concept of monotheism; it is hard to see how martyrdom could occur in a polytheistic religion. Yet should we deny the name ‘martyr’ to those polytheists who gave their lives for their country in battle or in refusal to give information to the enemy? Is there a form of martyrdom arising from patriotism, as well as that arising from religious loyalty? Or can martyrdom arise from loyalty to any kind of cause, other than religion or country? Have there been martyrs in the cause of Communism, or even Nazism?1 Even more puzzling, especially in psychological terms, is the question of deliberate martyrdom. Does a person, who deliberately seeks martyrdom, placing himself voluntarily in a situation where he courts death, qualify as a martyr, or should he be 93 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 93–104. © 2007 Springer.

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classed as a suicidal maniac? Many figures who have been revered as martyrs may come into this category – for example, the Christian missionaries who embarked on attempts to convert prominent Muslim leaders, placing themselves at their mercy. On the other hand, many people who may be classed as martyrs cross the boundaries of these distinctions. It is sometimes difficult to define exactly the cause for which a person may offer his life, since patriotism, for example, may be closely bound up with a particular religious belief. Was Samson a martyr? He died in the national cause of Israel in its war against the Philistines, and yet at the same time, he was striking a blow for Israelite monotheism against the polytheistic creed of Dagon, whose temple he brought down at the cost of his own life. Is a person a martyr who involves others in his own death, or must a martyr, to qualify as such, offer up only his own life? Here we enter the vexing question of the Muslim suicide bombers, who give up their lives in order to kill the enemy, even when the people defined as enemies are non-combatants.2 Another question with both psychological and theological implications is that of the distinction between martyrdom and atoning self-sacrifice. Martyrs, especially in Christianity, are often regarded as producing an effect of vicarious atonement (the supreme example of this is Jesus himself, in the traditional Christian interpretation, though not necessarily in his own estimation, as I shall argue in expounding the Jewish attitude towards the death of Jesus). By giving his life, it is thought, the martyr performs a deed of salvation that benefits others; he takes upon himself a death and suffering that spares others from undergoing such ordeals. Is this part of the definition of martyrdom? If so, it may sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a voluntarily-undertaken martyrdom, a salvific act of sacrifice, and an act of suicidal mania. Indeed, in general, it will be necessary to develop criteria by which it may be possible to distinguish between martyrdom (highly regarded in all religions) and suicide (generally regarded as a sinful destruction of human life). 3. JEWISH DEFINITIONS OF MARTYRDOM All the above questions are carefully considered in the Jewish sources, and the answers provided there are important contributions to the subject-matter of the present colloquium. First, it should be said at once that in Judaism (in general, though with some disagreement of sources) martyrdom is not encouraged as a deliberate act. Anyone who deliberately seeks martyrdom when it is possible to avoid it is regarded as culpable, not as admirable. It is only when the victim is forced to choose between performing some heinous act and suffering death that the choice of death is regarded as not only admirable but as the highest deed possible to humanity: this is what is called in Hebrew qiddush ha-Shem, which means literally ‘the sanctification of the name (of God)’ (though this term originally had wider connotations, and only gradually acquired the specialized meaning of ‘martyrdom’).3 A martyr honors God in a way that transcends all other virtuous conduct. He or she acts entirely without base motives of self-interest and overcomes the natural human fear of death, being

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motivated entirely by love of God and loyal conviction of God’s holiness which must be asserted even at the cost of life itself. The promise of reward in a future life is secondary in Judaism, though it is not entirely absent. It is noteworthy that the chief instance of martyrdom (or attempted martyrdom) in the Hebrew Bible, that of Daniel and his companions, makes no mention at all of future reward, though to the authors of Maccabees, this doctrine (especially in the form of bodily resurrection of the dead) had acquired some importance. Along with the imperative need to avoid apostasy, two other categorical injunctions were regarded as more important than the duty to preserve one’s own life, and therefore as providing occasions for martyrdom: the prohibition against taking the life of another person, and the prohibition against the worst forms of sexual depravity (incest or adultery). The locus classicus on this subject is Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 74a, which describes a meeting of rabbis to discuss the question, ‘Which are the laws of the Torah which one must observe even at the cost of death?’ It should be noted that the vast majority of the laws of the Torah were not included in this category; that is to say, only three laws were singled out as so important that their preservation was a matter of martyrdom. In the case of the other laws (including for example the laws of the Sabbath and the laws that forbid the eating of certain foods) it was decided that they should be infringed rather than lose one’s life. In fact, all the ceremonial laws were regarded as unfit topics for martyrdom, and a great many of the moral laws too. Rather than kill an innocent person, one should suffer death. This law of martyrdom (which, outside Judaism might not be considered to come under the concept of martyrdom, but rather under the concept of conflict of duties) is graphically illustrated in a story (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 74a) about the famous Babylonian teacher known as Rava. He was approached by a Jew who told him: ‘The governor of my province has ordered me to assassinate a certain person; otherwise I myself must die. What shall I do?’ Rava replied: ‘Die and do not kill. Is your blood redder than his?’ The Talmudic passage which tells this story then asks the question: ‘From which biblical proof-text did Rava derive this decision?’ The answer given is: ‘From none. It is a matter of reason (sevara).’ In other words, the Talmud regards Rava’s decision as derived from natural law, an expression of fundamental human rationality. Rava’s question, ‘Is your blood redder than his?’ presents some important implications. It asserts the fundamental equality of all human life. What qualifies a person to live is not any feature or talent or even virtue that he possesses but simply the fact that he is a living person, one through whose body blood flows. The man who questioned Rava is not to consider whether his own life is in some way more valuable than the life he is being compelled to destroy, and therefore as justifying an evasion of the martyrdom required of him. Further, Rava, by his reply, forestalls the perennial excuse of the subordinate ‘I was only obeying orders.’ Rav’s questioner might argue that he had a duty of obedience to the ruler of his province; this was the refuge of an Eichmann, who pleaded obedience to legitimate authority as his excuse for mass murder, and was even surprised that

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anyone could doubt the validity of this excuse. In Judaism, a crime can never be excused in this way. There is the famous saying of Shammai, when asked about whether a criminal could ever be regarded as merely the ‘representative’ of his employer in a criminal act, the employer being regarded as responsible: ‘There is no ‘representation’ in crime. A person must obey the command of the true Master (God), not the command of the putative master (the employer).’ (b. Kiddushin 42b). Everyone is responsible for his or her own deeds, and this may lead at times to a duty of martyrdom. 4. STATUS OF THE DUTY OF MARTYRDOM Yet martyrdom, when considered as a ‘duty’, has certain peculiar features. Maimonides, the leading Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, has this to say about a person who, through lack of heroism, avoids martyrdom in circumstances that require it: ‘He profanes the name of God and fails to fulfill the command to sanctify the Name; nevertheless, because he transgressed under compulsion, he is not liable to punishment by flogging, much less by death, even if he committed murder under compulsion, for there is no punishment by flogging, or death except for one who transgresses willingly, and by the evidence of witnesses and after due warning.’ (Mishneh Torah, Yesodei ha-Torah, 5:4). Martyrdom may be enjoined in Judaism as a duty at times, but it differs from heroism and it is never regarded as less than an act of heroism. The question is, then, ‘Can it sometimes be an act of excessive heroism?’ The martyrs of the books of Maccabees are represented as undergoing death rather than transgressing the Jewish dietary laws by eating forbidden foods. But it appears that in later Judaism this was regarded as unnecessary martyrdom, since the dietary laws are not included among the three prohibitions mentioned in b. Sanhedrin 74a as requiring martyrdom (murder, incest and idolatry). Did the mother and her six sons give away their lives for nothing, in the eyes of later interpreters of Scripture? Can it even be that their action was blameworthy, since they neglected the important duty of preserving their own lives in favor of lesser duties? Should we even regard their action as suicide, rather than martyrdom, and therefore as not only unnecessary or blameworthy but as seriously sinful? The answer to these questions is ‘No.’ The later formulation of the conditions of martyrdom does not, after all, rule out the heroic behavior of Hannah and her sons as either unnecessary or as blameworthy. For, the rabbis of the Talmud, while confining martyrdom to the three major prohibitions of Scripture, made certain conditions. They said that the minor prohibitions should be infringed under pain of death, but only when such infringement did not amount to an act of apostasy. If the infringement of even minor laws was staged by the oppressor in such a way as to symbolize the renunciation of Judaism, then the correct response is martyrdom. Such a staging could be in one of two ways: either by making the infringement a public show (not merely an act performed in private), or by making the infringement a mere episode in a general campaign of suppression of

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Judaism. The permission given by the rabbis to the infringement of minor laws was confined to circumstances when such infringement took place in private and was not part of a general religious persecution. The mother and her sons were thus genuine martyrs in rabbinic eyes, and even though their deed is most fully recorded in works that that were not included in the Jewish canon of Scripture, there are rabbinic works of authority that do mention it in terms of the highest reverence (Midrash, Lamentations Rabbah 1:16, b; Gittin 57b). 5. MARTYRDOM AND SUICIDE A question now arises that has given cause to much controversy among Jewish religious thinkers. Suppose a person chooses death rather than infringe a minor prohibition, in circumstances when no repudiation of Judaism as a whole is implied? Is this martyrdom, or is it suicidal foolishness? Does the Talmudic passage which isolates the three great commandments for which the sacrifice of life is demanded merely permit the preservation of life for lesser commandments, or does it positively enjoin this? In other words, is it a positive duty to preserve one’s life in such circumstances, or is it merely condoned? Judaism makes a distinction between conduct that is obligatory on every ordinary person, and conduct that is (to use a Christian term) supererogatory; that is, not obligatory but meritorious in the highest degree. This is called in Hebrew ‘middat hasidim,’ or ‘the quality of saintliness;’ it includes such conduct as the cancellation of a debt owed by a poor person. The question, then, in this case, is whether a person who refuses to accept the condonation offered for minor infringements is acting as a saint or as a fool. There is even the possibility that he may be acting wickedly, by neglecting the important duty of self-preservation in favor of lesser duties. Maimonides takes the view that someone who chooses death rather than infringe a minor commandment (in private and at a time when no general religious persecution is in force) is actually wicked, and should be classed as a suicide (Mishneh Torah, ibidem 5:1). While this is the mainstream view, it has been challenged by some highly-respected authorities. We must distinguish here carefully, in Jewish thinking, between a situation of oppression, when infringement of commandments is demanded by a tyrant on pain of death, and the very different situation when there is no oppression, but dangerous circumstances arise in which the infringement of commandments is required in order to save life. For example, when a person who is dangerously ill is prescribed forbidden foods by a doctor as a cure, he may eat such foods because the preservation of life takes precedence over all dietary laws. Similarly, if a fire breaks out on Sabbath threatening life, it may be quenched despite the law forbidding fire-quenching on the Sabbath. In this case, there is no question that the flouting of the Sabbath law is not only permitted, but is an actual duty, and that anyone who fails to flout the law and thus endangers life is acting wickedly. This is the situation known in Hebrew as ‘piqquach nefesh.’ The paradigm biblical case cited in the Talmud is that of David (1 Samuel 21), who demanded of the High Priest that he should hand over the sacred loaves of show-bread in order to sustain the lives of starving men. This, according to the Babylonian Talmud

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(Menahot 96a), was a perfectly justified demand, despite the extreme sanctity of the show-bread. This case of David is actually cited by Jesus (Mark 2:25) to justify the plucking of corn on the Sabbath by his starving disciples; which shows that Jesus, far from merely despising the Sabbath was appealing to the ancient Jewish principle that preservation of life comes before the observance of Sabbath, as of other ritual laws. Jesus on this occasion even quotes (Mark 2:27) the saying, familiar from rabbinic writings, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath’ (for this saying see Mekhilta on Exodus 31:13). The incidents in which Jesus is opposed by the Pharisees for healing on the Sabbath are best understood as anti-Pharisee propaganda of a postJesus date, inserted by the editors of the Gospels into Jesus’ mouth.4 Thus the Jewish laws of martyrdom form part of a complex of ideas regarding the observance of the commandments of the Torah and the circumstances in which such observance can be waived. To obey the laws of the Torah is regarded as the expression of love of God, but to obey them to the point of death was never part of God’s intention. To support this, some rabbis quoted the biblical text, ‘He shall live by them’ (Leviticus 18:5) – on which they comment, ‘but you shall not die because of them’ (Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 85b). Only the three holiest laws, essential to all morality, require martyrdom. The others are all open to infringement, according to circumstances. Yet this infringement of the laws, when permitted, contains various grades of significance. Sometimes the infringement is a definite duty, sometimes a mere permission. Sometimes there is more love of God in breaking a law than in keeping it. Thus while Judaism is a religion of commandments, there is always a certain relativism which rescues the religion from the charge of mere inelastic heteronomy and obedience. All the laws are subject to considerations of love of God and love of humanity. Even the most absolute of laws, that against killing a human being, is subject to exceptions; one may kill in self-defense, or to rescue a fellow-human from a pursuing murderer. Normally, killing can be done only through judicial process, which requires evidence of two eye-witnesses of the capital crime; but citizen’s emergency justice (self-defense or rescue) can justify a private killing, which however must be succeeded by full judicial enquiry. Martyrdom itself can be viewed in this relativistic light as an exception to an important moral principle: it is an exception to the law against suicide; two expressions of love have conflicted. This leads me into some linguistic considerations. The Christian term ‘martyrdom’ means ‘giving witness’ and the concept underlying this term is one of testifying to the truth of Christianity and avoiding all denial of its truth. In Judaism the term is instead ‘sanctification of the Name.’ The Christian term, then, makes martyrdom a matter of loyalty to a cause, while in Judaism the term has wider connotations. Loyalty to the cause of Judaism as a religion is only one of the motivations for accepting death, though it has been an important ingredient in Jewish martyrdom generally, since acceptance of death is required to avoid any act or affirmation defined as idolatrous, and such an act would constitute apostasy. But the avoidance of murder and of incest are regarded as just as important motivations, and these are not primarily matters of ‘witness’ to Judaism but matters of universal principle. Even non-Jews are required to undergo death rather than commit such acts (though the question of whether Judaism

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demands martyrdom from non-Jews has been disputed). There seems here to be an important distinction between the Jewish and the Christian definitions of martyrdom, so that in view of the etymology of the word it can even be doubted whether the word applies to Judaism at all. An important element in Christian martyrdom is to bear testimony to the truth of Christianity in such a way as to further an ongoing campaign to convert the whole world to Christianity. In Judaism, this missionary ingredient is missing, since in Judaism salvation is granted for non-Jews by adherence to monotheism and to the basic principles of morality contained in the Seven Noachic Laws. 6. UNIVERSALITY IN CHRISTIANITY AND JUDAISM It should be explained that there is an important difference between Judaism and Christianity on the question of what is often called (misleadingly in my opinion) ‘universality.’ Christianity is a universal religion in the sense that it aims at the conversion of the whole world to its belief, and even (at least in its medieval form) denies salvation to all non-Christians (extra ecclesiam nulla salus). Judaism teaches that non-Jews, who adhere to monotheism and the rest of the Seven Laws are fully acceptable to God. Judaism accepts converts to Judaism, but does not go out of its way to acquire them since it is not essential for salvation to be a Jew. Judaism is a two-covenant religion: there is the covenant of God with Noah, which applies to all mankind, and there is the covenant of Sinai which applies to Jews only (including of course voluntary converts to Judaism). Another way of putting this matter is that Christianity is both a universal religion and a universal Church, while Judaism is a universal religion, but not a universal Church. For a long time, this was held against Judaism, which was decried as particularism. More recently, however, it has been increasingly recognized that Judaism’s ‘particularism’ should be more correctly called ‘pluralism.’ Underlying this pluralism is another important distinction between Judaism and Christianity, the question of Original Sin. Judaism does not believe that mankind was condemned by the sin of Adam, and therefore does not require a salvific remedy applying equally to all mankind. Out of the seven laws of the Noachic Code, three are actually identical with the three laws of martyrdom. Indeed the very wording of the Three Laws, as enunciated in the Talmud, shows that they were based on the wording of the Seven Laws. It is thus an important and intriguing fact that the rabbis who sat down to formulate the most basic laws of Judaism, for which martyrdom is required, did so by annihilating the distance or difference between Jews and Gentiles and asserting a manifesto that was common to all. 7. VICARIOUS ATONEMENT There is also an important element in Christian martyrdom that is absent in Judaism, and that is the element of vicarious atonement. It might be said that the archetypal Christian martyr is Jesus himself, and his sufferings on the Cross and especially his death are regarded in Christian theology as atoning for the sins of mankind.

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The question may be raised, however, ‘Can Jesus be regarded as a martyr at all? Or should his death be described as a sacrifice rather than as martyrdom?’ 8. MARTYRDOM, SACRIFICE AND SUICIDE I think that it is important to make a strong distinction between martyrdom and sacrifice (even though martyrdom may have an additional sacrificial function). A martyr always dies for a cause, to which he bears witness by his death, or, in more Jewish terms, he dies in order not to submit to tyrannous pressure to commit an act of betrayal of principle. In case of a sacrifice, however, the person dies for the sake of his own death, which is regarded as having an efficacy of its own in producing salvation for others. The death of a martyr is an unfortunate necessity, a tragic incident in the course of a campaign whose manifesto can be formulated, while the death of sacrifice is valuable in itself as conferring a vital benefit on others simply by its occurrence, and associated with no manifesto except belief in the efficacy of the sacrifice itself for salvation. In Pauline Christianity, Jesus’ death was sacrificial. Jesus did not die in pursuance of some program of reform or because he was avoiding the performance of some execrable act. The Cross itself was its own aim and motivation. In the Gospels, on the other hand, we do find some adumbration of a case for Jesus as martyr. He is represented as advocating reforms in Judaism and as arousing the tyrannous resentment of the authorities through his proposals. Even here, however, this notion is not carried through as the reason for his crucifixion, which, in the end, is ascribed to his own deliberate salvific aim. He decided to die on the Cross, even though he could have called on the angels to rescue him, because it was his destiny and personal decision to die on the Cross as a ransom for mankind. He arranged his own death by deputing Judas Iscariot to betray him. Thus even in the Gospels, Jesus can hardly be described as coming into the category of ‘martyr.’ Of course, this does not mean that, in historical fact, Jesus was not a martyr. In my view, it was Pauline theology that transformed him from a martyr to a sacrifice. His death at the hands of the Romans and their Jewish gauleiter, the High Priest, was brought about because he was regarded as a serious threat to the Roman Occupation of the Land of Israel. By proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom of God, Jesus was rousing hopes in the Jewish people of the ousting of the Romans and the return of Jewish theocracy. Jesus was thus in the tradition of Jewish messiah-figures, many of whom were executed by the Romans, and who count, in Jewish estimation, as martyrs in the cause of Judaism. John the Baptist, too, as Josephus makes clear (Antiquities, xviii. 5.118–19), died because his preaching was regarded as stirring the people to rebellion, not for the reasons given in the Gospels. Jesus, in my own opinion, was undoubtedly a martyr, but Pauline theology of the Cross took him out of this category. Yet Pauline theology of the Cross ensured that all Christian martyrs in ensuing ages acquired a sacrificial aspect, so that the Christian word ‘martyr’ acquired a nuance that differentiates Christian martyrs from their Jewish equivalents, such as Rabbi Akiva. The cruel death of Rabbi Akiva at the hands of the Romans (for the offence of continuing to teach Judaism at a time when this was forbidden by the

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Emperor Hadrian) has never been regarded as having an atoning effect for the sins of other Jews, who must atone for their own sins by repentance and reparation. In Judaism, the concepts of martyrdom and sacrifice are clearly distinguished. Here again, however, some qualification is necessary. There was one rather late period in Jewish history when the concepts of martyrdom and sacrifice became confused with each other. This was in Germany in the period of intense persecution of the Jews by the motley masses of Crusaders, setting off to liberate Palestine from the Muslims, but taking the opportunity to take vengeance on the so-called ‘Christ-killers’ on the way – a procedure that combined religious zeal with safety, since the Jews who were massacred were, unlike the Muslims, unarmed. At this time, many Jews facing inevitable death for themselves and their children took an understandable psychological line by embracing death with pious fervor. Here the psychology of martyrdom merged with the psychology of suicide, a not infrequent phenomenon in all varieties of religious martyrdom. Once this development had taken place, a further displacement occurred: martyrdom was confused with sacrifice. Jewish fathers, rather than wait for their children to be burnt alive by the Christian mob, cut their own children’s throats, and mentally identified this tragic act with the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac at the behest of God. The fathers then killed themselves and their wives, in emulation of the acts of mass suicide at Masada and Jotapata narrated by Josephus in his account of the Jewish defeat by the Romans (War, III. vii; War VII, viii). These acts of desperation at least rescued the Jewish victims from a posture of total passivity in the face of irresistible oppression. Thus Jewish history is not entirely without its episodes of suicidal mania, masked as holy acts of sacrifice. There is some evidence (found in certain unpublished manuscripts by the scholar Shalom Spiegel) that these aberrations were partly derived from an underground Jewish tradition that the sacrifice of Isaac (which according to the Bible story was cancelled) actually took place and was followed by Isaac’s resurrection. This unofficial version of the story shows that the sacrificial mystique developed centrally by Pauline Christianity did exist in Judaism but in a form that remained peripheral and uninfluential until the tragic events of the Middle Ages brought it back to the surface in one ravaged area of the Jewish world. The willing acceptance and even courting of death as an act of supreme piety and obliteration of self is the aspect of martyrdom illustrated here, rather than the aspect of atonement for the sins of others. 9. VICARIOUS ATONEMENT IN JUDAISM On the other hand, the idea that the sufferings of the saintly can be of benefit to others by atoning for their sins, and thus enabling them to escape their due punishment, can indeed be found in earlier sources in Judaism, though again in a peripheral form. There is a story in the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Metzia 85a) about the sage Rabbi Judah the Prince (the redactor of the chief rabbinic text, the Mishnah) which goes as follows: Rabbi Judah once showed lack of sympathy with an animal whom he was leading to be slaughtered and which was attempting to escape. He said to the animal: ‘Go; for this you were created.’ This rough behavior was regarded by God as a sin,

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and, as a punishment, Rabbi Judah suffered for the next ten years from a painful stomach complaint. This complaint departed when Rabbi Judah on one occasion showed unusual compassion for some animals. His maid was about to clear away some young weasels found in his house, but he stopped her, quoting the biblical verse, ‘His tender mercies are on all his works’ (Psalms 145:9). Because he showed compassion, compassion was showed to him, and his stomach pains ceased. During all the years that Rabbi Judah suffered, the harvests were unusually profuse. His sufferings atoned for the sins of his neighbors, who benefited by escaping normal punishment for their sins in the way of agricultural failures. This story is quoted here to show that the idea of vicarious atonement is not entirely absent from Judaism. The story also shows how peripheral this idea is in Judaism, for it is not even the main point of the story, which concerns chiefly the question of compassion towards animals. While Rabbi Judah’s neighbours benefited unwittingly from the saintly rabbi’s sufferings, they were never encouraged in any way to look to such sufferings as a means of escaping punishment for their sins. This contrasts startlingly with the atmosphere of Christianity, in which people are centrally aware of the availability of the sufferings of Jesus as a means of atonement. Moreover, it could be argued that Rabbi Judah is not a sacrificial martyr in the same sense as Jesus, whose sufferings are totally undeserved. Rabbi Judah suffers for a sin that he has committed. True, it is a very minor sin, which in a less saintly person, would have been overlooked by God. Nevertheless, it is a sin of lack of compassion. The Jewish story is saying that the sufferings of the saints can produce a measure of atonement even though not voluntarily undertaken and even when incurred as a punishment. Such suffering does not come under the Jewish concept of martyrdom (qiddush ha-shem), which seems to be confined to the undergoing of death. Here there appears to be a difference between Judaism and Christianity, in which suffering, even without death, can be characterized as martyrdom. For example, the hardships of Paul, accepted by him, are described by Dr. Jakob van Bruggen in this volume as themselves a form of martyrdom. There seems to be some ambivalence on this issue, however, for Msngr. Dr. Harry W. M. Ta´jra´ in another chapter in this volume, makes a distinction between Paul’s ‘persecution’ and his ‘martyrdom,’ confining the latter term to his death. The possibility of broadening the term ‘martyrdom’ in Christianity to include non-lethal sufferings may arise from the aspect of atonement for others which is never absent in the Christian concept of ‘martyrdom’ but never present in the Jewish concept of qiddush ha-Shem. It should be mentioned, finally, that both the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic writings contain the idea of sufferings imposed on a blameless person as a test and also as qualifying him for some special reward. The chief biblical example, of course, is Job, but Abraham also comes into this category, especially as rabbinic theory holds that the Akedah was the last of ten trials imposed on him by God. In rabbinic sources, sufferings imposed on a blameless person as a test are called ‘sufferings of love’ (yissurin shel ahavah). On a pragmatic level, some instances are recorded of rabbis who were unwilling to accept these sufferings, and escaped from them by the formula, ‘I do not want either them or their reward’ (lo hem ve-lo sekharon).

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In my opinion, sufferings of this kind cannot be included in the concept of ‘martyrdom’, however defined, since essential to that concept is the willing acceptance of suffering in loyalty to a defined good cause. Sufferings (‘trials’) undergone for the sake of accumulating merit or reward for the sufferer is something different. 10. PSYCHOLOGICAL MEANING OF THE JUDAIC/RABBINIC CONCEPTION OF MARTYRDOM Martyrdom in Judaism is an extreme expression of courage, loyalty and abhorrence of evil-doing. It is not a virtue in itself irrespective of circumstances, and not to be sought out in a deliberate way as conferring meaning on life. But if circumstances demand, it is not to be avoided, and the martyr is accorded the highest respect. The element of voluntariness is essential to the definition of martyrdom, in that avoidance of it by committing the demanded disloyalty or evil-doing must be possible. The martyr is one who is faced with a choice and cannot avoid having to make the choice. If he can avoid the whole choice-situation, he should do so, because otherwise he will have contributed to his own death. If this option is not open to him, and he succumbs to natural weakness and fails to become a martyr, he is nevertheless not regarded as subject to any legal penalty, for he has acted under compulsion. Psychologically then, martyrdom is regarded as belonging to the realm of extreme morality and as outside the scheme of normal moral behavior, which is governed by the principle ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself’ (Leviticus 19:18), a principle singled out as basic by several Jewish teachers, including Hillel, Akiva and Jesus. This accounts for the somewhat surprising fact that despite the very large numbers of Jews who have died in religious persecutions, there is very little mention of martyrdom in everyday Jewish practice and worship. The concept of martyrdom does not color everyday thinking in Judaism. There has been nothing in Judaism corresponding to the Flagellant movements in Christianity and Islam, centering on the concept of martyrdom as desirable. The martyrdom of great teachers is, in general, regarded as a calamity which requires explanation, rather than celebration. Thus the martyrdom of Rabbi Akiva is deplored by Moses (granted a prevision of it) and is ascribed to the inscrutable will of God (b. Menahot 29b). Yet (in a rare reaction) Akiva himself welcomes it, as an opportunity to ‘love God with his life’ (b. Berakhot 61b). The martyrdom of the Ten Martyrs of the Hadrianic persecution receives the explanation that it atoned for the sin of the ancestors who sold Joseph into captivity (Midrash Mishle, 1:13), but this interpretation was opposed by some important authorities on the ground that it infringed the principle that children should never be punished for the sins of their fathers (Deuteronomy 24:16). Thus positive attitudes towards martyrdom are always tempered by qualifications which prevent it from becoming an ideal or a focus for fanaticism. 11. CONCLUSION Martyrdom, in Judaism, is defined as death voluntarily undergone when seriously disloyal or immoral acts are demanded on pain of death by tyrannous power. An act of martyrdom is regarded as of the highest possible merit, but it is not regarded as

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having salvific or atoning effect on others; in other words, it is sharply distinguished from the concept of sacrifice. It is also sharply distinguished from suicide, which is regarded as sinful; consequently, martyrdom must be avoided by flight from the tyrant if possible, and must never be voluntarily sought. Persons who deliberately court martyrdom, under the impression that they are thereby reaching the greatest possible religious heights, or are bringing religious atonement to others, are regarded with disapproval. NOTES 1

2

3 4

The original meaning of the word ‘martyr’ (according to OED) was: ‘One who voluntarily undergoes the penalty of death for refusing to renounce the Christian faith or for obedience to any law or command of the Church.’ Later, however, it came to mean, ‘One who undergoes death or great suffering on behalf of any belief or cause, or through devotion to some object.’ Here, I employ the second meaning, as it applies to Judaism, but in view of the fact that the word ‘martyr’ originated in a Christian vocabulary, it is necessary to explore conceptual differences in the Jewish and Christian treatments of the topic. Recently, some have seen Samson as the prototype of the modern suicide-bomber. This, however, is to ignore the circumstances of Samson’s action, which was not one of gratuitous violence. He was being exhibited in public and taunted as a symbol of the humiliation and defeat of his nation and religion. Moreover, his victims were not randomly-selected ordinary civilians, but high-level representatives of the enemy. For the history of this term, see Maccoby (1987). For full discussions, see Maccoby (1986), pp. 40–42; Maccoby (2003), pp. 132–135. See also Sanders (1990), p. 13.

REFERENCES Josephus, Flavius (1920–1925). Antiquities of the Jews (Loeb Classical Library, edition 1930–1935). Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. Josephus, Flavius (1920–1925). The Jewish War (Loeb Classical Library, edition 1927–1928). Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press. Maccoby, H. (1986). The mythmaker. San Francisco: Harper & Row. Maccoby, H. (1987). Sanctification of the Name. In A. A. Cohen & P. Mendes-Flohr (Eds.), Contemporary Jewish religious thought. New York: Simon & Schuster/Free Press. Misdrash Halakha, Mekhilta. Sanders, E. P. (1990). Jewish law from Jesus to the Mishnah. London: SCM Press. Spiegel, S. (1990). The last trial. New York: Schockem.

CHAPTER 10 THE MARTYRDOM OF PAUL

JAKOB VAN BRUGGEN Theological University of Kampen, Kampen, The Netherlands

1. INTRODUCTION St. Paul is remembered by the church not only as the illustrious apostle to the Gentiles, but also as a martyr of the Roman Emperor. As such he shares his name day with St. Peter, on June 29. The large statues of Peter and Paul in front of the Sistine Chapel in Rome are strong and proud, but inside the chapel they are also memorialized as exemplars in the martyrdom of the Christian church. The most remarkable fact is that this martyrdom is not seen as a problem, as harmful to the mission of the apostle and the church. But neither is it glorified as the real climax of the Christian life. Paul’s comment is very sober at this point. Suffering and even martyrdom are an unavoidable gate to God’s glory. As he declares already after his first missionary journey: “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). We know a lot about Paul’s path to martyrdom, but nothing about his last hours. The way to the kingdom seems more important than the entrance into that kingdom. Tradition says that Paul was beheaded by the sword, which is in line with the form of capital punishment allowed by law for Roman citizens. The Book of Acts, however, stops at the moment Paul is imprisoned in Rome for two years. We can imagine how it ended in martyrdom, but we have only Paul’s letters that tell us how he was prepared to die for his Master, Jesus Christ. Now that the accent is on the long road of suffering that led to Paul’s final martyrdom in the narrow sense of the word, we are in a position to investigate his attitude, his psychological reactions in times of afflictions. And we can ask the question: What is decisive in his attitude? What frame of reference do we need if we are to understand a person who accepts martyrdom, even though he does not seek it. And can we deduce from his attitude something concerning the relationship between religion and psychology? 105 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 105–114. © 2007 Springer.

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To answer these questions I will first sketch the facts of Paul’s suffering. In the second place I will describe his attitude in his afflictions. In the third place I will look at the motives for Paul’s conduct. Finally I come to a concluding description of the religious framework that belongs to Paul’s attitude and makes it understandable. This leads to a conclusion concering the relation between psychology and religion. 2. THE FACTS OF PAUL’S SUFFERING The former persecutor Paul experiences persecutions nearly from the first moment after his conversion to the person of Jesus the Messiah.1 Already in Damascus the Jews are trying to kill him, and all along the road this apostle travels we find opposition from his own countrymen. They dislike the person who in their eyes has become a traitor and a supporter of a dangerous sect. In the book of Acts we can follow the trail of this persecution. Again and again, Jews who refuse to participate in Paul’s radical change try to silence this learned preacher of Jesus. They do this by opposing him in the synagogues (Acts 9,22–25,29; 13,45–50), by spontaneous actions to lynch him (Acts 14,19–20), by asking the help of the Roman governors against him (Acts 17,5–9; 18,12–17), by inciting the mobs against him (Acts 21,27–31), and finally by trying to condemn him in front of the Sanhedrin and by conspiring for his murder during the expected transportation to Jerusalem (Acts 23,12–22). This, in combination with many other troubles along the way, gives Paul the image of a person who is continuously in trouble. As he writes in one if his letters: “It seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe” (1 Corinthians 4:9).

This long road of hardships and sufferings (cf. the disaster catalogues in 1 and 2 Corinthians)2 leads to a period of continued imprisonment. Arrested in Jerusalem at the end of his third Missionary Journey, he becomes a prisoner in Caesarea for more than two years. Thereafter he is brought to Rome in chains. And there he had to stay under house arrest for two or more years, with a soldier to guard him (Acts 27–28). There is something strange in this period of imprisonment. In fact, there was no valid accusation against him. His being kept in custody by Felix looks more like a protective measure to safeguard him against the plots of his countrymen to kill him. And after Paul made an appeal to the Emperor, the Roman governor is embarrassed. Festus does not know what reason he can give for sending this person to Rome. His Jewish advisor Agrippa can only say that it is merely due to Paul’s own appeal that he has to be sent to the Emperor. So Paul arrives in Rome with a declaration of innocence; nevertheless, he remains a prisoner. His road to martyrdom seems to make no sense at all! The facts of Paul’s martyrdom are the result of the opposition of his own countrymen—whom he loved. This is the second remarkable element in the facts. Paul loves his people. Although there are persons who did him a lot of harm

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(Alexander the metalworker, 2 Timothy 4,14; cf. Acts 20,33–34), he never stops to pray for his own people. He even writes about them: “For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race, the people of Israel” (Romans 9:3).

Looking at the facts of Paul’s martyrdom, we conclude that his martyrdom has an extraordinary character. It seems to be a mistake, a result of misunderstanding. Nevertheless, it becomes very significant in his life. To him it is the path he has to follow as a Christian to enter the kingdom of God.3 3. PAUL’S ATTITUDE IN HIS SUFFERINGS At first sight the apostle seems to enjoy his hardships. He writes in very positive terms about his situation as a prisoner in his letters. In his letter to Philemon he proudly presents himself as “prisoner of Christ Jesus” (1) and he speaks about his being “in chains for the gospel” (13). To the Philippians he says that “what has happened” to him “has really served to advance the gospel” (1:12): it has become clear to all that he is “in chains for Christ” (1:13) and because of his chains “most of the brothers in the Lord have been encouraged” (1:14). How normal is it to be positive about chains? It might seem to be a mild form of religious masochism, such as we encounter not only in the history of the Christian church but also in the history of Buddhism. Looking more closely, however, the situation with Paul is very different. His attitude is positive about the effects of his hardships for the gospel and for others. Personally, however, he dislikes hardships and sufferings, and although he sees the benefits his chains bring, he does not delight in his chains as such. To the contrary, He seems to register protest when he writes to Timothy that he is “being chained like a criminal” (2 Timothy 2:9). Paul himself has informed us explicitly about the inner process of rejection and acceptance in his life. He does so in 2 Corinthians. At first he was praying for a quiet and undisturbed life in his work as preacher. But he learned that God wanted to prevent that he would become a proud and boasting preacher. His humiliation was necessary to make manifest to all people that the power of the gospel differs from the power and success of the human apostle. To the contrary: the power of the gospel becomes manifest through the vulnerability of its messenger, as Paul testifies himself with the following words: “To keep me from becoming conceited . . . there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:7–10).

That Paul doesn’t strive for martyrdom and death as such is very clear from the fact that sometimes, when he has the opportunity, he makes a choice for life and against

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becoming a martyr at that moment.4 In his letter to the Philippian Christians he tells them that he doesn’t know what to choose: death or life? “For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of you for your progress and joy in the faith” (Philippians 1:21–25).

Was Paul really sometimes in a position to make a choice? We know of two occasions in which he made this choice for life and against martyrdom. When Festus proposed that he should go to Jerusalem and be tried there, Paul knew that he would be murdered on his way to the temple city. Being murdered meant to him: entrance in the kingdom of life! Nevertheless, he chose for life by making his appeal to the Emperor (Acts 25,10–11). A meaningless appeal, since he was innocent. What did he try to achieve by his appeal? It spared his life for a few years! A dangerous trip by sea followed this appeal to the Emperor. It would have been easy for Paul to enter the kingdom of God through the depths of the waters. Without his advice the ship should have been wrecked! But Paul, with the utmost exertion, gave advice and help to all the people aboard with the result that they reached land in safety (Acts 27). So Paul continued in chains, but he was alive! He had made his choice, not against martyrdom, but for life. It is clear that for Paul the advancement of the gospel is the matter that counts, not his personal fate. He is in service as a messenger, and he carefully calculates what will most advance his task The result can be to his own advantage or disadvantage, but that is not what matters to him. “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength” (Philippians 4:11–13).

We began our discussion by asking whether Paul in his acceptance of suffering is not an example of religious masochism. The answer is negative. There is one point at which we can demonstrate very clearly that he is in any case not a victim of the type of masochism that finds its origin in feelings of guilt. Paul himself had been a persecutor of Christians. He regrets that later on, and for the rest of his life. He humbles himself as the “worst of sinners” and as a display of God’s mercy on sinners in this world (1 Timothy 1:16). It is quite remarkable that he never makes a connection between his former sins as a persecutor and his being persecuted himself. How easily he could have made this connection by seeing his sufferings as penance for his misdeeds against Christians. One time he says that his sufferings complement the sufferings of Christ (Colossians 1:24), but he never speaks about his suffering as deserved punishment for his past sins as persecutor. This can only be explained by the fact that for Paul the forgiveness and grace of Christ are real and sufficient. He doesn’t have to feel himself to be guilty any longer, although he feels himself humble among his brothers and sisters. Where there is no feeling of guilt, there is no penitential suffering.

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The attitude of Paul in his suffering is that of a minister, a servant: willing to endure the hardships of his task, trying to make them profitable for his Master and his message. 4. MOTIVES FOR ACCEPTING MARTYRDOM For Paul martyrdom is not an unavoidable risk, but he turns it into positive gain. In the first place he sees himself as an example for the Christian road to living in the presence of God. He leads us on this road, for we all have to endure hardships to enter the kingdom of God. “Look at me!” Paul says. “Don’t forget my chains” (Colossians 4:18). And to Timothy he says: “Don’t be ashamed of me his prisoner; but join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God” (2 Timothy 1:8). Paul has Jesus Christ as his example: he fills up in his flesh “what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24). And from prison he writes to the Philippians the song about Christ who as an example for us “humbled himself and became obedient to death” (Philippians 2:8). In the second place Paul turns his sufferings into gain and benefit for the propagation of the Gospel. As messenger he takes care that the gospel is known by the entire “palace guard and by everyone else” and they learn that he is “in chains for Christ” (Philippians 1:13). To Agrippa he says frankly: “I pray God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am, except for these chains” (Acts 26:29). At sea he tells the people who are in utmost distress: “Last night an angel of the God whose I am and whom I serve stood beside me and said `Do not be afraid, Paul. You must stand trial before Caesar; and God has graciously given you the lives of all who sail with you” (Acts 27:23–24).

In Rome Paul preaches the kingdom of God, “boldly and without hindrance” to all who come to see him in his prison (Acts 28:31). In the third place, Paul gives an example of role-acceptance. He not only suffers his chains, but seeing that it is his task to be a messenger in chains, he accepts that in a wonderful manner. He even makes jokes about his situation, when he asks a favor from Philemon. With irony he appeals to his having reached not only the dignity of an old man, but also that of a prisoner (Philemon 9) and although in his prison he is dependent on gifts, he playfully asks Philemon to charge him for the costs of Onesimus’s desertion and solemnly makes that promise in his own handwriting (Philemon 18–19).5 5. THE RELIGIOUS FRAMEWORK The motives for Paul’s attitude function within an overarching religious framework. This framework is specific to Paul and cannot be deduced from a general theory about martyrdom in religions as such. Viewed superficially it would seem that it is sufficient to look at only one section in the Handbook of Psychology for the description of the mental attitude of religious martyrs. At first sight Christian martyrs have

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much in common with Jewish martyrs, and both of these in turn have much in common with Islamic martyrs. In fact, however, the differences become larger when we take a closer look at the facts. Recent history teaches us clearly the difference between the suffering martyr of the Jewish and the Christian religions and the fighting, self-destructive martyr of Islam or Buddhism. There are also many differences between different martyrs within one religion. The situation of Stephen and James is quite different from that of Paul. James tried at first to avoid conflict with and persecution by his countrymen, and it is only much later that he was willing to die for his Lord at the moment when there was no escape. We cannot limit ourselves to one single, generalized section in the Handbook of Psychology about martyrdom and its implied mental attitude. Can we nevertheless learn a general lesson from Paul’s martyrdom? I think so! In Paul we see how important the religious framework is in the overall structure of his mental attitudes. Nobody can understand Paul’s attitude in his martyrdom without accepting the worldview within which he lived, his convictional framework. Even if someone would deny the reality of that framework in a metaphysical sense and would deny the reality of God and of the resurrection of Jesus, he cannot deny that for Paul these are the decisive factors in his life. He can only be explained by accepting the validity of this framework for his conduct. Thus a psychological treatment of Paul, if needed, could be neither successful nor scientifically justified apart from studying his religious worldview. This will be the same with Jewish or Islamic martyrs! It is the difference in religious frameworks that produces different types of martyrs. What specifically is Paul’s worldview? We can summarize the decisive components of his convictional world in the following points, limiting ourselves to that which is of immediate importance for his conduct as a martyr. The criterion for selection is that Paul speaks about some issues with exaltation, with a high level of emotion. We find in his letters doxological exclamations and poetical eruptions of religious emotionality. At which moment do we find this exalted kind of writing? First, when Paul speaks about God the Creator “who is for ever praised, Amen” (Romans 1,25; cf. 2 Corinthians 1,3; 11,31; Ephesians 1,3) and about Christ “who is God over all, for ever praised, Amen” (Romans 9,5). From God and through God “are all things. To him be the glory for ever, Amen” (Romans 11,36).6 For Paul this is not abstract. He believes in a God who is unseen but active in the world and judging mankind. For Paul this history is the reality of Gods anger (Romans 1,18ff.) and grace (Romans 3,21ff.), leading to his final judgment and to the eternal Kingdom of heaven. Second, for Paul the resurrection of Jesus is as real as his blindness near Damascus after Jesus spoke to him from heaven. And his letters become poetic when he speaks about this heavenly Lord: “God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2,9–11).7

Third, Paul speaks in an exalted way about the Spirit who works in the hearts of the believers. Through him we will grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is

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the love of Christ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3,18–19). For Paul his religious worldview is proven by his own life story. Conversely, when we speak specifically about his martyrdom we find that he viewed the glorious way in which he performed his task during his sufferings as giving testimony to the reality of which he was convinced through faith. His martyrdom must not only be understood in the light of Paul’s belief in God’s mighty deeds, it is in turn also an independent demonstration of the grace and power of Paul’s Lord. It is impossible for psychology or theology to scientifically confirm this idea, i.e. that Paul’s martyrdom is proof of the truth of Jesus’ resurrection and of his heavenly guidance in this world. Of course, psychology and theology can investigate whether there are signs of mental illness or theological inconsistency that would keep us from taking him and his ideas seriously.8 Is Paul consistent or confused in his convictions? Is there a congruency between his mental attitude and his life or not? Does he have a certain spontaneous power to convince his environment and is he accepted by his friends as “normal,” or is he dysfunctional in his own surroundings? Those questions can be asked and to a certain degree be answered. But assuming that this inquiry would lead to the opinion that Paul does not suffer from mental illness or logical inconsistency, we still have to answer the question as to the metaphysical truth of his convictions. It is scientifically sound to be aware of this fact. The logical stalemate that exists at this point was also present in Paul’s own lifetime. When Paul spoke to King Agrippa to explain his position and his work, the Roman governor Festus interrupted his defense by shouting: “You are out of your mind, Paul! Your great learning is driving you insane!” In his reply Paul then makes an appeal to the king to prove that he is not insane: the king knows about the prophets and how their prophecies are fulfilled in the Gospel. But Agrippa answers: “Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?” Whereupon Paul replies: “Short time or long – I pray God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am, except for these chains.” (Acts 26,24–29). At the end of this chapter a short word has to be said about the current theory that we must understand Paul sociologically and no longer psychologically. Malina and Neyrey (1996) in their book about Paul, subtitled An archeology of ancient personality, analyze the passages in which Paul speaks about himself as fitting into the ancient practice of the Encomium. This in fact is the normal role-model for a person in antiquity. The more a person fits into the standards of his society, the more important his personality. Also Paul seems to accommodate himself to the table of honor that was valid in his social environment. Not only about his birth and education, but also about his “fortune” does he speak in a positive way. But what about the “deeds of ill fortune”? Malina and Neyrey (1996) write at this point: “Although acknowledging his ill fortune, Paul maintains that God defended his honor in these challenges and repeatedly vindicated him.”9

The authors make a comparison with the lists of trials philosophers overcame that “are mentioned as proof of the excellence of their teaching.”10 And they conclude

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that “his deeds of ill fortune actually serve as proof of his ultimate good fortune and favor from God.” In this way Malina and Neyrey try to fit the martyrdom of Paul into their Encomium-theory – but it does not actually fit into that scheme. It is precisely in his sufferings and not in the overcoming of his sufferings that Paul demonstrates the way of the Kingdom. We cannot understand his suffering psychologically without also looking at his religious convictions. Nor can we substitute sociological conventions for psychological motives. Suffering did not belong to the collective ideals of the original disciples of Jesus. Christians had to learn the necessity of entering the kingdom through suffering. It is in his martyrdom that Paul makes it very clear that he cannot be fully explained by sociology or psychology without first taking into account his religious worldview. For Paul this worldview is not the result of personal choices or social conventions – it is the result of his life having been turned upside down by heavenly realities. NOTES 1

2 3

4

5

6

7 8 9 10

Cf. Segal (1990), pp. 285–300. Segal discusses Paul’s conversion and his conclusion is: “Two problematic issues appear to have curtailed recent psychological investigation into conversion. The first is the realization that historical data rarely is appropriate for psychoanalytic or therapeutic discussion, so the most it can do is illustrate some particular facility of the given psychoanalytic notational scheme for describing experience. The second factor is the realization that the term conversion is culturally relative. Each group defines what it means by conversion; even ecstatic conversions seem to be behaviours learned within a community, though the content of visions may have individual or unique aspects. As a consequence, a great many contemporary studies of conversion have taken a sociological approach, defining conversion as a change in religious community, as I have done in describing Paul.” 1 Corinthians 4,9–13; 2 Corinthians 4,8–9; 6,4–10; 11,23–28; 12,10. See for the life of Paul and the place of his sufferings in that life van Bruggen (2001) and van Bruggen (2005). At this point Paul moves along the lines of Judaism (see H. Maccoby’s chapter “Martyrdom: Theological and psychological aspects. Martyrdom in Judaism”; in this book). See for Paul’s positive attitude towards the meaning of his suffering also H.W.M. Ta´jra´’s chapter “Spiritual, human and psychological dimensions of St. Paul’s martyrdom” in this book. Maccoby (this book) mentions the element of vicarious atonement of martyrdom as absent in Judaism and as important in Christianity. His only example, however, is Jesus Christ himself. In any case Paul does not consider his martyrdom as vicarious or atoning. Cf. Galatians 1,5; Ephesians 3,21; Philippians 4,20; 1 Timothy 1,17; 2 Timothy 4, 18 and many other passages where Paul speaks about the “glory” of God. Cf. 1 Timothy 3,16. Cf. Bonaparte (1957); Theissen (1983); Van Spanje (1999). Malina and Neyrey (1996), p. 211. Cf. Fitzgerald (1988), p. 114ff.

REFERENCES Bonaparte, M. (1957). Eros, Saül de Tarse et Freud. Revue française de psychanalyse, 21, 23–33. Fitzgerald, J.T. (1988). Cracks in the earthen vessel: An examination of the catalogues of hardships in the Corinthian correspondence (SBL Dissertation Series 99). Atlanta: Scholars Press.

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Malina B. J., & Neyrey J. H. (1996). Portraits of Paul: An archeology of ancient personality. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Segal, A. F. (1990). Paul the convert: The apostolate and apostasy of Saul the pharisee. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Theissen, G. (1983). Psychologische Aspekte paulinischer Theologie. Göttingen: VandenHoeck & Ruprecht. Van Bruggen, J. (2001). Paulus: Pionier voor de Messias van Israël. Kampen: Kok Van Bruggen, J. (2005). Paul: Pioneer for Israel’s Messiah (Trans. van Bruggen [2001]). Phillipsburg: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company. Van Spanje, T. E. (1999). Inconsistency in Paul? A critique of the work of Heikki Räisänen (WUNT 2, 110). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

CHAPTER 11 SPIRITUAL, HUMAN, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL DIMENSIONS OF ST. PAUL’S MARTYRDOM

Msngr. H.W.M. TÁJRÁ Ordre de Sainte Marie la Vierge, Paris, France

1. THE PERSECUTION AND MARTYRDOM OF CHRISTIANS: AN ENDURING PROCESS Throughout all Christian history, persecution and martyrdom have been a perennial fact of life. New Testament is replete with pertinent references. Already, St. John the Baptist, the great Precursor of the Messiah had been decapitated on the order of the Tetrarch, Herod Antipas, for having denounced that ruler’s unlawful marriage to Herodius.1 This violent death pointed directly to Jesus’ own sacrifice: His death on the Cross for the Redemption of sinful humanity. During the years between 60 and 70 AD St. James the Lesser,2 and Saints Peter and Paul3 were martyred: the enemies of holy Church believing quite wrongly that slaying the leadership would destroy the nascent Christian community. The Practice of Christianity was illicit in the whole territory of the Roman Empire until Emperor Constantine the Great converted to the Faith in 312 AD.4 Thus the first three centuries of Christianity were marked by massive persecutions and consequent martyrdoms as successive Roman Emperors sought to destroy the Faith by murder. Down through the centuries, persecution has continued at regular intervals led by a variety of adversaries. The French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 are conspicuous examples of the total unchaining of dark Satanic forces of violence and evil in the world. These cataclysmic political events were marked by massive religious persecutions which claimed the lives of thousands of New Martyrs. including the respective, anointed monarchs of both countries, King Louis XVI of France and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. The 20th century Church has known the greatest number of martyrs since the Roman persecutions. The century started with the Armenian Holocaust of 1915 perpetrated by Muslim Turkey and ended with the Timorese Genocide of the 1990s 115 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 115–124. © 2007 Springer.

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wrought by Javanese Muslims in the name of some jihad or other. Even as we speak in this year of grace 2002, about 250.000.000 Christians are undergoing persecution and many are being martyred in various parts of the world at the hands of various sorts of persecutors, both political and religious.5 In examining St. Paul’s martyrdom it would be safe to say that unfortunately his death was not an isolated act of violence, but a very early example in a long history of death and destruction. The great heavenly vision of St. John the Divine which he had on the island of Patmos in the year 95 AD, scarcely thirty years after St. Paul’s death, is recorded in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. This great spiritual writing provides us with a clear view into the nascent Christian community’s understanding of cosmic war, persecution and martyrdom. It is a text which greatly helps the modern reader to understand the spiritual and psychological ambience surrounding St. Paul’s martyrdom and the early Christian community’s understanding of it. St. John, author of the sublime Gospel which bears his name, was caught up in the second great persecution of Christians which occurred under Emperor Domition who reigned from 81 to 96 AD. Domition continued Nero’s policy of developing the Emperor-cult and taking on the title of Lord and God (dominus et dues). Such an assumption of divinity was clearly unacceptable to the monotheistic faith and practice of the Christian community. The Book of Revelation alludes in many places to the sufferings of Christians because of their faith in the one-true God. In the passage below from Revelation 12 the description of Satan’s cosmic war against the faithful. The dragon, of course, is Satan – the incarnation of all the forces of evil in the world. His servant is Caesar, who in assuming the title of God places himself in conflict to God Himself.6 “Now war arose in Heaven Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon: and the dragon and his angels fought. but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in Heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan. the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the whole earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (. . .) Rejoice then, o Heaven and you that dwell therein! But woe to you, o earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short! And when the dragon saw that he had been thrown down to the earth, he pursued the woman who had borne the male child.7 But the woman was given the two wings of the great eagle that she might fly from the serpent into the wilderness, to a place where she is to be nourished for a time . . . The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman, to sweep her away with the flood. But the earth came to the help of the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed the river which the dragon had poured forth from his mouth. Then the dragon was angry with the woman, and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus.”

2. ST. PAUL’S ACCUSERS AND THE INDICTMENT AGAINST HIM The passage from Revelation 12 above contains two words essential to our understanding of St. Paul’s martyrdom.

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The first word is the Greek noun ho katégoros, which denotes the accuser, the one who denounces. This is the person who brings forth an accusation or a list of accusations before the proner judicial authorities in view of obtaining the defendant’s formal condemnation and punishment. The word can take on the idea of a betrayer when the accuser comes from the defendant’s own family or community. St. Paul’s accusers were multiple, which reflected the challenge posed by his apostolic ministry to the political and religious establishment of his time. In the Acts of the Apostles St. Luke has given a clear and detailed list of the charges laid against the Apostle; charges which were many and variegated. Let us look at some examples. In Acts 16, 19–21 we learn that St. Paul’s accusers were slaveholders at Philippi who dragged him and his fellow missionary, Silas, before the magistrates of that city, accusing the two of causing a disturbance within the municipal confines and of advocating practices which they contended were unlawful for Roman citizens to accept or follow. The Latin text reads “non licet nobis suscipere neque facere cum simis Romani” (“They advocate customs which it is not lawful for us Romans to accept or practice”) This was quite a dangerous accusation because its real sense was that Paul and Silas were drawing men away from the cult of the Emperor to the worship of the one true God and His only begotten Son. As the Latin text states. this was something “non licet.” It was a direct challenge to the dignity, authority, and power of the reigning Emperor. In Acts 17, 5–9, the accusers were members of the Jewish community of Thessalonica, a grouping juridically recognized first under the Roman Republic and then again under the Principate. The accusations were fundamentally the same as at Philippi, but they were more forcefully articulated. The Apostles were alleged to be malefactors who were turning the whole world upside down. In so doing, they were alleged to have specifically broken the decreta Caesaris, the imperial edicts by claiming that there was another king (regem alium), namely Jesus Christ. The proclamation of another king was a dangerous challenge to the Principate it was a charge of laesum-maiestatis, and this crime, first degree treason, was punishable by death. In Acts 18, 12–17, we learn of more legal problems for St. Paul, this time at Corinth. Here the accusers were once again Jews and the principal charge was that of persuading people to worship God in a way that breaks the law. The expression “against the law” ( para ton nomon = contra legem) was intentionally vague and so it could designate at one and the same time both the old Mosaic Law and its interpretation – which the Principate recognized as constitutive for the Jewish politeuma and whose use allowed it legal recognition, as well as designating the decreta Caesaris in matters of honor due to the Emperor. The answer of Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia, to the charges brought forth in his proconsular tribunal was to dismiss them, thereby indicating that he believed the accusations to refer to Jewish and not imperial law. As such the charges could not be subsumed under the heading of a crimen laesum maiestatis.

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In Acts 19, 23–41, members of the craftsmen’s guild at Ephesus, whose profession involved producing cultic objects to accompany the worship of the goddess Artemis,8 formulated charges that St. Paul’s preaching threatened not only the goddess’ cult in that city, one of the largest in the Roman Empire, but also the whole established religious order in the Roman world. Once again St. Paul’s monotheistic teachings were deemed a threat to the turbid form of polytheism prevalent in the Principate upon which the authority of the ruling dynasty was to a very great extent dependent. Finally in Acts 21, 27–29, we have the account of the Apostle’s arrest in Jerusalem and the beginning of the uninterrupted juridical process that would end years later in his martyrdom. The accusations here came from diaspora Jews, resident in the Roman Province of Asia whose chief city was Ephesus. The charge was of preaching against Old Testament law and customs and of profaning the Jerusalem temple by inviting a non-Jew, Trophimus of Ephesus, within its reserved precincts. Quite obviously the most lethal and psychologically effective accusations in all the above list for any Roman judge was the charge that St. Paul, a native-born Roman citizen, had committed the crime of laesum-maiestatis. Turning men away from the cult of the Emperor and preaching another king were acts which no Roman legal instance could ignore as it amounted to a direct challenge to the very ideological foundation on which the authority of the whole Principate and of its reigning Julio-Claudian dynasty rested. A Roman citizen, like St. Paul, would have his day in court even on such a grievous indictment. He could appeal an unfavorable verdict to a higher court, a right of which St. Paul availed himself when he cried out in Festus’ court in Caesarea: “Caesarem appello,” demanding thereby that Emperor Nero hear his case in Rome itself. Nonetheless a condemnation on a treason charge would automatically mean a sentence of death by decapitation.9 3. THE EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS: ST. PAUL’S MEDITATION ON LIFE AND DEATH Let us now examine the second word capital to our study. This is the word hé martyria. In jurisprudence, this term designates a testimony or a witness. In Christian tradition it is the act of offering the truth of Holy Faith from Holy Scriptures. The martyr then is first of all the one who confesses Jesus as the world’s Redeemer. It is a divinely inspired office as St. Matthew teaches us in his Gospel when he relates Jesus’ own words to His disciples: “When they deliver you up, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say; for it is not you who speak, but the spirit of your Father speaking through you.”10

As loving Jesus and His divine message of peace and reconciliation and witnessing to Him as the world’s Redeemer was so dangerous in the First Century, as it is now in our time, the word hé martyria quickly came to mean the violent terrestrial death of the witness as a result of his testimony. Spiritually speaking the conditions of martyrdom are those of charity. An example from the New Testament of this sense of

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charity and forgiveness towards the persecutors and towards those doing the actual killing, are the last words of the Protomartyr St. Stephen, who was condemned at Jerusalem by the High Priest and the Sanhedrin to be stoned for witnessing to the heavenly vision he had of the Son of Man: “As they were stoning him,” St. Luke writes, “Stephen prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And he knelt down and cried with a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ And when he had said this he fell asleep.”11 The martyr has a deep, continuous relationship with God, in mind, body and soul. It is God who gives him the power to witness and to remain steadfast until the end. Exempt from this spirituality is any sense of retaliation, vengeance, or holy war. By his Christian vocation, the martyr is called upon to pray for his persecutor. Therein lies the sanctity of the martyr, the culminating point of the process of sanctification which the Christian believer lives throughout his earthly existence. Hé martyria is the foundation of the Church. The excellence of martyrdom in the Christian tradition is that this ultimate form of witness nurtures the community, strengthens it and spreads the life-giving Holy Gospel even further because the faithful are encouraged to imitate the virtues and courage of the martyr. Jesus summarized the spiritual and human dynamics of martyrdom in His teaching on the Mount as recorded by St. Matthew: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in Heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.”12

St. Paul’s condemnation and martyrdom are very representative of the Divine Master’s teaching in His great Sermon on the Mount. The holy Apostle himself is well aware of the Messiah’s teachings and their applicability to his own circumstances. He gives some of his views in his Epistle to the Philippians, which was composed during his first Roman imprisonment about the year 60 AD, a period of house arrest which followed his appeal to Caesar and corresponded to the period in which he was awaiting his case to be heard. I have written extensively about the historical and legal aspects of the Apostle’s two Roman imprisonments in The Trial of St. Paul (1989) and in The Martyrdom of St. Paul (1994), so I shall restrict myself here to giving a brief appreciation of the spiritual and personal aspects of these events. St. Paul writes: “I want you to know, brethren, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the Gospel, so that it has become known throughout the whole Praetorian Guard and to all the rest that my imprisonment is for Christ; and most of the brethren have been made confident in the Lord because of my imprisonment, and are much more bold to speak the word of God without fear.”13

St. Paul’s arrest and his lengthy confinement, rather than terrorizing the Christian community at Rome or elsewhere into silence and renunciation, actually encouraged it to proclaim even more audaciously the holy Word of God, and this without fear or

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anxiety. The Greek word which St. Paul uses here to describe his state of mind and spirit is the word aphobos. This term designates both a spiritual serenity as well as the psychological state of being totally free of anxiety or panic. It describes very appropriately the state of St. Paul’s mind as an elderly, though still quite active, state prisoner. St. Paul’s aphobia, his serenity and freedom from anxiety, is expressed again a few verses later when he writes: “It is my eager expectation and hope that I shall not at all be ashamed, but that with full courage now as always Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death.”14

For St. Paul, the essence of his Apostolic ministry was to always magnify Christ in thought, word and deed. His words express his total, encompassing love for Christ as well as his own hopes of participating in the divine glory. At the moment, even in confinement, this glorification of Christ is made manifest by a corporal, psychological and spiritual expression of identification with the sufferings as well as with the glory of the Divine Master. This sense of total immersion in Christ is in fact enhanced by his imprisonment. The confinement itself is transformed by the total faith the Apostle has and by the exertion of his powerful mind and intellect into a sanctifying experience. For the Apostle both to live and to die are expressions of this total love for the Redeemer, a love tangibly expressed “in my body,” the Greek text reading here: en to somati mou. The love is therefore somatic, that is it is corporeal as distinguished from the purely psychical. The soma is the seat of the tangible and sensible in human activities. By leading a holy life, there is a more intimate communion with Christ. In Christian tradition, the soma is not just the seat of that which is physical: it becomes a holy temple because Christ is magnified therein. To attain such an advanced and intimate state of communion with the divine, St. Paul prays for confidence and trust (the Latin word being fiducia) and for courage, expressed in the original Greek by the term parrésia, which implies courage to speak boldly. The soma reaches its plenitude by the presence of Christ within it; therefore the soma becomes an ikonos, the icon of the Savior because in the body of the Apostle the radiant and eternal glory of Christ is reflected, although still imperfectly; the perfect coming only with the total dissolving of the Apostle into the essence of the Divine Master. So the Apostle can write in the very next verse: “For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.”15

The Apostle understands himself as being totally immersed in — and indissolubly joined to — Christ. He uses the word life (zoé) here not only to designate corporeal existence, but the total holistic life phenomenon: the zoé of the mind and spirit as well as the body are centered in Christ, fed by His teaching and redeemed by His salvific ministry. St. Paul contemplates death, not, of course, as a finality, but as a transitus from the earthly to the heavenly. Death can thus be defined as tó kerdos, meaning a gain or advantage moral benefit, or spiritual reward. Death is therefore the

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total dissolution of the person Paul into the divine essence of the Son of Man. As such it is kerdos, a gain. So he says: “If it is to be life in the flesh (the Greek text reads here en té sarki, the sarx being the physical body) that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. (the Greek verb which St. Paul uses here is analyo, to depart in the sense of an untying, dissolving all earthly ties in order to return to Christ). But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.”16

It is clear from the above verses that St. Paul personally would prefer this dissolving in Christ. His Apostolic ministry is, however, a sacred task and so necessity would require him to remain in this earthly life so that the Church at Philippi, and others as well, progress in faith and attain the plenitude of life in Christ. 4. THE IMMINENT APPROACH OF MARTYRDOM: ST. PAUL’S FINAL MEDITATION New Testament has an eloquent description of St. Paul, in the evening of his life. These are fragments of his sentences contained in the II Epistle to Timothy 4, 6–8. Much of this Epistle is deutero-Pauline, that is to say that its final, canonical form was compiled after the Apostle’s death by his first and second generation disciples. It contains his authentic words, or sententiae, as well as other material reflecting the faith and practice, the cares and concerns of the deutero-Pauline community. St. Paul’s final meditation was inspired during his second and final Roman imprisonment. His imprisonment was much more severe than the house arrest of his first imprisonment (see illustration). This time the Apostle is in a dungeon awaiting execution. Possibly the greatest painting on this subject is that of Rembrandt van Rijn which hangs in the Fine Arts Museum in Stuttgart. Only Rembrandt could have captured the aged Apostle in such a dramatic way, sitting on his pallet in the dungeon, meditating on his whole life and approaching death. The eyes are so expressive that they tell the whole story of St. Paul: they are literally a mirror into his soul. The words from the II Epistle to Timothy could very well serve as a commentary to the great painting: “For I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that Day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.”17

Once again, as in the Epistle to the Philippians, St. Paul uses the word analyo, the untying from corporeal existence. He sees his death in this manner: a gradual disconnection with that which is earthly, of this world. St. Paul’s life is being poured out as a libation. The Greek verb here is spendo: to offer a libation or drink offering. Unlike the classical Greek writers, Christian writers use the verb only in the passive voice. The Christian, here it is St. Paul, as God’s servant is offered up as a libation, that is he is called upon to shed his blood as a witness in testimony to the one true God and His only begotten Son. This emulation of

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Christ’s own martyrdom allows the Christian martyr to accede to the glory of the resurrected Master to become dissolved from this life, from the terrestrial sarx, in order to become immersed in the eternal and glorious Body of Christ. Christ is termed here, the righteous judge. This is the iustus iudex, the divine and omnipotent judge, who is contrasted to the unjust judge, personified in this instance by Nero and his court system which sentenced the Apostle to earthly death. A human court, presided by the unjust judge, sentences St. Paul to death by decapitation; the sword, a weapon of violence, is their instrument. On the contrary, from the just judge, St. Paul receives the crown of righteousness. Righteousness here refers to God’s justice, which can never err. The crown is a powerful, mystical symbol of the eschatological reward of eternal life awaiting St. Paul and also all who have loved the advent of the divine master in salvation history. 5. THE SPIRITUAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL RECEPTION OF ST. PAUL’S MARTYRDOM It is clear from St. Paul’s final meditation that the multiple dimensions of his arrest, imprisonment, condemnation, and martyrdom, cannot be fully comprehended, except within the framework of the Christian community. The final question in our overview is then how the deutero-Pauline community received St. Paul’s martyrdom spiritually and psychologically. The word “reception” takes on a specific shade of meaning when used in the context of Christian tradition. It signifies here the psychological process whereby the deutero-Pauline Church, that is the communities founded by St. Paul himself or by his immediate associates and composed of men and women who had to a very great extent known the Apostle directly or were in epistolary contact with him, as well as the subsequent Church down through the ages, spiritually and intellectually understood his violent end and how they psychologically absorbed and reacted to it. Reception implies, too, an act of transmission. How then did successive generations transmit the story of Paul’s offering of himself as a libation in the context of that dynamic which we call Holy Tradition? One has to remember that St. Paul’s martyrdom was not an isolated event. We have already noted the violent death of the great Precursor, St. John the Baptist. This, of course, as I said earlier, prefigured Jesus’ own death. The Acts of the Apostles record in the first Christian decade alone, the martyrdoms of the Deacon and ProtoMartyr, St. Stephen18 as well as that of St. James the Greater, the first of the Twelve Apostles to perish in witness to holy Faith.19 During the single decade of the 60’s, the entire leadership of the nascent Church, St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. James the Lesser were killed, leaving the three biggest Churches, those of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome bereft of their Founders. Many more of the faithful were killed in the Neronion persecution which broke out in 64 AD, that is concurrently to the deaths of the leading Apostles. We have to think of these cataclysmic events as a very widespread persecution, an attempt at genocide, not in terms of individual assassinations of conspicuous members of a yet illicit organization.

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There is no trace of collective denial in the early Church’s reaction to this massacre. The phenomenon of collective denial as we understand it today, is a modern political problem of which the best example in Christian History is the collective denial by the government of Turkey which totally refuses to accept its blatant responsibility for the Armenian Holocaust of 1915, despite all the historical evidence proving the guilt of that country in this total act of evil. The Christian community’s immediate reaction to the slaying of so much of its leadership and so many of the ordinary faithful was one of stupefaction. It was simply too difficult for the community to absorb the deaths of the Apostles and the ghastly deaths of so many brethren. The collective psyche was overwhelmed. Thus the event of St. Paul’s martyrdom was internalized by a bewildered and consternated community. The martyrdom was prayerfully received, but received silently. The shedding of the blood of God’s holy servant on earth could only be mentally understood, worked out psychologically, received and transmitted in cosmic terms, that is as part of the struggle between the forces of good and evil, between God and Satan, between Christ and the Antichrist with whom Nero, the slayer of the Holy Apostle, was identified. As we saw at the beginning of this brief study, the reception of St. Paul’s martyrdom as well as the deaths of his fellow-believers could only be understood from an eschatological perspective, i.e., placed in the framework of the coming Apocalypse about which St. John wrote in the Book of Revelation. About the second generation after the Apostle’s death there sprang up very gradually – but very intensely lived – a liturgical celebration of the martyrdom. At the same time the Christian community began the construction of the first rudimentary niche or cella over the tomb of St. Paul at the ancient Roman cemetery running along the Via Ostia, outside the walled city. These liturgical celebrations begat in turn a considerable amount of Christian Apocryphal literature concerning the life and death of the great Apostle. These types of writings were popular between the fourth and sixth Centuries. Works such as the Acta Pauli, the Acta Petri et Pauli, and the Martyrium Sancti Pauli, were produced or translated into such languages as Greek, Latin, Armenian, Syriac, and Coptic. Due to their late dating and somewhat heteroclite content, i.e., a mixture of a historical nucleus with much legendary accretion, they were never received by the historical Patriarchal Sees as scripture. They do provide, however, a very useful perception of how the Byzantine period received the deaths of the Apostles. At present, the commemoration of the martyrdoms of St. Peter and St. Paul is a major feast-day, celebrated annually on 29 June. In Rome, of course, there stands the splendid Basilica of St. Paul without the Walls over the tomb of the Apostle. The Basilica was first built in the fourth Century under Emperor Constantine and later re-built under Emperor Theodosian at the end of the fourth Century. The construction and reconstruction of first the rudimentary cella and then the major Basilicas over the tomb of St.Paul testify to the continuing reception of his martyrdom in Holy Tradition and how much the soul and psyche of the Christian Church was impacted by St. Paul’s martyrdom.

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NOTES 1

St. Matthew 14,3–12; St. Mark 6, 17–29 (The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version [1953]. New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons). 2 Eusebius of Caesaria. Historia Ecclesiastica II.23 3 Ibid. II.25. 4 Lactantius. De Mortibus Persecutorum XLIV; Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica X.4.16. 5 Figure provided in the documentation of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, London: Annual Report for the year 2001. 6 The most beautiful artistic representation of this cosmic war is the 14th century Tenture de l’apocalypse. In this tapestry, one of the most sublime works of Western Sacred Art, now in the Chateau d’Angers (Angers, France), the viewer sees the seven-headed dragon (representing Satan at his most powerful) generating the seven-headed beast (Rome at its most powerful) who then proceeds to wage war on the faithful and especially on the Woman and Child. Hennequin of Bruges who painted the cartons for the Tenture fully penetrated the psychology of the Book of Revelation and represented in a visible and tangible artistic work the psyche of St. John the Theologian. 7 The reference here is to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the Christ-Child. The Blessed Virgin is Mother of the Church, so the “woman” also refers to the visible Church, the Ecclesia, which is a feminine figure attested as such in Christian art. 8 In the Roman pantheon Artemis took on the name of Diana. 9 Acts of the Apostles 25, 11 10 St. Matthew 10, 19. 11 Acts of the Apostles 7, 59–60. It is interesting to note that St. Paul was present at St. Stephen’s martyrdom and approving of it. 12 St. Matthew 5, 10–12. 13 Philippians 1, 12–14 14 Philippians 1, 20 15 Philippians 1, 21. 16 Philippians 1, 22–24. 17 II Timothy 4, 6–8. 18 Acts of the Apostles 7, 60 19 Acts of the Apostles 12, 2.

REFERENCES Eusebius of Caesaria. (1959). Historia Ecclesiastica, I–V [Loeb Classical Library]. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lactantius. (1984). De Mortibus Persecutorum. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Tájrá, H. W. (1989). The trial of St. Paul: A juridical exegesis of the second half of the Acts of the Apostles [Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2. Reihe 35]. Tübingen: Verlag Mohr Siebeck. Tájrá, H. W. (1994). The martyrdom of St. Paul: Historical and judicial context, traditions, and legends [Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2. Reihe 67]. Tübingen: Verlag Mohr Siebeck.

PART IV MESSIANISM: THEOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS

CHAPTER 12 INTRODUCTION TO MESSIANISM Theological and psychological aspects

GERRIT GLAS University of Leiden, The Netherlands

With the issue of Messianism, we come to the most sensitive and critical subject of the present volume. No wonder, therefore, that the style of some of the authors becomes more personal and that in other chapters we find a great deal of reflection about whether and how the issue of Messianism should be addressed at all. Avi Ravitzky’s contribution is an exception to this general picture, mainly because his subject is the concept of the Holy Land, instead of Messianism per se. There are connections between the two subjects, however, not the least because the desire for the Holy Land often has been fused with Messianic hopes. Antoine Vergote, who is a retired professor of psychology of religion, theologian and psychoanalyst from Leuven (Belgium), describes the person of Jesus from three vantage points: 1. mystical experience and desire; or: from which perspective Jesus is representative of the perfect union with God? 2. moral consciousness, guilt feelings, and sin; or: from which viewpoint is it possible to see Jesus as exemplification of perfect morality? And 3. prophecy, self-consciousness and eschatology; or: from which vantage point is Jesus the representative of perfect religious disposition? Vergote follows a difficult and intriguing path. On the one hand he discards the historical criticism of Rudolf Bultmann and others; on the other hand, he also rejects the attempts of so-called psycho-theologians who seek psychological evidence for the unique religious meaning of a biblical person or concept. The interest of the psychologist of religion will never be purely scientific, according to Vergote. In the case of Jesus, it does matter whether he was a religiously original and authentic person. If Jesus qua human personality is considered original and authentic, psychology may rightly proceed with phenomenological analysis of the religious content of Jesus words and deeds and their psychological implications. This phenomenology will 127 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 125–132. © 2007 Springer.

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inevitably transcend the boundaries of scientific psychology if it is to mean anything at all. The same, Vergote says, holds for phenomena like love and guilt. In this manner, then, psychology of religion is the attempt to grasp a range of phenomena that by their nature transcend the limits of psychology proper. In fact, this ambiguity returns in each of the three perspectives just mentioned. Mysticism is marked by a certain “duality” or “bipolarity,” Vergote remarks. It does not just refer to a particular range of experiences, but rather to the experience of something which absolves itself from the experiential. The source of this experience comes from without and not from within. With this statement Vergote criticises Gnostic appropriations of divine reality which focus on origins from within, and sides with the mysticism of Jan Ruysbrock, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross who chose a perspective from without. It is clear that Vergote holds that this criticism also applies to current psychology of religion with its one-sided emphasis on the experiential and cultural aspects of religion. With respect to moral consciousness and feelings of guilt we stumble upon a similar duality, in the sense that it not easy to say whether Jesus underwent feelings of guilt. To give an affirmative answer to the question would imply that Jesus committed sin; to deny this might indicate a possibly pathological absence of moral consciousness or, as I am inclined to add, would give Jesus a superhuman status that would derogate the Christian idea of divine identification with human misery. Vergote, rightly, points out that Jesus allowed himself to be baptized, thereby indicating his willingness to repent and to ask for forgiveness of sins (Mark 1:9–11; Matthew 3:13–17; Luke 3:21–22). However, instead of focusing on Jesus’s personal consciousness of sin and his need for being cleansed of impurity, the evangelists direct our attention to Jesus’ radical identification with his people who were in need of God’s grace and renewal. The correlate of this act of humiliation finds its expression immediately afterwards, i.e., in acts which are manifestations of divine mercy, like the performing of miracles and sharing the lives of sinners and the wretched. By giving up himself and identifying with his people God gives expression to His inclination to save a fallen humanity and to show the richness of creation. Jesus’s prophetic mission, finally, also seems to be a source of confusion. As a prophet Jesus is a peculiar person. His predictions are ambiguous and not very precise at first sight: the Kingdom of God is coming, but at the same time the Kingdom is already there. Old Testament prophets and even John the Baptist announced divine judgement and wrath as future events, although as we have seen in the previous section these future events were already “sensed” in the present. In Jesus’ preaching, however, past, present, and eschatological future seem to merge in one perspective: hence, the notion of the presence of the Kingdom. These peculiarities and ambiguities raw our attention to the uniqueness of Jesus. This uniqueness is not of a kind that invites one to imitate his personality. For it is not his personality, nor Jerusalem, or even the Holy Land, that occupies the centre of the gospels. It is the world as a whole that is the object of Jesus’ teachings. This world is God’s working place, waiting for renewal, brought about by His mercy.

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To summarise, Jesus life suggests that there is conception of presence beyond the ordinary dualities of presence and absence, presence and past, and/or presence and future. The reality of this merciful presence manifests itself in a sphere which one could call a “concrete beyond,” i.e., it manifests in a sphere in which, for instance, relationships flourish and loving and caring people reach beyond their limits. Psychology of religion will never be able to fully comprehend and conceptualise this “beyond,” and yet it cannot do without it either. Abraham van de Beek, professor of theology at the Free University in Amsterdam, opens the next chapter with a personal reading of the story of Jesus as told in the four gospels. What emerges from this reading are four portraits, four images of Jesus: Jesus the radical in Matthew, the more human person of Mark, the wise teacher of Luke, and the mysterious preacher of love in John. These different personalities do not allow us to completely reconstruct the personality of Jesus and combine the traits of the different portraits into one. In fact, they even prevent us from constructing a unitary image and this fact itself, van de Beek suggests, may have a deeper religious meaning. In a sense, it may indicate another dimension of “the One incomprehensible God, appearing in the man who explodes all our schemes.” There is no natural psychological bond with Jesus, according to van de Beek, neither is there a duty to behave like Jesus, i.e., as radical, wise, and mysterious as He was. There is a lot in this approach which is similar to Vergote’s. Van de Beek seems to go one or two steps further by drawing a line from the epistemological “explosion of our schemes” to the existential moment of “dying with Christ in baptism.” With this he means that the message of Jesus is oblique to natural thinking and feeling. The gospel is an offence. Van de Beek quotes the theologian van Ruler(1969) who once said that “all indwellings are accompanied by considerable struggle.” Van Ruler aimed, thereby, at the unease brought about by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Van de Beek asserts something similar about Jesus. His presence brings turmoil and conflict. Therefore, the more real the person of Jesus becomes, the more conflict there is. The unrest indicates the beginning of spiritual recovery. Therefore, the person needs to go under and, in a sense, drown in the water of baptism and to give up his self-interest and longing for earthly goods. The more unease, the closer one approaches to truth and salvation. It is interesting to notice in which way this element of unease returns in the chapter by Ravitzky on the Jewish concept of the Holy Land. Avi Ravitzky is professor of philosophy in the Department of Jewish Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His topic is the conceptual ambivalence toward the Land of Israel, giving rise to “a perpetual oscillation between desire and dread, attraction and retreat.” It is true that much more has been written – and sung – on the yearning than on fear for the land of Israel. Nevertheless, awe and fear are not absent and images about the prosperity and comforting aspects of the Holy Land were always accompanied by images of possible destruction of the people living in it, or of the temple or Jerusalem itself. Ravitzky finds evidence of this ambivalence already in late 13th century writings of Rabbi Meir of Rottenburg, and sees it returning in the

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work of 17th century Prague emigrant to Eretz Israel, Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, and in 18/19th century commentary on the Bible by Raphael Berdugo from Morocco. Ravitzky analyzes an intriguing dialectic between a modern position in which there does not exist mythical unity between sacredness and place, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the position taken by some of the authors just mentioned, in which the encounter with the concrete is also an encounter with the absolute. In this latter conception sanctity is not confined to a certain place, because it emanates from that place. The sanctity of it transcends the centre and fills all space. This approach gives a totally different view on the meaning of the sacred: defining a sacred space is now recast as a way to limit the working sphere of the sacred, instead of adding sacredness to a space. In order to live, one has to limit the intensity of divine holiness, so to speak; there is thus a need to be “delivered from the immense burden of living in an atmosphere of undiluted sanctity.” Peter Verhagen, a psychiatrist and theologian working in Meerkanten, a psychiatic hospital in the centre of the Netherlands, has the final word in this section. He addresses the concept of Messianism from the perspective of the inner image, or representation, of the person of Jesus. He first gives an overview of the three quests for the historical Jesus, and, then, delves into some detail with respect to the work and the personality of Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer was convinced that all of the portrayals of Jesus in his century were in fact products of the character of the author of each portrait. A personality “can only be awakened to life by a personality,” argued Schweitzer, and this was view managed to debilitate entirely any attempt to rescue the historical Jesus from the Jesus who was experienced as a contemporary moral and/or psychological example. Again, we are confronted with a split between the objective (the historical Jesus) and subjective (Jesus as moral example). And, again, we see an author trying to make the move toward a third position, in which the dynamic between the object under study and the investigating subject gains priority. This time, it is Schweitzer himself who observes that the best or most sensitive lives of Jesus are written by those who are driven by hate or by love. Writing about Jesus is a search for one’s real self, according to Schweitzer: the more real the self, the better the writing; the subjective and the objective are totally interwoven at this level of understanding. It was the Protestant pastor and psychoanalyst Oskar Pfister who gave a psychological interpretation of this struggle, by using the term “introjection” and by pointing to Albert Schweitzer as the perfect example of a person who had fully “introjected” Christ. Introjecting Christ means not merely contemplating about or talking to Jesus, but living Him in a demonstration of pure love. The encounter with Jesus, then, leads to a reversal of positions and roles: instead of one trying to grasp Jesus, one enables oneself to be grasped by Him. He fills one’s life instead of that a person is attempting to fill his neediness and emptiness with Him. In the second part of his paper Verhagen gives an overview of some of the object-relational and cognitive (schema-focused) models of this process of “introjection.” He also discusses three examples from the empirical literature. This shift of emphasis complicates the picture: Verhagen not only studies the factual

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images of Jesus, but also some of the psychodynamic factors contributing to the formation of these images and the theories about these factors. The image cannot be studied apart from the process of imagining, nor can this process be comprehended without a theory about it. At the end of Verhagen’s chapter, the essence of this process of imagining is captured with terms like “strangeness” and “confrontation.” Ultimately, Jesus cannot adequately be portrayed; he resists imagination. This has an alienating and transforming effect on the reader. This transformation may be conceptualized with the conceptual tools of reception aesthetics, i.e. as a sequence of processes indicated with terms such as the poiesis (making concrete the narrative of Jesus in one’s life), aisthesis (opening one’s mind), and katharsis (changing one’s moral attitude). Such transformation is also known in a Christian variant, as meditatio, compassio and imitatio.

CHAPTER 13 CASTING A PSYCHOLOGICAL LOOK ON JESUS THE MARGINAL JEW

ANTOINE VERGOTE Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium

1. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW I will first make some epistemological remarks on psychology of religion in order to justify my approach to the present study, to emphasize its limits and to explain my choice for using three categorical domains of psychology of religion as working hypotheses to Jesus: mystical experience and desire; moral consciousness, guilt feelings and sin; and prophecy, self-consciousness, and eschatology. With respect to mystical experience and desire I will first explain these concepts, discuss some authors (Jung) and consider the historical Jesus, leaving theology, even that of the early Church aside. I will argue that Jesus represents the perfect accomplishment of the love union with the God of biblical religion, i.e. the encompassing union that Christian mystics believe they may desire and which they pursue systematically. With respect to moral consciousness, guilt feelings and sin I will first analyze consciousness of pathological guilt, normal guilt, and religious sin, as well as the psychopathic absence of moral consciousness. I will then concentrate on Jesus as associating with sinners and in His complex attitude of mercy and of recalling God’s judgment. The author highlights Jesus’ superior freedom, His conflict with religious authorities, and the fact that He does not confess sin. It is concluded, with Kant, that Jesus embodies the archetype of perfect morality with regard to God. Regarding prophecy, self-consciousness, and eschatology – the typical biblical category of prophecy has been taken up by students of psychopathology and applied even to the personality of Jesus Himself in order to characterize paranoid selfcentred delusions. However, the consciousness of the historical Jesus is totally focused on God and His Kingdom, to the extent that Jesus does not speak about His own identity, trustingly accepts His apparent failure, declares ignorance of 133 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 133–152. © 2007 Springer.

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God’s future acts and interprets the hostility against Him as aimed at the Kingdom of God. Compared with this historical Jesus, the paranoiac is an awkward caricature. With regard to a phenomenology that implicitly proposes concepts which provide direction and orientation to psychology, including psychology of religion, the author concludes that Jesus is the paradigm of the ideal religious disposition. 2. JESUS AS “MARGINAL JEW” From the superb study of John P. Meier (1991, 1994) I take over the formula “marginal Jew”, in order to clarify that I will consider the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth from a psychological point of view. I will parenthesize theological interpretations which the early Church developed after its acceptance of Jesus’ resurrection as being true and which would eventually permeate later documents about the historical Jesus. As the word Eyangelion translated by “Gospel” suggests, these texts do intend to bear witness to Jesus’ divine redemptive activity. Theological insights of the first Christian Church involve the conviction that God brought His Kingdom to humans through the historical person Jesus and that He divinely elevated Jesus as a response to Jesus’ faithful and obedient complying to His intention. The early church is inclined to report the words and deeds of Jesus as factual because resurrection would otherwise be meaningless. This believing, retrospective look at Jesus as well as the different intentions of the witnesses and preachers of the new belief, however, results in a variety of approaches which in their turn anticipate later theological convictions, apologetic explanations and new expressions. Modern philological and historical research is nonetheless able to analyse and distinguish the layers of the text. I am convinced that the existence of the historical Jesus is better documented than the most famous people of antiquity are. However, notwithstanding this, at that time he was a very marginal figure in the political and cultural world of the Roman Empire and was also marginalized by the contemporary Jews who did not follow Him. We must now discard the radical scepticism R. Bultmann expressed in 1923: “We can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources have shown no interest in either, and, moreover, are fragmentary and legendary.”1 “No interest”: a comment such as this is essentially a kind of theological judgment or point of view and certainly not an objective historical statement, revealing the heavy influence of Heidegger’s thought. As well, Bultmann’s use of the term “legendary” seems to be an interpretation partly derived from the supposed intimate connection between early Christianity and Gnostic literature. 3. THE INTEREST AND LIMITED POSSIBILITY OF A PSYCHOLOGY OF JESUS AS A PERSON Before the advent of psychology as a science in the 19th century, psychological interpretations, in particular those concerning Jesus, were immersed in theological spirituality and philosophical anthropology. When psychology began to develop

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beyond the strictures of its scientific discipline into an overall new science of man, liberal Protestantism tried to explain Jesus’ message by attempting to reconstruct His inner emotions, experiences and thoughts in terms of the supposed general features of a religious person. Such psychological portraits of Jesus may make a literary career, in the way that novels do, by subdividing Jesus’ life into a series of subplots or themes. However, psychology which intends to be scientific should only interpret, not invent facts. To preclude any misconception, I will first clarify some initial questions concerning the possibility and limitation of a psychological study of Jesus. This reflection leads to the more general question of the scope and competence of psychology of religion. Finally, I will explicitly consider the interest of our study and consider what we may gain from it. Jesus comes to the foreground as a real human being made up of a physiological body, a psychic life and a rational mind. He expresses various human emotions: joy, sorrow, anger, tenderness, mercy, friendship, admiration and anxiety. Psychology for an important part consists of the examination of how, to what extent and in what sense affective dynamism influences conscious life of ideas and behaviour. On the other hand psychology that does not wish to lose itself in imaginary psychologism, also endeavours to distinguish the influence of consciously expressed ideas on affective life. In this correlational study psychology tries to observe and interpret possible contradictions, conflicts and changes (Vergote, 1997a). Human beings have an historical existence and it is precisely for this reason that psychology must contain a dimension of psychohistory (Van Belzen, 1994). That is to say, psychology, in principle, cannot confine itself to an understanding of an individual’s religious feelings and belief by referring only to the inner psychic condition and tendencies of that person. Jesus, as a real human being, is undoubtedly inheritor of the century old Jewish monotheism and its historical evolution. So He could preach regularly in the synagogues, debate about the interpretation of the Scripture with people trained in commenting on the Hebraic biblical texts. Moreover He had been educated in His homeland Galilee in the religious reawakening that retrieved the conceptions of the patriarchal time. Generally speaking, the psychological study of a person is the study of his personal development, the awakening and evolving of his self. It is by self-examination that a person appropriates or opposes ideas and affective dispositions, which are transmitted by the past. This very personal process is partly unconscious in the descriptive sense of the word. In the creative mode, conflicting circumstances can incite an explicit consciousness which further evolves into mature responsibilitytaking and the adoption of a personal stance. Because of its normally unconscious and conflictual nature the developing psychic life is exposed to unconscious repression and, hence to conflicts that are not worked through, thus resulting in more or less pathological structures. I think that I have demonstrated that psychoanalysis should liberate itself from Freud’s tendency to pathologize too generally the unconscious.2 Psychologists may nevertheless ask whether Jesus’ behaviour and speech manifest the presence and influence of instinctual-affective representations that are unconscious

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in the pathological sense of the word. The psychological analysis of an eminent religious and conflict-prone personality urges for a clinical point of view, i.e. for a wellinformed clinical psychological mindset. Due to the potential for bias, both Christian or non-Christian sentiments may easily lead to misinterpretation of Jesus’ feelings and behaviour, for instance when such sentiments, prone to substituting faith for empirical fact, or opposing faith, result in neglect of normal psychological processes and dynamics. The intense anxiety of Jesus, for instance, when He was conscious of His apparent failure and awaited His persecutors, illustrate the common anxiety that overpowers a person the moment before the effective brutal aggression, he expects, occurs. This nonpathological weakness of Jesus’ psychic body embarrasses believers who want to see Jesus triumphing over all human affective frailty with divine power. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologists have expressed methodological doubts regarding Jesus’ mental health, as they did with reference to other people who were manifestly convinced of being divinely elected for an exceptional prophetic or revolutionary task. A clinical psychologist should cautiously analyse Jesus’ self-consciousness and pay attention to speech and behaviour that might be considered symptomatic in the strict sense of the term under ordinary circumstances. And, indeed, when symptoms are evident, the psychologist may try to interpret them by applied psychoanalysis, for instance by viewing them as resolution of repressed conflict. But when no symptoms are apparent, it would be presumptuous if not preposterous to simply “explain away” the exceptional characteristics of Jesus’ personality by automatically classifying such uniqueness as pathological. The paucity of personal biographical data regarding the life of Jesus the man greatly limits the possibility of psychological interpretation and explanation. No historically valuable report exists of any life event of Jesus before the age of about 30, when He first appears on the scene as one among the Jews who had begun to follow John the Baptist. The Gospels do not even allow us to make up a schedule of His short public life span. We thus ignore the psychological family dynamics and His personal mental, affective and sexual development. However the Gospels allow us to take for granted the fact that Jesus shared the sufficiently documented Judaic rituals and belief of His homeland. What may then be the task of the psychologist who is faced with Jesus? He observes, as he is professionally trained, an individual, a fellow human being, who experiences situations of conflict. He concentrates on any available evidence for inner conflict. Professionally defined, psychological observation essentially means listening, in order to hear, and in some sense even tot “see” (i.e., through body language or concrete metaphors that evoke visual imagery) the affective dynamisms to which the person is subjected. Moreover, the psychologist is interested in hearing the type of language the person uses: affectively rich or poor, logical or confused, open or defensive and full of distrust. This psychological study, I think, should be concentrated on some basic categories which structure the biblically religious mind. I will highlight three topical categories where the psychological and religious dispositions undoubtedly meet: mystical

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experience and desire; moral consciousness and guilt feelings; and, finally, prophetic self-consciousness and eschatological preoccupation. What may we expect from this study? As I have tried to indicate, it would be a commitment to ideology rather than to science to expect a priori that psychology should be able to explain the very particular personality of Jesus and His incomparable influence on the history of religion and civilization. But contending that a psychological study demonstrates that in Jesus’ words and deeds God’s gracious acting and speaking are perceivable, would turn psychology into psycho-theology. Such a psycho-theology is a chimera from a psychological point of view; and Gnosticism from a theological point of view. Nonetheless, as is often the case in psychology and, in particular, in psychology of religion, it will be obvious that the interest in our topic is more than purely scientific. With respect to the person of Jesus we are without any doubt interested in what is original and particular to Him and we surmise that this originality and particularity must be of utmost importance for religion and for our conception of being human. Consequently we look for what is new in the ideas of this marginal Jew. If His originality is authentic and non-pathological, then one may proceed with the analysis of the proper religious content of His words. In other words, psychology then leads us to a phenomenology which – using the methods of comparison – proceeds to what may be considered as an ideal form of the ethical and/or religious way of life. This phenomenology of course transgresses purely scientific psychology, like any psychology does when it considers mental health, the capacity of loving, interpersonal communication, et cetera. 4. MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE AND DESIRE Since the early days scholars who have been positively disposed toward religion were inclined to select “experience” as its key concept, often in connection with mysticism. The work of William James, one of the founding fathers of psychology of religion, incorporates the arguments and ambiguities of this trend in a paradigmatic way. Later, Freudian psychoanalytic theory was applied to undermine the tenets of a theory that considers mystical experience as the core of religion. Freud indeed considered the biblical religion of the Father as the most spiritualized outcome of religious history. However, today many people in the West who are at the fringe of the Christian tradition, show a lively personal interest in what seems to be mysticism to them. For many of them Jesus is a beloved mystical person. The question whether Jesus was a mystic is thus presently a meaningful question. When Dionysius the Areopagite introduced the adjective mystical into Christian literature he gave it a meaning that could be taken up and developed by mystical currents of Christian spirituality and, centuries later, in modern psychology of religion. With the adjective mystical Dionysius qualified the part of his theology that elaborates the non-conceptual knowing of God, consisting of an “incomprehensible union” with Him. The words “non-conceptual”, “incomprehensible” and “union” evoke the epistemological dimension which Saint Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century identified as experience (Van Hecke, 1990) and associated with

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Christian mysticism of which he is an important initiator. Today, the word experience is largely and often loosely connected with religion, to the extent that the expression “religious experience” becomes an ecumenical melting pot for all kinds of personal involvement with religion. We hear people speaking of religious experience, the experience of faith, and the experience of the divine or of God. The word experience highlights the personal, subjective appropriation of religious content. Therefore, the expression “religious experience” has come to naturally include an interest in mysticism, understood as happily effectuated religious experience. Thus, the expression “religious experience” refers implicitly to a divine realm that is not present in the person’s usual immediate awareness. In this context, the word mysticism signifies a duality which structures the combination of “experience” and “religious.” However, with regard to the interest in mysticism scholars often emphasize the subjective side to the exclusion or underappreciation of what theology considers as the ultimate, inherently “other-than-human” side. So in a recent congress on psychoanalysis and religion I heard a speaker quoting Saint Augustine’s words: “God who is more innerly in me than my most inner self.” However, this speaker omitted the second part of this quotation: “and more high than my highest self.” This anecdote is a good illustration of the subjectivist turn within the psychology of religion, which opposes religious experience and mysticism to what is then negatively called: the Church. A widespread sociological hostility against all institutions strengthens this opposition between mysticism and the Church because the Church is an institution with “dogmatic” pronouncements, laws and prescriptions, and organized rituals. The opposition between the Church and mysticism came about with modern subjectivism. It has been systematically elaborated by liberal Protestantism with the aid of historical and philological criticism of the history of the Churches and of Christian theology. Liberal Protestants interpret the Kingdom of God which Jesus preached, as a purely interior spiritual accomplishment of man’s universally religious nature. They, accordingly, explain Jesus’ important saying “the Kingdom of God is entos hymôn” (Luke 17, 21), by translating it as: “is in you”, i.e. present in your mind and heart. In the year 1902, when W. James published his book on religious experience, the sociologist E. Troeltsch took up a thesis of Max Weber. While correcting it, he suggested viewing the Church type as historically the first one in Western Christianity, to interpret sects as protests against the lack of religious perfection in the Church, and then to understand the mystical type as the failure of both types and as the final Christian form of developed individualism. Troeltsch’ sociological typology represents an adequate description of the way many more or less religiously interested contemporary people think. Troeltsch however seems to ignore the long Christian tradition of mysticism of which Saint Bernard is a prototype. As others prior to him, Saint Bernard had turned the focus of his followers’ attention to the call of the personal piety of faith – which, to be sure, in itself is a tendency inherent to all Christian religion. From the perspective of Medieval mysticism the opposition implied in the sociological typology of Troeltsch and others appears to be false. On an underlying level of the discussion, there seems to be a fundamental question at stake; that is the question of whether Jesus did, or did not, simply

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preach the Kingdom of God and said that it is by nature in the hearts and minds of his people. The answer to this question determines the conceptions of liberal Protestantism and the above-mentioned sociologists. A positive answer to this question is already at the basis of the early Gnostic interpreters, like the author of the Gospel of Thomas. As for liberal Protestantism and its typical sympathy for mysticism and a mystical view of Jesus, one may ask whether the theological accent on the radical sinfulness of humanity did not provoke a turn in the opposite direction, which could then join modern subjectivism. C.G. Jung represents par excellence the Gnostic psychological interpretation of religious belief.3 For this reason he attracted Christians and non-Christians who entertain a sympathy toward mysticism. He seemed to give their search a scientific basis in “depth-psychology.” He reformulated religious ideas in a manner that situates the supernatural contents to which religions refer, in the inner psyche. So, “God” is an archetype that structures the “subconscious” and fulfils it with its expansive “libidinal” energy.4 Jung criticizes the modern irreligious rational and technical mind that, he says, represses the religious anima and identifies the human being with his rational animus. This repression avenges itself either through depression in which people feel the void of their existence, or in a delirious search for the experience of divine energy. These symptoms reveal that “God will become human”; not completely, however. Jung warns against religious megalomania.5 Jesus’ predication is, in fact, in accordance with mystical desire and experience. Jesus, however, radicalizes the tense polarity I noticed with respect to mysticism; a polarity which Saint Augustine adequately formulated in a more philosophical terminology. Jesus announces the actual presence of “the Kingdom of God in your midst.”6 It came and still comes to people who listen to Him and who follow Him with belief. This kingdom is not a natural endowment, an element of the extended physical universe, in the hidden centre of the self, but comes from God in and through the words of Jesus who announces its presence amidst His followers. To be sure, for the ones who believe in Jesus’ words, the affective qualities of peace, joy and trust, characteristic of the Kingdom of God, are felt by inner experience and signal the divine transformation of the self. We may call the experience of the qualities of the Kingdom of God mystical. The self, however, does not produce this experience from within. It is mediated by the performative speech act of belief and by assenting to the performative language of Jesus who brings the Kingdom of God amidst His Jewish listeners. The mystical mood opposing religion, or the Church, always falls back into Gnosticism, often in an even more subjectively affective way than the Gnosticism of the Thomas Gospel and its more mythological Jungian variant. The various figures and trends in true Christian mysticism, elaborated by Jan Ruysbroeck, John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and many others refer to Jesus as their paradigm and permanent divine guide. In this Christian mysticism love far more than experience is the key concept. This is significant, for, as Freud stated so poignantly, love is an act of the ego in totality (Vergote, 1988). Mystical love assumes the whole self in the union with the personal God coming to humans in

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the Kingdom of God as preached by Jesus. Christian culture developed a special sensitivity for this mystical core of Christian belief from the 12th century onwards, the epoch in which in the West love poetry articulated and stimulated a refined culture of affective expression and of enchanting metaphors of love and its subtle wanderings. In this context, Christian mysticism analyzed the law like regularities of the kind of love that responds to God’s coming into the world and which can be found in the words announcing Him. This mysticism springs from the desire for union with God, as it seemed to be announced and foreshadowed by Jesus. Mysticism then is the accomplishment of this desire, going through the systematic purification of the affective, ethical and intellectual components that mediate and hold back the love intention. I would like to compare the conception of these Christian mystics with the insights gained by extensive empirical research examining the “mystical component” in the religion of contemporary believers in the U.S.A. (Hood & Williamsen, 2000). As a major result, it is shown that the mystical component is present in their religious attitude and that it consists of three combined but distinct factors: the extroverted insight that “All is one”; the introverted factor of subjectively experienced one-ness with a greater unity; and an ineffability factor which, I think, points at an intuitive consciousness of one-ness and union, which is not transferable by means of language. Apparently, this “mystical” element has a more articulated content when it is religion that gives it to its subjects. If the mystical component extends beyond a particular religion, it is at any rate observable in subjects who express their belief by adhering to a religion. This research thus contradicts the conception that religion, or the Church, should be opposed to mysticism, at least for the population examined. The scope of the research imposes its limitations. It would indeed be worthwhile to examine the specifically psychological dimensions of the progress along the mystical way – given that the mystical state is so much more generally viewed as at least partly a divine and hence utterly non-psychological phenomenon – as this has been enlightened by the mystics. It would also be most interesting to rigorously compare the “mystical component” as found in the experience of believers and in the experience of people not belonging to a particular religion. Mysticism is a fundamental dimension of different religions. In Christian religion there are various forms of mysticism which systematically elaborate one essential component of Christian belief: the love union with God. Of course, Christian mysticism is concentrated on the God of Jesus. God is mediated by Him, and consequently also by the Church as He founded it. Jesus is then also the paradigm for Christian mystics. May we then consider Jesus Himself to be a mystic? In the historical Jesus we observe an attitude which is analogous to the one I have noticed when speaking about the opposition between mysticism and religion, an opposition Christian mystics do not show. Jesus indeed regularly confronted the Jewish religious authorities, essentially the priests. Of course they suspected Him because he was a layman from the countryside, far away from Jerusalem, its temple and its priests. When this charismatic layman made his appearance, it was with a most important claim for a new divine event that was happening with Him.

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In the case of other religious authorities, such as the Pharisees and the scribes, Jesus had rather irenic debates. In case of the high priests, however, the confrontation was hostile. In their minds He was obviously threatening their religious power. An additional factor, underneath the conflict and contributing to this hostility, might be that Jesus’ predication of the Kingdom of God “amidst you” in fact radically undermined the importance of atonement by sacrificial rite. Like in most religions of that time these rites were the centre of religious behaviour and sentiment. The conversion to the present and coming Kingdom of God indeed constitutes a radically new moment in biblical history. It is significant that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews tries to connect the sacrificial ritual and Jesus’ death in obedience to God. In accordance with John the Baptist, Jesus concentrates His message on conversion to the Kingdom. When He baptizes, it is in accordance with this conversion, i.e. not primarily in view of God’s judgment, but in view of the Kingdom of God coming with Him, here and now. If Christian mysticism is regarded as the sustained effort to fulfil one’s desire for union with God and His coming Kingdom, we may consider Jesus to be a mystic and may view Him as the paradigmatic instance of Christian mysticism. The reason for this is that it is He who in fact fully lived, thought, spoke and felt in union with the God He announced. He and His followers could enjoy God’s presence. They, therefore, did not share the austere way of life of the Baptist (Mark, 2:18–20). Nevertheless, there remains an important distinction between Jesus Himself and all subsequent mystics who emulate and refer to Him. Jesus enjoyed the divine presence in love from the beginning of His public life, as far as we know from historical witnesses. In Him we do not observe any trace of a desire leading Him to search explicitly for union with God. Nor does He seem to pass through moments of intensified experience, silence of affect and struggle with imaginary obstacles. We might, therefore, call Him a superior or accomplished mystic. To be sure, nonetheless, Jesus remains the human person who lovingly exhibits and lives His union with God and who maintains a relationship of prayer with His Father. And although He emphasizes the actual presence of the Kingdom of God, Jesus also refers to its future coming and an ultimate fulfilment beyond human history. To sum up my view of Jesus from the vantage point of the category of mysticism: I would refer to Jesus as the mystic par excellence from the point of view of being the living, total achievement of the union with God, for which Christian mystics strive. He helps to conceptualize what humans are doing when searching for union with God; or when acknowledging in a more implicit way the presence of a mystical factor in their lives. Because Jesus perfectly represents the person living and experiencing the mystical “component,” we understand that for the mystics following Him, His words and behaviour have been a light by which to detect the imaginary and affective strings of mystical desire.7 When Nygren (1982) interpreted the mystical desire of Christians referring to Jesus as being a non-converted form of pagan eros he actually denied that Jesus was calling man to follow Him along the mystical path towards mystical perfection that He Himself represents.

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5. MORAL CONSCIOUS, GUILT FEELINGS, SIN Because Jesus was a human being – or, to the degree that he was a human being – it is often supposed that He must have shared with humans the possession of a universal moral consciousness that enables man to distinguish between good and evil in the ethical sense (i.e., not by divine omniscience but by moral deliberation and choice). Moreover, Jesus belonged to the Jewish religion and was educated in its concepts. In His talks He regularly referred to the biblical conviction that God is the lawgiver for the people He elected and guided. Did Jesus also manifest the typical biblical consciousness of sin? We could also ask whether He experienced and expressed feelings of shame, which are so important in civilizations in which people refer to public judgment, rather than to a god with whom they do not entertain a very personal relationship like the Jewish people. We may wonder whether it is possible to understand Jesus if His personality is understood as an example of the common observation Freud correctly formulates: “. . . it is precisely those [more virtuous] people who have carried saintliness the furthest who reproach themselves with the worst sinfulness.”8 I leave aside the pathological dramatisation of Freud’s commentary: “. . . virtue forfeits some part of its promised reward; the docile and continent ego does not enjoy the trust of its mentor and strives in vain, it would seem, to acquire it.” Actually, aside from the instances of the use of confession for self-accusation and self-punishment, virtuous persons may confess their sins to God in the spirit of entering into the enjoyment of His loving mercy. Thus, we may ask: what can be said about Jesus Himself as person and his own “human” consciousness of guilt? This question is important because the absence of guilt feelings normally signals real psychopathology. Moral consciousness is not given by birth but rather is the result of a developmental process, including a long, complex and multifactorial education. The personal appropriation of moral laws and virtues takes place by inner transformation of instincts that are immoderate by their very nature. This labour on the self and by the self implies transgressions and guilt feelings which are awakened by the violation of ethical principles. These guilt feelings are painful and humiliating and, therefore, may be unconsciously repressed. This process may lead to a guilt neurosis without guilt consciousness.9 The development of moral consciousness, however, can also be completely absent, so that guilt feelings may not even become manifest. This is what many psychopathologists mean when they use the technical term: psychopathy. Guilt feelings are also virtually absent in severe forms of psychopathology called: paranoid psychosis. Guilt consciousness in this case is externalized and projected onto the imagined rival or persecutor. Dauntless psychopathologists have tried to explain the enigmatic Jesus by applying the label of paranoia to Him. The first public appearance of Jesus, however, should immediately lead astray psychopathologists looking for symptoms of paranoia. Jesus associates Himself with John and with other Jews responding to the claim of the prophet. He allows Himself to be given “the baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mark 1, 9–11; Matthew 3, 13–17; Luke 3, 21–22). The four Gospels offer testimony to this fact

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(even though this event was initially considered by the Church as somewhat embarrassing!). Afterwards, Jesus thoroughly modifies His life and starts off His preaching and healing activity. One might, therefore, correctly state that He was, in fact, converted by John. But was this a moral-religious conversion from sin unto God, as John preached to sinners and as Jesus Himself begins to preach when He announces the Kingdom of God and the conditions for entering into it? Reading cultural anthropological as well as biblical studies one is inclined to agree with the way in which J. P. Meier tackles this question in his A Marginal Jew. Rethinking the historical Jesus.10 “Modern Christians”, he says, “especially Catholics, think of repentance and confession of sin very much in terms of the personal sin of the individual penitent with an uneasy conscience.” Western civilisation indeed evolved, among others by the influence of Christian religion, to a more distinct consciousness, i.e., to the exploration and expression of inner subjective enjoyment and suffering. The word “subject” changed its meaning by referring to personal individuality, instead of to what is objectively given to personal individuality. In the modern West the act of submitting oneself to John’s baptism would normally be a public confession of personal sin in itself. But as J. Meier writes, nothing in the Gospels permits us to look into the personal subjective consciousness of Jesus. Only one thing can be taken for sure: He recognizes that He is a member of sinful people and He associates with the Jews who by confessing their sins recall God’s gracious deeds for His ungrateful people. In the prophetic texts of Israel grateful remembrance, repentance and renewal are associated with the lived history with God. The psychologist who interprets biblical texts with the eye of subjective introspection only will miss the point, as I have illustrated in a study on Saint Paul’s famous text on sin in Romans VII.11 After His baptism Jesus emerges as a very particular prophet who follows John’s preaching while radically modifying it, as we have seen. He exhorts to conversion, refers to God’s judgment, but instead of warning us of the tremendous divine justice, He performs God’s saving mercy and speaks abundantly of the joyous experience of belonging to the already present Kingdom of God. He performs miracles, not as a magician exhibiting his special power, but as the person through whom the Kingdom of God already brings forth happy healing as well as forgiveness of sin. Jesus Himself manifestly enjoys God’s creation and, therefore, ascetic puritans are hurt. He scandalizes moral-religious authorities by His personal relationships and table intimacy with sinners and outcasts. Jesus’ behaviour oftentimes seems paradoxical, if not contradictory: He expresses an ambiguous complicity or at least familiarity with sinners, and permits no reproach of this affiliation, for His is the way of love. Divine mercy is expressed in His words and embodied in His behaviour. Additional characteristics augment this observation, for example, Jesus’ attitude toward the Jewish ritualistic custom of avoiding contact with the “impure.” For the modern mind this is a most enigmatic concept. The idea of the impure pervades the biblical tradition, as it does other pre-modern civilisations. In the Bible it is not only meeting a prostitute which leads to impurity, but also contact with the dust of the market place where Gentiles circulate. The impurity of animals like pork, shrimp or serpent is well

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known. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas demonstrated, the “primitive” idea of impurity belongs to a cultural unconscious which is determined by the a priori scheme of living beings which are well formed.12 This scheme, consequently, implies disgust for creatures which are deformed and monstrous. These creatures are seen as the embodiment of bad powers investing the world. In the Bible avoiding contact with impure beings implies a religious recognition of the Creator. Having contact with the impure means to comply with demonic powers which oppose Him in His goodness. The anthropological notion of the impure was applied to Gentiles and prostitutes. For, as they do not belong to the holy nation, they are considered to be contaminated by demonic forces. In the Christian tradition the idea of the impure was unfortunately transferred to the domain of sexuality. The idea of the impure could so become the metaphor for sin. This metaphor may even express the general human, more or less guilty lack of dignity in the face of the Holy God, such as is exemplified in the vision of Isaiah VI. Cleansing through baptism also derives its meaning from biblical consciousness. When Jesus submits Himself to baptism He associates Himself with sinners and with people who are conscious of being impure over against the holy God, as Isaiah was. Nothing, however, lets us think that Jesus Himself had the experience of Isaiah when God’s holiness was revealed to Him. Concerning the traditional avoidance of the impure, Jesus at any rate showed a radical freedom from this collective unconscious category and its religious dualistic derivatives. Neither His behaviour nor His words signal the neurotic symptoms of repression of the unconscious fear of sexual impurity. When His disciples, following their guide, feel liberated from the imperative of the impure, by clearly proclaiming the principle which is religiously lucid and psychologically healthy, Jesus retorts to the scandalized Jews: “Not the thing entering into the mouth defiles the man, but the thing coming forth out of his mouth, this defiles the man.” (Matthew 15, 19). This moral religious principle has major consequences for honest self-consciousness with regard to moral judgment and the confession of sin. Jesus calls for an honest examination of personal intentions, for this factor is decisive for God. From the viewpoint of the new morality of heightened self-awareness and self-experience that Jesus wished to inculcate, fantasying about adultery is equal to committing adultery and the complicity with feelings of hatred is already committing the sin of homicide. This rigorous call to purify one’s subjective intentions accompanies Jesus’ renunciation of religious hypocrisy He observes in the merciless judgments of some authorities. A psychologist may appreciate the healthy character of Jesus’ principle, for it helps the avoidance of repression as well as of psychopathic perversion. Freud would surely agree with Jesus, but he would draw attention to the danger that is implied in this acutely honest examination of the intention: the danger of torturous guilt anxiety. However, a major correction to Freud’s reasoning should be added here. The pathology of guilt anxiety is caused by repression, but the confession of sin is not mere self-enclosed introspection. On the contrary, confession of sin is a word spoken to God who is forgiving mercy. Jesus moreover does not expect His followers to be perfect in the sense of being perfect (teleos), as God is perfect; this is

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not a biblical but a Greek idea taken over by Matthew 5,48.13 Jesus calls us to be merciful as God is and He invites to pray: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive. Again, the historical Jesus intrigues the psychologist. For, from his vantage point he can only agree with human wisdom and with the Bible when it reports, describes and analyzes the evil that pervades humanity. Jesus is as conscious of human evil as He is of the holiness of His God, the Father, and He Himself prays: hallowed be thy name. But he does not add as Isaiah does “I am impure.” And when He allows John to baptize Him, we can only say that He is deeply conscious of being part of the sinful people He calls to convert and to enter into God’s Kingdom, present and future. Jesus clearly looks at sinners in a way in which He manifests Himself as divine lucidity and as divine mercy actively seeking for salvation for his people. By highlighting God’s mercy, Jesus at the same time affirms that God does not save people who sin against the Holy Spirit; I understand: people who consciously and radically oppose God. This idea may be hurtful. It is in accordance with an encompassing biblical conviction. In the face of God who created man in His image as a free personal being, this person is called to freely assent to God and is thus given the possibility to refuse. The Gospel narrative concerning Jesus’ temptation in the desert is a theological composition; but it very clearly states that in His work and as a person Jesus from the beginning personifies the opposite of the satanic refusal to assent to God combined with self-divinisation. For this sin no remission can exist. The reader may of course doubt whether a human being is capable of this radical sin. As a psychologist I will conclude with Kant’s repeated statement that the historical Jesus is the human archetype of perfect morality.14 In Jesus this perfection is coterminous with His very personal relationship with His God.

6. PROPHECY, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS, ESCHATOLOGY The category of prophecy does not belong to the general psychology of religion because it refers to ideas and behaviour that do not belong to the domain of universal human motives and experiences. This category, however, has been taken over from the Bible and transferred to psychopathology for describing delusions that show some resemblance with prophecy. No wonder this psychopathological category has been applied to the enigma of Jesus’ personality. The biblical prophet is a person, who is seized by the divine Spirit and who, speaking on behalf of this supra-human instance, reveals mysterious divine judgments and future interventions in the history of humanity. The popular idea of the prediction of future events reduces prophecy to a kind of magical knowledge, just like the magician is thought to perform “miraculous” acts as personal exploits. The strange speech and symbolic actions of biblical prophets could give the impression that they were mad. When Jesus commences His prophetic activity some of His relations indeed suspect Him of madness and try to force Him to go back to His family and take up His job of carpenter again. (Mark 3, 21). In modern times, many and overly self-confident psychiatrists have repeated this “diagnosis” with

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more sophistication, but perhaps with more pretension than comprehension or competence, as one can observe in a book the otherwise interesting Kretschmer warmly recommends.15 The peculiar originality of a person often disturbs people who work in the field of science, art, philosophy, etc. For some Jews Jesus was and is a token of contradiction and He has remained that for many throughout history. He defies the rationalist mindset that for ages would govern the human mind, the soul and conceptions of mental health. A suspicion of delusion then prompts the psychological and clinical examination of Jesus. Jesus surely acts and speaks like a biblical prophet, but He does so in a very particular way. He exalts His initial mentor John as a prophet, as even more than a prophet, for He considers him to be the last and key-transitional prophet before the coming of the Kingdom of God. And Jesus repeatedly claims that the Kingdom is present and at the same time He declares that it is an event yet to take place. But when in the face of the persecution unto death Jesus is aware that He apparently failed in establishing the Kingdom of God, Jesus Himself prophesizes with trust that His divine Father will establish His Kingdom despite His apparent destruction. Jesus is also confident that His God will save Him from death, but He does not predict anything more precise. No more does He attempt to delineate a definite time schedule for the eschatological accomplishment of the Kingdom of God. Four features in this summary about the historical Jesus are significant for psychology pondering the phenomenon of prophecy: Jesus’ self-consciousness, the universality of His project, the absence of dualism and the trusting acceptance of His impressive failure. Jesus insistently proclaims that the Kingdom of God is coming with and through the announcement He Himself makes. We may infer from this that Jesus is conscious of the key function He occupies in the coming of the Kingdom. He Himself created this expression. However, He never proclaims that He is the Messiah establishing the Kingdom of God. We thus may say that His self-consciousness was an oblique one accompanying the dominant focus on the Kingdom of God, the only object of His solicitude. Jesus expresses the same selfless concern when He simply says that He is ignorant with respect to the moment of the eschatological fulfilment of God’s Kingdom. A second impressive feature lies in the tension between Jesus’ personally limited missionary activity and the encompassing universality of the Kingdom of God He announces and makes present. Jesus says that “Many from the east and west shall come and shall recline with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of God.” (Matthew 8, 11). It is not clear whether He alludes to the future conversion of the Gentiles. What is striking, however, is that He never views Zion as the future centre and ultimate home of the patriarchs. The Kingdom of God indeed focuses the attention on the presence of the universal God, not on His biblical transitional dwelling place. In the third place, the psychologist may also be impressed by the duality of time in Jesus’ view of the Kingdom of God. This time conception contrasts with philosophical and with mythological religious dualism. Jesus enchants His listeners with

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His specific way of speaking in parables. They are indeed literary masterpieces, preserving their incomparable eloquence throughout different epochs and civilizations. Their metaphorical language is psychologically very significant. Jesus metaphorically weaves together divine creation as given to humanity, the presence of the coming Kingdom and the future eschatological presence of God. By this feature the parables are in accordance with the meaning of the miracles and signs Jesus performed. I refer to healing miracles which John P. Meier in his magnum opus Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. II, thoroughly examines and considers as historical. I leave aside the nature of miracles like Jesus’ walking on the water and his stilling the storm, which we may interpret as symbolic narratives. For Jesus Himself, in His healings, He made already visible the coming of the Kingdom of God He preached. Jesus asserted His authority and the meaning of His miracles by interpreting their meaning Himself. They fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy: “The blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised” (Matthew 11, 5 ff.). For Jesus the miracles are the beginning of the actualisation of the triumphant coming of God’s Kingdom. This significance of the miracles becomes once more clear when we compare Jesus with John the Baptist. The Baptists’ preaching is heavily oriented towards the near last times and God’s final judgment. And neither the Gospels nor the Jewish Roman historian mention a miracle the Baptist would have accomplished. For Jesus, the miracles He performs have a function in the revelation of God’s providential power. God will fulfill His Kingdom in a future time no human being knows, even not “the Son of man.” Jesus did not put Himself in the centre of the Kingdom of God and surely did not consider Himself as disposing of divine knowledge. The time structure of Jesus’ parables also excludes a dualistic conception of the world. Jesus was an itinerant celibate prophet, totally dedicated to God’s Kingdom, which was coming and already present. He manifestly enjoyed God’s creation. In His parables nature and normal human activities are the symbols of the already present Kingdom of God and of its future divine accomplishment. The behaviour of the convivial Jesus and His attention to sinners was scandalous in the eyes of people our clinical psychology would evaluate as sick of culpability or as more dangerously dualistic (Matthew 11, 19 ff.). The Kingdom of God he announces to people of all kinds demands not to judge the others, but to free oneself from anxiety and enslavement of possessions, and to trust in Gods loving presence. Jesus also opposes religiously and psychologically dubious ritualism and obsession with ritual purity. Contrary to what one would observe doomsday prophets, Jesus accepts the Jerusalem temple and its festivities as still belonging to the present time of the divine and human history. But as prophet he foretells the destruction of the temple and its historically contingent order of things. Fourthly, Jesus is conscious of the harsh hostility towards Himself, but He does not place Himself in the centre of the aggression. It is the Kingdom of God that suffers from violence, and Jesus and His disciples together with it. Jesus manifestly ponders the mystery of evil in humanity, but He is not scandalized, as are the Jewish

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believers who expect that God will reappear in the form of a divine triumphant and glorious messenger. Jesus’ attitude is a psychologically perplexing combination of wondrous love for God’s present coming and the sharp consciousness that God’s Kingdom is so radically different from human desires and imaginings that the announcement of its nearness, or even the very allusion to its potential qualities, will inevitably, almost by nature, elicit revolt and reactionary persecution. In the face of this hostility Jesus’ conception of God and His Kingdom does not allow the use of violence in order to impose it. Neither does Jesus substitute Himself for the future judgment of God. The conversion of the apostle Saul-Paul may support these statements. The deeply believing and faithful Saul helps with the execution of the first Christian martyrs. We may understand this behaviour. Prior to his conversion, Saul represents the true disciple of Moses who takes the sword against what he considers to be false venerators of false gods. Saul persecutes with the sword the false worship of the true God. So did Mahomet also, centuries later. Saul was probably deeply impressed by the words and deeds of Stephen, the apostle. The witness and conduct of this early martyr were probably important factors in Saul’s conversion to Jesus Christ and a significant model of the nature of the coming Kingdom. In his powerful missionary activity Paul refuses to use violence in the service of God. Jesus’ death on the cross is the paradigm case, reflecting the non-violent nature of the true disposition to faith. I like to illustrate the attitude of Jesus Himself by referring to the parable of The lost sheep (Matthew 18, 12–14; Luke 15, 4–7): Jesus did not come to judge, but to save. In the parable of The weeds among the wheat (Matthew 13, 24–30) Jesus rejects a violent conduct that would eliminate from society people the disciples of Jesus judge to be bad people. One should let the weeds grow among the wheat until the harvest, that is, the Last Judgment. Otherwise one will “uproot the wheat along with them”, i.e., with the weeds. Jesus initiates the Kingdom of God in the time of this world. But for Him this first epoch of the Kingdom of God is the time of a mixture of good en evil, of faith and unbelief, and this in persons and in society. The use of violence in the service of God’s Kingdom would destroy this one as it is growing in the secret intimacy of persons and in human institutions. By comparison, alongside Jesus’ prophecy the paranoid “prophecies” present an awkward caricature. When reading the psychoanalytical interpretation the late Jacob A. Arlow proposes, on the basis of some texts of Isaiah torn from their context, one would rather apply the diagnosis of paranoia onto the interpreter. The “consecration” of the prophet, he says, is a dramatic event accompanied by acoustic and optic hallucinations. The future prophet undergoes his consecration in passive submission and ecstatic exaltation. He then considers Himself to be the mouth of God and not just the one who predicts the future. He is a lonely man, isolated from other people, focused only on God the Father. He withdraws his libido from all other realities and all people. In Him the oedipal conflict with the father reaches the highest intensity and he decides in favour of the Father. The dynamical oedipal conflict, however, is not smoothed away and the prophet manifests a most intense ambivalence with respect to authority, to mention only these two points.

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This “psychoanalytic” interpretation goes on without any serious consideration of the message prophets like Isaiah proclaim. And all this in an apparently scientific journal! 7. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Does our study offer a contribution to psychology of religion? To Christian belief? Or to the critical examination of psychology of religion? All psychology of essential human phenomena shares the same ambiguity: it studies phenomena that are rooted in the human psyche but which are inserted and inscribed in it by that which is beyond psychology; by that which is neither physiological nor purely rational. This state of affairs is not unique for the psychological study of religion, but also characteristic for the psychology of love, ethics, language, and art. To look at Jesus from the vantage point of psychology, however, is a most instructive and perplexing venture. Our study regularly has led us to interpretations that were not only partial, as is often the case with psychological explanations of the unempirical dimension of reality, but often also into a realm which resists explanation and rational interpretation. Normally, psychology examines an ensemble of motives that in an ambiguous way – preconsciously or unconsciously – determine the observed religious attitude and which consequently foster a crisis and a development, in adults as well as in children. In Jesus we observe only one motive: the loving and faithful accomplishment of God’s will to make the Kingdom come through Him, Jesus the Jewish layman of the little marginal countryside. Jesus represents the perfection of the religion Allport called “intrinsic.” This attitude is evident from the start of Jesus’ public life, and from that point onward it seems that no actual or potential disappointment, owing to real events or to strong emotional frustration, is able to shake it or leads to a mindset requiring a kind of new conversion. No moments of ecstasy lift Him up from normal consciousness. Jesus lives from the beginning in the intimate union with God, which the mystic desires to accomplish and to experience, and for which he submits himself to a philosophically and psychologically justified strategy of gradual conversion. In the mystics a variety of felt absences and joyful experiences of God may produce rapturous visions. In Jesus we observe no such a mystical way of progress. The perfect serenity and the merciful encounters with sinners witness the absence of any uneasiness about personal guilt. And if we consider Jesus’ idea of His God the Father, we must conclude that we cannot think of an idea of the father that would better match the paradigm we are looking for when we reflect on anthropological, psychological and clinical data. At any rate, there exists an immeasurable difference between the latter view and Freud’s conception of divine providence, as the extension of human illusory desires or as the magnified father idea resulting from unresolved oedipal rivalry. To sum up: I concur with the view according to which it is possible and useful to apply the notion of a psychological type, as a descriptive concept, to the biblical individual known as Jesus. Jesus – as a person – is the ideal type of a religious person. For the psychologist Jesus is a human and supra-human figure, which may

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serve as the background model for psychological interpretation and evaluation of religious phenomena. Concerning the fundamental human factors he studies, be it love, mental health, moral consciousness, creative intelligence, the psychologist indeed necessarily keeps in mind an ideal form which he is unable to squeeze into rational concepts. For the theologian, this psychological conclusion may be of value insofar as it offers some clues with regard to why and how Jesus’ message could objectively communicate the coming of the invisible God. And does this psychological conclusion not give some valuable support to the Christian belief that to be Christian for an essential part consists of a personal “imitation” of Jesus? NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Bultmann (1934), p. 14. Vergote (1997b), pp. 77–170. Noll (1997), pp. 98–164. Jung (1952), pp. 98–108; Jung (1957), p. 107. Jung (1948), p. 128; Jung (1951), p. 44ff. Meier (1994), pp. 423–430. Vergote (1988), pp. 153–167. Freud (1930), 246. Vergote (1988), pp. 50–51. Meier (1994), p. 113. Vergote (1990), pp. 95–130. Douglas (1966), pp. 41–57. Dupont (1985), pp. 539–550. Bohatec (1966), pp. 351–357. Arlow (1951), pp. 374–397; Lange-Eichbaum 1928; cf. von Muralt (1946), pp. 242–254.

REFERENCES Arlow, J. A (1951). The consecration of the prophet. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 20, 374–397. Bohatec, J. (1966). Religionsphilosophie kants. Huldesheim: Georg Olms. Bultmann, R. (1934). Jesus and the word. London/Glasgow: Fontana. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger. An analysis of the concept of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge and Kegan. Dupont, J. (1985). Études sur les Évangiles synoptiques. Volume II. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. Standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (ed. by J. Strachey) Volume XXI. London: Hogarth Press. Hood, R. W., Jr., & Williamsen, W. P. (2000). An empirical test of the unity thesis: The structure of mystical descriptors in various faith samples. Journal of Christianity and Psychology, 19, 222–244. Jung, C. G. (1948). Ueber die Psychologie des Unbewußten. Zürich: Rascher. Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion. Untersuchungen zur Symbolgeschichte. Zürich: Rascher. Jung, C. G. (1952). Symbole der Wandlung. Zürich: Rascher. Jung, C. G. (1957). Psychologie und Religion. Zürich: Rascher. Lange-Eichbaum, W. (1928). Genie, irrsinn und ruhm. Köln: Komet Verlag. Meier, J. P. (1991). A marginal Jew. Rethinking the historical Jesus. Volume I: The roots of the problem and the person. New York/London: Doubleday. Meier, J. P. (1994). A marginal Jew. Rethinking the historical Jesus. Volume II: Mentor, message and miracles. New York/London: Doubleday.

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Noll, R. (1997). The Aryan Christ. The secret life of Carl Gustav Jung. New York/Toronto: Macmillan. Nygren, A. (1982). Eros and Agape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Belzen, J. A. (Ed.). (1994). Psychohistory in psychology of religion: interdisciplinary studies. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi. Van Hecke, L. (1990). Bernardus van Clairvaux en de religieuze ervaring. Kapellen: Pelckmans/Kok Agora. Vergote, A. (1988). Guilt and desire. Religious attitudes and their pathological derivatives. New Haven/London: Yale University Press Vergote, A. (1990). Explorations de l’espace théologique. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Vergote, A. (1997a). Cause and meaning, explanation and interpretation in the psychology of religion. In J. A. van Belzen (Ed.), Hermeneutical approaches in psychology of religion (pp. 11–34). Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi. Vergote, A. (1997b). La psychanalyse à l’épreuve de la sublimation. Paris: Cerf. Von Muralt, A. (1946). Wahnsinniger oder Prophet? Zürich: Europaverlag.

CHAPTER 14 THE LAND OF ISRAEL Desire and dread in Jewish literature

AVIEZER RAVITZKY Department of Jewish Thought, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

1. INTRODUCTION* Can the Holy Land also be a homeland? Can the same place serve as a “the King’s palace” or gateway to Heaven, on the one hand, and a national home and nurturing mother,1 on the other? And how are we to reconcile this dichotomy, which has figured so prominently in Jewish history and in the Jewish sources? The home (or homeland), protects its inhabitants, and creates a sense of intimacy and comfort, while the sacred makes demands, and elicits feelings of awe and dread. While the home an existential concept and the homeland a historical/national notion, the sacred is a religious/normative concept, and the sacred place a metaphysical notion. The purpose of the home is to protect and nurture, while the purpose of the sacred is to demand, or even threaten. Despite these differences, these two concepts have, in the course of Jewish history, converged.2 This convergence, however, has generated considerable tension and even conflict that has sometimes reached critical proportions. If religious awe of the sacred is a familiar phenomenon,3 traditional fear of the holy place is even more commonplace. In the history of religions, however, this fear has usually been directed toward a specific center or place, such as a mountain, city, or shrine, rather than toward an entire country.4 In all the above instances, the sacred, whether emanating from one or several sources, accommodates pockets of routine – or even profane – space. Not so the Holy Land in the Jewish post-biblical tradition, which considered the entire land holy. The transcendent center shifted from one, or even several, foci to a single, communal focus [“a land of earthly gateways, mirroring the gateways of heaven” – Judah Ha-Levi].5 Consequently, the tension between attraction and dread also broadened to encompass the entire land. For although the Holy Land wove bonds of 153 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 153–168. © 2007 Springer.

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love around its children, its religious demands and metaphysical intensity also struck fear into their hearts (especially into the hearts of its exiles). In extreme cases, this fear evolved into a taboo, and the entire land became forbidden territory that could neither be touched nor enjoyed: “‘You shall limit the people round about’ (Exodus 19:12): around Jerusalem and around the land of Israel . . . ‘Take heed to yourselves, that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it’: this is the Land of Israel and the Temple Mount” (R. Eliezer of Wirtzburg, 13th century.)6 Naturally, exile and geographical distance exacerbated this tension. Precisely the same people who exalted and cherished the land in yearning and hope, were those who, in the course of time, withdrew from the land and refused concrete contact with it. As time passed and distances increased – and the glorification of the earthly Jerusalem intensified, so much so that it came to resemble the heavenly Jerusalem7 – it followed that no-one was worthy of entering its gates or of crossing its threshold. Like a lover who avoids his beloved for fear of frustration and profanation, so the exiles feared contact with the Holy Land. They, too, idealized the Land of Israel from afar. Since antiquity, the religious consciousness entertained a conceptual ambivalence toward the Land of Israel. In time, another – this time, historical – layer of duality evolved: the real Jew versus the ideal land.8 These two dichotomies gradually reinforced one another and even merged, giving rise to a perpetual oscillation between desire and dread, attraction and retreat. In some cases, not only exile but also the destruction, of Temple and land, highlighted this tension and infused it with a dark, demonic quality that only the chosen few could resist. While Jewish historical research has dealt extensively with yearning for the Land of Israel, it has almost completely ignored awe and fear of it.9 The only literary genre that has given this theme the importance it deserves is the new Israeli poetry.10 However, this motif of retreat has failed to make its mark on the historic, philosophic or ideological discourse relating to the nation’s allegiance to its land. One exception should be noted: A. B. Yehoshua’s article, entitled: “Exile: a Neurotic Solution.” According to Yehoshua, Jews dread the land and see exile as “an escape to a conflict-free situation.”11 Yehoshua, however, draws a distinction between the people’s conscious and (repressed) subconscious attitude to the land. He argues that while Jews consciously abhor exile and feel an intensive pull toward the land of Israel, subconsciously they fear the land and seek to escape from it into exile.12 Yehoshua considers this discrepancy as a pathological, neurotic state that requires resolution. Although I agree with Yehoshua’s claim regarding the traditional fear of the land, I disagree with his “diagnostic” distinction between the conscious and subconscious attitude toward the land. I will attempt to show that Jews consciously acknowledged dread of the land, not only desire for it, throughout history. Many sages have developed this theme into theoretical and hypothetical constructs and even, on occasion, into existential positions and philosophical theories. And Jewish authors have, over the generations, been aware that the attitude to the Land of Israel has always been characterized by

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tension, dichotomy and ambivalence. It is only contemporary scholarship, with its entrenched, ideological bias, which has refused to acknowledge this. It is time we make amends. 2. THE KING’S PALACE We shall begin our discussion with examples of ambivalence toward the Land of Israel in the writings of some sages, from the medieval Rhineland to present-day Morocco, and continue with a more systematic study of the subject. Although most of the texts I shall be quoting viewed immigration to the land as a positive step, albeit reserved for the chosen few, some, more radical texts, were so overcome by the feelings of dread that they issued a total and permanent ban on such immigration. In the late 13th century, Meir of Rottenburg (Maharam), one of the greatest sages of the Rhineland, compiled a collection of responsa on the subject of immigration to the Land of Israel. In principle, his Responsa come out in favor of immigration. However, when discussing the special religious demands the Holy Land make on its inhabitants, Maharam changes his tune, invoking most of the dire admonitions in the Jewish sources against those who fail to meet these demands. He describes the need for extreme piety and asceticism, and for strict observance of the precepts relating to the land. Maharam does not depict God’s providence over the land as a benign force, but rather as a sinister one (a vigilant eye which misses nothing). Most importantly, Maharam draws a distinction between a sinner inside or outside the Holy Land. Fear of the enemy in the land metamorphosed into a fear of divine radiance emanating from the Holy Land. True, untold blessings awaited those who were able to rise to the challenge and resist the dangers, but these were the select few, and not the masses of simple, law-abiding Jews. To quote Maharam: One who commits one sin in the Land of Israel is punished far more severely than one who commits all manner of sins elsewhere. This is because God constantly watches over the land, his eyes never leave it, and his providence is permanently there. One cannot compare he who defies the King in his palace to he who defies him from afar. For the land is “a land that eateth up its inhabitants” (Numbers 13:32). Likewise, the verse states: “That the land vomit not you out also as it vomited out the nation [that was before you]” (Leviticus 18:28). The land spews out transgressors.13 As for those who behave in the land with levity, of them I say: “But when ye entered, ye defiled My land” (Jeremiah 2:7).14 Those, however, who go to the land with pure hearts, and behave there with piety, will be amply rewarded.15

More than three centuries later, Isaiah Horowitz (Shelah), another German sage, also took the theme of “a Land that eateth up its inhabitants,” and transposed it on to a spiritual-mystical plane. It was Horowitz’s contention that the biblical threat was directed not only at those who sinned in the Land of Israel, but also at those who moved there for material reasons alone, seeking to lead a sheltered existence there, in defiance of its unique, religious character. It destroys those who wish to settle there simply to enjoy its fruit and derive gratification therefrom.”16

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In 1621, Horowitz emigrated from Prague to the Land of Israel. What concerns us here is his perception of Jewish life in Eretz Israel, and the psychological-spiritual demands the country made upon its inhabitants. Horowitz adopted a signally antiexistential position. Jews should not go up to the Land of Israel in order to live a safe and settled life, he argued, but rather, as a stranger (ger) and sojourner: Those who dwell in the Holy Land should not feel a sense of permanence and belonging, but rather a sense of transience and ethereality. They must feel that their presence there is constantly endangered both existentially and metaphysically. The biblical motif of dependence on rain, in particular in Eretz Israel, was extended by Horowitz to embrace physical existence in its entirety. It follows that life in the Holy Land is closely associated with insecurity, vulnerability, transience and alienation from the rest of the world.17 We see from the above that Horowitz perceived religious consciousness in psychological terms, as a sense of dependence and transience that alone can lead to total submission to the divine will. It follows that life in Eretz Israel, which epitomizes impermanence and dependence on the divine will, represents the peak of religious consciousness.18 Horowitz’s perception of the Land of Israel, therefore, is not that of a home or homeland, but rather that of a crucible that purges and purifies. It is wholly inspired by a “dread of the commandments and of the whip poised to strike.”19 His immigration to Eretz Israel made him all the more anxious to preserve this religious tension and highlight the more rigorous aspects of holiness.20 And yet, Horowitz still calls on the chosen few to come to the Holy Land and take up the gauntlet: “In this context it is said, ‘And the just do walk in them; But transgressors do tumble therein’ [in the Land of Israel].”21 Thus we see that, despite the four centuries and different historical contexts that separated them, both Maharam in 13th century Germany and Horowitz in 17th century Eretz Israel, were torn between love of the land and dread of its holiness. This might lead one to assume that their views were typical of Ashkenazi Jewry throughout the generations. However, the last example I am about to bring, the biblical commentary of Raphael Berdugo in18th/19th-century Morocco, refutes this assumption. Despite the radically different cultural context, it, too, contains most of the leitmotifs present in Maharam’s responsum. Like his predecessors, Berdugo transforms mundane fear (of the enemy) into a metaphysical fear (of holiness and its demands). Praise of Eretz Israel figures prominently in Berdugo’s works. In one of his sermons, he even castigated Jews who built luxurious houses for themselves in the Diaspora.22 Despite, or perhaps because, of the above, Berdugo does not mince his word describing the spiritual demands and dangers of life in the Land of Israel. The Land, he alleges, is meant only for those who have undergone a thorough spiritual cleansing and are ready to devote their lives entirely to the worship of God. Moreover, although the land is well-disposed toward the God-fearing, it is illdisposed toward sinners. In support of his thesis, Berdugo cites Jeremiah’s call to the inhabitants of Jerusalem to abandon the besieged city and surrender to the enemy (Jeremiah 21:9). According to Berdugo, the prophet’s warning was based not so much

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on pragmatic considerations (lest the enemy attack those imprisoned in the besieged city), but rather on theological grounds (lest God direct his wrath specifically at the inhabitants of the holy place). He who sins in the king’s palace, under the king’s eyes, cannot be compared to he who sins outside the king’s palace . . . This is why, when they angered God during the destruction, the prophet says that those who leave the city will be saved, while those who remain in the land will endure great hardships. This, for the aforementioned reason, namely, only a true servant of the Lord, who is scrupulous in his actions and engages in Torah study has the right to dwell in the chosen land. Anyone else would do well to keep distance.23

In other words, those who choose to dwell at the top of the mountain (the holy) may also find themselves at the epicenter of an erupting volcano. Those incapable of withstanding the tension inherent in such a situation “would do well to leave” and make for the plain (the profane). Berdugo, in his original interpretation of Jeremiah’s words, points not only to Jerusalem as the source of potential danger but to the entire country. Again, like Maharam’s transformation of a physical threat into a metaphysical one, Berdugo transposes the physical danger referred to by Jeremiah on to a metaphysical plane. He goes even further, and claims that it is not only the enemy, or even sin, that invites retribution, but the place itself, as the natural habitat of divine retribution: “those that remain in the land will endure great hardships.” Despite the different cultural and geographical contexts, all three aforementioned sages saw immigration to the Holy Land as a feasible – and positive – option for select individuals or groups.24 However, their fear of the banalization of Eretz Israel (Maharam: “those who behave frivolously”), of normalization of life there (Horowitz: “to live there peacefully as if it were their due”) and, worse, of the profenation of the land (Berdugo: “he who sins in the king’s palace”) led them to emphasize the more daunting aspects of life in the Holy Land, and to restrict immigration to the Holy Land as an option for the chosen few, only. For them, Eretz Israel was first and foremost a center of transcendence that tolerated only those aspiring to purity and perfection. 3. NEUTRALIZATION AND DREAD Contemporary research on the status of sacred place in the history of religions has been enormously influenced by the writings of Mircea Eliade. According to Eliade, the sacred place organizes the universe for religious person, providing one with an anchor within a chaotic and amorphous reality. For religious people, a reality that lacks an axis of sanctity is simply a chaotic flow of amorphous profanity. A world that lacks a pathway to the transcendent is a world that lacks structure: It has no “up and down,” no “front and back” Without an axis of meaning it also lacks solidity. The sacralization of place (and time), on the other hand, restructures the world around a solid, cosmic center. One takes a territory, separates it from the rest, and transforms it into a concrete, existential axis of reality: Chaos becomes cosmos, and the amorphous becomes distinct. In this way, sanctity builds the entire religious universe.25 According to this interpretation, the sacred place is human’s true habitat, one cosmic home. Therefore, the religious person wishes to draw as close as possible to the source of concrete, absolute reality. Humans yearn for an authentic experience of

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closeness to God; they constantly seek out a sacred cosmic axis – a pivot of reality – a lifeline in the sea of chaotic, amorphous emptiness that threatens to engulf them. By repeatedly re-establishing this reality (“the eternal return”) one is able to reach the very center of the universe. Eliade’s disciple, Jonathan Smith, has convincingly criticized his master’s theory.26 Smith27 claims that Eliade did justice only to a certain type of cultural and religious phenomenon. True, there are cultures that revolve around a sacred axis, that constantly reaffirm a centralized perception of sanctity, and aspire to dwell in a restricted, centripetal world. On the other hand, there are other cultures that have a more open, centrifugal approach to the sacred, that seek to transcend boundaries, and occasionally create new opportunities and new sacralizations. The centrifugal approach to the sacred, claims Smith, can be found mainly in religions that have become geographically remote from their natural centers. Unlike local religions, in which the believer is defined by the sacred place, a religion that is divorced from its geographical source frequently transcends place, opening up new horizons for the believer. Instead of encouraging an “eternal return” to the center, it creates a new u-topia (=non-place). For example, in the Graeco-Roman Empire, as the exiles’ affiliation to the center weakened, they began creating new pathways to the divine that lay outside the sanctuary and even outside place. Not only did the exiles sacralize alternative places, they frequently even “anthropologized” the holy place (transferred the religious focus from the holy place to the holy man). In this and other ways, they neutralized the territorial center of the universe, and created new anchors and pathways. Jewish history provides numerous examples of such attempts to neutralize the Holy Land (until the advent of the redeemer). From Philo of Alexandria (first century)28 to the new Hassidim, symbolic or spiritual perceptions of Eretz Israel have periodically resurfaced. As well as enabling the Jews to achieve religious fulfillment outside the Holy Land, they gave them a religious ethos and aspirations that transcended time and place. These perceptions underwent interesting mutations in the Middle Ages, when mystics and philosophers sought to portray Eretz Israel as an extraterritorial concept. “Any place where there is wisdom and fear of sin, is considered a part of Eretz Israel,” wrote the 13th-century scholar, Menachem Ha-Meiri.29 “[The name] Zion refers to the souls of sages who are distinguished [metzuyanot, a play on the word “Zion”] in their abode, and amongst whom the divine presence dwells,” wrote the mystic, Isaac of Acre in the same period.30 Similar viewpoints have, naturally, emerged in the modern era, and have occasionally been translated into popular idioms (“The Jerusalem of Lithuania” to describe Vilna, for example). These viewpoints have also frequently been sharply criticized: “I have heard several fools claim that each city, and each country were they live, are as holy as the cities of Israel and Judah” [Moses Hagiz].31 This topic has formed the subject of in-depth research in recent years, as it its due. What concerns us here, however, is a far more dialectic phenomenon.32 What happens when an exile neither neutralizes the sacred center, nor seeks a provisional alternative to it, but, on the contrary, is still vividly aware of it, and despite the physical

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distance, continues to direct one’s religious consciousness and cultural creativity towards it: when there is no other sacred place, nor any religious fulfillment outside. Will such a person be wholly overpowered by the existential and ontological pull of the place, or might one expect a more complex and subtle reaction? Moreover, what happens if historical reality changes, and suddenly the absolute center becomes accessible to the individual or masses? Will they strive to turn the “cosmic home” into a real home, or will they be deterred by its absoluteness? Although Eliade maintains that existence is contingent on closeness to the absolute, it is surely, at times, contingent also on distance from the absolute. Zali Gurewitz and Gideon Aran, in two illuminating articles, recently claimed that Jewish tradition, by its nature, creates a distance between the people and their place.33 It does not allow Jews to become fully entrenched in their country. Since the concept of “place” always precedes the place itself, a complete, harmonious encounter with the “place” and “the land” is never possible. The land is always just beyond reach, just around the corner, and the Jews are always poised on the threshold. According to Gurewitz and Aran, therefore, the Jewish perception of the sacred place differs from Eliade’s. It does not attempt to create an ancient, mythical unity between sanctity and place, but places the sacred beyond place. And although the land may be perceived as a meaningful object of desire, it is not perceived as a cosmic axis or source of holiness. No doubt, many Jewish sources support this argument. However, I am concerned here in a far more radical phenomenon; namely: what happens when the place is the very idea? When the real land harbors all the hopes and demands of the ideal land? According to Maharam, Berdugo and many other sages, it is impossible to live in the earthly Eretz Israel while maintaining a distance from its heavenly counterpart. The encounter with the concrete is also an encounter with the absolute, and the touch of the geographical is necessarily also a touch of the transcendent.34 This approach is different from that of inaccessibility dealt by Gurewitz and Aran. According to them, even if we reach the place, we have not yet encountered “its essence,” the “true” place. On the other hand, the texts I deal with reflect the fear that one may touch the “essence” itself, and “ascend the mountain.” They do perceive the concrete land as a center of intense, immanent holiness, one that not only transcends place, but emanates from it, too.35 Consequently, there is a religious consciousness that is diametrically opposed to that described by Eliade. Eliade holds that there is no religious existence – only chaos and profanity – without the act of sacralization. According to him, the starting point, i.e., the need to establish an axis of sanctity, is triggered by a state of chaos and meaninglessness. The opposite, however, is also true. The religious starting point could also be the premise that everything is holy, and that nothing is devoid of holiness. The metaphysical experience could begin with a feeling of a divine immanence that fills all worlds. It follows, therefore, that, by designating a specific place as a center of holiness, we are really defining the sea of profanity surrounding it. By “confining” the sacred to a single, circumscribed place, we are declaring all other places neutral.36 Similarly, by designating certain times as holy

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or “awesome,” we imply that all other times may be spent in worldly, routine, and even profane pursuits. As stated by Abraham Ibn Ezra (12th century): Since the glory of God fills all space, and man cannot maintain the proper level of spirituality everywhere, a limited place has been designated for prayer, and must be honored as such. Similarly, man is supposed to thank and praise God at every single moment . . . however, since he is usually involved in worldly affairs, fixed times have been designated for prayer, namely, evening, morning and afternoon.37

In other words, since no one is able to meet all the demands of the immanent divine presence, God’s glory was confined by the human act of sanctification to a specific point in time and place. This being so, could it be that the spiritual elevation of the distant land – as well as providing the exiles with a point of reference – also has delivered them from the immense burden of living in an atmosphere of undiluted sanctity?38 Has the “eternal repetition” of the act of sacralization always brought the Jew closer to his land, or has it also perhaps distanced the lover from the object of his love? 4. A DESIRABLE LAND We shall begin this section by reviewing the four major factors that have, over the generations, fueled religious yearning for Eretz Israel. We shall than proceed by revealing the ambiguity (desire-dread) inherent in them with examples taken from medieval and modern literature. 4.1 The Pull of the Commandments The observance of land-related commandments enriches the lives of the inhabitants of the land. Therefore, devout Jews yearned for the land, in order to observe the Torah more completely. Already in the Second Temple period, the sages issued regulations that set Eretz Israel apart from other lands. As R. Simlai stated in the Talmud: “Why was Moses so eager to enter Eretz Israel? Did he perhaps wish to taste its fruit, or eat of its produce? But thus spoke Moses: The Jews have been given many commandments that can be observed in Eretz Israel only. Let me enter the land so that I can keep them all.”39 Indeed, some of the medieval sages considered observance of the land-related commandments as the main purpose of dwelling in the land: “One is not allowed to leave the land,40 since he is thereby “relinquishing the obligation of observing the land-related commandments” (Rashbam).41 4.2 The Desire for Holiness Eretz Israel has drawn Jews not only because of the unique way of life it offers, but also because of its ontological, religious appeal. Religiously sensitive Jews desired the Holy Land because of the divine presence with which it is imbued. It is a land of prophecy,

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providence, atonement, and inspiration, a religious point of reference that has been sanctified by the deeds of the patriarchs and by the act of Revelation. The Tanaim already emphasized its supernatural qualities and its unique place within the universe.42 The wish to translate the physical experience of the land of Israel into a metaphysical dimension was extremely prevalent among the medieval sages.43 Some sages lauded the land’s superior geographical and climatic properties, or its astrological and astral superiority.44 Above all, however, they credited the land with an intrinsic holiness that set it apart from other lands and relegated it to a different order of existence. Naturally, other sages rejected or refuted this concept of intrinsic holiness, attributing the uniqueness of the Holy Land to its commandments only. The concept of intrinsic holiness, however, struck a chord within many – particularly mystical – circles. 4.3 The Desire for Collective Fulfillment Eretz Israel is the Promised Land not only for the individual Jew but also for the entire nation, the congregation of Israel. The desire for collective fulfillment has been associated with it since time immemorial. Just as the historical memory associated with king, judge, prophet and priest has always been rooted in the Holy Land, so, too, has the desire for the nations’ religious and political fulfillment. Although Jews never believed that “the Jewish nation came into being in Eretz Israel,” they have determined, in their collective memory, that the nation walked proudly in this land, and will do so again. In other words, messianic expectations fed Jewish desire for the land over the generations. 4.4 Dreams and Legends Finally, the Land of Israel is the object not only of formal halakhic, political, philosophical or mystical doctrines, but also of pure yearning, as reflected in legend, poetry, imagery and folklore.45 “For Thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and love her dust” (Psalms 102:15). Sometimes this yearning expressed itself as a craving for the physical land, “for its very houses and dwellings,” and sometimes for the mythical land, one that “it was impossible to believe that it existed in the real world,” one that “people were sure it was placed at another plane entirely.”46 The desire for Eretz Israel, therefore, also found expression in dreams, visions and legends. 5.

“LEST I SIN”

If the Land of Israel was so desirable, why did so few Jews actually immigrate? Surely all the aforementioned factors should have induced people to immigrate, especially after Nachmanides (13th century) and his followers issued a halakhic ruling that immigration to Eretz Israel was a positive biblical commandment. Why then was there so little immigration? Was it because of political-economic factors only, or considerations of comfort and self-interest? Or was there perhaps an internal dialectic at work here, within the desire itself? Did every failure by an individual or community to

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immigrate necessarily signify an ideological or theological betrayal, or was a more complex, psychological and existential principle called into play? The congregation of Israel shouted out their vow – “lest you arouse and awaken the love” – against the ingathering of Israel. For even if the whole people of Israel is prepared to go to Jerusalem, and even if all the nations consent, nevertheless, it is absolutely forbidden to go there. Because the End is unknown and perhaps this is the wrong time. Indeed, tomorrow or the next day they might sin, and will yet again need to go into exile, heaven forbid, and the latter [exile] will be harsher than the former. Therefore the congregation of Israel beseeched – “until it shall please” – that is to say: until the time comes when the entire world shall be filled with knowledge [of the Lord].47

These words, uttered by R. Jonathan Eybeschuetz in a sermon in Metz in the middle of the 18th century, graphically portray the collective Jewish dread of sin and retribution in Eretz Israel. This dread, which reaches a peak in this passage, prevents the real (as opposed to the ideal) Jew from entering the land. Since evil inclination or human nature in general will not permit the real Jew to attain absolute purity, it bars the way to the sacred place, too. In other words, Eretz Israel is relegated to some utopian era, beyond real history. Until such a time and until man’s nature undergoes a radical transformation, the way to the land is sealed. It is worth noting that, for Eybeschuetz, the traditional fear of precipitating the messianic era is only one specific aspect of his overwhelming dread of sinning in the Holy Land. Redemptive activism is not disqualified here on theological grounds only (precipitating the end), but also because of its inherent danger (sinning in the Holy Land) in an unredeemed, imperfect world. Eybeschuetz’s diatribe is an example of Jewish dread of the land taken to an extreme. Three basic factors feed this dread: (1) fear of sin and retribution; (2) fear of the sacred place; and (3) fear of precipitating the end48 (corresponding to the three, aforementioned, magnetic fields: the commandments, sanctity, and collective fulfillment). Despite, or perhaps because of, the intensity of this passage, it can serve as a yardstick for assessing more moderate expressions of dread of the land. Before reviewing the causes of fear of the land through Jewish history, I wish to emphasize that the sources brought in this chapter do not represent all, or even most, of the sources of Jewish literature through the generations. There is no symmetry between the expressions of dread and the expressions of desire of the land: For every expression of the first type, there are ten of the second. However, since the expressions of dread have been suppressed in the research and ideological literature,49 there is all the more reason for revealing them. Only then will we obtain a clear picture of traditional Jewish ambiguity toward the Holy Land. 6. FEAR OF DEMANDS Let us begin with the primary source of religious tension, the commandments relating to the land. “R. Hananiah b. Akashia says: The Holy One blessed be He wished to confer merit on Israel, therefore he plied them with Torah and commandments.”50 On the face of it, this aphorism seems simple enough: Commandments enhance a person’s merit, refine one’s personality,51 or help one triumph on the Day of Judgment (according to various interpretations of this aphorism).

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However, a more careful reading of this aphorism reveals a polemical undertone, as if it were designed to counter the (Pauline) claim that the yoke of the commandments was too onerous, and liable to cause man to sin. Although this Pauline argument was, of course, rejected by Jewish sages, there was still the specific burden of the commandments pertaining to the Land of Israel, not to mention the strict standards of spiritual piety that the life in the Land demanded. Perhaps, in this respect at least, there was room for preserving the religious status-quo that pertained in the diasporas? For example: it was not by chance that the theme of the demands Eretz Israel placed on its inhabitants was taken up, in the late 12th century, by the French Tosafists who showed a special interest in the laws pertaining to Eretz Israel (some of them were even to emigrate there): “Rabbi Hayyim [Cohen] claims that there is no obligation to dwell in Eretz Israel nowadays, because there are several commandments pertaining to Eretz Israel . . . that we are unable to perform as required.”52

Clearly, in the traditional religious context, this statement is paradoxical. What it says, in effect, is that not only do the land-related commandments not encourage immigration, they actually deter it. Similarly, not only does Eretz Israel not atone for our sins, it actually enhances our potential for sinning. Although earlier generations rose to this challenge (and presumably future ones, would, too), the current generation, with its weak moral fiber, fell short of the task.53 6.1 Dread of Holiness This leads us straight on to the second deterrent factor – fear of the land’s spiritual immanence and divine radiance. These attributes, while conferring special meaning on any act performed in Eretz Israel, also demanded high levels of piety and purity of its inhabitants. This being so, “Who shall ascend into the mountain of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy place?” Just as the congregation of Israel balks at collective immigration (see Eybeschuetz above) so does the individual hesitate to “dwell in the sacred place [for fear that the] sanctity will not endure him.”54 Like the prophet Jonah who fled from Eretz Israel,55 to “a place where the divine presence was neither present nor revealed,” so did many Jews prefer to remain in exile, where they were safe from the religious intensity demanded by the sanctity of the Holy Land. Even the lover of Zion, R. Hayyim of Volozhin (19th century) supposedly sharply limited the immigration to the holy place: “Only for a person who is a pure soul, and no body, it befits to dwell in the holy city. In our contemporary situation, however, the soul of God is contained in our bodies, and therefore, we must not travel there in these times.”56 6.2 Absolute Place and Time The third magnetic field alluded to above was the Jewish desire for collective religious and political fulfillment. This messianic expectation was, naturally, closely

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bound up with the land. However, by “precipitating the end” and violating the Talmudic pledge to remain nationally and historically passive during the period of exile, it immediately triggered a negative backlash. In another article, I discussed this topic in detail, in an effort to show that the barriers this pledge erected between the people and its land were far stronger than most historians and researchers would have us believe.57 Since the internal logic of this pledge dictated that a geographical redemption was contingent on a temporal redemption, it was not possible to enter the absolute place (Eretz Israel) before the appropriate time (the messianic era). I will illustrate this idea by one radical example. At the beginning of the 13th century, the leader of German pietism or Hasidism, Eliezer of Wurzburg, issued one of the strongest warnings against immigration (to the land) in the history of Jewish literature. As he saw it, any attempt to break through and ascend to the land prior to the messianic times would involve a metaphysical disorder. The Land of Israel is likened by him to Mount Sinai as it was at the very moment of divine revelation – forbidden to approach or touch. Anyone who dared to break through put his very soul in danger! In Eliezer’s words: “You shall limit the people round about” (Exodus 19:12): around Jerusalem and around the land of Israel.” “Beware of going up the mountain”: for he has adjured Israel not to force the End and not go up to the land prematurely . . .” “Whoever touches the mountain shall surely die”: whoever hastens to go up to the land shall surely die.” “No hand shall touch it, for he shall be stoned”: whoever hastens [to go there] shall not live – whoever goes up before the End – for while the Exile persists they shall not go free.” “And when the horn sounds long, they shall ascend the mountain”: when shall the people of Israel leave the Exile to ascend to the land of Israel? When the horn shall be blown [at the time of redemption].”58

According to this extreme position, the way to the Land of Israel was blocked by an iron wall. The Exile represents the reality of history; the land, the utopia of the End of Days. Any attempt to remove the barriers separating them would be selfdestructive. The author not only lent compelling, binding power to the oath not to force the messianic realization; he also heightened the traditional religious reluctance to approach the holy precinct, casting the whole Land of Israel as a religious object, a transcendent and awesome entity. Finally, although the present chapter has focused on literary and theoretical expressions of ambivalence toward Eretz Israel, it is important to bear in mind how this ambivalence has also found expression in feelings, visions, and images that have less to do with doctrines and creeds than with passions and hopes. These passions and hopes also oscillated between the twin poles of desire and dread – desire for the heavenly Jerusalem and dread of the earthly Jerusalem, desire for the “home” and “mother’s breast,” and dread of disillusionment and desolation. 7. CONCLUSION Although in this chapter, my main focus has been on the relation to the land of Israel at the Middle Ages and the modern era, I have also touched on a major nerve of the contemporary Jewish and Israeli experience. I have attempted to answer questions

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such as: Can the Holy Land also be a homeland? Does religious allegiance necessarily entail an anti-existential approach that precludes engagement with concrete history? In actual fact, the three factors discussed in this article can be viewed as a metaphor for the way in which an entire society contends with the three dimensions of its past: The normative dimension (the commandments), the metaphysical dimension (sanctity) and the eschatological dimension (redemption). Although many would argue that only recently this struggle has filtered through to the collective consciousness, I have attempted to illustrate, on the contrary, that it has been an integral feature of the collective consciousness from ancient times. In any event, it is certainly no “neurosis,”59 but rather, a deep-seated tension that has either a paralyzing or catalyzing effect, as the case may be. NOTES * For a broader (Hebrew) discussion of the questions discussed in the present paper, based on many Medieval and modern Jewish texts, see Halamish and Ravitzky (1991), Ravitzky (1998) and Ravitzky (1999), pp. 11–48, 279–294. 1 “He who relinquishes [his life] in his mother’s bosom [Eretz Israel] cannot be compared to he who relinquishes [his life] in a stranger’s bosom” (Jerusalem Talmud, Kil’ayim, 9c). Cf. Mo’ed Katan, 3a. 2 Philo of Alexandria drew a distinction between holy city and homeland. Jerusalem, for example, is a metropolis and a holy city for the Jews, but the homeland is the place where one was born in exile. See: Kasher (1979). 3 See: cf. Douglas (1966); Eliade (1972), p. 384; Otto (1969), pp. 12–40; Shulman (1980), pp. 42–43. 4 Following the Babylonian exile, the national center of gravity shifted from country to city and shrine. See: Weinfeld (1984), pp. 126–127; Wilkin (1992), pp. 18–19. The Bible refers to “the holy mount” and to “Jerusalem, the holy city,” but does not refer explicitly to the Holy Land. However, early allusions to the Holy Land can be found in verses such as: Exodus 15:13; Isaiah 57:13; Psalms 78:54. In any event, explicit references to Eretz Israel as the holy land can be found only in the literature of the sages and in Hellenistic Jewish literature. On various aspects of the sacred place in the Bible, see: Japhet (1998). 5 Ha-Levi (1946), p. 12. 6 Ta-Shema (1995), pp. 315–318. See below, no. 58. 7 This process began already in the Babylonian exile. See: Levenson (1976); Smith (1987), pp. 8–10. 8 Gafni points out that most statements of the sages praising the land, its centrality and merits, were made after the failure of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt and the decline of Jewish settlement in the land. See: Cf. also Gafni (1977); Gafni (1984), pp. 227–232. 9 For an interesting discussion of this topic by the Safed kabbalists, see: Pachter (1991), pp. 313–316; Zohar (1998), pp. 331–334. 10 See, for example, Yehuda Amichai, Chaim Goury, Zelda, Dahlia Ravikovitch, Avigdor Hameiri, Eyal Meged, and others. There are frequent allusions to the theme of dread in S. Y. Agnon’s stories. 11 Yehoshua (1980), pp. 33–59. 12 Although Yehoshua considers the physical fear of Eretz Israel – fear of enemies and economic hardship – a conscious fear (ibid, 41–44), he does not perceive “metaphysical fear” of Eretz Israel in the same way. 13 Sifra, Aharei Mot, 13; Nahmanides, Commentary on the Bible, Leviticus 18:25; Numbers 35:33. 14 See the commentaries of Radak and Malbim in loco. 15 Meir of Rothenburg, Responsa [Ed. E.M. Bloch]. Berlin, p. 5. Cf.: Sefer Ha-Tashbetz, Lwow, 1858, 51b. In this and subsequent quotations, I have added my own punctuation and written out the abbreviations in full. 16 Isaiah Horowitz (Shelah), Sheney Luhot Ha-Berit, Warsaw, 1863 (photocopied edition: Jerusalem, 1963). 17 These traits are usually associated with exile! See: Ber (1980); Eisen (1986); Scholem (1976), p. 190. 18 Sheney luhot ha-berit, 3, 11a.

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As R. Eleazer Azkari put it, in his Sefer Haredim, Venice, 1601, 60b, quoted in Sheney Luhot Ha-Berit, 1, 76a. See also infra, note 48. 20 See my comments on Nahmanides’ Rosh Ha-Shana Sermon, in Ravitzky (1991), p. 45. 21 Sheney Luhot Ha-Berit, 75b. According to Hosea 14:10. 22 Raphael Berdugo, Rav Peninim, printed with a Passover Haggadah, Tel Aviv, 1975, pp. 74–75. 23 Berdugo, Mey Menuhot, 1, 20b. Cf.: Ibid, 5, 128a. 24 Maharam tried to immigrate, and Horowitz actually immigrated, to Eretz Israel. 25 It follows that the act of sacralizing a place is also an act of creation. According to Eliade, any house built by religious man obeys this principle, namely duplicates the paradigmatic mold of creation (Eliade 1952, 1954, pp. 33–72; 1959a, 1959b, pp. 20–67, 1972, pp. 367–387). 26 For a comprehensive critique of Eliade’s doctrine, see, for example, Carrasco and Law (1991). In recent years many critiques of Eliade have been published. For details, see Dan (1997), 166–168. 27 Smith (1978), pp. xv, 93–103; Smith (1987). Cf. Dummont (1970); Neusner (1979), p. 124. 28 See: Halpern-Amaru (1986). 29 Menachem Ha-Meiri, Beit Ha-Behirah, Ketubot, 111a (A. Sofer edition, [Jerusalem, 1947], p. 505). For a more radical philosophical outlook, see: Rashbash, Responsa, Constantinople 1546, §3. 30 Isaac of Acre, Ozar Hayim, MS Moscow-Ginzburg 775, 198a (Cf: 94a). Idel (1981), p. 126, note 40. 31 Moses Hagiz, Sefat Emet, 14a. 32 Unlike neutralization, which in most cases is an ideological response, the dread discussed here is basically an existential and ontological response. 33 Gurewitz and Aran (1992); Gurewitz and Aran (1994). 34 Schwartz (1997), pp. 17–21, 71–80. 35 The perception of the inherent sanctity of the land appears frequently in Jewish sources, especially in mystical and Hassidic literature. However, it was rejected by various schools, especially by the Maimonidean school. See: Fax (1986); Levenson (1985). 36 Habad Hassidism was particularly opposed to this idea. Thus, for example, R. Menahem Mendel Schneersohn ordered that Torah classes be held on weekdays, too, not only on Sabbath and festivals. He also made a point of playing down the holiness of the synagogue vis-à-vis other buildings and places, on the grounds that everything is holy. See: Ravitzky (1996), pp. 184–185. 37 Abraham Ibn Ezra, Commentary on Ecclesiastes, 5a (published in various editions of Miqraot Gedolot on the Torah). One would expect to find this kind of religious perception mainly in pantheistic, immanentist or neoplatonic philosophies (of which latter Ibn Ezra was an adherent). 38 Ravitzky (1991), pp. 16–27. 39 Babylonian Talmud, Sotah, 14a. For an extreme reading of this statement, see: S. Ravidovitz (1969), I, p. 113. 40 Babylonian Talmud, Baba Batra, 91a. 41 Rashbam, Commentary on Baba Batra, ibid. Published in the regular editions of the Talmud; cf. Bleich (1977), p. 7. 42 For example: Babylonian Talmud, Ta’anit, 10a. 43 R. Judah Ha-Levi, Tzyyon ha-lo tishaly. In Shirman (1955), I, 486. 44 See Melamed (1991); Melamed (1998); Schwartz (1991); Schwartz (1998) and Shavit (1998). 45 Ben Sasson (1977), pp. 167–169. 46 Nahman of Bratzlaw, Liqutey Moharan Tinyana, (no publisher) Jerusalem 1985, §115. This is a typical expression of an attitude that surfaced repeatedly throughout the generations. 47 Eybeschuetz, Ahavat Yehonathan, Warsaw 1875, Weekly Portion Va-Ethanan, 74a. 48 In other words, he combines the normative, ontological and eschatological dimensions. 49 They were not suppressed, needless to say, in the anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox literature. 50 Mishnah, Makot, 3, 16; Avot, Kinyan Torah, end; Avot de-Rabbi Natan, end. 51 Urbach (1971), p. 321. 52 Tosafot, Ketubot, 110b. 53 Some tried to restrict the validity of this dictum to R. Hayyim’s generation only “due to the special circumstances that pertained at that time” (Raphael Trebitsch [1740], ah Ve-Adom, Constantinople, p. 7). 54 Bornstein (1912), §454. The author related seriously to this concern, but ruled against it.

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Mekhilta, Bo, 12. Assaf (1947), p. 67. Ravitzky (1996), pp. 211–234. Supra, note 6. Supra, note 11.

REFERENCES Assaf, S. (1947). Megilat Yohasin [Ancestral pedigree chronicles]. Reshumot, 4, 67-76. Ben Sasson, H. H. (1977). System vs. vital forces [Hebrew]. Cathedra, 4, 167–189. Ber, Y. (1980). Galut [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Schocken Books. Bleich, J. D. (1977). Contemporary halakhic problems. Ktav: New York. Bornstein, A. (1912). Avnei Nezer – Shulhan Arukh: Yoreh Deah. Pietrokov: Hotza’at Sefer. Carrasco D., & Law, J. M. (Eds.). (1991). Waiting for the dawn: Mircea Eliade in perspective. Niwot: Colo. Dan, Y. (1997). On sanctity [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Magnes. Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger. London: Routledge. Dummont, L. (1970). Homo hierarchicus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eisen, A. M. (1986). Galut. Modern Jewish reflections on homelessness and homecoming. Bloomington: Indianapolis University Press. Eliade, M. (1952). Images and symbols. Paris: Sheed Andrews and McMeel. Eliade, M. (1954). The myth of the eternal return. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Eliade, M. (1959a). Structure et fonction du mythe cosmogonique. In S. Sauneron, J. Yoyotte, & M. Lambert et al. La naissance du monde (pp. 471–495). Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Eliade, M. (1959b). The sacred and the profane. New York and London: Harper Torchbooks. Eliade, M. (1972). Patterns of comparative religion. New York: World Publishing Co. Fox, M. (1986). The holiness of the holy land. In J. Sacks (Ed.), Tradition and transition (pp. 155–170). London: Jews’ College Publications. Gafni, Y. (1977). Bringing deceased from abroad for burial in Eretz Israel – On the origin of the custom and its development [Hebrew]. Cathedra, 4, 113–120. Gafni, Y. (1984). The status of the land of Israel following Bar-Kokhba revolt [Hebrew]. In A. Oppenheimer & U. Rappaport (Eds.), Bar-Kokhba revolt: New studies (pp. 227–232). Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi. Gurewitz, Z., & Aran, G. (1992). Al Ha-Maqom. Alpayim, 4, 9–44. Gurewitz, Z., & Aran, G. (1994). Never in place: Eliade and judaic sacred place. Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 87, 1–17. Halamish, M., & Ravitzky, A. (Eds.). (1991). The land of Israel in medieval Jewish thought. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi. Ha-Levi, Y. (1946). Poems [Hebrew] [Ed. Y. Zamora, Vol. I]). Tel Aviv: Mahbarot Le-Sifrut. Halpern-Amaru, B. (1986). Land theology in Philo and Josephus. In L. A. Hoffman (Ed.), The land of Israel (pp. 65–93). Notre Dame, Indiana: Center for the Study of Judaism and Christianity. Idel, M. (1981). The Land of Israel and 13th century Kabbalah [Hebrew]. Shalem, 3, 119–126. Japhet, S. (1998). Some biblical concepts of sacred place. In B. Z. Kedar & R. I. Z. Werblowsky (Eds.), Sacred space: Shrine, city, land. International conference in memory of Joshua Prawer (pp. 55–72). Jerusalem and London: The Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Kasher, A. (1979). Jerusalem in the national consciousness of Philo [Hebrew]. Cathedra, 11, 45–56. Levenson, J. D. (1976). Theology of the program of restoration of Ezekiel 40–48. Misoula, Mont.: Scholars Press. Levenson, J. D. (1985). Sinai and zion. Winston: Winston Press. Melamed, A. (1991). The land of Israel and climatology in Jewish thought. In M. Halamish & A. Ravitzky (Eds.), The land of Israel in medieval Jewish thought (pp. 35–42). Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi. Melamed, A. (1998). From the navel to the heart: The land of Israel and the ‘theory of climatology’ in early modern Jewish thought [Hebrew]. In A. Ravitzky (Ed.), The land of Israel in modern Jewish thought (pp. 42–53). Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi.

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Neusner, J. (1979). Map without territory: Mishna’s system of sacrifice and sanctuary. History of Religions, 19, 103–127. Otto, R. (1969). The idea of the holy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pachter, M. (1991). The Land of Israel in the literature of the sages of Zafed [Hebrew]. In M. Halamish & A. Ravitzky (Eds.), The land of Israel in medieval Jewish thought (pp. 290–319). Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi. Ravidovitz, S. (1969). Iyyunim be-mahshevet Israel. Jerusalem: Reuven Mass. Ravitzky A. (1991). Al da’at ha-Maqom. Jerusalem: Keter. Ravitzky, A. (1996). Messianism, zionism, and Jewish religious radicalism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ravitzky, A. (Ed.). (1998). The land of Israel in modern Jewish thought. Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi. Ravitzky, A. (1999). Heirut Al-ha-luhot (Freedon Inscribed). Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Scholem, G. (1976). Devarim bego. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Schwartz, D. (1991). The land of Israel in the fourteenth century Jewish Neoplatonic school [Hebrew]. In M. Halamish & A. Ravitzky (Eds.), The land of Israel in medieval Jewish thought (pp. 138–150). Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi. Schwartz, D. (1997). Eretz ha-mamashut ve-ha´ dimyon. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. Schwartz, D. (1998). Philosophical conceptions of the land of Israel in sixteenth-century Jewish thought [Hebrew]. In A. Ravitzky (Ed.), The land of Israel in modern Jewish thought (pp. 54–93). Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi. Shavit, Y. (1998). The physical characteristics of the land of Israel in Jewish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: A modern version of the ‘theory of climatology’ [Hebrew]. In A. Ravitzky (Ed.), The land of Israel in modern Jewish thought (pp. 391–412). Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Tzvi. Shirman, H. (Ed.). (1955). Hebrew poetry in Spain and Provence [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik. Shulman, D. (1980). Tamil temple myths. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smith, J. Z. (1978). Map is not territory. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Smith, J. Z. (1987). To take place. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ta-Shema, Y. (1995). The attitude of German Hasidim to the immigration to the land [Hebrew]. Shalem, 6, 315–328. Urbach, E. E. (1971). Hazal: Pirkey emunot ve-de´ot [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Magnes. Weinfeld, M. (1984). The inheritance of the land [Hebrew]. Zion, 49, 115–137. Wilkin, R. L. (1992). The land called holy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Yehoshua, A. B. (1980). In favor of normalcy [Hebrew]. Jerusalem: Schocken Books. Zohar, Z. (1998). Children of the palace [Hebrew]. In A. Ravitzky (Ed.), The land of Israel in modern Jewish thought (pp. 326–355). Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi.

CHAPTER 15 THE PERSON OF JESUS

ABRAHAM VAN DE BEEK Department of Theology, Free University, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

1. INTRODUCTION When we speak about the person of Jesus in the context of psychology, it must be clear from the very beginning that we actually do not know very much about Jesus’ personality. Those of his contemporaries who wrote about him were not greatly interested in his psychology.1 It is very difficult to reconstruct his character from their writings. Therefore I will not attempt to make such a reconstruction, but rather sketch the images of his personality that arise from the texts that most explicitly and extensively describe his life, namely, the four gospels. It is clear they are written with a theological interest, instead of a psychological one. But if we take this into account they do give us an interesting view of how people thought about what kind of man Jesus was – and why they thought so. The gospels of the New Testament are definitely closer to his life and person in time than any other statements about these questions. So if we can find anything authentic about the psychological structure of Jesus anywhere, then it will be in these scriptures. We might at least expect to find reports about the impression he made on people during his life. These impressions could reveal a glimpse of his real being. However, as will turn out to be the case, even if we analyze all the data of the gospels that can help us, we will find very little. Moreover, the pictures of Jesus in the four gospels differ considerably among one another. Consequently, the conclusions we are finally left with are unimpressive and almost trivial for a person who had an impact as great as Jesus did. Nevertheless, it is interesting to read the gospels from the perspective of Jesus’ psychology. Usually we read them from a theological paradigm or with historical literary interest. By changing our perspective we find new views on the Jesus of the gospels and these views, in their turn, offer a contribution to theology as well. 169 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 169–182. © 2007 Springer.

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I have tried to describe the impression of the person of Jesus that each of the gospels evokes in me, in the sequence in which the gospels appear in the New Testament, leaving aside issues related to chronology and interdependence, which are more or less generally accepted in New Testament scholarship. I read the gospels, starting from the beginning of each book, trying to imagine what kind of person is described as I read the text, just as when I try to gain an impression of the main character of a novel. So, I will not begin with detailed analyses of small passages or enter into dialogue with other scholars about the interpretation of these passages. I will give a synthetic overview of each of the gospels, by focusing on the portrait of Jesus they evoke in me. I try to put between brackets what I learned about theology and literary criticism. I will concentrate on the texts as documents that tell a story about a human person and by doing so evoke images of his personality. In the end, of course, I will have to check these images with details in the text, to see whether they concur or contradict the portraits that I am developing. 2.

MATTHEW

Starting with the Book of Matthew, Jesus’ radicalism was the most striking aspect of his public appearance from the very beginning. Right after calling the first disciples from their work and family obligations and responsibilities (4:18–22), Matthew launches into the teaching of Jesus, with the long Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5–7). The requirements of this longest uninterrupted address by Jesus in any of the gospels2 are too radical to be followed by human beings. Even the commandments of Moses pale in the light of the absolute demands of Jesus. This image continues through the Book of Matthew: Jesus is an extremely radical person who does not leave room for any ‘Yes, but . . .’. Moreover, his radicalism is directed at how people have to relate to himself. It is not commandments as such that should be followed, but he himself as the One who asks everything. From the very first moment Jesus appears in the life of his disciples, their only choice was to follow him (4:19). It is like Jesus later says: ’He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and he who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me.’ (10:37f). The Jesus of Matthew is a radical himself, who calls on his followers to be so too. This radicalism extends so far that Jesus pronounces laws himself (5:21–48). He does not hold to the old tradition, even not to the commandments of Moses. He violates the Sabbath in the eyes of the strict Jews, not only by healing people on that day (12:9–14), but also by accepting his disciples plucking ears of grain (12:1–8). He and his followers do not wash their hands before the meal, thus breaking the law of purity (15:2; cf. 15:11–20). Obviously Jesus is not living the kind of uncompromising life that ultra-orthodox people share. He has his own way of telling what is important, and laws regarding food and drink do not belong to that sphere. Therefore they call him a glutton and a drunkard (11:19). That does not, however, weaken his uncompromising rules. Moses has accepted divorce if it is done in a well-ordered

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way, but Jesus forbids any divorce (19:1–9), just as he requires that our yes is a yes without restriction (5:37). This attitude brings him into serious conflict with the teachers of the law and Pharisees. Sometimes you have the impression that he enjoys the conflicts with them. He insults them publicly, calling them white-plastered tombs (23:27). In discussions he is a master of debate; he frequently puts them to shame, sometimes literally. Imagine that poor law student standing there with the coin of the emperor in his hand (22:20), a coin that he should not even touch! A person who consigns his opponents – who belong to the leading groups of society – to such a position cannot but expect that they will retaliate one day. Jesus is a terror for his opponents, and by exposing them to shame he makes bitter enemies. You should not have Jesus as your enemy. As a friend, however, he also can be very blunt. When the disciples point to the marvelous buildings of the temple he responds, ‘There will not be left one stone upon another.’ (24:2.) And he is just as gruff with his own family when they want to see him (12:46–50). Far worse is his reaction to John the Baptist when John is in prison (11:1–6). Are you the One we hope for? Jesus quotes fine verses from the prophet Isaiah, pointing to what is happening in his liberating work. But the liberation John waits for is left out when Jesus quotes the prophet: ‘To proclaim liberty to the captives.’ (61:1). It is no wonder that the section ends with the words: ‘Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.’ (11:6) All this does not mean that the Jesus of Matthew is a heartless man. On the contrary, repeatedly the gospel tells us that Jesus is moved by compassion for the crowds that follow him (9:36; 14:14; cf. 20:34). His conflicts with the Pharisees have to do with his love for people who suffer because the yoke the teachers of the law put on their shoulders (11:28). In his radicalism he sees through the hypocrisy of the Pharisees (23:23). Therefore he rebukes Simon the Pharisee on behalf of the woman who calls for his mercy (26:6–13). The contrast is also sharply expressed at the moment his disciples want to send away the children (19:13–14). What Jesus said about children in the previous chapter is still fresh in mind: ‘Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depths of see.’ (18:3–6) A sharper protest against any abuse of children cannot be found. He is radical – also in his help for those who need help. This radicalism includes our desertion of him (26:31). Ultimately he will be left alone. Nobody is able to go to the very end with him. That does not mean that this does not touch Jesus. No other evangelist writes more about Jesus’ feelings than Matthew. Jesus might be blunt towards John the Baptist, but after John’s death he leaves for a lonely place, to be alone (14:13). When his own death is near he tells his disciples that he is worried, and Matthew paints his agony in deep colors (26:36–46). But both times he rises to the calling of people and his Father. When he wants to be alone his compassion for the crowd is stronger than his longing (14:14) and when he fears the fate he will suffer his obedience to the Father is stronger than his anxiety (26:42, 46).

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Jesus is a human being, with pain and worry, but with all his radicalism he refuses to give in. He refuses to defend himself to the judges (26:62–63; 27:14). He is above their judgment, and after their sentence he only expresses that they will be judged by him (26:64) – at least the Jews. Pilate is not worthy of any comment from him, except for the disparaging ‘You have said so.’ (27:11) The Jesus of Matthew is a radical person who provokes many conflicts, but with a vulnerable heart and without ever giving in. His death is just as radical as his life. People often want to know what the last words of their beloved ones were. According to Matthew, the last words of Jesus were ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (27:46). 3. MARK At first glance the Jesus of Mark is similar to Matthew’s Jesus. But the radicalism is far less clear. That has mainly to do with the absence of the Sermon on the Mount and other teachings of Jesus. Almost all other elements of Matthew are in Mark, but without the first gospel you would not feel them so very much. It is remarkable how some differences make Jesus another kind of man. When John the Baptist is killed, Jesus and his disciples go to a lonely place, just as Matthew tells us. However, in Mark it is on behalf of the disciples, so that they can rest after they preached the gospel (6:30–32), and not because of Jesus’ own feelings, as Matthew suggests. And again, after the busy day that follows, Jesus lets the disciples go away, while he himself remains behind to send away the crowd (6:45). The Jesus of Mark seems to be less self-centered, less demanding of the ultimate from people on his behalf. He also pays explicit attention to women in need. Unlike Matthew, Mark tells us that Jesus speaks immediately with the Phoenician woman, and not just after the disciples challenged him to do so (7:27). Matthew does not tell us about the old woman who gives all she has in the temple, but Mark does (14:41–44) – and none of the evangelists pays more attention to the woman who had a flow of blood for twelve years than hasty Mark (5:25–34; cf. Matt 9:20–22; Luke 8:43–48). Women with troubles don’t rise above the horizon for Matthew’s radical Jesus. Thus Mark’s Jesus has a compassion that Matthew’s Jesus lacks. There is a difference between the two. Certainly, it is not a fundamental difference. But the Jesus of the first gospel radically demands that we follow him, while the second gospel reveals human feelings in the person of Jesus that Matthew overlooks. 4. LUKE The Jesus who arises from the Gospel of Luke is quite another person. He has the traits of a wise man: a very intelligent, authentic person who is above human feelings and interests. He can be likened with a Stoic philosopher. Luke paints Jesus in his youth as a very intelligent boy who is interested in religious affairs at the expense of all others (2:39–50). When Jesus starts his work, he

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is not an exorcist as in Mark (Mark 1:21–28), but a teacher who soon becomes well known and is praised by all (4:14–15). He refuses to be claimed by the people of Nazareth as their idol, and when they become angry at this rejection, a characteristic scene follows: they want to push him from the cliff, ‘But passing through the midst of them he went away’ (4:30). He exudes an authority that makes him untouchable. People cannot change the way he wants to go, either in a negative or in a positive sense. When the crowd tries to keep him from leaving them because they are longing for his words, he refuses to stay, for he knows his calling is wider than his own region (4:42–44). The same thing occurs a chapter later when many people come to hear him and to be healed by him. He goes to lonely places for prayer (5:16). In chapter 4 he still has an argument: ‘I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also.’ In chapter 5 he does not give an answer at all. He has an authority which has no need for apology. From this perspective the scenes about the Sabbath and the conflicts with the Pharisees appear in a different light compared to Matthew: it is not radicalism, but wisdom that is above the rules of law and the small-mindedness of pious people.3 Though they are watching him to see what he will do on the Sabbath, he heals a man with dropsy (14:1). He will not wait until the next day because of the suspicious attitude of people, any more than he lets himself be pressured by people’s requests for help. The status of Jesus is also expressed by the circles in which he lives. Wealthy women sponsor his work (8:2–3). A special delegation of the leaders of the synagogue in Capernaum comes to him on behalf of the Roman centurion (7:3). There is no direct confrontation of different powers in the world as in Matthew (8:5–13), but a story – as we can imagine – that takes place in civilized circles. It fits into this picture that Herod not only fears that Jesus is John redivivus (cf. Matt. 14:1; Mark 6:14), but wants to see him personally (9:7–9). And when the king tries to kill him Jesus is not intimidated, but sends back a challenging answer (13:31–33). The scene of Martha and Mary also expresses Jesus’ interest: he prefers the student disciple to the woman in her practical work (10:38–42). It is characteristic of Luke’s Jesus that he rejects any group interest. He is above all parties. When someone asks him to help him receive his fair share in an inheritance, he refuses to be a judge (12:13–14). Riches in God are more than possessions. The word of God also surpasses earthly family bonds. When a woman praises the mother who brought forth such a child, Jesus immediately responds that hearing the word of God is the highest benediction one can receive (11:27–28). In the perspective of eternity, all human differences appear in a different light. The Galileans who were killed in an accident were not greater sinners than other people (13:1–5). Jesus’ resistance to group interests becomes clearest in his reaction to the Samaritans. On several occasions, of which the parable of the Good Samaritan (10:30–37) is the best known, Luke tells that Jesus breaks through the high walls between the two peoples who inhabited Palestine at that time.4 The same breaking of walls is obvious in his contact with tax collectors. Some stories also appear in the other gospels, but within the context of Luke they acquire a different quality, especially in

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the case of the story of the praying Pharisee and tax collector (18:9–14). In this light, we should read the famous parables of chapter 15 about the lost sheep, coin and son not so much as expressing Jesus’ love for the lost, but rather as acceptance of socially rejected groups in society. The chapter begins by the sentence: ‘Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” ’ (15:1–2). It fits fully in this picture that Luke’s Jesus does not show much in the way of emotions. Unlike Matthew and Mark, Luke does not have Jesus speak to his disciples about his anxiety in Gethsemane (Luke 22:39–46). Nor is his worry present from the beginning of the account. Only after the prayer in the garden of Gethsemane does Luke tell us about it. Jesus’ strength is not based on the support of others, not even his most intimate friends. Neither does the secret of his strength find its source in his personality as such. It is in his prayer – in Gethsemane, but also earlier. Luke tells us that before he calls his disciples Jesus prayed to his Father (6:12–16). On the whole, no gospel gives more attention to prayer than Luke.5 Jesus does not call for his disciples’ support; it is the other way around. Even when he is in the court he does not forget Peter, who just denied knowing him (22:61).6 It must have been terrible for this man to see the consequences of his coming: not peace but fire on earth. It is only when he speaks about this that his usual tranquility seems to be disturbed (12:50). Even on the cross his attention is directed to his fellow men. It makes a real difference if Jesus says ‘My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me’, as Matthew (23:46) and Mark (15:34) report, or according to Luke, ‘Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they do’ (23:34), ‘Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise’ (23:43) and ‘Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.’ (23:46) 5. JOHN Already in his first meeting with his first disciples it becomes apparent what kind of person Jesus is in John. He asks them, ‘What do you seek?’ Their answer is evasive: ‘Where are you staying?’ (1:39). One never gets complete clarity in the case of Jesus. There is always some mystery around him, as in His answer to Nathanael: ‘Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.’ (1:49) How did he know? It is this man who responds to his mother in an astonishingly blunt way and subsequently does what she wants (2:1–10). It is this man who chases away the merchants in the temple because it is his Father’s house (2:13–17), and subsequently speaks about breaking it down (2:19), in such a way that nobody but his disciples understand what he actually means – and this only after his resurrection (2:20–22). He is a mysterious man whom you never really understand, but who gives the impression that he understands you very well. He knew what was in people’s hearts (2:24) and therefore he did not trust himself to them. Jesus is never fully open to the people, precisely because he knows them so very well – and thus they intuitively feel uneasy with him because he confronts them with their own uncertainties. If you want

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to know more about this man you can not openly ask him – neither the disciples of John (1:39) nor the Pharisee Nicodemus, who came to him in the night (3:1). At the latter occasion a discussion follows full of misunderstandings, ending in a monologue by Jesus, after which Nicodemus fades out of the story. Frequently the evangelist tells us that people ask for an explanation, or that they do not understand what he tells them. They do not understand what he says, or who he is, while he knows them very well. It is by him that their words acquire a meaning they themselves never intended, as in Caiaphas’ argument that ‘it is expedient that one should die for the people, and that the whole nation should not perish.’ (11:49–52) It is thus not surprising that finally people ask for a clear sign about his identity (6:30). But according to John the first sign was already given (2:12). And after this question Jesus does not answer with a sign, but with a speech with so many layers and cryptic associations that it gives occasion to a great variety of interpretations right down to the present day. The following reaction is only to be expected: ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’ (6:60) ‘After this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.’ (6:66) People are always wondering what he means, where he will go and what he will do. Will he come to the feast or not? (11:56). He tells his family that he will not go (7:8), but nevertheless comes to Jerusalem – though not publicly but in secret (7:10). Somewhat later he teaches openly in the temple (7:14). Later the people ask: ‘Will he maybe go to the Jews in the Diaspora?’ (7:25) Or even: will he commit suicide? (8:22) When for once Jesus does show His feelings and weeps at Lazarus’ grave (11:35), we do not know why he wept. Is it grief? Or anger? And anger about what? The Jesus of John is an inscrutable man – intriguing and irritating as well. Only the few who were saved by him have an unambiguous relation with him. But it is the sort of relation that cannot be expressed in words. It cannot be described in terms of a definition of his identity. His relation to them exists only because it was he who saved them. The story of the man born blind (chapter 9) is typical. After being healed, it takes a long time and many words before he confesses Jesus as the Son of God – and then only after Jesus has recited the words that he has to agree with (9:35–38). The only thing that is actually important for him is that he was blind and now sees (9:25) – and the man who did this is his Savior. And, according to John, even that is not compatible with Jesus’ real intentions. The healing was not about salvation or sin, but aimed at the honoring of the works of God (9:3). At the beginning of chapter 13 the evangelist suggests he is about to unveil Jesus’ mystery. Because Jesus knew that his time had come, he performs a clear act: the foot washing. This deed is explicated as showing ‘he loved them to the end.’ Jesus’ identity is revealed as love. Nowhere in the Bible (except for the first letter of John) does the word ‘love’ occur more frequently than in the following chapters. Now that his time has come a new day dawns, with a new law: love one another. But Jesus is again misunderstood. None of the participants at the Last Supper understands what Jesus says about ultimate love and betrayal (13:28). They think about a trivial explanation of what happens. Nobody understands that he who knows what is in Judas

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(13:11) sends his disciple to fulfill his sinister task – let alone that they understand that it serves the fulfillment of the Scriptures. The love of Jesus is a strange love. The chapters about his last night are difficult to understand. They tell about love and they resonate on the level of feelings and emotions. Finally, however, they are not about emotions at all, but about obedience. ‘Whoever does my commandments loves me.’ (14:15, 21; 15:10) ‘And you are my friends when you do what I commanded to you.’ (15:14) It is especially on the basis of these chapters in the gospel of John, that the word agape has been defined as deep authentic love, in opposition to eros as sensual love.7 Eros tries to gain something,8 agape is qualified by surrender to the other. But actually agape means sober trustworthiness. It is a word from economics:9 Are you a trustworthy partner in business transactions? We can trace this meaning of agape in the discussion of Jesus and Peter after his resurrection. Jesus asks Peter (21:15–17): were you more trustworthy for me than the others, since you promised to die with me? And again: Are you trustworthy? Then finally: Are you my friend10 – as I declared you to be my friends because you know everything I heard from my Father? (15:15) They should know everything, like friends you can trust in all your affairs. But Peter failed – and so did all the others. They did not succeed in being friends of this unfathomable man. Though he has told them all, his question, ‘Do you now believe?’ (16:31), at the end of his last speech to them, sounds almost cynical, because he immediately proceeds by saying that they will leave him alone. The only one he can trust is his Father. They do not know the way (14:5) and they do not understand that he is love and asks for love: to live in trust to the very end. This love is the core of the incomprehensibility of John’s Jesus, as obviously appears in the Gethsemane scene (18:1–11). In John this scene is not about Jesus’ agony. Not a word about that. The focus is directed at Judas. Certainly, Judas is not trustworthy. But is that really true? The passion story of John only once says that Jesus was emotional. This is when he speaks about Judas’ betrayal. Judas is one of his disciples – one of those who are his friends. Can you give up your friendship if your friend betrays you? Were not the feet of Judas too washed by Jesus?11 If love is not about emotions but about unconditional trust in affairs, can you then exclude any person from the love for those who are entrusted to you by the Father? None of them is lost but the son of perdition. It is in this way the Scriptures will be fulfilled (17:12). Because of the commandment of the Scripture, Jesus has to accept Judas’ role. But it runs against who he is as the unconditional Word of God. Or is Judas trustworthy even in his betrayal – exactly because he fulfils the Scriptures, by being obedient to the Word of God at the cost of himself? Is he ultimately not at the same side as Jesus? This is the conflict Jesus mirrors in the passion story of John. This story culminates in John 18:8–9. It is remarkable that in John Judas does not betray Jesus with a kiss. It is only mentioned that he was there. He is there, because he has to be there according to Scripture. But he does not play the role of a dirty scoundrel who kisses his master while he betrays him. Then Jesus says: ‘If you seek Me, let these men go.’ This was to fulfill the word which he had spoken, ‘Of those whom thou gavest me I lost not one.’ Precisely in the context

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where Judas should be the focus, the subsequent phrase ‘but the son of perdition’ is left out.12 The text provokes thought. It offers no solution – as John never gives solutions. The Jesus of John confuses our thought. He disturbs our systems. Again and again it is clear that people, even those who are closest to him, cannot understand him. There is only one thing clearly in view: love. Doing what you promised to do, doing the things you are called for. Jesus did so. Before he dies he restores the honor of his mother (19:25–27). Then everything is fulfilled (19:28). Then he speaks about his thirst – a sign for his thirst for the Word of God that he fulfilled – and concludes, ‘It is finished’. (19:30) The Jesus of John is a person you never can grasp. He is intriguing and continues to be so to the very end. Nevertheless, the evangelist reveals the secret of this man: the fulfillment of his life is love. However, this love is just as mysterious as the person himself. It is the love that explains nothing, but performs what has to be done in responsibility to one’s calling. Most people have obscure acts and try to cover these with clear words of explanation; this person has obscure words that can be understood from his deeds alone. For, He is who He is. The Jesus of John speaks a lot. However, his words are meaningless unless you understand the secret of his life: to be the Word of God in person. 6. DISCUSSION We can try to find common features from the four gospels.13 It is clear that all four pictures give the image of a strong person. Jesus was not a person you could easily ignore. This however is almost the only general trait in the gospels. As was already noted, to say this is almost trivial for a person who had such an impact on history. We can also change our method, and instead of trying to extract what is common in all four pictures, we can try to make a composite which includes all, just as we could listen to four students telling about a professor, each with their own story, and get an impression of him by making a composite of the four stories. That is the way biographers use to work. The problem, however, is that the four pictures sketch quite different personalities. Precisely because the stories are about such a strong person, the characteristics are pronounced – and they are hardly compatible. The wise man of Luke has a very different nature from the radical of Matthew, who has little in common with the mysterious man of John. So our conclusion has to be that the gospels do not help us to reconstruct the personality of Jesus. Does this make our results valueless? Not at all! We must use them, however, in an appropriate way. First of all, the different portraits prevent us from describing the real character of the man of Nazareth. Thus we avoid those people who would be like him claiming to be more similar to the Lord than other people are. There is no natural psychological bond with Jesus, and the contrasting characters of the gospels prevent us from constructing one. Neither should we try to behave like Jesus: being wise, or radical, or mysterious. We all have to behave in our own way, in accordance with our own

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character and calling. Such behavior should have a visible result: to be trustworthy. In relation to Jesus this does not mean we have to strive for similar feelings or express ourselves in similar ways. On the contrary, it means to trust the love of God, who was trustworthy for his people until the very end. Ultimately, then, this is not about the psychology of Jesus in the four gospels together, but about their theology concerning Jesus: the One, incomprehensible God, appearing in the man who explodes all our schemes. The evangelists were obviously not interested in the psychology of Jesus per se, just as they were not interested in his physical appearance and do not write anything about it. They wrote from a theological perspective, as they were interested to tell a message about God who acted in Christ. That colors the character of the Jesus they wrote about. Therefore their accounts are not trustworthy, according to the requirements of psychology. They use psychological features only to make a theological point. This is the reason why there is so little empirical material to base our conclusions on. Only more or less fragmentary impressions of Jesus’ personality arise from the gospels. Because they are used for theology, they do not tell us about the real Jesus (except at a very low and general level), but rather about the way the evangelists thought the theological message about Jesus could be served by psychological traits. This does not mean they do not inform us about Jesus at all. However, what they tell us is not about his psychology but about his religious meaning according to the gospels. In that perspective the four psychological portraits give us a fine insight into how people in the early church used psychology to express their faith – and into what, according to them, was the characteristic Christian personality. This depends very much on the context you live in and the interests you have. This conclusion clarifies why certain people prefer one gospel to another. Christians in modern bourgeois society are impressed by Luke, probably unconsciously, because of the personality that Luke evokes. We like neither radicalism nor mysterious persons. Modern civil society prefers wise people who instill balance in relations. For the gospel of Luke we can draw the same conclusion as Overbeck (1965) did for the letter to Diognetus more than a hundred years ago: ‘Why are people so impressed by this text? Because they discover themselves in it.’ Therefore revolutionaries prefer Matthew’s Jesus, and theologians Mark’s, since the latter does not obstruct theology with too much psychology. One can read Mark without allowing it exert a too strong appeal to one’s personal involvement. For the same reason John is interesting for people who like mystery – reading texts that sound profound, without understanding their meaning. I am a theologian – I would prefer the Jesus of Mark as my neighbor. Matthew’s Jesus is too inconvenient for me. Luke’s is too wise for me; I would feel myself so immature next to him, though I would prefer him to the radical man of Matthew. John’s Jesus would always leave me feeling uneasy. What does he mean? What does he know about me that I would rather not have him know? And therefore maybe he is even more threatening then the intractable Jesus of Matthew. However, if we can not cope with the images of Jesus that we extract from the writings of early Christianity, and thus not with their ideas of true Christianity, how could we cope with a situation in which the master himself would be our neighbor – or even

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worse, would move into our house and live with us? It might be as Van Ruler (1969) says: all indwellings are accompanied by considerable struggle. Van Ruler was speaking about the Holy Spirit. Jesus would not be better. In order to exercise the practice of Christian living a little bit more, we should not allow our selves to be guided by the easiest image (for theologians Mark, and for respectable laymen Luke) but by Matthew – unless one is a radical. In that case I would advise you to pay attention to John, to the mysterious man who knows you better than you know yourself, because you hide yourself in activity. Worse for our longing to have rest is the Jesus which John describes after chapter 13: the Jesus without restriction because his time has come. Nothing has to be hidden any longer: he is love itself, the one who without restriction does what he is called to do. Ultimately John’s Jesus might be more radical than Matthew’s. But worst of all for our hope to save ourselves is the person he points to: Jesus himself. Christian life begins with baptism: dying with Christ (Romans 6:4). 7. CONCLUSION The evangelists do not give a biography or a characteristic of the personality of Jesus. They tell us about God who is acting in him. This does not mean that Jesus did not have a specific personality. However, we cannot reconstruct it, because the authors who wrote about him are not interested in psychological description. This means that by listening to their message we should not be interested in following Jesus by imitating his personality. Following Jesus is: to believe that God in Him revealed himself in his way that ended on the cross. This makes Christian life always uneasy according to the standards of natural human inclinations. It also implies that we can choose our own favorite feature from the psychological portraits the evangelists sketch. For, they do not speak about the true Jesus as a human character, but about the One who expresses the incomprehensible God in our midst. NOTES 1

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Consequently present New Testament research pays more attention to the theological motives and the literary perspective of the authors than to the personality of Jesus. The failure of nineteenth century reconstruction of the ‘Leben Jesu Forschung’ was described once and for all by Albert Schweitzer (1913). Later efforts to seek the historical Jesus, as in the New Quest and the Third Quest, are more interested in his historical and social context and Jesus’ interaction with that than in his own personality, and even these new quests produce very ambiguous answers. More recent Christologies, such as those by Eduard Schweizer (1968) and by Marinus de Jonge (1988), often restrict themselves to the theology of the gospels. Schweizer even makes the inscrutability of Jesus the core of his book, and De Jonge refers to ‘The One with Whom it all began’ only in his last chapter, and restricts himself to his opinion on Jesus’ own vision of his relation to God. Only in his Epilogue does De Jonge express his personal relationship in faith to Jesus. The gospel of John has many addresses by Jesus, often evolving from an encounter that fades away into a sermon. But even the long address before his death (John 14–17) is interrupted by his leaving the room during the last supper (14:31), and ends in a prayer (chapter 17). This is also the case with Jesus’ teaching. Most of the words of Jesus in Matthew can also be found in Luke. As is almost generally accepted now in modern research there existed a common source with sayings of Jesus that is called Q (the unknown Quelle of these words), similar to the Gnostic Gospel of

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Thomas. In the reconstruction of this source, however, though interesting in itself, it should not be overlooked that these sayings have different functions in Matthew and Luke. There are major differences between a situation in which they are put together at the beginning of Jesus’ work as a massive message, as Matthew does, and a situation in which these sayings are scattered through the entire gospel, depending on the context. It is exactly this that makes the difference between prophetic radicalism and mature wisdom. Matthew only once mentions the Samaritans, and then in a negative perspective: ‘Do not enter any town of the Samaritans.’ (10:5) The attitude of Jesus according to Luke is quite different. The negative commandment not to enter into a town of the Samaritans is changed into a positive message to prepare accommodation in a Samaritan village. When, subsequently, the Samaritans themselves refuse to receive Jesus, the disciples want to destroy them, but Jesus rebukes his followers severely for this attitude (9:52–56). Jesus in his wisdom goes to another village instead of calling fire from heaven. Further, only Luke tells us the story of the ten lepers of whom only one, a Samaritan, returned for thanksgiving (17:16). And again, he travelled through Samaria (17:11). It fits in this perspective that Luke in the book of Acts frequently tells about the gospel in Samaria (1:8; 8:1–25; 9:31; 15:3). The only other evangelist who has a positive attitude to Samaritans is John, in the long story of the Samaritan woman in chapter 4. See esp. chapter 11 and 18:1–8 but also the prayers of Jesus himself (5:16; 6:12; 9:28; 22:32). Cf. the difference between Matthew 26:74 and Mark 14:72. See esp. Nygren (1953), and somewhat more nuanced Kopmels (1990). ‘Eran ist das leidenschaftliche Lieben, das den andern für sich begiert’. See E. Stauffer (1957). Agapao. In: G. Kittel (Ed.), Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament I. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, p. 34. Stauffer (1957, see note 8) refers to the colourless meaning of the word ‘agapao’ in common Greek language. He states that the etymology of the word is unknown. Personally I think it is borrowed from Semitic languages (’ahab) and introduced into the Greek world by tradesmen. That would explain why it is not used in higher language. The substantive is almost restricted to biblical language, but it is too far-reaching when Kopmels states that it is shaped by an exclusive biblical meaning. The verb was used in classic Greek already since the time of Homer, but with little of its later distinct meaning. Precisely because it did not have much to do with feeling, it was useful for reference to the commandments: not what you mean but what you do is important. Actually the term ‘fileo’ refers far more to what Nygren means with ‘agapè’ than ‘agapè’ itself. 13:1–11. Judas is mentioned explicitly in 13:2 and 11. He does not leave before 13:30. See further on this topic van de Beek (2003). Burridge’s (1994) Four Gospels, One Jesus? A Symbolic Reading is for the main part devoted to the variety of the portraits of the gospels and directed to the theological perspective. Only less than five pages deal with the one Jesus, and in that part we are told that we have only interpretations of Jesus. That does not make the book of less value: on the contrary, it makes clear how impossible the reconstruction of a coherent portrait of Jesus, based on the sources we have, really is.

REFERENCES Beek van de, A. (2003). Elia en Judas. Nederduits Gereformeerde Teologiese Tydskrif, 44, 171–184. Berger, K. (1995). Wer war Jesu wirklich? Stuttgart: Quell Verlag. Burridge, R. A. (1994). Four gospels, one Jesus? A symbolic reading. London: SPCK. Jonge de, M. (1988). Christology in context: The earliest Christian response to Jesus. Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Kopmels, L. A. (1990). Liefde tweeërlei: een kritische apologie van eros. Voorburg: Publivorm (also published as dissertation, Leiden). Nygren, A. (1953). Agape and Eros. London: SPCK. Overbeck, F. (1965). Studien zur Geschichte der alten Kirche 1. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

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Schweitzer, A. (1913). Geschichte der Leben Jesu Forschung. Tübingen: Mohr. Schweizer, E. (1968). Jesus Christus im vielfältigen Zeugnis des Neuen Testaments. München/Hamburg: Siebenstern Taschenbuch Verlag. Stauffer, E.(1957). Agapo. In:G.Kittel (Ed.), Theologisches Wörtertruch Zum Neuen Testament 1. Struttgart: Kohlhammor Verlag, p.34. Van Ruler, A. A. (1969). Structuurverschillen tussen het christologische en het pneumatologische gezichtspunt. Theologisch Werk I (pp. 175–190). Nijkerk: Callenbach.

CHAPTER 16 IMAGINING JESUS: TO PORTRAY OR BETRAY? Psycho(-patho)logical aspects of attempts to discuss the historical individual

PETER J. VERHAGEN Meerkanten, Ermelo, The Netherlands

1. INTRODUCTION: IMAGES OF JESUS Even subsequent to what scholars have termed the third quest, in the past three decades, the search for the historical Jesus – Jesus the individual, as it were – remains an intriguing and interesting history or even a fascinating historical preoccupation. Intriguing and interesting for several reasons, most notably because such searching tells us much about the nature of the development of modern critical views of the New Testament and its method of handling of and wrestling with one of the key dilemmas of faith and history. That is, given the cultural distance between modern society and the life and death of someone 2000 years ago, how could modern psychological, sociological, and cultural conceptions enable us, or hinder us, to relate here and now to a religious person of the past (beyond the simple sense in which all heroes of mythic proportions, whether they existed in actuality or not, may provide helpful moral exemplars for emulation [Evans, 1996])? Moreover, the story of the quest is also intriguing and fascinating because it reflects the perceived motivations of significant others. This perception is, though dependent on many variables, certainly influenced by the personality traits and needs of the researcher, of the seeker. This, of course, underscores one of the central ambiguities of the whole project of the search for the historical Jesus that have characterized such searches from their earliest beginning. I will focus at this ambiguity in the course of my investigation and I will interpret it as a tension between the portrayal versus the betrayal of the historical Jesus. In fact, I aim to show that these two polarities – portrayal and betrayal – almost always operate in tandem rather than in simple opposition, and I will attempt to explain why this interaction is important. 183 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 183–204. © 2007 Springer.

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In this chapter I want to draw attention to one specific source of the creation of the image of Jesus (or God): the personality or the self of the writer, researcher, patient or believer. As one might expect, the literature is replete with theories and constructs regarding the influence of the narrator’s or researcher’s personality on the creation of an historical image (which I shall refer to as “the imagining” or imaging)1 of an important biographical personage. Many authors outline this influence in terms of psychosexual theory (Erikson, 1959), object relations theory (Rizzuto, 1974, 1979),2 transitional phenomena (Meissner, 1992), attachment theory (Murken, 1998), and cognitive schemata (Schaap-Jonker, Eurelings-Bontekoe, Verhagen, & Zock, 2002). Although stated in different ways by each of these theorists, one of the main themes common to their approach is that the vicissitudes of the imagining process reflect the ongoing interaction between the specific representation of God – in this instance, I am concerned with the representation of Jesus – and the imagining person’s own self-representation. Viewed in this way, the Jesus representation must be connected to one’s sense of self in a highly personal way, including one’s sense of meaning and purpose in life. And in so far as a person can attach priority to such a highly valued object, he can transcend his own priorities freed from the constraints of selfinterests, in favor of a greater cause. According to many authors, the ability to make this distinction is one of the critical signs of mature religion (Symington, 1994). Moving beyond the individual level to the institutional level, fragments of psychological representational constructs such as these circulate in the minds of scientists, historians, and mental health professions. These theories and constructs are usually intended to deepen the ability to understand, evaluate and even explain the ins and outs of that influence. However it is not my intention, nor do I think it possible, to develop a comprehensive overview of all the theories and constructs that influence the creation of mental representations of the divinity. I will confine my attention here to a small portion of the empirical research that deals with the way Jesus (and God) is imagined and represented. One other introductory comment is needed here. It seems appropriate to make a distinction between the image of Jesus – traditionally regarded as vere home, vere Deus – and the image of God. This is so not only owing to theological considerations. Let us consider, for instance, the old hypothesis that the God image is modeled after the father (whatever the truth of this hypothesis), it is not at all clear beforehand that the same will hold for the image of Jesus. As far as I can see, there are no or at least no compelling empirical research data to warrant a sharp distinction between the representation of these two images on a psychological level. What we have to consider is that not only the images are different, but the process of imagining as well in so far as we understand the imagining as an interactive process. However, for our quest we have to accept that we need to make use of the results of empirical research on the psychological aspects of imagining God, although our main interest in this chapter is the image of Jesus. In the first part of this contribution I will develop a historical outlook on portraits of Jesus. I will briefly pay attention to the theologically-oriented, yet science-based criticism that Albert Schweitzer formulated in his landmark study on the “Lives of

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the historical Jesus” (Schweitzer, 2001). Schweitzer, as may be well known, reviewed the scientific shortcomings in these “Lives” of the Jesus and then hypothesized about the possible background of these shortcomings, errors and biases. What was surprising in his essay, written so relatively long ago, was that he also forwarded some ideas about the influence exerted by the inner world of the scientists and writers who each in a sense crafted their own historical Jesus. Schweitzer even tried to add support for his psychological hypothesis by referring to certain historical facts and life events in biographies of these scholars. We are most interested in this hypothesis, especially since it was expressed in the magnum opus of a man who became famous because for his own creation of an image of Jesus, that has been called the “religious construct of strangeness.”3 In the second part of this chapter I will discuss a modern psychological theory regarding imagining Jesus or God, but in a limited sense. That is, I will concentrate on just one aspect of the imagining: the self as a source of projection. Even this restricted focus will require additional limitation. I will confine my comments to the description and discussion of three recent examples of empirical research on the role of psychological sources in the imagining of Jesus or God. When mentioning the third study, I will narrow our focus to the role of personality pathology and the imagining of God. In the conclusion I will try to bring all the disparate pieces together and make a few critical comments under the heading: Jesus and his strangeness. It was Schweitzer who coined this strangeness construct.4 This construct of the strangeness of the historical Jesus is, as it will appear, not meant to point to a rather mysterious or mystical aura. By strangeness we mean in a rather technical sense the counterintuitive quality of the representation of the historical Jesus as a person, and in his sayings and doings (see also the chapter of van de Beek in this book). 2. LIVES OF JESUS: THREE QUESTS Scholars usually discriminate among three, more or less distinct phases in the scientific approach to the figure and personality of the historical Jesus (McGrath, 1994; Theissen, 2003). A few lines may serve as introductory remarks. The nineteenth century is the famous era of the first quest as becomes apparent in the numerous “lives of Jesus.” From the rationalist perspectives of the Enlightenment period, the idea of a supernatural redeemer, God incarnate, was no longer acceptable. This abstract, perhaps even aloof notion was replaced by the idea of God as an enlightened moral teacher (McGrath, 1994). This first quest, in other words, was based on the idea that there necessarily had to be a gap between the historical Jesus, who actually lived and worked as religious teacher, and the more mystical Christ concept of the early church. Learning more about that historical figure, the first quest supposed, would result in a more adequate version of Christian faith. In the course of the nineteenth century we see a subtle shift in this approach. Parallel to the increasing interest in the budding psychological and social sciences there originated a heightened awareness of the religious aspects of the essentially

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human functioning of the personality of Jesus. For the most part, this enhanced the momentum of the style of the first quest. It was now believed that, not only did His remarkable personality lay the foundation for Christian faith, but also his religious personality could be imitated by anyone. It is during this period, and ever since, that numerous “lives of Jesus” were published and became very popular. It is in this way that Jesus was modernized. It was Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) who in his famous survey The Quest of the Historical Jesus, surveying the period beginning from Reimarus (1694–1768) and ending well in to the nineteenth century, brought these “lives” together in a highly critical approach (Evans, 1996; McGrath, 1994; Rollins, 1999; Schweitzer, 2001). The critical appraisal by Schweitzer did not herald the end of the portrayals of different images of Jesus. Since the twenties of the last century, Weaver (1999) enumerated more than forty variegated portrayals and popularizing icons of Jesus, each of which were nevertheless (i.e., for all of their scientific objectivity) deeply rooted in national and cultural traditions and identities. According to Weaver, one could discern a distinctly identifiable German, English and American Jesus, each of which claiming to be historical! Weaver agrees with Schweitzer unhesitatingly about “the propensity to find in Jesus that which we need to find and to paint him in the colors of our own time and culture” (italics added by P.J.V.). Weaver continues, “In this sense the deniers of Jesus’ historicity were right: there is no historical Jesus, not because he did not exist, but because he is available only in pluriform ways.”5 Consider even the view of Jeremias (1961) who actually represented a rather extreme position in the period of the second quest. Jeremias was prepared, on one hand, to suggest that the basis of the Christian faith lies in what Jesus actually said and did,6 yet stated with an almost perceivably ironic smile: “Die Rationalisten schildern Jesus als Moralprediger, die Idealisten als Inbegriff der Humanität, die Ästheten preisen ihn als den genialen Künstler der Rede, die Sozialisten als den Armenfreund und sozialer Reformer, und die ungezählten Pseudowissenschaftler machen aus ihn eine Romanfigur.”7

The second quest is generally considered to have started with a lecture by Käsemann in 1953.8 The main points of departure from the first quest are, first, the idea that there is a discontinuity between the earthly Jesus and the exalted Christ, almost to the degree of portraying each as if they were unrelated figures. Secondly, it was now emphasized that there is continuity between the preaching of Jesus and the preaching about Jesus. The earthly, historical Jesus and the exalted and proclaimed Christ are no longer unrelated. The first quest had suggested that discontinuity prevailed. According to the second quest it was no longer needed to deconstruct or reconstruct the Christ of faith in terms of the earthly Jesus. The main interest of the second quest is primarily the historical foundation of the kerygma. Since the seventies and eighties of the twentieth century we see yet another ideological shift. Since the onset of writings that characterize this period, one notices that particular attention was trained upon the relation between Jesus and his environment in first century Judaism. The Jewish background of Jesus, as he actually lived and worked in the Holy Land during the first century became extremely important.

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For, Jesus stood up against mainstream Judaism with its practices and beliefs of the Jewish religion. The superb trilogy with the revealing title A Marginal Jew – Rethinking the Historical Jesus written by John P. Meyer (1991–2001) would be the classical exemplar of this third approach. The two chapters in this volume, written by Van de Beek and Vergote (chapters 15 and 13 respectively), are related to this new shift. But how different are their approaches! Van de Beek takes a critical stance to the third quest. According to him, this new quest produced only new ambiguous answers, not much new under the sun, and also, in his commentary, incurs a loss. That is to say, according to Van de Beek, due to the third quest’s efforts to attend more and more to Jesus’ interaction with his Jewish environment from a historical and sociological point of view, results in a diminution of attention to that which had been gained, and still needs to be discerned, regarding his personality. And yet despite his critique, Van de Beek admits that a reconstruction of the personality of Jesus is not really possible. The Jesus of Van de Beek’s approach is the “One incomprehensible God, appearing in the man who explodes all our schemes” (this volume, p. 223). Van de Beek’s account has the character of a narration, It refers to social interactions, mental events, like emotions, and to actions (including speech acts). By narrating he portrays a character, that is to say four different characters: the wise man of Luke, the radical character of Matthew, the mysterious man of John and the more compassionate person of Mark. Interestingly enough, Van de Beek also tells us quite a lot about himself in relation to these four characters. And so the narrative becomes connected with his self-concept as a theologian! Nevertheless as a narrative the imagery is based on the four Gospels as the constitutive narrative for the Christian outlook. And it is in the light of this narrative that the reader or believer has to interpret his or her life, as Van de Beek in fact illustrates by his approach. How different, therefore, from the somewhat postmodern approach of Van de Beek is the fascinating portrayal depicted by Antoine Vergote. Vergote’s aim is to look at the historical person of Jesus. Compared to Van de Beek, Vergote is rather optimistic about the possibility of drawing a portrayal of the historical Jesus, although Jesus was marginalized in his time and culture. And, contrary to Van de Beek, Vergote feels that he is able to discern common features from among the four Gospels, giving us something that is, on one hand, unified, and yet not less divine; that is, not merely an image of “yet another” strong, dramatic biblical personality. Jesus, as painted by Vergote, is a profound mystic, the human archetype of moral perfection, a sound prophet, and far from being a paranoiac. “Jesus is the paradigm of the ideal religious disposition” (this volume, p. 168). There is more involved here than just science, or pure psychology of religion. Vergote is interested in what is new, particular and original to Jesus, for all religious belief and for the very conception of being human. In these few words we hear Vergote’s commitment to his object of study. When he, a theologian and psychoanalyst himself, ends his chapter with a rather rhetorical question, we sense the admirational identification9 which was alluded to earlier in his text (see: chapter 13, this book).

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3. PSYCHIATRIC EVALUATION OF JESUS’ CHARACTER It is certainly not without reason that Vergote portrays Jesus as far from being paranoiac. In the course of time Jesus often, indeed, became depicted as mentally disordered, even during his lifetime. Albert Schweitzer not only brought the nineteenth and early twentieth century “lives of Jesus” together, he also paid special attention to the medical history of Jesus, so to speak, and published his medical thesis under the title: Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu (Magdalen, 1994; Rollins, 1999; Schweitzer, 1913). In this thesis, as he did earlier in his study The Quest, Schweitzer questioned and radically criticized the suggestion made by several authors that Jesus may have been suffering from a hereditary disease, paranoia and megalomania, or that he should be considered as an epileptic or hystero-epileptic. In Schweitzer’s assessment, the first two studies could not stand the test of scientific criticism against the criteria Schweitzer sought to uphold. Furthermore, he found no evidence whatsoever to support Rasmussen’s diagnosis. Of course there appeared several other studies whose sole intention was to disprove the conclusions jumped at by these writers. But the judgment Schweitzer passed on these psychiatric conclusions was brief and to the point: apologetic in character, not tackling the problem at its scientific core.10 Schweitzer concluded: “Whether ideas which in modern terms appear fantastic are either more or less so is entirely unimportant. To identify elements which appear strange to us as symptoms of insanity betrays a layman’s attitude of mind. All that a psychiatric evaluation does is to consider the development and nature of a man’s logic in the formation of his ideas and their relation to his behavior as a whole.”11

Schweitzer himself evaluated, as might still be well known, the ideas and behavior of Jesus as determined by eschatological thinking. Some of Schweitzer’s contemporaries, however, considered precisely that form of eschatological thinking, along with Jesus’ belief in his messianic dignity, as a sign of mental derangement and madness in and of itself, because such thinking could not conform to the way of thinking of healthy men. Schweitzer contested this quite firmly. Those particulars of the life of Jesus that could possibly be interpreted as indicating insanity ought in reality to be assessed against the context of his life as a whole, argued Schweitzer. For example, how could Jesus’ driving the money-changers from the temple be seen so simply as an attack of epileptic grand mal, or his struggle in Gethsemane as an attack of epileptic petit mal? Is it not impossible to execute such a project or even to make relevant utterances during such an attack? Schweitzer felt that such conclusions needed to be “completely ruled out.”12 Thus, according to Schweitzer these kinds of portrayals amounted to nothing more than betrayals. The uniqueness and exceptionality of the person of Jesus was preposterously betrayed as pathological without a cautious analysis. 4. A MAN’S TRUE SELF IN THE WRITING OF A LIFE OF JESUS In his explanation and formulation of the problem of imagining or reconstructing the portrait of Jesus, Schweitzer clarified that according to his conviction the historical investigation of the life of Jesus does not originate from a purely historical interest.

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Aside from what Schweitzer interpreted as a struggle against the tyranny of the dogma of the dual natures of Jesus Christ, he felt that the main motive of our research was to present the so-called historical Jesus in a form intelligible during the time of the interpreter: “But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Jesus in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus. No vital force comes into the figure unless a man breathes into it all the hate or all the love of which he is capable.”13

Schweitzer went so far as to state that the greatest of the lives written of Jesus were inspired by hate: the lives written by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) and by David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874). They hated, according to Schweitzer, the “supernatural nimbus” with which Jesus traditionally had been surrounded, which coerced them into needing to depict him as an ordinary person in Galilee. The life of Jesus written by Reimarus was published after his death. But the “Life of Jesus” written by Strauss and published in 1835 made his career as a professor in theology impossible. The facts were that after he took up the position of “Repetent” in the theological college of Tübingen, he lectured on Hegel – who himself studied theology in Tübingen and hated his studies (Solomon, 1988) – with great success. But his book destroyed his prospects. Strauss was a radical representative of the “speculative theology” and was included among the “Hegelsche Linke” (Hegelian Leftists). In 1833, Strauss wrote, “If I know myself rightly, my position in regard to theology is that what interests me in theology causes offence.”14 And offence he caused. In the words of Karl Barth, Strauss confronted the spirit of his times with the force of a theologian turned unbeliever.15 An angry “No!” could be heard in his doctrine of faith, and thus he came to adopt a more comfortable but dilute, pantheistic worldview. Nevertheless – and this is Schweitzer’s point – Strauss, due to his misgivings, produced a major contribution to the topic of the historical Jesus in his introduction of the category of myth and mythical language as reflection of the New Testament writers’ cultural outlook.16 I would like to return for a moment to Strauss’s interpretation of the life of Jesus. Twenty-five years after he began his researches, Strauss commented himself: “It made my life a lonely one,” and yet the book, “preserved the inward health of my mind and heart.”17 How great was the contrast with the enormous success of the Vie de Jesus written by the French philosopher and historian Ernest Renan, published in 1863. It was a major success, resulting in eight imprints within three months. Renan’s romantic and sentimental portrayal of Jesus made a tremendous impression on many readers in those days. And yet, according to Schweitzer, Renan’s story made no sense at all and was certainly inferior to Strauss’s depiction.18 Schweitzer, and later on Barth, respected Strauss for his major and provoking contribution to the topic of inquiry. What about those “lives of Jesus” inspired by love? According to Schweitzer, they all demonstrated an immense struggle to acknowledge and express in a believable way a truth full of pain. But sometimes they lack conscience, and there is occasionally even a hint of insincerity in such stories, as in the case of Renan.19

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And what about Schweitzer himself as a commentator on the lives of Jesus? To what degree did his own true self gain expression in his writing about these lives, despite the fact that he did not compose a distinct life of Jesus himself? Whether or not the kind of characterizations he used regarding others can be applied to Schweitzer himself remains difficult to say a century later. However, we may perhaps seek assistance through the writings of the Protestant minister and psychoanalyst, Oskar Pfister (1873–1956). At the end of his study on Christian faith and anxiety, Pfister, who eventually became a close friend with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and after 1921 with Albert Schweitzer as well (Nase, 1993), brought forward the example of the kind of writer who fully introjects Christ. Such a personality does not just live in some sort of relationship with Christ, but, if we can state so, lives Him in a convincing demonstration of love.20 Pfister paid special attention to Albert Schweitzer because he considered the latter to be a stellar example of just such a type. Pfister’s comment is just as remarkable as moving. He saw Schweitzer as the man who demonstrated, though perhaps less so in his limited foray into the realm of theological studies, the lasting meaning of Jesus for modern mankind; i.e. through his medical devotion as an expression of love. I want to suggest at the end of this first part of my comments that it is not the case that everybody, sophisticated or not, simply creates his or her story and representations of Jesus from inner, obviously unconscious motives, and that each of these representations is theologically beyond dispute. That would be an outrageous simplification. But, in general, a personality is to some extent defined by the world of thought within which the individual finds himself or herself and shares with his or her contemporaries. In the case of Jesus there is a difficulty with the nature of the sources of the life of Jesus, although we know quite a lot about his public ministry. The interpretation of what sources we possess is necessarily inseparable from the scholar’s own religious commitments and political and other aims and also inseparable from the strong emotions, love and hate, that these commitments generate. In this regard the biographical notes of Schweitzer even illustrate a kind of passionate wrestling with the material. What we discovered is that Schweitzer himself not only developed his own religious construct as his portrayal of Jesus. In addition, he presented also a psychological hypothesis about the influence and meaning of the commitments of the scholars he studied on their object of study. He tried to elucidate how the true self of the writer might became involved simultaneously in the portraying and betraying of the historical Jesus by love and by hate. And his own life became the utmost demonstration of a participative narrative within the larger sphere of the basic constitutive narrative of the Gospel. We will come back to these findings after the next part of this chapter. In what follows, I wish to focus on the psychical sources of this personal contribution to the portrayal and betrayal of the image of the Jesus. 5. IMAGINING GOD AND JESUS In the first part of this chapter I attempted to develop an historical outlook on the topic of imagining Jesus. It was a remarkable finding, I believe, that Albert Schweitzer himself also developed a psychologically-oriented thesis. He paid attention to the

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personal character of all these “lives of Jesus.” His contention – which rings with classical and even contemporary psychological notions of empathy and identification – was that “a personality can only be awakened to life by a personality.”21 On the basis of this assumption, he almost constantly informed his readers about the lives of these writers themselves, as if their biographies were almost as important for understanding their writings and portrayals of Jesus as the facts of Jesus’ life. This was most outstanding in the case of his analysis of the works of Strauss, to whom Schweitzer even dedicated a whole chapter “the man and his fate.”22 Be this as it may, did Schweitzer really intend to use these biographical notes as source for the imagining of Jesus? I suspect that a psychological-methodological question of that kind perhaps demands too much of Albert Schweitzer. Yet in the next part of this chapter we will take up precisely this question from a contemporary psychological perspective. In the practice of psychotherapy it is often observed that certain specific personality correlates are closely related to the religious experience of the patient (e.g., Schaap-Jonker et al., 2002). Hence, the “image” of God or of Jesus can be described as an individual’s affective experience of God or of Jesus, or as connected to the internal, mental representation of God or Jesus. It is important to note that the term image refers to emotional experiences in general and not to visual experiences only. Feelings and emotions are in this respect even more important than cognitions (Lawrence, 1997; Rizzuto, 1979). What God represents to a particular person determines to a large extent his relationship with God. Insight into any individual’s image or representation of God is therefore a prerequisite for a full understanding of someone’s relationship with God (Tisdale et al., 1997). Ana-Maria Rizzuto was the first to formulate a comprehensive theory about God images, based on the perspective of object-relations theory (Rizzuto, 1974, 1979, 1996). Subsequent studies have shown that the quality of internalized early self-object relations is associated with the overall representational quality of the image of God. Persons with early traumatic experiences and/or developmental difficulties more often tend to experience God as irrelevant or distant from their lives, and more often tend to experience God as controlling and more often as angry and punitive than people with more stable early relationships. Likewise, people with caring and empathic early environments experience God as more loving, available and constant. Persons with disturbances in the development of object relations are more likely to have enduring problematic relationships with others, which may extend to the relationship with God (Brokaw & Edwards, 1994). Yet the psychological image of God is not only associated with the internal representation of self-object relationships, but also with the image of the self. An accepting attitude towards the self and others is associated with belief in an accepting God (Benson & Spilka, 1973; Tisdale et al., 1997). Given the association between psychopathology, disturbed self-object relations, low self esteem and the type of God image, it is to be expected that psychopathology is associated with negative God images. There are some studies that tend to confirm this hypothesis: the more people show disturbed psychological functioning, the more

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they tend to view God as distant, punitive and revengeful. And it cannot be ignored that psychotic patients, as compared to neurotic patients, as well as patients in closed versus open treatment settings, experience less closeness to God. Longer hospitalisations are associated with more distant and unloving images of God (Brokaw & Edwards, 1994; Tisdale et al., 1997). We will take a closer look at the few research data in order to develop these ideas and insights more fully. But before we proceed, there is one point that should be discussed. One of the important topics in today’s continuous education for residents and professionals in psychiatry and psychotherapy is the capacity to develop competence in recognizing possible biases against religious and spiritual issues in clinical practice and in scientific research literature regarding the relationship of religion and spirituality to mental health, and to deepen one’s understanding of the origins of these biases. The educational objectives of the presentation of such research material and possible biases in courses and training are changes in knowledge and attitudes. According to Spero (1992), it is the very sanctity with which many continue to regard the projection theory installed by Freud, as if no other explanation for religious experience had ever been offered (such as Winnicott’s or others), that represents a psychological bias, even though Freud’s theory is not completely invalid from a psychological and possibly even to some degree from a theological worldview. The very essence of his analysis is that Freud’s observations really are descriptions of a special kind of experience, that not only can be interpreted in the psychological realm as Freud did in an illuminating way, but also in a religious realm as an event taking place between a person and a real object named God. Very intriguing and important in this respect is Spero’s observation that not only neurotic but also psychotic processes actually enrich our understanding of religion. Psychotic or primitive defences might offer insights into some of the dimensions of God as well, for instance his infiniteness, unboundedness and ubiquitousness.23 I will come back to this contribution later. But the main point of interest in Spero’s work is that it is not the case that a real model of religion and psychology (and psychiatry) should portray only the dynamics of development in relation to empirically evident primary objects or primary care takers, but also in relation to the not empirically verifiable divine reality. In Spero’s words: “To date, the professional literature contains no theoretically sound and clinically sophisticated model for distinguishing between the religious patients’ view of God as an objective reality and the psychological view of the image of Gods as a product of representational dynamics.”24

Since 1992 this picture has not really changed. 6. THREE TYPES OF EMPIRICAL RESEARCH 6.1 Image of Self and Image of God It was Freud who suggested that the God concept is modeled after the father. Religion became a cultural projective system. The God image is formed through a projection of paternal and/or parental qualities. That is just in three lines the theory. What is known about the evidence in favor of this specific projection theory?

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Beit-Hallahmi and Argyle (1975) give an early review of empirical research. They found six studies and, in spite of severe limitations, enough support to the notion that the deity is a projected love-object, but limited support for Freud’s more specific hypothesis that this image must be a paternal object. The first example of empirical research I would like to refer to is a study published fourteen years ago by Roberts (1989). Roberts presents his study as a re-examination (only one study on the same topic is mentioned) of divine images from the viewpoint of self-esteem theory, which is a variant of projection theory according to him: God as a projection of self (Beit-Hallahmi & Argyle, 1997). These two, relations to the parents and self-esteem, stand out as important factors shaping the God image. At the same time there is more than enough evidence that the parental relations are a major influence on a person’s self-esteem. So these two elements are intertwined. Other factors are relationships to significant others and groups, religious practice and religious teaching (Wulff, 1991). What Roberts considers to be the most striking finding concerning God images is the description of God along two dimensions: nurturance and discipline. These two dimensions appear time and again in the literature, although the descriptive labels slight differ from one study to the other (BeitHallahmi & Argyle, 1997; Murken, 1998; Vergote & Tamayo, 1981; Wulff, 1991). Roberts’ study is a typical questionnaire survey among a random sample of 236 households (response rate 78% = 185 respondents). Respondents had to evaluate how often they thought of God according to each of ten adjectives (listed in random order) allowing to rank each adjective separately on a scale from one equals never to five equals always. Ten adjectives referring to self were selected corresponding to the ten divine adjectives (corresponding, but not identical, and with a “semantic image” similar to the divine adjectives). Subjects were asked to rank the so-called self-adjectives or phrases along the same five point scale. The findings were consistent with the results found elsewhere in the theoretical and small amount of empirical literature. God was imagined along the two dimensions of nurturance and discipline. Roberts suggested that personality profiles can be discerned that reflect God images along the two dimensions just discussed. He hypothesized that individuals will imagine God like themselves. Those who imagine God as nurturing described themselves as generous, sincere, and as prone to forgive and forget. Women described God as nurturing more than men. Church attendance was found to be an important determinant of the nurturing image of God. Some evidence was found for a relation between critical self descriptions and a disciplining image of God. Although these findings are consistent with other findings, as I stated, no satisfying answer can be given to the question as to why these two dimensions reappear time and again. The principle of projection only suggests a relation with the genesis of divine images, but does not hint at the overall and certainly not the full quality of what is projected. For this reason Roberts explored a few other theories (e.g. attribution theory) in the search for alternatives for the projection theory. But nevertheless he assured the readers that the projection theory is not useless but rather incomplete. In his theoretical understanding and explanation he seemed to place importance on the social context as source and as limitation on the quality of what is projected.

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6.2 Image of Jesus: A Historiographic Approach The second study I want to review briefly was executed by Piedmont, (1999; see also Piedmont, Williams, & Ciarrocchi, 1997). Piedmont and his group studied the self as source of the origins of the image of Jesus by utilizing historiography as a mode of analysis of legendary or historical persons. The Adjective Check List (ACL) was used for the purpose of experimentally generating a composite portrait of Jesus. Secondly they evaluated the ACL ratings in relation to self-ratings in a five-factor model of personality (Piedmont, McCrae, & Costa, 1991). Participants (77 women; 38 men) completed both the ACL and the Neo Five-Factor Inventory as an additional form of self-evaluation. The profile of Jesus thus derived was then compared to the self-rated personality profiles in order to evaluate the degree to which images of Jesus correlated with individuals’ own self image. The Jesus profile that resulted can be characterized as a compassionate, considerate, warmly embracing individual. According to the ACL portrayals, “Jesus” is a caring and concerned individual who yet maintains a certain degree of detachment from those around him. He was not perceived as emotionally distressed, selfish or slipshod. This profile, according to the researchers, accurately reflects the overall biblical presentation of Jesus. Ratings like these are also consistent with the various images of God that can be found in many religions. Yet, perceptions of Jesus are significantly related to the needs and temperaments of the individuals themselves. Extraversion and openness to experience had the most influence in forming the profile of Jesus. The great advantage of using a strategy as the one in this study is the use of trait (personality) instead of state (signs or symptoms as depression or anxiety) characteristics. In this way, in a manner far superior to that used in Roberts’ study, the multidimensional nature of the image of God or Jesus gains better evaluation. The findings of this study are also consistent with other findings. Of special interest is the fact that Piedmont’s group noted an interesting connection with attachment theory. The dimensions of extraversion and openness reflect an individual’s capacity for warmth, empathy and acceptance. These qualities underlie the ability to form and maintain emotionally sustaining relationships with others. On the other hand, fear of rejection, anxiety, and jealousy are related to neuroticism, whereas low trust, emotional detachment and self-orientation are related to (low) agreeableness. These dimensions reflect a preoccupied and/or fearful attachment style. The findings in this study show that the five-factor model offers a suitable and valid method for the description of personality and the perceived personalities of religious figures. Using this strategy one could, for instance, obtain ratings for parents or significant caregivers, which could then be used for the further study of the developmental aspects of the image of Jesus or God.25 According to McCrae (1999), for another example, openness to experience is probably the most relevant factor for the study of religion, compared to the other dimensions of the five-factor model.

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6.3 Image of God and Personality Pathology There are few empirical studies focusing on the association between personality pathology and images of God. Most studies are qualitative (Banschick, 1992; Rizzuto, 1979). To our knowledge no study has investigated the association between DSM-IV personality disorders and image of God in a manner similar to our own effort (Schaap-Jonker et al., 2002). The main aim of the study was to investigate the association between personality disorder traits according to DSM-IV and God images. We were particularly interested in the possible association between personality disorder features and certain characteristics of God images. We also investigated the association between symptomatology, personality disorder features and image of God. Finally, we explored the association between religious subculture (level of orthodoxy), on the one hand, and God images and personality pathology, on the other hand. According to Murken (1998), the image of God can be studied by paying attention to two dimensions: (1) feelings about God, subdivided into positive and negative feelings, and (2) the perceived experience of divine action, indicated with adjectives like supportive, dominating, punishing or passive. These dimensions have been investigated by using one part of a larger German-based questionnaire, developed by Murken (1998); more specifically, the component that focuses on God experience. This component has been translated into Dutch and consists of 49 questions, divided into five subscales. The results show that God images are influenced by pathological personality traits. Personality traits in the borderline, avoidant, schizotypal, schizoid, dependent and paranoid spectrum appeared to be associated with negative feelings about God. Personality traits were also associated with negative views on God’s actions, especially in respondents with schizotypal, avoidant, obsessive-compulsive and paranoid traits. It is well known that patients with personality pathology, especially borderline patients, are characterized by strong, non-integrated feelings of anger and by negative affectivity (Kernberg, 1992). As a consequence, interpersonal relationships are often disturbed. More specifically, respondents with high scores on cluster A traits tended to offer God images referring to God as passive, aloof, distant and unsupportive. This is similar to the way people with schizoid, schizotypal and paranoid traits typically behave toward others: interpersonal relationships of people with these traits are characterized by distance, aloofness, mistrust and detachment. Respondents with high scores on cluster C traits, especially those with obsessive-compulsive traits, appeared to experience God as dominant and punishing. This could readily be deemed analogous to the way obsessive-compulsives relate to others: these people tend to be controlling, rigid and inflexible. They adhere to rules and regulations and have rigid ideas about good and evil. The absence of an independent association between cluster B pathology and God might be explained by a correlation between cluster B traits on the one hand and cluster A and C traits on the other. Co-morbidity between the A, B and C cluster

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personality disorders is a well-established fact. There also existed an association between Axis I symptomatology and negative God images. However, this association appeared to be mediated by personality pathology. This should be taken into account in future studies. In our study no empirical evidence could be found for the presumed predisposing role of religion with respect to depression (Molenkamp, 1993; McCandless, 1991). It could be hypothesized that that those who suffer from personality pathology are more prone to depression because of their religious convictions. According to this hypothesis, religious convictions are not in themselves pathogenic, but rather are sometimes the result of the selective focus on certain of these convictions under the influence of wider personality pathology. Personality pathology, then, leads to one-sided emphasis on the negative, threatening aspects of religion. Living in a strict orthodox culture appeared to be associated with the image of God as judge. However, membership of an orthodox church showed no relationship with positive or negative feelings about God, or personality pathology in general. Therefore, one must conclude carefully that God images in orthodox communities are not typically threatening, nor related to personality pathology. What is often described as “orthodox” theology may have contributed to the image of God as judge. Such theologies tend to describe God as an entity who notices every sin and who judges every person by his works at the day of the Last Judgment. However, we have to be careful to not propound a simple causal relation between theological doctrine and quality of God images. Our results suggest that religious culture largely determines the type of God image, but predicts to a much lesser extent the affective quality of these images. It seems, instead, that personality pathology is associated with the affective valence and emotional intensity of God images, especially when they are negative. Our results, finally, illustrate the importance of the study of the interaction between religious culture and personality pathology on the one hand and the type and emotional meaning of God images, on the other hand.26 6.4 Object-Relational and Cognitive Schema-Focused Perspectives Since in our study the concept of the image of God is conceptualized in an objectrelational sense, we decided to further scrutinize our findings from the perspective of a psychodynamic object-relational approach (Kernberg, 1992). However, since God images can also be viewed as frames (or schemas) for certain types of objectrelations, Young’s schema theory (Young, 1994) might offer an appropriate conceptual framework as well (Schaap-Jonker et al., 2002). From a psychodynamic object-relational perspective one could say that the way one relates to God mirrors the way one relates to others. Thus, in their relationship with God, patients who espoused religious beliefs assume the role of the abandoned child (cluster A patients) or of the controlled and dominated subject (cluster C patients) complementary to, respectively, the aloof, emotionally distant and the dominating, demanding and controlling object. This type of object relation seems

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very similar to early object relational configurations between patient and parents. It is suggested that the early environment of schizoid and paranoid patients is characterized by coldness, detachment and abandonment (Gabbard, 1994; GlickaufHughes & Wells, 1997). In such circumstances, children defend themselves by withdrawal and detachment. The history of the obsessive-compulsive patient is characterized by the conditional provision of love and attention: care is only given if the patient behaves perfectly, according to the parents’ wishes. The threat is here: loss of love by the primary object (Gabbard, 1994). The relationship with God would thus seem to offer a repetition of early traumatic object relationships and, hence, cannot but evoke very painful affects. Although in relationships with others the patient “survives” by identifying with the abandoning or controlling object, i.e., by using defence mechanisms like identification with the aggressor and turning passive into active, he seems to be unable, or unwilling, to use these defences in his relationship with God. So, in his relationship with God there seems to be a fixation to trauma. Kernberg (1992) describes precisely such a relationship in the case of fixation to trauma. According to Kernberg, the patient does not simply identify with the bad object, but with the whole relationship to the bad object, so that there is both an identification with the victim, as well as with the aggressor. In identifying with both the suffering victim and the sadistic object, the subject himself is swallowed up by all-encompassing aggression in the relationship. From the schema-focused cognitive perspective as developed by Young (1994), one could argue that internal self-object relationships are represented in the form of cognitive schemas. Cognitive schemas are information-processing structures, guiding the subjective perception of the social environment, and as such determine the emotions and behaviour that are elicited by interpersonal contacts. Young (1994) describes that personality disordered patients have early maladaptive schemas, originating in early life as a consequence of experiences with caregivers. These early maladaptive schemas are ego-syntonic, rigid and inflexible and tend to remain unaltered during life. Such persons show a great resistance to change, especially because the personality disordered patient tends to seek and select the environment that fits his or her maladaptive schemas best (schema confirmation). In addition, activation of the early maladaptive schemas in the present leads to strong affective arousal, disproportional to the objective impact of the event. We have suggested that the negative image of God one finds among personalitydisordered patients should be considered as an early maladaptive schema. We assume that God images originate in early childhood and, often, are rigidly experienced as “the” truth about God. Negative God images, then, are confirmed by selective attention to information which is congruent with the image and by discarding schema incongruent information (Schaap-Jonker et al., 2002). Young describes 16 types of schemas. In case God is experienced as abandoning, passive, and aloof, the schema of abandonment and instability of care is activated. In cases in which schema of incompetence and defect is activated, the subject is convinced that abandonment by God is justified: one does not deserve his love.

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When God is experienced as punishing, schemas of perfectionism, emotional inhibition, and negativity/pessimism and being-worthy-of-punishment are operative. The subject assumes that he has to live up to Gods standards, with fear of failure, perfectionism, emotional inhibition, and preoccupation with guilt, shame, and punishment as the inevitable result. Like all early maladaptive schemas, negative God images could conceivably lead to considerable distress. Young’s (1994) schema-focused psychotherapy for personality-disordered patients might be relevant for patients with maladaptive God images. The cognitive, experiential, interpersonal and behavioural techniques of Young’s approach could then be used to change pain provoking images into more benign, adaptive ones, thereby reducing their distress. Interventions in cognitive schema-focused psychotherapy, for example, aim at challenging both the content of religious cognitions and the operations in thinking (Johnson, 2001; Nielsen, 2001; Propst, 1996; Robb, 2001). All of the preceding suggestions need empirical confirmation. Future research therefore needs to focus on (1) identification of early maladaptive schemas involving negative God images in personality disordered patients, for instance by using Young’s schema questionnaire; and (2) investigation of the feasibility and effectiveness of this type of treatment, especially in patients with negative God images. Finally, since cross-sectional studies do not allow causal interpretations, follow-up studies are needed to evaluate the effects of schema focused therapy on negative God images. Such studies would ideally address themselves to the question: Can negative images develop into more benign ones and is this related to better mental functioning, and under what conditions might such a favorable transition occur?27 7. PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER AND AN OVERALL OUTLOOK Before this chapter will be concluded, I would like to reflect for a while on our findings. We were, first, impressed by Albert Schweitzer’s thorough and critical discussion of the many lives of the historical Jesus. We acknowledged his intuition and insight in psychic dynamics, an insight that anticipates later developments in psychology and psychology of religion. Subsequently, I reviewed the literature on constructs like projection, especially with respect to the use of such mechanisms to maintain an inner equilibrium of selfand object representations, and the depiction of the self as one of the sources of such mechanisms. There appeared to be some evidence for correspondence between the nature of self-representations and images of God or Jesus. However, the stronger claim of Freudian paternal projection theory could not be confirmed. Piedmont et al. (1997), for instance, found that only 11% of the variance in Jesus image ratings was associated with the subjects’ self-perception. Their claim that this represents “a moderate sized association” seems an overstatement. Many questions remain unanswered. What has projection to do with its very recipient? Is it possible that the recipient induces the mechanism? And if this is the

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case, is the recipient affected by projection? How do we account for the impact of projection mechanisms on the relationship between subject and recipient, as perceived by the subject, in so far as the representation of the unique object known as God is concerned? At this stage, we perhaps are best advised to adapt our frame of reference by introducing the concept of projective identification, instead of projection. With such a conceptual shift a different picture emerges: religious pathology is, then, related to non-recognition of the difference between the projected image and the perception of reality. In other words, the way Jesus and God are represented and dealt with becomes pathological in a religious sense to the extent these images and representations are interpreted as “real” objects. The “absence” of the Other (parent, loved one, divine object), the (unbridgeable) gap between our conceptions/images and the reality of the object, is no longer tolerated and is falsified by a quasi-hallucinatory act of identification between phantasy and reality. This theme emerges in the chapter “The Psychologistic Approach to the Image of God” of Spero’s book: “In fact, (. . . . .), the same tendency to mistake and construe our projected and transferred representations of the object for the veridical object (. . . . .) exists throughout the gamut of human relationships.”28

Religious pathology could, then, be viewed as the result of projective identification, which in its turn may serve many aims: to avoid separation, to control the object, to get rid of bad parts of the self, or to protect good parts of the self. From this object relational perspective we might better understand the tension and ambiguity, and the more than occasional simultaneity, between portrayal and betrayal. At the background of this discussion there looms a still broader philosophical issue: the supposed dichotomy between objectivist and subjectivist accounts of religious “objects.” This dichotomy dates back to Descartes and early Enlightenment rationalist philosophy. In our view it is absolutely necessary to somehow get beyond this dichotomous mode of thinking (Jones, 1996; Spero, 1992). At the same time, it is also clear that despite the fact that we are all post-Cartesians, our thoughts and conceptual schemas are still deeply permeated by the Cartesian mindset.29 8. “PARADIDÓMI” We will bring our considerations to a close with a theoretical or experimental investigation of the recipient of the projections and projective identification, the religious object. What is happening between the recipient and the reader, the listener, the believer? To do this, I will focus on the New Testament Greek verb “paradidómi.” The term “paradidómi” can be translated in two ways. The word occurs frequently in the passion story, in which is used to indicate the betrayal of Jesus, his being handed over to Pilate, and for his being delivered up by Pilate at the apparent will of the people. The other meaning of the verb is “tradition;” that is to say – the accuracy with which the image of Jesus is portrayed. For example, the essential teaching for Paul is the purity with which the Christian tradition is handed down or handed on. In a certain way, this double meaning has haunted the way Jesus is imagined and represented

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from early times till now. This ambiguity has been the leitmotiv of this study as well. Were Jesus actual teachings handed down or handed over? Or do we have “teachings” somehow debrided of the personality of the man who crafted these teachings? Is Jesus portrayed or betrayed? Or do these two always go together? There is some evidence for this third position. Van de Beek (chapter 15, this volume) for instance, seems inclined to the same position in his description of the different impressions the person of Jesus makes on him. The psychological portrayals of Jesus as they are found in the four gospels, give us “insight into how people in the early church used psychology to express their faith – and into what according to them was the characteristic Christian personality” (italics added by P.J.V.), depending on the context they lived in and the interests they had. That kind of approach even clarifies why in contemporary times people tend to prefer the Jesus of one gospel to the Jesus of another, a radical Jesus to a wise Jesus, or a mysterious one to a moderate person. Van de Beek takes a position in which the influence of religious, political and emotional commitments on the interpreter are taken for granted. In these preferences of today, as in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, we perceive the ambiguity between portrayal and betrayal. Van de Beek, however, does not hide his own personal opinion regarding to the role these influences have played on his appreciation of the person of Jesus. 9. JESUS AND HIS STRANGENESS What about the influence of the legendary or historical person him- or herself on that imagining by ordinary and scholarly people, with or without pathological personality traits? What can be said about the self in the presence of God, or the presence of Jesus? Is it possible, for instance, that our self-conceptions and self-perceptions change owing to the actual influence of the presence and absence of Jesus – either by sudden conversion, or over the years, through the dynamic tension between opposing self-images and object-images? With this question in mind I think it appropriate to reinstate the notion of the strangeness of Jesus (Theissen, 2003). By doing so, I return to Albert Schweitzer and one of his remarkable open-ended final sentences: “He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who did not know who he was. He says the same words, ‘Follow me!’, and sets us to those tasks which he must fulfil in our time. He commands. And to those who hearken to him, whether wise or unwise, he will reveal himself in the peace, the labours, the conflicts and the suffering that they may experience in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery they will learn who he is”.30

In Schweitzer’s last chapter, at an earlier point, he felt that he had ascertained that theology can only be surprised and dismayed by this elusiveness. And yet it is this very strangeness that in so many important ways exerts an impact on the reader, the believer and the scholar, and elicits their most profound reactions, whether religious, political, emotional, or scientific. This is what Theissen referred to when he introduced the construct of psychological strangeness.31 It is this strangeness, whether in the authority and perfection or in the humbleness and weakness of Jesus, that inevitably leads to a

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confrontation. This confrontation, or encounter, and the perceived reactions of the ultimately unimaginable Other are incentives for (re-) enactment and identification of the self with part-objects, and this with various aims. In this way the potential of the relationship is challenged, in both directions, toward the other and toward the self, by re-enactment and transformation of rigid interactive patterns. From this psychological perspective it could be maintained that relational patterns gradually become imbued with values. These relational patterns, though related, are not identical to the truth of the narrative (Wolterstorff, 1995). What does the object of the act of imagining do with the subject? What do biblical narratives effect upon their readers? What happens in that so-called enactment? What is the impact of strangeness of the historical Jesus? How can we perceive the ongoing process of creation and maintenance of the imagining of Jesus throughout the life cycle? In partial response, note that according to a variant of the performance mode of text interpretation (Wolterstorff, 1995), the so-called reception aesthetics (Jauss, 1991), three processes become active. In the process of “poiesis” the reader reveals his life history, context and expectations by handing on the meaning of the narrative of Jesus and by concretizing that meaning in his life story. In the process of “aisthesis” the reader receives a new view, an (re)open(ed) mind, a new perceiving of motivations and needs, elicited by the enactment. The third process, the “katharsis,” means the efficacious change in moral judgment, commitment and way of life in communication with others. The Christian variant of these three processes are named “meditatio,” “compassio” and “imitatio.” It is the encounter with the Jesus of the Gospels in his strangeness that brings about this alteration in attitude, desire, habit and emotional proclivity. NOTES 1

I prefer the participle “imagining” to the noun image. We are used to the distinction between the God concept and the God representation or God image (Lawrence, 1997). The God concept is a more or less intellectual cognitive paraphrase of God. The God image in a psychological sense is an internal model of how an individual imagines God to be; ‘“a compound memorial process”, aggregating memories from various sources and associating them with God’ (Lawrence, 1997; Rizzuto, 1979). It would be a misunderstanding if we assumed that such an internal model would be fixed from a certain point of development. We should be aware of the fact that the creation of the image of God or Jesus is a process that continues throughout the life cycle (Erikson, 1959; Meissner, 1992). I would like to stress this ongoing process of creation and maintenance by using the word “imagining.” Religious imagination is an intriguing and provoking topic. According to Aristotle imagination is suspect, because it is too free and unconstrained. Usually imagination (and religious imagination) is placed between sensation and thinking. We imagine things not given by perception, and imagination is not constrained by logic and examination. In his recent review Gregersen argues in favor of the naturalness of religious imagination (Gregersen, 2003). This naturalness is implied by two aspects: (1) religious imagination develops “effortlessly, as a result of the workings of the human mind”, and (2) religious imagination “depends on non-cultural constraints, such as genes, central nervous systems and brains” (Gregersen, 2003, p. 3). 2 See also Wulff (1991), pp. 317–368. 3 Theissen (2003), p. 288. 4 Schweitzer (2001), pp. 478–487; Theissen (2003), pp. 6–7, 285–294.

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Weaver (1999), p. 360. This multiformity can also be demonstrated in another way. Since the end of the 1960s new christological sketches appeared in the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. These sketches belong to what is called the contextual theology. In these sketches we meet Jesus for instance as the chief, the ancestor or the healer according to African christologies. Or we see Jesus as the black Messiah in the context of the struggle against white racist presumptions. Again, the same ambiguity as noticed by Weaver can be found. Or, in the words of Wessels, in these sketches a bi-paly is going on between “portrayal or betrayal” (cited by Küster, 2001, p. 1). McGrath (1994), p. 326. Jeremias (1961), p. 14. McGrath (1994), p. 325. The portrayal of Jesus by Vergote has the characteristics of an “admirational identification” (Jauss, 1991). The important (O)ther (the hero or the saint) is perfect, elicits admiration and is an example. The “imitatio” in this scheme is not a mere obsessive, slavish observance, but a free and personal shaping of similar behaviour and style of living. Schweitzer (2001), pp. 292–294. Schweitzer (2001), p. 295; see also Schweitzer, 1913, pp. 43–46. Schweitzer (2001), p. 294. Schweitzer (2001), pp. 5–6; italics added by PJV. Schweitzer (2001), p. 67. Barth (1981), p. 495. Evans (1996), pp. 43–44; McGrath (1994), p. 329; Schweitzer (2001), pp. 74–90. Cited by Schweitzer (2001), p. 6. Schweitzer (2001), pp. 158–167. Schweitzer (2001), pp. 7, 167. Pfister (1944), p. 485. Schweitzer (2001), p. 7. Schweitzer (2001), pp. 65–73. Spero (1992), p. 49. Spero (1992), p. 49. Piedmont (1999), pp. 341–344. See Schaap-Jonker et al. (2002), pp. 67–68. See Schaap-Jonker et al. (2002), pp. 68–70. Spero (1992), p. 91. See also the introductory remarks to the historical and conceptual issues made by Glas and his concluding chapter in this book. Schweitzer (2001), p. 487. Theissen (2003), p. 289.

REFERENCES Banschick, M. R. (1992). God-representations in adolescence. In M. Finn & J. Gartner (Eds.), Object relations theory and religion: Clinical applications (pp. 73–85). New York: Praeger. Barth, K. (1981). Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert. Zürich: Theologischer Verlag. [Original work published in 1947] Beit-Hallahmi, B., & Argyle, M. (1975). God as a father-projection: The theory and the evidence. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 48, 71–75. Beit-Hallahmi, B., & Argyle, M. (1997). The Psychology of religious behaviour, belief & experience. London and New York: Routledge. Benson, P., & Spilka, B. (1973). God image as a function of self esteem and locus of control. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 12, 297–310. Brokaw, B. F., & Edwards, K. J. (1994). The relationship of God image to level of object relations development. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 22, 352–371.

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Erikson, E. H. (1959). Young man Luther. A study in psychoanalysis and history. London: Faber and Faber. Evans, S. C. (1996). The historical Christ and the Jesus of faith. The incarnational narrative as history. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gabbard, G. O. (1994). Psychodynamic psychiatry in clinical practice. The DSM-IV edition. Washington, DC: The American Psychiatric Press. Glickauf-Hughes, C., & Wells, M. (1997). Object-relations psychotherapy. An individualized and interactive approach to diagnosis and treatment. Northvale, New Jersey, London: Jason Aronson Inc. Gregersen, N. H. (2003). The naturalness of religious imagination and the idea of revelation. Ars Disputandi. Retrieved from: http://www.ArsDisputandi.org 3 Jauss, H. R. (1991). Ästhetische Erfahrung und literarische Hermeneutik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Jeremias, J. (1961). Der gegenwärtige Stand der Debatte um das Problem des historischen Jesus. In H. Ristow & K. Matthiae (Eds.), Der historische Jesus und der kerygmatische Christus. Beiträge zum Christusverständnis in Forschung und Verkündigung (pp. 12–25). Berlin: Evangelische Verlaganstalt. Johnson, W. B. (2001). To dispute or not to dispute: ethical REBT with religious clients. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 8, 39–47. Jones, J. W. (1996). Religion and psychology. Psychoanalysis, feminism, & theology. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Kernberg, O. (1992). Aggression in personality disorders and perversions. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Küster, V. (2001). The many faces of Jesus Christ. Intercultural christology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. Lawrence, R. T. (1997). Measuring the image of God: The God image inventory and the God image scales. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 25, 214–226. Magdalen, M. (1994). The hidden face of Jesus. Reflections on the emotional life of Christ. London: Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd. McCandless, J. B. (1991). The church confronting adult depression: A challenge. Counseling and Values, 35, 104–113. McCrae, R. R. (1999). Mainstream personality psychology and the study of religion. Journal of Personality, 67, 1209–1218. McGrath, A. E. (1994). Christian theology. An introduction. Oxford UK: Blackwell. Meyer, J. P.(1991–2001). A marginal Jew. Rethinking the historical Jesus. Vol. I–III. New York: Doubleday. Meissner, W. W. (1992). Religious thinking as transitional conceptualization. Psychoanalytic Review, 79, 175–196. Molenkamp, R. J. (1993). An empirical exploration of the existence and relative independence of seperate factors for clinical depression and spiritual desolation in a religious population. Dissertation Maryland unpublished doctoral dissertation, Loyola College of Maryland, Baltimore. Murken, S. (1998). Gottesbeziehung und psychische Gesundheit: Die Entwicklung eines Modells und seine empirische Überprüfung. Münster: Waxmann. Nase, E. (1993). Oskar Pfisters analytische Seelsorge. Theorie und Praxis des ersten Pastoralpsychologen, dargestellt an zwei Fallstudien. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Nielsen, S. L. (2001). Accomodating religion and integrating religious material during Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 8, 34–39. Pfister, O. (1944). Das Christentum und die Angst. Ein religionspsychologische, historische und religionshygienische Untersuchung. Zürich: Artemis-Verlag. Piedmont, R. L. (1999). Strategies for using the Five-Factor model of personality in religious research. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 27, 338–350. Piedmont, R. L., McCrae, R. R., & Costa, P. T., Jr. (1991). Adjective check list scales and the Five-Factor model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60 (4), 630–637. Piedmont, R. L., Williams, J. E. G., & Ciarrocchi, J. W. (1997). Personality correlates of one’s image of Jesus: Historiographic analysis using the Five-Factor model of personality. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 25, 364–373.

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Propst, L. R. (1996). Cognitive-behavioral therapy and the religious person. In E. P. Shafranske (Ed.), Religion and the clinical practice of psychology (pp. 391–407). Washington: American Psychological Association. Rizzuto, A. M. (1974). Object relations and the formation of the image of God. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 47, 83–99. Rizzuto, A. M. (1979). The birth of the living God. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rizzuto, A. M. (1996). Psychoanalytic treatment and the religious person. In E. P. Shafranske (Ed.), Religion and the clinical practice of psychology (pp. 409–431).Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Robb, H. B. (2001). Facilitating rational emotive behavior therapy by including religious beliefs. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 8, 29–34. Roberts, C. W. (1989). Imagining God: Who is created in whose image? Review of Religious Research, 30, 375–386. Rollins, W. G. (1999). Soul and psyche. The bible in psychological perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Schaap-Jonker, H., Eurelings-Bontekoe, E., Verhagen, P. J., & Zock, H. (2002). Image of God and personality pathology: an exploratory study among psychiatric patients. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 5, 55–71. Schweitzer, A. (1913). Die psychiatrische Beurteilung Jesu. Darstellung und Kritik. J. C. B. Mohr Verlag: Tübingen. Schweitzer, A. (2001). The quest of the historical Jesus [J. Bowden Ed., First Complete Edition]. Fortress Press: Minneapolis, [Original work published 1913]. Solomon, R. C. (1988). Continental philosophy since 1750. The rise and fall of the self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spero, M. H. (1992). Religious objects as psychological structures. A critical integration of object relations theory, psychotherapy and Judaism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Symington, N. (1994). Emotion & spirit. Questioning the claims of psychoanalysis and religion. London: Cassell. Theissen, G. (2003). Jesus als historische gestalt. Beiträge zur Jesusforschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Tisdale, T. H., Key, T. L., Edwards, K. J, Brokaw, B. F., Kemperman, S. R., Cloud, H., et al. (1997). Impact of treatment on God image and personal adjustment, and correlations of God image to personal adjustment and object relations development. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 25, 227–239. Van de Beek, A. (this volume). The Person of Jesus. Vergote, A., & Tamayo, A. (1981). The parental figures and the representation of God. A psychological and cross-cultural study. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Vergote, A. (this volume). Casting a psychological look on Jesus the marginal Jew. Weaver, W. O. (1999). The historical Jesus in the twentieth century 1900–1950. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International. Wolterstorff, N. (1995). Divine discourse. Philosophical reflections on the claim that God speaks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wulff, D. M. (1991). Psychology of religion. Classic and contemporary views. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Young, J. E. (1994). Cognitive therapy for personality disorders: A schema-focused approach. Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Press.

PART V INTERDISCIPLINARY ISSUES: PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE

CHAPTER 17 INTRODUCTION TO INTERDISCIPLINARY ISSUES Prospects for the future

GERRIT GLAS University of Leiden, The Netherlands

The variety of the contributions to the last section in this volume illustrates the enormous richness of the field we are surveying, both in its content and in its variety of interdisciplinary tools and methodologies. Spero focuses on the interface between psychoanalytical insight and biblical/rabbinic exegesis in a fascinating essay on the “hidden subject of Job.” Pfeifer’s account is concentrated upon the surfacing of biblical themes in psychiatric practice in a clear and wise overview that could very well be considered an example of integrative thinking. Rollins offers a well-informed description of the history, presence and future of “psychological criticism” as a new type of biblical scholarship. The author of this Introduction ends the section with a contribution in which some of the conference’s loose ends are picked up and unfinished discussions are carried on for a while, culminating in an agenda for the future. The first chapter, or essay, if one prefers, deals with the well-known biblical character of Job. Its author is Moshe Halevi Spero, psychoanalyst, scholar in the humanities and in rabbinic studies, and co-editor of this book. Spero distinguishes Job the person, or character named Job, from Job, the book with its inherent structure as a written instrument, its themes and its history of interpretations. The hidden “subject” of Job, therefore, does not refer to a hidden theme of the book, but to a subject who is not present and may even “not be” at all, at least not in the ordinary sense of the verb “to be,” that is – philosophically speaking – in terms of an ontology of presence. Spero is persuaded that the unknown author of Job lends eloquent representational expression to one of the earliest intersubjective developmental tasks, which form part of what is called the “mirroring phase.” Phrased in this way, the “subject” of the book is not simply a theme which can be analysed,

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interpreted, and related to other “themes.” Spero suggests instead that the author of Job obeyed “an inner compulsion to transmit an inherently and intrinsically turbulent psychological force – one not quietable by nature, one that cannot be defined in any simple sense, and one whose “solution” is not necessarily identifiable in the form of any specific datum of knowledge.”

Let me put some emphasis here on the notion of “force.” With this notion Spero takes up and elaborates on one of the key issues in the previous sections and their introductions: the ambiguity of speaking and writing about a (religious) dynamic which is both undeniable and almost inconceivable, not only for the scientific mind but for every Cartesian form of understanding which views the object as Gegenstand , i.e., as something out there to be analysed, broken down into pieces and reconstructed by human logic. According to Spero’s existentially- and religiously-enriched psychoanalytic terminology, the author of Job was in some manner especially sensitive to some dimension of “inherent turbulence” within the self, a dimension that borders on the inexpressible. Yet, at the same time, this heroic author was able to perceive “a dimension of pragmatic articulability” which allowed a form of narration that – though dim, primordial and ephemeral – could transfer important meaning. In a series of fine and intricate analyses, Spero makes a case for the view that Job should be read as a myth which has survived precisely because its mythical qualities reveal underlying structures and contents that otherwise would have been lost to the mind, or, remain inexpressible. From a psychological point of view, myth brings the mind to an imaginary realm in which unconscious content gains symbolic meaning. This is accomplished not by adding meaning to such content extrinsically, but by letting oneself become engaged in a dynamic of unfolding and closing of unconscious structures and contents. In this manner, myth – because of its derivativeness on unconscious processes – brings us into the sphere of absence: myth comes from nowhere, so to speak (e.g., the unidentifiable land of Uz) and is always about “something else.” Its language re-presents in such a manner that it enables absence to be preserved. Absence, again, is not sheer non-existence, but refers to a sphere of symbolization and power which works precisely in so far as its mystery is maintained and valued. From this perspective, Job must be read as the story of a myth-writer – Moses himself, according to Talmudic sources – who provides the rare opportunity to be witness to a process of personal evolution, referring to the earliest stages of inner development. The monologues of the friends, Job’s prayers, his rebuttal to the friends and his bitter complaints, the words of Elihu, God’s self-manifestation, and finally Job’s repentance – are all reconceptualized as parts of an intense internal dialogue. Or, putting this more clearly, they indicate the very early phases of a process which, after completion, imaginatively could be represented as such a dialogue. The process itself, Spero suggests, shares many features with phenomena which emerge in the so-called mirroring phase, one of the earliest phases of psychic development, as interpreted by Jacques Lacan and other, mainly French, psychoanalysts.

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This background is important because of Lacan’s criticism of what – in his estimation – were naive American ego psychological approaches to the concept of identification, in which mirroring phenomena were seen as part of a process creating something new, a sphere of mutuality and sharing, between infant and caretaker. Lacan emphasized instead the inherent alienation which is set in train by the mirroring process and a certain estrangement which becomes part of the ego. To understand this, the reader is asked to adopt the Lacanian view that the mirror image not only serves unifying goals, but also signifies alienation and rage. The mirror image is unifying because it enables the retroactive imagination of the self as fragmented “body-in-pieces” – an imagination which itself is only possible from a position with some solidity and permanence. However, the mirror image also, and more hideously, indicates and instils a sense of alienation, envy and rage, in so far as it can be seen as fulfilling an imagined lack within the other, instead of oneself. In other words, the mirror image is not simply taken as an “external” representation of a more or less unified self, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, as representing the self as object of desire of the other. Crucial to this desire is that it signifies a lack (or absence) in the other; the desiring object misses something. The child, subsequently, identifies with this lack, thereby permanently creating a new lack within itself. Thus, during the mirroring phase the child’s self-perception changes: a preoccupation for the coherence of shattered part-images of the self is transformed into a readiness to absorb and internalize the desire of (not for!) the other, with its inherent negativity (or lack). I realize that these statements are too brief to do justice to the intricacy and depth of both Lacan’s thinking and Spero’s use of the Lacanian conceptual framework in his analysis of Job/Job. But one other brief comment is necessary in order to avoid at least one common misunderstanding. Lacan’s use of terms like the Imaginary and symbolization are not meant to denote a rather primitive, subjectivistic epistemology, in which realities are represented just in the way the subject prefers to view them. Lacan’s basic thesis is much more radical. For, it is only from within the sphere of imagination that the Real can be recognized as “real.” It would otherwise be incomprehensible, no more real than unreal or ir-real. Symbolization, then, leads to further distinctions within the sphere of the Imaginary. In Lacanian jargon, there is no such thing as the real, there is no reality “as such.” Therefore, fragmentation and emptiness become only real under conditions in which there is something to “mentalize;” i.e., in a context in which psychic contents can be contained at least for a while in some form – and in which the mental appears as a function of narration, one might say – and in a context which the subject has achieved at least a limited capacity to represent. One of the most intriguing aspects of Spero’s essay in this respect is his observation of the importance of metaphors related to oral phenomena (in the sense of the psychosexual phases of psychological development); more specifically, references to the skin, the mouth, clothing, coverings and garment. These metaphors often sound cold and frightening in The Book of Job, at first sight. Job is “emptied out of his protective shell.” He “begins to sense that he may not be whom he believes himself to be” and

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“can do no more than surrender his “self” to God, trusting in some form of rewriting, reidentification, or resignification.” Again, this reidentification does not occur as an affirmation, or assertion, of something present, but in two stages, after the first and second instalments of the whirlwind. The first manifestation is preceded by God’s question to Job: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if you have the understanding. (Job 37:4)

Confronted with this question, Job remains silent. It is only after the second manifestation of divine glory and power that Job finds his tongue and begins to speak; this time, however, without any invitation to do so. Spero takes this to mean that God leaves room for Job to desire to speak. Earlier, God’s questions and His self-manifestation were in a certain sense also affirmations of His desire for Job. However, these were so overwhelming as to leave little space for “mentalization” and consolation. On the second occasion, however, there is room for a learning process to start; there is time for mourning, repair, and consolation. God’s “affirmation” of Job, thus, retains its inherent negativity. God does not just restore order. Neither does He give a full answer to Job’s desire for recognition, explanation, or justification. However, it is only by maintaining this inherent negativity that Job is invited and actually able to take part in a dynamic which opens up his existence and helps him surmount the turmoil in the way of imaginary representation and symbolic appropriation and, finally, of acceptance of lack, longing, and incompleteness, as “realities” even in God. Spero gives many textual and psychological clues to support his hypothesis that Moses’s own struggles were what inspired him (Moses) to his role as “myth-writer” of Job. I will leave it to the reader to savour the subtlety of the passages in which these textual hints are analysed and imaginatively explored, both in the context of rabbinic scholarship and of current psychoanalytic theorizing. The next chapter is by Samuel Pfeifer, a Swiss psychiatrist and director of psychiatric hospital “Sonnenhalde” in Riehen (Switzerland), and one of the driving forces behind the Conferences for Psychotherapy and Counselling in Gwatt (Switzerland) (now under auspices of the Akademie für Psychotherapie und Seelsorge). With his chapter, Pfeifer brings us back to clinical practice and illustrates the case he wishes to make with clinical vignettes. The first part of the chapter is devoted to biblical themes in different forms of psychopathology: depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and personality disorders. The second part briefly reviews the theme of religious attribution of causes of mental illness. Pfeifer discusses his own research on the subject in which it was demonstrated that demonic causal attributions were not specifically related to psychosis (schizophrenia) but to the ego-dystonic quality of certain perception, feelings, and actions. Pfeifer uses the term ego-dystonic in its classical sense of the quality of unfamiliarity and strangeness; what happens in one’s perception, feeling, or action does not belong to oneself and is, in cases of demonic attribution, explained by the influence of demons. The third part of his chapter argues for the need to build bridges between biblical “models” and bio-psycho-social psychiatry. Biblical models of mental distress are

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far more complicated and rich than is suggested by concepts like sin, curse, and demonic possession. Biblical texts do support an integrative view on the patient in which biological, psychological, and sociological aspects are interwoven. I am not certain whether Pfeifer would support the claim of some of his religious colleagues to add a fourth, spiritual dimension to the bio-psycho-social model of psychopathology. However, it is clear that spiritual issues do matter, that this is reflected in social and psychological functioning of patients, and that there exists a great need for carefully designed, sufficiently rich empirical research on the impact of spiritual functioning on mental well-being. In the final paragraph Pfeifer offers a plea for a supportive, integrative and valuesensitive approach of the patient. It is not unethical to challenge the assumptions of the world of the patient if this world is perceived as dysfunctional by the clinician. Religion may indeed play a dysfunctional role. However, this should be done carefully and with sufficient sensitivity with respect to the impact that this probing is likely to have upon the self-image and religiosity of the patient. Pfeifer’s contribution is clinically oriented and offers much needed suggestions about how to deal with religious issues in psychotherapy and psychiatry. The overall impression is that of the extensiveness of the interactions between religion and psychiatry. Pfeifer argues for a view in which the clinician takes the role of “interpreter” between the religiously loaded, assumptive world of the patient and the bio-psycho-social framework of the psychiatrist. Wayne Rollins, professor emeritus of Assumption College and of Hartford Seminary (Worcester, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut; respectively) and one of the founders of a research section on Psychology and Biblical Studies of the Society of Biblical Scholarship (1991), traces the interactions between psychology and biblical scholarship, especially those amounting to the recognition of a new discipline in the field of biblical studies known as “psychological criticism.” The overall impression of the history of these interactions is that of a “spirited dialogue” between psychologists and bible scientists. In ancient times, early predecessors of what now is called psychology were concerned with the soul, an inclusive term encompassing both mental and spiritual aspects of psychic functioning. Bible scholars, on the other hand, were aware of all sorts of psychological factors which are operative in the context of Bible interpretation. They even played a significant role in the acceptance of psychology. It was, for instance, Melanchton who introduced the term psychology to the academic world. And after the Reformation period, theologians were inclined to counter hesitance about the term and its new content by referring to a long history in which it was quite normal to discuss psychological factors in the lives of Biblical personalities and in the appropriation of their stories by contemporary believers. This dialogue was temporarily broken up under the influence of Schweitzer’s criticism of the psychiatric study of Jesus and of positivism and behaviourism in psychology, but gained new impetus after the demise of behaviourism and the dethroning of historical literary criticism as dominant approach in the Bible sciences. Rollins defines psychological criticism as a discipline which investigates the role of psychological processes in both the construction of the text and in its later

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appropriations. A second focus is “biblical psychology,” that is, the images of the self and of the human person which are evoked by stories and personalities in the Bible. Rollins then focuses on seven areas of concern for this new type of scholarship: unconscious factors at work in the text and its readers (collective unconscious factors included; with a reference to Jung); interpretation of biblical religious phenomena; analysis of psychodynamic factors in biblical texts; psychological analysis of biblical portraits of personalities; biblical psychology (mentioned above); psychological hermeneutics; and, finally, history of effects of the Bible and of Bible interpretation. Psychology, on the other hand, might learn from religion and biblical studies, for instance from its concept of a unified soul or self and from its notion of spirit. The human spirit transcends earthly reality in so far as it is a reality perceived by the senses. The book concludes with a chapter by the author of these Introductions, who is psychiatrist and philosopher. In this text I share some reflections on the thematic content of the conference. I first focus on the wide-spread dissociation between personal and scientific approaches of the Bible and draw some analogies with similar incidents of dissociation in psychiatry. I then highlight what throughout the book has been called the “transformative power” of religion. In the previous chapters this transformative power emerged as one of the most central and inescapable aspects of religion. After this, I try to point out how the main themes of the conference could have a bearing on psychiatry and psychotherapy, both clinically and scientifically. I finish with some thoughts about the possible contribution of biblical psychology to the practice of psychotherapy and psychiatry. This contribution should be sought in a variety of ways: first, in the further expansion of psychological criticism; second, in the development of a biblical worldview which may serve as mediating framework between the world of the Bible and the world of psychiatry and psychotherapy; and, finally, in the analysis of psychological processes occurring between text and reader, and between readers, both contemporary and historical readers.

CHAPTER 18 THE HIDDEN SUBJECT OF JOB Mirroring and the anguish of interminable desire

MOSHE HALEVI SPERO Postgraduate Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, School of Social Work, Bar-Ilan University Weinstock Oncology Day Hospital, Shaare Zedek Medical Center Department of Psychiatry, Sarah Herzog Memorial Hospital Behind every strategy of the symbolic world, there exists a theology to legitimate it. Umberto Eco (1981, p. 912)

The subject of Job, whatever might be its theological or literary dimensions,1 would seem to be Job, or God, or Job and God, and there ought to be no mystery about this.2 But there is mystery here, not least of which derives from the well-known problem that we do not even know who wrote Job, or why. And that is precisely why the title of this essay alludes to the fact that I am interested in a hidden subject. I will not say at this point who that subject might be, but the question I directed toward the first four words of this chapter may become sharper if I rephrase things ever so slightly and ask: Who is the subject of Job (not Job), or, who is the subject named Job? I will tweak the reader’s attention by hinting that I have in mind a subject who might not be. This subject-who-might-not-be is, in my opinion, the proper subject of Job. This essay, hopefully, will underscore something much deeper and more fundamental in Job than the usual themes having to do with the human propensities for crises of faith, obsessions about theodicy, and self-immolation over tragedy, evil, unjust suffering, and similar kinds of themes that have preoccupied previous writers.3 Of course, these moral and theological issues are certainly among the outstanding contributions of the book. And, like any investigator with a modicum of interest in evidential hypotheses, my attention will also gravitate toward many of the same stylistic, syntactic, and thematic idiosyncrasies that have perplexed previous writers. If my thesis is on the right track, it should be possible to elevate many of these idiosyncrasies – in particular, the mystery of the so-called “missing subject”4 of Job, 42:6 – to an entirely new plane of meaning. 213 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 213–266. © 2007 Springer.

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However, my professional perspectives are psychological as well as religious, and I am persuaded that the unknown author of Job has managed to lend eloquent representational form to one of the earliest, and among the most critical intersubjective developmental tasks that challenge the human mind during childhood and in modified form throughout a lifetime. Furthermore, though more difficult to prove, I believe that the author of Job set out intentionally to create this representation. Establishing such an intention, or at least lending strong support for same, would do much to resolve some of the perennial conundrums that characterize this book. But what is the scope of the term “intentional”? I certainly do not mean that the author was conscious of wanting to create a psychoanalytic, developmentallyoriented text in the contemporary sense of these scientific terms. Rather, I am persuaded that the author of Job was conscious (or mostly conscious), and painfully so, of certain intuitions bearing upon what we today call the mirroring phase, its joys and terrors, and was able to fashion an extensive mythic story, organized from bits of preexisting myths as well as from personal experience, that could successfully articulate the intense and stunningly paradoxical psychological forces that comprise this phase, and endow the mind with the capacity to move beyond it. One caveat: I do not intend to quote much chapter and verse in this essay; it is not that kind of essay, and I must assume that the reader is sufficiently versed in Job as to be able to link up quickly with such allusions as I do make to the text. When the substance of the text is critical, I will cite such material in full. But there are other, less familiar working assumptions that influence my writing, and these require some introduction. I want to provide this introductory matter because I think that the manner in which I intend to go about interpreting Job is as important as my actual thesis regarding Job. 1. A META-ANALYTIC INTRODUCTION Pauvre Job! If the dreadful trials and tribulations reported in the biblical text were insufficient to bring him to apostasy, and his compatriots’ admonitions unable to break his resolve, our incessant reinterpretations of the individual, his dilemmas, and his text may eventually break the man, ironically restoring to Temptation its forfeiture. Yet here is another essay, and so I, too, have succumbed to the compulsion. Centuries’ worth of scholarship has persisted in the attempt to illuminate the mysteries of Job’s personal attributes – his righteousness, his suffering, his quest, his celebrated patience,5 and the nature of his relationship with his wife, his friends and God – and to resolve the conundrums of the text, such as its origin, the dramatic prologue and comparatively naive epilogue, the interdigitation of the dialogues, its famous aporia, and of course its provocative theology, both explicit and implicit.6 These manifold dimensions are indeed fascinating, encompassing a great stock of objective oddities yet to be resolved. But no reader of Job can put aside the impression that something much deeper lies at work beneath the surface of this text; something that, more so than with

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any other biblical text, outstrips its historical, moral, and literary qualities, and runs to the root of a fundamental mystery of human selfhood. Now from a strictly deterministic psychoanalytical point of view, one might say, matters could not possibly be otherwise. After all, the works of man under all conditions express the vicissitudes of the psyche and the frustrations of human subjectivity; sublimated to this degree or that, to be sure, yet always emerging from some device or crevice in a given piece of art, literary text, or spoken narrative. And from the opposing direction as well, the reader of or participant in human kraft cannot help but respond on some level – be it empathic resonance, enjoyment, resistance, or renunciation (see Freud, 1905/1906) – to the latent, generally unconscious psychological factors that course through the given text, piece of music, or work of art. From this point of view, then, our chronic preoccupation with Job can be expected ex principium to be the consequence of very powerful, unsettling, and conflict-bound psychodynamic forces operating in the very core of intersubjective relations. Presumably, these would be forces that, although they have been carried “through” the text, have yet to be adequately articulated or contained within the literary, moral, or philosophical packages we have designed to date, such that the unrest in the heart of the reader of Job corresponds to unrest in the heart of the author. The scholar may naively (and forgivably) believe he has exercised his own conscious choice in deciding to alight upon this poorly metered strophe or that overarching philosophical dilemma, but in reality, he has succumbed to an incontestable pull emanating from deep within the text. It is for this reason that the compulsion to interrogate the text in search of sense, any sense, continues to beckon even when the “objective” scholarly agenda has been allegedly resolved. This may even be an additional aspect of what is tragic about Job.7 Yet this kind of theory sets into motion a very important line of inquiry. To what degree was the author of Job himself aware of this internal disquietude, to what degree could he assign some form of meaningful structure to the anxiety-provoking elements of his self-consciousness, and to what degree did he intend to share such structures, if there were, with others? If the author knew what was bothering him, if he had some modality for comprehending and articulating his perplexity – as the very existence of this eloquent text would seem to suggest – then the task of subsequent readers is not an impossible one. Meaning of some kind, and in a positivist sense, exists; this meaning was conveyed, either explicitly or implicitly; and meaning may be rediscovered. With such an argument in mind, numerous contemporary authors (we shall briefly consider some below) have attempted to analyze Job’s personality, or to seek that which the author of Job knew and wished to communicate, without ever questioning on the meta-analytic level whether or not Job conveys something which can be known at all, or whether it expresses a state of mind that can be evaluated as meaning this or meaning that or is capable of importing a specific moral or psychological lesson with a potential solution.8 Presumably, to raise questions of such radically basic nature would appear to question whether or not Job was sane at all or mentally capable of expressing a sentient message.

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Now there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that Job as we encounter him, or the author of Job, was anything less than sane. Nevertheless, I have raised this metaquestion because I believe that Job’s torment and the “notion” with which he struggles have very much to do with psychological experiences on the edge of what is knowable or capable of being articulated. For another argument can be made. It is possible to assume that the author of Job obeyed an inner compulsion to transmit an inherently and intrinsically turbulent psychological force – one not quietable by nature, one that cannot be defined in any simple sense, and one whose “solution” is not necessarily identifiable in the form of any specific datum of knowledge! If such were the case, then our anticipations regarding the text must be different. One would need to anticipate that all subsequent generations of readers would find themselves equally unable to modify this situation, despite all the interpretive might at their disposal. This possibility would naturally render much of our scholarly investment in Job an exercise in futility. Moreover, it would cast aspersion on the traditional theological principle that considers prophetic writings purposive and pregnant with coherent messages of transgenerational importance.9 I believe that exactly this kind of paradox lies at the core of Job, and yet there is no need to despair of working with it, for an alternative conceptualization can be evoked. It is not an unfamiliar one. This conceptualization is drawn from the methodology utilized by those who have grappled with similar paradoxes that have emerged in the encounter between the almost nihilistic, reductionist deconstruction of postmodernism and the Cartesian positivism to which psychoanalytic theory and interpretation aspired.10 This approach acknowledges, on one hand, the extensive domains of incoherence, irrationality, instability, and turmoil within the human psyche, and the inherent impossibilities of perhaps all knowledge conducted through “languaged minds.” This range of complexity and incoherence is believed to exist on some level, whether we like it or not, in the most highly sophisticated and seemingly durable ethical and philosophical teachings. This inchoate domain is exemplified by the primary unconscious, the secondary or repressed unconscious, and the dimensions of preverbal mental experience, silent deep grammar, and implicit mental operations – all of which are active on some level within the subterranean levels of human activity.11 The saving grace of this alternative approach, on the other hand, is that it points to the fact that, despite the postmodern critique, humanity seems to be able to create relatively stable configurations and structures around these domains, ranging from the most concrete vessels of containment, such as the cave dweller’s rudimentary pot, to the multidimensional abstractions of thought and the intricate if fragile systems of ethics with which man attempts to maintain social behavior. This alternative conceptual framework acknowledges the role of chaos, unknowability, impossibility, and disarray in human events, but also acknowledges that human history is characterized by periods, stages, and, at deeper substrata, by long-term ranges of stability and inner coherence, during which times it is possible to grasp a bit of the swirling chaos and give it expression, to capture some of that which lies at the event horizon of human consciousness and lend it permanent expression. In the clinical context,

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the argument has been that, while to some degree much of human nature is always in the process of contextualizing and decontextualizing itself, other important dimensions of human experience – particularly those that have been internalized and set to a temporal pace most suitable for the circumstances in which the individual finds himself – can be deemed “stable,” knowable, analyzable, and, most important, capable of being expressed and retained in narrative form.12 This the human mind does in full cognizance (at least, since contemporary consciousness has become increasingly able to deal with this possibility) that some of these expressions may continue to strike a familiar chord for eons while the vast majority may be interpreted differently by future minds. Thus, my meta-assumption for what follows is that the author of Job was somehow particularly sensitive to a specific dimension of “inherent turbulence” within the self, one which borders on that which is ultimately inexpressible and even maddening about the earliest steps of the formation of self. At the same time, and to our good fortune, this author simultaneously perceived a dimension or grid of pragmatic articulability (for lack of a better way of saying it) – dim, primordial, ephemeral, yet nevertheless one that he felt he would be able, with his narrative gifts, to lend some meaningful, linguistically-transportable quality, so that something about this state could be grasped and discussed in a consensual way. And if this is the case, then we, like the author of Job himself, have good reason to anticipate that our new perspectives will enable us to add an increment of coherence to that which, ultimately, will always exceed the bounds of articulation. One of the introductory apprehensions that I raised can be settled if the preceding characterization is accurate.13 That is, it now seems very likely that the reason we continue to penetrate Job is not so much in order to resolve specific textual dilemmas, or to evolve ultimate philosophical resolutions for Job’s moral quandaries as such. Rather, we interpret Job – and continuously inquire anew, and write and rewrite – because this is the truest consolation one can offer Job, and may be, in fact, the only consolation he sought. By the time we conclude, I hope it will be clear that this is no trivial assertion. 2.

WHO WROTE JOB?

Among the major quandaries surrounding The Book of Job is its unclear paternity. Since this issue commands an extensive literature, yet only concerns us peripherally, I beg to briefly summarize the extent of the problem. From the point of view of biblical research, Job’s authorship has been placed as far back as predating Abraham, drawing from ground material with Mesopotamian and Akkadean roots (see Pritchard, 1955),14 and extends as late as the period of the Babylonian exile.15 Much of the debate focuses upon terminology, style, and crossreference,16 and far less frequently upon the context of the psychological quality of Job’s message (which is made more difficult owing to our general bias toward universalizing the biblical message). Traditional Jewish opinion itself is rife with controversy on the matter, attributing the text variously to Solomon, Mordekhai, and the

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returnees from the Babylonian exile, while some rabbis believed that Job lived during a much earlier period, may have been married to Dina, the daughter of Jacob, and may even have been a descendent of Esau.17 This debate notwithstanding, the Talmud offers the radical opinion that Job was not Jewish but a member of the righteous among nations who comprehended divine truths intuitively.18 In a similar vein, another view (Talmud, San’hed‘r¯en, 106a; Exodus Rabbah, 21:7) has Job appearing as a counselor in the court of the Pharaoh who enslaved the Hebrews, alongside Jethro and B¯el‘am – his righteousness being attributed to his unwillingness to see the Jews enslaved, and his trials being a punishment for his failure to speak out boldly against the destructive decree. There exists one other particularly important rabbinic tradition, attributed to the talmudic sage Rabbi Sh¯e‘mon ben La‘k¯esh (ca. end 200 CE), which merits full citation (Jerusalem Talmud, So‘tah, 5:6): Rabbi Sh¯e‘mon ben La‘k¯esh taught: Job never existed and is not destined to exist [i.e., bears no prophetic message bearing on events that need to be anticipated]. But does this not contradict the opinion [we heard in the name] of Rabbi Sh¯e‘mon ben La‘k¯esh citing bar Ka’pra that Job lived in the days of Abraham? Say therefore [that Rabbi Sh¯e‘mon intended to teach]: Job existed, but his trials never existed. Then why were they attributed to him [in the text]? To teach that had such trials befallen him he would have been able to withstand them.

There are variations on this theme (see also Talmud, Baba Bat’ra, 15a; and Greenberg, 1992), but the essential idea – and it is the view adopted by Maimonides (Mo‘reh Ne’vu‘kh¯em, 3:22) – is that the narrative of the Book of Job is nothing other than a ma‘shal, a fable or morality tale. Furthermore, in the talmudic discussion of the authorship of the different books of the Jewish canon, the author of Job, fable or testimony, was considered to be none other than Moses himself.19 Surveying this confusion, Baskin concludes (1983, p. 7; see also Baskin, 1992): “The problem of Job’s identity is inherent in the book itself. Other biblical narratives are rooted in time and place, but Job seems to exist outside of time.” Baskin’s turn of phrase is important because it highlights a central dimension of the psychological reality expressed in Job and that is: its supratemporal quality.20 It is the specific quality of being above time, or of being timeless, that tends to characterize cultural myths that are of the greatest relevance to psychological development. Indeed, I believe four factors in particular suggest strongly that the proper listening frame for Job is the frame of myth, and that what we need most to comprehend in Job can only be comprehended by attending to its mythic dimensions as opposed, say, to what the text reveals directly. Extracting from the preceding literature that which is most useful for us here, we note, first, that the content of the narrative itself seems almost intentionally disinterested in marking its historical context. Second, far from being simply tacked on to a preexisting narrative, the Prologue and Epilogue play an important role in bringing the entire text together as a kind of dream narrative. I predicate this assertion upon the crucial role played in these subtexts by the Hebrew term ne’h.a‘mah or consolation, and this is because I believe that the term alludes to consolation of a very specific kind, further presupposing a psychological accomplishment of a specific kind. Third, as the literature referred to above reveals,

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there do exist very ancient precedents to the text, all of which focus upon some kind of interlocution between a suffering protagonist and his friends as they search, individually and as a group, for some meaning or purpose behind the suffering. These background texts may be seen as latent, deep structures of the kind that tend to survive only on the condition that they have achieved mythic quality. Finally, aside from the Talmud’s own testimony that the author of Job is Moses, a great many rabbinic commentaries felt that the purpose of the text is not especially to introduce the biographical personality of Job and his historical trials, but rather the epic ma‘shal or myth and its universal lessons. But I think that something very important about human biography or psychology does emerge in the details of the text. If we cull from all of the ancient textual precursors of Job and from the texts of Job itself, the common theme that emerges is the desire to know the deity’s will or, if I may put it differently, the wish to discover the face of the loved one whom we beseech. Aside from any type of religious seeking, concretely construed, I believe that there are structures hidden even deeper within this wish. And it seems to me quite natural that these manifest and latent structures were brought together in their fully poetic form by Moses. 3. JOB AS MYTH: WHAT LICENSE DOES THIS PROVIDE? Why is it so important to classify Job as myth? This question actually opens a much larger discussion than I can entertain here. The sole aspect of the discussion that concerns us here is the epistemological legitimacy of analyzing the biblical personality through contemporary psychological methods. Classifying Job as myth – that is, aiming an analysis at its mythic dimensions – enables us to steer clear of making claims regarding the actual or historical identity of the personalities involved, while enabling us to focus upon the deep message that seems to have survived centuries of revision, and which may be evolving into its current form, so to speak, in the guise of certain “mythic” structures espoused by contemporary psychoanalytic theorists. Let me begin by stating that myth makes it possible to conceptualize that which might otherwise remain not-able-to-be-experienced mentally, or unknowable, in the human condition. Myth does this not simply by adding another “story” to the storehouse of human literature, but rather by actually augmenting the available internal representational space of the mind so as to enable whatever kind of creative psychic work may be necessary in order that the mind, now enveloped within a new structure provided by myth, can come to know an important new bit of psychological data (Lévi-Strauss, 1949, 1955). The classic illustration of this point is the way in which the great Oedipus myth enabled the human mind to begin to grapple with specific elements of incestuous strivings – long before the formal methods of psychoanalysis developed alternative (better?) ways of doing so. Some myths draw their importance from the way in which they express specific thematic content, while others lend palpability to even more fundamental structures, such as the very nature of the formation of the human mind and other primary processes of psychological functioning.

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As Ricoeur points out (1981, 1991), the mimetic effectiveness of the poem or text, its capacity to conduce toward some modicum of identification, works best because it re-creates by means of what the Greeks termed m¯uthos, a fable, which reaches the most profound depths of reality. From our point of view, perhaps it is more significant to state that a story or myth has effectiveness to the extent that it engages and somehow captures a moment of opening and closing of the symmetrical and asymmetrical tendencies of the post-linguistic, post-specular mind, giving us a bit more of an opportunity to “flirt” with the abyss as glimpsed through the navel (Freud, 1900a, p. 525) of the myth or dream, along the edge of the unconscious (i.e., the dimension of total unconscious symmetry). Myth, in Maud Mannoni’s eloquent expression of these paradoxical qualities (1993, p. 129): always participates in a complicity between discourse and what discourse casts off into ‘somewhere else.’ It is this rejected material that is important, because the field of speech is that of desire. Myth in this sense comes from nowhere, that is, from the unconscious. Myth always takes place at the origin, and we come up against an imaginary mind bounded by death on one hand and desire on the other.

Thus, myth is always about that “somewhere else,” that “something else” that cannot be expressed through the structures of language that reign in every given epoch. Put differently, the mythic place, or the myth qua place, refers to that geographically unlocalizeable Land of Uz. where Job takes place and doesn’t take place since, after all, Job never existed except as a tale! If myth is not heard or “read” in this way, “then the modalities – especially that of paradox – will deliver obstacles to the comprehension of the rational mind, instead of providing lures and stimulations to the depths of the imagination” (Bomford, 1999, p. 90). All the more substantial, therefore, is the prevailing assumption that the component structures of the myth have an inherent integrity which must be respected – indeed, maintained – in order for any of the components to exert their structure-imposing influence over the maw of the symmetrical unconscious. Lévi-Strauss makes another assertion that is significant in this regard (1958, p. 216): “One of the main obstacles to the progress of mythological studies [is] the quest for the true version, or the earlier one. On the contrary, we define the myth as consisting of all of its versions.” He proceeds to explain that Freud’s redaction of the Sophoclean Oedipus myth demands that Freud himself be included within the new dimensions of the myth. I have always taken this to mean that the dynamic structure of the myth includes not only Freud’s novel psychoanalytic perspective on Oedipus (i.e., the problem of bisexual reproduction as opposed to the original concern, the denial of the autochthonous origin of man), but even the dynamic conflicts within Freud himself as he rewrote or re-narrated the original myth, even the particularities of the writing process itself insofar as inherent to these were Freud’s mastery of key maternal and paternal psychosexual conflicts. Similarly, and paradoxically, as we attempt to bring forward that which we might hold to be latent in the deep core of the story of Job we are simultaneously modifying the myth, and becoming part of it.21 We recall that myth enables thought to have dimension, which means it can also give dimension to non-things, absences, and negativizations, and thereby include these mythologized, and otherwise impossible dimensions of experience within the

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mind (Bion, 1963, 1967). This dimension includes that which we referred to above as the “somewhere else” and “something else” that by definition are always being “dropped” or remaindered from every linguistic human expression in so far as no human locution can ever be completely adequate to the task of expressing the totality of our desires, or to locating (through semantically-ensconced invitations) the definitive object of our desires. Now myth can capture this gap, as paradoxical as it may seem, yet in order for this to happen, all of the elements in the myth must interact in order to preserve those special qualities they have acquired by virtue of their integrative role in the myth (Bion, 1963, pp. 45, 92). Myths may be helpfully viewed as a first clause in a statement of psychological fact. That is, myth – in particular, what are known as primary myths, to which group I intend to recommend Job – states that the ground of the unconscious must be booted up, broken in or “transgressed” in order to write upon it. The subcomponents of the mind, such as the basic ego functions, must themselves become symbolified (see Spero, 1996, 1998) in order to create a psychic apparatus suitable for the processes of signification, representationalization, and symbolization that ongoing mental life requires. The present analysis subscribes to the belief that the discovery of new interpretations for myth are not necessary artificial or exterior to the myth. Rather, these additions or revisions reflect the natural, ongoing maturation of the myth itself. This is so largely because myths are never arbitrary nor merely ante facto carriers of completed historical achievements, but rather derive their main characteristics as well as their content from deep structural properties of the human mind, including the very structural elements of the basic cogwheeling of mental processes themselves (i.e., a myth, like certain types of dreams, may portray the history of the instantiation of the symbolizing process itself within the mind). This trait highlights what may otherwise seem to be contradictory qualities of the myth. On the one hand, myth is akin to symbolic metaphor and, as such, “cannot take just any conceivable form, but must instead display considerable morphological stability” (Michon, 1985, p. 290). On the other hand, and precisely by comparison to deep structures within the mind, myth also discloses an active property. Myths are not hermetically sealed against the accretion of new elements, but rather evolve through certain relatively predictable processes of evolution into more complex forms. This occurs almost exclusively secondary to major transformations in psychological perspectives that demand some kind of adaptation or revision of the structure of myth in order for the myth to retain its relevance. The process of change in myth and mythopoesis is instigated by at least two central sets of oscillating forces: First, there is the desire to escape the psychology of the group, occurring simultaneously with the fact that the myth continues to express symbolically the tensions and linguistic structures that are deeply identified with the group (Freud, 1921c, pp. 136–7). Second, the renunciation of direct forms of instinctual expression through the expedient of constant advances in symbolization, which occurs simultaneously with the fact that the very presence of the myth gives testimony to the indestructibility of instinctual life and desire, and “primitive” modes of

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perception (Freud, 1932a, p. 191). These antagonistic psychodynamic vectors provide a major impetus for the introduction of variation into myth (Arlow, 1961, 1969, 1982; Hartocollis & Graham, 1991). Thus, the introduction of variation into the text of the myth indicates that the mythreviser has already been influenced by subtle psycho-cultural changes, or that he has perceived what one might term a readiness for change with the culture or ideology which awaits the actual revision of the myth in order to initiate or augment the full potentiality of such change, at least in terms of its communicability. On rare occasion, one gets to witness the personal evolution of a selfsame myth writer who within his or her own lifetime revises a mythic structure in accordance with changes within the micro subculture within himself. The same processes also essentially characterize the mediating function of the psychoanalyst as he compares and contrasts the subjective and symbolic aspects of the analysand’s myth-generating tendencies against the baseline of the analyst’s own professional metaphors and myths. Again, in this instance the goal is the empirical discovery of the invariants, surfeits, pleonasms, and gaps that emerge from the interaction between these two sets of structures.22 4. PREVIOUS PSYCHOANALYTIC APPROACHES TO THE CONTENTS OF JOB The psychoanalytic methodological approach I have adopted maintains that one is best advised to approach myths – and occasionally even historically veridical documents – as one approaches the “actors” and “events” that unfold during the course of a dream. That is, as we know from the case of dreams, the actors in the story are relevant not as individuals per se, nor even as dramatis personae, but rather as representations of different aspects and components of human personality (generally, the author’s) that have been depicted as if engaged in various internal relations as the story unfolds (see Freud, 1908 [1907], 1916, pp. 311–317, 1919, p. 232n). In addition, some of these components might be fragmentary or “part” representations and others might be more completely internalized or “whole” representations. According to this approach, for example, the image of God and the Satan might be seen as representing, respectively, positive and malignant superego introjects of varying qualities, and Job’s four companions can be viewed as representing different levels of the ego’s self-observational functioning. It might not be obvious at first blush what is represented by the famous divine tempest or whirlwind, yet one would need to assume that this element as well gives expression to some aspect of the internal mental state of the mind of the author, or of the author’s sense of some larger group or even universal psychological trait. Very few interpreters of Job have followed this approach. The English poet, mystic, and illustrator William Blake was possibly the first to view God and other elements of the text not as realities but rather as states of mind. Most interestingly – and also most vexingly from the standpoint of research – Blake offers his interpretation not in the form of analytical prose but as a series of 21 steel engravings, each surrounded by various passages from the Bible and accompanying linear symbolisms, entitled

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Illustrations of the Book of Job (1820–25) (see Damon, 1966; Wicksteed, 1924). In these, Satan is portrayed as the accuser within, the search for God as man’s own search for self, each of the friends as a different state of consciousness, and so forth. The contribution of Blake’s 21 steel engravings would probably have been lost had it not been for the fascinating reconsideration of his work by Marion Milner, a British psychoanalyst influenced by Klein and Winnicott. Milner’s evaluation (1956) is not strictly an analysis of Job but rather an analysis of Blake’s commentary on Job through his engravings, and one must bear in mind that her insights therefore are in large measure an interpretation of Blake’s psyche as well as of the themes set into independent motion by the author of Job. Nevertheless, the value of the analysis inheres in the degree to which Milner has touched on universal elements in the text. Milner chiefly emphasizes the notion that Job’s “sin,” comprehended in the psychological sense, lies in denying the destructiveness (or the existence of the death drive itself) inherent in human nature and in some form of difficulty accepting the deep emptiness or void that lies at the bottom of the self. What effectively cuts off a man from his full creative powers, argues Milner, is the failure to acknowledge the existence of evil within oneself, and ultimately the failure to acknowledge the existence of the unconscious. This form of manic denial reaches its zenith when, as Blake depicts it graphically, Job, already depleted by the first wave of his afflictions, gives his last crust of bread to a beggar (despite the fact that there is no rabbinic source for this last element). It is owing to this disproportionate philanthropy that God allows Satan to attack Job for the second and far more disastrous time.23 The image of God that Job worships in order to legitimize such excess, in Milner’s analysis, is Job himself, and he must learn to decentralize that image in order to balance the fantasy of omnipotence with a more full awareness of his own potential destructiveness (which takes the form of the image of Satan, externalized in the text as if it were independent entity). Milner notes that up until a specific point in the work, Blake depicts the background image of God as having a face identical to Job’s! At that point where Blake begins to distinguish the faces, from Milner’s point of view, a “therapeutic” change has come about due to Job’s having finally worked through the so-called depressive position, inaugurating a more mature resignation to the loss of omnipotence through mourning and new levels of symbolization. In Blake’s intuition, as Milner adds in her gloss (p. 183), It seems he has now no need to create such a central image of himself as God in order to counterbalance its opposite, the denied knowledge of his own capacity for ruthless destructiveness. He no longer needs to protect himself from the terrible grief and shame of knowing that he is capable, in the secret depths of his heart, of wishing to destroy those he loves most when they frustrate him; because, in recognizing the destructiveness he has also brought in another force that has power to control it. . . . Here I think Blake indicates that the process of getting rid of the wrought image of oneself is something that accompanies the discovery of the new kind of power over destructiveness.

Milner continues: I think this means that Job has now become able to face the destructiveness that he has done in his secret thoughts and to realize how, in his early belief in the omnipotence of thought, he felt he had really destroyed those he loved and so had to built up the wrought image of his own perfection to compensate.

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Extrapolating from Milner’s interpretation, religious or moral maturity resides in acknowledging these polarities within ourselves, as opposed to concretizing them, splitting them into exaggerated opposites (i.e,. reaction formation as opposed to sublimation), and projecting one or the other (or both) onto quasi-real objects in the outside world. Symbolization and mourning, then, would be the type of psychological advances that militate against the inferior resolutions of the dilemma, ultimately leading to the representational sense of restitution deeply within the personality. The psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung’s famous Answer to Job (1952), rich with the terminology of archetypes, collective unconscious, and other elements particular to Jung’s version of psychoanalysis, also follows this approach, but with an important variation. For Jung (who was in some ways no less a mystic than Blake!), Job is an analysis of the conflicting forces or structures within the mind, only the mind in question is God’s. The guilt motif that permeates the book, at least according to the view Jung endorses, is recast as God’s guilt for creating an imperfect creature, a creature that God somehow comes to view as morally superior to Himself. This seemingly outrageous portrait is nevertheless not too unfamiliar to the psychoanalytic conception of the types of internal envy that carom about amongst the structures of the mind. Satan is depicted as an element of God’s mind (the Yahweh element), expressive of a paranoid, destructive force that, much as God may have on one hand sought for man, Job, to enable Him to contain that force, also generated intense jealousy, equally destructive, of the very possibility that He might need man for such assistance (see esp. pp. 44, 74–6, 88, 96, 163).24 This internal conflict is ultimately resolved – Jung’s explanation here is complex, but presciently suggestive of the process of the containment induced unconsciously via the mechanism of projective identification – through the union of masculine and feminine process within the unique quaternary represented by Jesus. This final resolution indicates God’s having finally evolved a mode for loving man without resorting to splitting.25 Of course, as with much of what Jung had to say regarding the deep unconscious, it remains unclear to what extent he refers to God as an independent entity and to what degree as a representation of human unconscious. 5. THE PSYCHOSEXUAL FOUNDATION FOR A DEEPER PSYCHOANALYTIC DIMENSION I am going to propose that Job takes us to one of the deepest levels of self-discovery imaginable. The analysis I shall present will be couched in terms of a contemporary psychoanalytic understanding of the relationship between early mirroring, the formation of language and symbolic structures, and the losses that are part and parcel of these developments. The processes to be discussed are believed to be critical during the earliest years and even months of development, and it would be anticipated, accordingly, that a text alleged to represent these would also demonstrate evidence of complementary landmarks characteristic of this early period of life. That is, it is always preferable to find that the unconscious fantasy level of the narrative – say, in classical psychosexual terminology – matches or overlaps with

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the current developmental-linguistic theme of the text. In particular, investigating the narrative of the text, one ought to be able to provide ample evidence of themes expressive of the oral psychosexual phase of development. Even more specifically, might there be evidence for the role of the skin, itself an oral phenomenon, in its unique role as precursor for the psychic enveloping structures without which mind as we know it cannot develop.26 Though this kind of analysis is simple enough to perform, no such attempt has ever been reported in the literature. Surveying the prevailing metaphors that psychosexual theory would lead one to anticipate, one discovers the following data: 1. References to skin (‘or): 2:4, 7:5, 10:11, 13:28, 16:15, 18:13, 19:20, 26; 30:18, 30, 31:30, 32:19, 40:31. This number is without parallel among the prophets, and whereas Leviticus, a pentateuchal text, obviously provides numerous references to skin, the context is literal rather than metaphoric. There are only 3 references to skin in Lamentations, and one in Jeremiah. 2. References to flesh (ba‘sar): 2:5, 4:15, 6:12, 7:5, 10:4, 11, 12:10, 13:14, 14:22, 19:20, 22, 26; 22:6, 33:25, 34:15. 3. References to clothing, garments, or coverings (begg‘ed, le‘vush, k¯e‘suei): 9:31, 13:28, 15:27, 16:18, 21:26, 22:6, 23:17, 24:7, 26:6, 29:14, 30:18, 31:19–20, 33, 37:17, 38:14. 4. References to uncoveredness or nakedness (‘ur, ‘e‘rom): 1:21, 18:7, 16; 22:6, 23:29, 24:7, 10, 26:6. 5. References to womb (re’h.em): 3:11, 10:18, 24:20, 31:15, 18; 38:8. Only Jeremiah comes close. 6. References to voids, emptiness, confusion (to‘hu, te‘hom): 6:18, 12:24, 26:7, 28:14, 38:16, 30, 41:24. 7. References to mouth (pe, peh): 3:1, 5:15, 16, 15:5–6, 13, 30; 7:11, 8:2, 21, 9:20, 16:5, 10, 19:16, 21:5, 23:4, 12, 29:9, 23, 31:27, 33:2, 6; 35:16, 39,27, 40:4, 23. Exceeding Proverbs and Psalms. 8. References to words, speech (m¯e‘lah, mell‘el, m¯e‘lem): 4:2, 4, 6:26, 8:2, 10, 12:11, 13:17, 14:2, 15:3, 13, 16:4, 18:2, 16, 19:2, 23; 21:2, 23:5, 24:25, 26:4, 29:9, 22, 30:9, 32:11, 14, 15, 18; 33:1, 3, 8, 32, 34:1, 3, 16; 35:4, 16, 36:2, 4, 38:2. The number exceeds even that of Psalms! The preceding overview makes it quite clear that the prevailing range of unconscious fantasy activity in the text of Job is the oral phase of development. To be sure, it is possible to locate specific references characteristic of the second, so-called anal psychosexual phase (2 references to e‘fer [ash] and 26 references to ‘a‘far [ash, humus, or dirt]), but these do not compete in overall quantity with the above list nor are they cross-supported by a wide variety of other anal metaphors. Thus, the latter more than likely have the effect of extending the boundary of the central Jobian metaphor to include the transition from the late oral phase to the beginning of the anal phase.27 This makes sense inasmuch as the additional psychological developments to be underscored occur in fact during this transitional period, and would tend to be less typical during the earliest, most archaic moments of orality.28

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The oral metaphors are primarily cold and frightening. Consider one example. Both Jeremiah (20:14–18), no stranger to suffering, and Job (3:3–11) rued the day they were born. Yet, whereas Jeremiah speaks in terms of a relationship to his mother, and of an ambivalent yearning for his mother’s womb that once protected him (e.g., Jeremiah, 20:17–18), Job generally speaks of body parts, the stomach, the breasts and the womb unconnected to any mothering figure, or of his mother’s womb as a portal to an inhospitable world (e.g., 1:20, 3:10–12, 10:18–19; cf. 31:18). In this light, the skin metaphors and metonyms are of importance, especially since they exert their foreshadowing influence immediately in the Prologue. It is through an awareness of the human narcissistic propensity to exchange “skin for skin” (2:4) that Satan succeeds in provoking God into granting license to deepen Job’s torment, followed immediately by the skin affliction from which Job suffers for the duration of the main text. Yet you will plunge me in a ditch, And mine own clothes shall abhor me. (9:31) Why, therefore, I shall take my flesh in my teeth, And put my life in my hand. (13:14) I am like a wine-skin that consumeth, Like a garment that is moth-eaten. (14:28) I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin, And have laid my horn in the dust. (16:15) And even after my skin, this is destroyed, Then without my flesh shall I see God. (19:27) By the great force [of my disease] is my garment disfigured, It bindeth me about as the collar of my coat. (30:18) My skin is black, and falleth from me, And my bones are burned with heat. (31:30)

Repeatedly, the author of Job offers images of rotting, black, burnt skin, worm-ridden skin (7:5) strangulating skin, skin that clings to bone limply and in a manner incapable of providing protection (29:20), only occasionally mitigated by comparison to dimming memories of the once protective “garment” of his own righteousness (29:14). If Job had once been protected by an enveloping barrier, as Satan himself acknowledged (1:10), Job’s abnormal skin formations have now become symbolic of elementary suffocation and restricted movement (3:23, 19:8). The general impression is that for the creator of Job the skin and its representatives had at some critical point lost their crucial protective quality, rendering him vulnerable to the dangers of unfiltered oral dreads and voids. Taken as a whole, the above description is similar to the clinical phenomenon known as a pathological “second skin” (Bick, 1968). In these cases, instead of the mind being enveloped by beneficial, protective representations of its own boundaries, one finds that the skin boundary or frontier representations are characterized

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as a kind of primitive, autistic-like barrier, or as a hostile, strangulating enclave (O’Shaugnessy, 1992), retreat (Steiner, 1994) or protective, insular shell within which one desperately attempts to basic, poorly differentiated mind-body regulatory functions in a highly concrete, barely symbolified manner (or, if symbolified, only in a single- or minimally two-dimensional way).29 Characteristic of the most disturbed level of function at this range of personality is the complete lack or gross impoverishment of so-called higher-level defense mechanisms based on repression, as these require the operation of symbolic functioning. Generally, the themes or motifs of this level of personality emphasize disease, the skin, boundaries, touch, maneuvers of holding and containment, contiguity, falling and chaos, and black holes, strangeness and alienness, shame, humiliation, and trance-like states, neophobia or dread of change.30 It is self-evident that many of the aforementioned themes dominate the literary content of Job. This is precisely why the researcher must differentiate between thematic content so turgid and one-dimensional that the inference would need to be that one is dealing with the work of a psychotic personality, as opposed to thematic content which offers a bouquet of a distinct kind of psychosexual metaphor simultaneous with other kinds of higher-level literary and thematic structures that, taken in sum, suggest the work of a creative personality. Thus, even among individuals whose speech or literary content points to preoccupation with skin metaphors, our overall evaluation of such content will change if we find evidence of the following factors: the achievement of relatively stable sense of object constancy and a sense of object permanence, tight organization within the functions and representations of the mind, the availability and salubrious influence of what are known as background “objects,” presences, or matrices (Grotstein, 1981, 2000, chap. 6; Ogden, 1986), and the capacity for caring, gratitude, and so-called depressive affect. Once again, it is self-evident that Job bears these higher-level traits as well as the more archaic ones. Thus, if we adopt the notion that the core of Job is drawn from deeply primitive fantasy material, we will need some additional explanation that enables us to square this characterization with the more ennobling and mature aspects of the content and structure of the text: Job’s consistency, the persistence of his dialogue with his friends, his specific insistence upon being granted permission to challenge God and get a response to his personal and moral brief, his conviction of innocence, and his steadfast loyalty to and obvious love for God. Put differently, is there a latent or hidden question beneath Job’s dense intellection that, when stripped of its semantic structure, more closely approximates the realities of the early oral-skin envelope phase of mental developmental? What might be implied by Job’s powerful wish: Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! That with an iron pen and lead They were graven in the rock for ever. (19:23–24)

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a wish so intense that it continues to be echoed by his eventual challenge of offering to God his “signature” or written mark (taw‘¯e [31:35]) – or, according to an equally legitimate translation of the key term, his desire? This suggests to me that, contrary to a long-standing tradition in the literature, Job’s demand, at the end of the day, does not really have its focal point on a specific intellectual issue or bit of cognitive knowledge. Rather, Job seems to be demanding that God help Job determine what Job’s desire might be, to what or whom is it directed, and why is it making him ill? He perhaps had tried, up to a point, to encapsulate his pain in the form of a specific indictment – the good are left to suffer unfairly (z.a‘dd¯eq ve-r‘a lo) – and, to a degree, this did enable him to defend himself against all those who attempted to challenge his sense of righteousness. However, after a certain point in the dialogues with his friends, emptied out of his protective shell, and left without the most elementary boundaries – as his metaphors tell us – Job begins to sense that he may not be whom he believes himself to be, and cannot be defined as he had in the past. In this spirit, he can do no more than surrender his “self” to God, trusting in some form of rewriting, re-identification, or re-signification. This perspective, which we shall now proceed to outline, also allows us to modify the general question that all previous scholars have posed. And that is, not simply “Does Job get an answer?,” but rather: Does Job indeed receive an adequate response appropriate to the level of his demand for a protective, warm, nonarbitrary, and not overfull and suffocating psychic envelope through which to be able to bear up better against the painful mystery of the unfulfillability of desire? Finally, presuming that God’s answer was delivered during the two whirlwinds, what in particular did God add between the first and second whirlwinds – at first blush, seemingly nothing new in content! – that seems to have been able to transform Job’s attitude in the presence of God from almost dumb humility, hand over mouth (40:1–5), to a more adequate reconciliation, rich with sustenance, and, by Job’s own testimony, consoling (ve-n¯e’h.am‘t¯e [42:1–6])? My response will be based on the probability that Job expresses an internal struggle of Moses’s – in particular: the subversion of early childhood mirroring, and the emergence of the painful acknowledgement of the inherent alienness of the self. 6. COMMON GROUND BETWEEN MOSES AND JOB The link between Moses and the character Job probably evolves somewhere within the episode known to us as Moses’s request of God to be shown His mysterious “glory” (ka‘vod). A variety of additional textual and thematic items help sustain the parallel. Since each could easily open up into a major digression, I shall simply list the main features, and then draw a working conclusion that will enable us to return to the hidden subject of Job. I begin by noting that the episode in question (Exodus, 33:1–23) takes place in the context of the awful and frustrating transgression of the golden-masked calf. Despite divine promises and the anticipated elevating effect of the Revelation at

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Sinai, a large group of dissidents from among the Children of Israel, immature and insecure in their newfound freedom and unfamiliar with a nonmaterial God, perpetrate a sin so great that God is prepared to eradicate this group and fulfill the promise to the forefathers by building a new nation through Moses alone. Moses intercedes on the people’s behalf repeatedly, strenuously, and successfully. As the text reveals without hesitation, there will be additional episodes of tension and rage, though Moses remains steadfast in his love and loyalty for the people as a whole till his dying day. Nevertheless, we know in retrospect that a pattern, subtle and incipient, has begun to unfold, whereby the distance between Moses and the masses increases in direct proportion to the intensification of his yearning for prophetic intimacy with God. The first manifest expression of this formula is contained in this chapter. Moses’s request or demand of God has specific metaphoric features. The most outstanding are: (a) an unparalleled abundance of references in a single context to the “face” (pa‘n¯em) of God and the expressed wish to see God’s face, or that God no longer hide His face, and ultimately the inability of the human to conceive of God’s face (33:12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 23), (b) a background context of prophetic consciousness, the cloud of glory, and the suddenness of God’s anger, (c) an unexcelled description of the aching desire on Moses’s part to share the deepest level of relationship. God’s response, however, makes it clear that this desire can only be met with partial satisfaction. Moses is instructed to stand by a rock – which is in itself situated in some divine space or place that in a sense is not of this earth (ma‘kom yesh ‘¯e‘t¯e [33:21])31 – and he will be permitted to see God only as He “passes by” and only by peeking through the narrow crevice or gap in the rock (n¯e‘krat ha-z.ur). This emphasis on pursuing a mutual gaze, or the wish to be enveloped by the face of God, and its frustration, are echoed in several passages in Job. For example: Lo, He passes by me, and I see Him not, He passes on also, but I perceive him not. (9:11) Behold, I go forward, but He is not there, And backward, but I cannot perceive him. (23:8) Because I was not cut off before the darkness, Neither did He cover the thick darkness from my face. (23:17) Wherefore do You hide Your face, And hold me as Your enemy. (33:24)

Indeed, the gravamen of Job’s pursuit, as many have sensed on some level, is not primarily, if at all, to obtain a specific response from God regarding a specific indictment. On the occasion that Job does seem to have specific charges in mind, it is mostly because his friends have irked him into a defensive position by accusing him of this or that shortcoming. However, overall, Job’s wish is global, as best represented by the following passages: You would call, and I would answer You, You would have a desire for the work of Your hand. (14:15)

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Oh, that I knew where I might find Him, That I might come even to His seat; I would order my cause before Him, And fill my mouth with arguments; I would know the words which He would answer me, And understand what He would say unto me. Would He content with me in His great power? Nay, but He would give heed unto me. (23:3–6)

These and numerous other passages make it clear to me that Job essentially seeks a basic dimension for relationship with God, not a particular item or quotient of data (14:13): Oh, would that You would hide me in the nether-world, that You would keep me secret, until Your wrath be past; that You would appoint me a set time, and remember me.

Two additional important details will be useful in declaring Job Moses’s fantasy. First, when Moses initially addresses God, he insists that the Children of Israel be guided through the desert directly by God and requests to be permitted to comprehend God’s ways (33:13): And now, if, please, I have found favor in your eyes, make known to me Thy ways, that I may know them, in order that I might find favor in your eyes. . .

The passage is redolent with desire, and highlights the role of the eyes or facial gaze. What did Moses mean by reference to the “ways” of God? We can answer this question quickly. The Talmud (Be’ra‘khot, 7a) explains that he demanded a solution to the problem of why good things happen to bad people, and why bad things happen to good people. This again places Job squarely into the mindset of one of Moses’s central preoccupations. Yet no answer is ever supplied to this question, for it is beyond the human ken. There then ensues a give-and-take that repeats this refrain, with subtle differences. Moses will accept no intermediary and demands God’s face, for without this:32 With what, however, will I know that I have found favor in your eyes, I and my nation. . .?

Here, once again, the emphasis appears to center upon a quasi-erotic solicitation of the feminine quality of h.en or “favor.” Yet even when God consents to this request of Moses, Moses increases the demand and asks to know God’s glory. While we have no idea what such glory entails – I will suggest some possibilities later on – God accedes and indicates that He will share some of this with Moses, with the ultimate exception: God’s face remains inaccessible. Man can only comprehend small bits of divine wisdom after the fact, retroactively, and always incompletely. A final element helps bring into focus the challenging, even aggressive stance Moses was capable of adopting toward God, which I believe accords with the feisty spirit one finds throughout Job, at least until God’s response in the whirlwind.

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Exhausted by the chronic rebelliousness of the people as well as by God’s seemingly incomprehensible anger with them, Moses complains that his efforts on behalf of the people have apparently “not found favor” (Numbers, 11:11) in God’s eyes. He wonders ironically about the limits of his responsibility: Have I conceived this entire nation? Am I the one who gave birth to it, that you might say to me, Carry it in your bosom, like a nursemaid carries the nursling?

Moses then adds that he has no meat to feed the people – as if to say that the people are basically demanding Moses’s very own flesh and milk, as the nursling demands of the nursemaid – and that he cannot satisfy their needs. And if you will thus [plan to] do to me, kill me, I beg you, out of hand, if I have found favor in your eyes, and that I not see my own calamity [be-ra‘a‘t¯e].

Studying this verse, the 11th century commentator Rashi notes, “The text ought to have stated ‘their calamity’ [be-ra‘a‘tam], but the sages amended the word.” Other midrashic sources suggest that the original term must have been be-ra‘a’te‘kha, “Your calamity,” referring to God. One way of correlating these disparate views has been suggested by Zvi Hirsch Meklenburg (1785–1865) (ha-Ke‘tav ve’ha-Kabb’a‘lah, loc. cit.), who interpolates the verse as follows: “Moses begged – ‘Kill me, so that I will not have to see the evil caused by your lack of intervention on their behalf which will then be blamed on me.” Be matters as they may, I think that we may reinterpret this portrait of confusion (“yours,” “theirs,” “mine”) – drawing an inference from the conspicuous effort at censorship as well as from what escapes censure – as a narrative depiction of the temporary dissociation and loss of identity that gathered intensity with every increasing increment of oral depletion, angry detachment, and inadequacy of the gaze. Increasingly, as well, Moses is even willing to risk death if that be the closest approximation to the total fulfillment of desire (divine “glory”), “favor” and closeness.33 Shortly after this episode, we encounter another element that considerably reinforces the profile of the quadratic configuration of eyes-mouth-face-skin. This concerns the highly symbolic and ritualized skin ailment z.o’ra‘at, generally identified as leprosy, which appears twice in Moses’s life. God employs a leprous skin condition as an interventive sign or “punishment” when Moses’s siblings Miriam and Aaron impugned his divine election (Numbers, 12:1–13). In this context, as in the immediately prior “cleft in the rock” episode, similar terms aggregate: suddenness (12:4), the appearance of God in a cloud, words, knowledge, and prophetic versus dream consciousness. Most noteworthy is the declaration that the uniqueness of Moses’s relationship with God is that they converse peh el peh, “mouth to mouth,” with no alteration in consciousness (12:8).34 And then, just as the glory cloud ascends, Miriam and Aaron are aghast to find that they are stricken with the skin change. Abashed, Aaron beseeches Moses (12:12):

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Let [her] not, I pray, be as one dead, of whom the flesh is half-consumed when he comes out of his mother’s womb.

This characterization, rudimentarily oral in quality, runs right alongside the quality of Job’s dark references to the coldness of the womb as well as the condition of his own deteriorated skin and flesh. The second reference to the skin condition of z.o’ra‘at actually appeared in the initial divine encounter at the burning bush when God enlisted it as a sign (Exodus, 4:6). Here, white z.o’ra‘at was effected when Moses put his hand in his bosom at God’s request. The appearance of this sign is accompanied by an interesting reference to the “voice of the sign” (kol ha-ot), an almost ironic allusion to the way in which God will buttress Moses’s speech impediment (ke‘vad peh ve-ke‘vad la’shon a‘n¯e). God then utters words that the reader will immediately recognize in spirit and almost in identical style to counterparts in the divine whirlwind in Job: And the Lord said to him: Who gives speech [peh, mouth] to man, or who makes [a man] dumb or deaf or alert or blind; is it not I? And now go, and I shall be with your mouth, and I shall instruct you as to what you shall speak.

It should be abundantly clear by now that the peh and pa‘n¯em around which Moses’s attention and desire rivet are the very same as those which gain such complex allegorical turn in the Job myth. That is, in this allegory, God, Satan, Job, his wife, and his friends are important not so much for their cognitively appreciable diatribes, retorts, and clever rejoinders as for their role as representations of wagging mouths in search of words, facial encounters garnished with verbalizations that camouflage the attempt to define oneself through the gaze of the other. To put it differently, the entire Book of Job is an enlarged stammer, or a paroxysm, or similar kind of effervescence that arises from a self that is attempting violently to adjust himself perfectly, and impossibly, in front of a mirror in the effort to secure the illusion of absolute, glorious reflexivity, and in so doing, to calm oneself into a façade of having achieved self-knowledge. This stammer, further, takes place alongside an equally powerful and violent effort to escape being ensnared in the mirror, even if the risk be intense loneliness and the need to resign oneself to the unslackability of desire. 7. THE MIRROR STAGE AND ITS RELEVANCE TO DESIRE The concept of mirroring as it is generally understood in the clinical context was up until recently associated with the work of Heinz Kohut (1968, 1971). Notably, Kohut advanced a conceptualization of the “idealizing” and “mirroring” subspecies of the transference, believed to recreate within the analytic relationship the pathological versions of normative mirroring phenomena that transpire generally around the time of the symbiotic and immediately post-symbiotic period of infancy.

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In fact, the “looking-glass phase,” as it was originally promulgated, was to be presented by Jacques Lacan in 1936 at the Marienbad Psychoanalytic Congress, but was only presented in full at the Sixteenth Psychoanalytic Congress in Zurich (Lacan, 1949) at which presentation he referred to the more familiar “mirror stage” (le stade du miroir).35 While Lacan was quite knowledgeable in the available developmental research on mirroring,36 he was not primarily interested in the mutual aspects of mirroring, the sharing by infant and caretaker in the “creation of something new that was never there before” which tends to preoccupy contemporary developmental researchers.37 Even at this early date Lacan had become an outspoken critic of what he deemed the naive American ego psychological approach to identification and to the equation of the subjective self with the ego. Instead, Lacan emphasized an inherent alienation set in train by the mirroring process. Furthermore, he posited that the ego or moi (as opposed to a more existentially authentic self or “I”) that emerges through the process of identifying with these alienations becomes overinvested in concerted efforts throughout a lifetime in to avoid dismantling this alienation.38 Yet Lacan actually had much more in mind than the contrast between virtual and real perceptual input. Lacan conceived of the mirroring phenomenon as an a priori structure or intuitive possibility and not simply in terms of the concrete act of looking in the mirror. The mirror stage is a priori in the sense that, while a self-reflective, unitary structure such as the “ego” cannot exist from the start, it will inevitably take form as a consequence of the mind’s inherent capacity to apprehend itself being taken as an object by others. As such, mirroring may derive from either a concrete specular-reflected image or from the reflection of the self in the eyes of another human being – or, more importantly, from any sufficiently scintillating object, hole, or gaze that stimulates the seductive intuition of mirroring.39 Thus, the impact of “seeing oneself being seen” – or, in the case of dialogue, yet bearing the same meaning, of “hearing oneself being heard” – becomes in and of itself a major structuring event even before complete self-other differentiation has taken place. By the time true self-consciousness has been achieved, the gaze is experienced more as an intrasubjective sense of self-recognition which, however, always harkens in some deeply repressed manner to the earlier pre-mirror (pre-specular) capture in the gaze of the other. As such, the mirror phenomenon embodies a major existential paradox: On one hand, even as the mirror introduces the individual to what seems to be the novel possibility of a unified self, it by this very possibility introduces an inherently alienating social structure which interferes with the original pure desire for the other. Put differently, the child takes the image it sees as being that which the other desires, thereby fulfilling the other’s imagined lack, even though by so doing he permanently creates a new lack within itself; i.e., all of the psychic space now occupied by this new self-image which is (even though it is not) himself. Thus, the image in the mirror that the human infant introjects, assuming it to be his own (the roughcast

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of the later “ego”), actually represents a transition between a prior stage (knowable only retroactively) in which the child imagined himself to be a fragmented “body-inpieces” and, following the unifying experience of the mirror intuition or event, a subsequent stage akin to the primary narcissism of classical theory.40 Now a fundamental emotional or affective dimension of the paradox needs to be noted as well. On one hand, the unifying aspect of the experience fascinates the child. On the other hand, the child develops a unique, primordial envy of this image inasmuch as it is the one upon which he and others lavish so much desire, an object external and internal to him at one and the same time, which in turn creates more alienation within the budding self. This confrontation with an exact replica of himself generates an intense jealousy and aggressiveness (Lacan, 1948). In Lacan’s view, contra Kohut, this aggressivity is not simply an enraged insistence upon getting more and more symbiotic mirroring, but rather the indication of an effort to rebel against and destroy this false ego structure. Paradoxically, it is the mirror stage itself that contributes to the sense of disconnectedness. How does this happen? As briefly as the matter can be articulated, Lacan hypothesized that during the mirror stage the sheer intensity of the desire on the part of the other (the father, the mother, the deity, or the specular image of the infant-in-the-mirror) to render the infant its object serves to disrupt the sense of symbiotic union that had prevailed until that point by creating a sense of lack or gap which can only be fulfilled by the child’s presenting itself as that object-of-desire. This lack announces separation and holds forth the potential for differentiation, but only if it can reach the level of representation and internalization. Until that more advanced phase, the real, brute, unfathomable, and inarticulable sense of being “cut off” or “fragmented” (i.e., not yet that which the infant will eventually comprehend by virtue of these words!) seems real. However, the mirror stage, at its more progressive end, helps to mold and transform the real sense of “fragmentation” into the imaginary or fantasy (i.e., protosymbolic) representation of the body-in-pieces. For, as is axiomatic in Lacan, it is only from within the imaginary register that the real can be recognized as real, just as it is only from within the subsequent symbolic register, which follows the internalization of linguistic signifying processes, that the imaginary itself becomes further distinguished.41 There is an emotional or affective face to this paradoxical state of affairs as well. On one hand, as we noted, as the mirror stage ends, in Lacan’s view, it “inaugurates, by the identification with the imago of the counterpart [i.e., the mirror-image self] and the drama of primordial jealousy, the dialectic that will henceforth link the I to socially elaborated situations.”42 These eventual identifications with that image tend to “camouflage” or “overcome” the anxiety of mental fragmentation,43 leading to an experience of jubilation.44 The anxiety that is masked by this jubilation stems from the loss of prior symbiotic unity, or the symbiotic envelope, ever to be denied by the perpetually-differentiating laws of language and the symbolic. On the other hand, the mirroring intuition stimulates the primal cycle of seduction-confrontation-rivalry with the image in the mirror, leading to increased aggressivity. This rivalry forms the basis for a primary masochism that reappears whenever the individual finds himself

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overtaken by imaginary identification with some substitute for the true other, especially when the individual cannot discern that the rival “other” is essentially a counterpart-image emanating from the mirror. Hence, the mirror experience or intuition has the capacity to unify, by virtue of the imposition of a first, basic structure on the mind. At the same time, and by that very expedient, it brings to consciousness a more clear awareness of the dimensions of dangers and desires that earlier were only dimly perceived. By the time the conception of unity becomes more developed, which tends to lure the infant further away from premirror-type experiences, the infant has already become “trapped” in the inexorable misidentification of himself with the “self” in the mirror or the mirroring other, what Lacan (1949, p. 4) calls the “armor of alienating identity.” Or, to put things more positively, one may say that, increasingly, non-narcissistic ways of being in and relating to the world are taken in by the child and symbolized – the premier symbolism being language itself – which gradually enable the child to internalize lack or want in a fundamentally constructive way and to adapt non-defensively to that certain inherent separateness, disunity, and limitation that characterizes intersubjective experience. Only once the specular image, and the subsequent “ego” upon which it is based, can be understood as an imaginary figure – that is, when the child can play with it as a ludic symbol – do we find that the true self becomes capable of escaping the stagnating, temporally static ego. In order to achieve the highest, most internalized levels of the sense of unity (i.e., those that include the sense of lack), one must internalize the symbolic structures of language. Language alone – the dialogue of one symbolic linguistic code interconnecting with another one, seeking out common units, aporia, disparities, spaces, fullnesses – enables a less defensive attachment achieved through recognizing the inherence of want of unity. Indeed, the very fact that we speak, are bounded by language, and must lose a significant proportion of what we have mentalized in the process of converting the brute “real” into useable representational entities suitable for mind, means that desire is frustrated, and we experience lack.45 That is to say, language alone enables the subject to announce specific wishes and demands, defined as belonging to himself, simultaneously acknowledging that his subjecthood is predicated upon lack, or “want” within the ideal of unity. Finally, it is just such destruction – or more correctly, deconstruction – of the false sense of identity and unity, maintained by the manifold techniques of mirroring that comprise the bulk of everyday interpersonal relations – which the analyst is called upon to initiate, despite the fact that, ironically and paradoxically, the patient’s transference tendencies will soon seek to dragoon the analyst into conformity with the maintenance of such mirroring. – 8. ELE‘HU’S INTERVENTION AND THE QUESTIONING OF MIRRORING If we can accept that Job represents Moses’s passionate demand for the thrall of mirroring, an adult portrait still powerfully (though not pathologically) attached to a memory of the child’s constant tugging at the face and the “look” of the Other to join

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him in a locked embrace, then we may anticipate that this portrait will ultimately give expression to the fall or subversion of mirroring, as outlined above. Such a “fall” requires an acknowledgement that the pragmatic functions made possible by linguistic signification will always be exceeded and even overwhelmed by desire. Simultaneously, as dependency upon the concrete efficacy of language and social ritual begins to fade, we expect the individual to exchange or transform his interest in the “look” into a tolerance of the gaze. I believe that one can understand Job’s two first sets of dialogues with his three friends, with their remarkable patterns – that on the surface seem to be a desperate search for absolute intellectual or theological consensus – as an imaginary representation of the struggle to secure absolute mirroring. Their gradually increasing aggressivity, and Job’s in response, represents the manner in which the infant in search of the desire hidden within language, beckoning to the independent existence of the other (cf. Mills, 2003), gradually grows suspicious of the enticing maw of the mirror, despite all of the pleasures that perfect symbiosis – or intellectual consensuality – might temporarily afford. In Moses’s life, at least as we know of it through the Bible itself, such mirroring can only be reflected in the few passages in Exodus 33. In his extended discourse through Job, however, the mirroring can be experienced through tens of excruciating stanzas exchanged between Job and the subcomponents of his own personality, represented by the “friends.” Job repeats himself, like all trauma victims, because he does not yet know how to address the Other that he intuitively knows is part of his pain.46 That is, he does not yet fully appreciate, though the reader may by now, that the Other is not even necessarily another person (such as his friends), but rather his own unconscious, the interminability of his own desire, and the alienated elements of his own self. The disruption of the textual patterns by the third set of interchanges, noted by all previous scholars, may then be viewed as the onset of the faltering of the snare of the mirror. As well, from chapter 28 until 32, there is a conspicuous increase in metaphoric references to the failure of skin, garments, and other protective envelopes, as if to say that the author of Job is experiencing increasingly some kind of lack or emptiness that his friends’ mirroring will not salve and which speech itself cannot yet address. Specifically, the potentially creative if also painful disturbance in mirroring seems to be set in motion by the growing awareness, at some level of consciousness, that the concrete, repetitive words and phrases of unidimensional speech have little bearing on the question of desire. To mark this faltering even more persuasively, the author of Job introduces the figure of El¯e‘hu, unknown until this point and not enumerated among the list of Job’s friends in the Epilogue. Although he, too, will attempt to convince Job that he is making contentions that draw him dangerously beyond his provenance, El¯e‘hu makes it clear that words themselves are problematic carriers for any such search. On one hand, speaking in relation to words in general and not necessarily in relation to any one individual or thesis: They are amazed, they answer no more; Words are departed from them. (32:15)

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Job speaks without knowledge, and his words are without discernment. (34:35) But Job does open his mouth in vanity, He multiplies words without knowledge. (35:16)

While, on the other hand, as regards himself, El¯e‘hu says: For I am full of words, The spirit within me constrains me. Behold, my inwards are as wine which has no vent, Like new wine-skins ready to burst. I will speak, that I may find relief, I will open my lips and answer. (32:18–19) If you have words to speak, answer me; Speak, for I desire to justify you. (33:32)

Juxtaposed, El¯e‘hu’s declarations offer a reasonable portrait of both the treacheries and seductiveness of words, and he is himself another representation of the troubling but also potentially creative polysemy and fullness of semantic signification. Yet El¯e‘hu’s most important contribution by far is his pointing to two alternative, non-semantic modes of communication of special significance: dreams and symptoms of illness (33:15–19). Whereas Job had earlier complained that his sleep is mere tumult (7:4), his illness strangulating (7:5, 15), and his dreams frightening (7:13–14), attributing to them no propositional significance, El¯e‘hu teaches that each of these states can be coherent and even comforting modes of communication between man and God. The author of Job, in other words, has begun to share with the reader the budding awareness that dreams (33:15) and illness (3:19) have unique intersubjective properties, and begins to hint to the possibility that the specific symptom of devastated skin, and the rupture of the psychic skin envelope, may be on the mend. At the same time, even El¯e‘hu’s sophisticated new awareness eventually gives way to the frustrating rhetoric familiar to us from the verbalizations of the other friends (e.g., 37:6, 20), suggesting the author’s ambivalence and struggle with the sparks of independence from the mirror. El¯e‘hu’s chapter, from my perspective, cannot be considered unnecessary or a mere literary extravagance. It is far more important to note that it represents the dawn of an awareness of the inadequacy of mirroring and at the same time the impossibility of achieving sufficient distance from mirroring in the absence of some additional psychological ingredient. El¯e‘hu, or that which the designation “El¯e‘hu” represents, has not provided this. God, or that which “God” represents, will. Thus, what is significant about El¯e‘hu‘s project is precisely the fact that it fails! And its failure is marked by chapter 37 through which the reader is made witness to a singular emphasis on the frightening effect of the divine voice or sound: Hear attentively the sound of His voice. (37:2) By the breath of God ice is given. (37:10) Teach us what we shall say unto Him, for we cannot order our speech by reason of darkness.

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Shall it be told Him that I would? or should a man wish that he were swallowed up? (37:19–20)

Depicted here are classical oral anxieties, but also the failure of language in the presence of an object perceived as omnipotent, complete, self-sufficient, and without safe spaces or envelopes within which one might register one’s lack. That is, for all of the demolition of mirroring that seems to have been achieved, or well advanced, the problematic of desire has yet to be addressed. As the El¯e‘hu fragment gives way to the next chapter depicting the epic divine whirlwind, a major developmental change takes place as well, though gradually or in two distinct phases. On the surface, two fantastical sound-and-light displays are provided, whipping like a gale storm around an astonished, diminutive Job, the first episode reducing him to silence (40:3–5) and the second apparently yielding a compliant (some scholars object: too compliant, even pseudo-compliant [e.g., Wiesel, 1976]), repentant or at least contrite Job (42:1–6), who shortly has his former wealth reinstated and receives a new family for his troubles. I sense that something of an entirely different nature now transpires, which I will first outline briefly and then discuss. The first installment of the whirlwind is indeed overwhelming in its depth and quality. However, one of the vital features that one cannot afford to overlook is the fact that it begins with a major challenge: Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if you have the understanding. (38:4)

The key interrogative term and adverb – ei‘foh ha’y¯e‘tah, “Where were you?” – is critical and we shall return to it. Though God in this installment then proceeds to pose some 50 additional rhetorical questions to Job, the shadow of this premier question is cast heavily over the lot. Of second next importance, the first installment ends with a powerful question or demand of Job, echoing, seemingly cynically, Job’s own much-crafted demand of God: Shall he that reproves contend with the Almighty?47 He that argues with God, let him answer it! (40:2)

As we know, Job just barely manages to offer his Domine non sum digna: Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer You? I lay my hand upon mouth. Once I have spoken, but I will not answer again; indeed, twice, but I will proceed no further (40:4–5).

Job’s response is not really the humble muteness it appears to be at first glance, though it may include that. Rather, it is a response of sorts to God’s demand – to the fact that God made a demand or asked a question of Job on par with the one he posed at the onset of the whirlwind, “Where were you . . .?” All the more interesting is the fact that though Job vows to not speak again, speak he does at the end of the second installment of the whirlwind. In the single reference in the literature to Job’s covering of the mouth, Glazov (2002, p. 39) suggests that Job means to indicate by this

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gesture something to the effect of, “I thought you wished me to be silent, but in fact I have been hiding my dissatisfaction, and I probably ought not to.” So what occurred between the two installments that altered the situation so dramatically? I suggest that two factors are in operation. First, I believe that in the initial installment of the whirlwind, Job had begun to sense what he needed most desperately, and that is: the possibility of the repair of the psychic envelope or container. For example, Or who shut up the sea with doors, When it broke forth and issued out of the womb; When I made the cloud the garment thereof, And thick darkness a swaddling band for it. (38:8–9) It is changed as clay under the seal, and they stand as a garment. (38:14)

This possibility was presumably healing, providing some respite for the novice self that had escaped the fractured mirror image. However, the author of Job suggests that the demand to speak, imposed suddenly upon one who was just emerging from mirroring, was premature and effectively regressed Job to the security of dumb silence. The advent of the second installment offers two new developments. First, it is almost entirely preoccupied with an illustration of a perfectly sealed or armored beast – a powerful breast container – an image that is in some sense so magically omnipotent and “metallic” as to remind us that even advanced oral, post-depressive developments nevertheless retain certain characteristic qualities in the unconscious at all times. On the other hand, and this is the second new development, God ends His declamations without making any further demand upon Job to speak. The divine language simply ends, leaving a potential lull or space in which the mind is now free to regard all of the previous phantasmagoria as one wishes, possibly as imaginary as opposed to concrete – possibly as if it never even happened in reality, and was only a dream! It is this empty space, or absenting, that, in the paradoxical fashion familiar to the psychoanalyst,48 enables the self to learn from painful yet salutary experience,49 to speak, to achieve reparation, and be consoled. The divine gap or lull, coupled with the repair of the psychic envelope, facilitated the requisite mental peace that allowed Job to “mentalize” what God had essentially hinted to in the formative question that inaugurated the whirlwind in the first place. That is, when a being that is supposed-to-be-omniscient (similar to Lacan’s sujet suppose savoir) asks of one, “Where were you?,” we know that He knows that we know that He is acknowledging our absence, that we were lacking, and that we may have even been desired.50 Without at first being cognizant of it, Job has absorbed the subtle divine message, which I would paraphrase as a neoJobian text: Job, Moses, all of these fascinating things that you behold, including your own oral and anal by-products, and your skin, these objects that actually emanate from man’s own unconscious, which is why he is so frightened and overwhelmed by them – to the point where all he can do, ironically, is to worship them as

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fetishes – are, at the end of the day, alien images created by language. As such, none – possibly even including your concrete guises for Me – are worthy of being the “armor plating” or skin of your ego, because none are independently capable of joining you in a questioning dialogue. The fact of the matter is as you rightly suspected, Job, only you said it a bit too cynically: your truck is with Me, and it is with Me that you must endeavor to speak, yet I will not be able to fully answer you, and not because I do not want to, but because I cannot. The unconscious can either answer you totalistically – drowning you in the swell – or you can admit it into consciousness partially, frustratingly, thereby maintaining your sanity and your capacity to repeat the search as often as you like.

Thus, it is after the second installment with its lull that Job finds his tongue and “answers the Lord” precisely because this time the Lord has not demanded him to say anything! Contrary to the friends, all of whom demand of Job an allegiance to a value system or theology posited as objet(a), and even from God himself in the first installment who seems to demand almost the same – and which requires Job to concretely close his mouth and say literally nothing – the final installment leaves Job free to present himself as absent, to enjoy, humbly, the awareness that he is God’s lack – and this enables him to speak. This idea fits hand in glove with the fact that, as we noted, only in Job’s final comment, after he vowed to no longer speak, does the author of Job introduce his cleverest bit of artistry, the absented subject Job (42:6): Wherefore I abhor [ ] and repent, seeing that I am dust and ashes.

As I have indicated by inserting square brackets, the text elides the proper subject of the stated abhorrence: it leaves unclear what Job abhorred. This aporia has caused some scholars to supply “my words” (i.e., “I recant my contentions against God”) while others suggest “myself.” Whatever it is in the end that has been absented from the text, and whatever future readers eventually comprehend, a psychic process took place in the mind of the author that enabled him to invent the idea of this narrative hole. As such, this narrative hole itself reflects all of what transpired that enabled “Job” to repent. Ultimately, this process is what enabled “Job” and Moses to be consoled and resolved, as the doubly connotative term v¯e-ne’h.am‘t¯e implies.51 9. LACK, HOLES, AND THE CLEFT IN THE ROCK “The ego is nothing but a hole,” Jacques Lacan said famously (1974–1975). That is not to say that there is no such thing as an ego, of course, but rather that the overrated structure we call an ego is essentially a hole because the mirroring upon which it is based is a hole, because the love of the other in whose presence the self tends to bask, and with whom the self seeks to identify, reflects back his (the other’s) own desire, which then places his “otherness” in the center of my self, leaving “me” quite out of the picture. Getting away from what could easily degenerate into a circular and impoverished sense of existence requires some doing. In Lacan’s writings, repeated emphasis is made of the fact that the inherent alienation in man stems from the fact that human desire is defined by the desire of the

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Other. This is the case not because the Other holds some concrete key to a secret “true” or “specific” object of desire but because the first objective of the human mind is simply to be recognized by the Other. Desire is always “the desire of the other” which somehow always manages to become confused for the desire for “something else” (Lacan, 1960). These “something elses” are what Lacan refers to as the objet(a), objects, things, places, values, even entire dimensions that have no special importance in and of themselves – or, have strictly limited importance (e.g., feces, the breast, the eyes) – that the self elects as the target or focus of his demands.52 When the hypothetical unity of the pre-semantic (or pre-mirror) “self” breaks down, as it does in the course of normal development, the “leakage” or “remainder” of the original sense of wholeness is transferred upon these objets(a).53 By so doing, an apparent sense of the achieveability of desire is created, an illusion that some concrete entity “out there” can effectively be pursued and captured and taken into the self, but which in fact has the sad effect of displacing desire ever further away from reach. Thus, it matters a great deal whether or not one lives life through the shading and coloring provided by objets(a) or clutches to them rigidly, and quite literally for dear life. For, in the end, objets(a) concretely pursued will always escape the subject. The only way to begin to suspend total, mindless captivity to the world of the objet(a) – which we can never do all of time, since our reality demands some objets(a) – is to recognize that the space of the imaginary ego and all to which it tends to be attracted in a mirroring-like manner, always represents something that must be left over. At some point, there must be a reckoning with the fact that an objet(a) is only a marker for the gap between the real and the non-symbolizeable; that it is an object that can, if properly framed within symbolic language, come to represent the “lack of” even as it therefore simultaneously causes longing and desire. Under this kind of philosophy, Lacan strengthened our understanding of the “symptom,” indicating that it too draws together the dimensions of the Imaginary and the Symbol, creating through its “neurotic” repetitiveness an ontological structure that conveys a story about the individual’s relationship to desire.54 Symptoms are required when an overwhelming outbreak of anxiety signals that the individual has, for some reason, ceased being able to use an appropriate balance of symbol and imagination to contend with the myriad holes that language can only partial contain, and whose suddenly insistent “presence” (can holes be present?) might otherwise bring the self to the brink of disaster.55 Properly speaking, a symptom disturbs, but at the same time readily lends itself to becoming used as a new objet(a) – at least until the ongoing evolution of self-consciousness demands otherwise, or, in the case of pathology, until treatment is undertaken. Giving up one’s symptom, like surrendering one’s absolute fealty to the objet(a), leads to freedom and also to a kind of destitution, familiar in Kleinian terms as the existential sadness or grief the infant experiences as it moves away from the manic omnipotence of the paranoid-schizoid position toward the vulnerable sense of subjectivity of the depressive position. The developmental transformations that I have only briefly outlined in the earlier section on mirroring and in the preceding two paragraphs have a lot to do with the

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infant’s capacity to discover holes in the as yet amorphous but gradually gelling image of the other. This is not merely a concrete optical discovery of a break in a geographic plane, but more a discovery introduced by the “breaks” or holes in mental activity instigated by the earliest significations or speech acts which convey meaning and the existence of desire.56 A semantic term achieves the status of signifier only if it is hole-y, only if it is not so full as to not require a break in the fullness of pleasure that characterizes the womb, the mirror, or the psychoses. In the Lacanian purview, every cut, blind spot, sore, crevice, textual aporia can become symbolic of the loss at the juncture between the brute Real and the Symbolic, and these may further adopt an infinity of imaginary guises. Eventually, the elementary hole, which rapidly takes its place in the warp and woof of language, will forever symbolize lack and enable relationship at one and the same time. In view of the above, I suggest that the cleft in the rock represents the window or hole, the three-dimensional sense of depth within the gaze as opposed to the static icon of the eyes or face as such, that, in average or “good enough” conditions, can be discovered in the other and then internalized within mature mental representations that enable the mind to breathe. God allowed this experience to Moses, even if at the same time thereby introduced new levels of frustration and anxiety. I further believe that Moses continued to look for ways to portray this experience, putting language, desire, and lack at the center of things. This he did with Job. Focused frontally upon the insatiability of his young flock, whose fulminating demands for water, meat, and other creature comforts continuously underscored the inadequacy of their oral development, Moses the leader may have himself begun to experience elements characteristic of regression-in-the-service-of-the-group. I think we can further hypothesize an outbreak of anxiety57 as Moses quickly realizes that yet another broadside has come his way from the direction of the people, which will inevitably be followed by a responding broadside from God’s direction, and possibly by a third from deep within his own psyche. The absolute jouissance experienced at Sinai cannot be sustained, freedom and Revelation have not mixed as anticipated, and the sudden exposure of weak personalities to the semantic primacy of God has sent the frightened people flying into orgiastic abandon, displacing their infirm belief in Moses onto the facemask demi-god (‘e’gel ma’se‘khah [Exodus, 33:4]), a concrete, degenerate symbol that substitutes defensively for the perceived loss of protective skin covering. For Moses, the void threatens again. In this regressive state, we can hypothesize that Moses must have re-experienced the sense of the original void that opened at the site of the burning bush and, as yet unsure of speech, his own defensive need for reassurance that the skin envelope was still secure. At these moments, the Name-of-theFather is suddenly insufficient, or perhaps the level at which it had been internalized at these points in Moses’s personal history was still premature, to the task of sealing the relationship between reality and the new order of the Symbolic. It is at this juncture that the symptom appears. As yet uncertain as to how best to meet the desire for the Other, but also aware that total absorption into such desire would mean psychosis, Moses, through the text of Job, is willing to risk his family, his possessions, and his

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friends, ratcheting his experience of undiluted subjecthood to the highest power. At the same time, Job augments his now vulnerable ego with the symptom of ruptured skin, which for Moses is perhaps the skin of the text of Job itself. Up to a determined point, Job and his friends, imitating Moses’s memories of leprosy and the hidden pang of desire it awoke, are focused upon the skin, indeed, cling to the skin; yet Job learns to surrender the body to the symbolism of language, dreams, and the interpretation of symptoms, even if this is always incomplete and anxiety provoking.58 All of the objects in the whirlwind, Job eventually realizes – as Moses did in the cleft in the rock – are objets(a), or symptoms; fascinating and seductive structures which can bind the ego under duress, but which must not be allowed to blind the individual to the hidden desire behind the dialogue or disable the individual from sensing the inadequacy of any envelope save that of language itself. In the narrative of Job, Moses hid the hole, first, by having Job himself cover his mouth in speechlessness until such time as he could even better acknowledge the emptiness of desire and, on a subsequent and even more advanced level of symbolization, by absenting the “subject” of Job from passage 42:6.59 10. JOB AND THE INFINITESIMAL MEASURE OF DESIRE In light of the preceding comments, we can return to the topic of God’s question to Job at the beginning of the whirlwind. The question posed to Job at the outset of the first speech begins with the simple Hebrew term of inquiry: ei‘foh, “Where were you . . .?” (38:4). This term, it is true, does not appear especially frequently in the subsequent passages, yet it is clearly intended to hover over all of the rhetorical questions that follow (“How do you know... Have you seen?”). It seems to me that the intention of God’s demand of Job is not to embarrass him, nor to overwhelm him into docile submission, nor even to coerce him into providing objective or concrete answer for the specific questions found in the soliloquy. To pursue these avenues too literally would be to commit the error of treating the text purely as an historical event. Rather, the “inquiry” depicted by the author of Job needs to be seen as a mythic representation of an unfolding psychological development; it is an imaginary story telling of processes taking place in intrapsychic space. In story form (for just a moment longer), the theme of a grand diabolical debate over human desire and loyalty, and the subsequent inquisition of Job is in reality a product of the author’s memory of having demanded to know God’s ways and His glory, which was in itself a reaction to God’s demand for the author’s loyalty, and which now, in this penultimate turn, had been deflected back at the questioner. Some kind of interplay had to occur; the question had to be tossed back and forth between man and God. Indeed, the desire to be the sole object of another’s desire is itself an objet(a), and hence, ironically, God’s touting of Job as His favorite had to be demolished, no matter how risky a gamble. “God’s” inquiry, in other words, tells us how Moses attempted to put to words the rudimentary struggle with the frailty of mirroring, the dizzying lure of desire, and the

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limits of language. Through Job, Moses depicts an impossibility; that is, he offers a myth for something about which one can speak only partially in theory, and that, ultimately, one cannot possibly know in its entirety. And yet Moses manages to go a bit further toward fleshing out the phenomenological shadow of these unknowabilities. Moses’s ma‘shal depicts the Symbol behind all symbols, the unconscious paternal law of language, acknowledging a carefully guarded secret – that symbols only work because they are intrinsically lacking, that language is predicated upon its incompleteness before desire, and upon its hidden holes and lacks . . . that “God” himself has lack. After all – and it has been staring us in the face for centuries – if God can pointedly ask Job where he was at a given point, then the conclusion is both obvious and stunning: Job was not there! Job was lacking. If Moses desires God, that desire itself must have come from somewhere, such that even without God’s direct answer – precisely because God does not answer – a semantically framed desire is always capable of allowing the speaker to sense a smidgen of the desire of the Other who introduced the subject to language. “You, Moses, are my desire!” God, as it were, would have experienced want or desire, and it is precisely this “acknowledgement” that Moses-as-Job wanted to hear. The “good” object is an object that has holes in it, and it is this trait above all else that distinguishes psychotic, omnipotent, static and impermeable objects from objects that can be internalized in the human mind, used beneficently, and be spoken of. Such objects can be loved and desired, but never fully captured. They can be aspired to in relationship because they are never complete. The fact that Moses’s unconscious may have initially wished to perceive these objects as absolutely full, without lack – as God taunts Satan about Job’s perfection – provoked the superego to empty them out, locate their holes, hide the full glory of their face, yielding the remainder of unsatisfied desire. By traversing his own fantasy, Moses reveals the evidence of a period of intense alienation during which, as Fink put it (1996, p. 81): The subject has successfully lodged his lack-of-being, his wanting unfulfilled, in that “place” where the Other was lacking. By accepting the place as empty, being is always possible.

This “place” is the mysterious, never geographically designated ma‘kom ‘¯e‘t¯e, which we now appreciate does not exist except in language, like the Land of Uz., like the story of “Job” itself. It is this very lack that institutes the symbolic level of relationship – and it is “good.” Thus refined, the internal objects of human subjectivity are, to be sure, somewhat less powerful, but also therefore more relevant.60 One ought therefore to understand God’s refusal to supply a more specific answer to Moses’s demand in the same light that we use in order to understand the psychoanalyst’s preference for his protective veil (or “glory cloud”?),61 and why the analyst may not directly nor fully respond to the patient’s insistence that the analyst consent to be permanently identified as having the specific subjective traits that the patient wishes to impose. Mirroring and psychoses – each of which mutatis mutandis obeys the uniquely symmetrical form of logic that allows for a thing to be the equivalent of its opposite62 – foster the illusion that perfect synergy and fullness of

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desire can be achieved, but this fool’s gold comes at the expense of the break-down of language and coherence. A God, as generally conceived, could easily be pressed into demarcating the same region as the mirror or the psychotic core,63 granting total jouissance to all comers. A mature God, if one may say such a thing, or a welldifferentiated “divine” psychic representational structure, allows desire to be suspended and deflected, never promising everything, permitting solitary glimpses, thereby pushing toward a relatively more limited, symbolized, and post-depressive sentient mind.64 The rabbinic midrash portrays these ideas in customary laconic form, but we can now hear something of utmost significance in their word play. Commenting on God’s demand to know Job’s whereabouts during the creation, the rabbis (see Exodus Rabbah, 40:3 [var., 31:1]) opened out their associations to the adverbial “Where” or ei‘foh [long o, as in “woe”], whose spelling is identical (except for pronunciation) to the noun ei‘fah [long a, as in “far”]. In biblical times, an ei‘fah referred to a dry measure of specific quantity (e.g., Exodus, 16:36), but more generally is used metonymically (e.g., a “handful”). [God said] You seek to contend with Me [“Shall he who reproves contend with the Almighty?” (40:2)] . . . Ei‘foh ha’y¯e‘tah, “Where were you. . . . ?” Tell me, Job, on what spot [place] does your ei’fah depend? On your head?, your forehead?, or some other limb? [When] you know the place of your ei’fah you may contend with me.

The term ei‘foh brings to mind the enclitic participle ei‘fo (“then”) that we encountered in Moses’s impassioned demand during the episode of Moses’s angry perplexity with the Israelites (above, section VI), and which seemed unnecessary. The terms are spelled slightly differently, yet they may be linking points.65 Whether related or not, the lack Moses learned to comprehend, however much, in the cleft of the rock, seems to be the same lack that motivated the trial of Job. Job’s ei‘fah would seem to be a counterpart to Plato’s agalma, put to such good use by Lacan.66 As played out through the drama of Alcibiades’s obsession with his love for some treasured yet indescribable element within Socrates, the agalma represents that hidden “something” – infinitesimal and even trivial as it may be objectively – which the self is convinced that other has, and which the self desires, but which the self is also in peril of using to hide his own lack. God’s question to Job, as paraphrased by the midrash, requires that Job acknowledge that he, too, must undertake the therapeutic effort to identify the way in which his ei‘fah serves as a cause of desire in others, even God. Ultimately, in a linguistic world, everyone speaking lacks! In this manner, Job can free himself from being captured as an objet(a) of God (“Have you considered my servant Job . . .?” [1:8]). The hidden subject of Job, or the hidden subject Job, is what remains after one is able to deconstruct the linguistically-erected self, after one can put aside the objet(a), the token objects that allegedly promise the fulfillment of desire, the arbitrary small measure or ei‘fah with which one asserts one’s claim on the other’s desire for us.

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11. DISCUSSION I have tried to recast Job as a text that offers a very accurate glimpse of the movement of the infant mind from primitive oral and skin fixations, characteristic of the earliest representational, enveloping structures of the budding mind, through mirroring and its subversion, toward the recognition of loss by virtue of the acquisition of words with which to speak. My thesis was foreshadowed by Job’s plea (19:23): Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were inscribed in a book! That with an iron pen and lead, They were graven in the rock forever.

Later, Job boldly claims, as if he had completed his brief to God, as best as he is able pending the appearance of El¯e‘hu (31:35): Oh that I had one to hear me! – Lo, here is my signature, let the Almighty answer me –

The Hebrew term for “signature,” taw‘¯e,67 is drawn from the same root as the Hebrew term for “desire” (ta’a‘vah). Moses’s signature is his presentation of self, ready for execration if that is what it takes to reveal the lack that has been filled by the Other’s desire. Fissures in healthy skin, engravings in stone tablets, clefts in rock – Moses is no stranger to the act of inscription. Yet an even new level is revealed through Job: signature as desire – expressing through the engravings of the pen on the writing surface those cuts which, by effacing the concrete, permit transformation in personality, and make possible that modicum of pleasure that a writer and a reader can hope to share. If my analysis has persuaded, then we can sense the depth of Buber’s intuition when he wrote (1942, p. 52), eloquently joining the primitive and the mature metaphors of the book, “Job is the first clothing of a human quest in form of speech.” This is a truly gifted way of putting the point. Inscription has moved to language; somaticized gouging of the skin with potshards has turned into a metaphoric envelope; real voids in one’s bosom are contained in creative textual aporia. The psychic “clothing” or mature psychic structures offered to us analogically in the form of trials of Job and his component “fellow” structures has matured from an extremely primitive state toward mature recognition of the inevitability of lack and the unquenchability of desire. He finally appreciates that lack is the characteristic of utmost relevance in the universe, and evil only secondarily. The crucial element of the change within Job, or perhaps in Moses himself, is the articulation of one’s awareness of fact that one has developed a novel personal interpretation of the mind’s relationship to its divine object representations different from those that had been merely absorbed through tradition. Job did not literally find a “new” God, or a new self. However, by relinquishing the search for the same old thing, by questioning whether he needed to forever remain identified with the ei’fah or other objets(a) he had until now blindly absorbed from others, such as the standardized explanations designed to render Providence possible, Job discovers

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that he has had to refind an entirely unique experience, the processes of negativization and symbolization themselves. This, I believe, is the hidden intent of the famously vexing intransitive phrase Al ken em‘as ve-ne’h.am‘t¯e ‘al ‘a‘far va-e’fer – “Therefore I abhor, and repent; seeing I am dust and ashes.” Abhor what?, we asked. The answer is: Nothing. A lack, a frightening, even abhorrent emptiness, a yawning gap within the self, vacated for the sake of a more honestly desirous dimension of relationship. This analysis allows us to firmly adopt the significance of the Epilogue, so often portrayed as an irrelevant, even childish add-on. It is true, as most have guessed by now, that the author of Job could not have thought it satisfactory to simply depict Job getting his property and children back – this would be manic denial or neurotic reproduction at best. It is also not the case that Job’s satisfaction would come merely from the fact that God vindicates his philosophical resistance to his friends’ moralistic remonstrations. Rather, owing to Job’s willingness to enrich his own language with lack, and his refusal to fill it with the pat texts and anxiety-quelling logic offered by his friends, he gains the opportunity of encounter. What is the quality of this “encounter”? The answer is supplied by the surprising details of the Epilogue. In the Epilogue, the externalized psychic fragments represented in the myth by Job’s companions coalesce into what might now be described as a solacing internalized structure. Only following this advent are we told (42:10): “And the Lord changed the fortune of Job [lit., “returned his captivity” (shav et she‘vut)],68 when he prayed for his friends.” In other words, God, or Job’s superego representations, had enfolded symbolically and benevolently upon Job’s acceptance of the impossibility of the concrete return of anything, save through symbolization. I understand this to indicate that the “refinding” process had progressed as a result of further empathic dialogue within the internal forgiving mental structures of Job’s personality, following which even further advances occur. As the text portrays it, there is now an in-gathering of all of Job’s former relations, or psychic constituents which, though belonging to an historically earlier period of his development, had now matured along with the overall transformation within. At this point, we are informed of an additional advance in consolation or ne‘h.a‘mah (42:11). And, reasonably, only following these developments could the text indicate the return of Job’s former material wealth and the gift of new children. Since I believe there was no return here of any real thing to any real place – except intrapsychically – we must paraphrase the conclusion, leaning upon the grammar of the future anterior tense upon which mature te’shu‘vah (repentance) is based. Such a paraphrase would run as follows: Indeed, by the time Job comprehends that he has reworked his terrors, and has relocated his own self within all of that which he once took to be his but which he gradually came to appreciate was really an (o)ther’s – and which he therefore only perceived as objets(a) – it will have become clear that he had been dreaming, and that his children and other physical acquisitions were, in fact, safe and sound.

Thus, what is returned to Job, the literal description of the text notwithstanding, is not any brute, material “Thing” (Das Ding) or da‘var but rather a new relationship

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featuring new, yet to be experienced dimensions of the other and of the self in interaction with it, a refound structure – (“And there returned . . . all his acquaintances who once knew him . . . ,” ve-khol yo’d‘e‘av le-fa‘n¯em [42:11]). Thus, if we are still impressed that Job is tragic, it is so primarily because it depicts a phase of development that is profoundly, inherently tragic, and precisely because the transition it portrays is, at one and the same time, an unavoidable, painful, impossible, and wonderfully exciting prerequisite for the emergence of normal human sentience. It is not about the substantive dimension of Job, but rather about what Job must acknowledge he is not, or has not, and about the manner in which that uncanny sense of “is not,” that lack and the yearning it creates, essentially binds him to the Other and, as he was uniquely graced to experience, binds the Other to him. Moses, the likely author of Job, knew very well that the lesson he had learned regarding the inherently “something else” of desire that can only be glimpsed in the gap, in an imaginary Land of Uz., “somewhere else” – a lesson so painful that man spends most of his life attempting to ignore or deny it – needed to be captured as best as possible in some narrative form. In choosing narrative, the author knows that he has committed himself to the paradoxical satisfactions of symbolic expression as well as the inevitable incompleteness of such expression. And not only the intellectual lesson as such, but also an ei‘fah, a handful of the desire itself had to be deeply hidden in the text in a way that retained the full flavor of the unbridgeable gap between any kind of structure known as “self” and that which is truly other. In the end, then, it is as Lacan states (1953/1954, pp. 190–1): What Freud shows us then is the following – it is in as much as the subjective drama is integrated into myth that has an extended, almost universal value, that the subject brings himself into being.

POSTSCRIPT In the foregoing I have emphasized the link between absence and desire. In particular, I have emphasized the role of God seeking man, which by implication acknowledges man’s absence and the desire it creates as a response to, or as a reverberation alongside man’s struggle with God’s absence. Contemporary psychologists have become quite comfortable with these notions, encountering as we do on a clinical basis innumerable confirmations of the way in which the symbolization and conceptualization of the concrete world is the painful but also enticing and rewarding dimension of psychological participation in reality, and of faith. We understand somehow that things must be this way psychologically, on the level of the relationship between man and one’s fellow, as Job, in my opinion, had always been instructing that things must be this way psychologically, including the level of relationship between man and one’s Creator. As confident as I can be of this approach to the challenge of comprehending the hidden subject of Job, I am nevertheless still wary that the preceding analysis not be perceived as an apotheosis of absence for the sake of absence per se. I have tried

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strenuously to make it clear that I am emphasizing “absence” as a component or dimension of what presence is all about, and as a dimension without which there would be endless plenty, a saturation of objects, but no desire. This position – defended by Hegel and since by Lacan, Levinas, W. R. Bion, Derrida, and others – is not without its critics. Space does not allow entering into this discussion, but I should like to make one final comment that acknowledges the danger of overuse of our conceptualization, and also emphasizes its value when maintained at proper proportion. Having worked throughout the preceding chapter with textual analysis, I will now use a most ordinary clinical situation to illustrate my point: the analytical approach to the “handling” of the transference. What is the motive of the analytic silence with which the psychoanalyst greets most of an analysand’s demands? Generally, analysts believe the following: When there takes place, during the course of the clinical process of psychoanalysis, an existentially monitored, tactical decision to not answer for the patient’s absent or lacking objects, or to not relent to the patient’s demand that the analyst supply idealized alternatives for them, the sense of the Other (the analyst, the analytic third, the unconscious) gradually becomes somewhat less mysterious, somewhat more tolerable in its relatively consistent magnanimity. And this, despite the fact that the challenge of otherness, precisely at these kinds of junctures, much more clearly conveys the message: “What you seek is not capable of being completely known.” The developmental truth I have just posited can be restated in order to place greater emphasis on religion’s belief in the objective existence of a divine Object (bearing in mind that at best we only perceive the representational (O)bject called “God”). That restatement would be: A fully internalized, multi-dimensional God, who proved to have sufficient historical responsibility, mutuality and availability, and who happens sometimes to be perceived as (or, “is”) absent, can still be experienced as havingbeen-present, or, better put, as absent primarily in the sense of “evoking memory and longing.” Owing to this, a God that is absent in such a way may be experienced as abandoning or as emancipating, depending upon one’s point of view. Thus, without a goodly tenure with the more substantial and mutual aspects of the man-and-God relationship – which is primarily that component of a relationship which must be remaindered and tolerated as lacking – a sense of true presence is not likely to be representationalized in the first place, though there may be some cognizance of a one-dimensional idea or notion of God. Consider this distinction as it arises in an interesting analysis of contemporary literature. In his miniscule, heart-wrenching classic Yosl Rakover Talks to God, Zvi Kolitz (1999 [1963]) portrays Yosl, the sole voice in the text, as he furtively completes a last letter to God, while surrounded by corpses of adults and a child in one of the last buildings in a ghetto being systematically destroyed by the Nazis. In painfully intimate prose, Yosl forthrightly asserts his faith and love for God, and the sureness that God loves His creatures. And yet Yosl feels he has no conceptual choice but to view the injustice to the Jews and to humankind in general as the result of has’ta‘rat pa‘n¯em, God’s hiding of His “face” or providence. He cannot comprehend why such protracted absence is deserved, and dares to warn God that His

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absence will eventually cause man to snap! Nevertheless, Yosl ends his letter, and the book, with an assertion of faith. In the 1950s, in a radio broadcast commentary on the original Yiddish version of the book, Emmanuel Levinas offered the Hegelian interpretation that the absconding God whom Yosl addresses is all the more present by virtue of His conspicuous absence, which ultimately enables faith, albeit a lonely one. At the time of publication, Levinas’s transcribed talk was not well known, and yet its thesis has since become a rather familiar existential-theological stance. In a revised edition of Yosl Rakover that includes Levinas’s essay, Leon Wieslertier (1999) took objection to Levinas’s position in a manner most relevant to the psychological experience of a “lacking” God, including one such as Job’s. While not a psychoanalytic assessment as such, Wieseltier’s main argument highlights the dilemma we have been trying to comprehend in this chapter in professional, object-representational terms. Wieseltier states that by turning an absence into a presence, Levinas disrupts the structure and the tension of Yosl’s complaint. To summarily twist absence into the manner of God’s manifestation, which is how Wieseltier interprets Levinas, is simply a contradiction in terms, “an absent God is a God who has not manifested Himself, and the rest is nothing more than desire, which is an engine of superstition” (p. 96). I cannot concur with Wieseltier. Desire is what enables relationship; the concrete enmeshment of presences can be nothing more than symbiosis, and to insist on presence can be infantile. As Wieseltier himself acknowledges (p. 98): There are people, moreover, for whom even the absence of God is absent, who are shaken not by the privation of providence but by the privation of the privation. Who live in a completely ungoverned and unconsoling world.

But this condition is not what pervades Yosl, or Levinas’s perception of Yosl. This condition alludes to the far more painful and lonely state of lacking an object, what Bion referred to as the failure to mourn and internalize the null-object that alone enables an “object” to be perceived. By so stating, I think Wieseltier has inadvertently revived the value of Levinas’s position: An absent God – one who has been successfully symbolized and in that sense “absented” – can always be experienced as present, and not merely in the sense of an endopsychic artifact but in the sense that a relationship representationalized is a relationship ready to hand, and forever. To be sure, this may not be as satisfying as His full presence, but how often can man be sure when that occurs. And recall that we are dealing with the assumption that it was no one less that Moses who wrote Job, who had partaken of the maximum amount of divine revelation allowable to humankind – and he still pinned for more. In the cleft of the rock he learned that more presence is not always the desideratum, but rather an increasingly refined sense of lack, and more desire. It is only when a God representation is completely lacking, or has been successfully ablated, that man stands truly alone. Wieseltier’s critique raises an additional point. There is a clinical problem when the religionist’s experience of God is “reduced” wholly to the god-of-individualimagination such as spoken of by Jung, Winnicott, and Bion. The maneuver seems fair

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enough, something psychoanalysts can abide all too comfortably, yet religion will not accept to thus limit God’s extension into human reality. We have agreed to not reenter this argument here, but we can now better appreciate through the present study that an intellectual-emotional contemplation of the kind that Levinas, Wieseltier, and the “Yosl’s” of the world, and ancient Job, might be capable of would actually be beyond the capability of individuals that have not achieved certain basic levels of representational development. In writing Job, Moses also assumes this basic level of psychic achievement, as it were. To desire requires sublation, a killing-off of the sense of the omniscient and omnipresent paternal object that stands in the way of healthy separation and abstraction, so that absence and lack can be experienced and mourned. The clinician does not anticipate that psychoanalysis will guarantee a valid divine epiphany, yet the new/renewed availability of more rich and complex dimensions of personality may enable the believer to grapple with the phenomenon of an absent God as a philosophically-theologically comprehensible state of relationship rather than as a sheer black hole which one must either fill with words or plummet into. As this essay was being composed in Israel, on the evening of September 9th, 2003, my dear brother-in-law, Rabbi Dr. David Yaakov Halevi Applebaum, M.D. and his precious daughter, Navah were killed by a terrorist’s cruel designs on the eve of her wedding day. Only if we learn from Job can we comprehend what was taken from us, and what was not. Consolation inheres in this. MHS

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For these, strictly speaking, do not comprise the subject of Job but rather its themes. The difference in psychological analysis is generally quite important. I, too, shall at some point here become involved in discussion of what I consider the main psychological theme implicit in the text, but only insofar as this helps us to say something significant about the subject of Job. Read on. Throughout, when I write Job with italics I am referring to the text as opposed to Job the character. Almost all of the pertinent issues regarding the date and authorship of the book, and many of its thematic-narrative issues are best summarized by Crenshaw (1992). Greenberg (1987) offers an excellent summary of rabbinic views on the nature of Job’s dilemma (e.g., rebel or devotee, Jew or Gentile), while Baskin (1992), Kurtzweil (1961), Mazor (1995), Rosenberg (1985), and Tsevat (1966) discuss the fine points of rabbinic exegesis and the moral implications of the book from the Judaic perspective. The problem of a “patient” or “impatient” Job is discussed by Fine (1955) and Zink (1965), the “pessimistic” Job by Reid (1983), the “tragic” or “non-tragic” Job by Steiner (1961), and Yafet (1995) provides an excellent comparison of the relative difficulties of the trials of Job, Jeremiah, and Abraham. Glatzer (1969) believes that the talmudic-midrashic interpreters “glossed over motifs of Job’s isolation, despair, and alienation, and presented God as far more concerned for the weal of Job, and Satan as more “human” than the two are actually portrayed in the book” (p. 18).

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The aporia in question, of course, focuses upon the problematic term “em‘as.” Job’s celebrated patience or hagpomon¯e is truly a later, Christian emphasis, and was much less a presumption among rabbinic writings (see Crenshaw, 1992; Fine, 1955; Zink, 1965). The rabbis were quick to note the distinction between the statement “For all this Job sinned not, nor ascribed anything unseemly to God” (1:22), following the first satanic attack, and the laconic statement “For all this, Job did not sin with his lips” (2:10), following the second, more destructive attack, and explained the difference by acknowledging that following the extreme devastation Job harbored suppressed anger in his heart, though he did not express it. He was nevertheless not held accountable for apostasy because he was tortured and hence could be considered as not in his proper mind (Talmud, Baba Bat‘ra, 16b). This of course is one of the many peculiarities facing the theology of Job: what did Satan expect to accomplish, from the standpoint, say, of Jewish Halakhah, by pushing Job to the point of denouncing God given that an artificially induced denunciation would in any event not be held against Job? On the other hand, is not the task of the Adversary always one of “inducing” or tempting man to transgress? Obviously, the solution lies in the notion of internalization, and the degree to which external impulsion, and even factors that seem superficially to be instances of force majeure, are taken internally and identified with. But this is a discussion for elsewhere. In any event, to the degree that Job endures with any degree of sanity and moral courage the lengthy psychological process that lies at the center of this episode, whether it is a process of working through repressed guilt (Reid, 1983) or mourning (Goiten, 1954; Niccolls, 1977; Schimmel, 1987; Van Praag, 1988) or some other process, as I shall propose, he may be considered a patient man. Job was enumerated by the Talmud (Baba Bat‘ra, 14b) as one of the three unique so-called “poetical” books of the Old Testament (the other two being Proverbs and Psalms), with distinct stylistic and grammatical rules and musical inflections that differentiate it from the other 21 books (see Breuer, 1982). Or, if not a tragedy in the full sense of the term, then certainly an epic about tragic suffering (see Glatzer 1969; Gordis, 1965, 1978; MacLeish, 1955; Raphael, 1960, pp. 37–51; Sewall, 1959, pp. 9–24); cf. Wiesel (1976) who suggests that Job is not tragic if we can suppose that, despite his overly humble resignation and abdication before God, Job is secretly refusing to accept humiliation and the need to repent. For this to work, Wiesel has no recourse but to imagine a “lost” text with an alternate ending! Kurtzweil (1961) and Steiner (1961) offer more satisfying arguments as to why Job is strictly not a tragedy. Wedbee (1970), as I mentioned above, goes so far as to propose that the ending (the Epilogue) effectively renders the book a comedy. The only strong methodological objection one could raise against this argument would be to contest the very possibility that biblical writers possessed, or displayed in their writings any evidence of a mature sense of self-reflectiveness. This is an interesting problem for any project that concerns itself with the psychological qualities of the biblical mind and the biblical author. In a fascinating analysis of biblical narrative, Niehoff (1992) distinguishes between “free indirect discourse” and “collective monologue” as methods for depicting characters’ inner mental states. “While free indirect discourse enables [the biblical author] to outline the half-conscious, fleeting movement of the mind, he uses scenes of collective monologue to confront a figure with his or her externalized self” (p. 595). The latter, however, is the less mature mode, more akin, I would suggest, to the child’s mode of addressing all of his assembled dolls (see Vygotsky, 1989, p. 235). Niehoff provisionally concludes that, while biblical characters overall evince highly complex perceptions based in profound self-awareness, they are not always completely conscious of their own individuality per se (see also Cohen, 1978, p. 100; Moye, 1990). The identificatory trait of “free indirect discourse” would be a narrative that renders or transforms the character’s thought into his own idiom while maintaining a third-person reference and the basic tense of the narration at the same time. Niehoff does not take account of a very interesting midrashic device, though admittedly it cannot automatically be attributed directly to the biblical mind, which makes a major effort to depict selfreflectiveness. On the words va-ye‘h¯e a‘h.a‘rei ha-de’va‘r¯em ha-e‘leh ([“And it was after these things”] Genesis, 22:20), in reference to the aftermath of the ake‘dah-sacrifice, the rabbinic midrash (Genesis Rabbah, 56:1, 4, also re: Genesis, 22:1) adds a‘h.a‘rei h¯er‘hu‘rei de’va‘r¯em she-ha‘yu sham (“And it was after the internal reflections that took place there . . .”). The midrash continues to delineate some of Abraham’s private musings and anxieties. The interpretation is based on the double meaning of the word de’va‘r¯em, which in Hebrew denotes “things” as well as “words” (or

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de’bu‘r¯em). Indeed, are not “inner reflections” an appropriate expression of the pathway wherein the mind metaphorically transforms the otherwise unknowable Ding an sich into words? The question remains, though: are internal meditations, such as these, and such as Esau’s described in Genesis, 27:41, the equivalent of a mature sense of self contemplating its own subjectivity? Now, if the hypothesis I wish to present here – which I still need to keep cloaked – is at all valid, Job may represent the singular example of the struggle with the sense of self and individuality known to biblical literature. While this belief is axiomatic for several religions, I write in the context of Judaism, and my sources are drawn from this context. In general, the attitude toward the purposefulness of the prophetic message is expressed in the Talmud, Be’ra‘khot, 34b and ‘E’ru’v¯en, 60b; esp. the view stated in Talmud, Me‘g¯e‘lah, 14a (see also Songs Rabbah, iv:22) – Ne’vu‘ah she’hu’z.re‘khah n¯ekh’te‘vah, ve-she‘lo hu’z.re‘khah le-do‘rot lo n¯ekh’te‘vah, “Prophecies that were needed [for future generations] were written; those not relevant for future generations were not written.” The literature is too vast for discussion here, and the corrective tendencies of post-postmodernism have by now been well accepted by most sciences, and the humanities, without losing the significant chastening effect of the original postmodern critique. Nevertheless, contemporary psychoanalytic theory is heavily influenced by different forms of “narrative constructivism” and what has recently been termed “perspectival realism” (Carnochan, 2001; Hoffman, 1992; Orange, 1995; Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 1997; Strenger, 1991), which tend to maintain under different rubrics the essential postmodernist fear of objectivist reductionism, and strongly idealize the notion of the nonexistence of one-mind (or one-person) psychological facts. These approaches are not as logically secure as their proponents imagine. With direct regard to the dilemma of the nature of psychoanalytic interpretation, theorizing, and formulation in the face of the variability of human behavior, the best recent considerations are Balter (1999), Eagle (2003), and Leary (1994). Balter, in particular, pits both “unknowability” and “mere” hermeneutic truth against a more mature concept of “relative certainty.” A simple illustration will suffice: We all know the pleasures of, say, reading Proust or contemplating the wisdom of Wittgenstein, yet, at a level that does not concern most fans of these two writers, there nevertheless must be explanations available, for instance, for what psychic tendencies and structures enabled each of them to think what they thought, compose the works they did, and what substructures enabled them to even have the capacity to mentally hold a sentence structure together long enough to get it written down. It is nice to live in an air-conditioned apartment complex, but, when the ventilation system breaks down during the summer, there better be someone available who knows his way around the tubes and machinery that exists in the dark basement of the building. Now, one can cavil that I am embarking upon reductionism, and add cynically that I will next introduce the need for biological and chemical analysis of these writers’ brains, their affinity to the smell of certain kinds of vellum and ink, and so forth. To be sure, depending upon what one wishes to know, such an analysis would be entirely in order and contribute a great deal to all concerned. However, I have raised the meta-issue here precisely because of my respect for the author of Job and owing to the intense desire to seek the deepest possible message he may have wished to convey. Compare recently Miller (1999) and Stolorow, Atwood, and Orange (1999). Regarding other methodological issues concerning the application of psychoanalysis to Jewish studies, see Halperin (1995). The best summaries of this background material are Crenshaw (1992), Hurvitz (1974), and Tsevat (1966). See also Pope (1965, pp. 50–66), Sanders (1968), and Terrien (1954, pp. 878–884). Pritchard (1955) assembles the ancient myths of similar content, among which are Egyptian, Sumerian, and Akkadic variants. All emphasize the need to confess sin and thereby propitiate a cruel deity, but none, as Crenshaw emphasizes (p. 865), compares to the complexity of Job, nor does any feature the sustained tension that persists within the lengthy dialogues in Job and the complex turns of theology they suggest. As regards the phenomenon of the surfeit of myth texts and variants that tend to surround a given theme, Malinowski’s comment is still apposite (1926, p. 39): “It is easier to write down the story than to observe the diffuse, complex ways in which the story enters into life, or to study its function by the observation of the vast social ands cultural realities into which it enters. This is the reason why we have so many texts and

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why we know so little about the [deep] nature of the myth.” Regarding how deeply a mythic structure might reach within the religious personality, see Jones (1991). McDargh (1983, 1992) and Spero (1992). The central position of the Satan in the role he plays in Job, for example, was anticipated by some to set a context for dating (see Scharf, 1967; Weiss, 1976), while others, such as Sarna (1963), focused upon the composition of certain terms, such as the curious appearance of be‘khor mot (18:13), thought to be a latent reference to an ancient Babylonian demon. For example, Ezekiel, 14:14 refers to Noah, Daniel, and Job in one breath, which led Blumenfeld in 1826 to insist famously that Job is of Babylonian authorship, a view maintained by Tur-Sinai (1954), who believed that the original text must have been Aramaic and subsequently translated into Hebrew some time around the 4rth century BCE (see also Habel, 1985, pp. 40–42). These views are found in Talmud, Baba Bat‘ra, 14a, 15b; Jerusalem Talmud, Sotah, 5:6; Genesis Rabbah, 19:12, 47:4, 76:9, 80:4. The view that Job may be identified with biblical Jo‘bav, apparently rooted in the pseudographical Testament of Job, was ridiculed by the commentary Abraham Ibn Ezra (ad Genesis, 36:33) (for additional details, see Greenberg, 1992, pp. 3–8). In a fascinating account in the Talmud, Baba Bat‘ra, 16a, Rabbi Levi defended the Satan, arguing that the dark angel only intended to champion the good name of Abraham, who the dark angel had tried ten times unsuccessfully, in the face of God’s profuse praise of Job. According to the Talmud, when Rabbi Ah.‘a bar Ya‘akov gave over this teaching in the academy of the city of Papunia, the Satan suddenly appeared and kissed the rabbi’s feet. Rosenberg (1985) discusses the ma‘shal or parable thesis in additional detail, arguing that by declaring the text a ma‘shal the rabbis were essentially creating legitimacy for “maximalization of significance.” Vargon (2001) recently assesses S. D. Luzzato’s struggle to maintain the view that Moses authored Job against the dissenting rabbinic opinions. Compare with Eisen (1999) concerning Ibn Tibbon’s view of Maimonides’s classification of Job as myth. An interesting variant, associated with the Moses-Job link, draws the hint to the link from Moses’s instruction to the spies (Talmud, Baba Bat‘ra, 15a, Sotah, 35a). This view highlights the passage “Seek out the land . . . are there trees [ha-yesh bah ez.]?” (Numbers, 13:20) and considers the term ez. an allusion to the Land of Uz. where Job lived. In this legend, Job is depicted as one of the giants of his generation whose death was strategically coordinated by God to coincide with the spies entry into the land, distracting the local peoples from the spies’ divagations. It is obvious that many students would consider the lack of time and place for Job a flaw, one that needs to be corrected as completely as possible. I am obviously building toward a different way of looking at things, with a view to accepting the temporal dislocation of Job as the central contribution of the text. La Capra referred in a somewhat different way to the need to occasionally not overemphasize temporal or other aspects of context (1994, p. 35): “If a text could be totally contextualized, it would paradoxically become ahistorical, for it would exist in a stasis in which it made no difference whatsoever. It would be immobilized in its own era. If contextualizations were fully explanatory, texts would be derivative items in which nothing new or different happened.” Is the resulting revised myth to be considered a new myth? Claude Lévi-Strauss adopted the broad view: We define the myth as consisting of all its variations; or, to put it otherwise, a myth remains the same as long as it is felt as such” (1955, p. 217). Lévi-Strauss, of course, had no intention of leaving the definition of “sameness” solely to subjective impression. He was referring to the use of an empirical methodology for structural analysis of mythic variants. Be that as it may, his main point was that the growth of myth is continuous even though its basic structure is discontinuous and atemporal (1949), at least until the intellectual impulses that created the myth have been exhausted or transmuted into newer forms. At the same time as our contemporary interpretations “enter” into and become one with myth, I am keen to not lose sight completely of the major epistemological and methodological issues that are involved here. Space limitations forbid my taking these up here in any length, save to make one or two comments. First, since all forms of interpretation of texts – be they literary, homiletic, or clinical psychological interpretations – in the absence of their authors’ current associations, or short of additional texts by the same author, entail the risk of imputing to the text something whose primary claim to “belongingness” may be nothing other than the interpreter’s wishes and projections. Given the

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degree of subjective considerations and impressions that are involved in textual interpretation under the best of circumstances, one must perforce acknowledge the inevitability of at least some degree of what hermeneuticists call appropriation of the text, some degree of “taking over” the text in response to the apparent sense of the text as opposed to what might be considered the “true” intentions of its author. Second, and with specific application to the area of Jewish scholarship, Elman (1996) makes an important distinction between the task of reverting retrospectively to unearthing hidden truths (known as the nonliteral pe‘shat) and transcending the text toward progressive truths (known as de‘rash). The legitimacy for the latter is entirely dependent upon the belief that the biblical text is intended to be “omni-significant.” Now, if we append – presumably with moderate to good evidence – a sophisticated psychoanalytic interpretation to the biblical text, or similarly interpret some aspect of the biblical personality, we face two epistemological possibilities. One view is that the contemporary interpretation has transcended the intended meaning, i.e., gone beyond what the text bears, and has posited an extrinsic bit of knowledge, one with no claim to truth based on a kind of back-handed argument that might claim that the similarity between the contemporary psychological insights and the biblical text or behavior lends “divine” or otherwise inspired weight to the contemporary interpretation. An alternative view holds that the contemporary interpretation somehow reveals the latent or hidden wisdom of the biblical word, whose inherent polysemy is always rich with dimensions of truth that are rediscovered in different languages and modes in different generations. Thus, a contemporary interpretation of the biblical text participates in some way with an earlier prestage inherent to the text, lending special status to that which had until now been considered “merely” contemporary. I have struggled with these issues elsewhere (Spero, 1982, 1986, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1999). See Bion (1965), pp. 3–5; Brody (1990), pp. 123–4; Edelson (1988), pp. 10–20; Kernberg (1991), p. 38; Modell (1984), pp. 150–7. The author of the text does indicate (1:5) that Job sensed some guilt regarding the fact that his sons, or he himself, may have extended themselves beyond proportion. As a mythic structure, however, Job’s guilt, or that of the author of Job, was not directly about any actual excesses of any actual, concrete “sons” but rather representationalized something much deeper, as we shall see as the essay continues. For Jung, the ultimate answer to Job is offered when the self-forsaken God on the cross experiences to the full what it means to be a human (1952, p. 74). Regarding the idea of the God/Devil or Satan split, see Freud (1923d). Two other interesting psychological analyses of Job merit brief mention. Andresen (1991) adopts some Kleinian-Winnicottian concepts to highlight the theme of the object’s (God) capacity to survive the subject’s, the infant’s (Job’s), destructive rages and intense feelings, reaching the point where it no longer operates according to the illusions of the subject’s satisfactions, and in this manner gradually acquires independent qualities of otherness that the subject can internalize and respect, taking joy in the object’s (now, the object representation’s) existence within the mind. Renik (1991) takes a different approach. Renik presents a long psychoanalysis of a difficult patient who, on one hand, always complained of not improving, yet, on the other hand, always excused the analyst of any role in this failure, despite what Renik viewed as the patient’s obvious anger and disappointment in him. Underneath, explains Renik, the patient, like Job, had created a powerfully resistant and almost perverse fantasydefense according to which the neglect and abuse were a mask secretly created by the patient against becoming aware of his deeper wish-fantasy that the analyst might harbor a special love toward the patient. We will need to refer to more specific literature later, but, the link of skin and orality was outlined, following initial suggestions by Freud, by Fenichel (1945, pp. 357, 376 et passim) and has been revived with great complexity in the work of Anzieu (1985) and his students. See also more recently, Biven (1982), Charles (2001), and Rucker (1994). A few additional differential comments are in order, as space is at a premium: (a) references to water (ma’y¯em), an obvious oral symbolism, are plentiful, although Jeremiah and Isaiah contain such references as well (but not complementarily with other oral references as is the case in Job); (b) references to death (ma’vet) are found as well, and also in other books of the prophets (see [a]),

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but this is a rather broad metaphor; finally, (c) there is essentially no triangular oedipal structure within Job. Even though – and this is important – the principle of “complemental series” leads one to anticipate that chronologically-later developmental phases may reactivate the mnemic impact of earlier phases, lending them some form of secondary expression, despite the fact that the earlier phase was in and of itself a pre- or non-semantic one. In my clinical work with and investigations of primitive mental experience, I use the term “symbolified” (1998) to denote the basic instantiation of the symbol-creating function of the mind, the bootingup of the mind for representational functioning, as a result of which it will eventually select material out of which to fashion specific symbols and symbolisms (see also Charles, 2001; Gaddini, 1984; Green, 1999b, p. 53). Compare Alhanati (2002), Bick (1968), Brenman (1992), Bucci (1997), Finell (1997), Grotstein (1990), Kumin (1996), Mitrani and Mitrani (1997), Ogden (1989), Paul (1997), Rucker and Lombardi (1998), Tustin (1986). Regarding the oddly worded statement yesh ma‘kom e¯ t¯e, “There is a place with me . . . ,” the rabbis exposited: “Said the Lord to Moses, Your portion in the World to Come has been reserved for you since the beginning of creation, and it is here” (A‘vot de-Ra‘b¯e Na‘tan, 12), and also “The Writ does not say, ‘I am in this place,’ in order to teach that God is the space of the world but the world is not His place” (Genesis Rabbah, 68:4). Further evidence that this ma‘kom is a non-place might be the fact that it is enumerated among the 10 a priori entities created “between the watches” (itself a non-time!) on the eve of Creation, where it lay ready for future use (see Talmud, Pe’sa‘h.e¯ m, 54a). Regarding the demand to see the face of the other, in a clinical context, see Weissman (1977). This dimension is even further reinforced by the fact that the second-person reference to God in the passage appears in the feminine form at [long a, as in “far”], instead of a‘tah. The commentators suggest, “[Moses’s] strength was weakened like that of a woman.” However, as Barukh Halevi Epstein points out (Torah Te’m¯e‘mah, loc. cit.), it is God whom is referred to in feminine form, not Moses. Epstein boldly comments that Moses must have been implying, “You [at] weaken me as the woman weakens the man during the sexual act.” Interestingly, although no human mind, including Moses’s, can sustain any glance or comprehension of the divine face as such, it is deemed categorical that Moses’s level of prophecy, exceeded by none other, was direct and without allegorical phantasmagoria, and is referred to as pa‘n¯em el pa‘n¯em, “face to face,” or peh el peh, “mouth to mouth,” a level not achieved by any other prophet (Maimonides, Mish‘neh Torah: H¯el‘khot Ye’so‘dei To‘rah, vii:6; cf. also H¯el. Ye’so‘dei To‘rah, i:10, Mo‘reh Ne’vu‘kh¯em, i:21, 37). Thus, the notion of the search for encounter with the face remains associated primarily with Moses. Nevertheless, the Talmud debates (Ber’a‘khot, 7a; see also Sha‘bbat, 87a) whether the statement u-te’mu‘nat A’do‘nai ya‘b¯et, “and [he] gazes upon the picture of the Lord,” means that Moses was in some way finally enabled, as a reward for his modesty, to sustain gazing at God’s face or whether it refers, as in Exodus, only to the “back” of God’s face. Until the upsurge of interest in Lacan in the last ten years, the sole English-speaking author to refer to Lacan when dealing with the importance of the mirroring function was Donald W. Winnicott (1967) (who speaks primarily in terms of the literal mirroring of the infant by the mother rather than the infant’s reflection in the mirror). Interestingly, Margaret S. Mahler, who during this same year introduced what she termed the “mirroring frame of reference” (1967, p. 87), makes no reference to Lacan’s work. Gouin-De´carie (1965, p. 66), working in Canada, cursorily mentions Lacan’s essay among a list of French psychoanalytic contributors to early object relations development. Kohut himself got around to acknowledging his intellectual debt to Lacan only in his last works (1977). The political issues useful for understanding the slow uptake of Lacan’s work, and other peculiarities of their fate from the standpoint of the history of ideas, has been discussed amply by Ragland-Sullivan (1989), Smith and Kerrigan (1983), Turkel (1982), and, most recently, Macey (1988). See Laplanche and Pontalis (1967), pp. 250–53; Muller and Richardson (1982), pp. 1–19; Muller and Richardson (1985). See Stern (1985), pp. 144–45; Winnicott (1971). The potentially alienating and uncannily disturbing qualities of mirroring have also been noted by developmental researchers. Priel, for example, concludes her developmental review (1985) by stating

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that the mirror image is uniquely anxiety-provoking because, on one hand, it is completely synchronous with the human infant’s movements and kinesthetic sensations, giving rise to the experience of having a double, yet, by virtue this very experience, the image acquires a quality that only the infant’s own body has: “This would mean that the child is receiving from the mirror rather bewildering me and not-me cues” (p. 184). See Ragland-Sullivan (1989), pp. 29, 318, note 62. Recent writers have clarified this even further by showing that Lacan’s mirror stage concept evolved across at least 3 major revisions (Julien, 1994; Van Pelt, 2000, pp. 21–44). Most important is the clarification that the mirror stage is preceded by an earlier period characterized by primordial identifications (more correctly, symbiotic, fused-and-patched-together identity components or incorporations), which are primarily psychoticlike. Subsequently, with the advent of the mirror phase, a period of primary identifications holds sway, predicated upon the imaginary (in this period, the individual sees his own desire in the image of the other). Finally, with full entry into the symbolic, there sets in a period featuring combinatory identifications (as opposed to the more primary, dichotomized binary identifications). At this point, the authentic “I” is aware that it plays a role as a signifier within the larger symbolic order, along with all other signifiers. In this last period, the individual recognizes, as opposed to literally seeing, his desire as being the desire of the other’s desire. As Julien summarizes the matter (1994, p. 50): “By means of speech that answers the subject’s demand for love, the subject can come to recognize himself in what he sees.” Though consistently ignored in most post-Lacanian exposition, Lacan also spoke in terms of a “desirein-pieces,” resulting from the constant projection outward of the child’s own desire or libido toward misrecognized, alienating objects and from the inability yet to satisfactorily combine partial drives or instinctual-zonal pleasures under such conditions (1953–1954, p. 148). See Muller (1988), p. 352. Lacan (1949), p. 5. Muller and Richardson (1982), pp. 6, 66. Lacan (1953–1954), pp. 168–9; Lacan (1954–1955); Lacan (1960), p. 311. One of the major conceptualizations of Andre´ Green (1999a, p. 59). See Caruth (1995) and (1996), pp. 62, 64. In the text, it is the formidable Sha‘da’ei appellation that appears, which has been translated, for want of any English equivalent, as “Almighty.” It is worth noting that this ancient name of God – the one that Moses insisted upon moving beyond toward the deeper mysteries of the tetragrammaton (see Exodus, 6:3) – appears 31 times in the Book of Job, a quantity which completely outstrips any other book of the canon (it appears only 9 times in the Pentateuch, and a total of 8 times in the entire remainder of the canon!). Could this be another hint to some particular Mosaic inclination? As recently expressed by Julien (1994, p. 189), “The analyst responds to the voice created in the Other by saying nothing; to the gaze solicited from the other by seeing nothing; to oral and anal demands to be satisfied by the Other, by giving nothing.” In the sense of the process described by Bion (1963, 1965, 1967), and compare with Job’s own final admission – “I heard of You by the hearing of the ear; But now my eye has seen You” (42:5). This element of theory, and in particular its relation to the rationale of treatment, is one of the more difficult but fascinating aspects of Lacan’s contribution to classical psychoanalytic thought. In a nutshell, the patient must learn to empty himself from his own speech, and from that point, a point of relative nothingness, truly relearn, to whatever degree possible, how to represent himself semantically, and somewhat more independently, given that he has been learning, with the analyst’s helpful neutrality, how to absent himself from his semantic chains, and his symptoms. With the rigorous analysis of transference, the patient ceases having to represent the “other” for the other! Critical throughout this process is the capacity of the patient to ask, “What do you want from me?” See esp. Borch-Jacobsen (1993), p. 150. Usage of the Hebrew term ne’h.a‘mah in the sense of change or recanting one’s prior attitude or policy is seen in Genesis, 6:7, I Samuel, 15:29 and II Samuel, 13:39. Its use to more strongly denote an emotional consolation – which, of course, nevertheless carries the latent meaning of a transformation in affective relationship – is seen directly in Job, 40ii:11 and is probably an important aspect of the intensely ambivalent context in Genesis, 27:42 (see Rashi ad loc.).

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The fact that the term na‘h. em or ne’h. a‘mah oftentimes follows the word shuv [“turn” or “return,” i.e., repent] in the biblical text does not automatically helps us to decide under which circumstances ne’h.a‘mah refers to consolation and the related intrapsychic dynamics of reparation, or to a more rational, executive type of reconsideration, akin to a philosophically decision to rescind a former commitment. I suggest Jonah, 3:9–10 as a good example of just how unclear the matter can be: Who knows whether God will not turn and repent [ya‘shuv ve-n¯e‘h.am], and turn away [ve-shav] from His fierce anger, that we not perish? And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil ways; and God repented [va-y¯e’na‘h.em] of the evil, which He said He would do unto them; and He did it not.

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In any event, I suggest that we not draw too fine a line here. For practical purposes, one can state that in general there are ne’h.a‘mah-like processes that lead up to te’shu‘vah (repentance) and other ne’h.a‘mah-like processes that result from or run parallel with the advancing stages of te’shu‘vah. Objet(a) (French) stands for objet(a)utre or the inherently “other” object. For detailed discussion of the functions outlined in the text, see, for example, Benvenuto and Kennedy (1986, pp. 176–79) and Glowinski, Marks, and Murphy (2001). See Fink (1995), pp. 59–61. ˇ zek (1992), p. 155. Lacan initially developed his concept of the symptom, which he intentionally See Ziˇ referred to by its Old French spelling “sinthome” (1975–1976) with reference to James Joyce’s nearpsychotic relinquishing of his body-envelope image, thereby instituting the symptom as the fourth member of his up-until-that-point triadic order of Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic. For further discussion, see Adams (2003). Discussed by Belau (2002, p. 153) and Caruth (1995, p. 11). See Lefort and Lefort (1980), pp. 46–49. Later, Lefort and Lefort state (p. 327): There is only one object: the drive object; it is an object that takes its place in a montage, the circuit of the drives, which absolutely implicates the Other and deprives the object of its Real dimension by marking it with a loss. That, indeed is why orality can never lead to intrinsic satisfaction, but rather to . . . a structure that is constitutive of the subject in the signifier.

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Regarding anxiety and the flooding of the Real into the breach of the hole, see Harari (2001), esp. pp. 102–11. See Rabate (2000), p. 19. Covering his mouth marks the oral gap, the hole, which he must protect, the “sea of anguish” (mouth=sea) within him (13:24, 27:7, 33:10). In the preceding paragraphs, I have made much of the role of the ma’kom or “place” – the real cleft in the geographic rock as well as the symbolic neo-space located nowhere in particular except mentally – where Moses and the character of “Job” coincide. I would like to note a curiosity about which I can only offer some creative conjecture. As is well known, the biblical text is replete with what are known as masoretic irregularities wherein a Hebrew term appears in a form that is corrupt in some way (missing a vowel or a letter). Such seeming corruption creates difficulty as it might render the anticipated singular term plural, or the opposite, or even unpronounceable. And so the matter might rest, where it not for the oral tradition that instructs how such terms are to be read despite the corruption. From the viewpoint of Jewish tradition, such corruptions are not mere copyists’ errors, nor accidents, and are seen instead as the location of various mysteries that must be interpreted for their fullest meaning. According to the principle of ke‘r¯e u’ke‘th¯ev, the word must be written on the biblical scroll in its corrupt form – or else render the text unfit – and yet it is to be pronounced not as it is written but in accordance with tradition – or else render the reading improper. In the Book of Job, two unique incidents of condensation stand out: I refer to the two, almost identical terms m¯en’ha‘sa‘a‘rah (38:1) and m¯en’sa‘a‘rah (40:6), two unusually “thick” terms that condense the naturally distinct words m¯en | ha-sa‘a‘rah, meaning “from | within the storm.” Both terms appear at the introduction of God’s two responses to Job from within the occult whirlwind. There are only

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13 other incidents of condensation in the Bible overall, and the present two incidents have been interpreted in a variety of fanciful ways. I would like to suggest that the appearance of a conspicuous lexical knot at precisely this point – whether intentionally crafted or even inadvertently slipped by Moses himself – represents in graphic terms the tendency toward increasing symmetrization (i.e., the collapse of the law of contradiction) the deeper one enters into the realm of the unconscious, or into the cleft containing the divine “space.” To read the condensed term correctly requires the Symbolic, the oral tradition, and thereby the reintroduction of an asymmetrizing cleavage, which makes possible the surrender of wildly packing all of one’s pleasure into a single “mega-term” (the whirlwind, or psychotic omniscience) in favor of our slow, even stammering linguistic sentience. The skin-veil concept continues in Exodus 34:30–35, when Moses, having descended from the mountain for the second time, discovers that he must drape or shield his face from the nation who now, in turn, and paradoxically, clamour to mirror themselves in Moses’ face and are at the same time frightened of his face. Indeed, the text implies that Moses himself was not immediately aware of why they were reacting in this way, though the text quickly reveals that the explicit cause of the peoples’ reaction was the glorious radiance of his face. Taken all together, this episode may express the nation’s heightened self-consciousness and sense of shame as a result of increased recognition of the desire for and dangers of too-literal mirroring (i.e., the type that permitted them to imagine that they could simply and concretely replace the temporarily absent Moses with any other kind of polished, mask-like surface). This psychic development must be considered a positive or creative advance. See Matte-Blanco (1975); Matte-Blanco (1988). See Bomford (1999). An entirely different and intriguing approach to the conceptual meaning of God’s pausing to ask Job about his whereabouts during Creation can be found in an unexpected source. In one of his brilliantly descriptive neuropsychological accounts of mind-body states generally overlooked by contemporary observers, Oliver Sacks takes up some of his own experiences with physical alienation and reappropriation of his sense of his own leg – or his relationship to his leg – throughout a difficult period of surgical repair and rehabilitation following a traumatic accident. In A Leg to Stand On (1984), Sacks relates at one point (pp. 110–12) the difficult moment just prior to taking his first step forward following a period of immobility. In the milliseconds of contemplation that Sacks manages to capture just prior to actually producing this single step, he becomes aware of what he considers a sense of measurement, of a frame-creating processing that his mind is feverishly calculating, akin to the infinitesimal “prePlanck” time just following the Big Bang and just preceding the beginning of qualitatively measurable time. “Out of nothingness, out of chaos, measure was being made” (p. 113, emphasis added). Sacks then writes (p. 113): All at once I thought of God’s questions to Job: “Where were thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who had laid the measures thereof.” And I thought, with awe, I am there, I have seen it. . . . I stood still, arrested, riveted to the spot, partly because the vertigo made movement impossible, partly perhaps because I was arrested by these reflections. My soul was transfixed by a rapture of wonder. “This is the most wonderful thing I have ever known, “ I thought. “Never must I forget this marvelous moment. Nor can I possibly keep this to myself.” And following straight on this thought came more words out of Job: “Oh, that my words were now written! Oh, that they were printed in a book!” Fortunately for us, this is exactly what Sacks resolves to do. While Sacks’s prose and interpretation are remarkable, I would differ with him on two points, and I think it an important avenue of divergence. First, Sacks takes the approach that the necessary key to re-establishing the cognitive map that eventually enables him to become reacquainted with his leg, and ultimately permits walking, is “the deed” (p. 114). As if to say, at some arbitrary point, one must simply walk! I would agree that it may seem this way, but hold that “the word” precedes the deed; indeed, without some linguistic carriage, deeds and actions fall stillborn into a void. And, in fact, Sacks and his physiotherapist companions certainly engaged in a fair amount of thinking and talking before he actually executed the first step. (Arguing from infancy does not change my opinion: the sum of infant actions are indeed arbitrary and only a select few are destined to fall into a schematic place within the context of a verbal ambiance that lends to them a basic framework.) Second and more importantly,

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missing from Sacks’s interpretive theory is the role of desire. Ironically, desire is not lacking in the narrative description: Sacks exudes it, and the reader can almost taste it. What I mean to say is that Sacks’s version of Job would seem to enable Job to retort, “Alright then, God, I admit I was a bit startled at first, but I have now been enlightened by contemporary neuroscience and can indeed account for my whereabouts and activities during the first moment of Creation!” In fact, neither Job nor Sacks, in the end, can fathom that nano-moment of utter suspension just prior to the first movement of time. Nor would I believe that Sacks had solved the problem by resorting to Kantian a priori or intuition in order to gain closure on his experience (in his 1993 Afterword, he himself acknowledges this dissatisfaction, but has as yet no alternative). No, even if what Sacks experienced in that awesome moment indeed had something to do with “framing” or measurement (and I agree that it does), it is not a measurement that the human mind can comprehend, and not for lack of insight, but because what he could comprehend of his experience is at best always a retroactive impression of the “measure” of desire and of lack. At root, the ultimate experience can only be felt as a void, and it is a void that opens up to desire (for total knowledge, for ethical wisdom, for perfectly mutual relationship with oneself, the other, even one’s leg). And this is the very void that, apparently by definition, the unconscious (or God) will always condign to keep incomprehensible to man. Putting aside the spelling distinctions between the terms ei’foh (which ends with the letter heh) and ei‘fo, the rabbis sensed another, far more significant parallel along the lines of the curious little ei‘fo, “however.” In Genesis, 27:33, after Isaac learns that it was not Esau who had just brought him the meal nor upon whom he had just bestowed the blessings, we are witness to an outbreak of horrified anxiety: And Isaac trembled with a great fear, and he said, ‘Who, then [ei‘fo, “however” or “accordingly”], was it that hunted for me food and brought it for me . . . It is based on the appearance of the term ei‘fo here and in the reference (Exodus, 33:16) cited in the text and in the reference in Job (19:23) that the rabbis deduced that Moses must have been the author of Job. Rashi (ad loc.) treats ei‘fo as if it were interchangeable in this context with ei’foh, rendering the term as a portmanteau: m¯e who ve-ei‘foh who, “Who is he and where is he?” Important for us is the fact that as the talmudic discussion continues, a further opinion suggests that Job lived during the period of Joseph, based upon the appearance of the term ei’foh (“Where”) as Joseph searches for his brothers, despite the fact that as we noted these two terms are not identical. All the more interesting, therefore, is that the rabbis did not point to the term ei’foh (“Where”) that appears during the whirlwind (possibly because it was uttered by God and not by the protagonist himself). I believe I have landed upon another interesting parallel between Moses’s preoccupation with desire in Job and another midrashic reference to the turmoil that results from the failure to subvert desire through a questioning that suspends any expectation of concrete response. I have in mind a parallel between God’s flaunting of Job before Satan, “Have you seen my servant, Job?” – which I think we could say would also be the way in which God would refer to Moses – and the following morality tale (Pe’s¯ek‘tah Ra’bba’t¯e, 13:6 to Exodus, 17:8): [Said the Lord] I am continually among you and available for your needs, and yet you [ask]: ‘Is God in our midst or not?’ By your lives! The dog [Amalek] shall come and bite you, and you will cry out for me, and then you will know where I am! Rabbi Ber’a’kh‘eah the Priest [transmitted a teaching] in the name of Rabbi Judah the Prince: [The matter is analogous] to a person who was carrying his son on his shoulders as they walked out to the [market]. The son spied an object [var., da‘var shel he’fez.?, “a desirable object”] and said, ‘Father, take that object and give it to me.’ And thus he did. And so on a second occasion and on a third occasion. Soon, they then met another person. The son said to the person, ‘Have you seen my father?’ The father said, ‘Do you indeed not know where I am?’ He threw him off his shoulders and a dog came and bit him.

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This tale features the failure of specular or mirrored desire, and perhaps also representationalizes the need to aggressively subvert mirroring, and to acknowledge the primacy of the (O)ther, in order to escape the snare of narcissistic demand. See Glowinski, Marks, and Murphy (2001), pp. 1–4.

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Cf. the use of the term as “mark” or “sign” in Ezekiel, 9:4. Cf. Zephaniah, 3:20, “. . . be-shu‘v¯e et she’vu‘te‘khem”.

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CHAPTER 19 BIBLICAL THEMES IN PSYCHIATRIC PRACTICE Implications for psychopathology and psychotherapy

SAMUEL PFEIFER Klinik Sonnenhalde, Riehen, Switzerland

1. INTRODUCTION Mental suffering cannot be understood in psychiatric terminology alone. Diagnostic criteria, structured interviews of psychopathology, imaging techniques and measuring biochemical parameters will never reveal the deeper issues that trouble a person. Value-sensitive therapists will therefore look beyond psychopathology at individual attempts to understand the inexplicable of mental distress (Kleinman, 1988). In the vast field of transcultural psychiatry, religious topics are an important aspect that may give us more insight in the individual’s dealing with suffering. Often religious patients may refer to biblical themes and archetypes (Heilman & Witztum, 2000) to describe their condition. The Bible contains a wealth of narratives on human suffering, interpersonal conflict, existential struggles and transcendent experiences (Mumford, 1992). It describes human beings in their tension within themselves, with others and with God, in their motivations and their distress, torn between good and evil. The clinical observations which are presented in this article have been gathered in my function as medical director of a private psychiatric clinic in Switzerland (Klinik Sonnenhalde in Riehen near Basel). Founded by deaconesses in 1900, it has always been the goal to integrate professional clinical psychiatry with Christian counseling. Today the clinic is integrated in the regional psychiatric network and serves as a valued alternative to state psychiatric hospitals. Although we declare our openness for religious issues, it is our goal to serve all patients, irrespective of their social, cultural or religious background.

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2. THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF BIBLICAL THEMES IN PSYCHIATRIC PRACTICE In therapy with religious patients, most of whom come from a Christian background, it is striking how they express their suffering not only in the descriptive terms of our culture and our medical vocabulary. Spirituality is an important aspect of their life, and it is affected, when they suffer from psychological problems. There are major differences in the phenomenology and in the religious presentation of various diagnostic groups. Thus, for didactic reasons, I would like to describe three distinct groups. 2.1 Depression Religious individuals do not only suffer from the general symptomatology of depression but especially from the fact, that faith which has been a source of strength and coping is now darkened and losing it’s supportive function. The general tendency of feeling guilty and a failure is then related to a failure in their spiritual life. It is important to understand this relation and to help patients see that their spiritual suffering is part of the depressive disorder. Let me describe a few examples: 1. Sad affect, loss of joy and interest can lead to a loss of joyful emotion in regard to God and his creation. This pertains especially to those theological traditions which emphasize emotions as a proof of salvation or predestination. 2. Ruminating and doubting, inner restlessness and endless brooding can lead to a loss of the conviction of salvation or predestination. 3. Self reproach and ideation of guilt are experienced as real guilt before God and can lead to fear of being eternally lost without a way of reconciliation and forgiveness. 4. Lack of energy and inability to make decisions obstruct participation in regular religious activities, increasing a sense of inadequacy. Even Bible readings and prayer become a burden. 5. Fear and regression, or inadequate clinging to others can severely hinder the fellowship with other believers which would normally be the social network of support. 6. Worries and a lack of perspective take away the confidence which the person had through faith. Bible quotations telling them not to worry, can increase the sense of disobedience and inadequacy. 7. Irritability and hypersensitivity can result in dysfunctional behaviour, which is perceived by the afflicted person as well as family and friends as not compatible with the love and gentleness of a Christian life. 8. A lack of hope and the wish to die are sometimes supported by Bible quotations out of context, which seem to encourage suicide. 9. Often patients or their Christian subculture interpret their emotional and somatic complaints as the activity of demonic powers, thus adding a dimension of terror to the depressive experience which goes far beyond bare human experience (Pfeifer, 1994). A brief case illustration follows:

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Case vignette: Suicidal ideation and the promise of heavenly bliss M.Z, a 20 year old student, who grew up in a loving family, was very sensitive from her childhood on. She is very gifted in music, but also suffered from frequent sleep disorders. When she was ten, her father died within weeks from cancer. She grew up to become a beautiful young lady, started to study music and was engaged to a stable promising young man. Then however, she failed her exams and had to leave the Music Academy. She had a growing hesitation to get married and presented with a severe depressive disorder with marked suicidal ideation and a history of several suicide attempts. Despite regular therapy and standard medication she suffered from prolonged severe suicidality. In therapy she described her longing for heaven: “This life is but a preparation for eternal glory; there I will meet my father, there I will be able to praise God with my music which did not find the world’s approval. My most beautiful experiences were those moments where I felt close to God, where I ‘felt like heaven’.” The patient’s description of the promise of heaven was – like all her private logic – so convincing that the religious therapist had to distance herself from that hope which she basically shared but which became dysfunctional in supporting suicide as the option to find the eternal bliss which the harsh reality of this world could not offer her.

2.2 Schizophrenia – Religious Delusions with Biblical Content Schizophrenia is the illness which is most commonly related to religious content, even in the secular literature and in diagnostic manuals. Religious delusions are often bizarre, representing a distorted and often threatening image of religious traditions and ideals. Interestingly, it is by far not only religious individuals who develop religious delusions. Often they serve the individual to explain the inexplicable in psychosis. Here are the most common features which can contain religious themes. 1. Hearing voices: Although there are some neuropsychological models to explain this phenomenon, the voices can be so convincing and threatening that they force the individual to try to find an explanation for him- or herself. Often, the every-day cultural context will not suffice to give such an explanation. Voices of angels or evil spirits, of God or Satan could help to give order in the inner chaos – but such descriptions will not be understood by the outer world, thus alienating the individual in its familiar surroundings. It should be noted, just as a marginal remark, that not all voice hearing can be interpreted as schizophrenic – a fact that has been established by the research of Romme and Escher (1993). 2. Mystical illusions and constructions of autistic meanings: The alienation and the disturbance of thinking, feeling and behavior, which are so characteristic of psychosis can lead to altered states of consciousness, which again may be experienced or described in religious terms. To distinguish them from real mystical experiences is not easy and would require the presence of other characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia See the illustration on the following page. 3. Prophecy: It is one thing to have an individual experience of heavenly bliss, but something else, when a person feels urged to let others know the revelations he or she has received. The content of such prophecies can be quite varied, from sharing images to preaching coming doom or the end of the world. Again, one has to carefully examine the cultural background of a person before asserting so-called “prophecies” as pathological.

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Case vignette: Mystical visions and psychosis J.B., a 39 year old secretary and member of a charismatic church became increasingly restless and felt urged by the Holy Spirit to serve her church by prophecies she had received. Often such “visions” were triggered by real events. When the pastor of the church was severely injured in a road accident she saw “a cross on the ground, partly covered by snow, and our pastor slain under the cross, and in his hands he held something like a seed.” Her insistence to share her many prophecies and visions in the Sunday service were increasingly resisted by other members of the church and finally led to a complete nervous breakdown which required psychiatric treatment.

4. Having a mission: This implies further action as a result of visions, prophecies or revelations. Often patients display delusions of grandiosity, and identification with religious figures or even the Messiah. World centres of religions and holy places such as Jerusalem or Rome are frequent travel destinations for individuals with such delusional systems. A vivid description of the “Jerusalem Syndrome” has been published by Witztum and Kalian (1999). 5. Rituals and sacrifice: Bizarre rituals, self harm and harm to others can be an expression of delusional ideation, e.g. as an offering to save the world and to bring salvation or to identify with the suffering Christ. Although Biblical allusions are frequently made, the underlying delusional system may be quite volatile and poorly defined, often serving as a post hoc explanation of self harm and suicidal gestures. Examples in the psychiatric literature refer to auto-enucleation of the eyes and autocastration in Christian and Islamic context or ritual burnings in the Buddhist culture (for an overview cf. Favazza, 1998). 6. Somatic sensations: Bodily hallucinations can have religious overtones and Biblical references. In a dramatic and symbolic form they may present as a delusion of pregnancy from God (associated with awe and feelings of ecstatic pleasure, but also with the depressing burden of being chosen to carry such a severe responsibility). Painful sensations or sexual stimulation can be perceived as demonic affliction. 2.3 Anxiety and Personality Disorders – Biblical Rationalisations of Behaviour and Defence Anxiety disorders and Personality Disorders comprise the field that was termed “neurotic” before the introduction of DSM-III and ICD-10. Space does not permit to describe the wide variety of biblical texts as a source of conflict or as a means of structuring defense mechanisms. They can be understood in terms of the general vessel of psychopathology being filled with the content of personal concerns and values, which can be primarily religious in the Christian patient. In his paper on “The phenomenology of religious psychopathology”, W. W. Meissner (1991) wrote: “Consideration should be given to how patients use their religious belief systems as a vehicle for the expression of neurotic needs and conflicts, in particular to identify patterns of symptomatic and characterological expression with their particular religious phenomenology.” (p. 268)

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In an empirical study at our own clinic (Pfeifer & Waelty, 1995) we explored the relationship between religion and the disorders that were formerly described as neuroses. Whereas we could not demonstrate a pathogenic function of religion per se, we found the frequent impression of patients that their psychological problems led to a significant impairment of their religious life.

3. BIBLICAL ASPECTS OF CAUSALITY IN PSYCHIATRY Probably the most frequent question our patients are asking, is the quest for an explanation of illness. WHAT has caused suffering, WHY is this happening to me, WHY NOW? It is the question for roots of affliction, for causes, for connections between trauma, conflicts and suffering. The Bible describes many instances of this probing for the ultimate cause of illness. In the Gospel of John (chapter 9:1-3, RSV) the following story is related: “As he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him: ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.’”

Causal attributions serve to construct a model of explanations to reduce the tension between painful reality and personal hopes, wishes and ideals. Mental problems are especially difficult to understand as explanations are often incomplete, and control is difficult to attain despite efforts to think or act differently. An overview on “Attribution theory and religious experience” has been published by Spilka and McIntosh (1995). In my clinical work, the quest for causality is one of the most frequent questions at the outset of therapy. Obviously, there is a mosaic of explanations for mental distress. The explanatory framework is multifaceted in the Bible, too, as will be shown in part three of this article. However, it seems, that in their emotional darkness patients are narrowing the vast scope of explanations to three topics that – at first sight – seem to strongly relate to the Bible: Sin – Curse – Demonic affliction. Sin: The question of personal guilt and rightful punishment for misdeeds (the Bible contains references to individual guilt, generational guilt and even the collective guilt of a people as a whole). Curse: In Deuteronomy 27:14-26 the Levites are reciting a litany of curses culminating in a curse against all who do not keep the law. However, the causative concept of a curse is widespread in all cultures of the world, often with no direct relation to the Bible. Demonic affliction: the ultimate evil cause certainly is the harassment or even the possession by demons. Again the Bible has multiple references to this concept, the source of evil spirits being both from Satan and from God (1. Samuel 16:14). However, there seems to be a wider concept in popular theory of illness, ascribing all inexplicable behavior to demonic forces. Thus the Arabic culture has a widely used word for mental illness (madjnoon), meaning “beset by a djinn,” the Arabic word for a demon. A few years ago, I conducted a systematic investigation of the frequency of demonic attributions (Pfeifer, 1994; Pfeifer, 1999) in 343 religious patients with

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psychiatric disorders. Diagnoses were divided into five categories: (1) Psychotic and schizophrenic conditions (PS), (2) Mood disorders (MD), (3) Anxiety and related disorders (ANX), (4) Personality disorders (PD) and (5) Adjustment disorders (AD). 129 of the 343 patients (37,6%) believed in the possible demonic causation of their problems. 104 patients (30,3% of the whole sample) looked for help through prayers for deliverance (figure 1). Two factors were significantly associated with such beliefs: diagnostic category and religious affiliation (the highest frequency of 52% being found, not surprisingly, in members of charismatic churches). However, patients’ concepts of demonic influence did not correspond with strict criteria of “possession.” Often they seem to be rather diffuse efforts to explain psychological distress of anxiety, depression and psychosomatic complaints within the framework of their religious convictions. The most surprising result of our study was the fact that demonic causal attributions were not only frequent in schizophrenia but also in all categories of non-delusional disorders (Pfeifer, 1999). The more intense the impression of ego-dystonic influence, the more frequent was the suspicion of an “occult” influence. Although many patients subjectively experienced the rituals as positive (Bull, Ellanson and Ross, 1998), outcome in psychiatric symptomatology was not improved which corresponds with research on outcome in other non-medical treatments (Finkler, 1980). 4. BIBLICAL ASPECTS OF THE BIO-PSYCHO-SOCIAL MODEL OF PSYCHIATRY Today’s most broadly accepted paradigm in clinical psychiatry is the bio-psychosocial model of mental illness (Engel, 1977). It gives us a broad understanding of the major factors contributing to the development of mental disorders. It allows for both genetic and psychosocial factors and it includes the individual’s personal way of dealing with his or her life events and interpersonal conflicts. But, we must ask: Is this model compatible with Biblical aspects? Why does it not include the spiritual life of an observant religious person? Where is God? What about sin? And where are the dark forces which are so prevalent in causal attributions? In my discussions with theologians and Christian lay persons I realised that we have to re-examine the Bible to develop a bridge between theological concepts and clinical observations. This has led me to the following theses: 1. It is a grave misunderstanding to limit biblical models of mental distress to the concepts of sin, curse and demons alone. 2. Biblical texts do support the bio-psycho-social model of psychiatry and serve for a better and more humane understanding of mental disorders. 3. The question of an additional “spiritual” dimension is largely unexplored for its clinical relevance. Research on religion and mental health seems to reflect social and psychological implications of the spiritual factor. Clinicians are called to serve as interpreters between “Biblical models” and bio-psycho-social psychiatry – (and vice versa!).

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Table 1. The bio-psycho-social model and biblical terms Biological aspects

Psychological aspects

Social aspects

General (medical) terms

Genetics Neurobiology Temperament Physical constitution

Emotions Reasoning Volition Behavior Defense Coping

Childhood Family life Trauma Stress Life events

Biblical terms

Weakness

Way of life Mind Heart Bowels Overcoming

Burden Hardships Trials Temptation

Let me describe a model that combines the language of modern psychiatric thinking and Biblical references to form a teaching concept to understand mental problems and their treatment (see Table 1). It may be surprising that the model does not contain a specific spiritual factor as a fourth element. However, as mentioned above (point 3), there is, in my opinion, no sufficient evidence for a separate spiritual faculty in the human psyche that acts independently of psycho-social factors. Explaining the “spiritualized” symptoms as basic correlates of a depressive episode with bio-psycho-social dimensions can become very helpful to the afflicted person and his or her family, thus relieving the fear of a spiritual crisis with all the negative perceptions of rejection, guilt, and anxiety directed toward God (thus leading to a negative image of God [cf. Rizzuto, 1979]). However, in some instances, the interplay between depressive guilt and real religious guilt; or the destructive aspects of a depression may be so impressive, that non-depressed religious persons are inclined to think that a “supra-natural factor” is at work. Metaphorically, one might speak of a “demonic” flavor in masochistic, severely depressive and/or anxious behavior and feelings. However, clinical experience has not yielded evidence that such interpretations (with the ensuing rituals of “deliverance” or “exorcism”) are sufficient to improve such a condition. Discussions with family members and religious counselors can then become an opportunity to give them a broader understanding of mental illness beyond lopsided spiritual models. Leaving a reductionistic position in psychiatry, means to give the patient a culturally sensitive interpretation of his suffering. Eisenberg (1981) described the function of the physician as an interpreter: “The decision to seek medical consultation is a request for interpretation. . . . Patient and doctor together reconstruct the meaning of events in a shared mythopoesis . . . Once things fall in place; once experience and interpretation appear to coincide; once the patient has a coherent “explanation” which leaves him no longer feeling the victim of the inexplicable and the uncontrollable, the symptoms are, usually, exorcised.” (p. 245)

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Table 2. Therapeutic implications and ethical guidelines • • • • • • •

Develop a supportive therapeutic setting in collaboration with the patient. Biblical aspects as part of a comprehensive model of illness and coping. Co-operation with a pastor, priest, rabbi or religious counselor (if possible). Psycho-education: Religious life can be affected by mental illness and distress (e.g. depression). Determine functional and dysfunctional aspects of religious interpretation. “Agree to disagree” – but focus on the areas which help a patient regain his balance Value-sensitive therapy: Using references to the Bible without losing sight of the bio-psycho-social aspects of psychopathology

5. THERAPEUTIC IMPLICATIONS: THE PHYSICIAN AS AN INTERPRETER What are the implications of such an interpretation for an integrated therapy? Paradoxically, it requires first a disentanglement of religiosity and psychopathology in order to help the person gain new insight into the nature of his or her problem, taking out some of the conflictual potential of the religious tension. To quote Spero (1976) in one of his earlier works: “The orientation of such therapy should not be directed at the destruction of religion nor is the philosophical background one that denies the usefulness of religion. Rather, the general goal is to separate the intrapsychic conflict from its “religious” defense system. Such a goal appears to be in the service of both psychotherapy and religion.”

Table 2 describes some of the guidelines in therapy with religious patients. Value-sensitive therapy follows ethical guidelines (Richards & Bergin, 1997) and helps patients understand their illness against the background of their religious values. Some therapeutic techniques may include a “Narrative construction of distress and therapy” as described by Witztum and Goodman (1999) in their work with ultraorthodox Jews. Various forms of integrative psychotherapy, such as interpersonal psychotherapy (Klerman, Weissman, Rounsaville, & Chevron, 1984) may be adequate to work with patients who are less immersed into a distinct religious subculture. The model described earlier gives the patient alternative ways to understand his or her problems without devaluing their basic beliefs. Although some patients are reluctant to accept medication on the grounds of personal fears and dogmatic considerations, one should try to win them in their own interest to take advantage of this aspect of therapy. One patient even has called her neuroleptic depot medication “my thorn in the flesh” (referring to Paul’s lament in 2. Corinthians 12:7). It seems important that therapists working with religious patients have some personal experience and understanding of faith. Even if they do not share all religious values of their clients, they should make themselves knowledgeable in their clients’ “religious subculture” (Havenaar, 1990; Worthington, 1988). The process of therapy should be guided by what has been termed “collaborative empiricism” in cognitive therapy. A Case illustration follows.

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Case vignette: Integrative psychotherapy and psychopharmacological treatment in a religious patient A 48-year old man consulted me with panic attacks, obsessional ruminations and depressive symptoms including severe sleep disturbance. The panic attacks had already forced him to give up many of his favourite activities. Often he would feel compelled to curse in an obsessional way. As a Christian, this caused him great distress, making him feel guilty before God, cursing God who allowed him to suffer in this way. Various attempts to seek Christian counselling including several sessions of exorcisms had not resulted in lasting success. He was seriously doubting his faith and saw no more hope through Christian counselling. His suffering was obvious, and his family was suffering with him. My treatment followed the principles of interpersonal therapy of depression including the prescription of clomipramin for the obsessive-compulsive symptomatology. To make a long story short, about four weeks later, he showed considerable improvement, not only in the depressive symptomatology, but also in his religious life. In one of the therapy sessions he remarked: “I would not have expected that, but your treatment really has helped me to regain my faith!”

It may not be unethical to challenge the assumptive world of a patient that is perceived as dysfunctional. Here the question arises from which perspective the assumptive world of the patient can be seen as dysfunctional, only in medical/ psychiatric terms, or also in a spiritual sense. Often a dysfunctional spiritual attitude will also lead to a significant impairment of general functioning. Moreover, a careful theological analysis of the depressive reasoning would probably yield other religious aspects which would allow a different interpretation of a patient’s construct. In terms of the spiritual life, differences between functional and dysfunctional role of religion can be identified (Spilka, 1989). However, therapists should be careful to explore religious values in an understanding way, helping their patients to determine for themselves which changes are necessary for their well-being and consistent with the Biblical basis of their faith (McMinn & Lebold, 1989). Therapy should focus on helping the client to get a multivariate view of their conflicts and their suffering within the framework of personal faith, thus achieving a constructive re-integration of faith into the whole range of experience and coping with the existential reality of life. 6. SUMMARY Human suffering cannot be understood in medical terms alone. Value-sensitive therapists will therefore look beyond psychopathology at individual attempts to understand the inexplicable of mental distress. In this effort, religious patients may refer to biblical themes and archetypes. The Bible contains a wealth of narratives on human suffering, interpersonal conflict, existential struggles and transcendent experiences. It describes human beings in their tension within themselves, with others and with God, in their motivations and their distress, torn between good and evil. So strong is the impact of Holy Scriptures in all monotheistic religions that it has moved individuals throughout history in a deeply meaningful and emotionally stirring way. In clinical psychiatric practice the Bible may become an issue in three major areas: Affective Disorders, Functional Psychoses and Anxiety and Personality Disorders.

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The Bible serves as a power to heal but it can also evoke deep conflicts in mentally suffering patients. It can bring consolation to the troubled heart but in some cases it is also used to construct interpretations that can have detrimental consequences. Mentally suffering individuals may experience and use their religion in a distorted and dysfunctional way, their religious belief systems being used as a vehicle for the expression of neurotic needs and conflicts. Clinicians who are working with religious patients are challenged to find a balance, giving helpful support – including the Bible where applicable –, without losing sight of the bio-psycho-social aspects of psychopathology. Therapy should focus on helping the patient to get a multivariate view of their conflicts and their suffering within the framework of personal faith, thus achieving a constructive reintegration of faith into the whole range of experience and coping with the existential reality of life. REFERENCES Bull, D. L., Ellason, J. W., & Ross, C. A. (1998). Exorcism revisited: Positive outcomes with dissociative identity disorder. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 26, 188–196. Csordas, Th. J. (1994). The sacred self. A cultural phenomenology of charismatic healing. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Eisenberg, L. (1981). The physician as interpreter: Ascribing meaning to the illness experience. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 22, 239–248. Engel, G. (1977). The need for a new medical model: a challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196, 129–136. Favazza, A. R. (1998). The coming of age of self-mutilation. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 186, 259–268. Finkler, K. (1980). Non-medical treatments and their outcomes. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 4, 271–310. Havenaar, J. M. (1990). Psychotherapy: Healing by culture. Psychotherapy & Psychosomatics, 53, 8–13. Heilman, S. C., & Witztum E. (2000). All in faith: Religion as the idiom and means of coping with distress. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 3, 115–124. Kleinman, A. (1988). The illness marratives. Suffering, healing and the human condition. New York: Basic Books. Klerman, G. L., Weissman, M. M., Rounsaville B. J., & Chevron E. S. (1984). Interpersonal psychotherapy of depression. New York: Basic Books. McMinn, M. R., & Lebold, C. J. (1989). Collaborative efforts in cognitive therapy with religious clients. Journal of Psychology and Theology, 17, 101–109. Meissner, W. W. (1991). The phenomenology of religious psychopathology. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 55, 281–298. Mumford, D. B. (1992). Emotional distress in the hebrew bible. British Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 92–97. Pfeifer, S. (1994). Belief in demons and exorcism in psychiatric patients in Switzerland. British Journal of Medical Psychology, 67, 247–258. Pfeifer, S. (1999). Demonic attributions in non-delusional disorders. Psychopathology, 32, 252–259. Pfeifer, S., & Waelty, U. (1995). Psychopathology and religious commitment. A controlled study. Psychopathology, 28, 70–77. Richards, P. S., & Bergin, A. E. (1997). A spiritual strategy for counseling and psychotherapy. Washington: American Psychological Association. Rizzuto, A. (1979). The birth of the living God. A psychoanalytical study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Romme, M., & Escher, S. (1993). Making sense of hearing voices. London: Mind Press.

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Spero, M. H. (1976). Clinical aspects of religion as neurosis. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 36, 361–365. Spilka, B. (1989). Functional and dysfunctional roles of religion: an attributional approach. Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 8, 5–15. Spilka, B., & McIntosh D. N. (1995). Attribution theory and religious experience. In R. W. Hood (Ed.), Handbook of religious experience. Birmingham AL: Religious Education Press. Witztum, E., & Goodman, Y. (1999). Narrative construction of distress and therapy: A model based on work with ultra-orthodox Jews. Transcultural Psychiatry, 36, 403–436. Witztum, E., & Kalian, M. (1999). The “Jerusalem Syndrome” – Fantasy and reality. A survey of accounts from the 19th century to the end of the second millennium. Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 36, 260–271. Worthington, E. L. (1988). Understanding the values of religous clients: A model and its application to counseling. Journal of Counseling and Psychology, 35, 166–174.

CHAPTER 20 THE BIBLE AND PSYCHOLOGY New directions in biblical scholarship

WAYNE G. ROLLINS Assumption College; Worcester, Massachusetts; USA Hartford Seminary; Hartford, Connecticut, USA

1. INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY As an American biblical scholar engaged in the application of psychological and psychoanalytic insight to the Bible and its interpretation, it was gratifying to receive an invitation from the Foundation of Psychiatry and Religion in the Netherlands to contribute an essay to this volume on psychological aspects of biblical concepts and persons. In the words of the book of Proverbs, which is never short on psychological insight: “Like cold water to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country” (Proverbs 25:25). My objective is to drop the other shoe. Since the initiative for this publication originated from the psychological half of this inter-disciplinary effort, I would like to offer a field report from the other half, biblical studies. It is my aim to sketch the past, present, and possible future of a new discipline within biblical studies, called psychological biblical criticism. It has been in the making over the past thirty years, but has come of age as a sub-field within biblical studies only in the last decade. One of the more striking examples of its arrival is a document published by the Pontifical Biblical Commission in 1993 under the title, “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church.” (see Pontifical Biblical Committee, 1994). It offers the most comprehensive survey of new developments in biblical scholarship issued by any ecclesiastical body. His Holiness, Pope Benedict XII states in the preface that “the methodological spectrum of exegetical work [on the Bible] has broadened in a way that could not have been envisioned thirty years ago.” One of the pieces of the spectrum is “Psychological 279 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 279–294. © 2007 Springer.

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and Psychoanalytic Approaches.” Commenting on these new approaches, Joseph Fitzmyer, a premier biblical scholar and one of the document’s authors, tells us: The psychological and psychoanalytical analyses of human experience have proven their worth in the area of religion and enable one to detect multidimensional aspects of the biblical message. In particular, this approach has been invaluable in the analytical explanation of biblical symbols, cultic rituals, sacrifice, legal prohibitions, and biblical tabus. . . . The aid that can come from this approach to [the biblical-critical] method cannot be underestimated.1

My paper will provide a field report on these developments in three parts. Part One will rehearse the history of dialogue between biblical scholars and psychologists that stretches over the past two millennia. I will also comment on the communications blackout between psychology and religion, beginning in the 1920s, that lasted forty years, and on the rapprochement that began to surface in the late 1960s. Part Two will provide an overview on “psychological biblical criticism,” recounting the ways biblical scholars have appropriated psychology as a tool of trade, identifying key players on both sides of the Atlantic, and sketching their agenda. Part Three will turn to a final question, namely, what psychology, psychiatry, psychotherapy might learn from the Bible in the light of biblical scholarship over the past century and a half. My thesis is that psychology and religion historically are soul mates, or “womb mates,” like Jacob and Esau, who for years were estranged and antagonistic, but eventually came to reconciliation in the realization of a common bond. For Jacob and Esau it was a bond of blood and destiny. For psychology and religion, the bond is in the rediscovery of a shared history of commitment to the cura animarum, the care and cure of the human soul. 2. THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY AND BIBLICAL STUDIES IN THE WEST: 2000 YEARS OF DIALOGUE One of the great rewards in any research is the discovery of an idea that overhauls one’s thinking. I made three such discoveries over the last fifteen years in my research on the history of psychology and biblical studies in the West. I had started off with the assumption, shared by many, that psychology is a child of modernity, no earlier than the last half of the 19th century. I had assumed that prior to Freud, Jung, Wundt, and Skinner there was nothing. All of this was to change. The first of these personal discoveries occurred in 1990 during a sabbatical leave in Berkeley California. I came across the title of a book that literally made me catch my breath. The author was Franz Delitzsch, a widely-respected 19th century biblical scholar. The title, in translation from the German, was A System of Biblical Psychology. Most astonishing was the date, 1855, which was one year before Sigmund Freud’s birth, twenty years before Carl Jung’s, and twenty-four years before the so-called “principal founder of modern psychology,” Wilhelm Wundt, created the world’s first psychological laboratory in Leipzig. Delitzsch opened with this surprising statement: “Biblical psychology is no science of yesterday. It is one of the oldest sciences of the church.” Surveying Western

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theology from Tertullian, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Aquinas, and the Reformation up to his own nineteenth century, Delitzsch concluded “that the ancient church had a psychological literature that claims respect no less for its extent than for its substance.” Naturally, I was excited, and on the basis of the evidence he presented, fairly convinced. But I also feared that Delitzsch’s work might be a case of selective historiography that would not stand up to the scrutiny of professional historians of psychology. This led to a second new fact, namely that historians of psychology, rather than scrapping Delitzsch’s claim, provided support.2 I was to learn from every article I read by professional historians of psychology, that psychology as a self-conscious reflective discipline in the West began with one seminal thinker and one seminal work in the fourth century BCE, namely, Aristotle and his Peri Psychès, “Concerning the Psyche.” They contended further, that in creating the “first systematic psychology”, Aristotle had “laid down the lines along which the relationship between various manifestations of soul and mind were conceived” for two millennia.3 Here again my suspicions were aroused, but the evidence they presented was irrefutable. Aristotle’s opus in combination with the works of Plato, Empedocles, Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, the Stoics, Plotinus, Hippocrates, and Galen, among others, collectively provided a detailed analysis of the nature and habits of the human psyche. They identified its parts and properties in relationship to the body (soma), reason (nous), spirit/will (thymos), and desire (epithymia), and to the faculties of memory, learning, motivation, emotion, socialization, personality, and imagination. They studied epistemology and perception and the relation of stimulus and sensation. They identified four passions (grief, fear, desire, and pleasure), the five senses, and the “four humors” or personality types (sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic). In proto-Freudian fashion they stressed the primacy of reason over instinctual drives. They spoke of dreams as the expression of suppressed desire. In the fifth century BCE, Hippocrates created a glossary of psychological maladies, ranging from melancholia, mania, and post-partum depression, to phobias, paranoia, and hysteria, and “declared that mental illness was a medical problem based on an organic dysfunction of the brain which could best be addressed by oral remedies” (Solomon, 2001, 15). This intuition was amplified six hundred years later by Galen (130–200 CE) who prescribed a cure for diseases of the psyche that involved a process of self-examination and counseling, anticipating Freud’s “talking cure.”4 In the words of one historian of psychology, the Greco-Roman psychological tradition collectively had succeeded in identifying “nearly all the significant problems of psychology that have concerned scholars and scientists ever since.”5 And in my third “discovery” I was to learn that biblical scholars and theologians, beginning in the first century C.E., were involved in the process. My third “discovery” occurred while I was on the trail of the origin of the word “psychology.” For purposes of comparison, I had discovered that the term “biology” first appeared in 1802, “sociology” in 1840, but that the term “psychology” appeared three centuries earlier, in 1524. Its first use is attributed to an obscure Serbo-Croatian,

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Marco Marulic, of whom little is known. But I was delighted to learn that the person to popularize the term psychologia and introduce it to academic discussion six years later, in 1530, was neither a philosopher, scientist, or philologist, but a biblical psychologist. His name was Philip Melanchton, Martin Luther’s associate. The document in which the term appears was titled, appropriately, Commentarius de Anima, a Commentary on Aristotle’s Peri Psychès (van de Kemp, 1980). It was appropriate for Melanchton to introduce the word “psychology” to the academic world, because he epitomized a fifteen hundred year old tradition of Christian dialogue on the nature of the human psyche in exchange with non-Christian contemporaries, beginning with Tertullian and Augustine (the latter often identified to as the “first modern psychologist”) and culminating in the 19th century work of Delitzsch, and in 1912 with a comparable work on biblical psychology by M. Scott Fletcher, The Psychology of the New Testament, written at Oxford, under the direction of B. H. Streeter. As with their patristic predecessors, the goal of Delitzsch and Fletcher was to “interpret the psychological languge and spiritual experiences of the New Testament in terms of modern thought.”6 They employ “newly-coined words” such as archetype (Urbilder), the ego, the conscious and unconscious. In the footsteps of Tertullian and Augustine, they compare staples in the biblical portrait of the human person (e.g. the terms psyche, spirit, heart, flesh) with ancient and contemporary models of the self. They study types of psychological experience: rebirth, renewal, sanctification, sin, and redemption. They compare personality theory among Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman writers. The conclusion to which this “discovery” led was that for the better part of two millennia in the West, up to 1920, psychology and biblical psychologists were engaged in spirited dialogue on the question of the nature, origin, habits, destiny, and care of the human soul or psyche. What happened in the 1920s that broke off the dialogue between psychologists and biblical scholars/theologians? From the biblical side, it was triggered by the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s The Psychiatric Study of Jesus (1913). Schweitzer, an M.D. and established biblical scholar, repudiated the psychoanalytic judgment of four psychological theorists who had come to the psychological conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth was “mentally diseased.” Schweitzer objected less to their conclusion, than to the reductionist and historically uncritical route by which they had arrived at it. On both critical grounds, Schweitzer declared their work to be worth “exactly zero.” C. G. Jung later added his own denunciation of reductionism: “If a work of art is explained in the same way as a neurosis, then either the work of art is a neurosis or a neurosis is a work of art.”7 Schweitzer’s assault on reductionism in combination with growing distrust of the materialist and positivist assumptions of behaviorism, the rising star on the psychological horizon, resulted in a ban among biblical scholars on anything that smacked of psychology until the last third of the 20th century. Three factors, however, were responsible for the thaw in that cold war. First was a change in psychology, marked by a dethroning of behaviorism, concomitant with the rapid multiplication of new fields of psychology. By 1992 the American Psychological

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Association identified no fewer than forty-two specialized divisions, with “each school bringing its own perspective . . . open to insights from the others.”8 Furthermore, some of the new fields proved remarkably attractive to theologians, pastoral counselors, and even biblical scholars. Second is a change in biblical scholarship, marked by a comparable dethroning of historical-literary criticism as the dominant critical discipline. John Dominic Crossan announced in 1977 that “Biblical study will no longer be conducted under the exclusive hegemony” of one or two disciplines, but rather “through a multitude of disciplines interacting mutually as a field criticism,” including, among others, sociological, feminist, ideological and psychological criticism.9 The third change is the so-called “psychologization of western culture.” Everyone from cabbies to TV talk show hosts, theologians to film reviewers, and now even some biblical scholars, were allowing psychological terms to slip into their work: psyche, the unconscious, the id, ego, free association, projection, repression, defense mechanism, psychological complex, neurosis, and Freudian slips. Largely the legacy of Freud and Jung, this new vocabulary gave voice to a new level of consciousness about the nature of the self. By the last decades of the 20th century, psychology and religion demonstrated new interest in one another. In the 1980s, Pope John Paul II, addressed the members of the World Psychiatric Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association, with these words: By its very nature your work often brings you to the threshold of the human mystery. It involves a sensitivity to the often tangled workings of the human mind and heart, and an openness to the ultimate concerns which give meaning to people’s lives. These are areas of utmost importance to the church, and they call to mind the urgent need for a constructive dialogue between science and religion for the sake of shedding greater light on the mystery of man [sic] in its fullness.

3. PSYCHOLOGICAL BIBLICAL CRITICISM: THE USE OF PSYCHOLOGY AS A TOOL IN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP One of the first signals of a break in the forty-year standoff between psychology and biblical studies came from classicist and New Testament scholar, F. C. Grant in his 1968 article, “Psychological Study of the Bible.” It appeared in a Festschrift for E. R. Goodenough, a Yale professor of religion who had regularly applied psychoanalytic insights to the interpretation of Jewish and Christian texts and artifacts. Grant wrote that Dr. Goodenough pointed out the value and importance, even the necessity, of the psychological interpretation of the Bible. This is a new kind of Biblical criticism. The earlier disciplines are all necessary and important, . . . . . but psychological criticism opens up a wholly new and vast, far-reaching scene . . . . . beyond the historical and exegetical interpretation of the Bible lies the whole new field of depth psychology and psychoanalysis.10

As is often the case with an emergent field of research, Grant did not find himself alone. Articles and books thinking the same thoughts and asking the same

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questions appeared simultaneously from distant quarters. In the same year, 1968, Helmut Harsch published an article with a title in the form of a question: “Psychologische Interpretationen biblischer Texte?” Three years later Antoine Vergote (1971) published a study of Romans 7, “Apport des données psychanalytique à l’exégese: vie, loi et clivage du moi dans l’epître aux Romain 7”. In 1972 Richard Rubenstein struck a bold Freudian posture with his book My Brother Paul, and Yorick Spiegel produced a milestone collection of essays under the title Psychoanalytische Interpretationen biblischer Texte, organized around six different psychological themes (Spiegel, 1972). Over the next three decades research would flourish. Highlights include the publication in 1983 of the first German edition of Gerd Theissen’s Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology, which refracts select Pauline texts through the lenses of three psychological models: analytical psychology, learning theory, and cognitive psychology (see Theisen, 1987). In 1991, the Society of Biblical Literature, the flagship of American Biblical Scholarship, endorsed my proposal for the creation of a research section on Psychology and Biblical Studies. In 1995, Martin Leiner did a doctoral dissertation under Gerd Theissen’s supervision at Heidelberg: Psychologie und Exegese: Grundfragen einer textpsychologischen Exegese des Neuen Testaments. Leiner provided a rich survey of psychological interpretation at work across the culture and proposed a theoretical basis for cooperation between psychology and biblical studies. In 1999 my book, Soul and Psyche: The Bible in Psychological Perspective, was published, providing a history, agenda, and bibliography for the field, and in 2001 the book of my colleague, D. Andrew Kille, entitled Psychological Biblical Criticism, elaborating on Freudian, Jungian, and developmental psychological insight into the myths of Genesis 3. By the end of the century, exegetical applications of psychological theory to biblical texts were drawn from no less than fifteen different schools, including Freudian and Jungian approaches, learning theory, cognitive and developmental psychology, existential psychotherapy, and object relations theory. New journals appeared, the Journal of Psychology and Theology in 1973, the Journal of Psychology and Christianity in 1982, and Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches in 1993, all calling for pluralistic biblical scholarship that invites insight from sister disciplines, including psychology. Encyclopedia and dictionary articles also begin to surface. Perhaps the earliest is Antoine Vergote’s “Psychanalyse et interprétation biblique” in Supplément au Dictionnaire de la Bible (Vergote, 1973–75). What is psychological biblical criticism? It is a discipline that emerges out of a new vision of the text. Its fundamental premise is that although the Bible is part of an historical, social, and literary process, it is also part of a psychological process in which unconscious as well as conscious factors are at work. Where are these factors at work? In every hand and soul that touches the tradition: in the biblical authors, in the communities they represent, in the stories and materials they preserve, in biblical copyists, translators, and publishers, in biblical interpreters and preachers, in scholars who contribute to volumes like this, and in the biblical effects that the Bible has worked and continues to work in individuals and entire cultures, for good and for ill.

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A second focus of psychological biblical criticism is “biblical psychology,” the biblical understanding of the self, to be elaborated below. It urges us to see the Bible as a manual on the perennial experience of the human psyche/soul, its trials, troubles, successes, and victories, employing a vast array of literary forms, from myth and legend, to psalm, parable, and sermon, to fathom and describe the soul’s nature, origin, habits, powers, and destiny. In sum, as important as the historical, social, political, economic, and cultural factors are in creating texts and interpretations, in the end, the psychic factors, conscious and unconscious, may prove to be the pre-eminent determinants of what is recorded in a text, why it was remembered, how it is said, why it is said, how it is read, how it is interpreted, and how that interpretation is received and translated, sometimes for immense good and at other times for grievous ill. What do we see as the agenda for this field? We have time at best to hint at seven areas of present and future research. First is the task of raising critical consciousness of at least three types of unconscious factors at work in text and reader. The first is the personal unconscious of the author and reader, their personal and social locations, their psychological types, and their personal psychological histories. John Dominic Crossan reminds us that “Divine inspiration necessarily comes through a human heart and a mortal mind, through personal prejudice and communal interpretation, through fear, dislike, and hate, as well as through faith, hope, and charity.”11 A second is the historical unconscious, i.e., remnants of pre-Christian or pre-Israelite consciousness that might reside unconsciously in Christian and Hebrew sacred texts. Jung writes, “Everything has its history, everything has “grown,” and Christianity, which is supposed to have appeared suddenly as a unique revelation from heaven, undoubtedly also has its history. . . . It is exactly as if we had built a cathedral over a pagan temple and no longer knew that it is still there underneath.”12 Third is the collective unconscious, which Jung describes as “a sphere of unconscious mythology [bearing on typical life situations] whose primordial images are the common heritage of mankind.”13 These themes and figures, such as the primordial garden, the divine child, the wise old man or woman, the satanic trickster, the sacred mountain, tree of life, golden age, the wicked queen, the archetypal battle between good and evil, “appear so frequently in widely scattered mythic traditions,” as Walter Wink observes, “that we are justified in regarding [them]. . . . as a standard component in spiritual [and psychological] development.”14 Biblical religious phenomena constitute a second item for psychological-critical research. In the tradition of William James’ classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience (James, 1902), this means the study of religious experience, religious practice, and paranormal experience in the Bible through a psychological lens. Conventional religious experience would include the phenomena of prophetic inspiration, messianism, and martyrdom, discussed elsewhere in this volume, along with conversion, glossolalia, visions, and biblical dreams. Religious practice would include cultic rites of foot washing, eucharist, burnt offerings, and purification. Paranormal experience would include demon possession and exorcism, faith

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healing, and parapsychological experiences of telepathy, clairvoyance, and out-ofbody experience. Additional research would focus on the psycho-spiritual experiential phenomena, referred to in biblical terminology as sin, guilt, grace, forgiveness, salvation, redemption, and rebirth. As Robin Scroggs observes, the biblical concept of “salvation means changes, changes in how we think, in how we feel, in how we act. And that means, or so it seems to me that psychological intuitions and, perhaps, even explicitly psychological models and terminology can give us insight into what these changes are.”15 A third area, the analysis of psychodynamic factors in biblical texts, is a psychological version of literary and narrative criticism. It adds depth to biblical interpretation, for example, by picking up on the habitual strategies of defense employed by the human psyche in biblical story lines. One finds examples of denial (Adam and Eve in the garden), intellectualization (the Johannine Pilate in conversation with Jesus), projection (Peter’s acclamation of Jesus as a victorious Messiah), rationalization (Eve’s passing the buck to the serpent), along with patterns of obsessive compulsion (Paul’s persecution of the Way in his earlier career), and the mitigation of cognitive dissonance (the creation of apocalyptic scenarios to resolve the problem of evil). A fourth line of research, the psychological analysis of biblical portraits of personalities, suggests three lines of exegetical inquiry. One is character analysis of biblical figures, such as Saul, Jonah, Jacob, King Herod, or Paul; a second is the analysis of the role biblical personalities can come to play as models or exemplars for readers, as Moses did for Freud, and the Christ figure for Jung. A third approach is psychoanalytic. Though in the strictest sense, psychoanalysis of biblical figures is ruled out by the absence of the analysand, a number of recent studies have suggested that psychoanalytic observations in the hands of seasoned analysts can provide compelling insight into biblical authors and their characters, as seen for example in David Halperin’s (1993) study of Ezekiel, and the two recent psychological portraits of Jesus by John Miller (1997) and Donald Capps (2000). The fifth area, biblical psychology, as previously noted, calls for a fresh inventory of the Biblical perspective on the nature, habits, pathologies and therapies of the self in conversation with contemporary psychological models of the self. It comprises a three-fold agenda. The first is the descriptive agenda, to identify the complex of functions, faculties, and behavioral patterns, along with typical predicaments, problems, and possibilities, that characterize human experience from a biblical perspective. Second, the diagnostic-analytic agenda is to identify the biblical perception of what has gone wrong in the human condition and what is the cure. Third, the prescriptive agenda focuses on what the Bible sees as the highest reaches of the self, individually and societally and what methods of nurture, care, and formation it prescribes for making the reach. A sixth research area is psychological hermeneutics. The term hermeneutics, derived from the Greek verb, hermeneuein, “to interpret,” refers to the study of what transpires between text and reader. A fundamental premise is that reading is not a

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one-way street. Texts interpret readers as much as readers interpret texts, and the transaction is riddled with psychological factors, conscious and unconscious. What texts are and do, and what readers are and do, are issues of special interest to psychological biblical critics because both text and reader are available for observation. One example may suffice. In 1979, Daniel Harrington, a Jesuit biblical scholar, observed that “interpreters should . . . be conscious of the baggage they bring to the task of biblical interpretation.” Harrington reviewed his own “baggage” as “a white American male, living in the middle to late twentieth century,” born of immigrant Irish parents, a Jesuit for twenty years. He comments: Each . . . of these elements has some impact upon the way I approach a biblical text. Remove one or two of them from my biography and substitute something else, and surely my reading of the text would change. I will spare the reader an inventory of my psychological strengths and weaknesses, but this omission should not be taken as suggesting that the interpreter’s psychological predispositions are not important.16

A seventh item on the agenda of psychological biblical criticism is studying the history of biblical effects, both pathogenic and therapeutic. Harvard’s history of religions scholar, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, provides a psychological critical observation about the pathogenic potential of religious texts. Smith comments: Scripture served as the chief moral justification for slavery among those who resisted proposals to abolish that institution; and indeed as sanctifying many an oppressive status quo against movements for justice . . . . Again, it has served the degradation of women . . . . Another: the mighty force of a scripture’s binding a community together has worked to make sharp, and often relentless, divergence between communities. Especially in the case of the Western triad –– Jewish, Christian, Islamic –– the scripture-based disparagement of those deemed outsiders has been, and continues to be, disastrous.17

The task of the psychological biblical critic is to bring to light those dark proclivities in Scripture and in its interpreters that work mischief in human affairs. Equally, if not more important, is the task of reflecting on the therapeutic effects of scripture and of religion in general. In his essay, “The State of Psychotherapy Today”, Carl Jung writes that “religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the word . . . They express the whole range of the psychic problem in mighty images; they are the avowal and recognition of the soul, and at the same time the revelation of the soul’s nature.”18 A primary goal of psychological biblical criticism is to understand in greater psychological detail the secret of the therapeutic and catalytic effect of the biblical text and the role it plays in the healing of individuals, societies, and cultures, a task to which pastoral psychologists have already made substantial contribution. 4. WHAT MIGHT PSYCHOLOGY LEARN FROM RELIGION AND BIBLICAL STUDIES? The brochure for this conference hinted at some of the benefits psychology might reap in conversation with theology and scripture. It noted for example, that the Bible provides “lively and penetrating images of man and his age-old struggle with experiences of vanity and suffering.” It also acknowledged that “the Bible

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offers perspectives on human anguish, suffering and interpersonal relationships which differ in important respects from conceptions based on modern notions.” A related insight was expressed in 1936 by theologian Emil Brunner in an essay titled, “Biblical psychology:” Empirical psychology, which takes as its model the freedom from prejudice of the natural sciences, has without doubt brought to light a great store of important knowledge which we should be loath to do without. But we must from the beginning draw attention to the fact that this psychology, like every psychology, is based on a definite world-view as its axiomatic presupposition.19

He identified the world-view of scientific psychology as “naturalistic positivism,” which “conceives of the soul and psychological realities as objects among objects,” rather than as subjects that constitute the observer-self. He went on to suggest that the Bible captures dimensions of the self, not susceptible to proof in terms of the principles of scientific verification, but nevertheless quintessential to a full portrait of the human psyche/soul. Brunner is not alone in suggesting that the biblical vision of the world and self might know something modern psychology has yet to discover. Freud and Jung offer similar hints. Late in life, Freud wrote, “My deep engrossment in the Bible story (almost as soon as I had learned the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest.” In similar fashion, Jung states, “We must read our Bible or we shall not understand psychology. Our psychology, whole lives, our language and imagery are built upon the Bible.” Though Freud does not elaborate the effect of the Bible on his interests, Jung does. The effect of the Bible on Jung becomes evident in the twenty columns of references under the category, “Bible,” in the Index to Jung’s Collected Works. Beyond that, Jung tells us, that the Bible, along with the stories, liturgies, statuary, stained glass windows, and creeds of religion, are able to describe the “individuation process with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts.”20 What then has the Bible to teach us psychologically? I would like to conclude by commending two biblical concepts to the serious consideration of the psychological sciences. Both concepts are ubiquitous in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures; both are essential to the biblical understanding of the self. The first of these is the biblical concept of a unified soul or self, denoted in Hebrew as nephesh or nishamah, and in Greek as psyche. Much of professional psychology has yet to solve the problem of finding a term or symbol they are willing to use professionally and scientifically for the conscious and unconscious totality of the human personality. From Aristotle on, the terms psyche, anima, soul, or self was available to refer to the total system of emotive, intellectual, volitional, imaginative, perceiving, spiritual, dreaming, conscious and unconscious life in the human person. But for the last eight decades, academic psychology has virtually discarded the term psyche, and supplied no substitute. Carl Jung enjoyed pointing out to his medical students the “old textbook for the Medical Corps in the Swiss army which gave a description of the brain as a dish of macaroni, and the steam from the macaroni was the psyche.”21

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But the problem remains, and today one looks in vain for references to psyche in introductory academic psychology texts, histories of psychology, and even texts on the psychology of religion. At the same time we find the field of psychology continuing to manufacture psych- rooted neologisms to describe new activities in the field psychometrics, psychodynamics, psychosomatic, psychosexual, psycho history, with no effort to define professionally what the psych element in these terms might mean. The same can be said for the term “soul,” which religionists use with an equal sense of disease and imprecision. The reluctance to use the term psyche or soul no doubt can be traced to the 17th century British empiricists in what has been called a period of the “banishment of the intangible.” Thomas Hobbes derided Greco-Roman talk of the psyche as “pernicious Aristotelian nonsense,” preferring to think of psychological phenomena as derivatives of the nervous system and brain. More recently B. F. Skinner lost not only soul and psyche but mind as well as an anthropological constant, which prompted one wag to say, “Pity poor psychology. First it lost its soul, then its mind, then consciousness, and now it’s having trouble with behavior.” Things are improving somewhat among some psychologists. Michael J. Mahoney writes in his 1991 volume, Human Change Processes: The Scientific Foundations of Psychotherapy, that “perhaps the single most important (re)discovery of twentieth century psychology has been that of the self, which has (again) become a cardinal concept after a moratorium that lasted over half a century.”22 One hopes this is the case. A second biblical reality worthy of psychological reflection is the concept of the spirit, in Hebrew ruach, in Greek, pneuma, sometimes referred to as a “holy” or “different” spirit. No entity plays a more important role as an explanatory concept to account for the phenomenon of “saving” and “saved” figures in the biblical story. To my knowledge psychology has no comparable term or concept that captures the biblically attested experience of ineffable moments of grace, of being touched by a power and presence that enables one to achieve moral, emotional, or ontological heights that formerly seemed unlikely, or of being filled with the sense of a power that sustains, informs and inspires one’s being in new transformative ways, all attributed to the power of the spirit. The biblical prophet tells us he is seized by the spirit; Jesus is said to have offered a new baptism of the spirit; Paul identifies the spirit as the determinative factor in transforming his life. And in the last three decades, even within mainline Christian churches, the phenomenology of the spirit and of spirituality has emerged as an apparent compensatory factor to balance the one-sided, logocentric, left-brained, rationalistic, positivist view of the self. In 1912, M. Scott Fletcher identified the biblical concept of the “spirit”—with its attendant experiential categories of new creation, transformation, and rebirth—as a psycho-anthropological element meriting consideration in understanding the life and experience of the psyche. Perhaps the most eloquent apologia for reclaiming a sense of “spirit” in the modern era is voiced by Carl Jung: We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves. It is the only way in which to break the spell that binds us to the cycle of biological events. . . . The wheel of history must not be turned back, and man’s advance toward a spiritual life, which began with the

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primitive rites of initiation, must not be denied. . . . Scientific thought, being only one of the psyche’s functions, can never exhaust all of its potentialities. The psychotherapist must not allow his vision to be colored by pathology; he must never allow himself to forget that the ailing mind is a human mind and that, for all its ailments, it unconsciously shares the whole psychic life of man. He must even be able to admit that the ego is sick for the very reason that it is cut off from the whole, and has lost its connection not only with mankind but with the spirit. . . . For thousands of years, rites of initiation have been teaching rebirth from the spirit; yet, strangely enough, man forgets again and again the meaning of divine procreation. Though this may be poor testimony to the strength of the spirit, the penalty for misunderstanding is neurotic decay, embitterment, atrophy, and sterility. It is easy enough to drive the spirit out of the door, but when we have done so the meal has lost its savor––the salt of the earth.23

When all is said and done in our ongoing pursuit of exchange between psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy on the one hand, and theology, religion, and biblical studies on the other, we should not forget an additional observation of Jung’s, that “psychology has only a modest contribution to make toward a deeper understanding of the phenomena of life and is no nearer than its sister sciences to absolute knowledge.”24 The same can be said for biblical studies. But it may be that in the process of conversation, we can discover something about the truths and vision housed in both traditions, that adds to a fuller sense of what is needed for the cura animarum, the care and cure of human souls. 5. SUMMARY Interdisciplinary dialogue between psychologists and biblical scholars has come of age. Though the seed for such dialogue was planted centuries ago with the heated exchange on the nature of the psyche between early Christian thinkers and their philosophical counterparts, the conversation has revived in the 20th and 21st centuries with new vigor. On the biblical side, academic biblical scholars and church leaders, like Pope John Paul II, have recognized the contribution psychological insight can make to an understanding of the psychic landscapes out of which the Bible and its interpreters have come, and the psychic factors at work in authors, texts, and interpretations. By the same token, psychologists and psychiatrists have become less gun shy when it comes to things like religion and the Bible. They are beginning to recognize that the biblical concepts of soul (nishamah and psyche) and spirit (ruach and pneuma), along with the biblical portrait of human behavior and development conveyed in legend, myth, parable, and song, may have something to contribute to the understanding of the self that complements contemporary psychological and psychiatric insight. The travel plan and itinerary of interdisciplinary research between psychologists and biblical scholars is still in the making, but seven areas of inquiry have already been taking shape and show promise: the study of unconscious factors at work in text and reader; examination of the exotic array of religious phenomena spelled out in the text; the exploration of psychodynamic factors at work in biblical stories and narratives; the psychological analysis of biblical personalities; the study of “biblical psychology” and its idiosyncratic reading of the origin, nature, habits, and destiny of

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the human psyche; the reconstruction of the history of biblical effects on individuals and whole cultures, both therapeutic and pathogenic; and research on the effect of texts on readers, and the effect of readers on texts. It is noteworthy that to date, exegetical applications of psychological theory to the Bible have been drawn from fifteen different psychological schools. Biblical scholarship, to be sure, has many miles to go in catching up on the preparation necessary for competent psychological analysis. But psychology and psychiatry also have much to learn of the contribution the Bible might make to a psychological understanding of the human person. The two camps are united, however, in a common ultimate mission: the care and cure of human souls. NOTES 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

Fitzmyer (1994), pp. 51–52. Lapointe (1970), p. 640. Peters and Mace (1967), pp. 1, 4. Rollins (1999), pp. 9–12. Hunt (1993), pp. 6–7. Fletcher (1912), p. vii. Jung (1966), §§ 98-100. Kille (2001), p. 7. Crossan (1977), p. 41. Grant (1968), pp. 112–113. Crossan (1996), pp. 2–4. Jung (1953), p. 84. Jung (1966), § 125. Wink (1978), p. 142. Scroggs (1982), p. 336. Harrington (1979), p. 132. Smith (1993), pp. 213–214. Jung (1970), § 367. Brunner (1936), p. 138. Rollins (1999), pp. 33–60. Rollins (1999), p. 99. Mahoney (1991), p. 211. Jung (1961), §§ 780–783. Jung (1966), §§ 98–100.

REFERENCES Brunner, E. (1936). Biblical psychology. In God and man: Four essays on the nature of personality (pp. 136–178). London: SCM Press. Capps, D. (2000). Jesus: A psychological biography. St. Louis: Chalice Press. Crossan, J. D. (1977). Perspectives and methods in contemporary biblical criticism. Biblical Research, 22, 39–49. Crossan, J. D. (1996). Who killed Jesus? Crossan responds to Brown. Explorations, 10, 2–4. Delitzsch, F. (1966). A system of biblical psychology (A. E. Wallis, Trans.) (2nd ed.). Grand Rapids: Baker Book House. (Original work: F. Delitzsch [1855], System der biblischen Psychologie. Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke [1861; 2nd ed.]. English trans. by T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh [1869]). Fitzmyer, J. A. (1994). Scripture, the soul of theology. Mahwah: Paulist Press.

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Fletcher, M. S. (2nd ed.). (1912). The psychology of the New Testament. New York: Hodder & Stoughton. Grant, F. C. (1968). Psychological study of the Bible. In J. Neusner (Ed.), Religions in Antiquity: Essays in memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (Vol. XIV, pp. 107–124). Leiden: Brill. Halperin, D. J. (1993). Seeking Ezekiel, text and psychology. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Harrington, D. (1979). Interpreting the New Testament. Wilmington, Delaware: Michael Glazier. Harsch, H. (1968). Psychologische Interpretation biblischer Texte? In U. Mann et al. (Eds.), Wege Zum Menschen: Festschrift zum siebzigsten Geburtstag von Adolf Köberle (pp. 281–289). Gˆttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hunt, M. (1993). The story of psychology. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books. James, W. (1902 [1985]). The varieties of religious experience. New York: Penguin Classics. (Original work published in 1902). Jung, C. G. (1953). Psychological reflections: A new anthology of his writings, 1905-1961 (J. Jacobi, Ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. G. (1961). Freud and psychoanalysis. In C. G. Jung, Collected works of C. G. Jung. Volume 4 (G. Adler& R. F. C. Hull, Eds. & Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published between 1906 and 1929) Jung, C. G. (1966). Spirit in man, art, and literature. In C. G. Jung, Collected works of C. G. Jung. Volume 15 (G. Adler & R. F. C. Hull, Eds. & Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published between 1922 and 1950) Jung, C. G. (1970). Civilization in transition. In C. G. Jung, Collected works of C. G. Jung. Volume 10 (G. Adler & R. F. C. Hull, Eds. & Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published between 1918 and 1959) Kille, D. A. (2001). Psychological biblical criticism. Minneapolis: Fortress. Lapointe, F. H. (1970). Origin and evolution of the term psychology. American Psychologist, 25, 640–646. Leiner, M. (1995). Psychologie und Exegese: Grundfragen einer textpsychologischen Exegese des Neuen Testaments. Gütersloh: Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Mahoney, M. J. (1991). Human change processes: The scientific foundations of psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books, Harper Collins. Miller, J. W. (1997). Jesus at thirty: A psychological and historical portrait. Minneapolis: Augsburg/Fortress. Peters, R. S., & Mace, C. A. (1967). Psychology. In P. Edwards (Ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Vol. 7, pp. 1–27). New York: Macmillan. Pontifical Biblical Commission. (1994). The interpretation of the Bible in the church. Catholic International, 5, 109–147. Rollins, W. G. (1999). Soul and psyche: The Bible in psychological perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress. Rubenstein, R. (1972). My brother Paul. New York: Harper & Row. Schweitzer, A. (1948). The psychiatric study of Jesus: Exposition and criticism (Charles R. Joy, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work published in 1913). Scroggs, R. (1982). Psychology as a tool to interpret the text: Emerging trends in biblical thought. Christian Century (March 24), 335–338. Smith, W. C. (1993). What is Scripture? A comparative approach. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. Solomon, A. (2001). Review of Out of its mind: Psychiatry in crisis: A call for reform (by J. Allan Hobson & J. A. Leonard). Cambridge, MA: Perseus. New York Times Book Review (October 7), 15. Spiegel, Y. (1972). Psychoanalytische Interpretationen biblischer Texte. Munich: C. Kaiser. Theissen, G. (1987). Psychological aspects of pauline theology (J. P. Galvin, Trans.). Philadelphia: Fortress. Van de Kemp, H. (1980). Origin and evolution of the term Psychology: Addenda. American Psychologist, 35, 774. Vergote, A. (1971). Apport des données psychanalytique à l’exégese: vie, loi et clivage du moi dans l’epître aux Romains 7. In X. Leon-Dufour (Ed.), Exégèse et Herméneutique (pp. 109–147). Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

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Vergote, A. (1973–75). Psychanalyse et interprétation biblique. In H. Cazelles & A. Feuillet (Eds.), Supplément au dictionnaire de la Bible (Vol. 9, pp. cols. 252–260). Paris: Letouzey et Ané. Wink, W. (1978). On wrestling with God: Using psychological insights in biblical study. Religion in Life, 47, 136–147.

CHAPTER 21 SEARCHING FOR THE DYNAMIC ‘WITHIN’ Concluding remarks on ‘Psychological aspects of Biblical concepts and personalities’

GERRIT GLAS University of Leiden, The Netherlands

1. INTRODUCTION In this chapter, I will tie together some of the strands of thought that were developed in this book, summarize some of the findings and raise a number of questions for further reflection. I begin with a discussion of the science – religion split as it was dealt with in the previous chapters. I will highlight attempts to overcome this split. Then I will focus more in-depth upon one pivotal question – that of the ‘negativity’ of divine presence and its relationship to what throughout this volume I have called the ‘transformative power’ of religion. In the next section I try to elucidate how this ‘transformative’ element – in one or another form and with all its ramifications, disguised or not – may emerge in the clinical situation. I will propose that clinicians become experts in the analysis of and imaginative play with the existential attitudes that structure the way patients relate to themselves and to others and to the fundamental themes and accompanying moods that organize their lives. This requires an enriched vocabulary for the overarching meaning and structuring effects of these basic attitudes, themes and moods. In the final section I discuss how insight into the main themes of this volume – prophecy, martyrdom, and messianism – may contribute to the improvement of our vocabulary and may lead to a better understanding of the patient. 2. DISSOCIATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN THEOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY Let me first recount some of the flavor of the experiences shared by the organizers of the conference when they discussed its aim and framework with colleagues and 295 G. Glas et al. (eds.), Hearing Visions and Seeing Voices, 295–310. © 2007 Springer.

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possible contributors. Generally speaking, the projected theme of the conference aroused both interest and skepticism – interest, because of the unique combination of fields which we intended to bring together; and skepticism, because of the relative lack of historical detail we possess about biblical persons, and the hazards of anachronistic interpretation that are inherent to any historical psychology. Nevertheless, underneath this skepticism there loomed the larger and more fundamental issue of the relationship between science, worldview and practical religious belief. This relationship appeared to be determined by dissociation between scientific scholarship on the one hand and the world of religious belief – as expressed in convictions, behaviors, and lifestyles – on the other hand. We wondered how this would all jell in an academic setting. This dissociation has traditionally been most obvious in academic theological circles, though, non-surprisingly, not absent in other areas of academic interest. Some theologians said that, while they would not hesitate to use psychological insight, popular or scientific, when delivering a sermon or in the practice of pastoral work, as scientists they could hardly take the subject of a psychological understanding of biblical persons seriously. Given the fact that the historical reality of many biblical persons is doubtful under the best of circumstances, they said, the idea of psychological identification with a biblical person would simply be beyond the mark. Biblical persons are in fact personages, literary characters, products of fictional creativity of gifted people a long time ago. One could possibly identify with aspects of such a personage or character. However, this identification would at best lead to an aesthetic experience, not far from the experience of reading Dante or watching a play of Shakespeare. Such experiences, moreover, would not add anything at all to the scientific understanding of such a character or personage qua real person with a real personality. Psychological understanding would rather provoke mystery and detract from the core business of biblical scholarship which aims at textual analysis and the unraveling of the wider social, historical and religious context in which a particular biblical personage was living. I already pointed at this issue in the introduction to the section on prophecy. For me, as a psychiatrist and philosopher, this dissociation was striking because of the obvious parallels with what at present is going on in the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy. In these disciplines one often encounters an almost complete dissociation between psychopathology ‘as such’, which is defined by classificatory schemes and diagnostic tools, on the one hand, and the life history and psychosocial context in which psychopathology unfolds, on the other hand. Life history and context are then seen as the individual, subjective coloring, the scenery against the background of which the ‘real’ problem occurs. Religious issues in the history of the patient are seen as part of this scenery. This dissociation fits in a larger pattern of thinking, according to which religious phenomena are attributed to the realm of subjective interpretation and of local culture, whereas science is considered to aim at the world of objective facts.1 Indeed, throughout this book we have seen that this split between the subjective and the objective obscures important aspects of religion and its dynamics. It not only denies

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the privilege usually held by religion to have relevance beyond what psychology and cultural anthropology have to say about it. It is also incapable to give words to and to understand the range of phenomena we have indicated with expressions like ‘dynamic,’ ‘relationship,’ and ‘power.’ If there is anything important to religion, it is the transformative power of the realities it is aiming at. Of course, it would have been possible to organize a conference in which the story of Jeremiah, or Paul, or Jesus, would be placed on an equal footing with the story of fictional characters like Hamlet or Othello. Such a conference would undoubtedly reveal interesting parallels and provide new points of view. However, what interested us was precisely the distinction between creative writing and religion. What difference does it make for a patient, a therapist, or a theologian, when biblical persons are seen as religiously significant, i.e. as persons whose lives and sayings do matter for us in a religious way? What kind of psychological dynamic is implied when a person’s religious instead of his/her aesthetic receptivity is awakened? As I see the matter, the issue is not whether religion does or does not appeal to aesthetic capacities; nor is it the appreciation of the role of fiction in the making and reading of biblical stories. For, it is beyond doubt that imagination and fiction have played and play a role in the construction and reconstruction of these stories. However, these fictional elements do not contradict a historical, normative, and/or religious understanding of the Bible, as Evans (this book; cf. Evans, 1996) and Wolterstorff (1995) have argued. Rather, the issue is the difference between a religious and a primarily aesthetic, moral or anthropological reading of the Bible. What does it mean for a biblical story to be understood as religiously important and even transforming? What does it mean for the realities these stories are referring to? How are we to conceive of these realities? What does it mean for a biblical person or personage to be understood in this religiously significant way? And what are the psychological correlates of the transforming qualities of religion? 3. ATTEMPTS TO OVERCOME THE SCIENCE-RELIGION SPLIT It is revealing to read the contributions to the present volume from the perspective I have just sketched – the perspective of how the authors deal with the epistemological divide between the subjective and the objective in their analysis of psychological correlates of divine reality. What strikes me is the great ingenuity and persistence with which most authors try to overcome the divide. The divergence of their approaches adds to the overall impression of creativity and of newness of the field. Some authors open up new worlds with their metaphors; others exploit the implicit potential for meaning of old vocabularies; still others give an unexpected twist to existing conceptual frameworks. However, what emerges above all is the conviction that religious phenomena have a quality which escapes from the subjective/objective dichotomy and that the dynamics of these phenomena opens up a world ‘beyond’ (or: ‘in-between’) the split between subjective feeling and interpretation on the one hand and the establishment of objective facts on the other. I aim now to illustrate this by highlighting some of the key issues that came into view in the previous chapters.

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In the chapter by Steve Evans the discussion is focused upon the notion of history. Evans explains why the notion of historical truth should not be understood as referring to ‘objective facts.’ According to his view, historical faith is ‘the vehicle for an ongoing relation with the person who is most crucial in understanding human life and the human task.’ Historical faith refers, therefore, to a reality beyond the subjectobject split: an ongoing dynamic between divine reality and the individual which is fundamental in the sense that it is presupposed in any attempt to interpret it. Faith should not be based on factual accuracy (inerrancy) nor reduced to a psychological (emotional) response to certain facts of life. It is, from the moment it exists, itself the expression of a dynamic which is already going on and in which the unraveling of meaning is both revelation and interpretation. In Neil Gillman’s chapter the same issue returns, but now it has been rephrased in terms of the ontological priority of divine pathos. Heschel’s notion of divine pathos appeared to refer to a relational dynamic between God and man which precedes any attempt to rational reconstruction (objective) and which transcends the world of mere inner feelings and imagination (subjective). I will be brief about the concept of pathos here, because it was dealt with at some length in the introduction to the section on prophecy. Surely, Heschel’s conception of the notion of pathos has been very helpful in paving the way for a non-dualistic understanding of the relationship with the divine. And Neil Gillman helped us to discern some of the theological implications of such understanding. In the chapter by Bob Becking the split seems to prevail at first sight. However, as we saw in the introduction to the prophecy section, the picture seems to change at the end of the chapter when Becking quotes the biblical scholar Walter Brüggemann who said that every historical presentation is both mediation and construction. This element of mediation seems to suggest that the biblical presentation – as beginning of a historical chain of mediations and appropriations – is allowed to exert normative influence on readers and listeners. Interpretation does not start from scratch; it is preceded by other interpretations to which it relates by definition and to which one relates oneself. The notion of mediation suggests that there is a ‘working history’ with an inherent normative dimension (Gadamer, 1960). Ambiguity and mystery are the terms that appear to be crucial in Antoine Vergote’s approach of the issue. They returned in Peter Verhagen’s comments on this and other chapters as an ambiguity between portrayal and betrayal. The interest of the psychologist of religion will never be purely scientific, Vergote declares. He criticizes current psychology of religion with its one-sided emphasis on experiential and cultural aspects of religion. Psychology of religion tries to grasp phenomena that by their very nature transcend the limits of psychology proper. It cannot deny these phenomena. Such self-limitation would lead to a too narrow approach to what is central to human life. So, psychology of religion contains the split in itself, so to say, i.e. as a fundamental ambiguity, which is both inevitable and undeniable. It is inevitable because otherwise psychology of religion would give up its scientific nature or end in the blind alley of reductionism. It is undeniable because the ‘facts’ urge to an approach in which openness toward the transcendent is maintained

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and combined with careful descriptions which remains as close as possible to the phenomena under study. Bram van de Beek’s notion of an ‘explosion of schemes’ may be conceived as a radicalized version of Vergote’s ambiguity and mystery. There is no single picture of Jesus, van de Beek argues; that is to say, Jesus does not represent something already known. The many portraits amount to an overall sense of otherness. So, for both authors the conclusion of the incomprehensibility and mysteriousness of Jesus leads to recognition of his distinctness and uniqueness. There is, however, a crucial difference between Vergote and van de Beek with respect to the degree of this uniqueness and its implications. Both agree that Jesus’ life offers more than a moral example. His excellence as such cannot be imitated. His life and work, instead, lead to a focus on the presence of the Kingdom of God. The gospel writers direct our attention from the person of Jesus away to the world and its future. The difference between Vergote and van de Beek concerns the extent of dissimilarity between Jesus and us and the consequences of this dissimilarity for religious life. Vergote mentions Jesus ‘a paradigm case of the perfect mystic’ and ‘a background model for psychological interpretation and evaluation of religious phenomena.’ Van de Beek would not agree, I suppose, but instead say that the uniqueness of Jesus is such that there does not (and can not) exist a natural psychological bond between Jesus and us. The reality of the Kingdom reveals itself not only epistemologically in the surpassing of our explanatory models, but above of all existentially in our death with Him in baptism. Both notions seem to hang together in van de Beek’s account: spiritual death implies a death of understanding, and vice versa. As such, the gospel is an offense against rational thinking. At the same time, it is also saving us: both phenomenologically and theologically the death of understanding indicates spiritual death, but now interpreted as a sign of hope, i.e. as the spiritual union with the person who gave up everything and emptied his existence from all precious relations, memories, and selfconcern. This self-emptying is known as kenosis. Spiritual death, taken in this sense, indicates one’s willingness to surrender and to give up self-certainty and pride. The turmoil, agony, and conflict this brings, is itself part of the process of redemption and, therefore, a sign of hope. It would be a matter of great interest at some future date to compare the psychological correlates of this process with the psychological characteristics of the mystic way of life with its emphasis on ascetics, sanctification, and spiritual union. Conflict, agony, and turmoil are preeminently present in the chapters by Spero and Levy on Job and Jeremiah, respectively. Their approach represents a different kind of attempt to overcome the divide between subjectivist and objectivist interpretations of interactions with the divine. Their conception develops along the axis of presence/absence (or: consolation/separation). The duality is also at the background of Ravitzky’s intriguing play with the concepts of sanctity and space and his reference to the ‘heat’ of divine presence. God’s presence may be a burden and his absence a gift, allowing man to expand his imagination and to express his creativity.

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Spero (see especially his Postscript) makes it abundantly clear that absence (of the Almighty) is not identical to mere non-presence, or even non-existence, but that it is a highly sophisticated, multi-faceted notion – pointing at such diverse things as the otherness of the Other, the process of absence-making which is associated with the deconcretizing that is inherent in the act of symbolization, the lack of an object of desire, and this lacking-of-an-object as itself the object of desire of the other. So, absence does not merely indicate non-presence, emptiness, and lack of fulfillment and of an object. Absence is the knot of a fine relational dynamics which adds a third dimension, beyond mere presence and non-presence. Crucial for the understanding of this dimension is that a person may become the object of longing of the other just because of its longing for another. It is because of his unfulfilled state that man becomes the object of divine longing. The desire becomes the object of desire. From this perspective, absence becomes an indispensable element in the unfolding of a religious dynamic, for which the Lacanian developmental framework of the mirror (imaginary) and symbolic stages offers the psychological vocabulary. This dynamic is sustained by both sides: Job’s absence (expressed by long periods of silence, lack of understanding, and bitter laments) becomes as important as God’s absence, at a certain point of time; and in the midrashic comments on Jeremiah 23 it appeared that Jeremiah’s identification with God blends with God’s identification with Jeremiah and his people. Behind this lies an entire ontology which is critical with respect to the dichotomy between factuality (of so-called objective facts) and imagination (as inner, subjective representation). This ontology recognizes the fundamental role of imagination in the construction of a shared world. It is only by the play of imagination that the real can be discerned from the non-real. Such a conception, we saw, adds relief and nuance to the concept of border – i.e., the border between the immanent and the transcendent; and between the inner and the outside world. It offers an alternative vocabulary to express the richness of the ‘in-between’ and the dynamical interchange between what is at both ‘sides’ of the border. Such a new vocabulary is developed in the moving and thought-provoking psychological analyses of Job by Moshe Halevi Spero and of Jeremiah by Bryna Levy. In Levy’s essay the concept of projective identification – with its dependence on the notion of borders between me and not-me and between the inner and outer world – is exploited beyond its ordinary meaning as a primitive mechanism of defense or as manifestation of countertransference. In Levy’s analysis, the process of projective identification not only connects the intrapsychic with the interpersonal, it also fuels the emotional and relational dynamic with religious meaning. 4. POSTMODERN SOPHISTICATION, PRESENCE, AND THE LILIES IN THE FIELD There is a lot to say about the philosophical and theological issues that are at stake here and which determine the way our problem is conceptualized. At this point, I will restrict myself to raising one set of related issues and to making a final suggestion based on the contributions to this book.

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Some of the contributions – most notably those of van de Beek and of Spero – emphasize the ‘not’ and the impossibility of identification (van de Beek) and the unavailability of the Almighty (Spero) to such degree that one wonders whether there is still a point (person, reality) to connect with. Are humans not such that they need at least some ‘presence,’ one is inclined to ask? The question is familiar and has been raised with respect to negative theology: too much emphasis on negativity, absence, otherness, and a reality beyond comprehension, may lead to an existentially thin and merely philosophical God about whom only sophisticated literates could say anything.3 I am sure this represents neither van de Beek’s position nor Spero’s. And I realize that I am overstating the issue if my comment were to be misconstrued as a straightforward comment on their contributions. What I am saying is that their chapters lead us to questions that are necessarily beyond their scope, but nevertheless are important enough to be raised. So, my first question is whether there is a terminus ad quem, an object, a reality to relate to if this reality is ‘beyond reason’ and referred to by negatives. A related question concerns the way religious language does in fact function if it is by definition imperfect, because it refers to a reality which is beyond comprehension and even, according to some, inexpressible. In what way do biblical stories affect the reader and hearer if the reality they are referring to is such that it can only be suggested? Do words matter at all, in that case? How are words related to religious practices and these practices to the divine reality they are supposed to represent? One can understand how easy it is for the negative theologian to replace the hyper-transcendence of the negative approach into a secularized, horizontal approach in which God’s presence is absorbed by human activity and/or sociopolitical action. Not far from this emerges a related question, i.e., how the hyperreflexivity of postmodern and what I called ‘negative’ approaches relate to the kind of faith which is recommended by Jesus Himself, when he welcomes children in his audience and when he compares the sorrow and doubt of the disciples with the untroubled existence of lilies in the field.4 How does such a ‘childish’ and ‘naive’ existence relate to postmodern sophistication which holds that there is no bedrock foundation for our beliefs and no ‘natural’ and self-evident access to a reality which is meaningful in itself. How does it relate to postmodern claims that all longing for certainty and universality has to be given up, because these desires deny the deeply contingent nature of reality and the impossibility to transcend the perspectival nature of our knowledge? Finally and more specifically, can the ‘negative’ approach do justice to yet another sort of ‘dialectic’; a dialectic in which the otherness of the other does not primarily indicate separateness and absence, but freedom and recognition? What I am suggesting is that the dialectic of presence and absence appears in a different light from the perspective of love. Where love reigns, the otherness of the other ought not to be perceived or experienced as absence, tragedy or threat, but as a joyful expression of the inexhaustible richness of creation and a celebration of the diversity of human persons in that creation. It is this love that makes one free and releases from the

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burden of one’s limitations, whether imagined or not. Persons with such love know themselves to be recognized and valued by others, like they themselves recognize and value others in their uniqueness and distinctiveness. Love means, then, respect and support for one’s innermost self. In sum, how can postmodern conceptions of the divine otherness account for these other aspects of otherness? These questions and suggestions are of course not precise enough to adequately deal with in the present context. So, let me limit myself to my main concern here, which is the hidden intellectualism behind postmodern epistemic ‘modesty’ – an intellectualism that also seems to affect some forms of negative theology. What I am concerned about is that the concentration on what God is ‘not,’ is in fact the intellectual mask of an underlying need to keep the cards in one’s hands and to exert control on the way we think and speak about how God ‘interacts’ with the world – almost, as if human beings are in a position to define this ‘interaction.’ Learned ignorance about who God is, and about his workings in the world, may in other words still be a sign of intellectual harnessing against the way the Almighty deals with our own existential needs. Such docta ignorantia may, therefore, in some cases be conceived as a self-saving maneuver in disguise. We are, in short, searching for a vocabulary which allows for self-criticism and intellectual scrutiny and which, at the same time, is able to give expression to the kind of trust that is characteristic for the faith of children and for the basic attitude of love. I admit that this is probably too much for one vocabulary. What is needed, then, is a certain amount of openness within each mode of expression to permit other modes of expression to present themselves; willingness to pass from one mode to the other in order to extend the range of one’s understanding; and eagerness to get a clearer picture of what can not be said in a particular mode of expression. These considerations indicate once again the importance of sensitivity with respect to the way in which one is and chooses to become involved in the analysis of religion. Each manner of involvement brings its own limitations and opportunities, by illuminating certain aspects and obscuring other aspects. In the search for the appropriate language and concepts the speaker or writer relates his existence, or parts of it, to the subject he or she is dealing with. This is what Søren Kierkegaard had in mind when he spoke about the method of ‘indirect communication’ and the impossibility of showing the truth of Christianity by giving a formal and systematic (i.e., ‘direct’) exposition of its doctrines.5 This kind of systematics tends to exclude the speaker, thereby ignoring what is most crucial for the understanding of truth, i.e., that it implies the involvement of the understanding person. Truth, in other words, is revealed in what one says as much as it is revealed by the way one relates to this ‘what’. The message itself implies self-relatedness. Being a witness of truth implies maintaining an attitude of sensitivity for this self-relatedness. This is also what American and English philosophers have in mind when they talk about the performative use of language. This performative element – which becomes apparent, for example, in promises and assertions – is crucial for the understanding of religious language, and especially its inherent normativity (cf. Wolterstorff, 1995). The skilled

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use of this performative element solicits the sensitivity just mentioned, not only of lay-believers but also of scientists and professionals. Religious belief involves a concern for a reality which by its very nature asks for response and – even – for surrender and commitment in order to be understood. If this is true, theological research and ecclesiastical doctrine will reveal the nature of religion to the extent that they are sensitive for this dynamic and know how to relate to it. Speaking about religion inevitably implies that one is already involved in the dynamics of religion. This dynamics cannot be objectified without neutralizing it at the same time. Ultimate truths tend to escape all attempts to speak ‘about’ them as if they could be addressed as something out there and apart from me. Ultimate truths, if they are worthy of their name, have a bearing on the searching and longing subject. They include subjectivity, now understood as commitment and involvement. Sensitivity for this state of affairs does not imply that the scholar has to abandon his or her objectifying attitude nor that he need dilute the standards of scientific scholarship. What is needed is a reflexive attitude which evinces awareness of the ambiguity and complexities that are involved here. This reflexive attitude amounts to a second-order type of thought in which the results of the objectifying method are investigated with respect to their possible existential implications. Awareness and sensitivity for these possible implications and the capacity for imaginative play with these implications belongs to the heart of scientific scholarship, and to the professional activities that are based on the results of this scholarship. This chapter can be seen as a modest attempt to such imaginative play with conceptual opportunities and limitations. The contributions in this book should be read as exercises in raising the kinds of awareness and sensitivity just mentioned. One could only hope that many psychologists, psychiatrists and philosophers of religion in the same vein try to improve their skills with respect to this second-order way of understanding and communicating. Professionals should ideally become experts in the analysis of and imaginative play with the existential attitudes that structure their modes of relatedness to themselves and to others and to the fundamental themes which are embodied in lives, works, and deeds of others. 5. IMPORTANCE FOR PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOTHERAPY The preceding remarks bring us close to what this approach could mean for psychiatry and psychotherapy. In order to make this clear, let me begin by sharing a particular type of clinical experience. Every psychotherapist or psychiatrist is acquainted with a number of patients suffering from numerous overlapping problems; problems which can be illuminated from various diagnostic and theoretical perspectives, none of which is totally convincing or decisive. In other words, with these patients one is often in a situation in which all interpretations and explanations are correct, and yet no single one suffices. It is my impression that in some of these cases, underneath the surface of symptoms and their possible explanations, there is a more deeply ingrained concern,

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a fundamental conflict or incapacity to engage in life and to shape one’s existence, a basic paralysis of one’s ability to decide. Addressing this fundamental concern or incapacity and giving words to what is sensed but apparently cannot be expressed, often leads to an increased sense of coherence, relevance and even transparency, both in the patient and in the therapist. Instead of drifting away and loosing contact with the patient, there emerges in the wake of such an existential interpretational stance a heightened sense of reality, a more energetic atmosphere, and a lively and more coherent awareness of what is really going on.6 It is very difficult to catch these moments and to lend words to what actually happens. Nevertheless, if successfully addressed, they do exist, those sterling moments in the doctor-patient relationship. Patients return to them time and again, they are remembered for years and may serve as biographical anchoring points. Elsewhere, I have tried to address this dimension of self-relatedness in the context of the basic fears and anxieties by comparing it with certain dimensions of clinical description, clinical hypothesizing and testing.7 The conceptual structure of the model I have proposed is threefold. The model, as it is represented here, refers to processes taking place in the clinical situation, i.e., in the interaction between the professional and the patient/client. 1. The clinical descriptive level. Concepts at this level refer to signs, symptoms, and complaints with which the patient calls for attention of the expert. Terms and concepts at this ‘surface’ level are merely descriptive, whether they are derived from everyday experience or from some background explanatory model. 2. The level of causal hypotheses. At this level I locate the explanatory models that are used to understand the clinical situation and to explain how causes lead to clinical symptoms. One can think here of all types of biological, psychological, and social scientific models and theories that may shed light on what is going on in the patient. These models are, of course, limited to a particular perspective. Clinical diagnosis is usually considered to consist of a combination of level 1 description and level 2 explanation; i.e., the diagnostician describes the course of signs and symptoms over time, classifies them and give hints to the explanatory models that might explain what is going on. 3. The existential (or anthropological) level. This third level consists of an analysis of the basic theme or existential attitude which gives depth and perspective to the entire picture. This basic theme or attitude is essentially the embodiment of the way the person relates to his or her (disordered) existence, or parts of it. It is the overarching way of self-relatedness. It can be intuited in terms of the basic themes that characterize a person’s existence.8 The important conceptual move one has to make professionally is similar to the one I suggested above. The fundamental themes and attitudes do not manifest themselves primarily as objects of thought, feeling and decision (although they may become such objects); rather, they express themselves in thought, feeling and behaving. They are, so to speak, embodied in the ensemble of one’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors. The anxiety of a person who is unable to connect with important others is not primarily a fear about being connected, such as fear for intimacy, or separation, or fusion with the

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other. Such anxiety is more fundamental, i.e., it represents an inner dynamic which manifests itself as disconnectedness and isolation and a whole range of behaviors which keep the person far from the point at which interpersonal relations might eventually become meaningful and substantive. Such a dynamic may remain hidden behind a facade of superficial success, but may then become finally manifest its destructive tendency in moments of crisis. To mention one other example: the indecisiveness of the person whose existence is an ‘embodiment’ of such indecision, is not primarily characterized by the incapacity to make a choice between option A and option B, but is, instead, marked by the fact that choices do not even reach the level of concreteness which is necessary for making such choices. The existentially indecisive person is successful in avoiding this concreteness; he undoes life of its concreteness. This avoiding and undoing is a manifestation of that person’s manner of self-relatedness. Addressing these fundamental (or existential) themes is not easy, but it is of immense importance in cases in which a person’s existence seems dominated by the destructive power of anxiety or depression or in cases in which one feels lost in a sea of conflicting interpretations and explanations. Of course, the basic existential themes may, after their recognition, become objects of reflection and speech. However, it is important to keep in mind that the dynamic precedes one’s thoughts and interpretations. Communication about this dynamic is, therefore, never completely descriptive. For, such communication entails a stance toward this dynamic, explicitly or implicitly. Ignoring these existential themes may therefore reflect a basic existential attitude in the therapist or clinician her self (an attitude of anxiety, for instance). How are clinicians to perform such ‘existential’ talk? The debate about this issue has often been structured by making use of the distinction between form and content, or between psychopathological form and anthropological structure, on the one hand, and existential (religious, theological) content, on the other hand. Yet the previous paragraphs and many of the chapters in this book suggest that this dichotomy is overly simplistic: the religious dynamic reveals an existential theme and at the same time moulds the way (or: form) in which the theme becomes manifest. The threefold conceptual structure presented here suggests that psychopathological concepts and their underlying explanatory frameworks cannot be separated from the dynamics of existential attitudes – in the patient but also between the patient and the therapist or doctor. The dynamics of these basic attitudes (and corollary moods) have an overall structuring effect on cognitive, affective and relational capacities and their unfolding, and, at the same time, present a particular existential theme. So, what clinicians have to do is to find words for the overarching meaning and structuring effects of these basis attitudes and concomitant moods. That is to say, therapists have to enrich their conceptual toolbox with the language of existential themes, prototypes, and potential meaning-investing scenarios. Biblical psychology, in my estimation and probably in the estimation of many of the contributors to this volume, offers many illuminating and characteristic examples of such themes, prototypes, and scenarios. Theology and psychopathology – with

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philosophical anthropology as the bridging discipline – come quite close to each other here, without merging with one another. From a philosophical point of view, it is challenging to contemplate that the unfolding of human functions and capacities is intrinsically connected and interwoven with the expression of the existential (religious) dynamic. The direction of this unfolding of functions and capacities is determined by the dynamics we discussed.9 At the same time, the specific manner or quality by which this underlying existential dynamic unfolds is partly determined by the specifics of the particular dysfunctions (emotional, cognitive, social) involved in each case and the biographical context (age, parental influences, other aspects of the psychosocial milieu). 6. BIBLICAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE PRACTICE OF PSYCHIATRY Throughout this book we observed numerous attempts to improve our language, insight and conceptual tools with which to address the psychic processes that reflect the deeper existential dynamic operating at the background. We noticed how conceptual and terminological refinement could be helpful for the theologian in his or her attempts to contextualize the message of the Bible. We also saw how the richness and psychological depth of the world of the Bible may help the clinician to enrich his vocabulary and capacity for understanding. Of course, there is a long way to go. To demand immediate applicability and relevance for the clinical situation is asking for a shortcut. Reiterating one of the main themes in this book, we do not meet full-fledged prophets, martyrs, and messiahs in our consulting rooms. However, the themes of prophecy, martyrdom, and Messianism are certainly present in our professions. With respect to prophecy, there are of course instances of religious delusion in which the person thinks he or she is a prophet. However, this is not the only field of application of the theme of prophecy. Discussions at the conference suggested that this theme also touches on the role of the profession in our society. What role do psychiatrists and psychotherapists have with respect to the denial of the importance of religion for science and society? Our professions, perhaps more than any other scientific discipline, are prepared to delineate just what can be expected when religion is suppressed and more or less in just what direction religious-affective dynamics will unfold when religion is banned from the public sphere and when its importance is denied. One might, to mention one example, expect an emergence of all sorts of quasi-religious practices and practices with a hidden religious meaning – think for instance of the religious connotations of addiction, slavery to power and domination (as in sadomasochistic relationships), cultism, longing for strong leaders, and hyper-individualism. With respect to martyrdom: this concept opens up a field of discussion where one has to define the border area between real and imagined martyrdom. What might we make professionally, to continue with the metaphor, of the hidden martyr-like behavior of anorexia nervosa patients and patients with obsessive compulsive disorder? To call these behaviors ‘quasi-religious’ is not meant to disqualify the exploration of the

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religious connotations of these behaviors. On the contrary, talking about the ‘quasireligious’ may bring the therapist and her patient into much more intense and therapeutically useful contact with plain religious dynamics that might be operating in the life of the patient or between the therapist and the patient. Messianism, finally, confronts us with the issue of religious longing and its tormenting dialectic of keeping distance and searching for closeness. Is this religious longing a sign of weakness, of lack of independence, and of incapacity to bear the tragedy of existence – as psychoanalysts have often said? Or is it a genuine desire in which the totality of one’s existence is involved and is directed to a fulfillment with transformative qualities? Or, to mention yet another problem, how does one share one’s religious convictions with persons who espouse different, or no beliefs? Most religions contain convictions that transform the believer into a special person, compared to the non-believer. How does the feeling of specialty, or of election or chosenness, affect personality organization? These three sets of questions are seldom raised. They show how far psychiatry and psychotherapy have floated away from the language of basic human needs, hopes, fears, and convictions. Biblical psychology has a long history. Its roots may even be traced back to ancient times, in which the science of psychology even did not exist. Thinking about the possible contributions of biblical psychology to the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy, a number of tracks could be followed. First, one could think in terms of the kind of study known as psychological criticism, developed by psychology-minded theologians such as Gerd Theissen and members of his school and the Psychology of Biblical Studies Group of the Society of Biblical Literature (Ellens & Rollins, 2004; Rollins, 1999; Theissen, 2003). Kille, for example, mentions three elements of the biblical text that could provide potential starting points: symbols and archetypal images, psychodynamic factors represented in narrative and discourse, and depictions of biblical personalities.10 A second approach might aim at the development of a biblical worldview as a mediating framework between the world of the Bible and of psychiatry/psychotherapy (cf. van Bruggen, Levy, van de Beek, and Pfeifer in this volume). This approach is not contradictory to the previous one, but its emphasis is different; is does not focus on a particular biblical person or text, but on aspects of the biblical image of the human person in general. Put differently, the biblical worldview it proposes does not only entail psychological aspects, or components. It also addresses issues like the nature and relation of body and soul and views on the nature of creation, evil, and reconciliation (cf. van Praag, Gillman, Vergote, and Pfeifer in this volume). Third, further on this track one finds the investigation of inner representations of God as they are shaped by personal experience and life circumstances. This seems to be a very promising area of investigation and research. Biblical psychology could develop into a conceptually richer discipline if it could adopt insights from object-relations theory (see Levy, Spero and Verhagen, this volume). On the other hand, object relations theory could greatly benefit from theological insight to broaden its vocabulary and to make it aware of a reality which encompasses the intrapsychic world.

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Finally, one could imagine an approach which aims at the analysis of the psychological processes that are going on between the text, the reader and the traditions, contexts and subcultures in which these texts are interpreted. This type of analysis is still in its infancy. It has a great potential for the understanding of situations in which the perception of the reader is biased by personal suffering and/or cognitive/affective distortions. NOTES 1

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9

10

This larger pattern of (naturalistic, scientistic, foundationalist) thinking is of course widely discussed in philosophy and has been investigated and criticized with respect to its meaning for ethics (cf. MacIntyre, 1984; Moreland & Rae, 2000; Taylor, 1989), the appreciation of everyday experience and knowledge (Dooyeweerd, 1953–1958), religion and belief in God (Evans, 1993; Plantinga, 2000; Plantinga & Wolterstorff, 1983), cosmology (Polkinghorne, 1998; Ward, 1996), the humanities (Brown, Murphy, & Malony, 1997; Murphy, 1999), the neurosciences (Arbib, 1999; Clayton, 1999; Glas, 2002, 2004) and psychiatry and psychotherapy (Bhugra, 1996; Boehnlein, 2000; Koenig, 1998; Schreurs, 2002; Scott Richards & Bergin, 1997; Shafranske, 1996; Verhagen & Glas, 1996; see: also Glas, 1996). The term ‘transparency’ can be found in the work of Søren Kierkegaard, as an expression for increased inner depth and coherence in the movement of religiously becoming oneself. See for instance: Kierkegaard (1980), Part II, Chapter 2 and 3. See: de Vries (1999), for a lucid picture of the recent debate on the nature of religion in postmodern philosophy. In Jewish religious thought the issue is also well-known, most notably with respect to the concept of God. See for instance: Jacobs (1987). Few thinkers have been more sensitive for this theme of how to reconcile ‘childish’ faith with a reflective attitude than – again – Søren Kierkegaard. See the explicit thematizing of it in Concluding Unscientific Manuscript (Kierkegaard [1846/1992], pp. 587–607). See, for instance, Climacus’ objections against the possibility of establishing the truth of Christianity objectively and his insistence on the importance of the subject’s relation to the truth as part of the truth, in Kierkegaard (1846/1992), pp. 19–58; 72–188. Cf. Yalom (1980, 1989), who mentions four existential themes: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Cf. Glas (2001, 2003). I discern seven basic themes in the area of anxiety: anxiety related to impending break-down of the I-self relationship; anxiety related to existence in itself; anxiety related to lack of physical protection; to isolation and lack of connectedness; to the capacity to take a decision; to meaninglessness and to death (Glas, 2001). Basically, these are Yalom’s four existential themes combined with anxiety related to impending loss of oneself in the I-self relationship, in the world around us and in one’s physical environment. The basic anxieties overlap in most cases. I am not aware of any philosopher who analyzed this intricate relationship more precisely and extensively than Herman Dooyeweerd (1953–1958) – unfortunately, however, only very shortly with respect to psychic functioning. Cf. Dooyeweerd (1953–1958), Volume II, pp. 181–330. Kille (2001), p. 14.

REFERENCES Arbib, M. A. (1999). Towards a neuroscience of the person. In R. J. Russell, N. Murphy, T. C. Meyering, & M. A. Arbib (Eds.), Neuroscience and the person. Scientific perspectives on divine action (pp. 77–100). Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publication & Berkely: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Bhugra, D. (Ed.). (1996). Psychiatry and religion. Context, consensus and controversies. London: Routledge.

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Boehnlein, J. K. (Ed.). (2000). Psychiatry and religion. The convergence of mind and spirit. Washington: American Psychiatric Press. Brown, W. S., Murphy, N., & Malony, N. (1997). Whatever happened to the soul? Scientific and theological portraits of the human nature. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Clayton, P. (1999). Neuroscience, the person, and God: An emergentist account. In R. J. Russell, N. Murphy, T. C. Meyering, & M. A. Arbib (Eds.), Neuroscience and the person. Scientific perspectives on divine action (pp. 181–214). Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publication & Berkely: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. de Vries, H. (1999). Philosophy and the turn to religion. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dooyeweerd, H. (1953–1958). A New critique of theoretical thought. Vol. I-IV (D. H. Freeman et al., Trans.). Amsterdam: H. J. Paris. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company. Ellens, H. J., & Rollins, W. G. (Eds.). (2004). Psychology and the Bible. A new way to read the Scriptures. Vol. I–IV. Oxford/Westport: Praeger Publishers. Evans,C. S. (1993). Empiricism, rationalism, and the possibility of historical religious knowledge. In C. S. Evans & M. Westphal (Eds.), Christian perspectives on religious knowledge (pp. 134–160). Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Evans, C. S. (1996). The historical Christ and the Jesus of faith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gadamer, H. -G. (1960). Wahrheit und Methode. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Glas, G. (1996). Psyche and faith – beyond professionalism. In P. J. Verhagen & G. Glas (Eds.), Psyche and faith – Beyond professionalism (pp. 167–184). Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum. Glas, G. (2001). Angst – beleving, structuur, macht. Amsterdam: Boom. Glas, G. (2002). Churchland, Kandel, and Dooyeweerd on the reducibility of mind states. Philosophia Reformata, 67, 148–172. Glas, G. (2003). Anxiety – animal reactions and the embodiment of meaning. In K. W. M. Fulford, K. Morris, J. Sadler, & G. Stanghellini (Eds.), Nature and narrative. An introduction to the new philosophy of psychiatry (International Perspectives in Philosophy and Psychiatry) (pp. 231–249). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Glas, G. (2004). Philosophical aspects of neurobiological research on anxiety and anxiety disorders. Current Opinion in Psychiatry, 17, 457–464. Jacobs, L. (1987). God. In A. A. Cohen & P. Mendes-Flohr (Eds.), Contemporary Jewish religious thought. Original essays on crictical concepts, movements, and beliefs (pp. 291–298). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Kierkegaard, S. (1980). Sickness unto death (H. V. & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1847). Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Concluding unscientific postscript to Philosophical Fragments (H. V. & E. H. Hong, Trans.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. (Original work published in 1846). Kille, A. D. (2001). Psychological biblical criticism. Minneapolis: Fortress. Koenig, H. G. (Ed.). (1998). Handbook of religion and mental health. San Diego: Academic Press. MacIntyre, A. (1984). After virtue. A study in moral theory. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. Moreland, J. P., & Rae, S. B. (2000). Body and soul. Human nature and the crisis in ethics. Downers Grove [Illinois]: Intervarsity Press. Murphy, N. (1999). Supervenience and the downward efficacy of the mental: A nonreductive physicalist account of human action. In R. J. Russell, N. Murphy, T. C. Meyering, & M. A. Arbib (Eds.), Neuroscience and the person. Scientific perspectives on divine action (pp. 147–164). Vatican City State: Vatican Observatory Publication & Berkely: Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. Plantinga, A. (2000). Warranted Christian belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Plantinga, A., & Wolterstorff, N. (Eds.). (1983). Faith and rationality. Reason and belief in God. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press. Polkinghorne, J. (1998). Belief in God in an age of science. Yale: Yale University Press. Rollins, W. G. (1999). Soul and psyche. The Bible in psychological perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

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Schreurs, A. (2002). Psychotherapy and spirituality. Integrating the spiritual dimension into therapeutic practice. London: Jessica Kingley Publishers. Scott Richards, P., & Bergin, A. E. (1997). A spiritual strategy for counseling and psychotherapy. Washington: American Psychological Association. Shafranske, E. (Ed.). (1996). Religion and the clinical practice of psychology. Washington: American Psychological Association. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self. The making of the modern identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Theissen, G. (2003). Jesus als historische Gestalt. Beiträge zur Jesusforschung. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Verhagen, P. J., & Glas, G. (Eds.). (1996). Psyche and faith: Beyond professionalism. Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum. Ward, K. (1996). Religion and creation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wolterstorff, N. (1995). Divine discourse. Philosophical reflections on the claim that God speaks. Cambridge: Cambridge Universtity Press. Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Yalom, I. D. (1989). Love’s executioner, and other tales of psychotherapy. New York: Harper and Collins.

NAME INDEX

Aaron, 232 Abiathar, 67, 69, 75 Abraham, 44, 146, 217 Abramski, S., 81n6 Adams, P., 258n54 Agrippa, King, 111 Ahab, King, 57-58 Akiva, Rabbi, 100, 103 Alcibiades. 245 Alhanati, S., 256n30 Alston, W. P., 34n17 Alt, A., 81n8 Alter, R., 21, 33n3 Amos, 50, 80n1 Andresen, J., 255n25 Anzieu, D., 255n26 Aran, G., 166n33 Arbib, M. A., 308n1 Argyle, M., 193 Aristotle, 43, 44, 201n1, 281 Arlow, J. A., 222, 150n15 Assaf, S., 167n56 Atwood, G. E., 253nn10, 12 Augustine, St., 138, 282 Ba’al Shem Tov, Israel, Rabbi, 46 Balter, L., 253n10 Banschick, M. R., 195 Barth, K., 189, 202n15 Baskin, J. R., 218, 251n3 Bauer, A., 82n35 Becking, B., 38-39, 57, 298 Beekman, A. T. F., 12 Beit-Hallahmi, B., 193 Be¯ l’am, 218 Belau, L., 258n55

Ben Sasson, H. H., 166n45 Bendor, S., 62n13 Benson, P., 191 Benvenuto, B., 258n52 Ber, Y., 165n18 Berdugo, R., Rabbi, 130 Bergin, A. E., 6, 274 Bernard, St., 137-138 Bick, E., 226, 256n30 Bion, W. R., 221, 249-250, 255n22, 257n49 Biran, A., 81n8 Biven, B., 255n26 Blake, W., 222-224 Blank, S., 84nn44, 46 Blazer, D. G., 10 Bleich, J. D., 166n41 Bohatec, J., 150n14 Bomford, R., 220, 259n63 Bonaparte, M., 112n8 Borch-Jacobsen, M., 257n50 Bornstein, A., 166n54 Braam, A. W., 12 Bremner, J. D., 16 Brenman, E., 256n30 Breuer, M., 252n6 Bright, J., 84n50 Brody, E. B., 255n22 Brokaw, B. F., 191-192 Brown, W. S., 308n1 Brueggemann, W., 59, 62nn17, 20, 298 Brunner, E., 288, 291n19 Buber, M., 50, 246 Bucci, W., 256n30 Bull, D. L., 272 Bultmann, R., 127, 134, 150n1 Burridge, R. A., 180n3

311

312 Caiaphas, 175 Calvin, John, 32-33 Campbell, J., 24, 34nn10, 11 Capps, D., 286 Carnochan, P. G.M., 253n10 Carrasco, D., 166n26 Caruth, C., 257n46, 258n55 Charles R. H., 82n23 Charles, M., 255n26, 256n29 Chevron, E. S., 274 Ciarrocchi, J. W., 194 Cicero, 43 Clayton, P., 308n1 Clines, D. J. A., 83n44 Cohen, D., 252n8 Constantine the Great, Emperor, 115 Costa, P. T., Jr., 194 Crenshaw, J. J., 251n3, 252n5, 253n14 Crossan, J. D., 34n16, 283, 285, 288, 291nn9, 11 Cryer, F. H., 53 Damon, S. F., 223 Dan, 166n26 Daniel, 95 David, King, 81n13, 97-98 de Kloet, E. R., 16 de Vries, H., 308n3 Deeg, D. J. H., 12 Delitzsch, F., 282 Descartes, 199 Diamond, A. R. P., 82n35 Dina (daughter of Jacob), 218 Dionysius, 137 Dooyeweerd, H., 308nn1, 9 Douglas, M., 144, 150n12, 165n3 Dresner, S. H., 50nn1-2, 51n1 Dummont, L., 16n27 Dupont, J., 150n13 Durand, J. -M., 62n3 Eagle, M. N., 253n10 Edelson, M., 255n22 Edwards, K.J., 191-192 Eisen, A. M., 165n17 Eisen, R., 254n19 Eisenberg, L., 273 Ele¯ ’hu, 235-239, 246 Eli, High Priest, 67, 81n13 Eliade, M., 158-159, 165nn3, 25 Eliezer of Wirtzburg, Rabbi, 154, 164 Elijah, 57, 66, 80n1 Elisha, 57 Ellens, H. J., 307 Ellis, A., 10

NAME INDEX Elman, Y., 255n21 Elper, O., 80 Engel, G., 272 Epstein, B. H., Rabbi, 256n33 Erikson, E. H. 184, 201n1 Esarhaddon, King, 55 Esau, 218, 280 Escher, S., 269 Eurelings-Bontekoe, E., 184 Evans, C. S., 3-6, 7n3, 30, 34nn14, 18, 297, 37, 308n1 Evans, S. C., 183, 186, 202n16 Evans, Steve, 298 Eybeschuetz, J., Rabbi, 162-163 Ezekiel, 286 Falk, Z., 82n33 Favazza, A. R., 270 Fax, M., 166n35 Fenichel, O., 255n26 Fine, H. A., 251n3, 252n5 Finell, J.S., 256n30 Fink, B., 244, 258n53 Finkelstein, L., 81n17 Finkler, K., 272 Fishbane, M., 77, 84nn44-45, 49 Fitzgerald, J. T., 112n10 Fitzmyer, J. A., 280, 291n1 Fletcher, M. S., 282, 289, 291n6 Frei, H., 25, 33n2 Freud, A., 84n51 Freud, S., 10, 72, 82n27, 84n51, 135, 137, 142, 144, 150n8, 190, 192-193, 215, 220-222, 255nn25-26, 286, 288 Frye, N., 43 Frymer-Kensky, T., 75, 82n38 Gabbard, G. O., 197 Gadamer, H.-G., 298 Gaddini, E., 256n29 Gafni, Y., 165n8 Gallio, Proconsul, 117 Gil, Y., 81n10 Gillman, N., 5, 37, 51n19, 298, 307 Ginzberg, L., 80n6, 82n37 Glas, G., 7n4, 17, 308nn1, 7-8 Glatzer, N., 251n3, 252n7 Glazov, G.Y., 238 Glickauf-Hughes, C., 197 Glowinski, H., 260n66 Goiten, L., 252n5 Goodenough, E. R., 283 Goodman, Y., 274 Gordis, R., 252n7

NAME INDEX Gouin-Décarie, Th., 256n35 Graham, I. D., 222 Grant, F. C., 283, 291n10 Green, A., 256n29, 257n45 Greenberg, M., 251n3, 254n17 Gregersen, N. H., 201n1 Grotstein, J. S., 227, 256n30 Gunn, D. M., 83n44 Gurewitz, Z., 166n33 Habel, N. C., 254n16 Hadrian, Emperor, 101 Hagiz, Moses, Rabbi, 158 Ha-Levi, Judah R., 153, 166n43 Ha-Levi, Y., 165n5 Halperin, D. J., 253n13, 286 Halpern, B., 62n12, 166n28 Ha¨meen-Anttila, J., 55 Hananiah ben Akashia, Rabbi, 162 Hannah (martyr), 96 Haran, M., 81n9 Harari, R., 258n57 Harrington, D., 287, 291n16 Harry W. M, 102 Harsch, H., 284 Hartocollis, P., 222 Havenaar, J. M., 274 Hayward, R., 80n6 Hayyim of Volozhin, Rabbi, 163, 166n53 Hegel, F., 43, 189, 249 Heilman, S. C., 267 Heinemann, J., 82n31 Herod Antipas, King, 115 Heschel, A. J., 5, 7n1, 37-39, 41-44, 46-47, 49, 50n3, 51nn4-10, 14-18, 83-84n44, 84n47, 298 Hilkiah, 80n6 Hobbes, T., 289 Hoffman, I. Z., 253n10 Holladay W., 81nn12, 18 Holladay, W. L., 62n19 Holtz, B. W., 80n4 Hood, R. W., Jr., 140 Horowitz, Isaiah, Rabbi, 130 Hosea, 82nn22, 34 Huldah, 75 Hunt, M., 291n5 Hurvitz, A., 253n14 Ibn Ezra, Abraham, 160, 166n37 Idel, M., 166n30 Isaiah, 50, 54, 82n34 Ish-Shalom, M., 81, n21 Ishtar, 55 Issac, 44, 146

313 Jacob, 44, 146, 218, 280 Jacobs, L., 308n3 James, St., 110, 115, 122 James, W., 137, 138, 285 Japhet, S., 165n4 Jauss, H. R., 201, 202n9 Jeremiah ben Hilkiah (also ben Buzi), 38, 54, 58-61, 65-86, 80n6, 156, 226, 255n27, 300 Jeremias, J., 186, 202n7 Jesus Christ, 5, 14, 22, 26-33, 53, 91, 94, 98, 100, 105, 108, 118, 122, 127-128, 133-152, 169-182, 183-204 Jethro, 218 Jezebel, Queen, 57-58 Job, 72, 82nn28, 32, 207, 210, 213-266 John Paul II, Pope, 283, 290 John, St., the Baptist, 115-116, 122, 128, 136, 141, 146, 171, 174-175 Johnson, W. B., 198 Jonah, 48, 66, 80n1, 163 Jones, E., 73 Jones, J. W., 199 Jonge de, M., 179n1 Joseph, 103 Josephus Flavius, 101 Joshua, Abraham, 37 Judah the Prince, Rabbi, 101-102 Judas (Iscariot), 176 Julien, P., 257n48, 257n39 Jung, C. G., 10, 133, 139, 150nn4-5, 212, 224, 250, 280, 282, 285, 287-289, 291nn7, 12-13, 18, 23-24 Kalian, M., 270 Kant, I., 23-24, 33nn7, 8, 133, 145 Kaplan, B. H., 10 Kaplan, E. K., 50nn1-2, 51n1 Kaplan, M., 50 Karasu, T. B., 6, 17 Kasher, A., 165n2 Kennedy, R., 258n52 Kernberg, O., 195-197, 255n22 Kerrigan, W., 256n35 Kessler, R., 62n13 Kierkegaard, S., 7n2, 23, 28-29, 33n5, 34n12, 302, 308nn2, 4-5 Kille, A. D., 307, 308n10 Kille, D. A., 284, 291n8 Kimhi, D., 80n6, 81n9 King, Martin Luther, 53 Kittel, G., 180n8 Klein, M., 81n19, 223 Kleinman, A., 267

314 Klerman, G. L., 274 Koenig, H. G., 12, 308n1 Kohut, H., 232, 234 Kolitz, Z., 249 Kopmels, L. A., 180n7 Kumin, I., 256n30 Kurtzweil, B., 251n3, 252n7 Ku¨ster, V., 202n5 Kutz, I., 14 La Capra, D., 254n20 Lacan, J., 208-209, 233-235, 240-241, 245, 248-249, 256n35, 257nn42, 44 Lalleman-de-Winkel, H., 82n22 Laplanche, J., 256n36 Lapointe, F. H., 291n2 Larson, D. B., 10, 12 Law, J.M., 166n26 Lawrence, R. T., 191, 201n1 Leary, K., 253n10 Lebold, C. J., 275 Lefort, R., 258n56 Leiner, M., 284 Levenson, J. D., 165nn7, 35 Levinas, Emmanuel, 249-250 Lévi-Strauss, C., 219-220, 254n21 Levy, Bryna J., 38-39, 61, 307 Lewis, C. S., 24, 34n9 Lombardi, K., 256n30 Luke, St., 117, 129, 172-174, 178 Lundbom, J. R., 60, 62n18 Luria, Isaac, Rabbi, 37, 46 Luther, Martin, 282 Maccoby, H., 89-91, 104nn3-4, 112n4 McCandless, J. B., 196 Mace, C. A., 291n3 Macey, D., 256n35 McCrae, R. R., 194 McCullough, M., 12 McDargh, J., 254n14 McGrath, A. E., 185-186, 202nn6, 8, 16 McIntosh, D. N., 271 MacLeish, A., 252n7 McMinn, M. R., 275 McNutt, P. M., 57 Magdalen, M., 188 Mahler, M. S., 256n35 Mahoney, M. J. 289, 291n22 Maimonides, Moses, 96, 218, 254n19 Malina, B. J., 111-112, 112n9 Malony, N., 308n1 Mannoni, M., 220 Mark, St., 172, 187

NAME INDEX Marks, Z., 258n52, 260n66 Marulic, M., 282 Mary, the Virgin, 124n7, 173 Maslow, A., 10 Matte-Blanco, I., 259n62 Matthew, St., 118, 129, 170-172, 177, 179n4, 187 Mazor, L., 251n3 Meier, J. P., 31, 34n15, 134, 143, 146-147, 150nn6, 10 Meir of Rottenberg, Rabbi, 129, 155-156, 165n15 Meiri, Menachem, Rabbi, 158, 166n29 Meissner, W. W., 184, 201n1, 270 Meklenburg, Z. H., Rabbi, 231 Melamed, A., 166n44 Melanchton, P., 282 Merkur, D., 84nn46, 51 Meyer, J. P., 187 Michon, J. A., 221 Miller, J. W., 286 Miller, M. L., 253n12 Mills, J., 236 Milner, M., 223-224 Mintz, A., 79, 82nn26, 30, 84n52 Miriam (brother of Moses), 232 Mitrani, J. L., 256n30 Mitrani, T., 256n30 Modell, A., 255n22 Molenkamp, R. J., 196 Moloney, J. C., 77, 81n19, 84n52 Mordekhai, 217 Moses, 80n2, 103, 148, 160, 170, 211, 218-219, 227, 229-232, 242, 254n19, 256n34, 286 Moye, R. H., 252n8 Muller, J. P., 256n36, 257n41, 257n43 Mumford, D. B., 267 Murken, S., 184, 193, 195 Murphy, N., 308n1 Murphy, S., 258n52, 260n66 Myers, J. M., 81n6 Naboth, 57 Nahman of Bratzlaw, Rabbi, 166n46 Nahmanides, Moses, 161 Nase, E., 190 Nathanael, 174 Nedelman, Y., 81n8 Neeleman, J., 10 Nero, Emperor, 118 Neusner, J., 166n27 Neyrey, J. H., 111-112, 112n9 Niccolls, T., 252n5 Nicodemus, 175 Niehoff, M., 252n8 Nielsen, S. L., 198

NAME INDEX Nissinen, M., 55-56, 62nn1, 4-5, 10 Noll, R., 150n3 Nygren, A., 141, 180n7 O’Connor, K. M., 82n35 O’Shaugnessy, E., 227 Ogden, T. H., 227, 256n30 Omran, A. R., 10 Orange, D. M., 253nn10, 12 Otto, R., 165n3 Overbeck, F., 178 Overholt, Th. W., 62n15 Pachter, M., 165n9 Parpola, S., 55-56, 62nn4, 6, 8-9, 11 Passhhur, 76, 77 Pattison, E. M., 10 Paul, M. I., 256n30 Paul, St. (also Pauline), 91, 100, 102, 105-115, 143, 163, 274, 286 Perroudon, M. -C., 62n10 Persaud, R., 10 Peter, St., 91, 115, 174, 286 Peters, R. S., 291n3 Petersen, D. L., 62nn1, 20 Pfeifer, S., 207, 210-211, 268, 271-272, 307 Pfister, O., 130, 190, 202n20 Philemon, 107, 109 Philo of Alexandria, 158 Piedmont, R. L., 194, 198, 202n25 Pilate, Pontius, 199 Plantinga, A., 33n5, 34n18, 308n1 Plato, 245 Polk, T., 62n20, 83n43 Polkinghorne, J., 308n1 Pontalis, J.-B., 256n36 Pope, M. H., 253n14 Pope Benedict XII, 279 Priel, B., 256n38 Pritchard, J.B., 217, 253n14 Propst, L. R., 198 Rabinowitz, Aaron, 37 Ragland-Sullivan, E., 256n35, 257n39 Rahab, 72-76, 78, 83n41 Raphael, D. D., 252n7 Rasmussen, K., 188 Rava, 95-96 Ravidovitz, S., 166n39 Ravitzky, A., 40n1, 129-130, 166nn20, 36, 38, 57, 299 Regev, E., 81n13 Reid, S. A., 251n3, 252n5 Reimarus, H. S., 186, 189

315 Renik, O., 255n25 Richards, P. S., 6, 274 Richardson, W. J., 256n36, 257n43 Ricoeur, P., 220 Rifkind, Simon H., 37 Riskin, S., 13 Rizzuto, A. M., 184, 191, 195, 201n1, 273 Robb, H. B., 198 Roberts C. W., 193-194 Rollins, W.G., 186, 188, 207, 211-212, 291nn4, 20-21, 307 Rosenberg, S., 251n3, 254n19 Rosenzweig, F., 50 Rounsaville, B. J., 274 Rubenstein, R., 284 Rucker, N., 255n26, 256n30 Ru¨mke, H. C., 10 Sacks, O., 259-260n64 Samson, 94, 104n2 Samuel, Rabbi, ben Rabbi Nahman, 74, 83n39 Sanders, E. P., 104n4 Sanders, P. S., 253n14 Sarna, N., 254n15 Satan, 28, 107, 115, 116, 123, 124n6, 145, 222-225, 226, 232, 244, 251n3, 252n5, 254nn15, 18, 255n25, 260n65, 269, 271, 285 Saul, King, 54, 68, 81n13 Schaap-Jonker, H., 184, 191, 195-197, 202nn 26-27 Schilder, A., 12 Schimmel, S., 252n5 Schley, D. G., 81n13 Schneersohn, M. M., Rabbi, 166n36 Schoenfeld, C. G., 82n36 Scholem, G., 51n12, 165n17 Schreurs, A., 308n1 Schwartz, D., 166nn34, 44 Schweitzer, A., 130, 179n1, 184-186, 188, 190, 198, 200, 201nn4, 10-14, 16-19, 21-22, 30, 211, 282 Schweizer, E., 179n1 Scroggs, R., 286, 291n15 Searles, H., 81n19 Segal, A. F., 112n1 Sewall, R. B., 252n7 Shafranske, E., 308n1 Shammai, 96 Shavit, Y., 166n44 She¯ ‘mon ben La’ke¯sh, Rabbi, 218 Shirman, H., 166n43 Shulman, D., 165n3 Silas, 117 Simlai, Rabbi, 160

316 Sjo¨berg, W., 62n7 Skinner, J., 77, 84n48 Smith, J. H., 256n35 Smith, J. Z., 158, 165n7, 166n27 Smith, J., 158 Smith, W. C., 287, 291n17 Socrates, 245 Solomon, A., 281 Solomon, King, 67, 217 Solomon, R. C., 189 Sonnenberg, C. M., 12 Spero, M. H., 192, 199, 202nn23-24, 28, 207210, 221, 254n14, 255n21, 274, 299-301, 307 Spiegel, S., 101 Spilka, B., 191, 271, 275 Stauffer, E., 180nn8, 9 Steiner, G., 251n3, 252n7 Steiner, J., 227 Stephen, St., 110, 118, 122 Stern, D. N., 256n37 Sternberg, M., 21, 33n3 Stolorow, R. D., 253nn10, 12 Strauss, D. F., 189 Strenger, C., 253n10 Symington, N., 184 Ta¯jra¯, H. W. M., 89-91, 102, 112n5 Tamayo, A., 193 Ta-Shema, Y., 165n6 Taubes, S., 9, 253n14 Theissen, G., 112n8, 185, 200, 201nn3-4, 307 Timothy, St., 107 Tisdale, T. H., 191-192 Trebitsch, R., 166n53 Troeltsch, Ernst, 30-31, 138 Tsevat, M., 251n3, 253n14 Turkel, S., 256n35 Tur-Sinai, N. H., 254n16 Tustin, F., 256n30

NAME INDEX Van Ruler, A. A., 129, 179 Van Scheyen, J. D., 12 Van Spanje, T. E., 112n8 Van Tilburg, W., 12 Vargon, S., 254n19 Vergote, A., 127-129, 135, 139, 150nn2, 7, 9, 11, 187-188, 202n9, 284, 298-299, 307 Verhagen, P. J., 130, 184, 298, 307, 308n1 Vermetten, E., 16 von Muralt, A., 150n15 von Rad, G., 82n26 Vygotsky, L., 252n8 Waelty, U., 271 Ward, K., 308n1 Weaver, W. O., 186, 202n5 Weber, M., 138 Wedbee, W., 252n7 Weinfeld, M., 165n4 Weippert, M., 62n2, 11 Weissman, A. M., 256n32 Weissman, M. M., 274 Wells, M., 197 West, W., 6 Wicksteed, J. H., 223 Wieder, A. A., 83n39 Wiesel, E., 238, 252n7 Wieseltier, L., 250-251 Wilkin, R. L., 165n4 Williams, J. E. G., 194 Williamsen, W. P., 140 Wink, W., 291n14 Winnicott, D. W., 192, 223, 250, 256nn35-36 Witztum, E., 267, 270, 274 Wolterstorff, N., 34n13, 201, 297, 302, 308n1 Worthington, E. L., 274 Wright, A. G., 80n4 Wright, N. T., 31, 34n16 Wulff, D. M., 193, 201n2 Wundt, W., 280

Urbach, E. E., 166n51 Van Belzen, J. A., 135 Van Bruggen, J., 89-91, 102, 112n3, 307 Van de Beek, A.M., 129, 180n12, 187, 200 Van de Beek, B., 129, 299, 187-200, 301, 307 Van de Kemp, H., 282 Van der Toorn, K., 62nn3, 11, 14 Van Hecke, L., 137 Van Os, J., 16 Van Pelt, T., 257n39 Van Praag, H. M., 3-6, 13, 15-16, 252n5, 307 Van Rijn, Rembrandt, 121

Yafet, S., 251n3 Yalom, I. D., 308n6 Yehoshua, A. B., 154, 165nn11, 12 Yevin, S., 81n6 Yosl Rakover, 249 Young, J. E., 196-198 Zink, J. K., 251n3, 252n5 Zˇizˇek, S., 258n54 Zock, H., 184 Zohar, Z., 165n9

SUBJECT INDEX

Absence and desire, link between, 249; see also under God, absence of Ambiguity, 298 Anatoth, City of, 80–81n6; see also under Jeremiah Answer to Job, 224 Anxiety, as emotion in Biblical themes, 120, 135, 136, 144, 147, 171, 174, 190, 194, 204, 210, 215, 234, 241, 242, 243, 247, 256n38, 258n57, 260n65, 270, 272–273, 305, 308n8 Aphobos, 119; see also anxiety Asinnu, 56 Atheism, 10 Atonement, 16, 28, 68, 90, 94, 99, 101–104, 112n5, 141, 161; see also under vicarious atonement in Judaism Behaviour, Biblical rationalizations of, 270–271 Bible mental health and, imposing figures of, 13–14 psychology and, 279–291 psychological Biblical criticism, 283–287; see also separate entry psychology and biblical studies in the west, 280–283 religion and biblical studies, benefiting psychology, 287–290 salvation in, 26 Biblical conviction of God, 44, 142 Biblical effects, history, 287 Biblical narratives, see narratives, Biblical Biblical persons as objects of faith, 29–30 Biblical portraits of personalities, analysis, 286 Biblical prophet, 145 Biblical religious phenomena, 285

Biblical scholarship, psychology as a tool in, 283–287 Biblical themes in psychiatric practice, 267–276, 306–308; see also under psychopathology, psychosis anxiety and personality disorders, 270–271 bio-psycho-social model of psychiatry, 272–273 causality in psychiatry, 271–272 depression, 268–269 phenomenology, 268–271 religious delusions, 269–270 schizophrenia, 269–270; see also separate entry therapeutic implications, 274–275 and ethical guidelines, 274 Bio-psycho-social model of psychiatry, Biblical aspects, 272–273 Book of Job, The, 209, 217–218 Book of Revelation, The, 116, 123 Causality in psychiatry, Biblical aspects of, 271–272 Christian mysticism, 140–141 Christianity and Judaism, universality in, 99 Church and mysticism opposition between, 138 Cognitive schema-focused perspectives in imagining Jesus, 196–198 “Collaborative empiricism”, 274 Collective unconscious, 285 Commandments, 160 “Consecration” of the prophet, 148 Contextual theology, 202n5 Crimen laesum maiestasis, 117 Curse, 271–272

317

318 Decreta Caesaris, 117 Defence, Biblical rationalisations of, 270–271 Delusions, 14 Demonic affliction, 271–272 Depression, 268–269 religion and, 12 Desire absence and, link between, 248 interminable mirroring and the anguish of, 213–256 Job and, 243–245 Deus absconditus, 38, 46; see also under God, absence of Divination definition, 53 implications, 53 Doubt, 136, 268, 275 self-doubt, 66, 70 Dread, 157–160 DSM-IV personality disorders and God images, 195 Dynamic ‘within’, searching for, 295–308 Biblical psychology and the practice of psychiatry, 306–308 postmodern sophistication, 300–303 psychiatry and psychotherapy, importance, 303–306; see also under psychiatry and psychotherapy science and religion, dissociation, in theology and psychiatry, 295–297 science-religion split, attempts to overcome, 297–300 tracks to be followed, 307–308 Ego, 240–243 ego-dystonic influence, 272 Ei‘foh, 243–245, 260n65 Ele¯‘hu’s intervention and the questioning of mirroring, 235–240 Embeddedness, 37–38 Empathy, 66, 70–72, 79, 191, 194 En to somati mou, 119 Entos hymon, 138 Epistle to the Philippians, 119, 121 Epistle to Timothy, 121 Eretz Israel, 160; see also Israel, Land of Eschatology, of Jesus, 145–149 ‘Explosion of schemes’, 298 Externalist approach, 4–5, 32 Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, 99 Faith Christian perspective, 28

SUBJECT INDEX fundamental object of, 28 historical faith in the narrative of Jesus, 30 nature of, 27–30 Fear of demands, 162–164 absolute place and time, 163–164 dread of Holiness, 163 Fiducia, 120 ‘Fileo’, 180n10 Five-factor model, in imagining Jesus, 194–195 Force, notion, 208 Four Gospels, One Jesus? A Symbolic Reading, 180n13 Fragmentation, 234 Frenziness, 54–56 God Abraham Joshua Heschel on, 5 absence of, 38, 46, 129, 149, 199, 200, 208, 220, 239, 248–251, 299, 300–302 biblical conviction of, 142 concept, 10–11 earthly reality and, 38 face (pa‘ne¯m) of, 229, 256n34 God in Search of Man, 47 God’s pathos, in Heschel’s mature theology, 47–48; see also pathos image of, 195–196 dimensions, 195 and DSM-IV personality disorders, 195 pathological personality traits, 195 image of self and God, 192–193 imagining God and Jesus, 190–192 Issac Luria, Rabbi, on, 46 Jesus’ conception of God and His Kingdom, 148 object representation of, 198, 246, 250, 255 of the prophets, 43–45 Gospel of Thomas, 139 Guilt feelings, 142–145 depressive guilt and real religious guilt, interplay between, 273 moral consciousness and feelings of, 128 Handbook of Psychology, 109–110 Hasidism, 37, 42, 46, 164 Hearing voices, 269 Hebrew Bible, 33n1 He martyria, 118–119 Heschel, Abraham Joshua in America, 41 in Berlin, 41 doctoral studies at, 42 epistemology, 48–50 God of the prophets, 43–45 as a Hasid, 42

SUBJECT INDEX Heschel’ mature theology, God’s pathos in, 47–48 Heschel’s sources, 45–47 Heschel’s three worlds, 41–43 on the image of God, 44 prophecy in the writings of, 41–50 Prophets, The, 37, 42 in Warsaw, 41–42 Historical Jesus, 189 Historical truth for Christians, 5 Evans on, 4–5 Historical unconscious, 285 Ho katégoros, 117 Holiness, 160–161 Holy Land, 153 Human Change Processes: The Scientific Foundations of Psychotherapy, 289 Identification (man with God, God with man), 39, 66, 71, 76–78, 91, 120, 128, 187, 191, 197–199, 201, 202n9, 209–210, 220, 224, 233, 235, 257n39, 270, 296, 300–301 Ikonos, 120 Illness and religion, 269–270 Imagining Jesus, 183–204 Adjective Check List (ACL) in, 194 attachment theory, 184 cognitive schemata, 184 empirical research, three types of, 192–198 extraversion and openness, 194 five-factor model, 194–195 historiographic approach, 194 and the image of God, 184, 190–192 image of God and personality pathology, 195–196 image of self and God, 192–193 images of Jesus, 183–185 object-relational and cognitive schema-focused perspectives, 196–198 object relations theory, 184 paradidómi, 199–200 psychosexual theory, 184 Schweitzer on, 186 transitional phenomena, 184 Imitatio, meditatio, compassion, 131 Imma (Mother) Zion, 70–73 Impurity, 143, 145 anthropological notion, 144 ‘primitive’ idea of, 144 Integrative psychotherapy, forms of, 274 Interdisciplinary issues, 207–212 Internalist approach, 4–5, 32

319 Interpretation, 273 physician as an interpreter, 274–275 ‘introjection’, 130 Israel, Land of, 153–168 collective fulfillment, desire for, 161 desirable land, 160–161 dreams and legends, 161 fear of demands, 162–164; see also separate entry Holiness, desire for, 160–161 Horowitz’s perception of, 156 immigration to, 155–157 land-related commandments, 160 ‘LEST I SIN’, 161–162 Neutralization and dread, 157–160 Iustus iudex, 122 Jeremiah depression and the character of, 58–62 Jeremiah interpreted, 65–80 conflicting empathies, 66–67 exposing his mother’s infidelity, 69–72, 73–75 human aspect of, 65 identification with God, 77–78 Jeremiah marginalized, 67–69 Pesikta portraying, 69 as a ‘priest from Anatoth’, 68, 80–81n6 priestly descent of, 69 seduction, 75–80 shady progenitress, 73–75 womb to tomb, 72 Levy’s portrait of, 39 Jerusalem, 154 Jesus; see also person of Jesus attitude toward Jewish ritualistic custom, 143 baptism, 143 as biblical prophet, 145–146 character, psychiatric evaluation of, 188 conception of God and His Kingdom, 148 from the vantage point of mysticism category, 141 hostility towards, 147 images of, 129 imagining Jesus, 183–204; see also separate entry Jesus’ parables, time structure of, 147 on Kingdom of God, 146–147 lives of Jesus, three quests, 185–187; see also separate entry as the marginal Jew, psychological look on, 133–151 moral conscious, guilt feelings, sin, 142–145

320 mystical experience and desire, 137–141 portrayal versus the betrayal of, 183 preaching of Jesus and the preaching about Jesus, 186 prophecy, self-consciousness, eschatology, 145–149 prophetic mission, 128 resurrection of, 28 story of, 27–30 strangeness of, 200–201 uniqueness, 128 Jews/Jewish definitions of martyrdom, 94–96 literature, desire and dread in, 153–168; see also under Land of Israel tradition, on people and their place, 159 Job, 208–210 chronic preoccupation with, 215 contents of, previous psychoanalytic approaches to, 222–224 countertransference reaction, Jobian patience as (Renik), 256n25 Epilogue, the, 218, 236, 247, 252n7 hidden subject of, 213–256 infinitesimal measure (ei‘fah) of desire and, 243–245, 259n64 Lacanian conceptual framework, 209 lack, holes, and the cleft in the rock, 240–243 meta-analytic introduction, 214–217 Milner’s interpretation, 223–224 mirror stage and its relevance to desire, 232–235; see also under mirroring concept Moses and, link between, 228–232 as myth, 219–222 paternity, complications in, 217–219 psychosexual foundation for a deeper psychoanalytic dimension, 224–228 signature, Job’s (taw‘e), 246 suffering of, 213, 214, 219, 226, 252n19 John, Jesus of, 174–177 Judaism martyrdom in, 93–104 vicarious atonement in, 101–103 katharsis, 131, 201 kenosis, 77, 299 kerdos, 121 kèsèph concept, 58 Kingdom of God, 146–147 kurgarru, 56

SUBJECT INDEX Land of Israel, see Israel, Land of Leg to Stand On, A, 259n64 ‘‘LEST I SIN’, 161–162 Lives of Jesus, three quests, 185–187 1953 (second quest), 186 by David Friedrich Strauss, 189 by Hermann Samuel Reimarus, 189 man’s true self in the writing of, 188–190 nineteenth century (first quest), 185 Van de Beek’s account, 187 Lost sheep, The, 148 Luke, Jesus of, 172–174 Man is Not Alone, 47 Man’s Quest for God, 47 Marginal Jew –Rethinking the Historical Jesus, A, 143, 187 Mark, Jesus of, 172 Martyrdom, 89–92, 306 and conception of Jesus, 90 definition of, 93–94 Hyam Maccoby on, 89–91 imminent approach of, 121–122 Jewish and Christian conception, 90 Jewish definitions of, 94–96 Judaic/Rabbinic conception, psychological meaning, 103 in Judaism, 93–104 martyrdom of Paul, 105–112; see also under Paul occasions for, 95 queries around, 90 sacrifice and suicide and, 100–101 status of the duty of martyrdom, 96–97 suicide and, 97–99 Tájrá on, 90–91 theological and psychological aspects, 93–104 universality in Christianity and Judaism, 99 vicarious atonement, 99–100 vicarious atonement in Judaism, 101–103 Martyrdom of St. Paul, The, 119 Masochism, religious, xiii, 90, 107–108, 234 Matthew, Jesus of, 170–172 on Jesus’ radicalism, 170 Mental disorders, 9–10, 16 religion and, 11–13 Mental suffering, 267 Messianism, 307 Avi Ravitzky’s contribution, 127 Peter Verhagen on, 130 theological and psychological aspects, 127–131 Metanarratives, 25

SUBJECT INDEX Metaphor, xii, 14, 43, 60, 136, 140, 147, 253n8, 273, 297, 306 God as seducer, 83n44 hasidic “seeing”, 48–49 impurity as sin, 144 Job vs. Jeremiah, metaphors compared, 226 land as mother, 82n23, 165 myth as metaphor, 221–222, 225–226 skin, oral, 210, 226, 236, 246 sotah vs. mother, 71 womb as tomb, 72 Midrash, 66 Mirroring concept, 232–235 binary identifications, 257n39 combinatory identifications, 257n39 developmental research on, 233 disturbing qualities of, 256–257n38 Ele¯‘hu’s intervention and the questioning of, 235–240 mirroring framework (Mahler & Winnicott), 256n35 primary identifications, 257n39 primordial identifications, 257n39 Moral conscious, 142–145 Moral treatment, 9 Moses, 13, 21, 27, 67, 80, 80n2, 81n2, 103, 148, 160, 170, 208, 210, 218, 236, 239, 254n19, 256n31, 256n33, 258n60, 260n65 and Job, link between, 228–232, 242–247 My Brother Paul, 284 Mystery, 298 Mysticism, 128 mystical adjective in Christian literature, 137 mystical illusions and constructions of autistic meanings, 269 religions and, 140 Myth, mythopoesis, 4, 24–25, 29, 46, 130, 146, 183, 190, 208, 210, 214, 232, 243, 248, 253n14, 254n19, 255n23 Biblical narratives as, 24–25 Job as, 219–222 methodological issues, 159–161, 219–222 Na‘h.em, 258n51; see also ne’hh.a‘mah Narratives, Biblical, as history, 21–33 Evans on, 4 literary value, 22–23 miracles and supernatural in, 31 as moral exemplars, 23–24 as myths, 24–25 story of Jesus, and the nature of faith, 27–30 value, if not tied to history, 22–25 value, if tied to history, 25–27

321 ‘Naturalistic positivism’, scientific psychology as, 288 Ne’h.a‘mah (consolation), 218, 241, 241, 247, 257n51–258n51 Neo-Assyrian prophets, 55 Neutralization, 157–160 New Testament, 21, 169, 179n1 Non-delusional disorders, 272 Non-psychological phenomenon, 140 Objective (the historical Jesus) and subjective (Jesus as moral example) split between, 130 Object-relational and cognitive schema-focused perspectives, in imagining Jesus, 196–198 Old Testament, 21, 33n1 Oppression, 97–98 ‘Orthodox’ theology, 196 Paradidómi, 199–200 Parresia, 120 Passions, 281 Pathos, 37, 72, 75, 78, 80, 298 divine pathos, mystical, pantheistic/dualistic background, 38 as a dynamic term, 43–44 emotions and, 45 Heschel’s notion of, 37 as a relational term, 44 separating biblical God and philosophical God, 44–45 Paul about God the Creator, 110 about spirit, 110–111 Paul, martyrdom of, see separate entry religious worldview, 111 on resurrection of Jesus, 110 Paul, martyrdom of, 105–112 Acts of the Apostles, 117 Acts 16, 19–21, 117 Acts 17, 5–9, 117 Acts 18, 12–17, 117 Acts 19, 23–41, 118 Acts 21, 27–29, 118 motives for accepting, 109 Paul’s suffering, facts, 106–107 attitude in his sufferings, 107–109 imprisonment, 106 religious framework, 109–112 St.Paul’s accusers and the indictment against him, 116–118 St. Paul’s final meditation, 121–122

322 St. Paul’s meditation on life and death, 118–121 aphobos, 120 spiritual, human, and psychological dimensions, 115–124 persecution and martyrdom of Christians, 115–116 Person of Jesus, 142, 169–181 and gospels of the New Testament, 169 Jesus of John, 174–177 Jesus of Luke, 172–174 Jesus of Mark, 172 Jesus of Matthew, 170–172 mental health, 136 psychology of, interest and limited possibility, 134–137 radicalism of, 170 resistance to groups, 173 status, 173 in the context of psychology, 169 vantage points, 127 Personality disorders, in Biblical theme, 270–271 personality pathology and images of God, 195–196 personal unconscious, 285 types, 281 Pesikta de-Rab Kahana, 6, 67, 74, 80 nn1, 83 n41 Pesikta Rabbati, 21, 26, 61, 69–73, 81nn7, 82n22, 83 n42 ‘place’ concept, 130, 159, 229, 244, 256n31, 258n60–259n60; see also under space Politeuma, 117 Principle of analogy, 30 Principle of correlation, 30 Principle of criticism, 30 Projective identification, 39, 66, 71, 199, 224, 300 Prophecy, 37–40, 269 of Jesus, 145–149 as a religious phenomenon, 53 in the writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, 41–50; see also under Heschel, Abraham Joshua Prophets biblical prophet, 145 concept, 53 ‘consecration’ of, 148 Jeremiah, depression and the character of, 58–62 Neo-Assyrian prophets, 55 as persons, 53–62 frenziness, 54–56 Martin Luther King-idea, 53 traditional idea, 53

SUBJECT INDEX Prophets, The, 37, 42, 47 shamanism, 57–58 Protestantism, 135 Psyche (also ‘nephesh’ ‘nishamah’), xiii, xiv, 17, 68, 76, 123, 124, 139, 149, 215, 223, 242, 273, 281, 288–291 Psychiatric evaluation of Jesus’ character, 188 Psychiatric Study of Jesus, The, 282 Psychiatry and psychotherapy, importance, 303–306 professional and the patient/client, interaction between, 304–306 clinical descriptive level, 304 existential (or anthropological) level, 304–305 level of causal hypotheses, 304 Psychoanalysis, applications of, xii, 16, 67, 135–136, 219, 224, 249–251, 254n13, 283, 286 Psychodynamic factors in biblical texts, analysis, 286 Psychological Aspects of Pauline Theology, 284 Psychological Biblical criticism, 211, 283–287 present and future research areas, 285 biblical portraits of personalities, analysis, 286 biblical psychology, 286 collective unconscious, 285 historical unconscious, 285 history of biblical effects, 287 personal unconscious, 285 psychodynamic factors in biblical texts, analysis, 286 psychological hermeneutics, 287–288 Rollins defining, 211 Psychological hermeneutics, 287–288 Psychology of the New Testament, The, 282 Psychopathology, 3, 14–15, 90, 133, 142–145, 191, 210–211, 267, 270, 274, 296, 305 Psychosis, 14, 142, 210, 242–244, 269–270, 274; see also under psychopathology Q (the unknown Quelle of these words), 179n3 Quest of the Historical Jesus, 186 Radicalism, 170–171 Reductionism, 39, 216, 253n10, 253n11, 274, 282, 298 Regem alium, 117 Religion biblical studies and, benefiting psychology, 287–290 boredom and, 10

SUBJECT INDEX mysticism and, 140 psychiatry and great divide, 9–11 Herman van Praag on, 3 for individuals, 12–13 meeting points between, 11–17 possible interactions between, 3 religion and mental health, 11–13 spirituality and, 11 Steve Evans on, 3 psychotherapy and, 16–17 religiosity, levels, 12 religious belief C.G. Jung interpretation, 139 religious consciousness Horowitz perception, 156 religious delusions with biblical content, 269–270 religious imagination, 201n1 religious individuals, depression in, 268–269 religious patient integrative psychotherapy and psychopharmacological treatment in, 275 Responsa, 155, 166n29 Rethinking the Historical Jesus, 147 Revelation, 12, 116 Rituals and sacrifice, 270 Sacrifice, martyrdom and distinction between, 100 Samaritans, 173, 180n4 Satan, n18, 28, 107–108, 115–116, 123, 124n6, 145, 222–223, 226–227, 232, 244, 251n3, 252n5, 254n15, 255n25, 260n65, 269, 271, 285 Schizophrenia, 269–270 having a mission, 270 hearing voices, 269 mystical illusions and constructions of autistic meanings, 269 prophecy, 269 rituals and sacrifice, 270 somatic sensations, 270 Scholar and the believer, 39–40 Science and religion, dissociation, in theology and psychiatry, 295–297 Science-religion split, attempts to overcome, 297–300 ambiguity, 298 ‘explosion of schemes’, 298 mystery, 298 Self-consciousness, of Jesus, 145–149 Sententiae, 121

323 Shamanism, 57–58 Shekhina, 46–47 Sin, 128, 142–145, 271 moral judgment and the confession of, 144 sin unto God moral-religious conversion from, 143 skin-veil concept, 259n61 Somatic sensations, 270 Sotah (unfaithful wife, analogy), 73–75; see also under Jeremiah Soul and Psyche: The Bible in Psychological Perspective, 284 Soulfulness, 17 Space, representational, 130, 153, 160, 220, 233, 235–238, 243, 299; see also uder ‘sacred’; ‘place’ Spendo, 121 Spirit concept, 289–290 Spirituality and religion, 11 Spiritual therapy, van Praag on, 6 Stress, 11–12, 16 Suffering, xiv–xv, 5, 22, 39, 59, 66, 72, 78–79, 82n26, 91, 94, 101–102, 104n1, 105, 109–112, 112n3, 116, 120, 143, 188, 197, 200, 252n7, 267–268, 270, 275–276 Sufferings of love, 102–103 Sufferings of Rabbi Judah, 101–102 Suicide, martyrdom and, 13, 90–94, 97–99, 100, 102–104, 175, 268–269 Symbolism anal, 225, 239 face (or gaze), 13, 24, 145, 219, 223, 229, 230, 231, 235, 242, 249, 256n34, 259n61 glory, 105, 110, 120, 160, 210, 228–231, 243, 269 oral, 209, 225–226, 231–232, 238–239, 242, 246, 255n26, 258n56 womb, 39, 61, 65, 69, 72, 80n2, 82n28, 82n29, 225, 226, 232, 239, 242 Symptom, 242–243, 258n54 System of Biblical Psychology, A, 280 Teleos, 144 Trial of St.Paul, The, 119 Uz, Land of, 208, 220, 244, 248, 254n19 Value-sensitive therapy, 274 Vicarious atonement in Judaism, 99–103 Weeds among the wheat, The, 148 Zoe (life), 120