Corpore Mortis Huius: A Thomistic Grammar for Depression
Luke Olsen, MDiv (c), Duke Divinity School
Nearly one-in-five adults and one-in-four adolescents between the ages of 13-18 in the United States experience an anxiety or depression disorder.1 Depression reveals a confusion in our language at the convergence of theological and medical discourse and practice. It is an experience which troubles the easy distinction between theology and medicine, sin and pathology, health and holiness. In this way it complicates our understanding of pain and suffering. This friction in our language reveals a deeper uncertainty about what it means to be a healthy human person. Uncertainty is painful for the Christian person who finds herself scripted by two often competing narratives – of medicine and Christian theology – that both attempt to identify pathologies and offer salvation for her body and so, ostensibly, to relieve her pain. Counterintuitively, such scripting increases the suffering for this person who feels in her body something altogether inconsistent with the confident mechanisms of theology and medicine. This experience demands greater precision both from the Christian theologian and the medical practitioner who speaks to the depressed person about her body, pain, and health.
Thomas is an able partner for resourcing and developing a Christian language for depression and anxiety. Though he nowhere clearly addresses depression, Thomas describes the experience of a sub-rational force located in a person’s body which makes the person feel imprisoned. This paper considers Thomas’ commentary on Romans 7 and how it informs Christian reflection on original sin, human psychology, and mental illness. Of particular importance is Thomas’ discussion of how the person under grace may experience in her sensitive appetites such painful and strong passions that her intellect is in some way “held captive.” This discussion proceeds from a hylemorphic anthropology and so is not clearly reducible to biopsychosocial pathology or active sin. In this way it resists the Cartesian dualism and Baconian self-assurance which dominates medical discourse. In addition, Thomas’ nuanced psychology pressures the easy moralizing or avoidance that characterizes many theological discussions of mental illness. Instead it reveals resources for a grammar in which a medical-theological discourse about depression may be sustained without reduction or elision. I will conclude with ways a Thomistic grammar of depression may sustain more meaningful discussion, at the intersection of medicine and religion, about mental illness and the pain it produces.
1 “Facts & Statistics,” Anxiety and Depression Society of America, accessed April 27, 2018. https://adaa.org/about- adaa/press-room/facts-statistics.
Thomas is an able partner for resourcing and developing a Christian language for depression and anxiety. Though he nowhere clearly addresses depression, Thomas describes the experience of a sub-rational force located in a person’s body which makes the person feel imprisoned. This paper considers Thomas’ commentary on Romans 7 and how it informs Christian reflection on original sin, human psychology, and mental illness. Of particular importance is Thomas’ discussion of how the person under grace may experience in her sensitive appetites such painful and strong passions that her intellect is in some way “held captive.” This discussion proceeds from a hylemorphic anthropology and so is not clearly reducible to biopsychosocial pathology or active sin. In this way it resists the Cartesian dualism and Baconian self-assurance which dominates medical discourse. In addition, Thomas’ nuanced psychology pressures the easy moralizing or avoidance that characterizes many theological discussions of mental illness. Instead it reveals resources for a grammar in which a medical-theological discourse about depression may be sustained without reduction or elision. I will conclude with ways a Thomistic grammar of depression may sustain more meaningful discussion, at the intersection of medicine and religion, about mental illness and the pain it produces.
1 “Facts & Statistics,” Anxiety and Depression Society of America, accessed April 27, 2018. https://adaa.org/about- adaa/press-room/facts-statistics.