Medicine as Sacrament: Walker Percy on Illness, Wellness, and Theology
Ethan Schimmoeller, MD, MA, Memorial Family Medicine Residency, South Bend, IN
St. Basil the Great taught that the art of medicine was given to man by God not only for the relief of suffering, “to make up for what is lacking in [corporeal] nature,” but also to serve as an analogy for the cure of the soul. Medicine is a symbol uniting heaven and earth. Like an icon, it expresses and communicates higher layers of meaning, so, in a sense, medicine is a sacrament. However, modern techno-medicine has broken such cosmic coherence and fallen from its theological analogy into a meaningless idolatry. Burnt out physicians variably practice as technocrats or bureaucrats; patients vacillate between deep suspicion and unreasonable faith in their doctors; ethics and spirituality have been dually hollowed out. Medicine lies in the metaphysical ruins of scientific materialism, and easily falls prey to whatever passing ideology may instrumentalize it.
The American Catholic author and physician Walker Percy offered such a diagnosis in his dystopian novel Love in the Ruins, and sought to recover the theological analogy of medicine in late-modernity. The book’s protagonist, Dr. Thomas More, is described as a “bad Catholic at a time near the end of the world.” He is a psychiatrist - i.e. doctor of the soul - who claims a distant relation to St. Thomas More. He grapples with the human condition and yearns to offer his patients more than Prozac and behaviorism:
For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
The novel sends him to heal Western man’s soul with a spiritual stethoscope, the “Ontological Lapsometer.” The device is Percy’s literary portal to engage traditional categories within techno-medicine. It is the soul, capsized by modern moral and spiritual chaos, that ails us. Its illness has seemingly infected the core of medicine writ large. Through the lapsometer, he clearly re-establishes St. Basil’s analogy of medicine while illustrating the danger of pseudo-spiritual neuro-technologies. True healing moves from the ‘mythical monster‘ to the great anthropological coherence: embodied soul, ensouled body, a ‘lordly exile’ seeking a heavenly homeland. True healing flows from a Christian ethics of love, and this is accessible, in a sense, to doctor and patient alike one encounter at a time.
This paper will explore the relationship of medicine and theology in Walker Percy’s work. It will first examine, in particular, his rich sense of illness and wellness, and then further explore the potentialities for the analogy to regenerate medicine. The genius of the Lapsometer is not that it is technological - though it is - but that it is sacramental, re-uniting body and soul, heaven and earth, doctor and patient in Christian love. How might fMRI or Deep Brain Stimulation play into the converse? How can medicine be recovered as a sacrament? What is the proper relationship of this ‘natural sacrament’ to the Church’s Sacraments? How can illness and healing function as theological signs? Even in late-modern medicine, doctor and patient can meet as co-exiles who dialogically uncover the illnesses of their souls to find true healing, especially through a relationship of mutual charity. It is telling that Walker Percy found his faith while recovering from tuberculosis, and his characters found theirs while practicing medicine.
The American Catholic author and physician Walker Percy offered such a diagnosis in his dystopian novel Love in the Ruins, and sought to recover the theological analogy of medicine in late-modernity. The book’s protagonist, Dr. Thomas More, is described as a “bad Catholic at a time near the end of the world.” He is a psychiatrist - i.e. doctor of the soul - who claims a distant relation to St. Thomas More. He grapples with the human condition and yearns to offer his patients more than Prozac and behaviorism:
For the world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self and man pasted back together as mythical monster, half angel, half beast, but no man...Some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher.
The novel sends him to heal Western man’s soul with a spiritual stethoscope, the “Ontological Lapsometer.” The device is Percy’s literary portal to engage traditional categories within techno-medicine. It is the soul, capsized by modern moral and spiritual chaos, that ails us. Its illness has seemingly infected the core of medicine writ large. Through the lapsometer, he clearly re-establishes St. Basil’s analogy of medicine while illustrating the danger of pseudo-spiritual neuro-technologies. True healing moves from the ‘mythical monster‘ to the great anthropological coherence: embodied soul, ensouled body, a ‘lordly exile’ seeking a heavenly homeland. True healing flows from a Christian ethics of love, and this is accessible, in a sense, to doctor and patient alike one encounter at a time.
This paper will explore the relationship of medicine and theology in Walker Percy’s work. It will first examine, in particular, his rich sense of illness and wellness, and then further explore the potentialities for the analogy to regenerate medicine. The genius of the Lapsometer is not that it is technological - though it is - but that it is sacramental, re-uniting body and soul, heaven and earth, doctor and patient in Christian love. How might fMRI or Deep Brain Stimulation play into the converse? How can medicine be recovered as a sacrament? What is the proper relationship of this ‘natural sacrament’ to the Church’s Sacraments? How can illness and healing function as theological signs? Even in late-modern medicine, doctor and patient can meet as co-exiles who dialogically uncover the illnesses of their souls to find true healing, especially through a relationship of mutual charity. It is telling that Walker Percy found his faith while recovering from tuberculosis, and his characters found theirs while practicing medicine.