Scrupulosity in 17th- and 18th-Century Divines: An Illness or a Sin?
Derek McAllister, Ph.D. (c), Baylor University
Scrupulosity can be thought of as an obsessive guilt about religious or moral issues. It is reflective of an overly severe conscience, and is in this way similar to OCD. In recent psychiatric history, these have been difficult to distinguish and therefore to approach. For instance, one might think that while religious scrupulosity may respond somewhat to faith-based interventions, OCD is best treated as a clinical disorder. However, we can learn a lot by looking further back in history. Scrupulosity as a psychological and spiritual afflication receives significant attention and elaboration in the writings on religious melancholy by 17th- and 18th-century “divines” like Robert Burton, Bishop Jeremy Taylor, Bishop John Moore, and Richard Baxter.
In attempting to hold ourselves properly accountable to God, we are “zealous without knowledge, and too solicitous about that which is not necessary.” As Taylor describes it, a scruple is “a trouble where the trouble is over, a doubt when doubts are resolved.” The scrupulous are haunted by their wrongdoings, as if their peccadillos were grave offenses. Scrupulosity was thus understood as a cause of religious melancholy. For Burton, the author of Anatomy of Melancholy, religious melancholy cannot be reduced to pathology. While it certainly may manifest with psychological and somatic symptoms, religious melancholy is fundamentally analyzable in terms of loving God, our summum bonum. Instead of loving God properly as we ought, we are prone to fail in one of two ways: either excess or defect, a division which happily reflects two different kinds of religious melancholy.
Scrupulosity, in fact, plays a significant role in causing both kinds of religious melancholy. Curiously, however, one can be culpable for being too scrupulous. One recent anthology unapologetically gives to Taylor’s piece on scruples the anachronistic, clinical label, “obsessional neurosis.” But in reality, both Taylor and Baxter had included the problem of scrupulosity under Christian ethics and right Christian living. In that respect, to be scrupulous was seen as a problem of wrongful thinking, for which one could be held culpable, and not necessarily as a pathological illness of the mind.
At the same time, both Taylor and Baxter, as well as Rogers and Burton, all retained a view which regarded melancholy, in some form or another, as a disease. This suggests that our authors believed that mental illness and one’s culpability in it were not mutually exclusive. Almost paradoxically, Taylor writes, “It is a Religious melancholy,” he says, “when it appears to be a disease and a temptation.” By the conclusion of this paper, I aim to explore what it would look like, the present-day implications, if we take such a position seriously.
In attempting to hold ourselves properly accountable to God, we are “zealous without knowledge, and too solicitous about that which is not necessary.” As Taylor describes it, a scruple is “a trouble where the trouble is over, a doubt when doubts are resolved.” The scrupulous are haunted by their wrongdoings, as if their peccadillos were grave offenses. Scrupulosity was thus understood as a cause of religious melancholy. For Burton, the author of Anatomy of Melancholy, religious melancholy cannot be reduced to pathology. While it certainly may manifest with psychological and somatic symptoms, religious melancholy is fundamentally analyzable in terms of loving God, our summum bonum. Instead of loving God properly as we ought, we are prone to fail in one of two ways: either excess or defect, a division which happily reflects two different kinds of religious melancholy.
Scrupulosity, in fact, plays a significant role in causing both kinds of religious melancholy. Curiously, however, one can be culpable for being too scrupulous. One recent anthology unapologetically gives to Taylor’s piece on scruples the anachronistic, clinical label, “obsessional neurosis.” But in reality, both Taylor and Baxter had included the problem of scrupulosity under Christian ethics and right Christian living. In that respect, to be scrupulous was seen as a problem of wrongful thinking, for which one could be held culpable, and not necessarily as a pathological illness of the mind.
At the same time, both Taylor and Baxter, as well as Rogers and Burton, all retained a view which regarded melancholy, in some form or another, as a disease. This suggests that our authors believed that mental illness and one’s culpability in it were not mutually exclusive. Almost paradoxically, Taylor writes, “It is a Religious melancholy,” he says, “when it appears to be a disease and a temptation.” By the conclusion of this paper, I aim to explore what it would look like, the present-day implications, if we take such a position seriously.