Seeing the Body: Noesis and Modern Medicine
Matthew Vest, MA, PhDc., Instructor, Associate Director of Graduate Education, Center for Bioethics, Ohio State University
Modern medicine increasingly rests upon an understanding of the body as an object or as property owned by autonomous individuals. According to Herve Juvin, such a body is a “new invention” in the twenty-first century that is focused not on a passage from birth to natality but rather on resisting needs, suffering, and the effects of time. Moreover, conditions of the body that once were deemed blessings (good health, long life) or natural sufferings of the body (disease, illness, deformity, dysfunction, etc.) are now seen respectively either as expectations (even rights) of health or as impingements upon the body that is ever-less subject to nature and destiny. The “primacy” of this new body means that life is managed, produced, consumed, and constructed through technology and medicines that are governed primarily through a “world of choice and the market.”
Moving beyond such a truncated understanding of the body within the relatively narrow sphere of a modern health marketplace, this paper seeks to uncover some of the thought and spirituality of the ancient Church Fathers that reveal strikingly different expectations of medicine and health. Why turn this direction? In one sense, turning to the Church Fathers stems from a core belief that a crisis in medicine is ultimately a spiritual crisis. In the Noetics of Nature, Bruce Folz has traced philosophical-theological “missteps” and “spiritual atrophy” that have contributed to “our ecologic crisis,” and we would do well to approach the body and the art of medicine on similar terms. Such a pattern of thought agrees with Marcel Gauchet that the disenchantment of the world begins when God no longer “presents” the world, and it becomes something “constituted.” “God having become Other to the world, the world now becomes Other to humans.” So, too, when the body is no longer a theanthropic place for divine indwelling, the body becomes mere materiality to be manipulated as desired.
Ironically, this disenchanted body as something “constituted” does not reduce modern medicine to a naïve materialism. As Bulgakov noted, “matter ceases to be just matter for us when the forces of nature serve our human ideas.” In other words, triumphs of technology and medicine should be viewed as nothing less than “the spiritualization of matter, the annihilation of matter considered simply as such.” All medical work with the material body hence should be seen as part of “the gradual spiritualization of matter.” The implication of Bulgakov’s position leads to an important distinction regarding Weber’s disenchantment; namely, any attempt to reduce the body to mere materiality without any intrinsic meaning inevitably enacts a rival spirituality or pseudo-religion. In short, medicine cannot escape religion and spirituality even when in the throws of secular disenchantment, and this is propaedeutic for approaching medicine as an art of seeing (theorein) the divine depths (logoi) of the body, of seeing the theanthropic body.
Modern medicine increasingly rests upon an understanding of the body as an object or as property owned by autonomous individuals. According to Herve Juvin, such a body is a “new invention” in the twenty-first century that is focused not on a passage from birth to natality but rather on resisting needs, suffering, and the effects of time. Moreover, conditions of the body that once were deemed blessings (good health, long life) or natural sufferings of the body (disease, illness, deformity, dysfunction, etc.) are now seen respectively either as expectations (even rights) of health or as impingements upon the body that is ever-less subject to nature and destiny. The “primacy” of this new body means that life is managed, produced, consumed, and constructed through technology and medicines that are governed primarily through a “world of choice and the market.”
Moving beyond such a truncated understanding of the body within the relatively narrow sphere of a modern health marketplace, this paper seeks to uncover some of the thought and spirituality of the ancient Church Fathers that reveal strikingly different expectations of medicine and health. Why turn this direction? In one sense, turning to the Church Fathers stems from a core belief that a crisis in medicine is ultimately a spiritual crisis. In the Noetics of Nature, Bruce Folz has traced philosophical-theological “missteps” and “spiritual atrophy” that have contributed to “our ecologic crisis,” and we would do well to approach the body and the art of medicine on similar terms. Such a pattern of thought agrees with Marcel Gauchet that the disenchantment of the world begins when God no longer “presents” the world, and it becomes something “constituted.” “God having become Other to the world, the world now becomes Other to humans.” So, too, when the body is no longer a theanthropic place for divine indwelling, the body becomes mere materiality to be manipulated as desired.
Ironically, this disenchanted body as something “constituted” does not reduce modern medicine to a naïve materialism. As Bulgakov noted, “matter ceases to be just matter for us when the forces of nature serve our human ideas.” In other words, triumphs of technology and medicine should be viewed as nothing less than “the spiritualization of matter, the annihilation of matter considered simply as such.” All medical work with the material body hence should be seen as part of “the gradual spiritualization of matter.” The implication of Bulgakov’s position leads to an important distinction regarding Weber’s disenchantment; namely, any attempt to reduce the body to mere materiality without any intrinsic meaning inevitably enacts a rival spirituality or pseudo-religion. In short, medicine cannot escape religion and spirituality even when in the throws of secular disenchantment, and this is propaedeutic for approaching medicine as an art of seeing (theorein) the divine depths (logoi) of the body, of seeing the theanthropic body.