A Thomistic Take on Madness and Modernism

Schizophrenia: a psychotic disorder characterized by loss of contact with environment and by disintegration of personality. [Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, 1970]

Schizophrenia is a horrible disease, one in which the victim loses contact with reality even in its most immediate form — that victim’s environment. The psychologist and polymath Louis A. Sass has proposed that the mental and emotional symptoms of schizophrenia bear eerie similarity to the styles of literature and art and thought in this modern era. [See Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature, and Thought, Harvard University Press, 1994.]

Modern art and literature and thought is, like schizophrenia, “characterized by loss of contact with environment.” Arguably, there is also a disintegration of personality in modern men and women who often try hard to be original and unique and interesting but those efforts fall flat, especially the efforts of those wretched adolescents that we worship as celebrities. We have lost contact with our environments, hence with reality, despite our delusions to being enlightened and open-minded creatures basking in the light of historical knowledge and other forms of disciplined empirical knowledge — science. Our enlightenment comes entirely from inside our minds, and especially from inside the minds of our false gurus, politicians and businessmen as well as philosophers and novelists and painters.

Modern art and literature and thought come from our engagement with our own thoughts and dreams as if they were some sort of higher reality which can be immediately deployed to understand and even judge what lies outside of us, without further perception of our environments or further development of our minds. We have lost contact with our environments. We don’t actively and honestly engage our environments, let alone the greater universe shown to us by modern physics and mathematics or the greater Creation shown to us by the Bible and Christian liturgy and prayer. Some Christian theologians and clergymen lessen the damage to their minds and the minds of their followers by holding to the revealed truth which is our Lord Jesus Christ, but then leave those minds stunted by inadequate formulations of that truth. They insist on adhering to ancient or Medieval statements of the revealed truth which rely on the no-longer plausible empirical knowledge and speculative knowledge of earlier centuries.

I’m returning to lines of thought which inspired some fiction writings after reading Professor Sass’s book circa 1996. Those lines of thought influenced all the novels and short stories I was writing at that time and since then, even when those novels dealt with human characters more sane than those who have formed the modern age — and we should remember that there have been many such sane inhabitants of the modern age and there are still many but those many have been overwhelmed and rendered nearly powerless by the self-deluded founders of modern culture and politics.

These old lines of thought are also new lines of thought because I’ve changed a lot over the past decade and my thinking has matured into an updated version of Thomistic Existentialism. I knew back then that we’re physical creatures being born, or still-born, in this phase of God’s Creation. Now I know more explicitly that our minds are shaped by our responses to our environments, to our universe, and to God’s world. To see God’s world as clearly as possible, we should ascend through an honest perception of first our environments, then the universe as seen by the best empirical knowledge of our age, and finally the revelations which are our Lord Jesus Christ.

This is, of course, an idealized schema presented to understand our relationship to God and His Creation. We should be exposing ourselves and our children to ‘God-thought’ well before any mature understanding of modern empirical knowledge is possible. That understanding will likely come for most only after modern culture, in its popular forms, is impregnated by that knowledge and, right now, modern culture only reflects a corrupted, science-fantasy view of physical science, a morally corrupted and utilitarian view of biological science, and a view of history and literature intended to justify the assumptions and presumptions of the modern mainstream.

Given those heavy qualifications, we should still try to ascend to God through the Almighty’s Creation, guided by the Lord’s direct revelations, most especially that perfection of revelation Who was our Lord Jesus Christ. At all stages of this ascent, we should be allowing those perceptions to shape our minds. The biological aspects of this process are discussed, in a partially veiled way, in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and in a way that will be more clear to modern readers in How Brains Make Up Their Minds by the brain-scientist and ‘Thomistic-pragmatist’ Walter J. Freeman. (See What is Mind?: Pragmatism and Thomistic Existentialism and other blog entries on that site with the major title: What is Mind?.) In retrospect, I can see that Louis Sass spoke much of well-developed minds by speaking of minds which failed to develop properly because they were the minds of human beings who failed to forthrightly engage their environments — because of medical problems or because of choices which deform their own minds and moral natures, even their physical selves when we see a physical human being in the context of his environment.

This developmental process begins with active perceptual engagements with what lies around us and continues with a openness to the order in those environments. That openness will lead to a corresponding shaping of our minds. Unfortunately, the process can go on when the baby is born into a perverse society which teaches him to close his mind to love or to emprical knowledge. Openness on the part of the baby will lead him to a state of closed-mindedness.

More interestingly, the process of forming a well-developed mind proceeds as a supplementary process to the major process of forming a human person, a biological creature who is subjected to a higher moral order — the peace of Christ. (See The Peace of Christ is Published.) In other words, he develops towards a Christ-like state of being and that process of development depends more upon participation in worship and prayer than upon ‘good intentions’ or ‘consciousness’ in moral decisions. That process of development is better seen as a slow journey to God, one step at a time, than as a sudden conversion based upon some conscious decision. Modern science would even indicate that some skeptics are right that revival-tent conversions are brought about by heightened hormone levels and irritated nervous systems and the conscious acceptance of salvation follows after the converted one is halfway up to the preacher’s dais. This sudden conversion is shakier than many would hope.

Brain-scientists have proven what Aquinas and some other pre-modern thinkers saw by general observation, what has been denied by the dominant thinkers of the modern world:

In modern terms, the conscious regions of our brain aren’t involved in our moral actions until those actions have already begun.

Freeman has speculated quite reasonably that those conscious regions of our brain, and the conscious aspects of our minds, have the power to censor or veto action as it is beginning. I would add, and perhaps Freeman meant to imply this, that our conscious selves can help direct our future development so that we act in particular ways in the future. Moral intentions precede conscious efforts but those conscious efforts can help shape our future intentions by changing our state of being which is the true foundation of our actions.

I think it’s obvious that practitioners of modern art and literature and thought share with schizophrenics (as well as those with schizoid personality disorders which are not schizophrenia but share some symptoms) the tendency to lead with the conscious parts of their minds and this is why they fail to engage physical reality. I think this is a different version of the claim of Sass that victims of schizophrenia aren’t mentally incompetent so much as they are mentally over-active. The entire world becomes just so many puzzles to be solved by a finite number of mental rules manipulating mental entities which have doubtful validity in the real world. Modern thinkers, artists, and writers are like schizophrenics in that they treat reality as no more than the source of information to be processed in their over-active, but usually shallow, minds.

It’s important to realize that schizophrenics are trapped in their disease while many modern men, at least those who have set the trends of modernism, have willfully chosen to turn inward, relying on their own dreams rather than letting their minds be formed by the reality around them. Schizophrenia is a brutal disease in which the brain’s physical activities are deeply disordered in certain ways. That it so closely resembles modern, rationalistic art, literature, and thought seems surprising.

But should we be surprised? Schizophrenics have some sort of neurochemical disorder that prevents them from engaging the world in a forthright way, the first step of shaping our minds properly — that is, shaping our minds in response to our environments first of all, then to the universe as described by the best of empirical knowledge, and then to the world which is the universe seen in light of the moral order which is the manifestation of God’s purposes for this phase of Creation. God’s purposes begin with the satisfaction of His own pleasure in Creation but that pleasure mostly comes from His telling a story in which the Son accepts death as an act of love for the Father and, secondarily, a story in which companions for the Son are born and shaped.

We should be frightened and embarrassed that our minds have been shaped by exposure to art and literature and thought which arises out of the delusions of men who really didn’t want to accept the reality around them, either the impoverished, but real, truth of the pagan’s Nature or the plenitude of the Christian’s Creation.

We are all schizophrenics now.

We all live inside ourselves, projecting our increasingly uniform delusions onto our environments. We decide what reality should be, and then make pitiful efforts to impose our delusions upon the reality of this phase of God’s Creation. A neurochemical imbalance in schizophrenics. A moral failing in modern men.

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