Important Question

10/31/2011

5 Comments

 
I hate to post on top of my own post, but I have an urgent question. I can't explain why it is urgent, but it is. If anyone has any information relevant to this question, please turn it over, honestly, without any hedging. The question: Have there been any well-known Christians, especially Catholics (like saints or popes or theologians or Doctors of the Church) who eventually went insane, á la Nietzsche at the end of his life? (I couldn't find an answer on Google.)
5 Comments
Adam F.
10/31/2011 11:50:42 am

Nietzche is quite the benchmark for insanity! I would hate to compare any respectable Christian philosopher or theologian to his final years (although Kierkegaard had a rough couple of years at the end of his life, for very different reasons than Nietzsche, as did Vico). Do you think it's even possible for a thinker to be respectable if 1) he/she is Christian and 2) he/she is insane (in a pejorative sense)? I suppose that would lead to the more fundamental question of whether, in judging a thinker, you can separate someone's philosophy from his/her lifestyle. I'm not sure you can. I'm not sure what to make of someone like Heidegger...

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Conor
11/2/2011 09:01:39 am

I just looked at the list of Church Doctors and I don't think any of them went insane at the end of their lives. Sorry I can't think of anyone who went insane.
Adam, I do think it is possible for a thinker to be respected if they fall into one or both of those categories. It is certainly true for artists who go insane, but maybe I'm being naive. As far as Heidegger, I came to the conclusion that I'm just encountering a book with Heidegger. That book tells me that Heidegger was a great thinker. As far as the Nazi stuff goes, no one really knows how much he knew about the Nazi party and when he knew it. A lot of people got behind Hitler not knowing how far he would take things and would probably have not gotten involved with the Nazi Party had they known. But that doesn't necessarily get Heidegger off the hook. Maybe he really did believe in the superiority of the Aryan race, but it doesn't matter to me. I read Heidegger for his philosophical views, not his political ones.

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Jack
11/3/2011 01:45:26 pm

Hey Joey,

Interesting question. It really makes one wonder if religious conviction is itself a form of insanity. To really answer this question we would need to define the way we think about sanity (easier said than done). I'm not even going to try here. So let's just think about it the way you said: in Nietzsche crazy terms.

If religious conviction is a form of insanity, then I would say all Catholics are at least a little bit insane, particularly saints. Sainthood seems to remove the possibility of insanity from their legacy. I can't think of any examples of people who went from being leading Christians to documented maniacs, but here a couple examples just to make you think.

St. Francis of Assisi once leaped into a bed of thorns because he had an impure thought. If I saw someone do that I would probably think they're nuts, but I suppose he had a reason.

There have also been saints who have lived entirely on the Holy Eucharist for long periods of time. That seems crazy to me, as I love food, but again it might not be insanity.

Some saints claim to have heard voices (Joan of Arc, for example). Were they really voices from heaven or was she schizophrenic? I believe they were real, but I could see people not agreeing with me.

As for popes, some of the Renaissance popes were totally sane by Machiavellian standards and bat-shit crazy by current pope standards.

So to make a long thingy shorter; maybe no Christians are insane. Maybe we all are. Who knows? But no, I can't think of anyone as obviously crazy as Nietzsche was when he died, the poor little fella.

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Joey
11/4/2011 08:40:04 am

All interesting thoughts. Thanks, guys. I guess I was trying to figure out if maybe religion is necessary to keep oneself sane, or at least whether it prevents one from going really insane like Nietzsche. I thought that if no Christian has ever gone bat-shit crazy, and someone like Nietzsche has, it might somehow provide evidence that Nietzsche's philosophy will inevitably drive one insane. But as Jack pointed out, religion can drive people to a lot of behaviors that look like insanity themselves. And I don't know that it's fair to Nietzsche to say that he went crazy because of his philosophical views. More likely it was just his syphilis. I don't know enough about his life to say.

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Adam F.
11/4/2011 01:46:51 pm

I think that we have to be very precise by what we means when we say 'insane'. The definition that I implicitly posited was, "insanity is the existence of a disconnect between one's thoughts and one's actions." But after reflecting on that definition, I think it's simplistic.

I agree with you, Jack, that there are no objective standards of sanity. What is one person's insanity is another person's sanity. As Climacus pointed out in Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments, Christian belief may be considered 'insane' or 'absurd' from a strictly rationalist perspective. But I think that we have to be very careful when interpreting what Kierkegaard meant there. Christianity is not, or at least should not, be considered 'absurd' from the perspective of the Christian. It is only for the person who has not received the 'condition' from God, whose reason has not yet been transformed through grace by recognizing its own limitations, that Christianity appears 'absurd'. Once the condition for Christian faith has been received, then one's reason is 'healed' from its own sinfulness, and the 'paradox' of Jesus' divinity that once seemed absurd no longer appears so. In fact, it seems absolute necessary insofar as it is part of God's plan for mankind. At least that's how I conceive of a Christian epistemology that does not delegate faith into the realm of the 'absurdity' or 'insanity'.

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