Mental illness and metaphysics

Mental illness is more common than ever in our society, and we have many institutions dedicated to treating it. We have psychiatric wards, outpatient clinics, and above all, pharmaceutical companies which provide the drugs which alter brain chemistry in various ways in order to allow the mentally ill to (sometimes) live a more normal life. The dominant view on mental illness is that it is caused by abnormalities in brain chemistry, and solutions are sought to address mental illness on this level. To be sure, this can be effective in many cases. A material cause is assumed, sought out, and a material solution is provided. But I must ask: is the material cause of an illness the only cause of the illness? It is the habit of human beings that when a cause which explains a phenomenon satisfactorily is found that no further explanation is deemed necessary. If the answer can be found in matter, then any explanation for an illness which may transcend materialism is simply discarded as unnecessary; the most obvious explanation has been found and suffices.

This tendency to select one explanation and to be satisfied by it is very human, but even in the material world, there is seldom just one cause for an occurance. Consider a pitcher on a mound in a baseball game who throws a curveball which is caught by the catcher. One may be asked: what is the cause of the ball being received by the catcher? One could say "The pitcher threw it" and leave it at that, but there are many causes for the pitcher having thrown it in the first place, and each one of those causes has its own set of causes, and what we find is that the pitcher throwing the ball is part of an interconnected web of causes made up of all things. It would be completely missing the bigger picture to say that the only reason the ball reached the catcher is because the pitcher threw it.

So if a mentally ill person has a "ball" called mental illness, it may be wise to ask: did someone or something throw that ball to them? One could say that the pitcher is a combination of hereditary factors, brain chemistry, and past behavior. But remember that the pitcher in the baseball game is the result of a nearly infinite combination of past causes, which begs the question: could the pitcher of material causes of mental illness being in the place to throw the ball of mental illness itself have metaphysical causes as well?

Some may scoff at the notion, but I must remind you that we live not in a world of cold, dead matter but a world with well documented cases of stigmata, saints with incorruptible corpses, and inexplicable cures to illnesses. These phenomena are well-documented, although there are those who would brush them aside and conceal them, and there are varying degrees of explanation as to why they occur. All metaphysical theorizing aside, there remains the fact that a metaphysical aspect to reality has made itself known in this world. If that be the case, then metaphysics can at the least be said to affect something in the infinite web of causation which would lead to any case of mental illness, albeit perhaps only as indirectly as something only distantly related to the actual manifestation of mental illness itself.

Cardinal Lozano Barragán of the Roman Catholic Church in an address on the World Day of the Sick said that "Therefore, once the mental illness has caused such a disorder as to take away from the mentally ill patient any responsibility for his actions -- qualifying them as separation from the divine will, as a sin -- the mental patient cannot separate from God."

If I bit of a fruit that was poison...

Foisted into the limitation of Original Sin
Surrounded by deception
Flesh that is corruptible
Laws are created which bid us to the Grave.

Created from nothing, the void created by God's omnipotence.
The nothingness which all limitation becomes in light of the power of God.
Is there not some purpose to being housed in this husk?
Is there not some reason to be confined among such Evil?

Are not the commands to take up one's cross,
a Father who chastises us to renounce the horror we are?
Does not suffering create for us,
the knowledge of Evil to bring us to Good?

Is not this world the opposite,
of everything that life desires?
Beasts desire food, but their food is hunger.
Beasts desire drink, but their drink is thirst.

Humans seek pleasure because they are not pleased
Humans seek excitement because they are restless.
A world of distractions which whittle us down,
A world of living death.

If I bit of a fruit which was poison,
would not my Father take me to be treated?
If I bit of a fruit which was evil,
would not my Father teach me not to do so?

Divine Illumination

Divine Illumination is an idea which has been abandoned by most thinkers as a viable source of cognition, and this is a shame, because Divine Illumination is the only theory of cognition which would allow noumena, or things-in-themselves, to be understood by the mind as they actually are.

In modern philosophy, the empiricism of Francis Bacon, Humean skepticism, and the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant were influential ideas, all of which in some way disallow the mind from seeing things as they actually are, either because knowledge is obtained via the senses, and the senses are imperfect (empiricism), all things are subject to doubt (skepticism), or because the mind cannot grasp noumena, but only appearances of things.

What is missing from these theories is that there may actually be a God, and if there is a God, then this God can reveal what things actually are to the mind. In that light, these philosophies which state that one cannot understand things as they actually are the products of either deliberately shunning God, or of God deliberately keeping the person in the dark.

Starting with St. Thomas Aquinas, philosophers started to emphasize the individual, limited intellect more than Divine Illumination, which was a theory not only espoused by St. Augustine, but also Platonist and Neo-Platonist philosophers. By modernity, Divine Illumination had been almost completely abandoned and replaced by various forms of naturalism, empiricism, skepticism, and other philosophies which create the idea in human beings that they cannot know reality as it actually is.

These modern inventions are for the most part something like a negative hubris, the product of human minds consumed by fear of the Divine and deceived by evil surreptitiously keeping themselves and deliberately keeping others in the dark about the true nature of things. Human beings believe that there are rules, limitations which keep themselves in the dark, and shun the light of God, who being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent can of course reveal and illuminate anything to any mind He desires.

It would be unwise to put limitations on human knowing; if God is involved in the process of human understanding, then there are no limits!

Angels Amidst Confusion

Released the EP Angels Amidst Confusion on Bandcamp yesterday, available for $4, or if you just want to listen to it online, for free. The cover art is a digitally manipulated distortion of a woodcut by Albrecht Durer, namely, The Four Angels Restraining the Winds from The Apocalypse.

The first three tracks are dark and explore the darkness of the human soul amidst the confusion of our age, and the last two tracks explore liberation from this confusion and Divine Illumination.