From: hounddog23x@gmail.com   
      
   Hallucination, or Divine Revelation?    
   "Madness" used to be considered an affliction of the spirit--demonic   
   possessions, or Godly visions. Now it's treated as a medical issue. What does   
   this mean for contemporary believers?    
      
      
   Hieronymus Bosch / Wikimedia    
   2.7k 313        
   EMMA GREEN    
   JUN 5, 2015    
      
   What is the difference between a homeless man who claims to speak to God and a   
   saint who says the same? When I posed this question to Andrew Scull, the   
   author of the recent book Madness in Civilization: A Cultural History of   
   Insanity, he chuckled and    
   cited a quip by the philosopher Bertrand Russell: "From a scientific point of   
   view, we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees   
   heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes."    
      
   When Russell said it, it was an atheist's diss against mystical visions, and   
   against religion generally. Coming from Scull, it's more of an invitation to   
   explore the complicated relationship between religion and madness over   
   thousands of years of    
   cultural history. Scull argues that stories of the supernatural--often paired   
   with stories of madness--have long been a source of power for religious   
   organizations, proof of their authority to interpret the presence of the   
   divine--and evil--on earth.    
      
      
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   Over time, though, the relationship between religion and madness has become   
   more ambiguous. Science has transformed the way many modern believers and   
   religious institutions approach faith. For a long time, the influence of God   
   or Satan was a sufficient    
   explanation for all sorts of phenomena, from so-called possessions to the   
   kinds of visions supposedly experienced by Catherine of Siena or Teresa of   
   Avila. Now, those who decode visions and possessions are psychiatrists, not   
   priests, and explanations are    
   rooted in the individual mind, not the interference of God or the devil.    
      
   In the deserts of ancient Israel, a homeless man who was said to have visions   
   and perform miracles was revered by some as the son of God. Which leaves two   
   questions: How should claims of divine encounters be interpreted in the modern   
   world? And if a    
   homeless man on the street were actually the messiah, would he be recognized?    
      
   * * *    
      
   As it turns out, being a biblical prophet isn't a foolproof shield against   
   accusations of insanity. "If you look at the history of the Old Testament   
   prophets, the answer is hard to disentangle," Scull explained. "Many parts of   
   their lives are seen as mad    
   or possibly possessed, and only over time do some of them get reinterpreted as   
   inspired." Throughout biblical times, apparent mental disturbances were often   
   seen as divine punishments or demonic possessions. Rarely, they were   
   understood as heavenly    
   visions. But even this boundary was fluid. "Saul is seen at one point as   
   behaving like a prophet, then later on people see him as not entirely right in   
   the head, attributing that to God punishing him for not slaughtering everybody   
   when he was supposed to,   
   " Scull said.    
      
   Throughout biblical times, apparent mental disturbances were often seen as   
   divine punishments or demonic possessions.    
   One of the main points of Scull's book is that interpretations of madness have   
   changed dramatically over centuries and across cultures. It's unclear, for   
   example, whether manifestations of madness in ancient times would be   
   recognizable as mental illness    
   today. But Scull does offer a sort of common-sense definition of how instances   
   of madness have been identified over time: disruptive behavior, disturbed   
   perception, loss of speech, diminished emotional or rational control.   
   Especially in the early    
   centuries A.D., he writes, identifying and curing this kind of behavior helped   
   Christianity spread across the eastern Mediterranean and, eventually, the   
   Roman Empire. During this time, healings and exorcisms were a common   
   preliminary rite before baptisms.   
    Just as Jesus had demonstrated a power to cast out demons, so early Christian   
   leaders claimed to rid people of demonic possession--or lead them away from   
   sin, if their madness was seen as punishment from an angry God.    
      
   Divine visions were also an important part of how Christians proved their   
   spiritual authority and claimed to distinguish their religion from that of   
   pagans (although the legitimacy of the visions depended heavily on who was   
   having them, and who was    
   interpreting them). "The presence of miracles and saints was an important   
   calling card of Christians--that's the way they converted pagan Europe," Scull   
   said. Christian leaders collected and distributed the body parts of saints and   
   martyrs as relics and    
   urged laymen to pray to them for divine intercession. They believed certain   
   people who had divine visions could produce demonstrable miracles, including   
   ridding people of supposed possessions, and those powers were thought to   
   linger after their death. "   
   Typically, saints whose martyrdom had involved beheading or some damage to the   
   head--those were the saints who seemed to have particular power over mental   
   disturbance," Scull said.    
      
      
   In the Middle Ages, as medical practice began to develop, cases of madness   
   were often treated as both spiritual and physical. "Physicians conceded that   
   some cases of madness were really possessions, or things that belonged to   
   divine," Scull said. Those    
   cases might be referred to priests. But others, the doctors argued, "were   
   theirs, because they were rooted in the body, in the humors."    
      
   In Europe, things started to change in the 16th century. These were the first   
   days of the Scientific Revolution and the so-called Age of Reason, marked by   
   the rise of rational philosophy and scientific invention. The Catholic Church   
   was still an    
   incredibly powerful force in European culture, but it also wasn't the same   
   institution as 10 centuries prior. Powerful challenges to the Church's   
   authority had spread through Western Europe. During and following the   
   Protestant Reformation, accusations of    
   madness were often used as a form of political power, used to argue for the   
   legitimacy of one Christian denomination over another.    
      
   In the Middle Ages, "physicians conceded that some cases of madness were   
   really possessions, or things that belonged to divine."    
      
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