God Behind the Screen

Literary Portraits of Personality Disorders and Religion

Janko Andrijasevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429795855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire religieuse

This interdisciplinary study of literary characters sheds light on the relatively under-studied phenomenon of religious psychopathy. God Behind the Screen: Literary Portrais of Religious Psychopathy identifies and rigorously examines protagonists in works from a variety of genres, written by authors such as Aldous Huxley, Jane Austin, Sinclair Lewis, and Steven King, who are both fervently religous and suffer from a range of disorders underneath the umbrella of psychopathy.

Part I
On Personality and Spirituality

1 The Levels of Personality – Corpus et Animam

The idea that personality is at the same time characterized by integration and multifacetedness is very familiar to all those who ever ventured into examining their own selves, which most of us have done in one way or another. On the one hand, humans have an implicit awareness that beneath the somatic – the only tangible aspect of personality – there is an extensive and unexplored universe that plunges down into multileveled depths of our inner worlds. On the other hand, unless all these diverse threads are integrated into a structure that leaves an impression of a more or less solid monolith, we are speaking of either immaturity or, in more serious cases, decomposition of personality.

The ontological layers of being and their harmonic or disharmonic dynamics can only be tackled by using abstract terms, for they are not locatable in a physical, biological, or even energetic sense, despite the fact that they do permeate all the aforementioned aspects of human existence. The component parts of personality can thus only be dealt with within the domain of experience, ideas, and intuitive knowledge, while the world of solid facts and hard core science is not the most adequate frame of reference here. This does not mean that the manifestations of personality feats and the consequences of behavior stemming from personal idiosyncrasies cannot be analyzed and measured using different methodological means. However, this book is not taking an approach that can be qualified as strictly scientific.

“The metaphor of levels or layers or strata [of personality] seems most natural.”¹ It is difficult to state how many inter-autonomous strata there are. The notion that most people are familiar with is the idea corpus et animam, which implies that we are composed of body and soul. The bodily level entails no serious dilemmas because it represents a proof in itself, being materially manifested in space and time. However, it cannot be claimed that some of its functional and regulatory aspects are still not a mystery. “Pages could be given to its wonders.”² The soul, on the other hand, is much more challenging to discuss, for its physical non-manifestation, the subtlety characterizing its acts, and the huge influence it has leaves the ratio eternally perplexed. The structure of the “soul” is the bone of contention we have been chewing on and fighting over for millennia.

The utterly reductionist understanding of human as a machine, i.e. a dimensionally depleted, mechanic/materialistic being, is a rather common “current conception, which prunes nature to almost its quantifiable components.”³ Still, even when seen as mere mechanisms, human beings are not denied the instinctual psychodynamism, however narrowly understood. The problem with materialistically oriented scientific approach lies in the fact that the psychological (nonmaterial) level of personality is considered “to be a part of the body,”⁴ a product or even a by-product of brain activity. For scientists of this orientation, conscious experiences are merely echoes of the biochemical processes in the brain, which narrows mental life down to the physical level. “Thus everything would be reduced to properties of matter.”⁵ According to other, more open and holistically oriented stances, the reality is diametrically opposite. Here the body is seen as a manifestation of the spirit, on which it entirely depends. It is impossible to offer concrete proof for either of these approaches. Huston Smith says that everything only “depends on [our] ontic sensitivity.”⁶

In some spiritual traditions, the way of life of an individual based predominantly on bodily needs is compared to that of nonhuman animals and is considered essentially subhuman. In Hinduism, there are four principles that characterize basic animal behavior, namely “eating, sleeping, defending and mating.”⁷ If the overall actions of an individual do not exceed the four mentioned principles, it is believed that this person, put very bluntly, leads an animal life. Higher potentials of the personality, primarily spiritual ones (believed to be implicit in every individual) remain dormant in such cases.

Returning for a moment to the materialistic/behavioral personality model, even when speaking of humans as computers, the existence of some kind of a software platform is not denied. So, even the most extreme reductionist interpretations mention the body on one side and a kind of a “soul” on the other. Let us now move on to the considerations of the nature of the “soul.”

The widely exploited term “soul” was used earlier in the roughest and broadest sense to denote that part of personality that is not identical with the body. It is the underpinning instigator of an individual life, and as soon as it separates from the body, we speak of death, i.e. of the negation of life. What is the nature of this constituent of personality, which components does it consist of, which laws is it bound to, what principles does it function by? These are some of the perennial questions that will remain largely unanswered. Still, each closer insight into the nature of the “soul,” however inconclusive, bears enormous significance for humanity, because knowledge about the soul is commensurate with progress and progressiveness, while ignorance about it engenders stagnation and degradation.

In spiritual traditions, soul is generally not seen as a homogenous antipode of the body. The qualitative heterogeneity of the soul may be illustrated by the etymological description of the mythical Hellenic term “psyche” – “‘the spirit or soul of man’ and also ‘the seat of the will, desires, and passions.’”⁸ Or more vividly, in the same mythology, “psyche” is also a butterfly that goes through various painful metamorphoses until it reaches the final “transcendent glory.”⁹ The soul contains different components defined in a different way from religion to religion, from philosophy to philosophy, from psychology to psychology. The Christian tradition inherits the model of “a human as a trinity made of spirit, soul, and body,”¹⁰ Hinduism endorses a similar concept of being, body, and Absolute Truth¹¹ (although this and other Far Eastern religions distinguish between several levels of identity), and other religions also offer their own configurations of the composite levels of the soul. Philosophers and psychologists suggest numerous models of multifaceted layers of personality, but delving into their similarities and differences would take us too far. This is why I choose to adopt the classification proposed by Viktor Frankl as a starting point and a guiding light in dealing with the tangled paths of inner life. I have great confidence in Frankl because he approached both religion and science in a pithy and undogmatic way, trying to correspond to the objective reality as much as possible. I have also largely drawn on the ideas of Huston Smith, which give a touch of additional precision to Frankl’s model. Finally, whenever we are dealing with the modern understanding of the phenomenon of personality, it is impossible to avoid the contribution of the great twentieth-century psychologists – Freud, Jung, Fromm, Allport, Horney, and others, even though their ideas are in this study oftentimes present only implicitly.

Frankl’s model of personality outlines the structure and dynamics of the main facets of human existence in a simplified, but functional manner. It combines two aspects of dimensional ontology: layers and strata.¹² Layers refer to the three basic levels of personality, very similar to the ones proposed by Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann: the somatic, the psychic, and the noetic. Strata regard three different degrees of consciousness, introduced into science by Freud: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The levels of personality are graphically presented as three concentric circles – the somatic level is on the outside, the psychic is between the somatic and the noetic, and the noetic, or the spiritual, is at the core. If we imagine a three-dimensional projection of these circles as a cylinder, that cylinder could be immersed into triple strata of consciousness. The core of our personality contains “the spiritual center that is encompassed by the peripheral somatic and psychic layers.”¹³ This core is like an axis; it extends “throughout the unconscious, preconscious, and conscious strata.”¹⁴ So, “any human phenomenon, whether belonging to the personal axis or to the somatic-psychic layers, may occur on any level: the unconscious, preconscious, or conscious.”¹⁵ Besides this, the levels of personality are hierarchically layered. The higher dimension is the one that contains the lower one and overarches it at the same time. “Thus biology is overarched by psychology, psychology by noölogy.”¹⁶

Let us now briefly dwell on the layers of personality named earlier. The somatic has already been noted, so more attention will be paid to the psychic and the noetic. Both belong to what we colloquially refer to as the “spirit” or the “soul,” but since there is an essential difference between them, they need to be discussed in more detail.

Frankl sees the psychic dimension as lower than the noetic one. It is a level significantly permeated by the conscious, and it cradles emotions, sensations, instincts, passions, desires, the intellect, urges, talents, social impressions, and the learned behavioral patterns.¹⁷ This region is governed by the forces of psychodynamism, which are frequently blind, but which possess the potential to be brought into the consciousness. Untamed and fragmented, these forces can lead one into chaos, but harmonized with the stronger and steadier forces originating from the noetic dimension (more profound and higher than the psychic one...