Possession or Insanity? Two Views from the Victorian Lunatic Asylum

Possession or Insanity?: Two Views from the Victorian Lunatic Asylum Anthony Ossa-Richardson Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 74, Number 4, October 2013, pp. 553-575 (Article) Published by University of Pennsylvania Press For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jhi/summary/v074/74.4.ossa-richardson.html Access provided by University of Notre Dame (16 Oct 2013 09:08 GMT) Possession or Insanity? Two Views from the Victorian Lunatic Asylum Anthony Ossa-Richardson During the Enlightenment, the widespread belief in demonic possession gradually gave way to the medical view of pathological insanity. This process was well underway in the seventeenth century, and the latter view was no longer a specialist position in the eighteenth. The physician Richard Mead, writing in 1749, denied the existence of possession, and prescribed medical treatment for the insane: blood-letting, emetics, purgatives and other drugs, diet, and exercise. He also prescribed a sort of psychological treatment: the doctor should, he said, ‘‘keep the patient’s mind employed in thoughts directly contrary to those which possessed it before.’’1 The old language of possession was still present, now as metaphor. Mead was unusual in his time for recommending a moral, as well as a physical approach; one may contrast, for instance, the purely physical treatment offered in Peter Shaw’s much-reprinted textbook, A New Practice of Physic.2 But by the end of the century, this moral treatment started to be introduced into lunatic hospitals in Italy, England, and France. The traditional hero of this movement was the French clinician, Philippe Pinel, celebrated across the Continent for his humane handling of the insane; he I would like to thank two anonymous referees of the Journal of the History of Ideas for their comments on earlier versions of this article. 1 Richard Mead, Medica sacra, sive, de morbis insignioribus qui in Bibliis memorantur commentarius (London: Brindley, 1749), 47–58, 57: ‘‘Et illud quidem ante omnia est agendum, ut mens cogitationibus iis, quae antea occupaverant, contrariis exerceatur.’’ 2 Peter Shaw, A New Practice of Physic (London: Osborn and Longman, 1728), 1:26–29. Copyright 䉷 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 74, Number 4 (October 2013) 553 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 reduced their restraints and abolished harsh physical treatments, advocating psychological approaches to the mitigation and cure of their conditions. In his landmark work of 1801, the Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale, Pinel dismisses demonic possession as past superstition— demoniacs, he says, citing Mead approvingly, were only ever maniacs.3 Legislation in 1808 and 1828 prompted county asylums to open across England, for the benefit of pauper lunatics. The first of these was the Middlesex County Asylum in Hanwell, west London, which opened in 1831. It was here, in the 1840s, that the physician John Conolly became famous for abolishing physical restraint entirely, attempting to rehabilitate and educate his patients instead of confining them. Conolly, too, was dismissive of any belief in possession, singling out Joseph Glanvill for censure in this regard.4 These developments have been much studied: Pinel and Conolly, the asylums, their doctors and patients, their social structure and effects, have all received attention.5 But one group has, to my knowledge, been almost entirely overlooked—the chaplains. As in Germany, these were problematic figures.6 The law demanded the presence of a chaplain at each asylum, and there was some discussion in medical journals as to their role in dealing with the mad. It was argued in certain quarters that chaplains were useless, as divinity had no good effect on the mad—indeed, they were in danger of stirring up religious enthusiasm among the more volatile patients.7 In 1855 the Asylum Journal recommended the appointment of chaplains ‘‘the warmth of whose religious feelings ranges below that of gentlemanly sentiment, good taste, and quiet decorum.’’8 3 Philippe Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale (Paris: Richard, 1801), 246. 4 John Conolly, An Inquiry concerning the Indications of Insanity (London: John Taylor, 1830), 416–17; cf. Pinel’s strictures on Johann Weyer, Traité médico-philosophique, 245–46. 5 Most usefully, for the English context, the work of Andrew Scull: Museums of Madness: The Social Organization of Insanity in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1979); Social Order / Mental Disorder: Anglo-American Psychiatry in Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 1989); and the essays in The Insanity of Place, The Place of Insanity: Essays in the History of Psychiatry (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006). For France, see Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and for Germany, Ann Goldberg, Sex, Religion, and the Making of Modern Madness: The Eberbach Asylum and German Society, 1815–1849 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 6 On German attitudes to asylum chaplains, see the brief discussion in Goldberg, Sex, Religion, 48–49. 7 An early example is the editorial in the London Medical Repository and Review, n.s. 3 (1826): 553. 8 ‘‘The Chaplaincy Question at the Belfast Asylum,’’ The Asylum Journal 4 (March 1855): 49–51, 50b. 554 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? On an intellectual level, asylum chaplains were caught in a bind from the start, since on the one hand they were religious figures, and on the other, ancillary to the medical establishment. How did they perceive madness—as a theological, or a scientific problem? In 1841 we read of one chaplain who exceeded the limits of his office and made ‘‘emphatic assurances to the melancholy and the mad that the devil was ever seeking to devour them . . . in the bottomless pit they would be bound with chains instead of cords’’; the visiting superintendent watched with horror.9 Much later, in 1893, the medical community would set out their own view of an ideal asylum chaplain, written in the mock-Tudor prose beloved of the late Victorians: The Good Chaplain regardeth it as a fundamental axiom that the false beliefs or the sense of spiritual desertion and the fear of impending damnation are the indications of physical disease, and neither the work of the devil nor the expression of Divine wrath . . . he hath learnt to regard the lunatic as the victim, not of demoniacal possession, but of a pathological state.10 The implication is that not all asylum chaplains, even in 1893, regarded lunacy as a problem of pathology. Nonetheless, already in the mid-century, many were keen to find some compromise. In 1854 James McKee, the chaplain at the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, contributed a long essay on madness to his asylum’s annual report. Here the relationship between theology and science is unclear: insanity is attributed to a disorder of the nervous system, and yet it is to be cured not by medicine, but by ‘‘moral and religious treatment’’—even by sympathetic conversation with the patient. The psychiatrist Sir John Charles Bucknill, an enthusiastic supporter of Conolly’s new methods, reviewed McKee’s report in print, and could find only an icy sarcasm with which to express himself: ‘‘We must excuse ourselves from the task of offering any criticisms upon the medical theories of the Rev. Mr. McKee.’’11 The chaplain, for Bucknill, had overstepped his remit as a man of religion. Despite this, demons were nowhere to be seen: McKee’s was a natural theology after Paley, to be integrated with physical science. Review of Nathaniel Bingham, Observations on the Religious Delusions of Insane Persons, in The British and Foreign Medical Review, ed. John Forbes, 12 (July–Oct 1841): 54–60, 57. 10 Journal of Mental Science, 166 (July 1893): 400. 11 John Charles Bucknill, ‘‘Annual Reports of County Lunatic Asylums and Hospitals of the Insane in England and Wales,’’ The Asylum Journal of Mental Science, 3 (1857): 464–500, 492. 9 555 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 McKee was not the only asylum chaplain to publish his thoughts on insanity. In the latter half of 1855 a quiet debate took place in the pages of the Journal of Psychological Medicine, on the nature of insanity and its relation to demoniac possession. It rehearsed old arguments, bringing them from the works of the learned elite into the ambit of the professional man. Behind the polite scholarly disagreement of two chaplains in quarterly print lay the intellectual revolutions of a century: and these came not only from medical science or psychology, but also from theology and biblical criticism. In this article I seek to explain how evolving theories of hermeneutics, brought from England to Germany and back again, came to harmonize with, and so in theological circles support, new medical conceptions of madness. For this process to extend to the working clergy, the idea of the demonic had to be refashioned, even if it could not be eradicated. The July 1, 1855 issue of the Journal carried an article by Joseph Souter, the chaplain at the Essex County Asylum in Brentwood, entitled, ‘‘Does Any Analogy Exist between Insanity and Demoniacal Possession?’’12 In his first paragraph Souter broached a dispute between occultists, who claimed that insanity was the result of demonic possession, and others, who argued that possession, now as in ancient times, had only ever been, in fact, insanity. Both sides accepted the analogy or similarity between insanity and possession. To collapse one cause onto another, you must first assume the identity of the effect—and it is this identity which Souter sets himself to defend. But no sooner has he taken his first step, than he changes the question, remarking that: At the very threshold of this inquiry, it is of great importance that we should endeavour to ascertain whether the Evangelists make any special distinction between lunatics and demoniacs.13 It is this problem, that of the New Testament, which occupies him for the remainder of his article. Printed in the Journal of Psychological Medicine was an article about textual hermeneutics; here, in 1855, we have a relic of the old Christian humanist attitude to natural science—that it can be aided by the proper interpretation of ancient texts, in this case the Scriptures. This shift in focus was noticed by a fellow asylum chaplain, John May. 12 Joseph Souter, ‘‘Does any Analogy Exist between Insanity and Demoniacal Possession?’’ The Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 8 (1855), 391–400. 13 Ibid., 391. 556 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? May had been John Conolly’s right-hand man at Hanwell in the 1840s, helping to establish a school for the asylum patients;14 in 1855 he was still there, though the school had closed, and Conolly departed. May replied to Souter’s article in the subsequent October issue of the Journal. With Souter, he turned first to textual arguments, admitting that ‘‘These remarks belong rather to Hermeneutics than Psychology.’’15 We shall return to May’s own position in a moment, but it is worth noticing the conscious decision of both chaplains to ground their analysis of physical phenomena in the interpretation of Scripture, even if their methods of interpretation differed radically. Souter argued that the Evangelists made no ‘‘special distinction,’’ as he put it, between madmen and demoniacs. One of his reasons is a broader statement of textual plausibility. Christ, we know, healed the blind, the lame, and other sick men. There must also have been madmen at the time, and they must have been brought to him; he must have cured them, and this must have been thought worthy of recording in the Gospels. But we only ever hear of demoniacs, ones whose symptoms correspond closely to those of presentday maniacs and epileptics. These demoniacs, then, must indeed be the madmen whose presence we so readily expect. As Souter puts it: If the demoniac laboured under an affliction totally different from any mere mal-organization or lesion of the brain, how, then, is the omission of any miraculous cure of insanity from all the gospel histories to be explained?16 There were, as usual, apparent anomalies in the text to be solved. Whichever position you took, on any given point in the Bible, there were always troubling bits you had to explain away: the Scriptures have never given the dogmatist an easy time of it. For Souter’s position, one difficult verse was Matthew 4:24, which said that both δαιμονιζμενοι (demoniacs) and σεληνιαζμενοι (lunatics) were brought to Christ. If those two groups were the same, we should not expect them to be listed separately. But, Souter asks, what does the word σεληνιαζμενοι really mean? In Matthew 17, another ‘‘lunatic’’ is shown to have the symptoms of epilepsy—seizures and fits of fainting. But Jesus is then said to cast a demon out of him. The ‘‘lunatic,’’ John Conolly, Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints, ed. Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine (Folkestone and London: Dawsons, 1973), 276. 15 John May, ‘‘Insanity and Demoniacal Possession,’’ The Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, 8 (1855): 483–93, 484. 16 Souter, ‘‘Does any Analogy,’’ 393. 14 557 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 reasons Souter, is one kind of demoniac—one with epilepsy. All the lunatics and maniacs of the New Testament, he concludes, are identified as ‘‘demoniacs.’’17 Now, if demoniacs in the Bible are no more than madmen and epileptics, should we not conclude that there was never any such thing as demonic possession? Souter thinks we should. But he needs to account for the Evangelists’ use of the word daimonion and its derivatives. ‘‘What they believed,’’ he asserts, ‘‘and what they meant their readers to believe, was this, that all evil, especially such evil as affected the spirits and minds of men, was the work of the devil.’’ Insanity, the affliction of the mind, like diseases of the body, is ‘‘the effect of that sin which the devil tempted man to commit, and still tempts him to perpetuate.’’ Daimonia, then, are not individual beings, but ‘‘evil influences proceeding from the Prince of Evil.’’18 This was wholly compatible with the language of the New Testament, if taken idiomatically. And where the Devil spread darkness in the human mind, so Christ spread light; in this respect he set an example for all those ‘‘whose lives and talents are devoted to the study of this painful disease’’—that is, for the doctors, and indeed also the chaplains, undertaking the new moral treatment in the asylums.19 In this respect, demons, formerly the proximate instigators of insanity by possession, have been reduced to the mere influences of a remote Devil. They have become indistinguishable from, and coterminous with, the physical or medical causes of insanity. Souter’s critic, John May, rejected his reading of the New Testament. May does not, in fact, deny that the demoniacs of the Bible were mad or epileptic; what he denies is that these figures were thereby not possessed. Their madness, rather, was an effect of their possession. He provides a neat summary of Souter’s reasoning: ‘‘So and So were demoniacs; but So and So were lunatics; therefore it is concluded, all demoniacs were lunatics.’’20 The weakness of this argument is self-evident. What Souter has done is to assume that his modern categories—natural madness and epilepsy—can be extended back to the time of Christ. To defend this assumption, he has had to portray the Evangelists as accommodating their language to the people of ancient Judaea: they spoke of direct and literal demonic possession, so as to make themselves understood, when all they really meant was the remote influence of the Devil. But, May argues, to take the Bible seriously as an account of that period, we must be prepared to read it literally: Ibid., 392–93. Ibid., 397–98. 19 Ibid., 400. 20 May, ‘‘Insanity,’’ 484. 17 18 558 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? If plain prosaic statements are not to be construed literally, it is manifestly impossible that we should ever arrive at the truth, and the object of revelation is nullified.21 Again, he says, ‘‘if language has any fixed meaning,’’ then the demoniacs of the New Testament must have been genuinely possessed.22 May answers many of Souter’s specific textual readings, and adduces new problem passages. For instance, according to James 2.19, τ δαιμνια ‘‘believe and tremble’’; nobody could translate the Greek here as ‘‘influences.’’23 Furthermore, the demoniacs exhibit a ‘‘supernatural acquaintance with the person of Christ,’’ which cannot be explained by natural insanity. From a literal reading of the Scriptures, the chaplain declares himself ‘‘bound to believe that evil spirits actually possessed men about the time our Lord was upon earth.’’24 According to May, possession in the New Testament was an extraordinary Satanic influence, that is, an influence on particular individuals beyond the usual run of things in the world. It was banished after the apostolic period; now there existed only an ordinary, remote temptation. This was the Devil as a mere principle of evil, ultimately behind all human sin and malice, but unable to interfere directly in the physical world. We are remarkably close to the ‘‘evil influences’’ postulated by Souter. Although they disagreed about the existence of possession in the Bible, the two chaplains concurred about the limits of Satan’s power in the modern world. For both, demons could not now be seen and experienced; the category of the demonic, then, could not be experiential, as it had been in early modernity.25 It was not a matter of psychology, the study of minds or souls, but of hermeneutics, scriptural interpretation. The Bible had long been used as crucial testimony or authority for the existence of demons, but it was now privileged as the sole source of reliable information on something no longer a reality. And whether one affirmed or denied ancient possession turned entirely on a hermeneutic problem: that of accommodation—the claim that biblical language was not a timeless expression of divine truth, but conditioned by the beliefs of first-century Judaea. To be accepted, that language had to be read historically, not literally. Ibid. Ibid., 487. 23 Ibid. The text mistakenly reads ‘‘St James (iii.19).’’ 24 Ibid., 488–89. 25 See, for instance, Girolamo Cardano, De rerum varietate (Basel: Heinrich Peter, 1557), 648–49. 21 22 559 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 This claim had the potential to upset everything held dear to Christianity, and especially to Protestants. As May put it, and he was not alone, it was impossible to understand the New Testament demoniacs as simply insane, ‘‘except by upturning at the same time the whole fabric of Christian truth.’’26 Behind the 1855 episode lay a century of theological squabbling. May was quick to point out the implications of Souter’s position, classing him with the ‘‘rationalistic writers,’’ and even with ‘‘the former and worse division of that school, who make the language of the Evangelists to mean anything they wish, or nothing at all.’’27 Likewise, a critic signing himself only ‘‘M. A.’’ commented in the Asylum Journal of Mental Science that ‘‘Mr Souter held opinions in common with Socinians of the present day,’’ and that ‘‘the denial of the doctrine of the demoniacal possessions of the New Testament was the foundation of German rationalism.’’28 The latter claim probably refers to the work of the German theologian Johann Salomo Semler.29 Semler, an accomplished and well-respected figure at Halle, was notorious for ascribing the supposed demonic possessions of the New Testament to madness, that is, to a purely pathological condition, with nothing of the supernatural, an argument he made in a series of pamphlets and treatises from 1760 onwards.30 He was not original in this respect (see Fig. 1 on p. 574). On the first page of his Commentatio de daemoniacis quorum in N. T. fit mentio, he acknowledged his debt to May, ‘‘Insanity,’’ 488–89; cf., for instance, Richard Chenevix Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord (below, n. 62), 152. 27 Ibid., 483. 28 M. A., ‘‘Insanity and Demoniacal Possession,’’ The Asylum Journal of Mental Science, 3 (1857): 247–53, 247. Cf. Amand Saintes, Histoire critique du rationalisme en Allemagne (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1841), 127–28. 29 Dietrich Ritschl, ‘‘Johann Salomo Semler: The Rise of the Historical-Critical Method in Eighteenth-Century Theology on the Continent,’’ in Introduction to Modernity: A Symposium on Eighteenth-Century Thought, ed. Robert Mollenauer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1963), 107–33, esp. 121–33; Jeannine Blackwell, ‘‘Controlling the Demonic: Johann Salomo Semler and the Possession of Anna Elisabeth Lohmann (1759),’’ in Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany, ed. W. Daniel Wilson and Robert C. Holub (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 425–42; and H. C. Erik Midelfort, Exorcism and Enlightenment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 87– 94. For a good general overview of Semler’s ideas see Gottfried Hornig, Johann Salomo Semler: Studien zu Leben und Werk des Hallenser Aufklärungstheologen (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996). 30 The two principal works are the Commentatio de daemoniacis quorum in N. T. fit mentio, first published in 1760, and the Umständliche Untersuchung der dämonischen Leute oder so genanten Besessenen of 1662. See Midelfort, Exorcism, 178, n. 8 for the publication history. 26 560 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? Arthur Ashley Sykes, an English clergyman with Arian sympathies, who had written a detailed defense of the insanity thesis, under a quasipseudonym, in 1737. Semler also acknowledged Mead and other Englishmen before him, as well as helping to edit and translate key English works on the problem in the following decade; perhaps the most important of these translations was a 1775 treatise by the dissenting minister Hugh Farmer, a work which itself drew on Semler, and which remained standard among English rationalists into the nineteenth century.31 Over in England the issue of New Testament possession was already a considerable controversy before Semler, and remained so after him.32 It had its origins in the work of Reginald Scot, a Kentish landowner of the late sixteenth century, who, against Jean Bodin, and expanding on the work of Johann Weyer, had dismissed witchcraft and sorcery as a sham in a revolutionary treatise of 1583. Among Scot’s sources, the Italian natural philosophers Pietro Pomponazzi and Girolamo Cardano had expressed a skepticism about the modern reality of magic and possession. But Scot went further, turning his attention to the phenomena described in the Bible: As touching those that are said in the Gospell to be possessed of spirits, it seemeth in manie places that it is indifferent, or all one, to saie; He is possessed with a divell; or, He is lunatike or phrentike: which disease in these daies is said to proceed of melancholie. But if everie one that now is lunatike, be possessed with a real divell; then might it be thought, that divels are to be thrust out of men by medicines.33 This is the earliest claim, to my knowledge, that the Gospel demoniacs were only madmen, and that demons were just an ancient way of describing disease. Scot would rarely be cited by later authors, but a number of works in the mid-seventeenth century repeated his ideas, and one of these, John Webster’s The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, was translated into German by the jurist Christian Thomasius in 1719. Thomasius also supported the work of the radical Dutch critic Balthasar Bekker, infamous for denying See Midelfort, Exorcism, 180–81, n. 17 on Semler’s engagement with contemporary English works. 32 See now H. C. Erik Midelfort, ‘‘The Gadarene Demoniac in the English Enlightenment,’’ in A Linking of Heaven and Earth: Studies in Religious and Cultural History in Honor of Carlos M. N. Eire, ed. Emily Michelson et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 49–66. 33 Reginald Scot, ‘‘A Discourse Concerning Devils and Spirits,’’ in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London, 1584), 512. 31 561 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 the existence of the Devil, and along with these we may mention other German rationalists of the eighteenth century, such as the textual scholar Johann Jakob Wettstein, and free-thinking polymath Hermann Samuel Reimarus. All of these figures had argued before Semler that the demoniacs of the New Testament were only the victims of madness or epilepsy. Nonetheless, it was following Semler that this view and other aspects of biblical rationalism would become accepted in German theology faculties. His most famous student, Friedrich Schleiermacher, marked the culmination of this discourse, and the first moment of its evolution into something else. Semler’s immediate predecessor, Arthur Sykes, had made explicit his principles of scriptural interpretation: ‘‘we are not to regard the Letter, but the real and exact Meaning of the Sacred Writers.’’34 The meaning is thus radically separated from the words used to express it: the spirit distinct from the letter. This was the essence of the principle of scriptural accommodation, and it lay behind all rationalist denials of possession. As Semler put it, ‘‘This question of demoniacs is, insofar as it pertains to us today, a hermeneutic problem.’’35 The word ‘‘demoniac’’ (or ‘‘demon’’), he explained, is a historical expression, which gives rise to a traditional opinion. . . . If it was the popular custom to speak in this way, then it follows that the Evangelists, who wrote for the benefit of other men, preserved the custom of this way of speaking, so that the grandeur of [Christ’s] miracles could better be understood by the others.36 For Sykes, likewise, the Evangelists tailored their language to the common beliefs of their contemporaries, and so did Christ himself. Of all the objections he anticipates to his view of possession, the most troubling concerns Christ: Why would Jesus countenance such a Notion as this, if there were really no such things as Demons, nor Persons possessed by them? Why would he not rid Men of such pernicious Opinions, and 34 [Arthur Ashley Sykes], An Enquiry into the Meaning of Demoniacks in the New Testament (London: Roberts, 1737), 70 35 Johann Salomo Semler, Commentatio de daemoniacis quorum in N. T. fit mentio, editio auctior (Halle, 1769), 59: ‘‘Quaestio haec de daemoniacis, est, quod ad nos hodie attinet, problema hermeneuticum.’’ 36 Semler, Commentatio, 29: ‘‘Est phrasis historica, quae opinionem per manus traditum prodit. . . . Si fuit vulgata ita loquendi consuetudo: sequitur, ut Evangelistae, qui hominum aliorum eius temporis . . . hanc loquendi consuetudinem servaverint, ut ab hominibus miraculorum [sc. Christi] magnitudo eo magis cognosceretur.’’ 562 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? plainly tell them, that these Possessions were nothing else but Lunacy or Epilepsy, or whatever other Name the Disorder had?37 Sykes’s answer to this would become a standard crux in the dispute, widely repeated, and widely attacked: it was Christ’s purpose to heal, and to spread the glory of God, not to educate the people on scientific matters inessential to their salvation. Christ used the people’s own conceptual language, because correcting their superstitions was alien to his purpose.38 A later German rationalist, Heinrich Paulus, even suggested that Christ had deliberately used the language of possession to humor the lunatic and assist his cure.39 Hermeneutics, by this logic, had direct implications not only for humanist projects, but even for medical practice. Sykes’s claim proved unacceptable to the orthodox theologians who opposed him and his successors. His first critic, Leonard Twells, agreed that Scripture was not intended to correct popular misconceptions on scientific issues, but denied that the existence of demons fit into the latter category. Since men’s views about demons and other points of theology came purely from the Bible, if that were incorrect, they would have no means of attaining the truth. Moreover, it would be ‘‘unbecoming in character’’ for Christ to feign the existence of possessing spirits. Since there is nothing in the biblical text to suggest a metaphor, we must take it at face value: the possessions by evil spirits were real.40 Twells and those like him were not blind dogmatists, and many of their arguments are highly convincing; indeed, the same arguments would later be deployed by David Friedrich Strauss in his brilliant 1835 critique of the Gospels. For instance, Twells observes that Christ used the language of demonology in private, away from the superstitious demoniacs, indicating genuine belief—a point which Strauss turns against Paulus.41 Schleiermacher himself discussed the subject briefly in his 1832 lectures on the life of Jesus.42 He agreed that Christ had no obligation to rectify the [Sykes], An Enquiry, 76–77. Ibid., 77–78. 39 Heinrich Paulus, Exegetisches Handbuch über die drei ersten Evangelien (Heidelberg: Winter, 1830–33), 1:475. 40 Leonard Twells, An Answer to the Enquiry into the Meaning of Demoniacks in the New Testament (London: R. Gosling, 1737), 59–66. 41 Ibid., 66; David Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: Osiander, 1835–36), 2:7. 42 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Das Leben Jesu, ed. R. M. Rütenik (Berlin: Reimer, 1864), 332–44 (Stunden 46–48). The Gospel demoniacs are also treated in two of his sermons, on which see Dawn DeVries, Jesus Christ in the Preaching of Calvin and Schleiermacher (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), 80–82. 37 38 563 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 superstitions of those he cured, and that the Greek belief in daemones, and the Hebrew belief in Satan, counted among these superstitions. The existence of the Devil was untenable, because it led inevitably to Manichaeism, and so undermined God’s omnipotence. Schleiermacher also pointed to the dispute with the Pharisees at Mark 3:23–30, where Christ showed the incoherence of his opponents’ representation of his healing as the work of Satan. Whether the possessed were only mad was a matter not for theologians but for scientists: it was ‘‘ein naturwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand.’’43 By the early nineteenth century, the debate had long become stereotyped; it could be endlessly repeated with little innovation. We see this, for instance, in William Carlisle’s 1825 broadside against the Unitarian minister Nicholas Heineken, and the latter’s reply.44 If there is novelty to be found, it is in the degree of permissible boldness: For Sykes and Farmer, it had been imperative to deny that Christ had ‘‘intended to assert the reality of demoniacal possession’’;45 but Heineken, though he denied it later, seemed to suggest that Christ, as a human being, might actually be ignorant of the scientific truth on the matter. Paulus had hinted at a similar view, and on this point Strauss agreed.46 By the early nineteenth century, the rationalist position on demoniacs and other mysteries of the New Testament was accepted throughout the theological faculties of German universities. Reactions against this school proliferated in the 1820s, and among the most important of those who rejected simple rationalism were a group of Schleiermacher’s students influenced by the revival of Pietism.47 On the New Testament demoniacs, the most significant figures in this movement were Johann August Neander (1789–1850) at Berlin, and his student and colleague Hermann Olshausen (1796–1839) at Königsberg and then Erlangen.48 Their ideas on the nature of diabolic influence formed the basis for the positions of both Souter and May. Ibid., 335. William Carlisle, An Essay on Evil Spirits (London: Carlisle, 1825); Nicholas Heineken, A Discourse on the Supposed Existence of an Evil Spirit (London: Heineken, 1825), with the text of the sermon which Carlisle had attacked, 1–18, and his response, ‘‘A Reply,’’ 19–139. 45 Hugh Farmer, An Essay on the Demoniacs of the New Testament (London: Robinson, 1775), 315. 46 Heineken, Discourse, 4; Carlisle, Essay, 88–89; Heineken, ‘‘A Reply,’’ in Discourse, 63. Heinrich Paulus, Philologisch-kritischer und historischer Kommentar über das neue Testament (Lübeck: J. F. Bohn, 1800–1804), 1:366; Strauss, Leben Jesu, 2:9–10. 47 Robert Bigler, The Politics of German Protestantism: The Rise of the Protestant Church Elite in Prussia, 1815–1848 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 76–124. 48 Potted biographies can be found in Philip Schaff, Germany: Its Universities, Theology 43 44 564 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? Neander wrote about possession both in his masterpiece, the Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche (vol. 1, 1825), and more fully in his later Leben Jesu (1837), rushed out in response to Strauss. The Geschichte deals not with Christ himself, but with the apostolic ministry; Neander contrasts the approaches to cases of supposed possession by Jews and heathens, on the one hand, and by Christians on the other.49 The former claimed to exorcise spirits by amulets, incense, invocations, and so forth— but these could have only a temporary efficacy, for they mistook the real cause and operated on the patient’s imagination alone. Possession by evil spirits was the received opinion of the time, and so, even though it was false, the apostles had to accommodate their language to it, ‘‘in order to be able to reach men’s hearts and minds.’’50 Thus far, Neander agreed with Schleiermacher. But he was not so willing as his elder to dispense with the Devil. The sickness of the demoniac, he concurred, came from within, but it was prompted by the operation of an external evil; in the Geschichte this evil is variously identified as ‘‘Alle Macht des Ungöttlichen, des Zerstörenden,’’ ‘‘die Macht des Bösen,’’ ‘‘der Fürst dieser Welt,’’ and ‘‘der böse Geist.’’ In the Leben Jesu, meanwhile, Neander explicitly rejects Schleiermacher’s denial of the Devil: Christ, he reasons, does nothing to dispel the Jews’ belief in Satan, and he would have done if it were untrue, for the matter is of moral importance to Christian doctrine.51 More importantly, Neander insists on a close connection between sickness—both physical and psychical—and sin. Schleiermacher had denied the demoniacs any moral culpability: ‘‘Men in this condition,’’ he said, ‘‘can essentially perform no spiritual activity and are not responsible for their conditions.’’52 But for Neander, sin is the root cause of all illness, a view elaborated in immediate preface to the analysis of possession in his Leben and Religion (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1857), 261–77 on Neander, and 295–99 on Olshausen. 49 Johann August Neander, Allgemeine Geschichte der christlichen Religion und Kirche (Hamburg, 1825–52), 1:97–100. 50 Neander, Allgemeine Geschichte, 96–97: ‘‘Es sollte durch den Kreis von Täuschungen, in welche jene Leute die Gemüther der Menschen zu bannen gewußt, hindurchbringen, um zu dem Herzen und zu dem Geiste der Menschen gelangen zu können.’’ Cf. Schleiermacher, Das Leben Jesu, 342–43. 51 Johann August Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi in seinem geschichtlichen Zusammenhange und seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Hamburg: Verthes, 1837), 282, n. 1. 52 Schleiermacher, Leben Jesu, 334: ‘‘Menschen in diesem Zustande eigentlich keine geistige Thätigkeit ausüben können, und für ihre Zustände nicht verantwortlich sind.’’ 565 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 Jesu, and bearing directly upon it. The importance of this subject is highlighted by its expanded treatment in the second edition of the work.53 That analysis repeats and develops the discussion in the Geschichte, now framed as a compromise between the extremes of rationalism and supernaturalism.54 (Souter, too, would present his own views as a similar compromise.55) Neander thus rejects the Jewish and Christian belief in evil demons, while acknowledging an overarching supernatural cause of demoniac insanity. In the later work, he also elaborates on the phenomenology of possession. He had previously described the demoniacs as ‘‘seized by a foreign power,’’ but here he writes: They believed themselves actually to consist of two natures: the true I, and the evil spirit subjugating them, and so it could happen that they spoke in the person of the evil spirit, with whom they felt themselves united in these drives, so contradictory to their true I.56 What Neander was presenting was a view of demoniacs as the victims of the Devil, their physical and mental conditions the direct result of their sin. This was precisely the position of his former student Hermann Olshausen, who handled the subject early in the first volume (1830) of his long commentary on the Gospels.57 Here too we find the distinction of Devil or Satan from demons, and the rejection of the latter as literal, as well as the close association of insanity and sin.58 Olshausen’s treatment of these subjects was the fullest before 1837, and it was this analysis which Strauss would eviscerate, with his typical sarcasm and brutality, as representing ‘‘die mystische Theologie und Philosophie jetziger Zeit.’’59 The problem for Strauss was Olshausen’s attempt to move the subject of possession from the field of physiology and psychology, where it had been for Schleiermacher, back 53 Neander, Leben Jesu, 276; Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, 4th ed. (Hamburg: Verthes, 1845), 233–37. 54 Ibid., 282. 55 Souter, ‘‘Does any Analogy,’’ 391. 56 Ibid., 281: ‘‘sie glaubten aus zweien Wesen, ihrem eigentlichen, wahren Ich und jenem dasselbe unterjochenden bösen Geiste, zu bestehen, und so konnte es geschehen, daß sie selbst wie in der Person des bösen Geistes sprachen, mit dem sie sich in diesen ihrem wahren Ich widerstreitenden Trieben verschmolzen und eins fühlten.’’ 57 Hermann Olshausen, Biblischer Commentar über sämmtliche Schriften des Neuen Testaments, Erster Band (1830: Reutlingen, 1834), 289–308. 58 Olshausen, Commentar, 291 and 293–94 respectively. 59 Strauss, Leben Jesu, 2:15. 566 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? into that of morality and religion.60 And Olshausen’s chief innovation, dismissed by Strauss as an ad hoc and unsustainable hypothesis, was that possession represented not the complete triumph of sin, of the principle of evil over a man, but rather a state of tension between good and evil, with the latter dominant but not yet supreme. This accounted for the violence and convulsions typical of the demoniacs, and explained why the most sinful figures of the Bible, such as Judas, were not themselves possessed. Crucially: In demoniacs is clearly evident a struggle against evil in its most dreadful form, but the very fact that a struggle still remains, supports the existence of a noble life-germ within, so that, even among demoniacs, faith is the necessary condition of their cure.61 Olshausen thus vindicates the role of moral and religious factors in the curing of possession. And although he allows that possession, since the spreading of the Gospel, has been rendered far rarer, given the mitigation of the Devil’s power over mankind, nonetheless he suggests the possibility that some modern ‘‘maniacs and epileptics’’ may be demoniacs by another name—and that, by implication, moral and religious factors may be necessary in their treatment as well. The point would be made even more forcefully in an English treatise sixteen years later: It may well be a question moreover, if an apostle, or one with apostolic discernment of spirits, were to enter now into one of our madhouses, how many of the sufferers there he might not recognize as thus having more immediately fallen under the tyranny of the powers of darkness. Certainly in many cases of mania and epilepsy there is a condition very analogous to that of the demoniacs, though the sufferer, and commonly the physician, apprehend it differently. Yet this apprehension of theirs is not of the essence of the matter; this will but be in general the reflection of the popular notion of the age about it.62 Ibid., 2:20. Olshausen, Commentar, 295: ‘‘Im Dämonischen offenbart sich freilich scheinbar das Kämpfen wider das Böse in grässlicherer Gestalt, aber eben daß noch immer ein Kämpfen wider dasselbe rückständig ist, spricht für das Vorhandenseyn eines edlen Lebenskeims im Innern; so daß also auch bei den Dämonischen der Glaube die nothwendige Voraussetzung ihrer Heilung ist.’’ 62 Richard Chenevix Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord (London: Macmillan, 1846), 164; cf. Olshausen, Commentar, 296n. 60 61 567 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 The vocabulary of ‘‘recognition’’ is judicious: the principle of accommodation has been turned back against those who deny possession. Just as the ancient Jews and pagans had their explanatory prejudices, so do modern scientists. Hermeneutic problems are now seen to be not confined to the Bible, but intrinsic to experience itself. The treatise just quoted is the Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord, by the Irish scholar, poet, and theologian Richard Chenevix Trench, later the Archbishop of Dublin. The work was published first in 1846 and reprinted frequently throughout the century. In the 1850s it was extremely well known and widely cited, and the prolific Scottish minister John Cumming plagiarized it in his own Foreshadows (1854), itself reprinted four times in the decade.63 Trench’s ideas, then, could hardly have had a wider circulation. And the chapter on possession in the Notes is largely a paraphrase of Olshausen’s analysis, bordering on plagiary itself. By 1855, Olshausen’s own work had been translated, albeit into the imperfect English of a native German.64 The idea of possession found in these works was thus a commonplace in theological circles of that decade, and it is no surprise that May cites both Trench and Olshausen; Souter must have known them too. In any event, the old Pietist emphasis on sin, and on the individual’s struggle with evil, is evident in both chaplains’’ articles. The chaplains’ view of insanity as the effect of Satanic—not demonic— influence, occasioned by the patient’s moral depravity, was therefore the product of German theology developed in reaction to rationalism, and in particular to Schleiermacher, in the 1820s and ’30s. But Souter and May were not only derivative theologians; their professional milieu, after all, was psychiatry. And their views on possession, it turns out, chimed well with new medical theories about insanity. Just as contemporary theologians were bringing demonic possession into closer relation with sin, and with the failure of the individual will, so contemporary alienists were seeking to redescribe insanity, at least in certain manifestations, in similar terms—as the product of, or at least exacerbated by, moral depravity, and as manifested in an interruption of the patient’s self-control. Pinel, notably, had broken with Locke in identifying a kind of madness unrelated to the faculty of judgment: what he called ‘‘manie sans délire’’ was a ‘‘lesion of the will,’’ the patient’s reason remaining intact. One such patient at Bicêtre, he noted, had a periodic propensity 63 John Cumming, Foreshadows: Lectures on Our Lord’s Miracles (London: Arthur Hall, 1854), Lecture XIII, 356–84. 64 Hermann Olshausen, Biblical Commentary on the Gospels, tr. Sergius Loewe (3 vols.; Clark’s Foreign Theological Library: Edinburgh, 1846; repr. as 4 vols.; Edinburgh, 1847– 50). 568 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? to violence and even murder, his will ungoverned by his rational faculty. The effect was: An inner contest, which he claimed to experience without respite, between the fierce impulse of a destructive instinct and the profound horror inspired in him by the thought of wrongdoing. No trace of a lesion in his memory, imagination or judgement.65 Pinel denied the efficacy of moral treatment in these cases, prescribing instead evacuatives and antispasmodics. His student Esquirol, who identified the condition as an aspect of what he called ‘‘monomanie,’’ was more optimistic about the success of moral treatment.66 In an early 1811 article, Esquirol had classed ‘‘démonomanie’’—the madness of believing oneself possessed—as a species of religious melancholy, the product of superstition and intense moral commotion.67 Although ‘‘démonomanie,’’ unlike the ‘‘manie sans délire,’’ was a disease of the imagination, and therefore manifested in delirium, it was intimately associated with the moral faculties; Esquirol insisted that it stemmed in part from an ‘‘horrible dépravation des moeurs.’’68 He also allowed that the ‘‘consolations of religion’’ might offer some benefit to the patient, and that a minister’s gentle encouragements might help to restore the hope and confidence necessary to later recovery; this must have endeared the Frenchman’s work to John May, who was evidently familiar with it.69 The scholar and physician James Cowles Prichard, in his influential Treatise on Insanity (1835), agreed with Esquirol’s analysis of possession as religious melancholy.70 But he noted also a condition in which the patient, ‘‘as if actually possessed by the demon of evil, is continually indulging enmity and plotting mischief, and even murder, against some unfortunate object of his malice.’’71 This was Pinel’s ‘‘manie sans délire,’’ or as Prichard called it, moral insanity. It should be noted that Prichard refers to Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique, 82: ‘‘Combat intérieur qu’il disoit, sans cesse, éprouver entre l’impulsion féroce d’un instinct déstructeur et l’horreur profonde que lui inspiroit le sentiment d’un forfait. Nulle marque de lésion dans la mémoire, l’imagination ou le jugement.’’ Cf. 149–53. 66 Étienne Esquirol, Des maladies mentales considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-legal (Paris: Baillière, 1838), 2:31–32. 67 Esquirol, ‘‘De la démonomanie’’ (1811), in Des maladies, 2:482–525. 68 Ibid., 517. 69 Ibid., 520. May, ‘‘Insanity,’’ 489. 70 James Cowles Prichard, A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind (London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1835), 30–31. 71 Ibid., 21. 65 569 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 ‘‘the demon of evil,’’ i.e., Satan, and not to evil demons; despite the ‘‘as if,’’ his description is not entirely metaphorical. Demonic possession in the old sense is an exploded superstition; the real influence of the Devil will look more like moral insanity. Indeed, Prichard’s theological aims have been well demonstrated, and an educated religious reader of the time would have found much to agree with.72 Moreover, while Prichard did not fully endorse Johann Heinroth’s view that moral insanity was caused by depravity, he did allow that depravity could exacerbate or even help to effect some aspects of the condition; moreover, for Prichard, the sufferer of moral insanity is, to quote one modern scholar, ‘‘no longer capable of normal socio-moral behaviour.’’73 Prichard is not mentioned by either Souter or May, although, given his prominence, it is inconceivable that they were not familiar with his theories. Souter does cite the Belgian alienist Joseph Guislain, whose lectures on phrenopathy, first published in 1852, were brought to his attention by an English synopsis in the Journal of Psychological Medicine. Guislain developed earlier ideas on moral insanity, for which his own term was ‘‘monofolie.’’ He described patients who suffered from what appeared as a foreign ‘‘élan’’ or impulse—attributed by many of them to the influence of an ‘‘esprit malin.’’74 It was this alien force that drove them to terrible acts, while in full command of their reason. Unlike Esquirol, then, Guislain identifies possession with the ‘‘inner contest’’ of Pinel’s ‘‘manie sans délire.’’ Souter quotes a case-study from the synopsis, and remarks: Every one at all conversant with the insane must have seen cases of this kind; men possessed of a sort of double consciousness; the actual ego of the men feeling itself fettered, or driven outward by some strange impulse, and perfectly conscious of the thraldom, yet not having the strength of will to resist it.75 72 On Prichard’s theology, see Hannah F. Augstein. ‘‘J. C. Prichard’s Concept of Moral Insanity: A Medical Theory of the Corruption of Human Nature,’’ Medical History, 40 (1996), 311–43. 73 The quotation is from Jan Verplaetse, Localising the Moral Sense: Neuroscience and the Search for the Cerebral Seat of Morality, 1800–1930 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 192–96. Prichard, Treatise on Insanity, 235–38. Cf. Johann Christian August Heinroth, Lehrbuch des Störungen des Seelenlebens oder der Seelenstörungen und ihrer Behandlung (Leipzig: Vogel, 1818), 2:23–43; Augstein, ‘‘J. C. Prichard’s Concept,’’ 336–37. 74 Joseph Guislain, Leçons orales sur les phrénopathies (Ghent: Hebbelynck, 1852), 1:230–31. 75 Souter, ‘‘Does any Analogy,’’ 398–99, citing ‘‘An Analysis of Guislain’s Work on Insanity,’’ Journal of Psychological Medicine, 7 (1854): 434–43, 438. 570 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? By the 1850s, the greatest psychiatric authorities all accepted the existence of a kind of insanity defined by a lesion in the will—producing an inner contest or ‘‘double self’’—and manifested in acts of violence and immorality. To the chaplains, the resemblance of this condition to the new model of the New Testament demoniac, with his double consciousness, was unmistakeable. Whereas earlier rationalists had translated demonic possession into a rather generalized madness or epilepsy, the attentive scholar could now understand it as equivalent to moral insanity or ‘‘monofolie,’’ an overpowering by the impulse, whether apparent or real, of a violent foreign will. To illuminate the nature of this change, it will be instructive to contrast two lists of parallels between ancient possession and modern insanity. The first is found in a 1786 dissertation by the German physician Theodor Gerhard Timmermann (1727–92), much in the vein of Farmer and Semler. Surveying the symptoms of the cases listed in the Gospels, Timmermann finds muteness, blindness, epilepsy, ‘‘melancholic lycanthropy,’’ and frenzy (in the Gadarene demoniac).76 These were all external descriptions of disease and impairment, equivalent to a doctor’s diagnosis: all, except the blindness, were evidently the symptoms of insanity or mania.77 The second list is found in May’s Journal article. He identifies the salient features of the demoniac as superhuman knowledge, ‘‘moral uncleanness,’’ suspension of physical faculties, and the ‘‘double consciousness’’ which we have discussed above.78 All but the first, according to May, found their equivalent in present-day insanity; the three common features had been adumbrated in both the recent theological and the medical literature available to him. Here was a close rapprochement between possession and modern madness: even if direct Satanic intervention had ceased, his indirect influence continued to produce similar effects. Souter and May differed little in rejecting the immediate influence of the Devil after the apostolic period. In their agreement on this point, they reduced possession from an experiential to a hermeneutic category, safely confined to the sacred page. Trench had already made this explicit: although he allowed the possibility of modern possession, he also admitted that knowledge of the phenomenon could come from the Bible alone. Theodor Gerhard Timmermann, Diatribe antiquario-medica de daemoniacis evangeliorum (Rinteln: Boesendahl, 1786), 24; cf. Mark 5:5. 77 Timmermann, Diatribe, 24: ‘‘Nam fuisse morbum, id est, laesionem functionum vel jugiter vel aliquamdiu perdurantem et quidem gravissimam, qualem alias causae naturales in confesso producere solent, Cerebri turbationem, nemo negabit, nisi qui occoecatus fuerit.’’ 78 May, ‘‘Insanity,’’ 490–92. 76 571 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 We are obliged to put together, as best we can, the separate notices which have come down to us [i.e., from the Gospels], and from them seek to frame some scheme, which will answer the demands of the different facts; we have not, at least with certainty, the thing itself to examine and to question, before our eyes.79 For this reason we should not be surprised at the remarks of the semianonymous M. A., writing of the chaplains’ dispute a year later, that: the subject is worn almost thread-bare, and these gentlemen have thrown little new light upon it, but it is interesting to read the remarks of chaplains of two large asylums, who have had similar opportunities of observation, and who have arrived at different conclusions.80 What the Souter-May episode shows is the utter irrelevance of first-hand observation to the problem. Both chaplains participated in a medical project that not only ignored the spiritual realm, but sought to discourage religious feeling. Not blessed with apostolic discernment, they could observe only insanity, no matter how great an analogy it may have offered to possession. And it was the nature of insanity, not ancient possession, which united them. The shift in belief from possession to insanity has too often been treated as a one-way process, a mere rejection of the supernatural, whereby the ‘‘literal belief in Satan . . . was ever more firmly viewed as silly, superstitious, even sick.’’81 This was true of the leading names of medicine, and the transition was compounded by the professionalization of psychiatry in the nineteenth century, as more than one scholar has noticed.82 However, we cannot generalize. Innovations in German and English theology, diffused to a broad audience by the 1850s, prompted a revised view of possession among the educated. Works were still published which espoused the strong rationalism of Mead and Farmer, from Thomas Shapter’s Medica Sacra (1834) to William Menzies Alexander’s Demonic Possession in the New Testament Trench, Notes on the Miracles, 150. M. A., ‘‘Insanity and Demoniacal Possession,’’ 247. 81 Scull, ‘‘Madfolk and their Keepers: Roy Porter and the History of Psychiatry,’’ in Insanity of Place, 38–53, at 45. 82 Scull, ‘‘From Madness to Mental Illness: Medical Men as Moral Entrepreneurs,’’ in Social Order, 118–61; Goldberg, Sex, Religion, 47–82. 79 80 572 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? (1902); but a sophisticated compromise was now possible, and orthodox theologians no longer had to adopt the position of a Twells or a Carlisle. Even within the asylums, the transition from insanity to possession was not linear, and the chaplains, above all, formed an important bridge between the old and the new. Jan Goldstein has demonstrated the close ties between Pinel’s moral treatment and earlier religious practices in France83; although in England the lineage was less clearly defined, clerical activities showed an evident affinity with moral treatment, a fact not lost on physicians of the era. In a public lecture of 1852, Forbes Winslow repudiated the exclusive use of moral methods: those who denied the primacy of medicine, he insisted, were guilty of treating madness as a ‘‘spiritual malady,’’ essentially a vestige of demonic superstition—‘‘The clergyman instead of the physician was therefore summoned to the bed-side of the insane, and the bible and prayer-book displaced the physical remedies prescribed for the cure of the cerebral disorder.’’84 The connection is explicit in May’s article. If insanity, like possession, was the result of moral error, then the new treatment was highly important, for it sought in part to overcome the depraved habits and vices which exacerbated the patient’s condition. To this end, religious observance—prayer and fasting, the dampening of passion—was invaluable, and May’s contribution as a chaplain could be vindicated.85 Souter had ended on a like note, characterizing the modern psychiatric project as a revival of Christ’s luminous work among the demoniacs. In insisting on the Satanic origin of insanity, the two chaplains asserted, in the face of broad professional skepticism, the value of their own work for the medical establishment. To listen to the chaplains, then, is to hear the other side of Enlightenment—to understand the great appeal of the compromise between science and theology, and its implications for psychiatric practice. For these figures, seeking to negotiate the demands of both Christian belief and medical respectability, Trench’s analysis must have been highly satisfactory—May could look his skeptical colleague John Conolly in the eye. Indeed, Conolly’s supporter Sir John Charles Bucknill, who, as we saw earlier, had so disparaged the scientific forays of the chaplain James McKee, thought it Goldstein, Console and Classify, 200–206. Forbes Winslow, ‘‘Lettsomian Lecture II: On the Medical Treatment of Insanity,’’ delivered on April 7, 1852 [not 1837, as the DNB claims], and printed in the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 7 (1854): 204–39, at 208. Cf. Scull, Museums of Madness, 167, misquoting this passage. 85 May, ‘‘Insanity,’’ 492. 83 84 573 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS ✦ OCTOBER 2013 FIG 1. Insanity Thesis of Demonic Possession 1556–1855: A Philosoph- ical Stemma. The solid lines indicate lines of influence; the broken/ dashed lines indicate critiques. The names in square brackets did not hold the insanity thesis but were part of its transmission, via their rejection of it. This diagram is not intended to be exhaustive, but only representative of some major trends. 574 Ossa-Richardson ✦ Possession or Insanity? possible that the possessed of history had been ‘‘madmen, the exciting cause of whose malady was the Evil One.’’86 In this respect Bucknill was closer to McKee than he would have liked to admit. The chaplain had touted his knowledge of Locke and other philosophers, asserting that insanity could not afflict the indivisible soul, but only the nervous system, impairing the soul’s ability to affect the body.87 But this was precisely how theologians had always described possession— the Devil invaded the body, not the soul, which was rather besieged than conquered. The German scholar Franz Delitzsch had recently articulated this point at length, but it was as old as scholasticism, and can be seen in, for instance, the commentary of Albertus Magnus on Matthew.88 The theological explanation thus renewed itself as medical science, and now served McKee to legitimize his presence on the asylum wards at Northampton. The same pattern is seen with Souter and May. Their exchange, a dispute masking a more fundamental consensus, was not a seminal moment: despite being commented upon, both in England and Germany, it remained obscure and offered no new arguments.89 Nonetheless, it shows us not only how the work of elite critics and scholars became commonplace for those outside the learned world, but also, more interestingly, how the conceptual arsenals of two disciplines—theology and psychiatry—could be harmonized for both intellectual and professional purposes. A nuanced history of ideas must take into account the consumers and adapters as well as the pioneers: the refinement of the old, alongside the shock of the new. Queen Mary University of London. John Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine (London: Churchill, 1862), 13. 87 James McKee, quoted in Bucknill, ‘‘Annual Reports,’’ 492–93. 88 Franz Delitzsch, System der biblischen Psychologie (1855: Leipzig: Dörffling and Franke, 1861), 298–302. Albertus Magnus, Enarrationes in Matthaeum, in his Opera omnia, ed. Augustus Borgnet (Paris, 1890–99), 20:393–94. 89 In Germany, see Alexander Reumont’s synopsis and review of the English journal issue, Allgemeine Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medicin 14 (1857): 629–41, at 636, 638. 86 575