Who is Mentally Ill according to the Church Fathers?
Everyone is mentally ill according to the Patristic meaning of mental illness. You do not have to be schizophrenic in order to be mentally ill. The definition of mental illness from a Patristic point of view is that people are mentally ill when the noetic energy they have inside them is not functioning properly. In other words, being mentally ill means your nous is full of thoughts, not only bad thoughts, but good thoughts as well. Anyone who has thoughts in his heart, whether they are good thoughts or bad, is mentally ill from the Patristic perspective. It makes no difference whether these thoughts are moral, extremely moral, immoral, or anything else. In other words, according to the Church Fathers, anyone whose soul has not been purified from the passions and who has not reached the state of illumination through the grace of the Holy Spirit is mentally ill, but not in the psychiatric sense. For a psychiatrist, being mentally ill is something else. It means suffering from psychosis or being schizophrenic. For Orthodoxy, however, if you have not been purified of the passions and have not reached a state of illumination, are you normal or abnormal? That is the question. Who is considered a normal Orthodox Christian in the Patristic tradition? If you want to see this clearly, read the service of Holy Baptism, read the service of Holy Chrism that is held at the Patriarchate of Constantinople on Holy Thursday, read the service for the consecration of Church sanctuaries. There you will see what it means to be a temple of the Holy Spirit. There you will see who is illumined. In all of the Church services as well as the ascetic tradition of the Church, mainly three spiritual states are mentioned: the state in which the soul and body have been purified from the passions, the state in which the human nous has been illumined by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the state in which the human soul and body experience theosis.11 For the most part, however, they speak about purification and illumination, since the Church services are expressions of reasonable worship.12 So, who is the normal Orthodox Christian? Can someone who has been baptized but not purified be considered normal? What about someone who has not yet been illumined? Or is it someone who has been purified and illumined? Naturally, someone in the last category is a normal Orthodox Christian. So, what makes normal Orthodox Christians different from the rest of the Orthodox? Is it dogma? Of course not. Take the Orthodox in general. They all share the same dogma, the same tradition, and the same common worship. A church sanctuary, for example, might hold three hundred Orthodox Christians. Of that number, however, only five are in a state of illumination, while the rest of them are not. The rest of them have not even the slightest idea what purification is. So this raises the question: How many among them are normal Orthodox Christians? Unfortunately, out of three hundred only five are. All the same, purification and illumination are specific conditions of healing that experienced and illumined spiritual fathers can recognize. So we have here clearly medical criteria. Or maybe you are not convinced that these criteria are strictly medical? Consider the fact that the nous is a physiological human organ that everyone has. It is not only Greeks and Orthodox that have a nous. So do Muslims, Buddhists, and everyone else. So all human beings have the same need for purification and illumination. And there is only one therapeutic treatment. Or do you think there are many therapeutic treatments for this illness? And is it really an illness or not?
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