Narrating Suffering, Remembering Hope: Metz's Theology as Paradigm for Examining Mental Illness and Disability Theology

Abstract

This article proposes to explore new ways of speaking about disability by drawing from the theology of Johann Baptist Metz. Specifically, it uses Metz's ideas of subjectivity, narrative, memory, and hope and applies them to mental illness, with the intent to enable theologians to respond to mental health issues in a more nuanced way and to encourage Christians to foster a deeper solidarity with those suffering from mental illness. The article then briefly considers how Metz's paradigm may be used to enhance our understanding of other categories of disability.

KEYWORDS:

• Johann Baptist Metz
• mental illness
• narrative theology
• disability
• suffering

Notes

1. Hans Urs von Balthasar (2000 [1952]) offers a particularly barbed example of how even Christians have misunderstood and been intolerant toward those with mental illness: “If [a person] nevertheless is a neurotic … then he suffers from a lack of Christian truth, and his faith is sick or frail” (p. 86).

2. Gilles Deleuze (2007) points to the “stock narrative” approach toward mental illness in his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis. Rather than learning to speak about and understand her distress, the analysand instead has her experiences discounted by the analyst's procrustean application of ready-made narratives that supposedly account for the client's psychological state. “This is how psychoanalysis does it: it begins with ready-made collective utterances, Oedipal in nature, and it claims to discover the cause of these utterances in a personal subject of utterance which owes everything to psychoanalysis. You are trapped from the start … . Psychoanalysis is the murderer of souls,” Deleuze pronounces. “You can be analyzed for ten years, a hundred years: the longer it continues, the less there will be any opportunity to speak [emphasis mine]. That's the whole point” (pp. 84–85).

3. Swinton (2000) describes the dehumanizing effect of mental illness primarily from a social perspective: rather than focusing on the way that the intrinsic features of the mental illness can rob a person of her sense of agency, as I have done, he focuses on the threats to subjectivity that attack the person from the outside through stigma. One such aspect that he highlights is society's reduction of the person to the disease: “The tendency in public and professional perception is to regard persons ontologically in terms of their illness, that is, as ‘schizophrenics.’ Schizophrenia becomes … their primary identifying role …” (p. 91).

4. It is not my intent here to enter into the extensive conversation about the precise soteriological value of Christ's passion. While Christianity, e.g., in doctrines of atonement, has traditionally seen the work on the cross as salvific and the central moment of our redemption, some modern theologians have emphasized the scandal of the cross in a way that suggests our veneration of the cross and emphasis on the crucifixion are rather perverse (see, e.g., Soelle, 1984 [1973]). Metz's (1998 [1968]) position sees the cross as “… the sacrament of authentic humanness in a sinful world” (p. 14). Jesus’ crucifixion demonstrates the profundity of his solidarity with in our weakness. Indeed, he accepts the weakness of true humanity more than any other human. In this acceptance, of course, he transforms the dehumanizing cross—for death is the ultimate threat to subjectivity—into the symbol of the way in which our acceptance of our vulnerability bonds us in a genuine community of solidarity (see Metz, 2007 [1997], pp. 123–124).

5. Again, recall that hoping in Metz's sense involves committing ourselves to acting in ways that facilitate the actualization of that hope.

6. The analogy between the dead and those with dementia in no way depends on the fact that most people with dementia are at some end-of-life stage; it would hold for a person who experiences the neurological symptoms of dementia but who is otherwise in good health for years.

7. See Swinton (2000) for a fuller elaboration of this topic. Swinton does not draw on Metz in talking about dementia, but the two would be productive conversation partners.