Dementia, doubt and faith

Watching Louis Theroux’s sensitive and charming BBC documentary about Alzheimer’s sufferers has prompted thoughts about the challenge that the phenomenon of dementia offers to beliefs about the human soul and the after-life. The programme, which visited Beatitudes, a residential institution in Phoenix, Arizona, and also sufferers being cared for by loved ones at home, kept circling back to the same set of questions. Is this the same person that I once knew / loved/ married? Does anything remain of that person? If not, then where has that person gone, and who is this person who doesn’t know or remember me, or anything of what they once were?

Watching, or reading about, people suffering from dementia makes you realise just how much of what we regard as a ‘person’ is bound up with their unique cluster of memories, thoughts, beliefs, desires. When these have vanished, what’s left? And what does it do to one’s belief in (or hope for) some kind of survival after death? What exactly will survive of a dementia sufferer: if everything that made them a person, a unique individual, in this life has already gone, then what is it that they take with them into the ‘next’ life? And more urgently: even while the dementia sufferer is still alive, how can we continue to describe them as a ‘person’, with anything resembling a ‘soul’, when they can only live from moment to moment, with no sense of who they are or what’s going on around them?

I think I can anticipate the standard religious response, which might go something like this. Even in the most severe cases, something of the original individual survives: after all, Theroux’s documentary included examples of sufferers momentarily seeming to remember the identity of a loved one, and even expressing what looked like genuine emotion towards them with a kiss or a hug. So perhaps there is still, deep down, a ‘trace’ of the person that doesn’t die? And then there is Auden’s line, ‘What survives of us is love’: as with people who are severely mentally impaired, there is still the capacity to love, and maybe this is what really matters, in the end. And Theroux’s programme also gave some moving examples of how dementia can bring forth extraordinary compassion (as well as obvious frustration and sorrow) in those who care for them, whether they be loved ones or the staff at a centre like Beatitudes.

But I don’t know. On the face of it, dementia seems to challenge the religious view of the human person, and to provide support for the sceptical, scientific view that what we call the ‘soul’ of a person depends, in the end, on the activity of the brain, which is finite and dies with us. Certainly, dementia undermines any ‘naturalistic’ belief in survival beyond death, such as we find in Buddhism, or in ‘folk’ religious notions that assume we’ll all be reunited in some happy hereafter. How so, if everything that makes a person what they are, has already ‘died’ before death?

No, the phenomenon of dementia seems to suggest that the only hope for a life beyond death lies in the active intervention of an all-powerful God to resurrect the individual, and to reconstitute him or her as in some sense a ‘new creation’. Presumably, Christians would maintain that, in the case of dementia sufferers, God will somehow ‘restore’ them to themselves in the hereafter? If ‘our life is hidden with Christ, in God’, then perhaps their memories and all that they have lost through this terrible affliction are also kept safe in the heart of an all-knowing God? Perhaps, for Christians, dementia offers not an insuperable challenge to any belief in the ‘soul’, but a confirmation that the soul is not, in the end, identifiable with the physical, brain-dependent mind – but, as the Church has always taught, something supernatural somehow implanted in the individual by God, and independent of our physical existence?

Finally, I wonder what religious people think happens to the faith of a dementia sufferer? Despite the fact that the residential centre in Theroux’s documentary was called Beatitudes, and the fact that we saw one new resident installing a crucifix on her mantelpiece, very little was made of religion in the programme. But how do you continue to believe, to have a spiritual life, if you can no longer remember who you are, or who God and Jesus are, or how to string even a few words together to say a prayer? Unless, maybe, faith is like music, which those working with dementia sufferers have found to be a powerful tool in caring for them. Another recent BBC documentary (which unfortunately I missed) apparently featured a choir for Alzheimer’s patients: it seems that even the most seriously affected sufferers are able to remember well-loved songs from their earlier lives, and even to learn new ones. Perhaps faith and spirituality, work in a similar way, somehow surviving beneath the tempest-tossed seas of memory loss and confusion?

A free Church in a free state

While we’re on the subject of religion and politics, can I recommend an excellent article in the current issue of Standpoint? It’s by Jeremy Jennings and is basically a review of the posthumously-published Catholicism and Democracy, by Emile Perreau-Saussine, who died in 2010 at the tragically young age of 37.

However, Jennings uses his review to explore at some length the often tortuous relationship between the Church and democracy, particularly in France. Apparently, Perreau-Saussine’s book charts the journey of French Catholics from ultramontanism and alignment with monarchy at the time of the Revolution, to a liberalism based on a defence of the liberty of believers in a militantly secular state. As Jennings says: ‘A free church in a free state was to become the watchword of liberal Catholicism’.

As someone whose attraction to Catholicism has often been tempered by revulsion from some of its past political associations – Francoism, Vichy and the right-wing dictatorships of Latin America spring to mind – I found the article intriguing. In particular, it introduced me to a contemporary Catholic political philosopher whom I hadn’t previously encountered: Pierre Manent. According to Jennings:

He…sees the Second Vatican Council, with its recognition of the political role and primacy of the laity, as making true reconciliation of the Catholic Church with this liberal Gallican tradition. The balance between the temporal and the spiritual was reaffirmed, with the result that the Church at last found itself at ease in the world of democracy.

Manent’s The City of Man, its title an obvious nod to Augustine, seems like a good place to start in approaching his work. The fact that the English edition has an introduction by Jean Bethke Elshtain, of whom I am an unabashed admirer, is an additional enticement. It’s already in the Amazon basket.

The Church and politics, or Kennedy vs Santorum

For those of us from a liberal-left background, who are also drawn to Catholic faith, the increasingly close association between Catholicism and political conservatism, especially in the United States, is a cause for concern and even bewilderment. I’m a great fan of Michael Sean Winters, and enjoyed his book Left at the Altar, which charts the great falling-out between the Church and the Democratic Party who, Winters believes, should be natural allies – and were so in the past, for example at the time of the New Deal.

But just because you’re disillusioned with some aspects of Democratic policy, doesn’t mean you have automatically to embrace the political and cultural conservatism of the religious Right. More and more, Catholic political commentators and pundits seem indistinguishable from their rabidly fundamentalist Evangelical counterparts. For those who remember how the Evangelicals feared Kennedy’s election (see Shaun Casey’s book The Making of a Catholic President), it’s astonishing to see their modern successors anoint the Catholic Rick Santorum as their preferred presidential candidate.

Howard Schweber wrote an interesting piece for Huffington Post last week, in which he discussed what he calls ‘the Catholicisation of the American Right’. Some of us, however, are more worried by the ‘conservatisation’ of American Catholicism: the identification of the institutional Church, and a vast swathe of militant Catholic commentators, with the Republican Party. The Catholic blogosphere, particularly in America, is seething with red-hot culture warriors, with very few dissenting voices to be heard.

Andrew Sullivan, famously Catholic, gay, formerly pro-Republican but now pro-Obama, also posted an article this week – at The Daily Beast – commenting on Santorum’s recent vilification of JFK, and contrasting the very different Catholicisms represented by the two politicians. Now Kennedy was no paragon of Catholic virtue, though surely the civil right reforms he set in train were one of the great moral victories of our age, but I think Sullivan is spot-on here:

Kennedy was a Catholic of another era, unafraid of modernity, interested in other paths to God, publicly humble and cheerful, privately devout and deeply connected to others of all faiths and none. Santorum is of a different kind: authoritarian, deeply suspicious of freedom when it leads to disobedience of the Papacy’s diktats, and publicly embracing a religious identity as his core political one.

Given the politically-conservative tenor of the Catholic blogosphere, I anticipate that not many people who find their way to this blog will agree with this view. But take it from me, the reactionary ‘Christianism’ (as Sullivan calls it) represented by Santorum et al is a huge turn-off for those of us who seek a way of reconciling Catholicism with modernity, and our deep yearning for faith with our belief in an open, plural and tolerant society.

‘We seek for the causes of things, but we also seek their meaning’

Ah, Dr. Scruton, with your voice of sweet reason, thou wouldst fain make a believer of me. This strikes just the right note:

O vis aeternitatis

Not mentioned by Universalis, for some reason: today is the anniversary of Hildegard of Bingen. This (from Sequentia’s recording of ‘Canticles of Ecstasy’) is sublime:

‘To put it very simply and bluntly…’

When I was on holiday this summer, I resolved that, whatever my continuing doubts and reservations, I would at least do this: I would pray at the beginning and end of every day, and every day I would read the Gospel of the day (thank you, Universalis).

So far, I’ve kept to my resolution. Sometimes, it feels like a chore, but it provides an anchor in the turbulent seas of my life, and every now and then, something strikes me with the force of revelation.

For example, yesterday’s Gospel reading (from Luke 8, 1-3), though brief, got me thinking about realism and reliability in the Bible:

Jesus made his way through towns and villages preaching, and proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom of God. With him went the Twelve, as well as certain women who had been cured of evil spirits and ailments: Mary surnamed the Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, Susanna, and several others who provided for them out of their own resources.

It was a minor detail – that mention of ‘Joanna the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza’ – that caught my attention. I remember C.S.Lewis saying that, as a literary critic, it was the ‘everydayness’, the mundane realism, of the New Testament that helped to persuade him of its truth. If the whole thing was made up, he wrote, then the authors had somehow anticipated the methods of modern fiction, some two thousands years before the fact.

The myths and legends of the ancient world tend to be catalogues of miraculous and spectacular events, ungrounded in a particular time and place. But in the Gospels, it is the combination of miracle and quotidian detail that stands out. In the extract above, it is the throwaway reference to a real, verifiable historical person, her husband, his job, alongside the stories of deliverance from ‘evil spirits and ailments’, that leads the reader to think that this is either an extremely sophisticated farrago of lies – or something close to straight reporting of what actually happened.

And then, to quote Czeslaw Milosz: ‘To put it very simply and bluntly, I must ask if I believe that the four Gospels tell the truth.’ And if they do…

‘He believed first and foremost because he wished to believe’

‘…in my opinion miracles will never confound a realist. It is not miracles that bring a realist to faith. A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and ability not to believe in miracles as well, and if a miracle stands before him as an irrefutable fact, he will sooner doubt his own senses than admit the fact. And even if he does admit it, he will admit it as a fact of nature that was previously unknown to him. In the realist, faith is not born from miracles, but miracles from faith. Once the realist comes to believe, then, precisely because of his realism, he must allow for miracles. The Apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle that made him believe? Most likely not, but he believed first and foremost because he wished to believe, and maybe already fully believed in his secret heart even as he was saying: “I will not believe until I see.”‘

Fyodor Dostoyvesky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (my emphasis)