Health and Medicine in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition

STANLEY SAMUEL HARAKAS

Millions of Americans and hundreds of millions of world citizens cling to Orthodox traditions of faith and are members of Orthodox Christian churches. Those who tend the traditions and care for people who live by them will recognize Stanley Samuel Harakas as a reliable guide through the maze of teachings and practices having to do with health and wholeness. A well-respected theologian and ethicist, he has done as much as anyone in our generation to interpret Orthodoxy to its adherents and to explain it to other citizens. In this work he moves beyond his general interest in ethics to present what we believe to be the first comprehensive work on Orthodoxy in the context of health and modern medicine.

The book, like the other books in this series, has two purposes. For believers within the tradition it is a well of resources and a mirror for self-description. To others it is an important stream flowing by, with which they should be acquainted, as well as a window for learning about neighbors. In pluralist America where, as Father Harakas notes in line one, "the vast majority of Americans have little or no knowledge of the Eastern Orthodox Christian church," there is urgent need for such a work. The Orthodox are physicians and nurses and researchers; they are patients and supporters and seekers after wholeness. They play an overlooked but major part in the economy of medicine and spirituality.

The Western religionist who looks through this window will experience some shock of nonrecognition as a spiritual landscape first comes into view. The terms are similar to those one hears in Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism. Yet they connect with meanings which differ from those Western Europeans and their heirs around the world associate with these words and concepts.

Even the dedication page alerts us to the Scope of Orthodox concern. On one hand it reaches to the New Testament and the formal liturgy for a passage of noble ascription to "the only God," showing something of the transcendental reach of this faith that would not be earthbound. But the author continues with a down-to-earth reference, a tender and pastoral address to a congregation "down the block," as it were. There, presumably, the people think of "the only God," but they also live full, rich, distracted lives, with signals about health and medicine coming their way from many sources, few of them Orthodox. For them, this book will afford a rediscovery of meanings, and maybe even a discovery. The feet-on-the-ground Westerner, familiar with books dedicated to a teacher, a relative, a friend, will face Harakas's recognition of a debt too large for such dedication-page lines. He must immediately move above and beyond to "the only God."

Each time I study another manuscript in this series I am forced to ask: what is distinctive about this tradition? In all cases there can be overlap between heritages, since so many books deal with heirs of the faith of Israel, also as embodied in a new covenant in Jesus Christ. So it is with the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, and similar traditions. They all have much in common. And yet how different they are from each other.

Let me take the most obvious example. Many Jews, Catholics, and Protestants, along with adherents of some other faiths, are familiar with the notion that in certain religious communities how one acts is the measure of faith. Others, such as ultraconservative Protestants and Catholics, recognize themselves in communities where dogma or doctrine helps constitute the foundation. In Orthodoxy, it is manifest from this book, the liturgy, the "people's service," the public act of worship is the source, the measure, the life-giver to all the parts.

The first time I read this manuscript I found that, following his helpful general introduction, the author took up liturgy and stayed with it. When, I asked myself, will he concentrate on the history of doctrine, since Orthodoxy cherishes true teaching (-doxy)? When will he come to the works of justice and love that are such a part of religion, of Christianity? Orthodoxy does cherish these, as the book makes clear. Then it occurred to me: Harakas is talking about the teaching of Orthodoxy, about the action within it, whenever he takes up liturgy in detail.

As this realization dawns upon readers, they are likely to become more patient with the accent on liturgy and then to see their patience grow to fascination. The book helps familiarize them with the heart of Orthodoxy and its aspirations to heal; it can help them refract the light of Orthodoxy into their own often quite different faith traditions and learn from what it shows. Since all religious communities engage in worship, one might ask: while the believers give glory to 'the only God," are they also getting out of their liturgical acts, even if made up of humble forms of prayer and silent worship, all that they might for the care of their bodies and cure of their souls?

A fundamental reorientation occurs for the non-Orthodox just as a confirmation occurs here for the Orthodox. The visitor to the tradition learns to look at his or her own heritage in a new way. Let me illustrate with an example spanning an East-West boundary more distant than that drawn within Christianity between Orthodoxy and Western-based traditions. My colleague Anthony Yu spent years translating what became a four-volume publication, The Journey to the West. It is a centuries-old work of Chinese literature about a Buddhist monk and a monkey, an epic of sorts which fuses the sacred and the secular, the profoundly humanistic with the picaresque, the humorous, and the trivial in novel ways. Thinking I would show my at-homeness after having read two of the volumes, I said: "Tony, now I get it. The Journey to the West is the Don Quixote of the East." "No, you don't get it," he said in smiling reply; "Don Quixote is The Journey to the West of the West." He implied nothing arrogant, as his smile made clear; he suggested instead something perspectival, reorienting.

So it is, closer to home, with the mirrors and windows, the sources and streams, that meet each other in this book. Westerners may find themselves noting the ways in which, say, St. John Chrysostom is the Augustine of the East, when they might well be learning that St. Augustine is a Chrysostom of the West. Certainly they will come to terms with differing views of time and space. Stanley Harakas shows how he thinks of Chrysostom and Basil and others of long ago as his contemporaries, available here and now. And that thinking changes how one treats the acts that move a person through history and tradition: being born, suffering, dying.

The word wholeness appears in the subtitle of this book, as well it should. The term sometimes acquires faddish connotations in this new age of New Age thinking, but in these times when Westerners are learning from Buddhism and Hinduism or Christians are recovering elements of wholeness from Judaism, this word speaks directly to the center of Orthodoxy's vision and aspiration. It belongs here, offering riches to those in the tradition and beckoning those who must cross bridges to it.

Health and Medicine in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition is an exposition of this liturgical vision of wholeness by a lifelong inhabitant of the tradition and a major scholar. Between the transcendental grandeur of the first part of the dedication to this book and the communal warmth implied by the second part is where the Orthodox live and where they pursue wholeness. Harakas helps situate them at the juncture and invites others to learn and profit from their sojourn in that situation.

Martin E. Marty



Contents

Foreword		by Martin E. Marty		ix
Part	I.	INTRODUCTION TO THE ORTHODOX CHURCH AND PEOPLE		1
	1.	Tradition and History		3
	2.	Faith, Ethos, and Experience		12
Part	II.	WELL-BEING AND ILLNESS		23
	3.	A holistic Perspective		25
	4.	Illness		35
	5.	Suffering		45
Part	III.	CARING AND CURING		57
	6.	Human Dignity in Caring and Curing		59
	7.	Doctors, Priests, and Rational Medicine		69
	8.	Spiritual Healing: The Saints		79
	9.	Spiritual Healing: The Liturgy		89
	10.	Spiritual Healing: Holy Unction		99
Part	IV.	PASSAGES AND ETHICS		109
	11.	Passages: Beginnings		111
	12.	Passages toward Maturation		121
	13.	Maturity and Development		132
	14.	"Trampling on Death"		145
Notes				161
Index				183

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