Schizophrenia in Philosophy and Theology

When I had my first schizophrenic hallucination 61 years ago, I told myself that I was in the privileged position of having the terrifying knowledge of what such a hallucination actually is.  Of course no one would want to know what I knew or to receive the revelation that had entered my life and destroyed any possibility that I would ever have of being a normal human being.  I had seen the Light and it was divine.  I told myself that this was surely a Beatific Vision.  Besides from being horrified by the possibility of spending my whole life locked up in insane asylums, I felt obliged to study what had been published about schizophrenia and especially what people had written about the relationship between mystical rapture, theology and schizophrenia.  Normal people simply cannot begin to imagine what occurs during an ecstatic vision.  It is an ineffable experience.  When writing about it, one is forced to use metaphors and similes just to be able to hint at what happens.  I wanted to discover traces of schizophrenia in famous writers and religious thinkers.  I turned to philosophers and theologians to find my companions.  This article is the result of my quest.

I must admit that I have very little academic qualifications for writing about philosophy and theology.  When I was at Harvard, I took just two courses in philosophy and one in theology.  My bachelor’s programme there was in English literature.  Then I did a Ph.D. in linguistics at Laval University in Quebec.  What I have learnt about philosophy and theology comes mostly from my own readings.  On the other hand, I am a real expert on schizophrenia simply because I am a schizophrenic.  From personal experience, I know what occurs during hallucinations, visions, voices, delusions of grandeur, delusions of persecution, mystical raptures, and the horrors of paranoid hell.  I tell myself that most philosophers and theologians are totally ignorant of these phenomena.  Who knows more about the subject of this blog, they or I?

I use the word “schizophrenia” in the largest sense possible, making it more or less synonymous with “psychosis.”  The two criteria for determining whether a person shows signs of psychosis are the reputation that he had among those that knew him and the likely diagnosis that one of today’s psychiatrists would give him if he walked into the psychiatrist’s office.  (I use the pronoun “he” here for the simple reason that almost all the cases of schizophrenia that I discuss here happen to be men.)

Socrates (469-399 BC)

Socrates, often considered the founder of Western philosophy, showed several symptoms that could be indicative of schizophrenia.  What we know about him comes from the writings of his two disciples, Xenophon and Plato.  I shall discuss four manifestations of schizophrenia in Socrates’ life.

The first indication of schizophrenia does not come from anything that Socrates said, or that Plato or Xenophon claimed that he said, but rather from what he did, from his behaviour.  He often showed an unusual indifference to physical pain, which surprised everyone who witnessed it.  In the Symposium we find this testimony: “Once there was a most dreadful frost, and no one would go out of doors, or if he did he put on an awful lot of things, and swathed his legs, and wrapped up his feet in felt and sheepskin, but this man (Socrates) went out in that weather wearing only a cloak as he used to wear before, and unshod he marched over the ice more easily than others did with their boots on”.  In A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar states: “One of the consequences of chronic schizophrenia, noted long ago and verified since by numerous studies, is a curious insensitivity to physical pain”.  Thus Socrates’ indifference to physical pain was most likely a symptom of schizophrenia.

The second manifestation of schizophrenia was hearing voices, especially voices coming from God.  In The Second Sin, the famous Hungarian American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz declares: “If you talk to God, you are praying; if God talks to you, you have schizophrenia”.  Of course, many psychiatrists would disagree with Szasz, and the lack of agreement that is so typical of psychiatrists is in itself a good reason not to trust any of them.  But for the sake of studying the relationship between schizophrenia and mysticism, I am willing to accept Szasz’s hypothesis.  Therefore, if a person hears a voice coming from God, he is a schizophrenic.  In Apology we find Socrates saying the following: “This is what God commands me,” “I am really one given to you by God,” and “Something divine and spiritual comes to me”.  Socrates had what he called his daimon, which was a divine voice that served as a type of conscience and warned him not to do certain actions that would be detrimental to him or others.  He says in Apology: “This has been about me since my boyhood, a voice, which when it comes always turns me away from doing something I am intending to do”.  According to Szasz, such a voice is symptomatic of schizophrenia.

Socrates’ third indication of schizophrenia can be found in Book VII of The Republic.  Many different interpretations have been given to the Allegory of the Cave.  I here offer a new one.  This allegory describes perfectly what occurred during my Beatific Vision of 1963.  People in the cave live in darkness and have a very limited knowledge of reality.  One of them escapes and discovers the Light, which reveals a much more complicated and yet more beautiful reality.  He returns to the cave and tells his former fellow inmates what he has seen, but they refuse to believe him.  This is what happens in a Beatific Vision, which is a form of schizophrenic hallucination.  In both Plato’s story and my own experience, the superior reality is represented by the light.  In Plato’s case it was sunlight.  In my experience, it was the mystical light of God, Who is seen as being eternal, just and loving.  The true reality is that of God, since only He is eternal.  What most people call reality is actually unreal since it is made up of people who by nature are ephemeral.  They are here one day and gone the next.  Since they have no permanence, they cannot be real.  Plato describes thus the difference between those who have seen the eternal truth of the superior divine reality and those who remain in the darkness of the cave: “Do you think it is surprising if one leaving divine contemplation and passing to the evils of men is awkward and appears to be a great fool?”  Any psychiatrist today would say that this divine contemplation is a form of schizophrenic hallucination.  For me this experience is the same as a Beatific Vision.

The fourth manifestation of schizophrenia in Socrates is sexual repression.  The term “Platonic Love” refers to spiritual love between two people without there being any sexual activity.  The best account of Socrates’ Platonic love comes from Symposium.  It relates Alcibiades’ unsuccessful attempt to seduce his master, Socrates.  He manages to spend an entire night in bed with Socrates, who however resists all Alcibiades’ sexual overtures.  Their night together came after an evening of drinking wine with others and discussing various philosophical questions, especially love.  In the morning, Alcibiades has to admit that he had not succeeded in seducing Socrates.  He says: “I swear by the goddesses, when I got up I had no more slept with Socrates than if I had been with a father or elder brother”.

What we know about Socrates’ sexual life is this.  He was happily married to a woman named Xanthippe and they had three children together.  Yet he was constantly surrounded by young men, his disciples.  For all we know, he never had any real homosexual experience, although homosexuality was accepted as being perfectly normal in ancient Greece.  Socrates’ biographers never mention any real homosexual affairs.  We do not know if Alcibiades was the only disciple who attempted to seduce Socrates.  What we do know is that Socrates’ abstinence in terms of homosexual experience was the origin of our expression “Platonic love”.  This idea gives rise to a question: do we have the right to speak of repressed homosexuality in Socrates’ life?  Did he suffer from what Freud called bisexual confusion?  For the purposes of our discussion, what is most important, following Freud’s thinking, is that the repression of homosexuality might have been part of the etiology of Socrates’ schizophrenia.

The Old Testament

The Old Testament states repeatedly that God reveals Himself through insanity.  For example, it says: “The prophet is a fool, the spiritual man is mad” (Hosea 9:7).  The ancient Jews recognized that Isaiah was a true prophet of God when they saw him running stark naked through the streets of Jerusalem, announcing messages coming from God.  If anyone showed such behaviour in today’s world, no psychiatrist would hesitate to diagnose him as being schizophrenic.  It is interesting that this concept of what a prophet is and what he does is the same in Jewish thinking as it was in ancient Greek culture.  For the Greeks, Cassandra was a true prophet because, while being insane, she made prophecies that turned out to be true.

Abraham Heschel was one of the most important and respected Jewish theologians of the twentieth century.  In his two-volume work, The Prophets, we find the following descriptions of the relationship between insanity and Jewish prophecy.  “There is a close relationship between prophecy and insanity…  Insanity was sacred to the Israelites, the insane man being believed to be possessed by a supernatural power”.  The prophet Ezekiel “exhibits behaviouristic abnormalities consistent with paranoid schizophrenia”.  “In Israel, as throughout antiquity, psychopathic states were valued as holy”.

Heschel unambiguously addresses the fundamental quandary of the relationship between insanity and religious revelation.  Atheists assume that if religious faith is based on schizophrenic hallucinations, it must be wrong.  Yet Heschel, who recognizes and portrays the psychoses of the prophets, does not lose his admiration for them, who founded the Jewish religion.  He says: “The prophets were among the wisest of men.  Their message being ages ahead of human thinking, it would be hard to believe in the normalcy of our own minds if we questioned theirs.  Indeed, if such is insanity, then we ought to feel ashamed of being sane”.  He summarizes his admiration of the prophets thus: “In the mystery of prophecy we are in the presence of the central story of mankind”.

In all epochs and cultures, religious prophets have been considered to be insane.  For many people today, the word “schizophrenia” evokes nothing but wrongheadedness, evil, cruelty, illusions and suffering.  They assume that famous schizophrenics like the Unabomber Ted Kaczyński are all that they want to know about schizophrenia.  They are unlikely to consider the possibility that the most fundamental ideas of Western philosophy and theology had their origin in the schizophrenic raptures of Greek mystics and Jewish prophets.  If God is the ultimate, eternal truth and the basis of our religious faith and moral precepts, then we owe what we know of God to men who were considered to be insane.

The New Testament

The controversy surrounding the possibility that Jesus was a schizophrenic is older than the word “schizophrenia”.  The first serious study of the question was published in 1905 in Germany, three years before Bleuler introduced the word “schizophrenia”.  It was entitled Jesus Christus vom Standpunkt des Psychiaters (Jesus Christ from the Standpoint of the Psychiatrist), and it was written by the German psychiatrist George de Loosten.  The French psychiatrist Charles Binet-Sanglé published La Folie de Jésus (The Dementia of Jesus) in 1911 and the American psychiatrist William Hirsch made his contribution to the controversy in 1912 with his book Conclusions of a Psychiatrist.

Albert Schweitzer summarized these writings in his book The Psychiatric Study of Jesus.  It was published in Germany in 1913 and the English translation came out in 1948.  I bought and read my copy in 1962 at the age of sixteen.  Schweitzer was both a theologian and a physician, thus making him especially qualified to write about the subject.  Indeed, he blames the three psychiatrists mentioned above for their lack of knowledge of biblical theology.  For example, they are unable to distinguish between the legendary Jesus as presented in the Gospel of John and the probably more historically accurate Jesus of the synoptic gospels.

It is assumed by Protestant theologians that Mark was the first gospel written, simply because it is the shortest.  Matthew and Luke simply added passages.  Indeed, it is in Mark 3:21 that we find the one and only indication that Jesus’ contemporaries considered him to be mentally ill: “When his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hands on him: for they said, He is beside himself”.  To be “beside oneself” meant to be insane.  Another English version translates this passage as “He has gone out of his mind”.

In Schweitzer’s book we learn that William Hirsch gives Jesus the diagnosis of paranoia.  What eventually came to be known as schizophrenia was originally called paranoia.  Hirsch writes: “Everything that we know about him conforms so perfectly to the clinical picture of paranoia that it is hardly conceivable that people can even question the accuracy of the diagnosis”.  The French psychiatrist Binet-Sanglé gives Jesus the diagnosis of hebephrenia, which became one of the three main types of schizophrenia in later years, the other two being paranoia and catatonia.  The German psychiatrist De Loosten claims that Jesus “worked up a fixed system of insanity”.  All three psychiatrists state that Jesus had “numerous hallucinations”.

What does Schweitzer make of these various claims of mental illness in Jesus?  He dismisses them mostly because the three psychiatrists were not “acquainted with the contemporary thought of the time”.  In other words, they had not studied biblical theology.  Schweitzer even admits that Jesus may have had hallucinations, but their presence does not indicate in any way that he was mentally ill.

Here we are faced with the greatest problem of psychiatry, namely that psychiatrists rarely agree with each other about anything.  For the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, Jesus deserved the diagnosis of schizophrenia simply because God spoke to him.  For Schweitzer, these voices or auditory hallucinations in no way prove that Jesus was deranged.

Schweitzer’s short book begins with a foreword written by Dr. Winfred Overholser, who was the president of the American Psychiatric Association.  When discussing the nature of schizophrenia, he says: “We now know, of course, that the emotional and homosexual factors are highly important”.  In other words, Overholser applies Freud’s theory that repressed homosexuality is a frequent cause of schizophrenia in the case of Jesus.  As far as I know, Overholser was the first psychiatrist who posed the question of Jesus’ sexual orientation.  The Gospel speaks of one disciple whom Jesus loved.  Tradition has given him the name of John, although it is not stated in the Bible.  In the Gospel of John we read: “Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved” (John 13:21).  In the Polish Bible, “leaning” is translated as “przytulony,” which literally means “cuddling”.  The man that Jesus loved was the only disciple who witnessed the crucifixion, according to the Gospel of John (19:26).

The other most important man in the New Testament is Saul (Paul).  According to Scripture, his contemporaries thought that he was mentally ill.  They tell him: “Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad” (Acts 26:24).  While travelling to Damascus, Paul had a hallucination in which he saw and heard Jesus.  “Suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven.  And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?  And he said, Who art thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus” (Acts 9:3-5).  If anyone were to say something similar to one of today’s psychiatrists, he would immediately receive the diagnosis of schizophrenia.

The Mystics

The most respected study of Christian mystics is the book Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill.  She has an encyclopedic knowledge of the lives and writings of great Christian mystics.  She does not hesitate to speak of hallucinations and hysteria.  The only reason that she does not mention schizophrenia or paranoia is that she wrote her book before these words had entered common parlance.  The word “schizophrenia” was first used by Bleuler in 1908 and Underhill’s book was published in 1911.

She is, however, quite aware of the question of mental illness among the mystics.  For her, “Sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbours”.  Mystics have their own hallucinations to worship and do not care about what society chooses to consider sanity or insanity.  Her mystics are like the liberated inmates of Plato’s cave, who venture outside the world of shadows to discover the true light.  When they return to their former mental enslavement, their neighbours refuse to believe what they have to say about the greater Reality.  For today’s atheist psychiatrists like Thomas Szasz any communication coming from God has to be dismissed because it is a symptom of schizophrenia.  For Underhill, the messages from God that are transmitted by mystical schizophrenics are proofs of the supreme, eternal Reality, which is God.  During a mystical rapture, what most people consider to be reality is shown to be an illusion, simply because all its components are ephemeral.  You, I and everyone else are unreal simply because we are here for less than one second and then disappear and are forgotten, whereas God remains the eternal Truth.  Thus the only true reality is the divine Reality.  She writes: “Once his (the mystic’s) eyes have been opened on Eternity, his instinct for the Absolute roused from its sleep, he sees union with that Reality as his duty no less than his joy; sees too, that this union can only be consumed on a plane where illusion and selfhood have no place”.

My favourite mystic is the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), probably because I read him just two months after my Beatific Vision in 1963 and I realized that he and I had something in common.  Pascal carried around his neck a written account of a mystical vision that he had had in 1654.  He called it Le Mémorial.  It was discovered by his servant after his death.  This short testimonial includes these words, in my translation from the French: “Fire.  God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob and not of philosophers and scholars.  Certitude.  Certitude.  Emotion.  Joy.  Peace.  God of Jesus Christ.  Your God will be my God.  Obliviousness of the world and everything except God.  He can only be found in the ways taught by the Gospel.  The greatness of the human soul.  Almighty Father, the world has not known You, but I have known You.  Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.”

Today’s experts acknowledge that Pascal had a number of ailments, including migraine headaches and celiac disease.  No one, as far as I know, has said that he was a schizophrenic.  However, his Mémorial describes perfectly my own Beatific Vision, which I know very well was a schizophrenic hallucination.  Since Pascal’s experience was just like mine, it was also a schizophrenic hallucination and Pascal was thus a schizophrenic.  It is interesting to note the occurrence of “Fire” in his vision, since it actually means “light”.  The presence of a transcendent light is common in ecstatic visions.  Even Nietzsche talks about a “Lichtüberfluss” (an inundation of light) during his mystical vision of God.

The Polish mystic Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska states in her Diary, for example: “I came before the throne of God.  I saw a great and inaccessible light”.  This saint had a number of visions of Mary and Jesus, and even held the infant Jesus in her arms. Or so she says.  She was canonized by her Polish compatriot Pope John Paul II in the year 2000.  She was examined by two psychiatrists who declared that she was not a schizophrenic.  Of course they were Polish Catholics, and Roman Catholic theologians reject any discussion of the possibility of schizophrenia among the Church’s mystics and saints.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Nietzsche was undoubtedly the most famous schizophrenic in the entire history of Western philosophy.  He spent the last eleven years of his life in a vegetative, psychotic stupor.  He was confined to a mental hospital in Jena and then nursed at home by his mother and sister until his death.  My diagnosis of schizophrenia is not without controversy.  Various psychiatrists have published highly scientific treatises attempting to demonstrate that the correct diagnosis for Nietzsche’s mental illness should be a bipolar disorder, or the result of a brain tumor, or the consequence of syphilis, or schizophrenia.  Once again, we see that the vast disagreement among psychiatrists concerning any issue should make people wary of taking any of them seriously.

I have myself proposed a new hypothesis for the etiology of Nietzsche’s psychosis, and that is that it was schizophrenia caused by the repression of his homosexuality.  Freud was the first person to say in public that Nietzsche was a homosexual, which he did at a meeting of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society in 1908.  Freud could have referred to his case study of the judge Daniel Paul Schreber to make parallels with Nietzsche’s illness, since they were both cases of schizophrenia resulting from homosexual repression.  Why he did not do so remains a mystery.  An entire book has been written about Nietzsche’s homosexuality: Zarathustra’s Secret by Joachim Köhler.

There can be found in Nietzsche’s writings two clear indications that his mental illness was indeed schizophrenia.  The first is the passage in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s autobiography, which describes perfectly what occurs during a Beatific Vision.  Nietzsche’s myriad scholars have failed to recognize this passage as being a symptom of schizophrenia simply because they have no personal experience of this illness.  My own expertise comes from my life’s story.

Nietzsche first published his most famous sentence, “God is dead,” in 1882 in The Gay Science.  Six years later, he wrote Ecce Homo with the passage showing that God had revealed Himself to Nietzsche.  He uses the following terms to describe what he calls his “Inspiration”: Offenbarung (revelation; all translations are mine), Entzückung (joy); Göttlichkeit (divinity); Unbedingtsein (being unconditional); Tränenstrom (a stream of tears).  All these words clearly indicate that God had revealed Himself to Nietzsche.  In other words, they fulfill Thomas Szasz’s criterion for being symptomatic of schizophrenia: “When God speaks to you, you have schizophrenia”.  Today’s atheist followers of Nietzsche, who enjoy dwelling on the sentence “God is dead,” totally ignore this passage in Ecce Homo, which proves that God is not at all dead.

The description of this vision-hallucination ends with a second symptom of schizophrenia, namely with the delusion of grandeur,  in which Nietzsche compares himself to Jesus Christ: “Dies ist meine Erfahrung von Inspiration, ich zweifle nicht, dass man Jahrtausende zurückgehn muss, um jemanden zu finden, der sagen darf, ‘es ist auch die meine‘.“  ”This is my experience of inspiration;  I do not doubt that one must go back thousands of years in order to find someone who can say, ‘It is also mine’.”  Well, I can say that I had a similar experience in 1963.  What made it different from Nietzsche’s vision is simply that I immediately recognized that it was a schizophrenic hallucination, whereas Nietzsche never had any inkling that he was mentally ill.

His identification with Christ is obviously an example of a delusion of grandeur, which is an archetypal symptom of schizophrenia.  Just before his breakdown in Turin in 1889, he signed his letters: “The Crucified”.  In Sue Prideaux’s biography of Nietzsche I Am Dynamite, we read: “Delusions of grandeur continued: he talked of councillors of legations, ministers and servants.  There were also delusions of persecution”.  In an attempt to convince others and himself that he was, after all, a heterosexual, he told the personnel of the Jena mental hospital where he was confined that his wife Cosima Wagner had brought him there.  He called himself the Duke of Cumberland and sometimes the Kaiser.  These grandiose identities are typical of schizophrenics.  They remind me of John Nash’s claiming to be the Emperor of Antarctica.

I do not like Nietzsche’s philosophy.  He scorned socialism and I am a socialist.  He glorified war and I am a pacifist.  He hated Christianity and I am a Protestant.  I understand all too well why today’s far-right has made him their hero.  The worst indictment against him was Martin Heidegger’s admission that it was while reading Nietzsche that he decided to become a member of the Nazi Party.

I have a collection of Nietzsche’s ideas that I find particularly repulsive.  His supporters would accuse me of “cherry picking,” saying that I should not quote them out of context and that if I had understood Nietzsche correctly I would agree with everything he wrote.  I would reply simply that the more I understand him, the more I dislike his philosophy.  Here are some of the cherries that I have picked.

“God is dead.”

“It is indecent to be a Christian today.”

“To make a hero of Jesus!…  Spoken with the precision of a physiologist, even an entirely different word would still be more nearly fitting here – the word idiot.”

“It is the good war that hallows any cause.”

“You are going to women?  Do not forget the whip.”

“Man should be educated for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior; all else is folly.”

“What is good?… not peace, but war.”

“What is more harmful than any vice?  Active pity for all the failures and all the weak: Christianity.”

“We would no more choose the ‘first Christians’ to associate with than Polish Jews – not that one even required any objection to them: they both do not smell good.”

To conclude, I would say that it is people like Nietzsche who give such a bad reputation to us schizophrenics.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965)

Paul Tillich was the most famous theologian of the twentieth century, considered by many to be the most important Christian theologian since Saint Augustine.  He was also a schizophrenic, although most of his readers and admirers would be surprised by such an idea.  I began reading his books in September 1963, one month after my Beatific Vision.  I soon had the strange feeling that Tillich had had such an unusual ecstatic rapture himself.  After all, he said that “God reveals Himself while remaining veiled.”  This affirmation means nothing to normal people, but for a mystical schizophrenic like myself it was the proof that Tillich had also had a Beatific Vision.  The mystic sees the Kingdom of God, but God’s face is veiled behind a cloud of angels.  This was my reasoning: if my religious vision was indeed a schizophrenic hallucination and Tillich had had a similar vision, then we were both schizophrenics.  My logic was impeccable, but no one I knew of had any interest in my ideas about schizophrenia and theology.

Tillich’s biography reveals that he was hospitalized twice for a mental illness during the First World War, when he served as a chaplain for Protestant German soldiers in Lorraine.  He was present on the front at Verdun, where 300,000 soldiers lost their lives.  The traumas that he suffered there provoked a post-traumatic stress disorder, a real psychosis, requiring him to be hospitalized twice, the first time in 1916 and the second time in 1918.  His mental illness was called “shell shock” by the British and Americans at the time, whereas Germans used the diagnosis of Nerveschwächeanfall (an attack of weak nerves of neurasthenia).  All psychoses have much in common and thus a precise and accurate diagnosis is difficult to make, as well as being unnecessary.  I believe that the diagnosis of schizophrenia would be more appropriate because of the theological position that Tillich developed after the war and maintained for the rest of his life.

In 1920, Tillich announced that his theology was one of the Kairos.  Kairos is a Greek word that means “the propitious moment.”  When asked what his theology’s moment was propitious for, Tillich answered: “It is the propitious moment for the intervention of the eternal within the temporal.”  These words mean nothing to people who have never had a mystical rapture, but for us schizophrenics they describe perfectly what occurs during a beatific ecstasy.  In actual fact, Kairos is a very important concept in all four Gospels of the Greek New Testament.  For example, in Mark 13:33 it means the propitious moment for the advent of the Son of Man.  The Son of Man is also called the Messiah, the Second Coming of Christ or the Lord’s Anointed.  In other words, Tillich had a messiah complex, which is a classic symptom of schizophrenia.

Tillich was a devout Marxist for whom “Jesus was the first socialist.”  In both Jewish and Christian theology, the Messiah is given the task of humbling the rich and exalting the poor, which is precisely what occurs during a socialist revolution.  He also establishes a lasting peace among nations (needed now more than ever).  Finally, the Messiah judges the living and the dead.  Tillich never tired of judging the living and the dead, and he had opinions about a wide range of subjects (for example, he did not like Salvador Dalí’s Last Supper).

I had a moment of great joy in 1995 when I read this passage in Paul Tillich First-Hand, A Memoir of the Harvard Years by Grace Calí, who had been his secretary at Harvard: “’You know, Paulus,’ I said hesitantly, ‘I’ve often wondered how you have kept from becoming schizophrenic.’  At my words, he bolted upright in his chair.  ‘But that’s just it – I am!’  A shocked note of certainty in his voice jolted me.  The word I had used in almost a casual fashion came alive and hung midair between us, charging the room with a crackling intensity.  We both knew that he himself never used psychiatric terms loosely”.  I have often wondered, if the word “schizophrenia” had existed two thousand years ago, would Socrates or Isaiah or Jesus or Paul have had the courage and the honesty to apply it to themselves, as Tillich and I have done.

Thus Tillich knew that he was a schizophrenic and even told his secretary that this was so.  His admission proves better than anything else that I am right in saying that there is a profound perennial relationship between schizophrenia and theology.  It also gives credence to my claim that I, as a schizophrenic, am able to recognize schizophrenia in other people.

Tillich had other secrets that he could not reveal without compromising his career in American universities.  He was a devout Marxist and totally loyal, I believe, to the international Communist movement.  In 1933, he had the immense honour of being the first non-Jewish professor to be fired by the Nazis.  He was a professor of Marxist philosophy at the University of Frankfurt-am-Main.  He had just published his Marxist manifesto, Die sozialistische Entscheidung (The Socialist Decision), in which he makes it clear that he was an orthodox Marxist.  He did not allow this book to be published in English during his lifetime.  If he had, it would have meant the end of his career in American universities, just as it had already brought an end to his career in Germany.

His other big secret was his numerous adulteries.  He and his bisexual wife had an open marriage.  The America of the forties, fifties and sixties was far more puritanical than today’s America and far less tolerant of radical, Marxist political ideas.  Tillich, the prophet, liked to say about America: “It’s going to be very bad here, very, very bad”.  Unfortunately, he was right.

I met Tillich at seven o’clock in the morning of March 28, 1965, in the Hotel Continental of Cambridge, Massachusetts.  I presented him with a 27-page essay entitled “The Phenomenological Proof of God”, which gave a detailed account of the Beatific Vision that I had had two years previously.  Both Tillich and I were convinced that God had brought us together.  Psychiatrists call this “folie à deux”.  Tillich gave me his blessing with the most radiant smile that I had ever seen, his face a few inches from mine, and requested that I send him my essay when I finished it.  Three hours later, Tillich gave the last sermon of his life, in Harvard’s Memorial Church.  It ended with these words: “The Son of Man is in our presence.  He will come as a beggar.  The fate of the world depends on how he matures”.  I was certain that he was talking about me.  Two days later I was locked up in what used to be called the McLean Asylum for the Insane.

Tillich and I underwent a real metempsychosis, a transmigration of the soul.  Germans call this Seelenwanderung, the wandering of a soul from one body to another.  Tillich did not die in 1965, he simply transferred his soul to me.  His widow, Hannah Tillich, says in her autobiography From Time to Time: “One of Paulus’s marital jokes was to insist that I was his ‘second best.’  He called his first best his ‘cosmic reservation.’  A first best did not exist on earth, he said, but one must reserve a place for the great unknown One who might come, as the Messiah might come at any moment to the waiting Jews”.  I hereby claim to be Tillich’s “great unknown One”.

Conclusion

This is what I believe.  I believe that God is the supreme, eternal, transcendent Reality and that He reveals Himself to people who are called schizophrenics.  I believe that mystical schizophrenia is the holy disease, the sacred illness, and that people who undergo it should be treated with respect and not with psychiatric medication.  I believe that meaninglessness is the cause of much mental illness in today’s world and that much of this meaninglessness is due to the lack of the sacred in people’s lives.  The French writer André Malraux said: “Le vingt-et-unième siècle sera religieux ou il ne sera pas”—“The twenty-first century will be religious or it will not be at all”.

I am grateful to my schizophrenia for it is thanks to it that I know that God loves me.  This certitude is what Protestant theologians consider to be grace.  I hope one day to become what Tillich called “a visible sign of grace”.