This article develops the theme of healing as removing that which is alien to the human being. This notion of healing is consonant with two aspects of love: affirming the self in its proper or authentic state, and restoring the wounded self to that state. Christianity owes much to the contributions of the ancient Greeks on this subject, but greatly surpasses them in its recognition of the critical importance of the body and the supreme value of love.
PlatoRepublic, bk. III, 409c, trans. Paul Shorey, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato including the Letters, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).
8.
PlatoCarmides, 157a–b, trans. Benjamin Jowett, in Hamilton and Cairns, The Collected Dialogues.
9.
CousinsNormanHead First: The Biology of Hope (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1989), 281.
10.
PlatoSymposium, 187a, trans. Michael Joyce, in Hamilton and Cairns, The Collected Dialogues.
11.
PlatoPhaedo, 118, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in Hamilton and Cairns, The Collected Dialogues.
12.
ProvonshaJ.W.“The Healing Christ,”Current Medical Digest26.12 (December 1959): 3.
13.
KelseyMorton T.Healing and Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Books, 1995), 51.
14.
Augustine, Sermones Novi Testamenti, Sermo CCXXXI, tr. Benedict Groeschel, CFR, 41–54.
KoshlandDaniel E.Jr.“Recognizing Self from Nonself,”Science248 (1990): 1273. “When the immune system is working well, it never gets activated by self substances, but unerringly responds to the nonself substances. When the system is not working well this distinction gets blurred and diseases of autoimmunity occur.”
17.
MenningerK., MaymanM., and PruyserP.W.The Vital Balance (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 357.
18.
CousinsHead First, 287.
19.
Deepak ChopraM.D., and David SimonM.D.Grow Younger (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001), 189, citing D.C. McClelland and C. Krishnit, “The Effect of Motivational Arousal Through Films on Salivary Immunoglobulin A,” Psychology & Health 2 (1988): 31-52.
20.
FranklViktorPsychotherapy and Existentialism: Selected Papers on Logo-therapy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 43, 67, 76, 122, 183, 209, 217.
21.
See, for example, Cousins, Head First, 240.
22.
Thomas AquinasSt.Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 38, a. 3.
23.
Thomas AquinasSt.Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 32, a. 5.
