Abstract
Whether due to increased awareness or sheer fact, by all measures mental health challenges are on the rise. Preliminary reports indicate the Covid-19 pandemic has stoked a firestorm of mental health struggles worldwide, the embers of which are likely to smoulder for decades to come. This sobering reality makes these two robust theological accounts of mental health—Peter J. Bellini's The Cerulean Soul and Jessica Coblentz’s Dust in the Blood—welcome and sorely needed contributions to academy and church alike.
Peter J. Bellini, Professor of Church Renewal and Evangelization at United Theological Seminary in Ohio, derives the name for his unique title from the Latin for sky, caelum. In the volume's preface he explains that affixing the adjective ‘cerulean’ to the noun ‘soul’ connotes the latter's paradoxical ‘capacity for depth, depravity, depression, and the divine. Our journey will explore these sites’ (p. ix). (Unfortunately, this catching imagery is never revisited again in the volume.)
Bellini, self-confessedly not a disability theologian, penned his volume for the Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability series. He is aware that mental illness sits at some distance from the field, even when cast as a psychiatric disability. Most pointedly, he openly acknowledges disability theology's tendency to resist accounts that would seek to overcome disability—even in the eschaton—as a form of ongoing oppression and marginalization by ableist normativity. This sensibility is at odds with the driving premise of Bellini's project: that mental anguish can and will be redeemed in Christ.
The opening chapter moves adroitly through the challenging task of defining terms. Bellini clarifies that his aim is not to address all or every mental disorder, but to examine ‘depression and its treatment as representative and symbolic of the issues across the mental health field’ (p. 11). Even so, Bellini notes that ‘depression’ is not a univocal term. Melancholia, then, (and also melancholy) denotes depression-like states in an expansive sense that indicates its various cultural manifestations across time. (‘Despondency’ is another term Bellini reaches for.) Bellini pleads agnosticism on the question of causality (whether divine, demonic, hamartiological or psychological): there is need for ambiguity and apophaticism. But we are not left without theological coordinates.
Chapters 2 and 3 undertake additional throat-clearing. Bellini surveys seminal texts from history and philosophy on the subject of melancholia, tracing them to the modern shift to depression. He notes the inconclusivity of modern accounts of depression, and favours a ‘critical realist’ approach that seeks to develop a theological account of depression that integrates—rather than competes with—contemporary scientific and biomedical approaches.
Chapter 4 lays the groundwork for Bellini's constructive theological account. Dismantling insufficient accounts of imago dei, Bellini puts forward a relational portrayal that embraces the incarnate Christ's experience of humanity in three modes: creation, fall, and redemption. From here emerges Bellini's threefold typology of depression (detailed in chapters 5, 6, and 7 respectively): the natural, consequential, and purgative.
The natural locates depression in relation to humanity's nature as created, contingent beings who in the face of their freedom encounter anxiety. Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety and Paul Tillich's The Courage to Be serve as theological touchstones here. Their work exemplifies the angst-generating nature of human existence. The second type, the consequential, accounts for depression from the vantage of the fall. Evagrius Ponticus and Hans Urs von Balthasar are dialogue partners who indicate that some experiences of depression are due to sin. The final member of this typological trifecta is the purgative, which glosses other experiences of depression as instances of God's redemptive work. St John of the Cross in particular illuminates how, in God's economy, depression can function as a means of sanctification. Yet Bellini is careful to distinguish depression from the dark night of the soul, even if the two conditions may exist comorbidly.
Pivoting from this diagnostic typology, in his final chapters, Bellini seeks to construct an integrated theological account of depression grounded in the Trinity. Here the level of theological analysis reaches a new energy and pitch. He takes to task recently popularized notions of divine passability and kenosis, especially as represented by Jürgen Moltmann. He locates their origin in a Lutheran communicatio idiomatum, which Bellini takes as a theological distortion that violates the distinction between Christ's human and divine natures. On Bellini's read, this theological turn violated Chalcedon and opened the door for nineteenth-century kenoticism that lodges the suffering of the human Christ into the very being of the Godhead. Bellini, by contrast, insists that it is the human Jesus, but not the second person Logos, who suffers death: ‘there is no need for a kenosis as divine divestment’ (p. 155). At stake here is Christ's latitude to redeem depression. As the incarnate one, Christ's assumptio carnis is also his assumptio melancholia. Yet he redeems and transforms human melancholy not by his identification with humanity, but by his divinity. At issue, too, is the full-fledgedness of divine freedom for a God who does not need to suffer (contra Moltmann and fellow Lutheran company, for whom the cross overwhelms the Trinity). In repair, Bellini reaches for Anastasia Scrutton, who retrieves Augustine's and Aquinas’s distinctions between the passions (passiones) and affections (affectiones). This important parsing is conflated in modern thinking. But when properly restored, it illuminates how God voluntarily expresses affections without compromising his freedom. The upshot of all this is that God, in Christ, freely takes on the experience of our mental disorders and suffering, but due to his divine impassable nature is able to overcome them.
The final chapter draws to a close by considering the three theological typologies of depression with a Trinitarian lens. It considers how Christ and the Holy Spirit each operate as advocate, healer, and friend for those who experience depression in the present time and look forward to healing in the time to come.
Bellini's robust theological account of depression and mental suffering is astute and admirable. However, it is not without its weaknesses. The last chapter, for example, churns out a few unfortunate platitudes at which our next author would likely cringe (‘When nothing seems to hold together, God can provide that elusive meaning needed for the journey’; ‘The power of a theological response to depression is that God loves us even when we cannot love or feel love’, p. 173). What is more, insofar as Bellini's project rests largely on a typological approach to depression, it rises and falls with the strengths and weaknesses of that species. Bellini rightly demurs from offering any sure-fire criteria by which one may objectively determine any particular incidence of depression as an example of any of the three typologies on offer. (He notes that variants of all three might be at play in any one case.) This lack of specificity may leave one wondering if it offers any practical value. And while Bellini stakes his account on valuable and tantalizing systematic theological heights, there is little by way of direct pastoral and ecclesial directive. Given the Trinitarian God's engagement with his redeemed creatures who presently still languish, in what ways should the church imitate and replicate the work of its Lord? Bellini leaves much here to continue pondering, and it is just here that our next author carries us forward.
Jessica Coblentz, assistant professor at St Mary's College in Indiana, foregrounds her account with her own experience of depression as a doctoral student. The introduction also clues us in to a personal anecdote to which the wilderness alluded to in the first word of the book's title connects. This soon spills out into a robust biblical account of wilderness as a theological touchstone for depression which forms the beating heart of her work.
Chapter 1 surveys contemporary scientific accounts of depression, with the diagnosis that ‘these causal claims often disclose more about the worldview of a particular theorist … than they disclose about the identity of depression’ (p. 23). With the help of Heidegger's phenomenology, Coblentz provocatively suggests that depression is primarily an experience of unhomelikeness. In other words: depression experiences the world as an inhospitable landscape.
Chapter 2 identifies two common popular theologies of depression: the first defines depression as a self-imposed moral evil caused in some way by the sinfulness of the sufferer; the second explains depression as a dark night of the soul by which God refines the soul of the sufferer. (There are some obvious resonances with Type 1 and 3—‘natural’ and ‘purgative’—in Bellini's account, but they aren’t exact equivalences. Bellini doesn’t neatly ascribe depression to the sinfulness of the individual sufferer, but more generally to the matrix of sin and its effects in the world. He also carefully distinguishes the dark night of the soul from depression, though he does indicate that mental suffering may serve as a tool for divine ‘purgative’ purposes.) Coblentz doesn’t dismiss these outright, but they fail to give a thick account of depression. Her criticisms are aired in chapter 3.
Coblentz starts coming to her own in chapter 4. Coblentz carefully and appreciatively relays Karen Kilby's critiques of theodicies (which here are taken to include all theologies of depression). Kilby contends that theodicies fail because they put the theologian into the wrong relationship with suffering—ultimately a passive one. What is more, theologians who theologize suffering (including depression) inflect a kind of epistemic harm since they project their own meaning onto the suffering of others; this snuffs out the sufferers’ latitude for making meaning of their own suffering. The upshot, then, is that not even seemingly simple and dismissible theologies of depression can be dismissed, at least not if there remains any potential that an individual sufferer might opt to consider it a fair account of their own experience. The implication, too, is that theologies of suffering—and thus depression—should only ever take place in the first person, never the second or third. But while Coblentz is largely in agreement with Kilby, she doesn’t take it as a fatal blow to her own project. There still should be theologies of depression, Coblentz contends, and resolves: ‘What I can offer are resources for consideration, not prescriptions’ (p. 102).
The second half of Dust in the Blood endeavours to do just this through an exposition of depression as exemplifying the figure of Hagar's wilderness experience. Coblentz posits that the wilderness is an apt biblical material on which to strike out the phenomenon of depression insofar as both are experiences of unhomelikeness. Yet Coblentz insists—with Kilby looking over her shoulder—that this biblical tie isn’t to suggest that depression is inherently meaningful. In fact, this agnosticism on depression's meaning is precisely what commends Hagar's wilderness experience among other potential biblical candidates. With Delores Williams’s classic Sisters in the Wilderness in hand, Coblentz observes that God never brings Hagar's wilderness episode to a satisfying denouement. We never find out if she makes it out of the wilderness; all we hear is that God provides her with what is necessary for survival. And perhaps, Coblentz suggests, this definition should refashion the church's conception of salvation away from grand and triumphalist visions of healing and restoration; perhaps our salvation lies in just this: God's giving us the gifts to survive. A church with such a vision should be all the quicker to channel God's own presence and ‘unimposing accompaniment’ (p. 203) to those he permits to be sent into the wilderness.
My main criticisms of Coblentz's work relate to its comparison with Bellini's. To begin with a minor observation: it is interesting that neither work engages Michel Foucault, whose Madness and Civilization broadly charts the shift from more theological perspectives on mental health in the Middle Ages through to its wholesale medicalization in the modern era. This is more surprising in Bellini's instance, as his work casts itself as more philosophical in style and content. And there are some pressing theological questions which both authors decline to address head on, if mention at all. Given the near-suffocating levels of medicalization of mental health treatments, how is the Christian sufferer to navigate the modern medical system? To what degree can or can’t readers of the Bible see in its description of victims of demon-possession resonances with modern experiences of mental health afflictions? And what are we to make theologically of the bitterest dregs of depression, that of suicide? One can understand the decision to abdicate on these complex matters, and at the same time wish that they had nevertheless been broached.
Stylistically, the reader should be aware of their differing tones. The Cerulean Soul requires much more heavy lifting; perhaps unnecessarily so. Coblentz’s style is much more accessible, though sometimes also slightly less self-assured. Due to their slight variations in form and content, they will likely serve a Venn diagram of audiences: Coblentz taking a slightly more ecclesial and lay audience (though also interested biblical scholars and ethicists), and Bellini a heavier share of academics (systematicians in particular). To these respective groups I heartily commend both.
I will close by noting an interesting point of similarity and difference: the two aspects of the natural landscape to which their books make respective reference—sky and land. I wonder if we could attribute this to their respective traditions. Bellini, though affiliated with a Protestant institution, takes his cues from Orthodox theology and its skyward sweep of theological themes, theosis especially. Coblentz, a Catholic, is content to tend to the earth's soil in all its sacramental mystery. Between the two, we might easily look to Paul's instructions to the church of Corinth in 1 Corinthians 15, at the centre of which he explains: ‘the first person was of earth, dusty; the second person of heaven’. Perhaps Bellini and Coblentz license us to adapt Paul's words several verses later and look forward to the day when we can claim ‘Depression has been swallowed up in victory’. But until then, there remains much work for the academy's collective acumen and the church's corporate ministry as they navigate the shadowed landscape of depression behind those already blazing its trails.