• Re: CHRISTIANITY MADE WESTERN CHRISTIANS "SCHIZOPHRENIC" (2/3)

    From Tony Allan@21:1/5 to FBInCIAnNSATerroristSlayer on Mon Jan 9 09:42:20 2023
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    desires” (John Chrysostom, 1979), “circumcise your heart” says “St. Barnabas” (2003, p. 45) for religion became internal and private. Like
    the African or Roman self (Mauss, 1938/1979), the Jewish self had been embedded in a functioning society, individually decentred and socially contextualised (Di Vito, 1999); it survived death only through its
    bodily descendants: “But Abram cried, what can you give me, seeing I
    shall die childless” (Genesis 15.2). To die without issue was extinction in both religious systems (Madigan & Levenson, 2008). But now an
    enduring part of the self, or an associate of it—the soul—had a connection to what might be called body and consciousness yet had some
    sort of ill defined association with them. In its earthly body it was in potential communication with God. Like God it was immaterial and
    immortal. (The associated resurrection of the physical body, though an essential part of Christian dogma, has played an increasingly less
    important part in the Church [cf. Stroumsa, 1990].) For 19th-century
    pagan Yoruba who already accepted some idea of a hereafter, each village
    has its separate afterlife which had to be fused by the missionaries
    into a more universal schema (Peel, 2000, p. 175). If the conversation
    with God was one to one, then each self-aware individual had then to
    make up their own mind on adherence—and thus the detached observer
    became the surveyor of the whole world (Dumont, 1985). Sacral and
    secular became distinct (separate “functions” as Dumont calls them), further presaging a split between psychological faculties. The idea of
    the self/soul as an autonomous unit facing God became the basis, via the stages Mauss (1938/1979) briefly outlines, for a political philosophy of individualism (MacFarlane, 1978). The missionaries in Africa constantly attempted to reach the inside of their converts, but bemoaned that the Yoruba did not seem to have any inward core to the self (Peel, 2000,
    Chapter 9). Lienhardt (1985), whilst broadly sympathetic to the idea of
    a precolonial African “collectivist” self, maintains that some aspects of individuality were of course already recognised (“said the king… it is only I who can see the dance of the tortoise: his dance is entirely inside him”—a folktale quoted in Lienhardt, 1985, p. 143); he agrees that Christian education has developed this private self as more
    distinct and more drastic.

    (c) Scrutiny of the self
    If each separate person was now a potential temple for God (1
    Corinthians 3.16), yet “be you transformed in the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12.2). Everyday mundane self and experience were suspect and had
    to be interrogated. Introspection had been previously recommended by Plotinus (“go into yourself” [1984: 1.8.9.7-8]), and Augustine (2008, p. 123) recalls that, “By the Platonic books I was admonished to return
    into myself.” Not without some struggle for “I did not wish to observe myself… And I looked and was appalled… Where shall I go to escape from myself?” (2008, pp. 44, 60). “Abase thee, abase thee, O my soul!” says Marcus Aurelius (1906, p. 14) similarly. Immoral acts now become a part
    of you rather than something circumscribed and past to be punished by illness or crop failure: “If we say we have no sin, we are deceiving ourselves” (1 John 1.8). Christian duty now prescribed for all a
    rigorous self-examination ever deeper; one had to reject the compromised past, but in doing that one inevitably doubted one’s earlier perceptions and memory as having been suspect (though once tacit) and fundamentally misconceived or false. “Renunciation and despair of it are our first
    steps in the direction of the truth,” says William James of the evangelical Victorian (1904/1964, p. 140). “I had become to myself a
    vast problem and I questioned my soul” (Augustine, 2008, pp. 57–58). “Le
    moi est haissable” observed Pascal (1910). “What is the attitude of our soul towards your neighbour?… Examine carefully whether your heart be sincere,” recommends St. Francis de Sales (1934, pp. 294–295, 296), “[a]fter each point of the examination you will find yourself to have failed.” And Thomas à Kempis (1952, p. 196) advises “Therefore carefully
    examine your conscience to the best of your ability, cleansing and
    purifying it by true contrition and humble confession.” “Depressed in spirit, felt my own depravity” similarly comments a 19th-century mission diary in Africa (Peel, 2000). There was a shift from practice to belief (emphasised yet again in the Reformation with its particular emphasis on self-control [Max Weber]), and thus a focus on how you could believe,
    how you knew that you believed, and what it was to be sure (Needham,
    1972). (But there never could be any certainty, as Calvin notoriously noted.) Early Christianity appears to have been essentially a peasant protest movement (Horsley, 2005), and such introspection only seems to
    have come in after its more immediate political defeat (the leader’s execution) with gentile Christianity’s shift to a less politically
    engaged internalisation (compare the early modern Anabaptists and
    Quakers). Augustine quotes Galatians (5.17)—“you are unable to do what you wish”—to emphasise a compartmentalised and conflicted mind in which the elements are set against each other, unknowing, a conflict
    particularly salient at the period of conversion, and which William
    James (1904/1964) makes sense of using the idea of an unconscious. The
    point of self-examination was to achieve a new self mastery to conquer
    what were taken as the more bodily emotions. St. Colombanus writes in a 7th-century sermon: “Will you not beware of yourself, wretch, and have
    no confidence in yourself—you who are ensnared by yourself, but not set free by yourself” (as cited in Holder, 2000, p. 113). Early monastic accounts emphasise a constant monitoring of mood and the practical management of mood, in fighting the demons of anger (Goehring, 2000; Stewart, 2000): “do not let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4.26). One attempted such self-mastery away from others in secret (ένκpατια); similarly good deeds should be private and hidden (Mathew 6.
    1-18). Secular introspective scrutiny in printed autobiographies (as
    well as in private letters) can be dated from the mid-16th century in England, emerging out of the religious confessional literature (Skura,
    2008; Barker 1984; cf. Burckhardt, 1945): “In those days I would wreak mine anger altogether with pen and ink on paper”; “I… thought that to dissemble with a dissembler was no dissimulation” (c.1569); “as I have changed the inward affectes of my minde, so I have lured my wanton
    workes to effectuall labours” (1590; all three quoted in Skura, 2008).

    (d) Everyday sense data is downplayed
    If Hebrew salvation had been essentially this worldly, in Daniel 12 (and
    1 Enoch 22) we do have some firmer intimations of a life to come
    (possibly under Zoroastrian influence; Madigan & Levenson, 2008). In Christianity there was now a clear Platonic separation between the world
    of everyday experience—mundane, temporary, and compromised—and the real other world which was beyond sensory perception. “Nothing that is
    visible is good” says St. Ignatius (2003, p. 273). Origen (1872, p. 462) comments that, “All the Christians therefore have the eye of the mind sharpened, and the eye of sense closed.” Estranged from God, we now had
    to find him by estranging ourselves from our everyday life however appealing: “Natural good is not simply insufficient in amount and transient, there lurks a falsity in its very being” describes William James for the Christian (1904/1964, p. 140). “Do not love the world nor the things which are in the world” (1 John 2.15). “Such [social] amusements,” comments Edward Gibbon acerbically (1993, p. 527), “were rejected with abhorrence, or admitted with the utmost caution, by the severity of the fathers”: Thomas à Kempis (1952, pp. 33, 88) recommends that “Man’s true spiritual progress depends on denial of the [bodily] self…. Live a dying life… dead to self.” St. Ignatius comments that, “I
    no longer desire to live like a human” (Ignatius, 2003, p. 281). Our current world was impermanent but we had been redeemed from the sin of
    Adam through the Incarnation: “Old things have passed away, all has
    become new” says a 19th-century American convert (cited in James, 1904/1964, p. 200). It is particularly the immediate material aspects of
    our current world—food, sex, comfort, anger—that must be downplayed through fasting and self-denial, and engagement with them deprecated (Origen, 1872, p. 460). This involved the individuals themselves who to
    an extent become questionable and unreal. In the 17th century John
    Bunyan recommended “I must first pass a sentence of death… upon everything that can properly be called a thing of this life, even to
    reckon myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyment, and all,
    as dead to me” (as quoted in James, 1904/1964, p. 156). As the
    boundaries of possible experience passed beyond the human lifespan, they became separated from real life, extending on as a more abstract
    principle. “[Christians] live in their respective countries, but only as resident aliens” says the author of the Epistle to Diognetus (Anonymous
    B, 2003). What people actually could do in this extended life to come
    was left a little vague in experiential terms, but there were continued debates in the early church as to the activities and nature of the soul:
    was it purely intellectual as Origen (1869, pp. 137–142) avowed? Or did Resurrection involve the body as well as the soul (and the nature of the resurrected body was left open for medieval debate)? Like other
    religious systems but perhaps more so, Christianity used logical
    paradoxes to emphasise the value of the theorised spiritual over the experienced (the Folly of the Cross, Death of Death and Hell’s Destruction, three persons in one, “My power is made perfect in weakness,” “Credo quia impossibile est”). Taught the missionary when faced with materially inclined (and presumably mystified) Africans, “to die is to gain” (Peel, 2000, p. 166).

    (e) Conflicted agency and divine grace
    “And he is truly learned who renounces his own will for the will of God” (Thomas à Kempis, 1952, p. 32). One had to surrender to God—“break us, melt us, mould us and fill us with a love of God” as Methodists still appeal to the Holy Spirit (Heelas, 1981, p. 41); and personal agency was anyway less to be taken for granted—“I saw that when I acted against my wishes, I was passive rather than active” (Augustine, 2008, p. 114). Jewish salvation and divine punishment seem to have been this worldly
    and collective (Exodus 20.5) although there are hints of something more individual in Ezekiel 18.1–4 (Madigan & Levenson, 2008). Rather than
    their being natural and unremarked, the individual now had themself to
    focus on what it was to decide and act, and why. How did some people
    make the decision to reject God? Was it some malign external force yet within oneself (later to become codified as the Devil)? If God acted
    through you, was the active agent God or you, or somehow both? How could
    it have gone otherwise? How can I be sure I am saved? Can I be sure I am sure? Though the fuller development of these questions only occurred in
    late medieval theology, we can imagine how they pricked the minds of the more philosophical or nervous early converts like Augustine. And yet at
    the same time one was somehow finally responsible for one’s actions: Augustine opposed astrology because it located sin as external to him (Augustine, 2008, bk 4, Chapter 3). And yet the full weight of moral decision was ultimately externalised onto God as “grace,” his gratuitous and undeserved gift (Pitt-Rivers, 1992): “one of the symbolic ways of displacing personal responsibility” comments Firth unkindly (1970, p.
    25). God comes to Augustine without his apparent intentions and does something to him: “I was astonished to find that already I loved you” (Augustine, 2008, p. 127); yet “fearing a precipitate plunge, I kept my heart from giving any assent” (2008, p. 94). But that final plunge is somehow involuntary and up to God’s grace for “the mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance” (2008, p. 47). In the second century, Origen (1869, p. 416) comments that some “may have been converted to Christianity, as if
    against their will.” The confusing idea of “grace” somehow implies that
    God acts, and yet doesn’t act obviously, allowing and encouraging something human to happen (and was it inevitable anyway?). If so, why
    was it previously blocked by our sin? Presumably this would lead to confusion over personal and divine agency in the individual: Augustine
    for instance is constantly uncertain as to whether God or he is the
    active agent of a decision or action. We might assume that for the
    average convert, this would have been guided and made easier by the
    clergy, but the internalised God/self/soul/mind relations continued to
    be ambiguous:

    So I was in conflict with myself and was dissociated from myself. The dissociation came against my will; this was not a manifestation of an
    alien mind but the punishment suffered in my own mind … And so it was ‘not I’ that brought this about. (2008, pp. 148–149)

    Augustine’s conversion does not seem to have resolved these experiential issues, but rather that they passed into relative insignificance when he surrendered, took shelter in God, and then passed the credit for all his
    new now approved actions and thoughts onto God’s grace.

    (f) Decomposition and conflict of the self in conversion
    Conversion (followed by exorcism and baptism) was a total transformation which entailed the introduction of a split in the self which was ideally resolved through God’s grace. You could be a Roman pagan, and a Neo-Platonist as well as a bit of a Manichee as was Augustine in a sort
    of “add on” process (or consider Apuleius’ Lucius who collected various
    different pagan initiations), in which maybe you emphasised bits of one
    more than the other but you did not have to totally discard the other. Christianity however demanded a total renunciation of the old: “Unless a man is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of heaven” (John 3.3). (We are here assuming a voluntary conversion, not the forced mass
    conversions of Saxon England or Germany, or later of Uganda, but the rationale of any conversion presumed some volition which all successful converts placed retrospectively on their past act.) In conversion, there
    are two of you recognised and experienced: the older unregenerate you
    which persists in memory (or backsliding) after the conversion, “our old self” (Romans 6.6), and the new self anticipated or imagined before conversion, whether to be then welcomed or not. In the 17th century, Sir Thomas Browne, speculating on salvation, similarly comments “There is another man within me” (Browne, n.d., p. 110). Pascal: “So man is always divided and opposed to himself” (Pascal, 1910, p. 190). “God grant me chastity and continence but not yet” the vacillating Augustine complains (2008, p. 148). His dilemma ended in his final conversion when he found
    an injunction from God (Romans 13: 13–14) to give up the erotic life:
    but God’s agency and grace not Augustine’s. At the actual moment of conversion you are in two minds (“the divided self” as William James [1904/1964, Chapter 8] called it13), at which point the operations of
    the other self may for a moment become more salient and problematic, and have to be momentarily considered for you are then that other self. “The winds blow first one way, then the other, pushing my heart to and fro” (Augustine, 2008, p. 106). There is a dialogue between the two selves: “Why then are you perversely following the teaching of your flesh?” he asks himself, and admonishes “Do not be vain my soul” (2008, pp. 62, 63). “Because we are of two minds… we do not realise that we are doing evil” says St. Clement (2003, p. 197). For Augustine the two selves were the older unregenerate self, dominated by the sensual appetites, opposed
    to the new spiritual self (“This weight was my sexual habit”: 2008, p. 137); and he finally rejected his philosophical background because it
    could not deal with this sort of conflict (2008, p. 131). The actual
    moment of passing over to the new self was more or less involuntary (see section Conflicted Agency and Divine Grace) and might be sudden (Origen, 1872, p. 148). At the end, although the conflict had been real,
    acceptance of Christianity will mean there should be no residual doubts: “the alternative for them will be to be converted to the true view and
    not to deny that in the process of deliberation a single soul is
    wavering between different views” (Augustine, 2008, p. 149). Through becoming a Christian, recognition of God’s Incarnation in Jesus cut
    short his unavailing quest for perfect Platonic forms (Stroumsa, 1990).14

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    Conclusion: A psychology of self awareness
    Putting these six influences of Christianity together, we have an
    implicit and experienced psychology of detachment from immediate
    embodied experience in the world, with an emphasis on scrutinising and questioning the convoluted workings of a hidden and immaterial self,
    seen as distinct from other similar selves and from the natural world,
    now with private communication with an omniscient presence who already
    knows one’s thoughts and emotions, and with ambiguous agency for
    personal actions and experience in the world which are no longer to be
    taken as tacit and unproblematic: all of which came to the fore in the process of conversion in which one has to disassemble one self and
    create another by carefully bringing one’s decisions to conscious awareness yet attributing the final shift externally to the omniscient grace. This involved identification and scrutiny both of the processes
    of memory and cognition, and of the relations between self and outside world, and between new entities (God, soul) which had a close relation
    with the self, in a way that was hardly necessary for the pagan. Indeed
    with the growth of the idea of heresy, to correctly align such personal cognitions with the dominant procedures became an issue of vital
    importance. Drawing on Hebrew religion (for instances a, b and e) and on
    the Hellenistic mystery religions and on Stoicism and Neo-Platonism (instances a, b, c and d),15 this new view could picture a more explicit hierarchy of deity, the moral soul, through the cognitive mind to animal impulses, which might all act in concert or, more usually, be in
    conflict.16 We find this psychological schema in Augustine: “I turned
    then to examine the nature of mind,” he says in a review of his conversion, “vicious acts only occur if obsession has captured the mind’s affective part which is at the root of the impulse to carnal pleasures” (Augustine, 2008, pp. 67–68). We are assuming that all of this gradually percolated down through theological texts and clerical training, to the sermons and homilies preached to the ordinary populace.
    And thus to the way they would understand and experience themselves.
    With literacy, even words and ideas became separate from the speaking individual and maintained an independent existence.

    Unlike Greek philosophy, Christianity galvanises everybody. St. Gregory
    of Nyssa comments that,

    Every corner of the city is thronged with men arguing on
    incomprehensible subjects. Ask a man how many obols a thing costs, and
    he dogmatises on generated and ungenerated essence. Inquire what is the price of bread and you are answered the Father is greater than the Son,
    the Son is subordinate to the Father. Ask about your bath and you are
    told the Son was created out of nothing. (Kellett, 1933/1962, p. 216)

    Tertullian and Origen note that theology was as accessible to a workman
    as to a philosopher (e.g., Origen, 1872, pp. 156, 467).

    The central issue in all of this seems to be the emphasis on a continued scrutiny of personal actions and inclinations amidst a multitude of alternatives, and on the downplaying of the everyday physical world, and
    on the problematisation of agency: in all, a new self awareness and self reference, a shifting of the centre of gravity of consciousness into the individual human being. Many habitual aspects of ourselves, and these we
    can presume are already enhanced in proto-schizophrenia—our bodily functioning, “chance” thoughts, sensations, impulses, and memories—can be attributed to some source external to the experiencing self (to physiology, memory, dreams, genes, passions, habits). We cannot however
    now attribute agency to them. As agency is withdrawn from the natural
    world, from others, from animals, plants, stars, and spirits, our
    individual agency appears enhanced and yet there remains the uneasy
    balance between the “is it me?” and the “is it something external?”17

    Many external causes, spirits, and stars, not only no longer have agency
    but are no longer validated by our society, so any personal explanations
    of an external locus of control become increasingly idiosyncratic and divorced from our common social life (Tausk, 1919/1948).18 If the
    passage from proto-schizophrenia to schizophrenia is thus perhaps intelligible in social terms, does this offer any clues to the nature of proto-schizophrenia itself? If the attribution of agency is a general
    human characteristic, and is integral to both religion and psychosis
    (Dein & Littlewood, 2011), then this might suggest that both the proto-symptoms and their transformation into schizophrenia are concerned with this attribution, the transformation being related to the
    indigenous psychology we have considered here. This type of estrangement from experience (later reinforced by a number of secular and religious developments)19 fits well with Sass’ criteria for the reflexive self-consciousness that has perhaps propelled us into schizophrenia.

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    Acknowledgements
    The genesis of this paper lies in intermittent discussions over many
    years with Georges Devereux, Raymond Firth and Godfrey Lienhardt. We are grateful for more recent comments from Mitchell Weiss, David Napier and colleagues at the 2009 Conference on Cultural Psychiatry in Norcia,
    Italy, and at seminars at University College London, Durham and Oxford. Translations from the New Testament are our own; from the Old Testament those of the Authorised Version.

    Go to:
    Biography

    Roland Littlewood, BSc, MBBS, FRCPsych, DipSocAnthrop, D.Phil, D.Litt.,
    DSc, is Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry, and a Crabtree Scholar
    at University College London. He is an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist,
    has carried out fieldwork in Trinidad, Haiti, Albania, Lebanon and
    Italy, and is a Past-President at the Royal Anthropological Institute.

    Simon Dein, BSc, MSc, MBBS, PhD, MRCPsych, is a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Medicine at University College London. He is a
    part-time psychiatrist working in the NHS. He has written extensively on religion and health and on millennialism in Judaism and is the author of Religion and Healing Among The Lubavitch Community Of Stamford Hill: A
    Case Study in Hasidism. He is Chair of the Master's Degree Programme in Culture and Health at University College London and is Visiting
    Professor in Psychology at Glendwyr University, Wales. He is one of the editors of the journal Mental Health, Religion and Culture.

    Go to:
    Notes
    1In common modules for agent hyperidentification and theory of mind.

    2For instances of nonaffective delusions as Tudor melancholia see
    Littlewood (2009).

    3Possibly inherited from his insane French grandfather, Charles VI, on
    whom see B. Clarke (1975).

    4Insanity was twice as common in England as in Piedmont or Savoy (B.
    Clarke, 1975).

    5An obvious objection to our procedure, beyond what threatens to be an unfashionable unitary model, is that we cannot readily conflate recent cultural changes and the historical as a unitary phenomenon in what may recall a 19th-century evolutionist schema: recent small scale
    communities are not our ancestors and have changed in time just as have European societies. Nevertheless we would maintain that they have shared some common psychological features in the same way that, say,
    parliamentary democracy and feminist individualism have been a product
    both of Western historical development as well as of contemporary low
    income countries. This paper is not an essay in evolutionary
    inevitability but in social contingency.

    6It is obviously clumsy to keep talking of proto-symptoms and
    proto-voices, instead of symptoms and voices, but we need to bear in
    mind that a phenomenological description of the early stage is
    necessarily opaque and the “proto-” prefix reminds us that this will emerge only finally as the experienced symptom whether this takes a classically schizophrenic pattern or not.

    7Like elf shot in Anglo-Saxon England (B. Clarke, 1975).

    8Blankenburg had not suggested that this “loss of self-evidence” was temporally prior or causal in schizophrenia: his approach was purely phenomenological.

    9Who had previously published a comprehensive work on parallels between modern reflexive self-consciousness and insanity (Sass, 1992).

    10“Westernisation” and “modernisation” are hardly unproblematic terms:
    we are using them here for a shorthand for relatively increased material resources, industrialisation, urbanisation, literacy, the absence of prescriptive marriage patterns, individualisation and (more recently)
    lower fertility and mortality rates, a later age of marriage, the development of nationalism, and a more immediate relationship with the
    world economic and cultural system (Littlewood, 2002, p. 86).

    11There are large problems of method with the sort of schema we have
    offered here: a conflation of the historical and the cultural, and of
    course a drastic summarisation of an enormous field; a simplification of
    a complex theology across a vast chronological gap between early Christianity and more recent missionisation, assuming the same things mattered in the same way to diverse peoples; with an emphasis on English material (no Petrarch or Luther, or indeed possible Indian or Chinese parallels), and a detaching of local theorisations from their immediate social context. Nor are we looking at the spread of “Christian psychology” beyond Christianised countries through industrialisation and individualisation. We have ignored the specific contributions of
    colonialism and capitalism, the later trajectory of the self from
    Descartes to Kant and beyond, and the problem of reconciling a world of top–down essences with that of bottom–up experience. There is hardly an example or interpretation here which could not be qualified.

    12The seeds of gentile Christianity were located in these religions, as
    they were in later Greek philosophy and in the Israelite religion. Some
    of our “Christian” changes are presaged or facilitated by the Stoics and Neo-Platonists: reading Plotinus, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine—or even Julian (who accepted the idea of a supreme God and an individual soul;
    Burr, 2000)—shows us how much late paganism anticipated or paralleled Christianity: the single omniscient deity, the progress of the soul, the universality of individual moral obligations. “God is, and cares for us and ours,” and one “must dig within thee” recommends Marcus Aurelius (1906, pp. 16, 94). And similarly the indignant Yoruba of the Ibadan
    Empire maintained to the quizzical missionaries that they already
    recognised a supreme power above the gods (Peel, 2000, pp. 116–122). The choice of roles offered in Greek tragedy (Antigone) pointed the way to something approximating to a self-contained self: Momigliano (1971)
    argues the Hellenistic period had biographies and thus a notion of the individual. The religion of the Hebrews showed some of the
    psychologisation of Christianity in the emphasis on personal sin in the
    Book of Enoch and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, let alone the Jewish scriptures’ emphasis on an omniscient deity and the possibility
    of a life beyond the material (Madigan & Levenson, 2008). It would be
    unwise to speculate on the religious psychology of the Judaeo-Greek
    cults of Alexandria but we might presume something interesting here.

    13Later a common idiom for the schizophrenic self—e.g., R. D. Laing.

    14Conversion from paganism to Christianity of course has not always
    taken such a drastic and psychological form, and might be motivated by economic self-interest and local loyalties, whilst still accompanied by troubling dreams or illness (for a modern missionary instance, see
    Firth, 1973, pp. 325–326).

    15As Bertrand Russell put it, the philosophy of later antiquity had been
    a gradual process of increasing subjectivity. Augustine is of course an instance where both family background and Hellenistic philosophy pushed
    him into a Christian direction. His rather abstract Platonic divinity gradually developed personalistic characters under the influence of his Christian friends and mother: God now had a particular interest in him.

    16As in Aquinas. A more formal instance of something like this is found
    in the triventricular psychology of the medieval and Renaissance periods—sensation, reason, and memory—though this is more Galenic than Christian. See however the divine projection on to this in Robert
    Fludd’s interesting diagram of 1619 (E. Clarke & Dewhurst, 1972, p. 38).

    17In a neuro-philosophical paper, Kircher and Leube (2003) propose that
    our first level of consciousness (prereflexive consciousness) comprises
    such primary experiences which are tacit and “transparent” in that while the brain constructs our reality the mechanism of this construction is
    not represented in it; thus resulting in naïve realism—the assumption that the content of consciousness has a direct contact to the immediate environment. If we then reflect on primary experiences, the content
    enters introspective consciousness (level two). Primary self-experiences include self-agency (as well as self-coherence, self-affectivity, and autobiographical memory)—the sense that one is the author of one’s

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