Quest Magazine

Afterwards, You're a Genius: Faith, Medicine, and the Metaphysics of Healing

By Chip Brown
New York: Riverhead, 1998. Hardcover, 398 pages.

This book, with its odd title, is nevertheless an entertaining excursion into alternative medical practices by a journalist who apparently started out as a hard-headed and skeptical investigator of the subject but ended up convinced that there is much that conventional medicine does not know and that spirituality and healing go together in ways that we can hardly grasp.

As Brown entered into his exploration of healing techniques on the fringe of conventional medicine, he focused on those approaches that fall under the rubric "energy medicine." He was curious about the concept: of the "ghost in the machine," the idea of an animating soul or spirit in the body that is crucial to healing.

One could certainly conclude that Brown is very much persuaded of the truth of Voltaire's remark that "the art of medicine consists of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease." And amuse Chip Brown does, as he describes his explorations into psychism, aura balancing, subtle energies, healing prayer, hands-on healing, and other alternatives to conventional medicine.

A former staff writer for the Washington Post, the author has also written for a number of national magazines including the New Yorker, Harper's, and Esquire. He starts out skeptical, finds himself frequently puzzled at how he gets drawn into the peculiar ways of unconventional healing, and finally concludes, "Maybe there is also real magic in magical thinking."

He learns "not to clutch too tightly this idea that there is an intrinsic meaning in all events .... And yet the idea of intrinsic meaningfulness is central to the metaphysics of healing. At times nothing seems more powerful than the Willful disavowing of chance precisely because it does turn every misfortune into a lesson; it does render meaning; it docs ask you to search the flux of events for your complicity. Maybe the very effort to live by such a code creates its own meaning. You learn to pretend that everything happens for a reason and you are astonished to find that meaning appears.”

-WILLIAM METZGER

May/June 2001

Other Worlds, Other Beings: A Personal Essay on Habitual Thought

By Lathel F. Duffield, with Camilla Lynn Duffield
New York: Vantage, 1998, Paperback, xxii + 90 pages.

The ways we perceive and think about the world around us and the "other worlds" that are the object of religious concern depend crucially on the assumptions with which we view them. Many of our assumptions arc modeled by the language we speak (a proposition advanced most notably by the Theosophist Benjamin Lee Whorf and therefore known as the "Whorf hypothesis"). In the West, the dominant set of assumptions are "mechanistic," but the author proposes that another set of assumptions is also available, based on the concept of "numen," a spiritual power inherent in things, and calls for an integration of these assumptions.
-J.A.

March/April 2001

Physician: Medicine and the Unsuspected Battle for Human Freedom

By Richard Leviton
Charlottesviile, VA: Hampton Roads, 2000. Paperback, xii + 579 pages.

An emotionally colored mixture of incongruous elements, often angry, intended to disparage current medical healing practices, while touting obsolescent sickness care systems, this book is a jumble of news reports and quotations from the daily press, with few from respected scientific journals. Virulent attacks on physicians' associations and the current health care system mark the first chapter, followed by uncritical rambles through unproven fields of health care, new and ancient.

The book's statement of the relations between bacteria, bacteriophages, and viruses is incorrect. It often treats information and relationships described in fiction and motion pictures as valid scientific observations.

Alternative and complementary approaches to medical care are not necessarily in conflict with customary medical practice. The author unreasonably makes them so, overlooking that practitioners of each depend on an accurate knowledge of anatomy, physiology, and all other health care disciplines. All medical care requires an accurate diagnosis, must treat illness as part of the patient's life, and depends on remedies, whatever they may be, which should be regularly and thoroughly tested.

Change in all these elements should be expected. To prove means to test, not to confirm. Each form of therapy, orthodox or other, must be continually tested if it is to succeed or prevail. Systems, whether of care or of relationships to others or to Deity, can never be considered final statements if they are developed by human beings.

This book is worthless as a whole and unreliable as something to live by. It wanders from topic to topic, here scientific and there uncritical, with only an occasional piece of some worth.

-JOHN B. DE HOFF, MD, MPH

March/April 2001

The Incredible Births of Jesus

By Edward Reaugh Smith
Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1998, Paperback, 109 pages.

The gospel accounts of the life of Jesus are, as is well known, inconsistent with each other and in some respects contradictory. A single example, one of many, will illustrate. Matthew and Luke give different genealogies for Jesus. Both trace the descent of Jesus from David (important for establishing his claim to Messiahship), but do so by quite different lineages. Matthew (1.6) reports that Jesus descended from David's son Solomon, whereas Luke (3.31) reports a descent from David's son Nathan.

Annie Besant discovered such contradictions when she tried to make a harmony of the gospels, and that discovery broke her faith in a simple, pious acceptance of literal Christianity and started her on the road to Theosophy. Today the contradictions are a problem mainly for fundamentalist believers in the literal truth of scripture. Scholars generally regard the gospels as attempts to set forth certain ideas through whatever history, myths, legends, or traditional topoi best served the purpose. Theosophists tend to regard them as symbolical or metaphorical expressions of spiritual realities.

The German esotericist, quondam Theosophist, and founder of Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner, had his own ideas about the subject, which are the basis for The Incredible Births of Jesus. Briefly, "the divine spiritual intuition of Rudolf Steiner" (66) was that there were really two persons named "Jesus." One, the descendant of Solomon, who was a reincarnation of "the most advanced Ego humanity has produced, that of the ancient Zarathustra" (67), was born in Bethlehem but was taken to Nazareth as a youngster. The other, the descendant of Nathan, was born in Nazareth He had no permanent Ego, but was the recipient of the astral body of the Buddha.

When the Nathan Jesus was twelve years old, his parents presented him at the Temple, and at that time the Zarathustra Ego left the body of the Solomon Jesus (who then died) and entered the body of the Nathan Jesus. The father of the Solomon Jesus also died, as did the mother of the Nathan Jesus. The surviving parents married each other, and thenceforth there was one family and one Jesus. The story is much more complex than that, those being only the bare bones of the tale.

What is perhaps most interesting about this Anthroposophical interpretation is that it accepts as literal truth the gospel accounts of the nativity and tries to make sense out of their contradictions. That aim accords with the aspirations of the most literalist of Christian fundamentalists. Few of the latter, however, are likely to find much satisfaction in this effort to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable.

-JOHN ALGEO

March/April 2001