Biblemania - Depression, Madness, and Dysfunction
© John McManamy
Let us start on a low note:
"All things are wearisome," writes the speaker. "What has happened will happen again, and what is done will be done again, and there is nothing new under the sun."
Speaker, of course, is Jewish for Koheleth, which is Greek for Ecclesiastes. I am not sure what the proper Biblical word is for clinically depressed: "To what purpose have I been wise," our serotonin-deprived author laments. "Alas, wise man and fool die the same death."
Ecclesiastes is the nearest thing in the Jewish Bible to Buddhist literature, but without the Eightfold Path to Enlightenment. Readers are simply advised to place a vague sort of trust in God and to enjoy life to the best of their abilities. The Book was written sometime after the sack of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, and there is a lot to be depressed and disillusioned about:
"How solitary lies the city" we hear in another Book of the Bible, "once so full of people!...Bitterly she weeps in the night..." (Lam 1)
Then there is Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me," later echoed by Jesus on Golgotha.
In the meantime, there is the matter of life's cruel injustices: "Perish the day I was born and the night which said, 'A man is conceived.'" (Job 3.3).
Indeed, looking upon slab after textual slab of unremitting despair and depression, one wonders how any sane person can regard the Bible as inspirational reading. Yet we have all come across soaring lifting quotes (the 800 "glad" passages, according to Pollyanna), plucked out of context, and served up for our easy enjoyment. To me, all this "lift up our voices" talk has all the resonance of the top string of a chord. The challenge as I see it is to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable, and to come out a better person in the process.
Which leads me to my next topic:
MADNESS
Try this on for size:
King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon eating grass among the oxen (Dan 4.33), a frazzled King Saul needing to be soothed by a youthful David's lyre, hurling his spear at David, presumably right in the middle of a psalm (Sam 1.11). And of course Jesus driving the evil spirits out of the two madmen of the Gadarenes (Mat 8.28), as well as from Mary Magdalene (Lk 8.2).
But the Bible adds an extra dimension to the meaning of mad. If anything, mad is a positive character attribute. The great prophets transposed to our era would be prime candidates for five-point restraints, electro-convulsive therapy, and industrial strength thorazine. But in ancient Israel, someone actually wrote down what they said and preserved it for the next generation to read.
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