Response to Reviews of Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter

Abstract

When I began to “shop” the manuscript of Augustine and the Fundamentalist’s Daughter (FD), I was told by more than one publisher that anyone interested in Augustine would not be interested in me, and anyone interested in me would not be interested in Augustine. Chastened, I resigned myself to writing the book for myself, for endeavoring to see my life as a whole, not in segments but connected, not as parallel or conflicting intellectual and physical experiences, but as “the way by which the Lord my God has led me through this wildness” (Deut. 8:2). As Professor Capps recognized, FD is “self-therapy” of a certain kind, no doubt with all the dangers of unchallenged “insights” into the self. In fact, religious language may express better than psychological language the trajectory of a lifetime. Profoundly grateful as I am for years of psychotherapy, I need Augustine’s language to provide a larger framework for my experience. Moreover, I found that in order to see myself whole I needed a different model of “person” than the dominant understanding of person as an uneasy composition of components of unequal value, variously named as body and mind, body and soul, etc. I needed philosopher Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s idea of the “intelligent body,” a person not analyzable into parts, but one thing. Endeavoring to think as an intelligent body is an especially useful exercise for academics like myself. The extreme difficulty of doing so reflects the overwhelming success of the two (or more) entities model. Across centuries, we humans developed the ability to think with our rational minds, with our rational minds only, assigning emotion to body and excluding body from the activity of thinking. We call this “objectivity” and are very proud of its accomplishment. It took centuries, but we did it! Now academics find it “natural.” As the song says, “It’s second nature to me now, like breathing out and breathing in . . .” But it’s not natural; it is behavior learned under particular historical conditions (which can’t be discussed here). I’m guessing that many or most scholars long, as I do, to bring our life experience into closer conversation with the subjects we study. The life of an intelligent body includes Pastoral Psychol (2013) 62:393–398 DOI 10.1007/s11089-013-0529-5