The Ministry and Crucifixion of JesusA study in Enthusiasm, Envy and Manic-Depression

RAYMOND LLOYD

ARGUMENT

In all probability Jesus Christ was crucified while suffering from a psychosis, from a total loss of mood control known as a manic reaction. The following essay is taken up for the most part in adducing the evidence for such a hypothesis. This particular manic-depressive psychosis would seem to have been generated over the long term by other people's envy of the ability and goodness of Jesus (and, above all, of the enthusiasm enhancing these characteristics), and by the lack on the part of Jesus of the emotional and social wherewithal to cope realistically with this envy. During the potential healing crisis which a psychosis may represent, Jesus began unconsciously to assert himself to something like his inherent stature, to assume a Son of God authority which a very large number of people have since attributed to him as his due. At the time, this self-assertion was out of touch with social and political reality. Whether eventually he would have obtained the emotional insight necessary to exploit his great gifts in society without stress is something we cannot know, because the psychosis was interrupted by the crucifixion. To persons who consider Jesus only as the Son of God, these unrealised possibilities may not matter. In a secular age we may nevertheless do well to consider more openly, with a view to eventual catharsis, the type of human envy, which drastically cut short such an outstanding life.

1. INTRODUCTION

The possibility that Jesus became psychotic was suggested initially by the juxtaposition in the Synoptic Gospels of two unusual incidents, the curse on a fig tree for not bearing fruit in advance of the season, and the physical disruption of the moneychangers' activities in the Temple. On further examination the hypothesis was borne out in three ways, by the straightforward description of Jesus’ character and activities, by striking parallels in the later Marcan record with the classical symptomatology of a manic-depressive reaction, and by a psychodynamic analysis of the teachings of Jesus, both in particular and taken as a whole.

The first two of these three lines of evidence will be examined in the sections entitled 'The Personality of Jesus' and 'The Psychosis of Jesus'. The third aspect of the evidence will be given under the heading 'A Psychodynamic Interpretation', and that will be followed

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by a section entitled 'Towards an Existential Understanding' which will attempt to see from the perspective of Jesus himself whether there were other courses of action available in the family, social and political circumstances of his time. To begin with, several points should be made with regard to methodology, both in psychodynamics and New Testament studies.

This essay, under the title Cross and Psychosis, appeared in 1970 in FAITH and FREEDOM Vol 24 Nos 70-71, then published at Manchester College Oxford England. Raymond Lloyd read philosophy, politics and economics at Exeter College Oxford where he graduated in 1956. He later became deeply interested in problems of human behaviour. From 1961 (to 1980) he was on the staff of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations at its headquarters in Rome. At this stage (in February 2000) the only changes to the original essay have been minor ones in style and paragraph layout.

Psychodynamics

The particular hypothesis put forward here may be original, and it aims also to be comprehensive, but this kind of inquiry has a long, if interrupted, history. That Jesus was psychologically different has been suspected by many people, explicitly by his own family and many of his contemporaries and implicitly by modern theologians such as Professor Rudolf Bultmann who, in his 1961 Heidelberg lecture translated in Braaten and Harrisville's The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ, acknowledges as certain that Jesus suffered the death of a political criminal, and states that, as this death can scarcely be understood as an inherent and necessary consequence of his activity, 'we may not veil from ourselves the possibility that he suffered a collapse'.

More particularly there were several books written on the psychology of Jesus, in the early years of this century, by doctors such as de Loosten, Binet-Sangle and Hirsch, stating in general that Jesus suffered from paranoia. The authors, however, wrote with two disadvantages. First, they were out of touch with contemporary New Testament scholarship, and so based their diagnosis primarily on the questionably historical 'I am' discourses of St. John's Gospel. Such evidence was effectively refuted by Albert Schweitzer in the dissertation he wrote for his medical doctorate in 1913, The Psychiatric Study of Jesus. Secondly, these doctors, and Schweitzer himself, were writing at a time when not only psychoanalysis, but even systematic clinical descriptions of disturbed emotional states, were in their infancy. Thus, much of Schweitzer's psychiatric evidence for refuting the diagnosis of paranoia was later in effect discounted by Dr. Winfred Overholser, in his otherwise sympathetic

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foreword to the second English translation of Schweitzer's thesis published in 1948.

As we shall see later, Schweitzer himself may have come nearer the truth in pointing out that the Gospel record is probably best understood in the light of Jesus’ apocalyptic expectations, but without Schweitzer realizing that these might signify a manic reaction. Other German theologians had been troubled by the ecstatic nature of these expectations, particularly Oskar Holtzmann, whose War Jesu Ekstatiker? was published in 1903, but he could bring only ethical and not psychological tools to their analysis. Nor has there been much serious psychological study since, and this perhaps for three reasons. First, until a short time ago, modern theologians had shown a singular lack of interest in the historical Jesus, in preference for the Christ of the Kerygma; and while a new quest has recently begun, the idea of studying personality has usually been considered, in the words of Dr James M. Robinson, as not being, a factor of real relevance to theology today'. Second, the practice of psychoanalysis, which can certainly throw new light on the subject, has been limited to a surprising degree to persons brought up in a Jewish milieu, who either know little, or are not interested, or are too tactful to throw light on the ethico-emotional basis of the teachings and life of the founder of Christianity. And third, to anticipate, manic-depressive psychosis itself has not received as much attention from analysts as neurosis or paranoid schizophrenia, partly because manic-depressive psychosis usually clears itself up spontaneously (if often superficially), and partly because analysts, in their capacity as researchers and scientists, tend to possess personalities out of tune with the manic-depressive.

This bring us to a second point in psychodynamics: are labels such as 'paranoid' or 'manic-depressive' really useful, as applied to Jesus or anyone? If they are taken to mean states completely distinct from each other and from normality, such labels are not useful. Rather, the various psychological disturbances are very probably successive lines of retreat after normal methods of coping have broken down, so that a person may fall back successively on neurosis, manic-depressive psychosis, and schizophrenia, each line of retreat coinciding with emotional patterns of infancy, but with the particular line along which an individual retreats during psychosis usually having been pre-selected as emotionally the most congenial during earlier periods of lesser non-psychotic stress. But, even with this qualification, categories of psychological types and disturbances are still useful, because there seem to be some ways of rationalizing and idealizing the emotions which are open either exclusively or typically to the manic-depressive or cycloid, but not to the schizophrenic or schizoid. As will be shown later, the general tenor of the idealizations in the Gospels would classify Jesus as a manic-depressive. But what is also important is that the quality of

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idealization depends on the level of an individual's intelligence and the sophistication of family or social ethics. In the case of Jesus both his personal intelligence and contemporary Jewish ethics were at a very high level, which is perhaps the basic reason why so many have been unable to grasp, or have refused to acknowledge, that Jesus might have become psychotic.

A third question, which may be raised in the field of psychodynamics, is whether psychological labels can legitimately be applied to the dead. In the sense that, say, the 'mad' George III is not around for doctors to test the diagnosis of porphyria recently suggested by Dr. Richard Hunter and Dr. Ida Macalpine, then – despite the record of his urine samples - there will be a smaller number of persons than otherwise who think that this hypothesis throws light on eighteenth-century political history. Also the main purpose of psychodynamics is to test and retest observations with a living person, in the hope that their validity will enable him eventually to come to better terms with his emotional self. But psychiatrists who are in principle against using analysis in history are both poor historians and poor analysts - poor historians because the fascination of history is to know why things happen (and here the new studies of personal behaviour may throw as much light on political events as do economics and sociology), and poor analysts because the most meaningful understanding of emotional disturbance can be gathered primarily from what a person says, whether viva voce or, as in the case of Jesus, recorded in 1900-year-old historical documents. Moreover, with regard to Jesus, the psychodynamics of a historical figure are far from being an academic subject, because his ethical and spiritual teachings are a live issue for many people and institutions today. So it is imperative for us to examine the emotional origins of those teachings, whether or not we come to the conclusion that he was fully integrated, normal, or latently psychotic or, as is argued in this essay, that he actually underwent a psychosis.

The last point on psychodynamics to be made at the outset is whether or not a psychosis is a bad or unhealthy thing. In the absolute moral sense, there is nothing discreditable in a psychosis, for a person is unlikely to transgress the moral law any more or less than he has done in a non-psychotic state (except perhaps where he is subjected to new kinds of provocation and restraint). But in the social sense, a psychosis is still usually regarded as a bad thing, to a large extent evoking the kind of fear or envy, which is produced by any other kind of non-conforming behaviour. Whether it is absolutely a bad thing socially depends on whether or not a society is itself already like a plane off course and whether (to continue a parable of Dr Ronald Laing’s) a psychotic breaking out of formation in such a society would be considered by an ideal observer to be trying to get back on course or breaking further away. If the society

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itself is off course, a psychotic may have a sociobiological function that we have not realized, the manic in particular being the psychological type able to bend events to better or worse social purposes after the enthusiasm of others to tackle genuine problems has long drained away. It may indeed be partly an unwillingness deliberately to break out of social formation which is delaying a contemporary reappraisal of the historical Jesus in the light of psychodynamics, for many people already realize that there are serious emotional contradictions in the Gospel portrait. Thus when Canon Ronald Preston, in the first of his two essays in the 1966 Vindications, states that 'there is force in the old contention that if Jesus was not right he was either mad or bad', he may unwittingly be perpetuating the widespread and understandable social fear lest the psychotic in fact be both right and good. As we may see in this essay, Jesus was very probably all three.

But whatever their moral excellence or social function, there is no point in pretending that latent or actual psychotics represent personality ideals for a healthy civilization. Unfortunately too many people still get lost in their psychoses or, because alternatives do not exist or are financially or socially too costly, people are dragged out by drugs and other treatment and are put back (or have to go back) into essentially the same family and social conditions that produced the breakdown. It may therefore be largely a matter of chance whether a person can win through after a psychosis to full emotional maturity and integration and, if he is articulate, advance our knowledge of the human condition. This seems to have been the case with many saints who after ecstasy went through a long dark night of the soul, or, very possibly, some degree of manic-depressive psychosis. With Jesus, a potential healing crisis was cut short by the crucifixion: nevertheless a psychodynamic and existential study may yet enable us to perceive more accurately the emotional and social realities which are necessarily encountered by teachings such as those of the Sermon on the Mount and the Kingdom of God.

New Testament Studies

Within the limits of this article we cannot summarize or assess the past hundred years of New Testament studies with regard to the chronology, historicity and originality of the teachings and actions of Jesus. But the general view of the Gospels today, of the Synoptics as well as John, is that they are primarily a theological proclamation rather than a chronological record. This emphasis is not disputed, but the one does not exclude the other. The point to be made here is that the Synoptic Gospels, especially from the transfiguration on, show an amazing coincidence with a person's psychodynamic development, which would give renewed credence to the earlier view of their being some kind of chronological record. Indeed, there are independent pieces of evidence to support this argument, such

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as comparisons with the Mishnah, local topography, and a series of quotations (which will be found typical of manic-depressive recall and idealization) from the readings of the Law and the Prophets which, according to the triennial cycle of such readings, would have been made on the Sabbaths in the two months just preceding Passover in Nisan (April).

Because most New Testament scholars today will repudiate totally any chronological approach to the Gospel record, it may be worth our while here, irrespective of attitudes to the main thesis of this essay, to take a critical look at one example of the present historical scepticism, namely the cleansing of the Temple, not least because it would appear from a straightforward reading of Mark 1: 18 (and John 2: 17) that it was this action which led the religious authorities to make away with Jesus.

In the 1963 Pelican commentary on Mark, Professor D. E. Nineham apparently endorses a theory cautiously put forward in 1916 by Professor F. Crawford Burkitt that the cleansing took place, not prior to Passover in April, but in December, at the Feast of Dedication, which commemorated the re-cleansing of the Temple by Judas Maccabaeus in 165 BC. However, in the accounts of both Mark and John, Jesus is described as overturning the tables of the moneychangers, the receivers of the qolbon, or fee for changing other currencies into Temple currency. The only time these persons were allowed within the Temple precincts was to receive the annual pre-Passover Temple tribute enjoined by Exodus 30: 13 which, according to the Mishnah (Shekalim 1: 3) was between 25 Adar and 1 Nisan, that is, the third week before Passover. Jesus must therefore have been in Jerusalem at least fifteen days before his final Passover, and there is nothing in Mark to discount this. The teaching about a final Passover week is deduced from the report in John 12: 1 of the arrival of Jesus in Bethany 'six days before the Passover', and the actual dating of the entry into Jerusalem from 'the next day' in John 12: 12. It is possible, as Professor C. H. Dodd implies, that 'the next day' is a somewhat artificial formula of transition, but in any case the cleansing of the temple in John's account has been separated from the entry into Jerusalem and moved to the beginning of the ministry. There are probably theological reasons for this change, but it could also have been made because John knew that Jesus would not have found the moneychangers in the Temple in the final Passover week. Yet there seems little interest in modern commentaries on how such independent details can explain these and other chronological puzzles: for example, how it is that in Mark 14: 49 Jesus could state that 'day after day' he was in the Temple without the authorities' arresting him, implying that he was there longer than the traditional Passover week.

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Generally speaking the view followed in this essay is that of Professor C. H. Dodd, who in Chapter 1 of his New Testament Studies states that 'there is reason to believe that in broad lines the Marcan order does represent a genuine succession of events, within which movement and development can be traced'. It is possible to follow his argument with Professor Nineham through book, article and footnote, the latter admitting in his Studies in the Gospels that he cannot 'disprove that Mark's order was historical, for there may be arguments quite different from Professor Dodd's for believing that it was'. The hypothesis presented here may be such an argument.

A similar point may be made with regard to the question of historicity, which is not when Jesus said or did something, so much as whether the teaching or action in fact derives from Jesus himself or is an interpretation or addition by the evangelist or the early church. For this evaluation, it is necessary to know such commentaries and studies as those of Matthew Black, Bultmann, Carrington, Fenton, Jeremias, Manson, K. L. Schmidt and Vincent Taylor, and so be able at the very least to guard against Pauline and other later concepts. Certainly most of the interpretations of the gospels by these scholars are different from those given here, many of which may still be faulty. But whereas the earlier method of explaining odd teachings and actions was often through intellectual and spiritual tours de force and a tendency to count the teachings unhistorical, the interpretations given here, while more prosaic, do at least make the claim of greater psychological and historical consistency and comprehensiveness. In particular they account completely for the basic contradictions in Jesus’ teaching, which have long puzzled if not alienated many scholars, before the modern solution of ignoring them, or discounting them as unhistorical.

The interpretations here are based mainly on the teachings recorded in the Synoptics, but a study of John would also bear out the hypothesis, not only with respect to John's likely access to a historical source different from the Synoptics, but with the further point that the fourth Evangelist may be found to provide an outstanding existential justification of a manic-depressive Jesus. This briefly is that the later psychotic self-assertiveness of Jesus was inherently justified from the beginning and that therefore the full significance of his life would be understood only if social and political reality were made subservient to an attempt to recast all the teachings of Jesus with the authority of Son of God, as distinct from a part attempt to do this by the Synoptics.

Similarly, with regard to the question of originality, that is, whether Jesus first formulated a teaching or simply repeated it (for which it is necessary to consult such studies as those of Abrahams, Dalman, W. W. Davies, Daube, Guilding, Mann, Claude E. Montefiore

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and Strack-Billerbeck), the point can be made more briefly: in interpreting a person's emotional state the choice of analogy is often as significant as the formulation of a precept. However, as will be seen later, there are many teachings which are typical of a manic-depressive's idealizations, both in a latent and in a psychotic state, so that, given their high ethical content, the question of attributing their originality to Jesus may prove to be basically one of how intelligent we consider Jesus to have been and how frequently we may think to come across a breakdown in a similarly intelligent person.

It is of course possible to go through the Gospels, as Bultmann does in The History of the Synoptic Tradition, and adduce evidence for this or that word, phrase, sentence, teaching or story being secondary, editorial, literary device, artistically stylistic, fragmentary, imaginary, mythological, fairy tale, legendary, novelistic, popular wisdom, Hellenistic, scholastic, prophecy after the event, ideal or just absurd. But in this case, if indeed the total Synoptic portrait is found to be overwhelmingly of a manic-depressive type, second or third hand as it may be, then the early church must have had a definite interest in so presenting Jesus. And of course, the impact, which Jesus has had on history, is very largely derived from what the church said about him. In any case, the manic-depressive type is not contradicted by the minimal portrait presented by Bultmann in Jesus and the Word. Rather, if we do admit that Jesus may have suffered a collapse when he was drawn to Jerusalem at the end of his career, the reason may very likely be that the simultaneous 'call to obedience', given in the Sermon on the Mount and in the preaching of the Kingdom, can be formulated and sustained only by certain types of people in certain social conditions. We may then find that some of the Gospel details, whose very strangeness was a stimulus to look for other literary explanations, do in fact have a biographical significance.

But besides the literary strangeness, there was very probably a deeper ethical reason for the shift away from the historical Jesus, in that the historical-critical school was turning up someone who was not completely a worthy object of faith, either Jesus as such, or any man. The particular point is expressed by an otherwise most sympathetic non-Christian, C. G. Montefiore, in Volume 1 of his commentary The Synoptic Gospels, that he 'cannot see in the life of Jesus as recorded in Mark 1 - 13 anything about which to be lost in marvelling admiration or adoration'. The general point against any personality cult is made by Bultmann in Jesus and the Word, to the effect that interest in the personality of any great man serves only to divert attention from his work and purpose, which in the case of Jesus was his teaching and call to obedience. From what has already been written here, it is obvious that there is no intention in this essay of reviving the earlier type of psychological interest in

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Jesus, either that of his supporters or of his detractors. We shall however begin, in the words of Bultmann's Heidelberg lecture, by showing how the Gospels 'do indicate something of Jesus’ activity from which a few of his personal characteristics can be inferred'. We may then find, not that the Gospels 'say nothing of Jesus’ inner development', but that what they say is not announced in this way, yet includes a psychodynamically consistent and so highly probable explanation of just those two problems which have blocked a revival of scholarly interest in the historical Jesus-whether Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah, and what meaning he found in his death. In this essay, however, the solution of such problems is of secondary importance compared with a wider existential understanding, but this is to anticipate the conclusion.

II. THE PERSONALITY OF JESUS

In the Gospels Jesus is presented as healing, teaching and preaching. In these activities he shows three major features of his personality, his concern for other people, his intelligence, and his enthusiasm.

A concern for other people is one expression of the basic character trait of affectothymia, or warm-hearted, gentle, full emotionality, which has been measured by psychologists such as Dr. Raymond B. Cattell as the most significant of sixteen character traits differentiating one individual from another. With Jesus, the emotionality was expressed primarily in the form of compassion, in his healing work, in his 'heart going out' to the crowds, in his sharing the message of the Kingdom with tax-gatherers and other people who do not observe the Jewish Law, in his concern for what to the Jews was very much the inferior sex (eight of the twenty healing miracles claimed for individuals were performed on or on behalf of women), and in the expectations which he held out for the hungry, the poor and the sick.

The emotionality was also expressed in the warm indignation with which he effected some of his cures, in particular in the rebukes of evil spirits; in his impatience with the dullness of his disciples; and in his difficulty in tolerating rebuke, as may be inferred from his weak counter-arguments over the washing of hands and the plucking of corn, details of which we shall go into later. The emotionality was expressed finally in both joy and resignation, in the simple belief in providence in his teachings about the ravens and the sparrows, and in the despair of many such statements as 'To him who has, is given, and from him who has not, is taken what he has'. It is this characteristic of emotionality which, according to a descriptive psychiatrist like Kretschmer or a mathematical psychologist like Cattell, will develop, under unusual

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stress and exhaustion, in the loss of mood control seen in a manic-depressive illness.

Leaving the psychodynamics till later, we may note also that Cattell found the next most important character trait differentiating persons to be intelligence. Since Jesus has long been considered as representative of the omniscience of God, and since such characterisation must have derived at least in part from his intelligence, we need not describe this character trait here, except perhaps to cite one example with only the vaguest parallel in Jewish literature and wonder whether there exist many statements so beautifully perceptive as

‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.'

Also, Cattell's placement of intelligence in the secondary position is significant because it helps to explain how even the most intelligent people may become psychotic. Thus, among other people, Luther, William Cowper, Wesley, Samuel Johnson, Fechner, Comte, Coleridge, Mill, Ruskin, William James, Lenin, Montagu Norman, James Forrestal, Wittgenstein and Virginia Woolf were either all known while alive as depressives or manic-depressives or have since been cogently described or interpreted as such. Some of their breakdowns are recorded, and indeed all may have gone through psychotic experiences, especially if we recognize that an intelligent person can more easily conceal a depressive than a manic reaction. Parenthetically it may be said that such breakdowns need not be as common in the future, as knowledge of an infant's anxiety patterns becomes more widespread, and as children themselves are taught how to recognize and deal with them, rather than being permitted to rationalize the subsequent life-experiences which repeat the earlier anxiety patterns and thus reinforce them further.

Apart from his compassion and his intelligence, Jesus is also shown in the Gospels as an enthusiast, in his preaching and in his incessant work. To be an itinerant preacher of any kind is usually a sign of enthusiasm, to preach a coming Kingdom an indication of special urgency, but to preach it the way that Jesus did could have been begun or sustained only by unusual fervour. Added to the traditional interpretation of the Kingdom as the material transformation of the earth, Jesus went about calling for prior repentance, which for many would have meant the transformation of their even more intractable human nature.

Also characteristic of enthusiasm is hard work, an indication of which is given in the first chapter of Mark, where the evangelist seems to be presenting a typical day in Capernaum, where Jesus

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taught in the synagogue, drove out an evil spirit, restored Simon's mother-in-law, and in the evening when the Sabbath had ended and sick people were allowed to seek treatment, 'healed many who suffered from various diseases and drove out many devils'. Then before dawn the next day he had got up to go to a lonely spot and pray, only for the disciples to seek him out, and for Jesus to propose moving on to the neighbouring villages to proclaim his message. More generally, Jesus’ enthusiasm is evidenced in his Sabbath activities, which seem to have been unprecedented among the Jews and which led to considerable opposition. Jesus, however, was not put off, defending himself many times, but perhaps most significantly in the spirit of John 5: 17: 'My Father has never yet ceased his work, and I am working too'.

This characteristic of enthusiasm has great affinity with another of Cattell's source traits, that of surgency, which in the early 1930s was found to be the largest single factor at variance in the personality of children and adolescents, and sixth in adults. In Cattell's Description and Measurement of' Personality a surgent person appears as joyous, energetic, sociable, humorous, easy-going and quick-tempered, unlikely to succumb to neurosis and most mental disorders, except mania and psychopathy, where the incidence is unusually high'.

A manic-depressive breakdown itself is usually preceded by lesser elated or melancholy phases. The ecstasy of the baptism, the decision to make a prolonged fast and the ecstatic nature of the subsequent temptations in the wilderness may all be considered typical of hypomania (something more than enthusiasm but less than mania), while the withdrawal of Jesus to Tyre, the attempt to remain there unrecognized and the offensiveness of the remarks to the Syrophenician woman, are all typical of a depressed period.

What would have precipitated the complete breakdown hypothesized in this essay may no longer be chronologically traceable, but there would have been sufficient cause in the threatening remarks that Herod is reported to have made about Jesus 'This is John, whom I beheaded, raised from the dead' and the later warning from the Pharisees 'Herod is out to kill you'. Manic reactions occurred commonly enough during the 1930s when people suddenly feared losing their jobs: they occur that much more easily when a person's life as well as his life's work is threatened. It is interesting that Matthew (14: 13) deliberately alters Mark's account to make either Herod's threat or John's death the direct cause for the subsequent withdrawal of Jesus to a lonely place.

It was indeed while Jesus was later in territory out of Herod's jurisdiction, in Caesarea Philippi, that the final breakdown seems to have begun, for it was here that Jesus, after evoking from Peter the

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statement that he was the Messiah, began to teach about his death and resurrection. It was 'six days later' that Jesus went through the transfiguration, which could well be a reminiscence of the kind of ecstatic experience or elated loss of mood control that would have enabled him to sustain subsequent teachings about his death.

III. THE PSYCHOSIS OF JESUS

With Peter's statement and the transfiguration, the Synoptic record from Mark 8: 27 onward takes on a more urgent tone. Luke 9: 31 states outright that it was during the transfiguration that Jesus received the idea of his subsequent fate in Jerusalem, and the rest of Luke's Gospel is cast within the framework of a journey there. Such a chronological record is not essential to the thesis of this essay. It is enough only to recall Professor Dodd's comment on that part of the Synoptic record beginning with Mark 8: 27, given in his New Testament Studies, that 'it is on every account likely that at one point in his life Jesus summoned his followers to accompany him to Jerusalem with the prospect of suffering and death, and from that point on his thought and speech dealt with special emphasis on his approaching passion.'

There are three teachings that, more clearly than before, appear to be attributed to Jesus in the later Synoptic record. The first is that the Kingdom of God will be ushered in during the approaching Passover, the second that Jesus will in some way be God's agent or Messiah in ushering it in, and the third that, if a sign was necessary, Jesus would allow himself to be put to death so that God could work the sign of resurrection and with this usher in the Kingdom. All three teachings, while highly idealistic, are also definitely psychotic, as we shall shortly see.

It is of course possible to show a psychosis by taking a series of some forty actions and parables and showing how each one has an element of the psychotic in it. In many of them we can also point to indications of time and place which make it probable or certain that they took place in or on the way to Jerusalem, and just before Passover. The teaching in Capernaum on the temple-tax, the description of the Pharisees as whitewashed tombs, the curse on the fig-tree are three examples, but each would need a chapter, not to show the psychodynamics, but to deal with all the earlier explanations which may make sense, one by one, but not if taken cumulatively. This of course would not show that all the teachings and events took place on the same final Passover visit to Jerusalem, but the question would then become (given the provocative nature of many of them) why Jesus was not arrested, or deserted, many times earlier, or why, when he was in fact arrested, he was treated so drastically. In any case, in this essay we have, as it were, only a certain amount of time to go through the wood, so the best

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procedure is not to start chopping at the trees, but to look for a path through it, which we can do now by following the three psychotic teachings, with detailed but not exhaustive references to this or that incident.

To start with the teaching of Jesus about his death, this may be considered manic for four reasons. That Jesus, after John's execution might have feared for his life was normal enough, but it is already a doubtful sign of mood control when he began to preach that he would die in Jerusalem and then actually went up to Jerusalem to face his death. Of course we can count this as self-sacrifice, but this does not mean that the idea is not also psychotic. A very similar idea occurred to the manic-depressive, John Custance, who in Wisdom, Madness and Folly published in 1951, writes that at the outset of one of his manic periods 'an inner voice seemed to tell me that there was only one way to conquer the Powers of Hell, and that was to offer myself as a sacrifice'.

Second, when a person makes an authentic self-sacrifice, it is not usually he who chooses himself or the time and place of the offering. If he is not asked by his colleagues, his decision must at least have their respect. In the case of Jesus, his initial announcement led Peter to take him by the arm and rebuke him. Earlier of course Jesus had been tempted by the devil in the wilderness to jump off the Temple parapet, but had then denied Satan with scripture. Now, however, it is Peter who is described as Satan and told that he thinks 'as men think, not as God thinks'. Indeed at no time did the disciples of Jesus understand him, and they were 'afraid to ask'; while the teaching itself is enveloped in what would otherwise be described as morbid circumstances, because Jesus tried to keep secret both the teaching and his final journey to Jerusalem. In any case the teaching of self-sacrifice was not always maintained, because he apparently switched his expectation of God's approval to a demand for the destruction of the Temple, so that God might rebuild it in three days, an omnipotent claim typical of a manic reaction, and enough to explain why there was no agreement on it at his trial.

Third, it is only a relative form of self-sacrifice if the person expects shortly to be resurrected. It is interesting, in view of later accounts of the resurrection, that Mark still recorded the disciples' discussion among themselves as to what 'rising from the dead' could mean. Certainly it was not a psychotic idea to expect resurrection, for the Pharisees generally shared this belief with Jesus, but what was psychotic was to prophesy death and resurrection of oneself. It is well known that suicide is a typical enough end to the depressive phase of a manic-depressive psychosis. However, a manic person also may court death, not for itself, but as a door to unending, immortal happiness. This is borne out from case-histories of Dr.

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Bertram Lewin who, in The Psychoanalysis Of Elation, states that 'in severe manic excitements ... the patients often visit heaven, see God or the saints, or have intimations of immortality . . . these manic patients anticipate a good death'. As we shall see later, the psychodynamic reason for this is perhaps best given in Mrs Melanie Klein's Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Manic Depressive States where she shows that in mania a person attempts to demonstrate omnipotence over his internalized good objects or idealized self or overpowering conscience, but cannot in fact shake himself loose from his dependency on them. In both children and adults she found that 'the objects were killed but, since the subject was omnipotent, he supposed he could also immediately call them to life again'.

The fourth characteristic that would seem to put Jesus’ teaching in the manic category is the unusually short interval of three days between death and expected resurrection. Again it is possible to find analogies for this interval, as Matthew 12: 40 does with the story of Jonah; as Strack and Billerbeck have done in their Kommentar by citing one Rabbinic teaching that God never permits the righteous to be in need longer than three days; and as Jesus himself might have done if in fact he died in the first of three years of the triennial cycle of synagogue lessons, when the story from 2 Kings 20: 8, that of the sign of Hezekiah's restoration to health by going up to the Temple on the third day, would have been read as haftara on the third Sabbath of the month of Shebat, that is, seven weeks before Passover. However, even if we trace the analogy, it still remains for us to show why this and not another analogy of longer interval was chosen. One reason, as we shall soon see elsewhere, is that short intervals are typical of the time-telescoping expectations of a manic reaction. Of course many New Testament scholars now claim that Jesus’ expectations of resurrection, and of resurrection after a three-day interval, are prophecies after the event. It is just as likely that the total self-assurance with which a manic person would speak of his resurrection, not brooking any opposition, would have helped to convince his followers that the resurrection took place.

The characteristic of time-accelerated expectations is also typical of the second idea which dominated Jesus after the transfiguration, that the Kingdom of God would shortly be inaugurated, specifically, at the approaching Passover. Again, it cannot be counted psychotic on the part of Jesus to have held general expectations about the coming of the Kingdom; apocalyptic writings had flourished since 175 BC(E) and were to continue to AD (CE) 125. Also, most of the Jews who believed in these writings would have expected the Kingdom to come during the period of Passover: this is how they interpreted the observance enjoined in Exodus 12: 42. Passover, furthermore, was later to be used to time

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the beginning of the Jewish revolt in AD (CE) 66 and the suicide of Massada seven years later. What was psychotic in Jesus is that he appears to have originated the idea that the Kingdom would come during the particular Passover when he was to die. As mentioned in the introduction, it was probably Schweitzer who first understood the remarkable nature of Jesus’ eschatological teachings, namely that unlike other apocalyptic movements they were not called into existence by historical events. 'The Apocalypse of Daniel was called forth by the religious oppression of Antiochus; the Psalms of Solomon by the civil strife at Jerusalem and the first appearance of Roman power under Pompey; Fourth Ezra and Baruch by the destruction of Jerusalem', so writes Schweitzer in The Quest for the Historical Jesus, whereas the new wave of apocalyptic enthusiasm ‘was called forth not by external events, but solely by the appearance of two great personalities, and subsides with their disappearance'.

Too little is recorded to make any useful psychodynamic

statement about John the Baptist, the first of the two great personalities. Apparently, however, he expressly denied being either the Messiah or the expected herald of the Messiah, the returned Elijah. In any case he made no specific prophecy as to exactly when the Kingdom would be ushered in. Jesus did, on several occasions, and it is these forecasts, their inconsistency and their lack of correspondence with the facts that we find the time-telescoping expectations of a manic reaction. The first such forecast was probably that of Matthew 10: 23, when Jesus sent out twelve disciples to proclaim the kingdom of heaven and told them that 'before you have gone through all the towns of Israel the Son of Man will have come'. The disciples returned without this prophecy having been fulfilled.

Another forecast is given in Mark 9: 1 that 'there are some of those standing here who will not taste death before they have seen the kingdom of God already come in power'. There are other passages such as Luke 17: 20 and the historically more doubtful Mark 13: 32 when Jesus states that he does not know when the Kingdom of God will come, just as earlier there are passages when it is said that no sign will be given to the present generation. Such passages have led to the spiritualization of the Kingdom or the 'realized eschatology' taught by Professor Dodd, which may be higher ethics, but they do not alter the cumulative weight of the other evidence as expressed in Mark 10: 37, 11: 10, 14: 25 and 15: 43, and Luke 24: 21, among other scriptures, that Jesus, his disciples and the crowds were expecting the arrival of the Kingdom at that Passover, or even as in Luke 19: 11 that 'the reign of God might dawn at any moment'. Nor do they alter the fact that Jesus was questioned, mocked and executed, according to Mark 14: 61, 15: 2, 9, 12, 18, 26 and 32, as Messiah and King of the Jews. More

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truistically, if ever Jesus was to be executed as King of the Jews, it could only have been at that Passover when he felt it most appropriate in some way to assume the role.

There are other indications of the time-telescoping typical of a manic reaction, for example in Jesus’ expectations of finding a fig-tree in fruit in advance of season, and perhaps too (if, as may be more likely, John's dating of the Passover on a Sabbath is correct), in Jesus’ anticipation by one day of the Passover meal.

To pass now to the third manic idea, that of Jesus attempting himself to usher in the Kingdom, and showing thus the self-expansiveness typical of a manic reaction. Nowadays, as has been shown by psychiatrists such as Emil Kraepelin, John D. Campbell, Silvano Arieti and Clifford M. Scott, it is common enough for persons who undergo a manic phase to claim that they are the Christ. In the second part of this essay we shall see the psychodynamic interpretation as to why a person whom the Synoptics had shown as essentially self-effacing may suddenly take on a self-expansive role. Here, in recording briefly the assumption of some form of Messiahship by Jesus, we might also point to its unplanned, even whimsical, character. Certainly Jesus did not assume the role in any of the expected ways, such as at the head of a rebel force, although scholars like Professor S. G. F. Brandon in The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth and Joel Carmichael in The Death of Jesus have extracted every possible clue to show that such an insurrection took place. Many of the followers of Jesus may have expected some such action, but that Jesus himself became an armed leader may be considered very doubtful for, even without the help of the analytical interpretation given later, it was out of character both with his healing work and with the tenor of most of the teachings ascribed to him regarding love and obedience to authority.

The first overtly Messianic act of Jesus was to take upon himself the fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah 9: 9 (and perhaps also 14: 4), that the King would come into Jerusalem (from the Mount of Olives) humbly and riding a donkey. Here there is a curious mixture, but quite in keeping with the manic reaction of a person such as Jesus, between earlier humility and psychotic self-assertiveness. Similarly the virtual commandeering of a donkey for his purpose could be the latter trait, and his promise to return its ethical mastery, a conflict that had occurred in the temptation in the wilderness, but is now played out in public. Furthermore, the action seems to have been poorly planned, because such a procession would usually have been followed by the cleansing of the temple, whereas Mark 11: 11 has Jesus simply arriving and surveying the whole scene and then leaving because it was late, which could be another example of the manic's loss of time perspective.

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The subsequent clearing of the Temple is the second overt act of Messiahship, when Jesus upset the tables of the moneychangers. It was long thought that Jesus was justified in his action because of the extortionate practices of the money-changers, but in 1917, in his Studies of Pharisaism and the Gospels, Dr. Israel Abrahams showed that there were no significant grounds for believing this, and this argument now seems accepted by such New Testament scholars as Professor D. E. Nineham. The moneychangers provided the traditional coin with which the half-shekel tax enjoined in Exodus 30:13 was paid. In doing so, they took a commission or qolbon of 1/24 or 1/48. And even if this is considered high, it is by no means certain that the money-changers themselves kept the commission; some early rabbinical authorities think they did in lieu of wages for the fifteen days spent in money-changing or to pay the travel expenses from the provinces up to the Temple, while other authorities think that the commission was used for road repairs or for Temple ornamentation.

The half-shekel tax itself was used for the Temple sacrifices: to interfere with its payment could have been considered only as sacrilegious. As stated earlier, it would seem from Mark 11: 18 that this action was decisive in the determination of the religious authorities to do away with Jesus. Or, as John writes, his disciples recalled the words of Scripture: 'Zeal for thy house shall destroy me'. The explanation of Jesus’ action (he began to drive out buyers as well as sellers) is very likely found in a manic's total disregard of money: if the Kingdom of God is about to materialize around one, then money, as we read elsewhere in Luke 16: 9, becomes a thing of the past. Here we may cite another experience from Wisdom, Madness and Folly where John Custance recounts that, after having given away money to prostitutes till the bank warned him about his overdraft but convinced that God would give him more to carry on the good work, he went into a Christian Science church in Curzon Street, London, and after his request for money was refused, became 'so filled with righteous indignation that I pulled down in maniacal frenzy everything I could reach, with the idea of making myself a martyr, and thus showing up the meanness and hypocrisy of churches in general'.

It is interesting that Mr. Custance, an Oxford graduate and one-time intelligence officer, whose book is introduced by a former Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion, apparently suffered no idea of reference on this occasion, that is, while he claims in some of his other manic actions to be following Jesus, he does not do so in respect of the incident in the Christian Science church, neither at the time nor subsequently when writing his book. And yet the parallel with the clearing of the Temple is considerable. It is indeed this physical disruption of the Temple activities, for however good the reasons, which should long ago have

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alerted scholars to the reality of Jesus’ breakdown. Not that they could necessarily have expected help from psychologists, for so sanctified has the pre-Abrahams interpretation become, that Cattell in The Scientific Analysis of Personality uses the incident as an example of emotional learning when 'the individual learns that there are occasions to summon up the blood and break a barrier, as Christ whipped the money-lenders [sic] out of the temple'.

There are more examples of self-inflation in the later Gospel record and many other clinical symptoms of a manic reaction, such as extreme outspokenness, argumentativeness, distractibility, and irritability, even callousness; and, in another category, of flight of ideas, hypermnesia, wordplay and assonance. Some of these will be cited in the interpretative section of the essay, which comes later, but first we might recount briefly how the final Gospel record is completely consistent with a manic reaction.

The interference by Jesus with the Temple functions and his

unwarrantedly outspoken attacks on the religious leaders, as shown by modern commentaries on Mark 12: 38-40 and Matthew 23, would certainly have been enough to provoke the Jewish authorities into handing him over to the Romans, and the fact that the crowd had begun to act as if the Kingdom was coming provided the charge on which Jesus could be arraigned. If we recall that Judas was the disciples' treasurer, we need not be surprised that it was he who decided to hand Jesus over, especially as John portrays him as being particularly upset over the waste of money at the anointing of Jesus in Bethany. By this time indeed, Jesus’ mood may well have begun to break into a depressive phase of the psychosis, which would explain completely the horror, dismay and heart-breaking grief that he suffered in Gethsemane. Perhaps the earlier mood revived for a short time during his trials, which would account first for his essentially incoherent reply interpreted as blasphemy by the high priest, and secondly, for his inability to answer the charge dutifully put three times by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate. Also, his unusually rapid death from crucifixion was very probably occasioned by his utter exhaustion: the increased psychomotor activity of the past few weeks, which had brought him up to Jerusalem and led him to teach from early morning every day in the Temple, now at least ensured that, much to Pilate's surprise, his life would be snuffed out in a matter of hours, rather than the usual one or two days. Finally, it is extremely likely that a phase of total depression overtook him on the cross, in the despair of his last cry 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?'

IV. A PSYCHODYNAMIC INTERPRETATION

When a person breaks down, his condition can be interpreted in two broad ways, according to certain biological and emotional

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patterns of infancy to which his behaviour reverts and most resembles, and according to the developments and stresses of his life history and present situation. The early psychoanalysts concentrated on the infancy patterns and on a patient's inner psychic state. More recently, by extremely detailed studies of life histories and family situations, psychotherapists have been able to explain how the particular pattern of disturbed behaviour comes about.

Perhaps the first thing a baby learns is to distinguish what is gratifying from what is hostile, identifying the gratifying parts of objects as himself and the hostile part-objects as not himself. At about the age of two or three months, he learns to distinguish between himself and his mother, but the earlier distinction is carried over, according to whether or not the mother is gratifying him, whether he finds her good or bad. At the age of five months he begins to realize that real and imaginary things are bound up with each other, and to accept the pleasurable and unpleasurable, the good and bad, as parts of the one person, on whom he now finds he can depend and, this in spite of weaning; and so the more mature inter-personal relationships begin to develop, based on the recognition of himself and of others as whole, separate individuals. This understanding of an infant's development has been derived from the close observation by psychoanalysts of babies in play, in particular as described in the work of Melanie Klein.

It was necessary, among other reasons, in order to explain how it comes about that the consciences of children are often more harsh than the attitudes of fairly tolerant parents would lead us to expect. For it now seems reasonable to suppose that a strong conscience may have its beginnings in one or other of two initial stages of infancy: the persecutory paranoid position when a baby splits off the bad things from himself and projects them on to the world (his mother), but only at a cost of self-depletion and an anxiety that the bad part objects will return to punish him unless he propitiates them; and the subsequent depressive position when the baby, having obtained a clearer idea of himself and his mother as whole entities (but still in his imagination internalizing them as objects), becomes anxious last his instinctual aggressive impulses will disappoint or destroy the good and loved objects (his mother) and so leave him helplessly dependent, unless he is continually making reparation to them. The manic position is a temporary triumph over the depressive conscience, an attempted escape from the anxiety of abandonment by his loved objects through disparaging their importance. However, as the child cannot quite renounce the good and loved objects because of his identification with them, and yet still wants to be rid of the bad, he tries to demonstrate omnipotence over all objects, in order first to deny the paranoid persecutory sufferings the bad are causing him, and second to be able more

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effectively to make the depressive's reparation to the loved and good objects. He fails, and yet his anxiety is usually resolved as he finds that the bad objects and his aggressive wishes are not so potent, but that his mother continues to exist and to love him, with the result that his good inner world can become more secure.

Unconscious reminiscences of these early biological positions persist throughout life, but will surface under stress, taking several recognizable if overlapping forms in manic-depression, with lesser manifestations in the latent condition and extreme ones in the psychotic, but with each idealization depending on the intelligence, ethics, life-history and social situation of the person concerned. Thus one way in which a latent manic-depressive will attempt to resolve his anxiety of abandonment is through unusually dependent relationships. At the same time he may feel that in some way he himself has destroyed his loved and good objects, and so he may seek perfection elsewhere. If subsequently his new perfect objects are threatened, he may go through a manic phase and make a show of omnipotence (among other ways by totally absorbing his environment), and this in order to deny the importance of what he thinks good and yet with the hope of making reparation to it.

In studying whether and how far Jesus had an extreme depressive conscience, it is utterly useless to speculate on his childhood history, owing to the lack of evidence. For this reason also we cannot know how far his psychological development was subject to the important influences of heredity and constitution. We can however learn about the conscience itself and guess how it may have underlain a psychosis, by a study of his teachings and actions, and see how far they show manic-depressive characteristics such as we have just outlined, those of dependency, perfection and omnipotence.

With regard to dependency, Jesus seems to idealize this in his wide use of the characterisation of God as Father. Typically his conception was of the God who 'requires mercy not sacrifice' (Matthew 9: 13 and also Mark 12: 33-4), the prophetic formulation that, par excellence, distinguishes the depressive and reparative view from the paranoid and propitiatory: it was probably such a view that lay beneath his opposition to certain legalistic and sacrificial features of contemporary Judaism. The loving nature of God was of course taught by many rabbis, but Jesus seems to have taken it one step forward, for example in the parable of the prodigal son, where the father has compassion and runs out to meet the son, and this 'while he was still a long way off'. The dependence on a good and loving Father is found in Jesus’ many teachings of total trust and faith, for example in his instruction to his disciples to put away anxious thoughts about food and drink and to rely on their heavenly Father who feeds the birds. At one time however, and typical of a

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manic phase, this view of God seems to have broken down, both because he was prepared to consider himself a sacrifice and because, in the final parables of Mark and Matthew, he reverts to a paranoid view of God the judge and avenger, and to as clear a picture of hell as of heaven. Also he began expecting the impossible from reparative acts, that a person really could forgive 'seventy times seven', or that faith in God would endorse his curse on the fig tree.

On a more personal level, it was probably a special need of dependency which led Jesus to retain as his pupils persons whom he often called dull and unresponsive; and, while he is unusual in having women ministering to him (Luke 8: 3), it may have been a difficulty in establishing the usual interdependent relationship of adulthood, that of matrimony, which led him to idealize the people who have renounced marriage for the sake of the kingdom of heaven - if this is not a purely Matthean construction - and to teach that 'when they rise from the dead, men and women do not marry', a teaching which would not have been accepted by many who believed in the resurrection and in any case is inconsistent with other material expectations of the kingdom attributed to Jesus. Similarly, while at one period Jesus often taught people to 'honour father and mother' and not to set aside for God things which might be used for their parents' benefit (Mark 7: 11), at another stage, and typical of manic suspension of all significant family relationships, he defended the giving up for the Gospel's sake of 'home, brothers or sisters, mothers, fathers or children'.

It is almost certainly a need for dependency that is idealized in his teachings about service and love. Turning the other cheek, giving up your coat as well as your shirt, going two miles when you are conscripted to go only one, are all teachings where dependency seems to have been idealized almost to the point of servility. Love of one's enemies is perhaps the most extreme idealization of love and, of course, a teaching which could have been formulated only by someone who, like Jesus, was both compassionate and enthusiastic, because even if it is not his own enthusiasm which generates enemies, such a person will characteristically try to win them over rather than passively forget them.

With regard to the second manifestation of the depressive position, Jesus undoubtedly taught and sought perfection. He conceived of his mission as in some way to 'complete' the law (Matthew 5: 17), and extended to this effect the earlier teachings on anger, adultery, divorce, oaths and, as we have just seen, retaliation and love. 'You must therefore be perfect [in the Aramaic 'whole'] just as your heavenly Father is perfect'. Nevertheless, in many of his teachings the basic depressive position is revealed, that of the expectation of a reward, in this age or the age to come, a teaching

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moreover which was not so advanced as subsequently recorded by the Mishnah (Aboth 1: 3) as having been given by Rabbi Antigonish of Soko some two hundred years before Jesus, that people should behave like servants who do not expect a reward. Also, in what may well be the words of the early church, Jesus came 'not to invite the righteous, but sinners'. But at one time, and again typical of manic exaggeration, this distinction broke down, when he completely idealized the tax-gatherers and prostitutes and denigrated the religious leaders, saying that the former were entering first into the kingdom of God, and describing the latter as 'hypocrites, blind guides, blind fools, snakes and vipers' brood'. Equally in Luke's account he does not appear to discriminate between Zacchaeus, the doubtfully honest tax superintendent, and the acknowledgedly good young stranger, in trying to persuade them to divest themselves of half of all of their respective wealth.

An event precipitating the collapse could have been, as we saw earlier, the murder of John the Baptist, whom Jesus obviously held in very high regard (Mark 11: 30 and Matthew 11: 10-11 and 17: 13), or alternatively Herod's threatening remarks about Jesus himself. Or it may just have been, as we shall see later, the cumulative effect of other people's envy. What may be more interesting to note here is that the form taken by the collapse was not the more usual one of an attempt at suicide, but that of manic omnipotence. Why it took this form was probably because in earner depressive situations Jesus had both consciously and unconsciously imposed himself successfully on external circumstances. One may guess that the baptism by John, like Wesley's conversion at the Aldersgate Street meeting in 1738, was a way out of an earlier depression, the alternative to which, as we saw, is hinted at in one of the subsequent temptations in the wilderness, to throw himself down from the Temple parapet. Certainly the special fast following the baptism, like other exceptional measures of abnegation, would have been a pre-manic attempt at omnipotence, but this time only over his inner world. The attempt succeeded, inasmuch as he drew from it the spiritual resources for his subsequent exhausting mission. But extreme acts of conscious self-control have their limit, beyond which the unconscious takes over, so that the individual can no longer appraise whether or not what happens in fact results from his will.

In non-psychotic enthusiasm there is always an element of omnipotence and exaggeration: if this is coupled with ability and integrity it can, as we have seen, serve the highest of social purposes and perhaps also a sociobiological function in human evolution. For example, the teaching of Jesus that faith moves mountains, especially when it is removed from its clearly manic context in Mark, must have brought a world of good to very many people. The same is true with the healing stories because, at least in the treatment of the psychologically disturbed, there are no more

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important assets than faith and compassion. There can be little doubt that many of these healing miracles worked, by giving people faith in themselves, by dealing frankly with a sense of sin or guilt, by forcing their attention away from themselves to such a major outside event as the imminent appearance of the kingdom, or simply by Jesus’ allowing a few of the disturbed to look after him (Luke 8: 2). Perhaps Jesus derived a politically unrealistic sense of his authority from such healings: ‘if it is by the finger of God that I drive out the devils, then be sure the kingdom of God has already come upon you'. Nevertheless it would seem from such teachings as the refusal of a sign that Jesus did not conceive his mastery as extending over the elements, although the enthusiasm of the post-baptism period could have been one ground for later stories of the nature miracles.

More likely these stories would have derived from the type of manically omnipotent claim made during the breakdown, such as the one to pull down the Temple and rebuild it in three days, or the teaching that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven, or the instruction to go and look for the pre-Passover temple tax in a fish, or the (half hearted) advice to his disciples at the last supper to sell their cloaks to buy swords, or the appeal to his Father in Gethsemane to send to his aid twelve legions of' angels and, perhaps the ultimate in idealization expressed in Luke 10 : 18, the claim to have watched how Satan fell like lightning from the sky.

The attribution of significance to happenings in the weather is very common in a manic reaction and is reflected in John 12: 29, in the discussion whether what the crowd had heard was thunder or the voice of an angel speaking to Jesus. But it is not only the weather to which the manic attributes significance but to many other things within his range, as omnipotently he tries to substitute new good objects for those that are threatened. Even in his non-psychotic period we may note from the parables of Jesus the very wide range of human activity which he must have taken in, including farming, fishing, commerce, housekeeping and government. We can note again his wide range of human contacts, his almost unique practice as a teacher in going among the sick and those outside the Law. In mania, on the other hand, everything and everyone may become relevant. Jesus stands watching people making their offerings in the temple, and from that draws the teaching on the widow's mite, beautiful perhaps, but based on the exaggerated (or omniscient) presupposition of Mark 12: 44. He is involved in several arguments and extends them all, the one with the Sadducees about the resurrection quite illogically (Mark 13: 26) and the question about the first commandment quite beautifully because, although he is not asked to do this, he goes on to give the second, love of one's neighbour, to follow love of God.

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Since this was apparently the first succinct formulation of what for many people represents the moral law, it may be the place here to add a parenthetical note on psychosis. For a long time this was described not as emotional but as mental illness, primarily perhaps because man can universalize descriptions of emotions only in words. The nomenclature is still useful because during psychosis there is always a simplification or unexpected association of mental concepts. Many of these new concepts may not be particularly interesting, but in any case we seldom listen to them, having decided, as normal people, that by his actions the other person is psychotic or, as therapists, that something else must underlie what he is saying. Fortunately, enough poets and painters like Hoelderlin and Van Gogh have broken through to provide new rays for humankind. It is, however, wishful thinking to say that these are not the direct product of a psychotic period. What may be true is that a person cannot systematically develop his new insights during psychosis, which is often a self-fulfilling prophecy due to the new restrictions imposed on him. The real cause for regret therefore should be, not that many insights are psychotic, but that a person may not survive or win through to develop them later. In the case of Jesus, it was a tragedy of human history of the first order that a person who already by the age of thirty had accurately articulated so many emotional sublimations was then put to death.

For his proof of the resurrection Jesus had quoted Exodus 3: 6, which would have been read in the synagogues seven weeks before Passover. To justify the cleansing of the temple he quoted a scripture from the next week, Isaiah 56: 7, that the temple shall be a house of prayer 'for all the nations'. This ready use of scripture, typical of manic hypermnesia, is probably one basis for the frequent references to the Old Testament - Professor C. H. Dodd has identified some thirty - made by all four evangelists in their Passion narratives. The particular quotation from Isaiah is doubly interesting, for it is typical of manic universalism and so willy-nilly represented a definite step forward from the limited mission to the Jews. Indeed, in a manic phase, a person takes in so much, becomes so identified with the whole universe that, as John Custance and others have described, he loses the sense not only of guilt but also even of dirt. Thus, just as Custance in Madness, Wisdom and Folly was ready to follow St. Francis in kissing the sores of lepers, so Jesus could break into the last supper and strip like a slave and start washing his disciples' feet.

V. TOWARD AN EXISTENTIAL UNDERSTANDING

While we can recognize in Jesus’ teaching the idealizations of the manic depressive positions of infancy, and while we might guess at what precipitated a breakdown, we have yet to examine what in his life story as such would have worked against integration of

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personality. The most detailed research on the kind of upbringing that produces manic-depression was carried out between 1944 and 1953 by Dr. Mabel Blake Cohen of Washington and eleven other psychotherapists, and published in two papers, the second of which, 'An Intensive Study of Twelve Cases of Manic-Depressive Psychosis', appeared in the May 1954 issue of Psychiatry. Their work has since been supported by other doctors, for example by a study of 27 manic-depressives and 17 schizophrenics recounted by Dr. Robert W. Gibson both in the February 1958 issue of Psychiatry and in Psychiatric Research Report 17 published by the American Psychiatric Association in November 1963. In general their findings parallel those of Melanie Klein, particularly with regard to dependency, but in addition they discovered that the person who actually became a manic-depressive commonly came from a family where there had been special concern about social approval and where, usually owing to his natural abilities, he had borne the brunt of the family's striving for social prestige. There had thus been a background of intense envy and competitiveness, and the young person had commonly been the object of this envy within the family. As he had not been able to cope with his dependency drives, he counteracted this envy by denying it, and so developed a pattern of underselling himself and of not utilizing his capacities at anywhere near their potential level. Similar self-disparaging reactions by outstanding people have been noticed by Drs. David Maddison and Glen M. Duncan in their 1965 study Aspects of Depressive Illness.

We shall now examine the teachings of Jesus to see how far he was affected by and reacted to envy. We shall then go a step further, in the direction pioneered with 'schizophrenics' by Drs. Ronald Laing and Aaron Esterson in Sanity, Madness and the Family. For our study will not be confined to a disturbed person, but we shall examine the very disturbing factors in his family and social situation which may well have left no alternative but for Jesus to break down. In our examination we shall take into account two other recent works on envy. The first of these is a 1957 monograph by Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude, a work however which is a more indirect source for the present essay than her earlier work, because Mrs. Klein deals primarily with the envier and not the envied, with the baby who fails to learn gratitude toward an adequate mother rather than the one who overlearns gratitude toward an inadequate mother. The second and more important source is the major sociological work on 'Envy' by Professor Helmut Schoeck, published in 1966 and translated into English in 1969. (It is a pity only that this great work is flawed by a strident anti-egalitarianism, for the author apparently does not appreciate that concessions on the part of the privileged toward equality, democracy and world economic development may derive not only from a guilt-ridden desire to avoid envy but also from a more spontaneous joy at the spread of human excellence.)

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It is with Professor Schoeck's help that we may first attempt a definition of envy, as the emotion and attitude of looking upon a quality or presence enjoyed by another person which one does not try to imitate or obtain for oneself, which one cannot jealously claim as a right and which one might not even oneself enjoy, but which one hopes and often enough tries to deprive the other person of, so that he cannot enjoy it either.

Envy probably arises in man owing to a failure to learn gratitude, as was first shown by Kant in The Metaphysic of Morals and subsequently elaborated on from a more biological point of view by Melanie Klein in 1957. It is one of the emotions stemming from our realization that we are different from other people: envy, emulation, admiration, flattery, snobbishness or resignation coming from the realization that we are less gifted, and pride, modesty, compassion or indifference coming when we are better endowed. The things which usually attract envy are either external matters like property, power and status, which may be coveted as well as envied, or the more personal things like physical endowment, intelligence, integrity and, above all, enthusiasm, creativeness and zest for life. Envy is usually expressed toward those persons near to us who are in some way better than ourselves, but it can also be expressed by the comparatively well-endowed if there is a genuine threat to their position from below by a socially or politically less privileged but otherwise outstanding individual. It can also be expressed between generations, the young envying the power of the old and the old envying the vitality of the young. It very probably begins with a baby's envy of life-giving mother, and may be perpetuated among brothers and sisters, when jealousy over rights becomes envy over achievements. The fear of envy may cause the envied to make concessions and to assume a genuine or false modesty: but if envy really frustrates a person's development it may call forth the similar emotion of resentment, which occurs when the impossibility of realizing one's own potentialities becomes envy of those who have.

Emulation entered the world when, 'to be as gods, knowing good and evil', Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. In 'The Wisdom of Solomon' (2: 24), and in Milton's poetic rendering, this was prompted by the serpent's envy of God and of Adam and Eve's happiness. Human envy followed soon after, with Cain's murder of Abel. To St. Augustine envy was the destructive force opposed to life, the creative force, while to Chaucer, in 'The Parson's Tale', envy was the worst of the seven deadly sins because it opposed all that was good. In modern times, for reasons we shall see later, envy is probably the most skirted of human emotions and social attitudes.

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In describing the psychogenesis of envy and envy-deflection, it is unlikely that physical endowments remain of prime importance among children, first because physique is always changing, but more because both parents and teachers will put a higher premium on artistic and intellectual endowments, in particular the latter. The brighter the child therefore, the more he is a potential object of envy among his peers. He may of course have social advantages, as was the case with the young Albert Schweitzer in the village of Guensbach, where he made many scenes so as not to wear better clothes than those worn by the other and poorer village boys.

Jesus was presumably a very bright child, even if we discount as Lucan legend the 'amazement at his intelligence' shown by the teachers in the temple when he was only twelve. According to Mark 6: 3, Jesus had four brothers and an undefined number of sisters. There was presumably the usual amount of rivalry between these, and the understandable claim of jealousy on all outstanding brothers. It may also have developed into envy because, whereas Jesus is shown continually as teaching honour of father and mother, the family claims on Jesus himself, even when he bad passed thirty, seem to have been oppressive, as can be seen from Mark 3: 21 and 33, Mark 6: 4, Luke 11: 28 and also John 2: 4 and 7: 5. In this connection it might be recalled that it was envy of Joseph (Genesis 37: 11) that prompted eight of his ten half-brothers to try to murder him. Family claims on Jesus however, both conscious and unconscious, may well have been of less importance than the strict socio-religious atmosphere in which he grew up and lived, in the piety which would have confused able children with regard to the sin of pride, and in the political and social circumstances which would have denied many outlets for ability to the children of non-Roman citizens and, if Jews, to the children of non-priestly families, or to people raised outside Jerusalem and Judea, as were Jesus and his disciples in Galilee, and who were thus depreciated for provincial accents and imputed ignorance (Mark 14: 70; John 1: 46, 7 : 52; Acts 2: 7).

The obvious social outlets to such children's ability were commerce and tax collecting. Jesus certainly had an intelligent appraisal of commercial activities, as is shown by many of his teachings, for example, in the parables of ten talents and of the merchant who sells everything he had to buy a pearl of very special value, but what presumably barred this outlet to his ability was simply that he was born the son of a carpenter and not a merchant. Similarly no one would have kept company with tax collectors unless he in some way appreciated the good side of their abilities, but to a pious Jewish family a career in tax collecting would have been out of the question. The other social outlet, although this was only a part-time one, was that of rabbi, and Jesus very probably had some rabbinical training. He is occasionally addressed as Rabbi by his

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disciples and, as Bultmann shows in Jesus and the Word, he in some way lived, taught and disputed as a rabbi. On the other hand it seems improbable that he was fully trained or fully accepted, first because it was unlikely that he would have thanked God (in what we shall probably see later was a moment of resentment) for having hidden things from the learned and wise, and second because in both John 7: 15 and Acts 4: 13 Jesus and his disciples are described as untrained. Jesus indeed may have suffered a further disadvantage, if the inference in John 8: 41 is correct, that he was baseborn. But even if he was a rabbi, Jesus would largely have been thrust back on his ability and integrity. Again, if there is one thing that is envied more than intelligence it is character. It was probably an unconscious attempt to avoid such envy that Jesus taught unobtrusiveness in religious practices, to give alms, pray and fast in secret, not to let the left hand know what the right is doing. This is also the probable base of his teachings on humility, although in some of these an unintended but truer estimate of his value comes out, as in 'whoever wants to be great must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be the willing slave of all', or 'when you receive an invitation go and sit down in the lowest place, so that when your host comes he will say “come up higher, my friend". Then all your fellow-guests will see the respect in which you are held'.

Status and power often serve to deflect envy, away from the person and on to his more extraneous social position. The same is true for property. Jesus however left himself no such way out, for he also in some sense taught poverty and abnegation of worldly possessions. Do not store up treasure on earth but in heaven, provide no gold to fill your purse, sell everything you have and give to the poor: all these are teachings which probably have as one basis the avoidance of envy, but with exactly the opposite effect, for instead of envy being deflected into more manageable covetousness, it would, if the person otherwise retained his goodness, be drawn with ever greater force upon the person himself. Hence one reason for the monastic life is as a form of propertyless goodness to get away from envy.

Certainly ability and integrity can prove to be a morally incestuous circle, although Jesus broke out of it, not with a life devoted to study and the development of his intellectual gifts, but with enthusiastic participation in the world. This attracted envy most of all. It might be mentioned here that one typical way in which ability breaks out beyond social restraints is in crime and, while Jesus chose exactly the opposite path, the ability and enthusiasm which inspire the one, when considered in isolation from ethics, are not different from the ability and enthusiasm which inspire the other, as can be seen in the parables of the unjust steward and of the merchant who, having found treasure, then

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buried it again before buying the field. It is also seen in the temptation in the wilderness, when Satan offered all the kingdoms of the world if Jesus would worship him. But Jesus chose to put his enthusiasm into the service of goodness; and if there is doubt as to how good this was, then it is salutary to compare the character of other Messiahs and the type of activity into which they poured their ability and enthusiasm, as for example with the near twenty medieval Christs, from the man of Bourges to John of Leyden, described in Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium. Equally obvious from Professor Cohn's account and also from Monsignor Ronald Knox's Enthusiasm is the initial imitative activity of virtually all later Christs, whereas the messianic character of Jesus was essentially non-derivative, to the frequent embarrassment of the evangelists.

The envy opposing enthusiasm may also be seen in the social history of the latter word, from its etymology of 'being possessed by a god' and the source of poetic and prophetic fervour, to its longtime derogatory use, as in Wesley's 'it is the believing those to be miracles which are not, that constitutes an enthusiast'. It is still often used as a term of reproach, but an indication of its recent more neutral sense comes in the mid nineteenth century verb 'to enthuse'. A not too dissimilar history may be found for mania, from Plato's consideration of it as both madness and the emotional creativity of the poet to such recent non-derogatory revivals as in Arnold Haskell's expression 'balletomane'. The social reasons, both good and bad, for envy opposing enthusiasm will be discussed later, but here we can give an example of its role in the generation of emotional disturbance from Dr. Andrew Crowcroft's 1967 Pelican The Psychotic, in which, describing the mildly manic, he states that 'we envy him his effortless energy, his wit and drive'. The example is deliberately quoted here as a case of the insidiousness, even for a humane psychotherapist, of considering the psychotic as a thing rather than a being, from our perspective rather than his, for nowhere does Dr Crowcroft state that our envy may be just as much the cause as the result of the mildly manic (or depressive) state. A similar omission is made by Dr Anthony Storr in his study of the cyclothymic Churchill, where he regrets that many people merely envy the energy of great leaders without stopping to enquire what it is that drives them, but without Dr Storr in turn seeming to appreciate that one driving force may be that very envy, not to give in to it but to oppose it with more and more achievement.

The envy which opposed itself to Jesus’ enthusiasm, or what Bultmann in this instance calls 'exaltation of an eschatological mood', is shown very clearly in the hostility to the exorcisms. These, as indicated by Dr. James M. Robinson in The Problem of History in Mark, were conceived by Jesus not so much in the medical sense than as part of the final cosmic struggle with Satan. The doctors of

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the law had stated that Jesus 'drives out devils by the prince of devils' and that Jesus himself 'was possessed by an unclean spirit'. Jesus shows the irrationality of this by replying that Satan cannot be in rebellion against himself, for this would be his end, to which the point is added that Jesus was in fact trying to bind Satan up. This opposition to patently benevolent activity, this deliberate rejection of better light (to use phrases in the Nineham and Taylor Commentaries) is described in Mark 3: 30 as unforgivable slander against the Holy Spirit. It was the evil of envy. A similar story of envy, of 'sinners against their own souls', may be found in Korah's rebellion against Moses and Aaron (Numbers 16: 1-35 and Psalm 106: 16-18).

It is possible, given the irrationality of the charge against Jesus, that envy was compounded by stupidity, the emotional by the intellectual, and it is indeed 'obstinate stupidity' or 'hardness or blindness of heart' which Mark 3: 5 attributes to those who opposed Jesus for continuing during the Sabbath with his good and heating work. It is interesting that Kierkegaard considered envy and stupidity the two great forces of society, especially in the small town atmosphere, in which Jesus also lived. Which derives from the other depends on how far we consider an individual or social group to be governed by emotions rather than intellect, to be knaves rather than fools, but it is wishful thinking, however common this may be, to describe emotional opposition to the good as anything else than envy. Besides Abel, Joseph and Moses, other persons in the Bible who nearly lost their lives or otherwise suffered from envy include Isaac (Genesis 26:14), David (1 Samuel 18: 9 ff) and Paul and Barnabas (Acts 13:45 and 14: 19). The writer of Proverbs may also have known what it was to suffer from envy, judging from his statement, ‘wrath is cruel, anger is overwhelming, but who is able to stand before envy ' (Proverbs 27: 4).

The combination of ability, goodness and enthusiasm, such as that found in Jesus, make up the quality of creativeness, whose antithesis is just that of envy, whether in Satan's primal envy of God or in the infant's initial envy of the life-giving mother. Creativeness, however, is not unique to a person with cycloid predispositions: it is found equally in the schizoid, but tends to be expressed there in creativeness with ideas and things, whereas with the cycloid it is directed more toward persons and social relationships. It is of course quite usual to find creative persons who are completely integrated, but the emotional pressures of envy, especially if institutionalized in social and political form, are a constant threat to a person's emotional balance, so that the creative person who once had schizoid tendencies will, with reason, feel himself suffering anew front persecution, and counter this with his own paranoiac attitudes, while the cycloid will try unavailingly to win over his enviers or withdraw into a depressive phase.

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The social and political envy of Jesus would have arisen because of the authority attributed to him by the ordinary people who 'were astounded at his teaching, for, unlike the doctors of the law, he taught with a note of authority' (Mark 1: 22); because of his reputation (Mark 1: 28, 5: 20 and Matthew 8: 26 and 31), and because of his popularity, in continually being greeted or followed by large crowds. Envy was not the only or even the main motive for all the opposition, which arose also from a strict regard for the Law, as can be seen in other of the arguments about Sabbath activities. Thus there was not the same moral or even eschatological urgency for plucking corn on the Sabbath as there was for healing the sick. The first counter-argument, provided by Mark, that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, would have virtually dissipated the distinction between that day and the others, while an examination of the second counter-argument, when an action of David is used as justification, would probably show that the differences in the analogy, even allowing for the later rabbinic commentary that David's action took place on a Sabbath, are perhaps greater than the similarities, as may be seen from a comparison of Mark 2: 25-26 with 1 Samuel 21: 1-6 and the generally precarious situation of David at the time. Again, the comparison of his action with that of David was probably an unintentional comparison of himself with David, and typical of the deeper self-appraisal which surfaces under hostile questioning.

Perhaps this was a legitimate ground for envy on the part of his opponents because, as was implied earlier, the one useful social function of envy is to restrain boastfulness, ingratitude, self-centredness and pride. However, it is very clear from the Synoptics that such attitudes can hardly be attributed to Jesus, or indeed the emotion of envy itself. There is of course the ambivalent reply of Luke 11: 28 when, to the woman who cried out 'Happy the womb that carried you and the breasts that suckled you', Jesus rejoined 'No, happy are those who hear the word of God and keep it.' Taken by itself this would certainly seem an unconscious admission of the primal envy, toward the life-giving mother, as described by Melanie Klein. But all the other evidence would point to the alternative explanation that if anything, Jesus had overlearned gratitude.

This evidence is found in his actions, for not only did Jesus teach compassion and humility but he was also both admiring of and grateful to other people, two attitudes that are the direct opposite of individual and social envy. Thus in addition to his admiration of John the Baptist, Jesus admired the faith of the centurion (Matthew 8: 10) and of the woman with an issue of blood (Mark 5: 34); the gracious wit of the Syrophenician woman (Mark 7: 29); the piety of the rich stranger (Mark 10 - 21); the good sense of the lawyer (Mark 12: 34); and the gratitude to God of the tenth, returning leper (Luke 17: 18).

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Jesus’ teaching on gratitude is also found in some of his other cures, as when he instructs the healed persons to make the offering laid down by Moses (Mark 1: 44) or to demonstrate the mercy of the Lord (Mark 5: 19). More generally the complete lack of envy in Jesus (or more positively, his sense of joy), is perhaps the main reason why the Christian conception of God marked in its time an advance on the Greek or even Hebrew conceptions, the one in which man is an object of the envy of the gods and the other in which the jealous nature of God inevitably had a restricted interpretation open to abuse.

The two healings just referred to, and also those related in Mark 1: 34, 3: 12, 7: 36 and 8: 26, Matthew 9: 30 and 12: 16, and John 5: 13, are notable for another characteristic, that Jesus asked for his work to be kept secret. The unobtrusive goodness of such requests is obvious: they are also typical of an unconscious wish to avoid envy. The same may be said for the frequent attempts of Jesus to get away to a lonely place and for his reported journey to Tyre where he tried to remain unrecognised. The obvious reasons for such withdrawals would be exhaustion, physical or emotional, but the deeper causes for finding intellectual and spiritual refreshment on these occasions is the ability to rest and work for a time in a non-hostile, non-envious atmosphere, which incidentally is often a main underlying reason for emigration, to another country or to a big city.

The opposition to Jesus was considerable, even if we allow for the evangelists' exaggeration. We are apt to tone it down now, partly because we have found Jesus’ own 'woes' on the Pharisees to be themselves exaggerated, but also because we refuse to believe either that we ourselves would be any purer in heart or that human nature simply cannot be so evil. There is an ethical confusion here. 'Judge not that ye be not judged' is a useful recall toward moralistic modesty, not least when we see hypocrisy in the judgments of others. However, we run the risk of damaging both our individual personalities and our society's achievements if we allow judgment to become the prerogative of the less sensitive envious and stupid: higher goals can undoubtedly be reached by human ingenuity alone, but they will be more rapidly consolidated if they are promoted or defended by persons better aware of the logic and realities of individual and social ethics and psychodynamics.

Such insights of modern knowledge were not available to Jesus. To envy and stupidity he could oppose only more and more goodness. But in the absence of much more widespread self-knowledge, or without social, cultural or political authority, this course will usually be self-defeating, ending in retrenchment, ineffectiveness, resentment or breakdown. Retrenchment in Jesus’ activities is seen in his withdrawal to Tyre which, coincidentally enough, Mark 7: 24 makes to follow on the teachings against the

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twelve evils that come from a man's heart, four of which are of interest here: covetousness, malice, envy and moral stupidity. The ineffectiveness is seen in the report of the fewer hearings in his hometown, where amazement at Jesus’ teachings was coupled with the taking of offence, itself probably deriving from the envy of familiarity. The evangelist has Jesus saying on this occasion 'a prophet will always be held in honour except in his home town, and among his kinsmen and family'. Presumably this small-town envy would have been an underlying (though not the most important) reason for Jesus initially to have left Nazareth to seek out John the Baptist in Bethany beyond the Jordan and, as Professor Dodd shows from John 3: 22 and 4: 4, to conduct an early non-Galilean ministry in Judaea parallel to John's.

Later, this small town opposition was also a cause of resentment, in Jesus’ denunciation of the Galilean towns, and his prediction of a worse fate for Capernaum than for Sodom. Resentment is seen in the exaggerated 'woes' on the lawyers mentioned earlier and, in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax-gatherer, in his devaluation of the piety of the one at the same time as he praised the repentance of the other. It is probably seen also in the devaluation of himself, in his unexpectedly replying to the acknowledgedly pious stranger with the question 'why do you call me good?'

It is quite possible that Jesus had some insight into the true nature of the opposition to him. There is for example the teaching about the evil eye - the traditional symbol of envy - in Matthew 6: 22, where he states that 'if your eye is evil your whole body will be in darkness. If then the only light you have is darkness, how great is that darkness'. There is also the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, the emotional tenseness of which would seem to indicate its being the product of a breakdown, quite apart from its late placement in Matthew. In this parable, the landowner pays the same wage to those who have worked only a few hours as to those who have worked the whole day. The parable has usually been thought to show the bounty of God's grace, which no amount of extra effort can win for man. This point however could have been made if the landowner had unobtrusively paid the latecomers last, instead of first, and so not have given ground for the obvious complaint. The complaint indeed seems to have been provoked to elicit the final reply, given in Matthew 20: 15, 'are you envious because I am good?'

It is perhaps symptomatic of the modern refusal to face up to envy that in two recent translations of the New Testament, the New English Bible and Today's English Version, the expression of 'the evil eye' just cited from Matthew 20: 15 is mistranslated as 'jealous'. Similarly inadequate translations of phthonos, the Greek word for envy, are given in Mark 15: 10 (in both the 1961 and 1970 editions

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of the NEB New Testament) where, so to speak, the truth finally comes out, in the evangelist's narrative comment that Pilate 'knew it was out of envy that they had brought Jesus before him'.

Regrettably this envy of Jesus has continued posthumously, in some of the judgments made by the rationalists. It is probably uncharitable to name authors but an indication can be given in the following quotation: 'He was an obscure person who died at Jerusalem ... and who had the incredible good luck to be deified'. The same may also be said of some of the psychological judgments, where the imputation of paranoia seems to have been made in order to cut down a man of genius to a lesser scale, rather than to show that, but for psychotic ambivalence, he was in fact an even greater man and that, if he had worked his way through, he might well have become an even greater person still. Such greatness however depends very much on social and political circumstances. As Schweitzer saw, the eschatological mission of Jesus derived entirely from his inner strength: external circumstances around A.D. 30 were such that the Jews in Jerusalem did not want to upset the Romans, so that their charge against Jesus did not stop at arrest and imprisonment, but continued through to his being handed over to the secular power and executed.

If Jesus had lived only some thirty years later, when the Jews felt more keenly the disadvantages of the Roman occupation, then at the very least he would have been shut up rather than so rapidly done away with. However, in a period when there is no overwhelming threat to society, it is only too often the case that enthusiasm is not appreciated, and that outstanding ability is circumscribed by envy, however this is compounded and rationalized by other factors. The most obvious example of modern times is that of Winston Churchill who, as is shown by Lord Moran and Dr. Anthony Storr, was clearly a cycloid character, although there is no evidence that his 'Black Dog' of depression ever developed into a psychotic or suicidal phase. But one important reason why he was ejected from the Admiralty in 1915 and kept out of office in the 1930s was the envy of his contemporaries, for no one had made a greater contribution to Britain's war effort on the first occasion or a truer appraisal of the evil of nazism during the second. Fortunately the British people later realized that they themselves were a 'society off course', and the 'black waters of despair' of Churchill in 1938 became the tireless energy that contributed so much to the nazi defeat.

In the case of Jesus I have tried to show that his final conduct can be consistently explained only on the hypothesis of a psychosis, and that the social genesis of the breakdown was envy. Of course a case can and should be made out for the opponents of Jesus. In the first place it is true that they themselves lived in a closed society,

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economically, politically, and (in the sense that they lived in the prescientific age) intellectually, so that the envy usually inherent in a few persons would have been somewhat institutionalized, and genuine ability on the part of many of them very easily frustrated into resentment and into pointed but essentially negative criticism. In the second place Jesus himself may very well have been predisposed by constitution and heredity to over-gratitude, which in turn his early family upbringing presumably did nothing to correct. But what a person of ability usually does in such circumstances is either to gear his life toward an essentially selfish pursuit, even to the point of crime, or to let it go fallow and under-exploited under the guise of idealizations, often of a very highminded nature. Occasionally however there comes along a person of really outstanding ability who refuses to withdraw, who - to take the case of Jesus - had a combination of qualities without ready historical precedent, both intellectually and aesthetically in his parabolic teachings (which we now take as much for granted as, say, Socratic probing), and, unlike any previous teacher or prophet we know, by his simultaneous engagement in work among the sick, the poor, and the other outcasts.

The question to be decided as between Jesus and his opponents therefore is what was the more important in producing his psychosis, and his action in causing the physical disruption of the Temple activities, which led to his death: his constitution and upbringing, or the sheer force of the envy which his ability and beneficent activity aroused? Glass may always be brittle but, after it had withstood stones of individual envy, were the rocks of social envy hurled which no glass could withstand, or did it shatter spontaneously from faulty preparation? Or, to return to an early metaphor, was Jesus originally out of formation, or did he serve as a warning light to a society off course and, when that society remained off course, break out of formation into a psychosis?

Any attempt to get at reality must be filtered through our emotions, an effort which, when the emotions are envy and envy-denial, is a particularly difficult one. Nevertheless, it would appear that the society was off course before Jesus broke out of formation. When he began his prophetic mission - and there are enough times when prophecy is a legitimate social function - he apparently conceived it in original but completely acceptable terms, in the words of Isaiah 35 and 61 which are summarized in Matthew 11: 5 and Luke 4: 18. Indeed these activities, of healing the sick and bringing good news to the poor, were far less 'extreme' than the desert preaching and baptising of John, whose puzzlement they aroused (Matthew 11: 3), a puzzlement which also applied to Jesus’ healthier attitude to fasting (Mark 2: 18-19 and Matthew 11: 16-19). These more integrated attitudes, indeed, seem to have continued

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even after John's imprisonment and despite the opposition of his hometown, as the context of the above quotations will show.

But the persistence of the opposition to the good work of Jesus, prompted and perpetuated by social and political envy, and the refusal of the society to get back on course, sooner or later led Jesus to see his fate in the terms of the suffering servant of Isaiah 53 and in the omnipotent Son of Man and messenger of Daniel 7 and Malachi 3, a psychotic ambivalence which was just the reversal of the still extant good sense of the temptations in the wilderness (Matthew 4: 5 - 11). But even given the psychosis, and however excited and highhanded Jesus had become, it was not inherently necessary to hand over to death such an outstanding teacher, one who only a short while before his trial (according to Mark's chronology and internal evidence) had summed up love of God and neighbour as the essence of the Jewish religious tradition. The execution was allowed to happen because none of the opponents of Jesus was of the same intellectual and moral stature, and there was no contemporary Buber or Bultmann to see beyond the political and social envy to a society off course on the one hand, and on the other, beyond the rationalizations and idealizations, to the weak emotional foundations on which such great love and intelligence rested.

Some forty years after the execution of Jesus and during the destruction of Jerusalem another teacher, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, did appear to appreciate that his was a society off course and had got its political priorities wrong, for in the foundation of the school at Jamnia he showed that Judaism could survive both the national glorification of the Temple and foreign insults to it, and that it was the Bible, rather than national conquest and political accommodation to the Romans, which was the real (and portable) Jewish fatherland.

The social and political envy that denied Jesus his rightful role as a teacher is past history, but after two thousand years his idealizations of envy-avoidance are still with us. These are not necessarily a blessing, because too many good and highly intelligent people would still seem to shelter behind these idealizations, rather than fight through threats to their moral and intellectual integrity, an emotional shelter which very probably has denied humankind much progress, but which may do the individual little good, as unexploited ability becomes unexploitable and gives way to concealed if not open resentment. Envy is implacable, and moral, intellectual or artistic excellence sacrificed on its altar is an emotional and practical waste. Perhaps one day the good and intelligent will tackle envy at its infantile source, from positions of social and political strength. Meanwhile we do well to remember that excellence is what the wise admire, not what the ignorant envy.

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VI. CONCLUSIONS

To hypothesize that Jesus was a manic-depressive who eventually became psychotic, even if borne out further in a verse-by-verse commentary and by comparisons with many more case-histories will not in reality change much, but it may serve to clarify things: and this in at least four respects.

First, it will not change people's need or desire for faith. Bultmann was not unwilling to consider that Jesus suffered a collapse, but, in what seems a fair summary of his position made by Dr. Ernst Fuchs, he is described as arguing that 'the enquiry into the historical Jesus cannot and indeed should not contribute to faith in Jesus Christ, should not, because faith in Jesus Christ dispenses with every security and support, cannot, because certainty peculiar to faith is not to be mixed up with the uncertainty and relativity of historical research'. Persons who have this kind of faith, which remained after Bultmann's devastating intellectual scepticism, will incorporate a manic-depressive Jesus into their frame of thought presumably as, after Professor Erik H. Erikson's penetrating study, they have incorporated a manic-depressive Luther. However, the hypothesis should make a little clearer the distinction between faith and credulity, the one in the relentlessness of ethics, the other in the random idealization of emotions, and it should at least hint at why even faith is more evident in the psychological makeup of some people than others. Perhaps too, since many Christians have now accepted Bonhoeffer's teaching of a helpless Jesus, it may lead to some further diversion of the enormous spiritual resources still invested in Christianity toward the relief of psychological helplessness which, both to the individual and the community, may cause at least as much pain as physical suffering with which Christians have more traditionally been concerned.

Second, the hypothesis will not change our habit, or need, of labelling some people psychotic and others sane. It should however make clearer the distinction of sane and insane from good and bad, intelligent and dull, and their greater affinity with real and ideal. It is the sane and the real that is healthy, but this may be of little import if it is not also intelligent and good. We have a long way to go yet before all children are brought up in circumstances where they are taught how to prevent their aggressive instincts from being reinforced by anxiety. In the meantime there will be many sane but dull people who lack the imagination to help others overcome their unhappiness, coexisting with the anxiety-ridden themselves, and with the vast majority of both groups suffering in any case from great material and cultural deprivations. It is to be hoped that the anxiety-free and intelligent will grow in numbers and thus be better able gradually to raise the whole of humanity up to their level. Meanwhile they may get some useful help from the intelligent but

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anxious, in particular from those who, while they themselves may lack integration of personality, have been brought up to rationalize and idealize their anxieties into social and cultural goals.

Certainly there will be enough intelligent and anxiety-ridden persons who have also suffered from severe material and cultural deprivations but who have not been brought up in a background of high social ethics and who may thus seek personal satisfactions at the expense of social goals. Certainly, too, many of the intelligent and good but anxiety-ridden will remain on the threshold of integration even if they do not break down. Perhaps one day some special therapeutic measures will be taken on their behalf, for the proper interpretation of disturbances in highly gifted people may contribute greatly to further knowledge of the human condition. One wishes therefore that Wittgenstein's rigorous logical criticism of The Interpretation of Dreams had a counterpart in Freud's analysis in turn of the philosopher's emotional setup, for it is made clear in a biographical sketch by Professor von Wright that Wittgenstein lived on the border of depression and indeed, if the renunciation of his fortune to teach in the remote villages of Lower Austria is any guide, may at one time have broken down. Perhaps one day an Ezekiel, who in the opinion of Karl Jaspers, the psychiatrist philosopher, was schizophrenic, will walk into the study of so perceptive a therapist as Dr. Ronald Laing; or Professor Erikson will find a Gandhi alive.

Third, this hypothesis in no way changes the nature of ideals and social ethics, although it may help to clarify their content. Ideals are always ahead of reality, which in essence, after the psychoticism factor is discounted, is saying that reason must be considered the master of our emotions, even if we know that in reality it so often is not. Also, ethics, by their very logic, can progress only toward universalism: if I as one human being accept some things as my right, 1 must allow that all other human beings may make a similar claim. This essay may have made it clearer that the basic human right is the right to self, first to be recognized as an autonomous personality, and second to be taught how to develop into an integrated personality. This right in turn implies my duty to recognize all other human being as autonomous personalities, hopefully mostly good, but potentially sometimes bad, and, where practicable, to help other people to develop integrated personalities. Put in the words of Jesus or of Leviticus 19: 18, I must love my neighbour as myself, but must also learn to become an anxiety-free self, then recognize my neighbour, like the Good Samaritan, in the materially and culturally oppressed, or in the anxiety-ridden.

For many of the anxiety-ridden this love will take the primary form, not of affection but of acceptance, while for others it may have to assume the form, not of closer relationship but of greater independence. For both, however, I must recognize that anxieties

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may be perpetuated primarily by cultural and material deprivation, and that the mitigation of these may well have to precede the attempt to tackle anxiety. As an integrated personality myself, I do what I can, on the scientific, cultural or social side, exploring, interpreting or putting into effect new ways of making the human condition a happier one. At the same time I must as an integrated personality acknowledge that the schizoid or schizophrenic may be too entrapped in family history and other external circumstances and thus still too busy finding himself to care about loving his neighbour, but that he may nevertheless provide us with a heightened awareness of self: or that the cycloid or manic-depressive may have established relationships with his neighbour at the expense of self, but that he may still provide us with a heightened sense of the other. In short, when we ourselves are freed from anxiety and understand the logic of social ethics, the teaching about loving our enemies will be superfluous.

Fourth, this essay may have made clearer the insidiousness of personal and social envy. It may not be too great an exaggeration to say that, just as sex was the great repression of the nineteenth century, so envy may be the great repression of the twentieth. On the personal level, it is well enough known that people undergoing analysis soon enough lose their inhibitions in describing sexual attitudes: it is not so well known that interpretations of envy, in particular as it is transferred to the analyst as the second rather than a third person, are frequently the most painful of all interpretations, so much so that people would rather give up than face the truth and be helped.

On the social level also, envy is unhealthily repressed, often under much brave but shallow talk of love, and this perhaps for three reasons. First, as society becomes more democratic, there may be more emotional restraints on outstanding people to limit their ability, for equality can mean levelling at all costs, instead of only in an upward direction. Second, as society becomes more complex and more organized, there is probably greater envy of the independently-minded person, who may often be the more able. And third, because of the tremendous acceleration in technological progress and material comforts since full employment and the second world war, there would presently seem to be an unusual envy of young people, as seen for example in the crisis of the generation gap and the imitation of youth. Presumably the third phenomenon is temporary, but the other two are not.

If individual and social envy are to be overcome, there must be a much more widespread knowledge of psychodynamics, as well as the continuing removal of intellectual and material hardships which create resentment. Even this may not meet the case of the outstanding person, which can probably be done only with a new

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teleology of excellence directed toward total human advancement, rather than a new theory of a post-historic elect. It is just because his own standards of excellence were so high and because he hoped that such perfection would become more general among humankind - even if this was done dramatically rather than deliberately - that there will always be a great deal to derive from the acts and teachings of Jesus Christ.

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