DISEASE AND THE MORAL ORDER OF NATURE?
by Peter Morrell
In Mountains 1, 1983 – Peter Morrell
From direct and impartial observation of the world of nature, and
considerable reflection, we might come to believe that there seems to be little or no
disease amongst the animal and plant kingdoms in the wild. Even parasitism, which is
extremely widespread, can be viewed more as ‘mutualism’ (mutually beneficial rather than
harmful) and thus our perception of it might be little more than an ‘anthropomorphic
construction’ projected by us onto the natural world, rather than having an objective basis;
it is only rarely harmful and is found almost universally. Even most bacteria are scavengers
or are involved purely in decay processes. Thus disease might be seen as an entirely human
phenomenon. Almost as if the only true disease in the natural world occurs in those
organisms which come into close and direct contact with humans — most notably all
domesticated animals. As if they have gotten disease through ‘contamination’ by contact with
humans over many generations. After many years reflection on this theme, I do believe
personally, that disease probably is a peculiarly human phenomenon. It probably also
reflects the fact that nature ‘in the raw’ is in a state of perfect balance and harmony,
which contrasts with the many conflicts and disharmonies of the world of human affairs.
We can also argue that the ‘moral uprightness’ of animals protects them
from disease. By ‘moral uprightness’ I mean their purity and the way they stick very
strictly to their received pathways in life, never deviating from ingrained habit patterns
and conventionalized patterns of accepted behaviour. By contrast, humans seem to lack these
ingrained habit patterns and to conduct themselves in various diverse ways according to
their own willpower. No doubt Kent, and other religious moralists, would tend to regard ‘the
way you live your life’ as being very intimately bound up with the quality of such a life
(on a spiritual basis) and its relative ‘sickness’ with regard to the possible experience of
suffering, symptoms and signs of disorder and disease. Such moralists, as we shall see, do
regard disease as having a moral dimension, and of deriving from slack morals.
As we shall see below, some homeopaths have taken the view that the basis
for this human ‘origin’ of disease is moral. That means that we have disease because we have
lost a moral order for our lives, and that it is a direct and inevitable result. Are the two
equated at all?
We don’t have to search very hard to find a mass of moral ideas within
homeopathy which illustrate how puritanical and moralizing homeopaths tend to be. The
following quotes from Kent’s Lectures and from his Lesser Writings reveal a very rich seam
of such material:
“You cannot divorce medicine and theology. Man exists all the
way down from his innermost spiritual to his outermost natural” [Kent, Lesser
Writings, p.
“A man who cannot believe in God cannot become a
homeopath.” [ibid., p.671
‘The body became corrupt because man’s interior will became corrupt.’
[ibid., p.681
‘Man…becomes disposed to sickness by doing evil, through thinking
wrong…’ [ibid., p.664
‘Psora is the evolution of the state of man’s will, the ultimates of
sin.’ [ibid., p.654
‘This outgrowth, which has come upon man from living a life of evil
willing, is Psora.’ [ibid., p.654
‘Thinking, willing and doing are the 3 things in life from which
finally proceed the chronic miasms.’ [ibid., p.654
‘..had Psora never been established as a miasm upon the human
race…susceptibility to acute diseases would have been impossible…it is the foundation
of all sickness.’ [Kent, Lectures, p.126
‘Psora… is a state of susceptibility to disease from willing
evils.’ [ibid., p.135
‘The human race today walking the face of the earth, is but little
better than a moral leper. Such is the state of the human mind at the present day. To put
it another way everyone is Psoric.’ [ibid., p.135
‘Psora…would not exist in a perfectly healthy race.’ [ibid., p.133
‘As long as man continued to think that which was true and held that
which was good to the neighbor, that which was uprightness and justice, so long man
remained free from disease, because that was the state in which he was created.’ [ibid.,
p.134]
‘The internal state of man is prior to that which surrounds him;
therefore, the environment is not the cause…’ [ibid., p.136]
‘Diseases correspond to man’s affections, and the diseases upon the
human race today are but the outward expression of man’s interiors… man hates his
neighbor, he is willing to violate every commandment; such is the state of man today. This
state is represented in man’s diseases.’ [ibid., p.136
‘The Itch is looked upon as a disgraceful affair; so is everything
that has a similar correspondence; because the Itch in itself has a correspondence with
adultery…’ [ibid., p.137
‘How long can this thing go on before the human race is swept from
the earth with the results of the suppression of Psora?’ [ibid., pp.137-8]
‘Psora is the beginning of all physical sickness…is the underlying
cause and is the primitive or primary disorder of the human race.’ [ibid., p.126]
‘…for it goes to the very primitive wrong of the human race, the
very first sickness of the human race that is the spiritual sickness…which in turn laid
the foundation for other diseases. [ibid., p.126]
I think it is abundantly clear from these quotes that Kent took a very
puritanical and moral line about the origins of disease within the human race and he
apparently felt that Psora was equivalent to Original Sin or the Fall of Man. That is the
clear implication of the above remarks he made. He got himself into this very strange
position very largely from insisting that homeopathy necessarily involves a religious
dimension which places a moral duty upon the practitioner, and thus the homeopath has a
morally redeeming influence through cure. Thus he viewed the homeopath as a Godly savior who
dispenses spiritual as well as physical cures; and that illness stems from a corrupted state
of man, which homeopathy can cure. Kent’s logic is rather like…’all sick men are bad;
Socrates is sick, therefore Socrates is bad’. But in his case he contends:
‘all sickness originates from internal causes; internal causes are
spiritual; therefore all sickness has a spiritual basis’.
And then from there he equates internal and spiritual causes as the
miasms. Thus in his view the miasms are to be viewed as internal spiritual sins, or
derivatives of them.
He also avers another line of argument:
‘all disease causes (inner world) are invisible and nebulous; all
potentised remedies are of a similar nature; thus potentised substance, and especially the
higher potencies, are the only means of curing disease (by reaching into the subtle
interior realm of disease causes)’
This also leads to his oft-repeated adage of ‘the higher the deeper’. This
probably also forms the basis for his strong advocacy and use of the very highest potencies.
In this manner we can analyse and dissect Kent’s brand of homeopathy.
Like the Mediaeval Churchmen, Kent shows a remarkable devotion to
deductive logic and an apparent ignorance of induction or of knowledge based upon
experiment, data and the evidence of the senses — to which he also remains either oblivious
or contemptuous. There are some good parallels between Kent and Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) in
that both treat their subject matter with immense reverence as received dogma which cannot
even be questioned, and then build upon that base their towers of speculation and
philosophy. Both also tend in the direction of rigid dogmatism, excessive preciousness and
zealous devotion to ‘truth’ as received knowledge — not as freedom of thought or
experimentation, towards which both seem utterly opposed.
I would contend that the puritan idea within homeopathy (and in medicine
generally) is correctly invoked by Kent, in that illness tends to be regarded by many of us
as an unwanted evil, obtained through contamination, which must be ‘cleansed’ out of the
system by the healer. In most cultures the healer is thus regarded as an agent of divine
assistance, a cleanser, or purifier of souls.
Maybe Kent made the mistake of causally linking together two otherwise
distinct and separate observations, which are not causally connected. Is it really true that
lack of morals leads to disease? Are the sick to be viewed as bad? And the bad as sick? And
what of those who die of cancer, disfigured by arthritis, ravaged by Human BSE, muscular
dystrophy or MS? Are we to truly believe they ‘deserved’ those illnesses? And to have reaped
what they have sown? Or is this all a nonsense? It is so very hard to say. Perhaps Kent has
mistaken ‘moral rectitude’ with health and purity and hence concluded that disease must
therefore stem, pretty fundamentally, from an amoral or immoral position.
Sources:
Kent, James Tyler, c1900, Lesser Writings, Aphorisms and
Precepts, Jain reprint
Kent, James Tyler, 1900, Lectures on Homeopathic Philosophy