The Decline of Healing

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After the apostolic era of the church, a change in emphasis on the significance of suffering occurred. Suffering began to be viewed as such a blessing that it was wrong to seek healing. One could perfectly imitate Christ by subjecting oneself to his suffering.

Instead of healing, the church began to highlight almost exclusively the spiritual significance, and even worthiness, of suffering. Suffering became a sign of predestination and immediate entry into heaven, because it was conjectured that the sick did their suffering on earth. The notion that suffering has an ultimate redemptive value is still with us today.

In his early writings St Augustine argued that healing was meant for the early church but Christians should not look for a continuance of healing. Eventually he came to change his mind in his book Retractions, and declared in it that he was wrong. What had made him change his mind was his experience as bishop ofHippo(c.420AD):

'... I realized how many miracles were occurring in our own day and which were so like the miracles of old ... how wrong it would be to allow the memory of these marvels of divine power to perish from among our people . . .'
As the church began to consolidate its power, it became antagonistic towards pagan healing traditions until, by the Middle Ages, healing had become a renegade practice and the Catholic church warned its congregations that lay healers were in league with the devil. By the 16th century, in virtually ail of Europe healing was banned.

Priests had been free to practise medicine right up to the 13th century, when a papal decree had disallowed the practice. The result of this was that religion and medicine went their separate ways. The church would attend to one's soul and the physician to one's body.

Philosophy played a prominent part in the fall of healing. As well as Descartes' divorcing of the mind and body, Spinoza (1632-77) managed comprehensively to unseat the church's belief in the miraculous by suggesting that God was the cause of everything and he acted in accordance with rigid inviolable laws. Rationalism was systematically to undermine the belief in the supernatural and, by extension, the reality of healing.