How Faith Makes the Body Ill.
But here I find myself telling about these things, though I have not yet come to my proposed theme of how it happens that faith can make the body ill.
For until now I have treated of the powers and strengths of faith: [But] now I intend to come to another point, that of the abuse. It is like this. Imagine a physician. He has at his disposal good medications.
In accordance with his character, he will apply himself with these. He can either help the patient with the medications or he can use them to kill the patient. He can apply the balm of melissa officinalis to bring about health or he can administer arsenic to cause death.
So how is the present illustration to be understood? It means nothing less than that we human beings, through the power of our faith, are capable of effecting good or evil in someone else.
It is as if the master were to allow the carpenter to have his will. Thus our faith is no different from the instrument of a craftsman. The same craftsman might forge a knife to slay his neighbor and wound his body, whereby without the knife he would be unable to strike at him.
You should understand in terms of this likeness that if we abuse faith and fall away from the purpose for which it has been given to us, and apply the power of our faith toward false purposes, and depart from the true one; and if we willfully believe this is so or that is so, then under these conditions the abuse arising from the powers of faith will result in our effecting what we say should happen.
It will forge the weapon that brings about that which we believe should be so.
Next you should be aware that this same forged object, which physical art calls a weapon, might properly be called a spirit.
For without hands and feet a spirit can perform what is done by a human being.
The reason that it can act in this way is that it is like one. But now we need a brief explanation of this forging, [which occurs because] faith wants a certain order of things to come about.
When we know of a certain disease in a particular country and conclude that it is a [matter of] penance, vengeance, or plague, then the truth of the matter is as follows.
Even though this lies [in the realm of the] natural, faith makes it into something [that operates in the realm of the] nonnatural.
A state of affairs comes about in which no one can recollect anything about it using natural signs. The result is that all natural help seems lost.
What then results is that weapon that is forged by faith. If we are able to bring about good through [faith], we can also bring about evil through it.
Just as the mountain was cast into the sea, that which grows out of faith is here thrust into [our affairs]. For faith in itself is capable of producing [the effect of] every kind of herb: an invisible nettle, an invisible celandine (Schölkraut), [or] an invisible globe-flower (Trioll).
Thus every sort of thing that grows in earthly nature may likewise produce the strengths of faith. In the same way faith can cause all diseases.
Nonetheless, it would be an error and a false supposition to think that God gives [us] this force and power and that no one uses it in this way.
We indeed have the power to stab one another to death and to prove that we can do much harm to one another, but we should [still] not do such things. The same thing applies to the powers of faith.
Physical things offer us examples of the way in which the same things are capable of causing all sorts of good or all sorts of harm. It is precisely the same with the powers of faith.
For we become [by way of faith] just like those spirits to which all things are possible and that can do the things invisibly which the body does visibly.
As has been explained, faith is something that does not stem from us. It yields an instrument which is comparable to any other weapon.
In the same ways that the earth can wound the human being, it can also poison him. All of this comes about by the power of faith—by virtue of that same faith by means of which we [could] cast mountains into the sea.
For that might be a harmful sort of casting, to submerge a mountain in the sea. And if we should abuse faith, and our faith should be directed to the purpose that harm should befall our neighbor, then it will happen precisely that way.
By virtue of our intense faith, people can be put to death by prayer, [or made] crippled and lame. Natural diseases are perverted into unnatural ones. When such superstitions abound in a country, what the physician encounters is like that which Christus experienced in his own fatherland:
He did not want to effect very many signs in such a place. For their belief was not the sort of faith that remains in itself. Rather, they believed in such a way as to make one another ill-fated.
He let it remain that way. For God wants us to proceed with the true fa1th. If we do proceed that way, we are capable of making ourselves healthy by believing, but even this is not what God intends.
Rather, he wants us bear the fa1th within us and to believe that the possibility lies within us, but not that we have to exhibit it outwardly to the eyes. And because he does want to have it held in mystery, by which I mean in fa1th, and not tested out, for this very reason medications have been created for us.
These should bear out the works of divine love toward us, letting fa1th rest alone with its works of the kind that would allow us to walk on water without getting our feet wet. As to why God has ordained that by means of fa1th we should be able to cause diseases in one another, to cause illness and health with such superstition, that is for God to judge. ~Paracelsus, Selected Historical Writings, Page 749-753
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
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