Greetings!
>Fearful to start another thread with the equally elementary question: To
what
>extent was an equation drawn in the Middle Ages between sickness and sin?
>(Hence recovery associates with repentence, and MM is the type of the
repentent
>sinner);
Well, in the kind of texts I study (practical theology texts and
confessional aids) that connection between sin and sickness is crystal
clear. Sin is the sickness of the soul, just as illness is sickness of the
body, and the priest is the doctor of the soul when exercising the _cura
animarum_. This can be found quite early (in some of the early penitentials
c. 7th-9th centuries). An interesting manifestation of this are "diagnosis
aids" which circulate with some of these types of work. They consist of
charts lining up the deadly sins (sometimes both natural and voluntary
vices, actually) in opposition to the Virtues, Gifts of the Holy Spirit,
Sacraments, Beatitudes, Petitions in the Lord's Prayer, and the like. From
what little I know of medicine, this fits in with the doctrine of the
humours, that contraries cure contraries.
Susan Carroll-Clark
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