Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Thomas, Luther, Aristotle ·
New blog on the kid: I Get Annoyed to Nervous When Catholics Use the Term Narcissist
I am pretty sure that Luther, after I had admired him, like many other Lutherans still do, started to give me
Narcissist vibes, notably over
Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen, so, why would I object to Joe Heschmeyer calling him a Narcissist straight out?
It's not just the occasion, after coming to disagree with Chesterton on how much St. Thomas' orthodoxy owed to Aristotle, over studying Sorbonne Averroists through the condemnation of 1277 and over learning Aristotle scholars actually have started to consider Averroistic positions as going back to Aristotle. It's also, the term.
Now, I have no problem with assessing Luther as prideful. But that's partly because I came to see him as wrong, and that in turn is partly over having a hard time with how he dissed Mariology in the
Sendbrief and was willing to change the text in order to "eliminate an occasion" to "Papists". It's not about trying to clinically assess him. And the term Narcissist, it kind of does. A certain period, when you cursed someone, you cursed him with Hellfire. Now you curse with Mental Diagnoses. Hellfire isn't treatable per se and is applicable in the afterlife. A mental diagnosis is supposed to be applicable in this life, and therefore an actual threat, if coming from someone in a position to get it applied. If a homeless person says about a policeman "il est malade" (he's sick), that's not a threat. If a policeman says about a homeless person "il est malade" it's a bit more threatening. Joe Heschmeyer happens to be a lawyer and as such closer to the policeman than to the homeless person.
I read some statistics about how many of the homeless are what, and while "sex offenders" seems to be an objective status (as long as judges and penitentiaries apply it and no shrinks add diagnoses that could be mistaken for it), "mentally ill" seems to be suspect of being a function of this kind of modern curse. Insofar as it leads to actual measures, it can also lead to trapping someone in a situation of homelessness.
So, one point against "Narcissist" and for that matter "Delusional Narcissist" is, that kind of language can unfortunately have consequences. I was briefly considering, was I too lenient on the N-word used in Rochester, Minnesota, hadn't eugenics targetted black people there? Well, there were states where eugenics were applied in a racist way, but Minnesota seems to have been more inclined to misogyny in application. Kellogg was in Michigan, not in Minnesota. Michigan had about half as many victims as Virginia, but they were (as predictably in Virginia) majority black. Minnesota had half as many victims as Michigan (on a population about half the size), but the majority of victims were women. Obviously, eugenics as such is, for now and thank God, gone, but, medical practitioners who are not applying it can have had grandfathers applying it. And attitudes about certain behaviours, more frequent in black people (in Virginia) or more frequent in women (in Minnesota), making them prone to base false diagnoses on such prejudice.
In some circles among Protestants, the stamp "Narcissist" has become a pretty obvious go to when it comes to motivating breaking friendships and other relations. Sometimes, I'm afraid, marriages, leading to divorce, and remarriage, which Our Lord terms adultery. Now some of them have on top of that tried to say their advice is based on "how Jesus dealt with Narcissists."
The examples given are usually Pharisees (I'll return to a very unfortunate exception briefly), and they are in this case always collective. Jesus calls a "ye Pharisees" (or other group) or a "ye" some term like "brood if vipers" (toxic narcissism involves devious and unexpected attacks) "children" (narcissism is supposed to be one outlet of immaturity among others, I think of when He compared the Pharisees and their reaction to John the Baptist with their reaction to Him ... "like children saying, we have played music and thou hast not danced, we have sung dirges and thou hast not mourned"), "liars, hypocrites" (toxic narcissism has a problem with veracity), "ye fools" (note the plural! in Luke 11:40), and some other things, while each time Jesus is adressing a single Pharisee (Nicodemus, Jairus, presumably St. Joseph of Arimathea, though we only get to see him when it's time for a burial), He does so in gentle and courteous terms, not at all like someone dealing with a Narcissist (or presumed such) today.
These people are even sometimes prepared to consider Our Lord's close kin as Narcissists because of when they asked Him to see them. Not a misunderstanding of the occasion, not a slight overdoing of family obligations, no, it has to be straightout (if somewhat mild) Narcissism. Obviously, this view involves a blasphemy against the Blessed Virgin, at least from their side where Narcissism is supposed to automatically equate with the sin of pride.
Joe Heschmeyer called Luther "Delusional Narcissist" and what about the term "Delusion"? Classically, it could apply to someone like
The Emperor of Portugallia (title figure in this novel by Selma Lagerlöf). His daughter, Glory Goldie Sunnycastle, once off to Stockholm, has ceased to send her father letters. He speculates on the reason, concludes she has gone to a far land (the name of which conflates "Portugal" and "Gallia" and therefore certainly isn't an actual country), become Empress and therefore by extension made her father Emperor. Now, this doesn't make him unhappy. But he actually has a breakdown when finding out she is actually just a prostitute. So, a Delusion, in the most classic sense of the word, need not be a very grave thing. But it is a question of things like misunderstanding one's actual identity, belief in actual ranks that aren't there.
Emperor of anything, that's an actual rank. I'm reminded of an anecdote about the Emperor Francis Joseph visiting a mental hospital. He greeted one of the inmates, and introduced himself as the Emperor. "Oh, I thought so too, when I came here" ... Meaning, he was perhaps a bit orrery about his delusion of being the Emperor of Austria, unless he was simply making a joke about a stereotype. "Best X in the world" isn't an actual rank. Unless someone is keeping scores, and the "best" is synonymous to what admits a metric. Currently, since 1993, the world record of high jump is held by Javier Sotomayor, at 2.45 m (8 ft 1⁄4 in). I checked wikipedia.
"Best Aristotelian in the world" isn't how Luther termed himself, he just said he understood Aristotle better than two people a few centuries past. He warned against Aristotle, based on his understanding. If he warned against the Nichomachean Ethics, this may be because that work misses original sin, and therefore presents a picture of purely natural virtue, that misses out on the medicinal virtues Christians need like fasting, due to the fall of Adam. Ironically, once the Deformation got going, he was himself missing out on it. What he said about understanding Aristotle better than St. Thomas and Duns Scotus simply isn't even a claim of being "better than the best" it's a claim of learning that the Renaissance Humanists regularly made against the Middle Ages. Including the Latin. Now, the Latin prose of St. Thomas is less close to the prose of Cicero than the Latin prose of Erasmus or his disciples Luther and St. Thomas More. Would he have been delusional if he had said he wrote better Latin than St. Thomas? No. He would just have expressed the evaluation that Ciceronian prose is the best Latin prose, along with Caesar's prose. And likewise, while he tried to pull a Savonarola on Aristotle, and mistakenly extended it to scholasticism (wherein he was not followed by Lutherans generally, at least the ensuing century, Sweden had some petty but still rivals of the Coimbra Jesuits), this is not even a claim to be personally the best Aristotelian of history, it's a claim of reevaluating what Aristotle really stood for. And as mentioned, probably also of inheriting this reevaluation from his professors. Or inheriting a superciliousness to 13th C. scholasticism over being able to read Aristotle in Greek, which St. Thomas was not.
I'm not a particular fan of Luther. But when it comes to pride, I would say a prideful century tended to enhance prideful Deformers. And as Calvin is ultimately more followed than Luther, it argues Calvin was more prideful. Lutherans are currently 1%, which is not a huge success. Back in the 17th C. they were more important, but that was due to Royal Deformers, like Frederick of Denmark following suite of Gustav of Sweden. It was the pride of secular rulers, and unsurprisingly, Scandinavia today is a highly secularised region of the world. Much closer to New Jersey than to Texas, if you see what I mean. As to Cranmer, he had been a Catholic back when his King (whom he served with devotion) defended the Catholic faith and specifically the Seven Sacraments against Luther. Neither Calvin nor Cranmer can be seen as loyal supporters who in a moment of lucidity admit their master was flawed, because Luther was never their master in the first place. Both have more in common with Bucer, and Bucer was a man trying to mediate between Luther and Zwingli. In order to motivate such a mediation, you have to basically admit both of the "masters" are flawed, and have taken some "extremes" to be avoided. There is no surprise in Bucer considering either Luther or Zwingli or both flawed, just as there is no surprise in Mohammed considering the current Christians and Jews flawed or Joseph Smith considering both Presbyterians and Methodists flawed. It's actually more surprising how
Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné romanticised Luther, therein followed by
Ellen Gould White, since both had a theology vastly different from Luther's. But given they lived in an era of romanticising pioneers (Washington Irving infamously wrote a novel attributing to Christopher Columbus the pioneering not just of discovering the New World, but even of refuting Flat Earthism, as if it had been a thing), that could explain their attitude to Luther.
Can I remind that, it's a Christian and Catholic thing to be on the lookout against Toxic Narcissism in networks and groups, it's not a Christian and definitely not a Catholic thing, to be a watchdog about individual cases of the potential diagnosis Narcissism? Because, I think Tovia Singer pretty correctly resumes the Pharisee pov when he called Jesus "a Narcissist" ... not meaning that the pov is correct, but just that Tovia Singer is actually in their line, not misrepresenting their pov.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Valens of Auxerre
21 May 2025
