Krankheit und ihre Behandlung

What is illness? And how clearly do Christian ideas distinguish themselves from the traditional ideas of pre-Christian antiquity? Wolfgang Häfele examines the miracles of Saints Cyrus and John, written by the later Patriarch Sophronios of Jerusalem between 610 and 614. They are said to have a particularly hostile attitude towards doctors and medicine. Wrongly, as it turns out: Sophronios does indeed criticise the habitus of the then even Christian elite of physicians extremely harshly. At the same time, he is surprisingly appreciative of the possibilities of contemporary medicine. He falls back on the explanatory approaches of contemporary medicine as a matter of course when he describes suffering. Especially in the case of the sufferings of the soul, however, a second dimension then becomes clear, which permeates the collection of wounds: Illness and its treatment as metaphors.