"Limn" means "to portray." Don't worry; I had to look it up, too.

I was doing my weekly shelf-reading in the library (dusting shelves and making sure that the Dewey Decimal numbers lined up), when I came across a title that held all the thoughts I’d been thinking lately. Well, not all of them, but a remarkable amount of them. Called Limning the Psyche: Explorations in Christian Psychology, it’s a collection of research essays that examine the roots of modern psychology and attempt to determine what relation it could possibly hold to Christianity.

And relationships are what it is all about. Christianity, many of these theorists hold, in direct opposition to modern secular thought, sees the individual not as an autonomous, self-reliant agent, but as a figure in relation to many other figures. “[T]he minimum definition of humanity is being in encounter . . . ‘I am as I am in relation’” (62). The trinity functions as the model of the perfect relationship, in which the members are distinct but unified. Jesus at times expressed a differing will from that of the Father; this differentiation did not constitute disunion, which is a helpful consideration in reframing the idea of conflict. Conflict allows us to identify ourselves in relation to one another.

An established framework is essential for full human flourishing. The infant needs the assurance of a stable environment; the adult, on a different level, requires the same. “If I am sufficiently unsure I have the right framework, then it does not matter how richly articulated it is” (113). Because modern psychology lacks the definiteness of a moral, religious framework, it is ultimately unreliable.

Many of the authors reference Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work I have been stealing bits of in my spare time. The ideas of context, narrative, and virtue ethics are constantly swirling around in my head. I want to capture them and know what I’m thinking. And that’s why I’m doing this instead of homework right now.

There were so many passages that I wanted copy down, but these, from “Attachment: Bowlby and the Bible,” by Robert C. Roberts, touch on a lot of the major concepts.

What caused the species to have the attachment disposition? The Darwinian answer is, Because attachment behavior promoted survival, the physical characteristics that caused instances of it tended to be passed down through the generations. The theological answer is, Because God intended human beings to live a life characterized by love of himself and of fellow humans, he created them with the attachment disposition (214)

The Christian psychologist can explain more than the Darwinian about personality because her exploratory framework is ultimately personal: Why do human beings have the attachment disposition? Because they are created by God, who is love. That is, they were created out of a kind of proleptic attachment, and for attachment of a certain sort to one another and to their God. The Christian psychologist can acknowledge that the attachment of an infant to his mother, which consists, behaviorally, largely in keeping close to her, has a safety-regulating function. Something like an evolutionary process may indeed be the means by which God created the human race. But the Christian psychologist has an added explanatory resource that allows the deeply personal aspects of human life—of which Bowlby too feels the need to make sense—to be themselves, without “reducing” them to something explainable in terms of mere survival function (217)

Proper attachment is not just a phase people pass through on the way to individuation; it is an irrevocable structure of personhood, an abiding feature of true individuation.” But because “the human constitution contains an essential Godward tendency . . . it follows that we need another, higher, and more essentially reliable object of attachment by reference to which we can qualify our dependence on human objects (223).