29

Dickens, Dostoyevsky and a Homily

© National Portrait Gallery Charles Dickens by Daniel Maclise Fedor Dostoyesky by Vasily Perov

Steve Burrows

The Gospel reading which I heard on 17 January, St Anthony of Egypt's feast day, described how Jesus healed the leper who in faith appealed for the Lord’s help. In his homily, the priest said: ‘That our faith can have an effect in healing the sick, seems to be shown to us. So we must remember the sick in our prayers. Our prayers can help them. If it is God's will, we can heal them.’ He continued: ‘More contentious, and it is a matter difficult to deal with in this setting and in a short time, is the effect of sin on health. But let me mention it, nonetheless, as something for us all to ponder. There seems to be a link between sin and lack of health. Some medical opinion now backs this up. If we sin too much, it brings about illness.’

So the priest raised the proposition that sin results in illness, in as gentle and mild a way as possible. His approach was understandable, because this suggestion is open to an outraged attack by the parent of a child with cancer, for example. And no one would wish to apply this general rule about sin and illness to such a hard case. Dickens lived in an era when people had to face infant and child death much more often than we do today. In the scene in The Old Curiosity Shop in which Little Nell dies, the author poetically offers hope out of the loss. He writes: ‘Oh! It is hard to take to heart the lesson that such deaths will teach, but … when death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, shapes of mercy, charity and love, to walk the world, and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes. In the destroyer’s steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.’

There are obvious explanations for illness, such as lack of exercise and unhealthy diets, or stresses and strains as we age causing our bodies just to wear out. But granting this, I would say that it is true that sin makes you ill. How is this? Well, firstly admit that mind and body are linked. Then agree that moral and spiritual laws are realities. Finally, agree with the prophet Jeremiah that the Lord God has written these laws in our hearts and in our minds. So, in breaking them, we are affecting something in our minds. And our immune system and the functioning of vital organs depend upon the healthy running of the mind. If this is compromised, we can’t rally optimal defences against incipient cancer, or against organ failure, or against a crisis caused by bacterial or viral infection. And so we fall ill. Even at the level of thought, behaviour and perception, the mind won't work properly after sin. Literature again illustrates this. In one of G K Chesterton's Fr Brown stories, a doctor kills a husband to free the wife from an abusive marriage, and he suddenly finds that his previously healthy body and mind are unwell, they won't work properly. More famously, Raskolnikov, the impoverished student in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, kills the pawnbroker, having calculated that she is a worthless and bad old woman, and the good he would do with her money would outweigh the