Between Beasts and Angels: A Medical Pilgrimage with Walker Percy

Today’s techno-medicine is lost in the cosmos. Current events are replete with legal and political battles over healthcare administration and medical practice, and news headlines regularly sensationalize primary research in aspirations to transform the human condition, whatever we may take that to mean, and make a dollar in the process. We have no clue who we are or what medicine is for.

We have spent the last decades pouring faith and boundless funding into medical technology, and all it seems to have given us is a fragmented, impersonal, algorithmic system for managing broken bodies and minds—and not to mention demoralized doctors who vacillate between technocrats and bureaucrats. Now over half of doctors are burnt out.[1]

Where the Fathers of the Church thought about medicine sacramentally as a sort of analogy for the cure of the soul, presently it lies enervated within the ruins of scientific materialism grasping for meaning. Walker Percy identified these themes decades ago in his dystopian novel Love in the Ruins. There is no silver bullet or legitimate deus ex machina to correct today’s techno-medicine; however, Percy offers a pilgrimage from technology to sacrament in the person of Dr. Thomas More, the novel’s protagonist. We will follow him in his journey from one mode of using medicine to another as a guide for ourselves. In other words, we will explore Walker Percy’s map for modern physicians to find their way in the cosmos.

Walker Percy

Percy came from a prominent Louisiana family afflicted with melancholy and suicide, especially the men, his father included. In his young adulthood the likes of H.G. Wells inspired him with a scientific worldview where placing faith in the empirical sciences ought to solve the problems of mankind. He went on to medical school at Columbia University; however, during his pathology internship he caught tuberculosis from a corpse upon which he was performing an autopsy. His forced convalescence led him into books on a quest after the big questions of God and the meaning of life.

He spent years wrestling with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Camus, and Sartre, ultimately concluding that science could discover every fact in the universe and yet leave the scientist without a clue how to live at 2PM on a Wednesday afternoon. However, what matters most is how to live on Wednesday afternoon. Read an essay? Take to alcohol? Doom scroll social media? In other words, he had to look outside science to understand his family’s suicidal tendencies and the problems afflicting modern man, prompting his conversion to Catholicism and vocation as a writer.

Percy merged medicine and writing into what he calls being a “literary diagnostician” in Signposts in a Strange Land, using the novel to show fault lines running through Western man’s soul. In the same essay, he describes that “what the novelist notices is not how awful the happenings are, but how peculiar it is that people don’t seem to notice how awful the happenings are.” In the words of his best friend, Shelby Foote, his subject was “the human heart in conflict with itself.”[2] In contrast to the merely entertaining media we are so accustomed to, Percy’s writing demands active engagement. There is no binge-reading Percy. Like Flannery O’Connor, he frequently presents the dark side of human experience, while suspending judgment in order to force readers to make moral judgments. Some critics have described him as a gadfly. Walker Percy demands readers to be discerning, which demands us to have our own consciences on the line when wrestling with his novels.

Love in the Ruins

This brings us to Percy’s science fiction apocalypse, Love in the Ruins. Published in 1971, the novel was Percy’s response to the 1960s, where he aimed to locate the cause of social upheaval in moral and spiritual forces, aiming to renew Dostoevsky’s treatment of the rocky Russian 1860s in Demons, as Jessica Hooten-Wilson shows through review of Percy’s journals. Percy himself says Love in the Ruins “is really about the pursuit of happiness. The locale is a subdivision called Paradise Estates. Everyone there has pursued happiness and generally succeeded in being happy. Yet something is wrong.”[3] His diagnosis will follow momentarily. Although the book does tell a cautionary tale of category mistakes between brain/mind, politics/theology, and medical/spiritual problems, as Carl Elliot writes, it goes further. Percy also offers techno-medicine “what we Catholics call the Sacramental Life,” challenging its moral and metaphysical structure.[4]

The novel opens quite memorably with Dr. Thomas More gripping a carbine on the inside of a highway cloverleaf exchange suffering an allergic reaction to gin fizzes: “Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?” (1)

We meet Dr. Thomas More on the fourth of July like Dante: midway along the journey of life, in a dark wood. He is a psychiatrist, a doctor of the soul, who “believes in God and the whole business,” but by his own admission, “loves women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all.” Dr. More has fallen victim to depression and alcohol in a mid-life crisis after his pious eight-year-old daughter died of cancer. His then-wife blamed him for not taking her to Lourdes, France to heal the neuroblastoma swelling her eyeball out of its socket. She divorced him and ran off with “a heathen Englishman” more interested in her money than a “spiritual relationship.” As Dr. More says, he no longer eats Christ, and so no longer has life within him. He attempted suicide the prior Christmas Eve following a tryst doomed by an anaphylactic reaction to gin fizzes in a golf course bunker. Throughout the novel, in fact, Dr. More officially remains a patient at the local psych ward despite living outside its walls.

The blood flowing from his slit wrists clarified things for him, however. Life is worth living, and Dr. More had a scientific mind to offer the world. In the madhouse he further realized how mad the world is. Despite his cycling depression and mania, he is “a genius nevertheless who sees into the hidden causes of things,” seemingly the only one who notices Virginia creeper overtaking the streets and seems willing to acknowledge rampant murders in the bourgeois community (11).

All is not well in Paradise Estates. For Percy, the West has suffered from anthropological schizophrenia since Descartes laid the terms for the modern division between mind and body. As he spells out in Lost in the Cosmos, we vacillate between angelism and bestialism. Some live as angels with our heads in the clouds, suspended above the real world like gnostics through art and science (and not to mention digital life in virtual reality). Floating in idealisms, we crave existential “re-entry” points from our orbit about the earth to experience some temporary re-embodiment against chronic uncaused terrors and anxieties. Conversely, some live as beasts on the earth, crawling about on our bellies like a serpent subjected to animal desires. Some simultaneously inhabit both angelism and bestialism, living as souls or bodies but never ensouled bodies.

For Percy, the true cause of this malaise is spiritual. Powers and principalities have been unleashed, represented as “noxious” spiritual particles falling upon Paradise Estates. Indeed he calls this “More’s syndrome”: he has discovered it not only because he is a careful student of his patients’ stories, but also because he suffers from it himself. “Physician, heal thyself,” he rightly says. Yet this psychiatrist has grown tired of the old Freudian talk methods that dare to venture into the soul’s troubles and lay bare its inner darkness. He wants a quick fix.

Next to Paradise Estates is Fedville, a recognizable technocratic complex including a hospital, medical school, geriatrics center, and so-called love clinic. Eros and thanatos, love and death, are major forces throughout the book. Percy’s first title for the book was actually “Making Love in the Ruins.” In Fedville the scientists are all behaviorists who espouse a basically materialist, demoralized worldview whose anthropology imagines man as an organism responding to environments. As one of my own former professors said so eloquently, all we humans do is contract and secrete. Percy often asks readers, however, why we so often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments against what an animal might experience. In a hurricane people become more present and more generous with one another than on a typical sunny day. With such observations, Dr. More finds himself debating the scientists over the existence of the soul and the reality of human freedom in a string of events comical to anyone who has gone to medical school.

At the love clinic, scientists study sexual relations through scientific observation, mirroring the famous studies by Masters and Johnson supplying the foundation to medicine’s approach to sexuality. The scientists assume a shortsighted method. They subsume sex within their totalizing objective system while forgetting as observers they are still human and thus very much part of the system. The clinic’s “observation area” reading out biometric data from the lovers even has a destimulation closet for any observer who loses objectivity. Percy tests us by making us blush, demonstrating by the blush that sex has a greater meaning to it than organisms responding to environments. Dr. More knows the meaning of sex, though in his mid-life crisis has fallen into holding up three girls for himself in a Howard Johnson motel. One doctor offers to condition away More’s guilt with a “Skinner Box,” but More responds, “then I’d really be up the creek” (118).

The geriatric clinic does something similar for death. An elderly man is put up for possible euthanasia after unbecoming behavior in his Florida senior living center: defecating on a Flirtation Walk, cursing Ohioans, and digging for the Fountain of Youth on a putt-putt course. If that was not enough, after this he became mute and appeared unable to walk. The man, however, had been acting strangely simply to demonstrate his freedom like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man (or Percy’s own dark Lancelot). The Nirvana-like environment of the senior living center had eroded his human freedom, treating him like a passive organism to be manipulated by social engineers designing his environment. On stage in front of many medical students, Dr. More demonstrates the man is mute to defy the behaviorists trying to manipulate him. There is nothing wrong with him at all. His socially unacceptable behavior was philosophical in nature.

Aging and death, for the senior living center as much as for the scientists, are simply another problem to solve. Euthanasia presents a technical solution to a moral question. Indeed, people in the novel do not know what to do with death. They shun speaking about euthanasia or the rampant murders in Paradise. By contrast, St. Thomas More, Dr. More’s distant relation and namesake, was “most cheerful with Brother Death in the neighborhood.”[5] It was only after Dr. More’s attempted suicide, his own brush with death, that he began to love life.

The Ontological Lapsometer

Dr. More invents a device to heal the sundered soul of Western man called the “Ontological Lapsometer”: a stethoscope of the soul (7). The device is able to diagnose angelism-bestialism by measuring brain waves in certain regions akin to an EEG crossed with phrenology. With this, Percy seemingly predicted contemporary neuroscience of morality in reducing the spirit/morality to the mind and then to the brain, represented abstractly through various medical tests. The Ontological Lapsometer thus also anticipates fMRI, which is frequently used to correlate mental states with metabolic activity in various brain regions. The Lapsometer aims to disclose the deepest truths about the patient on which it is used by rendering the secret places of the heart visible to Dr. More, shortcutting the old Freudian talk methods.

It promises more than diagnosis. It will cure More’s syndrome by stimulating or inhibiting various layers of the pineal gland, the structure Descartes believed contained the soul. Setting individual souls upright, Dr. More aspires to correct the social maladies in his community. Failing that, he hopes it at least does not destroy the world; failing that, he hopes at least his article may be published before the world ends. He observes man is unlike any other animal:

If you measure the pineal activity of a monkey—or any other subhuman animal—with my lapsometer, you will invariably record identical readings at Layers I and II. Its self, that is to say, coincides with itself. Only in man do you find a discrepancy: Layer I, the outer social self, tick over, say, at a sprightly 5.4 mmv, while Layer II just lies there, barely alive at 0.7 mmv, or even zero!—a nought, a gap, an aching wound. Only in man does the self miss itself, fall from itself (hence lapsometer!). Suppose—! Suppose I could hit on the right dosage and weld the broken self whole! What if man could reenter [sic] paradise, so to speak, and live there both as man and spirit, whole and intact man-spirit, as solid flesh as a speckled trout, a dappled thing, yet aware of itself as a self! (36)

Dr. More wants to bring salvation to broken human nature through technology. He will use the device to make people happy like the Grand Inquisitor without the hard (and meaningful) volitional work of virtue. He aims to cure the right illness but with the wrong means. Moral and spiritual ailments can only really be treated with moral and spiritual treatments, and those are tied directly to his wealthy community’s spiritual poverty. Dr. Thomas More falls prey to a scientific utopia susceptible to St. Thomas More’s satirical Utopia. In the words of John Desmond, “with overweening pride, he hopes to perfect the lapsometer, cure man’s ontological flaw, and save civilization, and thereby achieve fame as mankind’s savior.”[6]

This, of course, is the ultimate hubris for medicine: redeeming mankind through technology, regenerating patients as a new creation fit for an earthly paradise. It should be no surprise that Dr. More gets hoodwinked by the devilish Art Immelman, accepting the false promise of a Nobel Prize as a drunken bribe in a replay of Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin in Demons. Immelman unleashes the Lapsometer in the medical school auditorium with disastrous consequences. Instead of equilibrating and healing their angelism-bestialism, they have a paradoxical reaction. Sexual drives are disinhibited, and aggression turns people against each other in violent outbursts. The social pathologies More had hoped to heal seem poised rather to bring the world to its precipice, growing only stronger after encountering his Lapsometer.

The powerful quasi-spiritual device was bound to fall into the wrong hands to wreak chaos in Paradise. This is the state of affairs leading Thomas More to where we met him: gripping a carbine on the inside of a highway cloverleaf exchange suffering an allergic reaction to gin fizzes. Immelman’s spiritual cronies have inspired political agitators to use the Lapsometer’s principles to reproduce the events of the medical school lecture hall within the community writ large through the release of heavy sodium, known by Dr. More to exacerbate More’s syndrome. The very techno-rationality that started with saving the world is instead poised to destroy it.

Sacrament and Paradise

The utopian project failed predictably. From the pit of witnessing the damage wrought by his technology, he calls upon St. Thomas More and renames the illness “Lucifer syndrome” (236). After eleven years away from the Church, the epilogue shows him re-entering paradise himself through the sacraments. It is Christmas Eve, the night on which Christ renewed human nature and the night on which he attempted suicide six years prior. Throughout the book he had struggled with a lack of guilt attached to his technological pride. Fr. Smith in the confessional, though, pricks his conscience with “the little way,” after More lists his sins:

Meanwhile, forgive me but there are other things we must think about: like doing our jobs, you being a better doctor, I being a better priest, showing a bit of ordinary kindness to people, particularly our own families—unkindness to those close to us is such a pitiful thing—doing what we can for our poor unhappy country—things, which, please forgive me, sometimes seem more important than dwelling on a few middle-aged daydreams (399).

He feels ashamed for his sins immediately, receives absolution, and wears sackcloth at midnight Mass. Dr. More may be a genius, but Fr. Smith is an apostle, to use Kierkegaard’s distinction so important to Percy. The book closes with More settled into a new marriage, living humbly in an old slave’s quarters, simply tending his own garden, rather than technologically commanding the garden of Eden. He is officially an ex-suicide, even if his old vices continue to tempt him.

Percy shows that the deepest meaning of medicine is sacramental in two senses. First, medicine is like the garments of skin worn by Adam and Eve outside paradise: it is a protection given by God to lighten the sufferings we experience in this life, especially when administered with love. Thomas More experiences this when his friend stitches up his wrists after his suicide attempt. Second, healing of the body is an analogy for healing of the soul. Medicine is an icon of the tree of life through which we may re-enter paradise, but it is not the key for unlocking paradise.

There is a fatal flaw, a lapse, an ontological wound, an illness of the soul, in all mankind living outside our heavenly paradise, and it touches every aspect of how we use medicine. Yet, an Ontological Lapsometer (or AI algorithm) trying to correct it can only do so by demoralizing its subjects in the process. I might be able to use an AI-driven “artificial pancreas” to treat diabetes effectively, but that is a different matter than, for example, striving to eliminate the sometimes unpredictable human component of medicine. In other words, the way medicine participates in restoring mankind to paradise is sacramental love rather than technological power. Instead of organisms responding to environments, for Percy, we are pilgrims.

Dr. More, in the book’s sequel, The Thanatos Syndrome, says medicine works “by venturing into the heart of darkness, which is to say, by talking and listening, mostly listening, to another troubled human for months.”[7] The Freudians were onto something. Medicine is a sacrament where the experience of illness, suffering, seeking help, and offering compassion participate mysteriously in higher patterns. Ironically, Dr. More was on the cusp of this experience in the early stages of developing his Lapsometer.

An abstracted graduate student suffering from “massive free-floating terror, identity crisis, and sexual impotence” presents to his psychiatric office. He is more objective than a behaviorist, describing feelings of warmth and tenderness toward his wife, though he will not say love. As you can guess, Dr. More’s Lapsometer demonstrates a classic profile of angelism. He shudders “in orbit around the great globe, seeking some way to get back.” Dr. More agrees to give the young lad his requested rayon organ so that if he could not achieve “an adequate response” at least his wife could. But there was one condition: the following day the patient must not drive to work. Instead he must walk six miles as the crow flies through the swamp. He acquiesced, eventually arriving at home after five-hours battling mosquitoes, alligators, copperheads, and other young men looking for a fight. The ordeal left him half-dead and malodorous. He embraced his wife, and made love to her for the rest of the night. Sex was reconciled to marital love, and angelism cured through non-technical means.

For Percy, doctor and patient meet as co-exiles together trying to mutually make their way back to paradise. Yet techno-medicine is often tempted to rid humanity of its sufferings and weaknesses while merely reconciling man to his sins, using quick fixes to rid the human of human condition. In Dr. More’s pilgrimage from technology to sacrament, he concludes “some day a man will walk into my office as a ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher” (382-83).

EDITORIAL NOTE: An earlier version of this essay was given at the Fall Conference of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, “Ever Ancient, Ever New: On Catholic Imagination,” November 2024.

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