Sheehan, John F.X.

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The Linacre QuarterlyVolume 43 | Number 4 Article 11November 1976Aesculapius and Zadok: Medical and PriestlyAuthorityJohn F.X. SheehanFollow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnqRecommended CitationSheehan, John F.X. (1976) "Aesculapius and Zadok: Medical and Priestly Authority," The Linacre Quarterly: Vol. 43: No. 4, Article 11.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/lnq/vol43/iss4/11Aesculapius and Zadok: Medical and Priestly Authority John F. X. Sheehan, S.J . Father Sheehart has been a member of the Marquette Uni -o e r sit y Theology Department since 1970 and has served as its chairman since 1972. The author of a number oj ar-ticles and reviews, he has written three books and a fourth is scheduled for publication by the Paulist Press in January, 1977. Physicians and priests have much in common. Friends and detractors of each group have generally been in agreement on that. Those who find physicians to be a beneficent lot, generaUy thin k well of priests; those who are "turned off' by physicians and find them aloof and arrogant, often entertain dark thoughts aboul the priestly caste. Detractors have noted traits common to the two groups. Each - at least sometimes - wears special garb; each seems a trifle overconcerned with being ad-dressed by proper title; each caste, no matter how narrow its education may be, offers to its members at least a special tech-r..ical vocabulary which seems -to t he hostile - designed to baf-fle the outsider. 292 Perhaps one further common denominator is found between the hard-working priest outside academe and the harried physi-cian in practice. Neither of them has opportunity to do much re-flecting on the nature of his pro-fessional life. There is too much to be done to waste time think-ing about it! Others have more leisure. A fairly recent book , t he work of a medical socio logist and a research physician , offers an unusual op-port uni ty for reflection. ( Models 0/ Madness. Models 0/ Medicine: Siegler and Osmond, MacMillan, 1974 ). In the major insight that interests us, the two authors lean heavi ly on an unpubl ished manu-script by T. T . Paterson. The results of tbat study may be properly rephrased as follows: medical authority derives from three sources; some of it is moral; some of it is sapientiai; what re-ma ins, the most important part, is simply Aesculapian. This last is not simply charismatic. It does not flow from personality. But it is not precisely sapientiai or mor-al. No government confers it with a li cense. (A non-licensed med i-cal student may be possessed of Linacre Quarterly such authority under the right circumstances, a t t he scene of an accident or - properly ga rbed -in the ward of a large hospi tal. ) Aesculapian authori ty proper is of course not independent of t he moral or the sapiential. The physician's moral authori ty, ac-cording to Siegler and Osmond, is " the right to control and direct by reason of the rightness and goodness (flowing from) the ethos of the enterprise. The doc-tor's moral authority, which is expressed in the Hippocratic Oath, stems from the fact that he does what is expected of him as a doctor, and that he is con-cerned with the good of the patient." (p. 94) Physicians sometimes forget this aspect of t heir au thori ty. Laymen rarely do when thin king of physicians. For this reason, laymen are dis-tressed by evidences of less than perfect behavior in physicians fa r more than they would be by such behavior in ot.her professions. No editorial could successfully de-plore a 8250.000 annual income in lawyers. A news item merely mentioning such income in physi-cians will give rise to a spate of letters. Physicians who are dis-tressed by this un fa ir reaction to medical in c 0 m e, (a reaction equalled only by that that which rises from mention of weal thy priests ) simply do not ack nowl-edge the moral dimension of their authorit.y. The sapiential aspect or medi -cal authori ty is sometimes over-est ima ted by laymen. In fact, t he sapientia had by the physician November, 1976 (and by t his Pa terson chose t.o mean techn ical and scientific competence) is limited. A well-t rained physiologist or biochem-ist may be superior to a physician in technical knowl edge of the hu-man body and its chemica l activity. Nonetheless, t he sapien-tial is a very importan t aspect of medical authority. Neither mora l nor Aesculapian can sub-stitute for i t. The sapiential is presumed. By now a fai rly clear notion of the Aesculapian should have emerged. It is what is lert over. It is that wh ich inspires the pa-tien t wit.h confidence in the physician. It is the comfort of t he "bedside manner" and all which makes that comfort reasonably founded. No physician is born with it. Consciously or unconsciously he keeps working at it. Developing it makes some demands of him and yet frees him from others. KUbler-Ross criticizes doctors and t heir fears in the presence of the dying pa tient. This seems to be one of her major themes in On Death and Dying, (MacMillan, New York, 1969). She talks of physicians' inability to handle their fea r of death, their need to run from such fea rs and from t he dying patient. We feel that this is perhaps unfnir. Rather the doc-tor may feel the need (like most charismatic figures) to avoid t hat which might shake confidence in himself (and thus weaken his ability to inspire confidence in others) and so he runs from the fear which he cannot handle. 293 Doctors, a t least in public, may not wring t heir hands in very hu-man despair a t the inability of 1976 medical treatments to han-dle a variety of powerful illnesses. Perhaps it is a part of wisdom t hat they even deny such feel-i.ngs of despair. To the extent that their denial is success ful, their Aesculapian confidence may remain unimpaired in the pres-ence of other diseases and other treatments. Physicians may con-tinue to rely on special garb and special titles - not so much t hat t heir patients need them as that they need them - in order to be able to help their patients. A few doctors feel otherwise; Siegler and Osmond chide the foolish Doctor Jones who so mis-understands all t hat as to insist that his patients call him Max. "Doctors are well-known for their eccent ricities .. . wit h their cus-tomary loyalty and forebearance, patients will call him Max, but they will t hink of him as Dr. J ones." (1'. 215) Sacerdotal Parallels There are in t he li fe of the contemporary priest many paral-lels to the dimensions noted above. In fact , most of the brief essay up to now could be re-read as a parable. But a few specifics can be underlined. We might use as our rubric equivalent to Aes-culapius the name Zadok. He was the pre-Hebraic priest of J eru-salem who came to serve David and his God. (Jerome Biblical Co mmentary, p. 707) Priests, too, are possessed of authority that is beyond the merely moral 294 or sapiential. We can call that their Zadokian burden. The moral dimension of t he priestly responsibili ty is no grea t-er and no less than it has always been. That the priest should re-main deeply faith ful to the ac-cepted code has not changed. The understanding of that code may have changed. The sapientiat demand has in-creased considerably in recent decades . (Following the medical authors, we here mean a techni-cal grasp of theology. ) One may question if its demands have ever been sufficiently heeded. It is true that most priests who are not academics will have to lea rn to live within some sapiential limits. Even as the physician in comparison with the physiologist, the priest must live in a world peopled by theologians (lay and even women!) whose sapiential grasp is far better t han his. But he cannot allow himself to re-treat too easily here. If the sapiential demands are great, no prior age has had a t its disposal the steady supply of well written books in English tha t make Iceep· ing up or even catching up such relative pleasures. Zadokian Responsibility But, finally, the priesthood is possessed of a dimension that is neither moral nor sapiential. The priest has a kind of authority that we can only call Zadok ian. It is that authori ty which is Zadokian that makes priests un-comfortable today as - analo-gously - the Aesculapian au-thority grows to be a heavier bur-Linacre Quarterl y den in a steadily more democra tic society, But theZadokian burden has al-ways been a heavy one, (And easy to ridicule; d. Frederic's 1896 novel, The Damnation of Theron Ware.) The distinctions of the medical caste which make easier the confident service of patients have often been abused and put rather to satisfy vanity and ar-rogance. The Christian priest, whose master came not to accept service but to give it, (Mt. 20:28) must have always had some am-bivalence about the Zadokian role. Only with difficulty can the priest keep clearly before him that Zadokian governance is also a kind of service. It may seem to be a kind of role-playing, but that role is re-Dective of a reality. In defense of that reality, this essay has been written as a sort of parable, en-couraging the priest to do com-fo rtably whatever is necessary in order to re-develop a confident pew-side manner - for the good of the Chris tian people. But why does this essay appear in a journal that is not published exclusively for t he reading of priests (for there are many such journals)? It is thus. The aban-donment of Zadokian responsibi-lity in recent years is simply a fact. It was caused by a failure of nerve in crisis. The crisis was real; the failure understandable. The late twentieth century priest has been tried beyond the tests of the late twentieth century physicians. And if the twentieth century priest is to reassume his Za-dokian responsibilities, he must be gently encouraged to it, fo r a while, by the lay folk whom he wishes to serve. Only if t hey help him now, can he re-Iearn to help them, and so play his proper role in the healing of a sick church. Sicknesses can be unto life. That they end so rests - occasionally and in some measure - in the hands of the physician. Statement of Ownership, Management and Circulation (Act of Augus t 12, 197(); Section 3695, Title 39, U.S. Code) Date of Filing: 10/ 1/ 76 ' Title of Publication: The Linacre Quarte rly F requency of Issue : Qua rterly · Location of Known Office of Publication : 850 Elm Grove Rd., Elm Grove, Wis. 53122 ' Location of Headquarterll of Publisher: 850 Elm Grove Rd., Elm Grove, W is. 53122 ' Publisher: Na~ tional Federation of Catholic Physicians' Guilds, 850 Elm Grove, Wis. 53122 , Editor: J ohn P. Mullooly. M.D., 8430 W. Cal>i tol Dr., Milwaukee, Wis. 53222 ' Managing Editor: Robert H. He rzog. 850 Elm Grove Rd., Elm Grove, Wis. 53122 ' Owner: National Fede ration of Ca tholic Physicians' Guilds. 850 Elm Grove Rd., Elm G rove, Wis. 53122 . Known Bondholders, Mortgages, and Other Securi ty Holders : None' Total Number of Copies Printed (net press run): Average each issue during I>receding 12 months-8,500; Actual number si ngle issue nearest filin g dote - 8,500. November, 1976 295 

Aesculapius and Zadok: Medical and Priestly Authority

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Aesculapius and Zadok: Medical and Priestly Authority

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