Priests, the appropriation of medical discourse and mystical experience in nineteenth-century france

Abstract

This article explores the appropriation of psychiatric terminology by French theologians and priests, within the context of the pathologizations of religion in the nineteenth century. This appropriation allowed the clergy to differentiate “authentic” mystical experience from feigned or “deviant” ones. Firstly, it analyzes medical and theological manuals that sought to create an opposition between hysteria and saintliness, which was useful from the ecclesiastical point of view. Secondly, it presents the reports of three priests on supposed female mystics with stigmata. It concludes that the appropriation of medical rhetoric by the clergy could be used to define the limits of religious experience approved by the Catholic church.