It was 1985. He was 15 and still a small boy—“pre-pubertal,” as his earliest psychiatric files attest. He had chosen the Shroud as the topic for a school history project, because it was “different,” and now he was struggling to write it up during half term. His dad had helped with some of the work, looking up articles for him, but it was difficult stuff for a teenager to absorb.
These accounts painted the dispute over the Shroud of Turin as a battle between faith and reason. The Vatican was deciding whether or not to allow scientists to carbon-date a segment of the sacred cloth. But even if the sceptics were proved right, and it was shown to have come from medieval Europe rather than Roman-occupied Palestine, it still wouldn’t explain how the Shroud had been made. Could a 13th or 14th century relic-faker have possessed the technology and foresight to create a 3-dimensional image, in accurate negative, so that the likeness of a crucified man would be viewed in its clearest form six centuries later, after it had been photographed?
As Saul peered into the shadowy face in the picture a sinister idea began to insinuate itself. If this were truly an image of Christ, then he should be looking at an imprint of goodness. But that possibility contained its own negative. If, as some scientists suggested, a different man might have been crucified at another time—his image seeping into the burial cloth by a freakish chemical reaction—then it was possible that this man had deserved his punishment. Saul began to feel that he might instead be gazing into the face of evil.
Saul’s parents had gone out that evening, leaving him at work on his project. They were worried that lately he hadn’t seemed to be himself, but they had no inkling of what they would encounter when they returned home. What they found was their boy sitting rigidly at the table in his bedroom, paralysed exactly as they had left him, holding his pen over a blank sheet of paper. For three days he couldn’t talk.
Saul’s original diagnosis betrayed the fact that the first doctors to see him were baffled by what was going on: “acute anxiety state with borderline psychotic features.” Immobilised, blubbering, and soiling himself, he could barely speak except to blurt out panic-stricken ravings about sex or religion. Saul thought he had been possessed by a devil, possibly by Satan himself. Then it occurred to him that he was the devil. He knew this was absurd: he couldn’t be that important. He was worthy to be possessed, he felt, merely by some lowly bureaucrat in hell.
After three months in a teenage psychiatric unit, Saul’s condition improved, and he went back to school—for the last time. Adolescence caught up with him, and so did the psychosis. As he grew, with seemingly unnatural speed, he was seized by a mania so extreme that psychiatrists resorted to injecting him daily with 120 milligrams of the anti-psychotic drug, haloperidol. One nurse remarked that it was enough to put down a horse (these days, the maximum recommended dose is around 12 milligrams). But Saul was more like a semi-tranquilised rhino, still raging at his jailors through the fog of medication. What worked slightly better were 13 treatments of electric shock treatment.
Manic depression is an affliction of mood. The modern diagnosis—bi-polar affective disorder—is less potent but more precise, identifying an illness which switches between extreme highs and lows of emotion, or “affect.” In its psychotic form, bi-polar disorder is one of the two classical, defining types of madness—the other being schizophrenia. Although symptoms of the two often overlap, the difference can be understood roughly as a distinction of thought and feeling. The delusions of the schizophrenic seem to belong to an alien system of ideas or perceptions, accessible only to the sufferer. The manic depressive experience emerges through an excess of energies and passions—rage, sorrow, joy, horror—or through their confounding absence.
In the 21 years since his first breakdown Saul has drawn strength from two ways of interpreting his recurrent illness. Firstly there has been his diagnosis and treatment at the hands of biological psychiatry. To be told that his condition is bio-chemical in origin has objectified it, allowing him to draw a distinction between his ill self and his well self. It has also allowed him to view medication, for all its inadequacies, as a means of fighting fire with fire. Saul has retaliated against all attempts by psychotherapists to root out childhood causes or find psychological resolutions for his illness. He calls the psychoanalysts “moonies” and the new breed of cognitive therapists “numpties.”
Saul’s existential recourse has been religion, and he sees no conflict between faith and biology. Since 1988, the Turin Shroud has been discredited by carbon dating, and the carbon dating has in turn been discredited, leaving the puzzle much as it always was. Saul now thinks his childhood vision of the Shroud as a Janus-like face of good and evil was “typically bi-polar.” But, like many manic depressives, he finds that only religious language feels the way he has felt.
Recently, listening to a sermon by a old minister of the church of Scotland, Saul found himself utterly overwhelmed. In an attempt to express his struggles with faith and madness, he wrote to the minister. The reply he received said: “Thank you for your truly beautiful letter. Your 20 years of wrestling with the fierce angel of illness have distilled a profound understanding. The Lord bless you and keep you.”
