Antipode to Trauma: Wholeness, Perfection, and Health in the Biblical and Patristic Tradition

Abstract

The article examines the phenomenon of health within the framework of biblical and Eastern Christian patristic anthropology. The point of departure is the understanding of God as the Absolute of perfection and the “fullness of health”, within whom the divine intention for the human being as a complete created image is rooted. Particular attention is given to the state of primordial human nature prior to the Fall – a condition conceived as integral, harmonious, oriented toward God, and capable of dynamically actualizing its God-imaging properties. It is demonstrated that this state of ontological integrity may be described as the original norm of health, insofar as the Creator’s design, the natural functional capacities of the human being, and the human vocation to communion with the Divine plenitude converge within it. Drawing on biblical texts and the writings of the Eastern Fathers, the article investigates ideal models of humanity before the Fall, wherein the notion of perfection is not contrasted with health but disclosed together with it within a unified theological and anthropological horizon. In this perspective, “health” denotes not merely the absence of deficiency or illness, but primarily an ontological ordering-conformity to the primordial divine intention and participation in the Divine life. It is argued that in these models’ health is not reducible to a set of physiological or psychosomatic indicators but represents an integral state of harmony of the single created nature, whose full meaning is revealed only in light of imago Dei and likeness to God. The study concludes that the categories of “perfection” and “health” exhibit a conceptual and connotative unity at the point of their intersection with the idea of integrity, which is economically inscribed into the structure of creation and reveals a theological vision of the human person as called to participate in the Absolute of health -given both as a gift and as a dynamic task of human freedom. The phenomenon of health is thus interpreted as a key to understanding primordial anthropology and as a criterion for evaluating contemporary approaches to human wholeness, including the overcoming of pain and trauma – physical as well as spiritual. In this context, medical chaplaincy emerges as one of the most important practical fields of support for the human person, especially in the most critical situations of life.
Ultimately, the article proposes a reformulated vision of contemporary freedom and agency within the paradigm of New Humanism.