"So you think you're God?" and other cool delusions

There is a common term for those who think they are above everybody else, not subject to the ordinary rules of social intercourse: "the God complex." It is not an illness in the DSM IV. Yet, we have all met this kind of person. By and large, they do not actually think they are God. It's just that to the rest of us they behave as if they have a kind of God-mandate to do as they wish. Not the kind of person you want to spend much time with.


But some people actually think they are becoming divine. Are they delusional?


The DSM IV can help us out, for here we find a reference to delusional disorder.


Diagnostic criteria for 297.1:Nonbizarre delusions (i.e., involving situations that occur in real life, such as being followed, poisoned, infected, loved at a distance, or deceived by spouse or lover, or having a disease) of at least 1 month's duration. 


In its sub-sections the DSM IV includes this one:


Grandiose Type: delusions of inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity, or special relationship to a deity or famous person.


So the person who does think they are God, or pretty close to being God has a delusional disorder of the grandiose type. This puts most of the great mystics, adepts, saints and religious icons as delusional. Most have been very aware of their closeness to the deity. Many have claimed that their closeness amounted to becoming divine. The best have showed the rest how to become divine too.


In the Christian tradition, the notion goes back to at least the end of the first century when the Pauline school of theology developed a Christ mysticism. It claimed  a) that the Jewish teacher Jesus from Nazareth was so in touch with God that he "is the image of the invisible God ...For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell"; and b) that just about everybody could have the same kind of experience, "Christ in you, the hope of glory." If it was possible for a human being to be divine (Jesus showed the way) then it's possible for us all to become divine.


As the tradition developed, by the fourth century or so (that's 300 years of trying to sort out what the church should really think about Jesus) the theologians (the one's who won imperial favor, mostly in the West) had decided that Jesus was divine in a particular and unique way. The rest of us? Miserable sinners for the most part. By then, the church largely agreed with the DSM IV. "So, you think you're divine? You have a delusional disorder." The DSM IV suggests treatment with antipsychotic medications. The church threatened excommunication, tried a little torture and burned to death not a few. No more delusion.


But what if the delusional fringe are actually right? What if there is more than a "spark of the divine" in all of us? What if God is in all things, if we just had eyes to see?


Grace Jantzen wrote a helpful feminist philosophy of religion. She took the view that the masculinist corpus was beyond revision and so came up with a new philosophy of religion based on women's experience. She called her book, "Becoming Divine." Seems she too is delusional!


My own fumbling after the divine is best summed up in the word panentheism: all is in God, God is in all. I try to see glimpses of her in all. Often I find it, but it's not always easy. In some people (and not a few dogs and often in "nature") closeness to the divine is evident. Oh! to see more!


Becoming divine? Now that's a cool delusion.


+Ab. Andy