Legal Commentary

Under Cover Believer

By Kevin Funnell

In a 1995 interview with Viktor Frankl, published in the journal First Things a couple of years before Frankl's death, former National Review Literary Editor Matthew Scully asked Frankl about his own spiritual convictions. In his many books and other works (including Man's Search For Meaning, Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning, The Will to Meaning , and The Doctor and the Soul, books that heavily influenced my return to religious belief), Frankl never expressly professed his religious convictions.

"I do not allow myself to confess personally whether I'm religious or not. I'm writing as a psychologist, I'm writing as a psychiatrist, I'm writing as a man of the medical faculty. . . . And that made the message more powerful because if you were identifiably religious, immediately people would say, 'Oh well, he's that religious psychologist. Take the book away!'"

"You see," he added, "I don't shy away, I don't feel debased or humiliated if someone suspects that I'm a religious person for myself. . . . If you call 'religious' a man who believes in what I call a Supermeaning, a meaning so comprehensive that you can no longer grasp it, get hold of it in rational intellectual terminology, then one should feel free to call me religious, really. And actually, I have come to define religion as an expression, a manifestation, of not only man's will to meaning, but of man's longing for an ultimate meaning, that is to say a meaning that is so comprehensive that it is no longer comprehensible. . . But it becomes a matter of believing rather than thinking, of faith rather than intellect. The positing of a supermeaning that evades mere rational grasp is one of the main tenets of logotherapy, after all. And a religious person may identify Supermeaning as something paralleling a Superbeing, and this Superbeing we would call God."

I always knew that he was a "closeted believer."

Oh, well, he's that "religious psychologist." Take the book(s) away!

Full post as published by Counseling Kevin on October 28, 2010 (boomark / email).