Theological disease

Theological disease is Alexander A. Gideon’s term for humanity’s destructive fixation on salvation: the belief that life may be sacrificed, and other people harmed, for the sake of a higher or promised end. In his argument, the hunger for redemption does not cure human violence but gives it a sacred justification. The concept is also tested against his own declining body and the practical care he receives, setting abstract hopes of rescue against the difficult work of living.

Definition and Argument

In a letter to Michel Sommo, Alexander describes a long intellectual struggle with political philosophers including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Marx. He rejects the explanation that human self-destruction arises simply from selfishness, baseness, or cruelty. Instead, he locates the danger in higher longings: the need to be saved and the obsession with redemption. Theological disease names this impulse to treat some imagined destination as superior to life itself.

For Alexander, redemption is a mask for a diminished capacity to live. He contrasts human beings with cats, which he regards as possessing an instinctive talent for life, and with whales that drive themselves onto shore in what he presents as mass suicide. The comparison gives the concept a stark measure: humanity’s pursuit of transcendent purpose can look less like moral elevation than a failure to value the life already present.

Historical and Political Examples

Alexander makes the argument through examples of violence committed in the service of sacred signs or promised futures. He recalls a story of two monks in fourteenth-century Uppsala who killed ninety-eight orphans and then killed themselves after interpreting the appearance of a blue fox as a sign that the Virgin awaited them. In his reading, the episode shows how a supposed message of salvation can make annihilation appear meaningful to those who accept it.

He also turns to local language of sacrifice and concealed glory, including verse that celebrates giving up life for a redemptive cause. Such rhetoric, he warns Michel, can sanctify the killing of others as part of messianic birth pangs or divine judgment. His fear is not confined to distant history: he warns that Michel’s convictions could endanger Michel’s daughter and others around him. Theological disease thus describes both an idea and its political consequence, the conversion of violence into a supposedly holy necessity.

The Bee and the Repeated Question

The idea emerges from a small incident as well as from historical argument. Boaz Brandstetter tells Alexander of a woman who claimed that a guru in Wisconsin could heal malignant disease through bee stings. Alexander puts a stick into Boaz’s hive, but the bees do not sting him. He turns their refusal into another occasion for asking whether healing, faith, and divine purpose can be read into events.

He recognizes this questioning as an old pattern in himself: a stray bee becomes the bearer of a theological problem, which he then attacks and tries to settle with certainty. The episode condenses the concept’s method. A chance occurrence is made to carry the weight of ultimate meaning; the question is then forcibly closed, only to produce another question. The repeated cycle exposes how the search for an answer can become its own compulsion.

Illness, Care, and the Value of Life

The argument takes place while Alexander is dying of advanced kidney cancer. He reports two operations, spread of the growth into his abdomen, and the judgment of doctors in New York City that further surgery is pointless. He asks Manfred M. Zakheim to arrange a private clinic for chemotherapy after radiotherapy at Mount Sinai Hospital, and makes management of his estate conditional on Manfred staying with him. His plans and requests are practical responses to illness, not promises of redemption.

After returning to Israel, Alexander stays in the family home, where Ilana Sommo remains to care for him and Boaz has returned to the household. As his condition worsens, Ilana moves into his room at night, helps him through episodes of panic, gives him medication, and assists with feeding and basic bodily needs. This dependence gives the concept an intimate counterpoint: against grand claims that life must be sacrificed for a higher end stands the sustained, unglamorous labor of helping one person continue through the day.

Theological disease is therefore not merely Alexander’s criticism of religious or political fanaticism. It is also a test of what counts as meaning when time is running out. His argument insists that no promised future can excuse the destruction of actual lives, while his circumstances make care, bodily need, and the presence of other people concrete measures of life’s worth.