The Hostility of Illness and the Therapeutic Importance of Hospitality
The experience of illness can be isolating and alienating. Serious and chronic illness can make one feel unwelcome in one’s own body and out of place in a world of otherwise healthy people. The theme of illness as alienation is explored in Susan Sontag’s 1978 essay “Illness as Metaphor.” Sontag, who at the time was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, compares illness to a second citizenship—one that we must all take up at some point in our lives:
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
This image of illness as a second and inferior citizenship draws attention to how illness can place a barrier between the self and the world. Even with excellent medical care, one can still feel fundamentally alone and unsupported.
How might we ameliorate the exile of illness? Modern medicine has been spectacularly successful in providing treatments for some of the most aggressive and debilitating forms of disease. But many still struggle to cope with the existential dimensions of the experience of disease or injury.
Hospitality—which can mean the literal reception of guests but has also been described as authentic human connection—is an undervalued remedy for the alienation of illness. A friendly conversation, a consoling touch, or even just a smile at an opportune moment, can cut deeper than any scalpel and heal more effectively than any salve. It reengages a person in the human world and establishes bonds of connection that are otherwise strained or severed by illness. We do well to consider how hospitality can be integrated into contemporary healthcare systems to ameliorate health-related existential suffering.
1. Illness and the Human Condition
Many diseases have a purely biological character. But the human person is a unity of body and soul. Illness is most properly predicated of the person qua a psychosomatic unity rather than just the body. Eric Cassell famously defined suffering as “the state of severe distress associated with events that threaten the intactness of the person.” Serious illness undermines the unity of body and soul in such a way that the body ceases to cooperate with our desires and becomes hostile to our intentions, perhaps even the deepest of such intentions—the desire to survive and the desire for transcendence.
The phenomenology of illness is reflective of the human condition. Human beings are, according to Christian belief, in a state of exile. As a result of the Fall, our communion with God has been severed and a principle of disunity has been introduced into both our human nature and the natural world.
Indeed, human beings find themselves in a situation of existential alienation. As Augustine famously stated, “Our hearts are restless until they can find rest in you.” We have deep in our hearts a sense of having known and lost some infinite thing. The knowledge of the precise character of this “thing” eludes us, but this certainly does not numb the presence of that splinter in our mind drawing our attention to our original vocation. Our lives are permeated by a sense that we are not quite at home in this world.
