Prayer - Lesson 10

Professor James Houston

Prayer

th732-10

Temperament and Personality in Contemporary Thought

Lesson Transcript

We were saying just now that the wonderful art of the Dutch painters in the 17th century really are climactic to what we’ve been saying in terms of this 12th point of Edwards. And Rembrandt is perhaps the supreme painter of them all because he's the painter that both explores still art and at the same time, like no other painter that’s ever lived, does he communicate the sense of glory that’s in the face of those he paints.

In fact, one of the most moving events of this last decade has been what I explored and yet was not able to enter fully with Henri Nouwen. But the story of Henri Nouwen is a very sad one because he was not fathered. His father was an eminent judge, who never understood his son. And even towards the end of his life, he got crippled by embracing one of his friends into an embrace that could have become homosexual. And his friend, who was a friend of mine as well as I being a friend of Henri Nouwen, had to say no, you're going too far. At the end of his life, he almost had a nervous breakdown. And so he decided that he would be inspired to go to the museum in St Petersburg and there to spend time with Rembrandt's portrait of the prodigal son.

My wife loved that portrait like Henri Nouwen did simply because we had traced the same journey after he had first gone there. And he tells us that he took this long train journey just to spend three days. And the three days were spent looking and looking and looking again at the prodigal son. And you may remember that was one of his last books that he wrote, about his experience of Rembrandt's painting, because in that portraiture his sonship was restored. But it was in the restoration to be in the bosom of the father that was the father of the prodigal son. It's a wonderful, wonderful picture. And so we went, my wife and I. And before she died, for a whole year she had a replica of Rembrandt's painting above her bed. She just loved it. And she lived in the presence of it in her dementia. It was, to her, such a healing presence to have this reality in her own life. And we almost felt like putting that picture in her coffin with her because it was so precious to her. Well, as I say, ever since, I've had a new awe for exploring where was this mystery that Rembrandt had himself. He obviously was painting himself as a prodigal too.

To just finish that reflection on what a painting can do for you, recently I was at a very highbrow rich and famous conference over a long weekend in Palm Springs this last May. It was the beginning of June actually, so it was the celebration of Canada Day on July 1st and, of course, the American day of July 4th. And there were very great celebrities there. But at the end of it all, a very high-powered electrical engineer from one of our most distinguished universities, she said to me do you mind if you come into a room with me just to be alone? And I said why? Well, she says, I've been looking at Henri Nouwen's transposition, transfiguration you might say, and looking at the prodigal son. And she said will you pray for me as the returned prodigal? Why? I had no idea what she was doing, but she had said when I was a young woman, I was [an intervarsity 00:06:01]. I was a devout Christian. But she said it was my intelligence that tripped me up. I then began to scorn the fact that I had a simple faith. And she said I turned my back on my faith. I became the prodigal. Will you pray that God will receive me back? I never was more moved in my life. And so I'm now phoning as often as I can, every week, and she's, of course, travelling all over the world as a very high-flown scientist. But here is one of our top scientists in America and she simply wants to be The Return of the Prodigal. There's a sense in which even though we've been a Christian for a long time, we're all still a prodigal. We still need to return to the Father's arms.

Well now, it's like going from the Mount of Transfiguration back to the plain. So now in this next session we’re going to look at how more contemporary writers since the 1920s have been struggling to distinguish between our personality and our temperament and vice versa. It was in 1922 that Carl Jung began to talk about archetypal types and he wrote an essay that was very formative for all that followed on personality types. And so Jung brought out that we have basically three types of preference where we have strengths in the one or in the other. So first, he distinguishes between those who are extroverts and those who are introverts, between the E and the I. Of course, the extrovert is the person who gets much more stimulus from the external world; whereas, the introvert is the person who has much more stimulus from the internal world.

And then Jung saw secondly that there were some people who were much more sensing. They were using their senses all the time. They externalised. And then there are those who are much more intuitive and they're exploring their inner world. And do you know, one of the psychic types that we have in our worship is that, like so many Catholics, they live in a sensual world. They smell the candles and the fragrance before the high altar and they live with their senses, their sacramentalism essential. And then there were others who are much more lonely people, who are usually much more withdrawn and they're the intuitive. And again, of course, we see this with our children, that perhaps the elder son is more externalised and the middle son perhaps is more intuitive.

And then, thirdly, Jung recognised there was a distinction between those who were much more thinking people and those who were much more feeling people, that the thinking people are more detached from their emotions, while the feeling people are much more involved in their emotions. And as I know one dear friend who's a highly recognised theologian - I won't mention his name - he got brain damage through his right hemisphere as a child and so he is hyper thinking - great clarity of thinking. And, of course, produces great expositions because of this. But people don’t realise it's not related to godliness so much as to his own brain handicap. And so McGilchrist, who is a well-known psychiatrist, has said that the modern world is a world of left hemispheric bias [sic 00:11:16]. It's highly cognitive. And the post-modern world is now beginning to say we need more redress, more balance, to go back to the right hemisphere that’s more intuitive, that's more artistic. And so when we see all the singing today and we see all the art today and all this proliferation of the artistic in our culture, it's really a cultural redress from the modern to the post-modern. That’s why we get much more praise for being artistic. There's a cultural change that’s taking place. Well, Jung didn’t live to see this, but we’re seeing it. That’s happening today.

Well, following on his formative essay of 1922, a mother and her daughter, Mrs Meyers and Elizabeth Myers-Briggs, they worked together during the '20s and '30s to produce what is called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. They were basically using all the data of Jung plus recognising a fourth preference that Jung had not spotted. And that was that the distinction between those who are much more judging and those who are much more perceiving. So if you bring all these different four sets of variables together, you eventually get 16 sub-personality types, which of course therapists love to explore. That’s their job. That’s their profession now.

But there was a third development. You’ve got Jung. You’ve got Myers-Briggs. And then more recently we have David Keirsey, who has made a modification by saying instead of trying to look at the range of 16 personality types, why don’t you just concentrate on the most common types of personality. In other words, let's go back to the old-fashioned Hippocratic distinctions because it was the early 2nd century Roman medical doctor who sees that the phlegmatic as much more sensing and judging and the sanguine as much more sensing and perceiving, and the choleric as much more intuitive and thinking, and the melancholic as much more intuitive and feeling. In other words, he, of course, was using the categories of different humors in the body. But of course, we can still call them humors, but we’re really talking to people who have in-built temperamental differences.

And so out of all these different explorations, two Catholics in Charlottesville, a Roman Catholic retreat centre of prayer, Chester Michael and Marie Norrisey have written some years ago a book called Prayer and Temperament and it's looking at these different temperaments. And what Keirsey has done is to reduce them like the Hippocratic to four types. And these personalities are therefore the ways that we're conditioned in our prayer life.

What do I think about all this? Well, I think it's overdone. And there was a period when I was teaching about the Enneagram and I found that my students and even adults, the parents of some of these students who are telling these things back home, oh, I'm a number one. I'm a number four. I'm a number six. I said, for Heaven's sake, you're not a number. But that’s how we tend with new discoveries to then over-exaggerate the significance and so I don't know what would happen to your marriage if your wife kept saying you always act as a number one. And you respond but you always act as a number three. Well, all right, but you have to decode all that into something a bit more personal. So that’s a problem.

But what, as we’ll see in another course, that we can do when we look at the great saints is that yes, we can identify that they have these different categories. And so as we've said before, if you are Franciscan in your prayer life and you're much more sanguine and sensual in the way you respond to the birds and therefore jump around skipping and hopping and jumping because of the glory of the scenery, then you don’t concentrate on your prayer life very much. But your prayer life is your spirit and so let it be. And if you're Ignatian then, of course, you're actually doing a Bible study or a sermon in your meditation on these things. And of course, if you're an egghead like Calvin then you have to read so much as part of your prayer life. So these are things that we have to recognise are overdoing the situation.

Well, as we conclude on this subject we realise that we have to be very cautious how we use the Enneagram.