Section 05: Medicine and Faith

This section holds together the two strands that the rest of the guide treats in turn: the surgery St. Luke continued to perform even as a prisoner and exile, and the theology of the human person he wrote in those same years. The two files cover, first, the operating he did throughout his exiles — in Yeniseisk, Turukhansk, Arkhangelsk, and Bolshaya Murta, where the state that exiled him could not do without his skill; and second, his religious-philosophical treatise Spirit, Soul and Body (Дух, душа и тело), which sets a trichotomist Christian anthropology — the heart as the spiritual organ, the spirit pervading the body — against Soviet materialism, and to which the famous interrogation retorts on the unseen mind and conscience belong. Throughout, the contested quotations are attributed and graded for attestation.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox / New Martyrs and Confessors (canonized 2000)

Contents

File Topic
Operating in Exile The surgery performed under arrest and exile — Yeniseisk, Turukhansk, the Arctic, Arkhangelsk, Bolshaya Murta; the restoring of sight; the wound-treatment research; the captors’ dependence on the prisoner’s skill
Spirit, Soul and Body The treatise Spirit, Soul and Body; the trichotomist anthropology and the heart as spiritual organ; the critique of materialism and the science–faith synthesis; the interrogation retorts on the unseen mind and conscience, attributed and graded

How to Use

  • Read Operating in Exile for the lived fact that made St. Luke’s case unique: a confessor whose persecutors needed his hands and could not wholly silence him.
  • Read Spirit, Soul and Body for the anthropology that answered Soviet materialism, and for the careful handling of the celebrated “I never saw the mind in the brain” retort.
  • The fuller argument against materialism is developed in Science and Religion; the war surgery in Chief Surgeon in Krasnoyarsk.

Cross-References