Kukso K.A. From “starving soul” to “spiritual clarity”: existential and theological aspects of the experience of illness in medieval culture

Abstract: This article is dedicated to the process of determination of existential dimension of illness in the culture of high and late Middle Ages. Based on the material of theological doctrines of this period, it is demonstrated how the illness becomes crucial and inevitable parameter of the human ontology. The analysis of the interconnections between the formed interpretations of bodily disorders and fundamental definitions of Christian anthropology, contributes into accenting the ethical productiveness of the medieval semiotics of illness. The author gives attention primarily to the theological interpretations of suffering in medieval culture, as well as examines how the latter predestined the existential autopoiesis of the sick. The followed in the article genealogy of the existential-phenomenological dimension of the experience of illness is realized by means of methodological orientations of the history of ideas based on the material of the tradition of understanding the sick flash of theological anthropology of the Middle Ages. The author concludes that the European culture owes to the medieval era regarding the discovery of the existential resource of an illness. The article also conceptualizes the formed within the stated chronological framework grounds of the cultural environment of sufferings, within the limits of which such manifestation of illness acts as a cultural constructive power.

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