Abstract

The Western world is currently undergoing a mass destigmatization regarding the issues of mental health - societal ideas of masculinity and femininity, definitions of weakness, the blemish of seeking help, and the complexities of personal identity are being tossed on their heads in favour of a push toward acceptance and personal liberation, with help at the ready. With that in mind, this thesis argues that the character of Jesus Christ can be recontextualized through the example of his own mental health struggles as a figure by which to model oneself in an effort to navigate the tumults of suffering. The patristic theologian, Cyril of Alexandria, in response to the Nestorian Controversy, galvanizes the necessary human nature of Christ - a nature that is witnessed most keenly in the biblical scene of the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ underwent emotions of doubt, fear, and temptation. Cyril's own ideas on an emotional human Christ, an individual that bore the full extent of the human soul, can be further explicated by the 19th century Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard. Though Kierkegaard doesn't single-out Cyril, nor indeed Christ, his explorations into the liberational components of anxiety illuminate how Christ's anxiety, as well as our own, might serve as an orientation toward faith. More contemporary theologians, such as Bernard Lonergan and John D. Caputo, understand this liberation as a way in which to extract and adjoin meaning to that faith. By witnessing this process in Jesus: an understanding of his human nature, anxiety leading to faith, and the appearance of meaning and purpose, the individual might then use the model of Christ, a contemporary imitatio christi, as a way to understand, witness, and assign meaning to their own suffering.