A doctor’s care is to make people healthy, so this medical care is for the healing and restoration of sinners. Surgeons, when they bind up wounds, don’t do it carelessly but carefully, so that the bandages are trim as well as useful. In the same way, the healing art of Wisdom, in assuming our humanity, adapted himself to our wounds, curing some of them by their opposites, some of them by their likes. A doctor treating bodily wounds in some cases applies contraries, as cold to hot, moist to dry, etc., and in other cases applies likes, as a round bandage to a round wound, or an oblong one to an oblong wound, and does not fit the same bandage to all limbs, but puts like to like. In the same way the Wisdom of God in healing man has applied himself to his cure, being himself healer and healing art, both in one. Seeing, then, that man fell through pride, He restored him through humility. We were ensnared by the wisdom of the serpent: we are freed by the foolishness of God. Just as the former was called wisdom, but was in reality folly in those who despised God, so the latter is called folly but is true wisdom in those who overcome the devil. We used our immortality so badly as to incur the penalty of death: Christ used His mortality so well as to restore us to life. The disease was brought in through a woman’s corrupted soul: the remedy came through a woman’s virginal body. To the same class of opposite remedies it belongs, that our vices are cured by the example of His virtues.
On the other hand, the following are, as it were, bandages made in the same shape as the limbs and wounds to which they are applied: He was born of a woman to deliver us who fell through a woman. He came as a man to save men, as a mortal to save mortals, by death to save the dead. And those who can follow out the matter more fully … will find many other points of instruction in considering the remedies, whether opposites or likes, employed in the healing art of Christianity. (De doctrina christiana, I, 13; PL 34, 24)
My great-great-grandfather Charles Partridge was a Spiritualist, so fervent a believer that the dead communicate with the living that he founded a weekly newspaper, The Spiritual Telegraph, to spread the news about the new dispensation he believed was dawning in the mid-1850’s. He was also a very successful businessman, running the largest match-factory in New York City and intensely interested in the latest scientific and technological advances of his day, while also championing most of the humanitarian causes then stirring society. His spiritualist leanings also led him to give a hearing to proponents and practitioners of homeopathic medicine. I thought of him while reading this passage from Augustine where both allopathic and homeopathic remedies are evoked in order to explain the healing art of the great Physician of souls. Edmond Hill’s translation of the De doctrina christiana even uses “homeopathic” in his version of these paragraphs.