كليدواژه :
ماهيت انسان , سلامت معنوي , روح , جسم
چكيده لاتين :
Spiritual health is a new concept in the area of health, attracting the attention
of many health-related researchers in recent decades. This notion was
initially proposed and developed in western societies. The health system of
our country has begun to investigate the issue in recent years.
Given that spiritual health is rooted in people’s beliefs and culture (which are
essential elements in defining and exploiting spiritual health), examining the
Islamic and western viewpoints toward this concept prevents the waste of
many resources and sheds light on the notions that have remained unknown
to our society.
Investigating western researchers’ studies, papers, and writings on spiritual
health and comparing their cultural, ideological, and social infrastructures
with ours yield serious and notable differences.
The first important difference between these two perspectives has to do with
their view toward human beings. In the writings of western authors, humans
are regarded as worldly and physical creatures, with little attention being
paid to their spiritual and transcendental dimensions. Even in those cases
where sporadic references are made to the spiritual dimensions of humans,
spirit is regarded as a follower of the physical dimension (1-5). In contrast,
according to our religious-philosophical teachings, humans are twodimensional creatures, with their spiritual dimension being more serious than
the physical one. Therefore, spiritual health should not be solely regarded as
a function of humans’ physical health. Indeed, this idea was the incentive
encouraging western scientists to begin examining spiritual health. More
specifically, the effects of spiritual ideologies on humans’ physical health (6)
motivated secular societies of the west to redirect their attention toward
spirituality and theology. Therefore, from the western perspective, spiritual
health is at the service of physical health and its attraction is attributed to
inexpensiveness and lack of aggression. From the Islamic viewpoint,
however, spiritual health is not defined only from the physical vantage point.
Instead, it is basically demonstrated in the light of attention to human soul,
which is regarded as the independent and major factor of spiritual health in
humans. In fact, according to the Islamic viewpoint, spiritual health
originates from human soul (7).
