The Story of Psychology (9 page)

This is hard to follow, to say the least. What Plotinus is saying here and elsewhere is that a tripartite real world exists above the material, physical one. It is made up of One (It); of Spirit or the intellect or mind, a kind of reflection or image of the One; and of Soul, which can look upward toward Spirit or downward toward nature and the world of sense.
¹⁸

What has this to do with psychology? Little and much.

Little, because Plotinus is not interested in the study of mental functions; he does not say a great deal about psychology except for taking issue with the psychology of Democritus and other atomists.

Much, because the Neoplatonic view of the relation between body and soul, soul and mind, would become part of Christian doctrine and would shape and constrain psychological inquiry until the rebirth of science fourteen centuries later.

Moreover, the way in which Plotinus arrived at his conceptions of Soul, mind, and It became the model for those who took any interest in mental processes before the emergence of scientific psychology. In part, he sought the truth through his trances. But since such experiences were relatively rare—during the six years in which Porphyry worked with him and observed him, he had only four—Plotinus sought to understand the nature of Soul, mind, and It chiefly by meditative reasoning. In other words, he painstakingly thought up a supernatural structure that seemed to him to explain the relation between the material world and the spiritual one. He did not, of course, test his hypothesis; testing belongs to the material world, not the spiritual one.

Between the first and fourth centuries
A.D.
, while the Roman Empire reached its zenith and then began disintegrating, Christianity became its dominant religion. In the resultant transformation of Western culture, pagan philosophers were gradually replaced as leaders of thought by a very different breed: the Patrists, or Fathers of the Church.

They were leading bishops and other eminent Christian teachers who, in endless and bitter debate with one another, sought to resolve the many controversial issues involved in the new faith. Their names are familiar to everyone who has any acquaintance with the history of those centuries; among them are Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Gregory Thaumaturgus, Arnobius, Lactantius, Gregory of Nyssa, and, of course, Saint Augustine.

Although pagan philosophy was withering away, its psychology lived on in selected and modified form in the Patrists’ “apologetics,” or sermons and writings defending Christian beliefs. The Patrists were
philosopher-theologians who, though primarily concerned with such central questions of faith as whether Christ was divine or human, were necessarily involved in arguments about such psychological issues as the nature of the soul, its relation to the mind and the body, and the sources of the mind’s ideas.

Nearly all of the Church Fathers of the early centuries of the Christian era were middle- or upper-class Roman citizens who, born and reared in Mediterranean cities of the Empire, received the education typical of men of their class. They were therefore acquainted with pagan philosophy, and in their apologetics energetically attacked those philosophic ideas which were incompatible with Christian doctrine, but accepted and adapted those which supported it. They rejected and condemned almost all that was scientific in pagan philosophy and that conflicted with such Christian doctrines as God’s ability to intervene directly in the lives of human beings, the earth’s centrality in the universe, and the reality of miracles. A great deal of scientific knowledge was forgotten, and, says the historian Daniel Boorstin, “scholarly amnesia afflicted the continent from
A.D.
300 to at least 1300.”
¹⁹

Psychology, however, was not so much forgotten as picked over and adapted by the Patrists to support their religious beliefs. Whatever was naturalistic in it, such as the view that mental processes are due to the movement of atoms within the brain or heart, they assailed as either inadequate or heretical; whatever in it bolstered the Christian belief in the supremacy of the soul and of transcendental reality, such as the Platonic theory of ideas, they welcomed and tailored to fit Christian doctrine.

One major psychological issue troubling them was whether or not the soul was a part of the godhead and came to the body equipped with innate knowledge, as Platonists held. Christian doctrine indicated otherwise: each soul was newly created at birth, and the mind of the newborn infant was therefore blank. Many Patrists accordingly attacked the doctrine of innate ideas, although they accepted most of the Platonic theory of ideas.

Another difficult issue was how the soul is linked to mind and to body and whether the soul needs a body in order to perceive and have sensations, as Aristotle had said. But according to doctrine the soul of the sinner or nonbeliever burns in hell after death; unless it can perceive when detached from sense organs, how can it sense suffering?
Ergo
, said most Patrists, the soul does not need the sense organs to perceive.

Such were the issues—there were many of them—over which the
Fathers of the Church labored and fought among themselves in their efforts to adjust psychology to the new belief; in this form psychology lived on.

Although the antenicene Fathers—those who lived and wrote before the Council of Nicaea, in 325—differed widely in their views, the work of Tertullian, the greatest of them, exemplifies how pagan psychological concepts were incorporated in early patristic writings. Tertullian (160–230), the son of a Roman centurion, grew up in Carthage, where he received a first-rate education; he then studied law, went to Rome, and there became an eminent jurist. In his mid-thirties, for unknown reasons he became a Christian and renounced pagan pleasures. He married a fellow believer, took priestly orders (priests were not then celibate), and returned to Carthage, where he lived the rest of his life and turned out a steady stream of fiery apologetics and denunciations of sin. He was the first Patrist to write in Latin rather than Greek; it has been said that Christian literature in the West sprang from Tertullian full-grown.

A persistently angry man, he was in a constant state of rage at the sybaritic life of Roman pagans and at their cruelty toward Christians. It was he who coined the celebrated maxim “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” He relished his own fantasies of the suffering the pagans would undergo after death:

Although married, Tertullian had as poor an opinion of the physical side of marriage as did Saint Paul, the source of much of his thinking. In his late forties he wrote his wife a long letter about marriage and widow-hood—it was meant to instruct other women as well—in which he expressed his contempt for his and her physical desires. Though not a
psychological discourse, it is representative of a myriad of patristic writings about sexual desire that had profound effects on the sexuality and emotions of believers for eighteen centuries; the nature and extent of those effects would eventually be revealed when Freud began the practice of psychoanalysis.

Tertullian, addressing his wife as “my best beloved fellow servant in the Lord,” directed her not to remarry if he died before she did; second marriage, he said, was tantamount to adultery. She should view widow-hood as God’s call to sexual abstinence, which He much prefers to married intercourse. Nor should she grieve at her husband’s death, since it would only end their enslavement by a disgusting habit that, in any case, they would have to give up to enter heaven.

History does not record what his wife thought of the letter.

This hellfire-and-brimstone scourger of the wicked was well versed in psychology as it existed at that time. He preserved a fair amount of it in his works in the form of attacks on those psychological theories which clashed with his religious beliefs and adaptations of those which lent them support. The account in Genesis of God’s creation of Adam was, for instance, reason enough for Tertullian to reject Plato’s theory that the soul of the individual exists before birth:

But although he believed that after death the soul lives on, he saw no reason to disagree with all those philosophers whom he cited as saying that soul is in some sense corporeal and allied to bodily functions:

Like some of the Greek philosophers, he defined the mind as the thinking part of the soul, but as a Christian he disagreed with Democritus’s belief that the soul and the mind were the same thing:

And on doctrinal grounds he revises Plato’s views on rationality and irrationality, since he cannot accept the latter as God’s handiwork:

After the Council of Nicaea, Christian doctrine became increasingly standardized and Christianity became the official religion of the Empire. Psychology, already at a halt, was diminished to whatever was acceptable to orthodoxy. Many of the views the antenicene Fathers had held on psychological issues became heresies. (Origen, after his death, was condemned for multiple heresies, one of which was his belief in the pre-existence of souls as taught by Plato.) Psychology was largely preserved from the fourth century to the twelfth in the attenuated form it took in the writings of “the Christian Aristotle”—Saint Augustine, the chief authority of the church before Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Augustine (354–430) was born in Tagaste, a town in the Roman province of Numidia (modern Algeria); his mother, Monica (later sainted), was a Christian, his magistrate father, Patricius, a pagan. The world around Augustine, still one of Roman luxury, was fast rotting away; in his youth barbarians were invading the outlying parts of the Empire, by his middle age Rome itself fell to the Goths, and in his old age the whole Western world was on the verge of collapse.

As a sixteen-year-old student in Carthage, Augustine behaved like a typical Roman voluptuary; “I boiled over in my fornications,” he later said of this period in his famous
Confessions.
But the following year, plagued by guilt instilled in him by his mother, he gave up promiscuity by taking a concubine, whom he lived with and was faithful to for more than fifteen years.

An apt and eager student, he was so awed by Plato that he called him a “demigod” and later incorporated much Platonism into Christian doctrine. After completing his studies, he became a professor of rhetoric in Carthage, and later in Rome and Milan. He read widely in the pagan philosophers and the Christian Scripture and became an adherent of Manichaeanism, a heretical Eastern offshoot of Christianity. But he was increasingly influenced by Plato and by Plotinus, whose ascetic and mystical Neoplatonism deeply stirred him. He became ever more troubled by guilt over his way of life and by the decay of his world: the Huns were ravaging the Balkans, the Goths laying waste to Thrace, the Germans surging across the Rhine, while in Italy corruption was worse than ever, taxes higher, and the populace more addicted to gladiatorial combats and circuses.