by Morton Hunt
Tertullian
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:
That last eternal Day of Judgment [will come] when all this old world and its generations shall be consumed in one fire. How vast the spectacle will be on that day! How I shall marvel, laugh, rejoice, and exult, seeing so many kings—supposedly received into heaven—groaning in the depths of darkness!—and magistrates who persecuted the name of Jesus melting in fiercer flames than ever they kindled against the Christians!—and sages and philosophers blushing before their disciples as they blaze together!20
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.
To Christians, after their departure from the world, no restoration of marriage is promised in the day of resurrection, translated as they will be into the condition and sanctity of angels… There will be at that day no resumption of voluptuous disgrace between us. No such frivolities, no such impurities, does God promise to His servants.21
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:
When we acknowledge that the soul originates in the breath of God, it follows that we attribute a beginning to it. Plato refuses to assign this to it; he will have the soul unborn and unmade. We, however, from the very fact of its having had a beginning, as well as from the nature thereof, teach that it had both birth and creation… The opinion of the philosopher is overthrown by the authority of prophecy.22
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:
The soul certainly sympathizes with the body and shares in its pain whenever it is injured by bruises, and wounds, and sores; the body, too, suffers with the soul and is united with it whenever the soul is afflicted with anxiety, distress, or love, testifying to its shame and fears by its own blushes and paleness. The soul, therefore, is proved to be corporeal from this intercommunion of susceptibility.23
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:
The mind or animus, which the Greeks designate nous, is taken by us to mean that faculty or apparatus inherent in the soul whereby it acts, acquires knowledge, and is capable of a spontaneity of motion … To exercise the senses is to suffer* emotion, because to suffer is to feel. In like manner, to acquire knowledge is to exercise the senses, and to undergo emotion is to exercise the senses; and the whole of this is a state of suffering. But we see that the soul experiences none of these unless the mind is also similarly affected … Democritus, however, suppresses all distinction between soul and mind, but how can the two be one?—only if we confuse two substances or eliminate one. We, however, assert that the mind coalesces with the soul, not being distinct from it in substance but being its natural function and agent.24
And on doctrinal grounds he revises Plato’s views on rationality and irrationality, since he cannot accept the latter as God’s handiwork:
Plato divides the soul into two parts—the rational and the irrational. To this we take no exception, but we would not ascribe this twofold distinction to the nature of the soul…[For] if we ascribe the irrational element to the nature which our soul has received from God, then the irrational element will be derived from God… [But] from the devil proceeds the incentive to sin. All sin, however, is irrational: therefore the irrational proceeds from the devil and is extraneous to God, to whom the irrational is an alien principle.25
Saint Augustine
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.
At the age of thirty-two, Augustine, yielding to his mother’s entreaties to marry, sent his beloved concubine away and waited for his fiancée to come of age. One day, “soul-sick and tormented” (as he tells us in Confessions), he was sitting in his garden in Milan with a friend when he was seized by a fit of weeping, fled to the end of the garden, and there heard a childlike voice saying, “Take up and read; take up and read.” He picked up the copy of the writings of Saint Paul that he had been reading, opened it at random, and came upon the words “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence.” In a moment his soul sickness vanished and he felt joyous and serene. He abandoned his plans to marry, gave himself over to study and preparation for his conversion, and on Easter Sunday 387, with Monica standing proudly by, was baptized by Bishop (later Saint) Ambrose.
He returned to Africa, gave his possessions to the poor, and organized a monastery in Tagaste, where he lived contentedly for a few years in poverty, celibacy, and study. Then he answered the call of Valerian, Bishop of Hippo, a small nearby city, to come aid him in diocesan work. Augustine entered the priesthood, and several years later reluctantly became Bishop of Hippo when the aging Valerian retired. He held that post until his death thirty-four years later, by which time Rome had been sacked by the Goths, the Vandals were at the gates of Hippo, and the total collapse of the western half of the Empire was less than fifty years off.
As Bishop of Hippo, Augustine continued to live monastically. Although small, frail, and troubled by a chronic lung disorder, he was constantly embroiled in religious controversies, debates, and struggles against heresies, but he managed nonetheless to write a vast number of letters, sermons, and major works, including his famous Confessions, and labored for thirteen years on his masterpiece, The City of God. His major aim in that work was to reconcile reason with the doctrines of the Church, but whenever they conflicted he was guided by his own precept, “Seek not to understand in order to believe, but believe in order to understand.”26
Augustine became the leading authority within the Catholic Church on doctrinal matters and remained so for many centuries. His jurisdiction extended to whatever he said about psychology, which he had a good deal to say about throughout his writings, though he never treated the subject systematically. His views on it, as on science in general, are a mixture of the informing and the obscurant, for he considers psychology, like all science, good when it serves religious purposes, bad when it disserves them. Knowledge other than that in Scripture is either evil or redundant: “Whatever man may have learned from other sources, if it is hurtful, it is condemned there [i.e., in Scripture]; if it is useful, it is contained therein.”27 Yet in his writings a good deal of psychology is preserved and so was made known to the scholars and “doctors of the Church” of the Dark Ages and early medieval centuries.
Galen, for one, survives in Augustine, who echoes his statements that the soul or mind can be influenced by the condition of the body, and, conversely, that the soul or mind can influence the condition of the body. Too much bile, says Augustine by way of example, can make a person irritable, but a person made irritable by external events may cause his body to create too much bile.28
He draws on pagan philosophers cited by earlier Fathers for his account of the structure of the mind, which he describes in terms of the three functions of memory, reason, and will. But at times what he says about these three becomes thoroughly mystical, as when he uses psychology to explain how a trinity could also be a unity:
Since these three, memory, reason, and will, are not three lives but one life, nor three minds but one mind, it follows that they are not three substances but one substance … These three are one, in that they are one life, one mind, one essence. But they are three, in that I remember that I have memory and understanding and will; and I understand that I understand and will and remember; and I will that I will and remember and understand … And therefore while each as a whole is equal to each as a whole, and each as a whole to all as wholes, these three are one, one life, one mind, one essence.29
Augustine equates mind with soul in the living person but says that the soul is immaterial and indestructible, and that after death it leaves the body and becomes immortal. How does he know that? His argument: The soul, or mind, can conceive of the eternal, a concept it cannot possibly obtain from the senses. Just as to think is to exist, so to think of the higher sphere of existence is to be part of that existence.30
But he also often deals with mental life in more naturalistic terms. Sometimes he restates, in his own exalted manner, the views of those pagan philosophers who were most interested in the mechanics of sense perception and memory: “I enter the fields and roomy chamber of memory, wherein are the treasures of countless images imported into it from all manner of things by the senses.”31 In this mood he marvels at how images are deposited in memory by the senses, how memory contains not only images but concepts, and how what takes place in the mind is sometimes a sequence of memories experienced spontaneously and sometimes the result of a conscious search.
Yet like so many of the pagan philosophers, Augustine regards sense-derived knowledge as uncertain and untrustworthy, since we cannot be certain that our perceptions truly represent reality. What is certain, what is beyond any doubt, is the primary experience of self-awareness, for to doubt is to think, to think is to exist; the very act of doubting affirms that we are alive and that we think.32 Thus does he rebut Skepticism and affirm the Platonic theory of knowledge, relying even more strongly than Plato on introspection as the route to knowledge and truth. Drs. Franz Alexander and Sheldon Selesnick assert in their History of Psychiatry that “Augustine was not only the first forerunner of Husserl’s phenomenology and of existentialism but also a forerunner of psychoanalysis.”33
And indeed his use of introspection goes far beyond that of Plato. The remarkable self-revelations in Confessions are a first in literature; the lineage from there to Rousseau to Freud is patent. But this is introspection leading to self-knowledge, and Augustine was after still bigger game. In The City of God and other of Augustine’s theological works we find an account of how introspection can reveal higher truths. Through reason, he says, we can rise above the limitations of the senses to acquire concepts such as “number” and “wisdom,” but we achieve the highest levels of understanding only by transcending reason through the introspective contemplation of God. Like Plotinus, Augustine rhapsodizes about the illumination that comes to him when, through such rumination, he feels himself “ascending by degrees unto Him who made me” and coming as close to ultimate truth as man can.34
The most important faculty of the mind, for Augustine, is the will, since it offers the only solution to the great theological problem of how to explain the existence of evil. If God is all-powerful, all-wise, and good, He could not have created evil, nor been unaware that it would exist, nor could there be another power as great as He who was responsible for evil. How, then, to explain it? Augustine reasons that for human beings to be good, they must be able to choose to do good rather than not-good (God did not create evil; evil is only the absence of good); God therefore endowed them with free will. But human beings can fail to will to do good, or can even will to do not-good; it is thus that evil comes to be.35
Augustine had personally experienced the failure of his own will to choose the good by living wantonly with his concubine. He found the explanation of that wickedness in our legacy of original sin, which gave sexual lust such power over us that we will to do evil rather than good. Or, rather, in the area o
f sexuality our will is powerless to do good. Even as a man cannot will an erection, he cannot will himself flaccid when lust overcomes him. Sexual pleasure practically paralyzes all power of deliberate thought, and the flesh commands man, defying his will as he defied the will of God.
Yet any truly good person, Augustine says, “would prefer, if this were possible, to beget his children without suffering this passion.” Had Adam not sinned, he and Eve—and all their descendants—would have been able to procreate sinlessly and without pleasure. How? This is difficult to envision, he admits, but he does not shrink from the task; his thoughts on the matter are an extraordinary mixture of keen psychological observation and ascetic fantasy:
In Paradise, generative seed would have been sown by the husband and the wife would have conceived…by deliberate choice and not by uncontrollable lust. After all, it is not only our hands and fingers, feet and toes, made up of joints and bones, that we move at will, but we can also control the flexing and stiffening of muscles and nerves … [Some persons] can make their ears move, either one at a time or both together… [Others] can make musical notes issue from the rear of their anatomy so that you would think they were singing … Human organs, without the excitement of lust, could have obeyed human will for all the purposes of parenthood … At a time when there was no unruly lust to excite the organs of generation and when all that was needed was done by deliberate choice, the seminal flow could have reached the womb with as little rupture of the hymen and by the same vaginal ducts as is at present the case, in reverse, with the menstrual flux.36
Such is Augustine’s selection and adaptation of what humankind had learned about the human mind in the first eight centuries of psychology; such are the principal notions that received the imprimatur of his authority and became the only acceptable psychology for the next eight centuries.
