The Story of Psychology (10 page)

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:

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 of 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:

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.

Few people, in the centuries after Augustine’s death, actually gave any thought to these matters. Mighty Rome was repeatedly ravaged and sacked; its people gradually crept away to country towns and fortified villages, until by the sixth century only fifty thousand were living amid the burned ruins and rubble of the once-great city. Its libraries and those of other cities were scattered and destroyed; the scientific learning of the past, along with its hygiene, manners, and art, was lost. Most of western European society came to comprise primitive villages, drafty castles, and walled towns, loosely organized in petty fiefdoms and kingdoms whose illiterate and bellicose leaders constantly raided and laid siege to one another, when not joining forces to fight against invading Normans, Norsemen, Magyars, Saracens, Franks, Goths, and Moors.

Eventually, chaos gave way to the settled order of the feudal system, but feudal lords, preoccupied by knightly jousting, wars, the Crusades, intrigues, witchcraft, and the rituals of courtly love, had no interest in learning. In a world where life was nasty, brutish, and short, psychology was as forgotten a cultural artifact as the geometry of Euclid or the dramas of Sophocles, and as irrelevant.

From the sixth to the thirteenth century the only people in western Europe who had any opportunity to learn about psychology were clerics, who, in the libraries of a few monasteries, could read about it in the limited form of the Patrists’ writings. But the subject had little appeal for most clerics, whose time and energy were pre-empted by matters of faith and the rigors of feudal existence. Only a handful, whose names mean nothing to us today, became familiar with what had been written and themselves wrote books on the soul and mind. None of these works is more than a compilation and iteration of what could be found in the apologetic writings, particularly the works of Augustine.

Change, however, slowly overtook the feudal order. The Crusades brought hordes of semiprimitive western Europeans into contact with Muslim commerce and industry; trade went where the cross had led; Italian merchant fleets and ships out of northern European harbors began carrying Oriental spices, silks, foods, and tapestries to European ports, and, with them, books and ideas. As seaborne commerce started to revive, so did inland transportation. Rude towns grew into cities, and in some of them, starting with Bologna and Paris, universities were
founded; philosophy was revived in the form of scholasticism, the painstaking logical examination of the great questions of faith.

At first the scholastics (or Schoolmen) were constrained by unquestioning reverence for the authority of Scripture and of doctrine as set forth in the Creeds and in the writings of Augustine and other Patrists. The scholastics’ method of examining philosophic and religious problems was to state a proposition, take a negative position, defend that view with scriptural and patristic quotations, then rebut it with an affirmative proposition, defending that with other scriptural and patristic quotations. As time passed, however, they became aware of other and more stimulating sources of knowledge. In part through writings brought from the Middle East, where learning had never died out, and in larger part through the writings of Arab and Jewish scholars in Spain and Constantinople, especially Avicenna, Averroës, and Moses Maimonides, they rediscovered Greek philosophy and psychology and, above all, Aristotle.

To many scholastics, his rigorous logic, vast knowledge, and relatively realistic outlook were a liberation from the arid, otherworldly musings of the Patrists. Aristotle, rather than Plato or Augustine, became the supreme authority for them. But for many years scholastics were divided into two camps: the mystic-Platonic (mostly Franciscans) and the intellectual-Aristotelian (mostly Dominicans). The mystic-Platonic side saw Aristotle’s naturalism and logic as a threat to faith; the Aristotelians, among them Abélard, Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas, saw them as a support to, and a way of proving, the truth of Christian doctrine. After decades of bitter struggles, the Aristotelians won out: Aquinas’s philosophy, reconciling Aristotelianism with Christianity and using reason to prove the truth of doctrine, became the official one of the Catholic Church and has remained so.