The Story of Psychology (11 page)

What sort of man was the Angelic Doctor, as he is called by his admirers? Not a man to catch one’s attention: a large, quiet lump of a fellow dressed in monk’s garb, usually absorbed in his own thoughts, a man whose pious and studious life was virtually without drama except of an intellectual kind.

Aquinas’s father, the Count of Aquino, whose castle lay halfway between Rome and Naples, came from the German nobility, and his mother was a descendant of the Norman princes of Sicily. Thomas,
born in 1225, grew up thoroughly Teutonic in looks—tall and heavy, broad of face, and fair-haired—and Teutonically stolid; it is said that he became angry only twice in his life, and his nickname, among his fellow students, was “the great dumb ox of Sicily.”

As a child of five he was sent by his father to live and study in the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino some miles away. His boyhood there could hardly have been carefree or joyous, and by the time he left at fourteen he was a confirmed scholar and ascetic. After five more years at the University of Naples, he became a Dominican monk, to the great distress of his family; they had expected him, rather than leading a life of poverty in a mendicant order, eventually to assume the prestigious post of abbot at Monte Cassino. At his mother’s instigation—his father had died—Aquinas’s brothers kidnapped him and imprisoned him for a year at the family castle, hoping he would change his mind. He did not; accepting his lot with saintly calm, he pursued his studies in his prison apartment.

He did lose his temper, however, when his brothers, in an attempt to lure him away from asceticism, slipped a seductive young woman into his chambers. On seeing her, Aquinas seized a flaming brand from the fire, drove her in panic from the room, and burned the sign of the cross on his door; his brothers sent him no more temptresses. Eventually Aquinas’s piety won his mother over; she helped him escape, and in 1245 he resumed life as a Dominican in Paris, where he studied theology under Albertus Magnus, the champion of Aristotle.

A prodigious student, Aquinas, thanks to a papal dispensation, was granted his doctorate in theology at thirty-one, three years earlier than regulations allowed. He had such powers of concentration that he could pursue a complex train of thought under the most distracting circumstances. Once, at a banquet in the court of King Louis IX, Aquinas, pondering how to refute the Manichaean heretics, was oblivious of the pomp, jewelry, great personages, and witty conversations all around him. Suddenly he slammed his big hand down on the table and cried out, doubtless alarming the assemblage, “And
that
will settle the Manichaeans!”

Not that he was a forbidding person; he was soft-spoken, easy in conversation, and cheerful, but he had important things on his mind and much to do. From waking to sleeping, his days were filled with study, writing, teaching, and worship. He attended all the hours of prayer, either said one Mass or heard two every day, and prayed before delivering every lecture or sitting down to write.

With so many devotions, the wonder is that he got so much done before his death at forty-nine, in 1274. In less than twenty years, while teaching at the University of Paris and at schools in Italy, he wrote a great many sermons, tracts, hymns, and prayers, a number of lengthy commentaries on the works of the earlier philosophers, and the massive (four-volume)
Summa Contra Gentiles
and the gargantuan (twenty-one-volume)
Summa Theologica.

The
Summa Contra Gentiles
is aimed at philosophic nonbelievers whose rationalism prevents them from believing. Aquinas seeks to lead them to faith by a route as unlike Augustine’s impassioned mysticism as imaginable: he presents them with rigorously logical philosophic arguments intended to engender faith through reason alone. As he writes in a tract addressed to a group of opponents, “Behold our refutation of [your] errors. It is based not on documents of faith but on the reasons and statements of the philosophers themselves.”
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The
Summa Theologica
, intended for students of theology, expounds and defends the whole body of Catholic doctrine; it comprises thirty-eight treatises on various subjects, including metaphysics, ethics, law, and psychology, and takes up 631 “questions” or topics, to which it presents some ten thousand objections or replies. Throughout, Aquinas uses dialectic to examine each question by step-by-step reasoning; the result is no more stirring than a logic textbook, but as a work of orderly argument it is incomparable.

Perhaps worn out by his exertions, Aquinas felt something strange come over him while saying Mass one morning in December 1273; afterward he could not continue his work on the
Summa.
“I can do no more,” he said. “Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life.” He died three months later, and in less than fifty years was canonized by Pope John XXII.

Aquinas’s theology and metaphysics do not concern us here except as he made psychology harmonize with them. This he did chiefly in three parts of the
Summa Theologica:
“Treatise on Man,” “Treatise on Human Acts,” and “Treatise on Habits.” Little of what he set forth in these sections was new; he was not an explorer but a reconciler of Christian doctrine and Aristotelianism.

His psychology is based largely on Aristotle (though couched in Aquinas’s own difficult and abstruse terminology), plus odds and ends of
Galen, Augustine, and a few others. He restored to psychology much that was sensible and realistic, and had been lost in the earlier patristic writings. But he froze the science in its classically speculative and argumentative mode and built into it certain key items of Christian faith, such as the dualism of body and soul or mind, that would cloud psychology to our own day.

In the psychological sections of the
Summa Theologica
one can see, despite the fog of Thomist verbiage, many familiar topics.

On perception, Aquinas discusses the five external senses familiar to earlier writers, plus the “common” sense—Aristotle’s notion—by which we recognize that data simultaneously perceived through different senses come from one object.

He subdivides the functions of the psyche, in more or less Aristotelian fashion, into the “vegetative” (its autonomic physical functions), the “sentient” (perception, appetite, locomotion), and the “rational” (memory, imagination, and reason or intellect). But he enlarges significantly a passing suggestion of “the Philosopher” (as he often calls Aristotle) that there are two kinds of intellect. The functions of the first, or “possible intellect,” are understanding, judgment, and reasoning concerning our perceptions; the functions of the second, or “agent intellect,” are to abstract
ideas
or concepts from our perceptions and to know, through faith, those other truths, such as the mystery of the Trinity, that cannot be known through reason.

Aquinas offers no empirical evidence that two distinct intellects exist; his conclusions are based on a combination of logic and doctrine. For whatever in the soul concerns bodily perceptions, sensations, and emotions—whatever is part of the soul-body unit during life—cannot live on after death. But the soul does live on; doctrine says so. It must therefore be that part of the soul-body unit partakes of higher and eternal knowledge and therefore is immortal; this is the agent intellect.
³⁸

Aquinas thus reconciles Aristotelian psychology, which did not allow a personal afterlife, with Christian doctrine, which insisted on it. Yet in making the perishable “possible intellect” the mechanism through which we create ideas, he excludes from his own psychology the mystical Platonic doctrine of innate ideas. He takes his stand with Aristotle that the mind of the infant is a tabula rasa with the power to extract ideas from experience. The doctrine of innate ideas will plague psychology in later centuries, but not through Aquinas’s doing.

He does, however, differentiate between desires rising from the concupiscible appetite and those from the irascible appetite, a dichotomy
he took from Galen, who got it from Plato. Aquinas develops it in more detail than his predecessors, organizing the material by means of definition, deduction, and common sense. His schema: When the concupiscible appetite is aroused by a good thing, we feel such emotions as love, desire, and joy; when repelled by an evil thing, hatred, aversion, and sorrow. When the irascible appetite is aroused by a good thing that is hard to obtain, we feel hope or despair; when by an evil thing, courage, fear, or anger.

This categorization of the emotions, though it may seem artificial and pedantic today, is more systematic and thorough than that of any previous philosopher. More important, Aquinas deserves credit for stressing, almost to a modern degree, that pleasure and pain are the basic substrates of the emotions.

On the subject of the will, Aquinas asserts, as doctrine requires him to, that freedom of the will does exist. But his grounds for saying so are derived from Aristotelian psychology. First he offers abstruse metaphysical reasons for asserting that reason is “more noble and more sublime” in its nature than the will;
³⁹
then, more plainly, he says that reason determines what is good, and the will seeks to gratify the desire for that object. We cannot help desiring the objects of our appetites, and we are free to will what we do about those desires, but the will remains subordinate to intellect, which determines what is to be sought or avoided. (If we will to do something evil, it is through lack of true understanding.) In one case, however, the will is a better judge than reason:

This again exemplifies the reconciliation Aquinas seeks between faith and reason. He aims to use natural reason to prove the truth of the Catholic faith, but mysteries such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Last Judgment, and the essence of God cannot be deduced from the evidence of the senses or reason and can be known only through faith.
⁴¹
He thus establishes a two-part epistemology: We know some things through experience and reason, other things through revelation. This amalgam of naturalistic psychology with supernatural Christian doctrine would
prove comforting to many believers in the centuries to come but would long impede the development of scientific psychology.

Aquinas’s impact on psychology was thus both positive and negative. In his description of the senses and reason as the means by which we acquire knowledge, he provided a basis on which psychology could someday gain an empirical and scientific outlook. But in describing the higher functions of the intellect as immortal and in insisting that certain kinds of knowledge can be acquired only through faith, he prolonged the grip of supernaturalism on psychology. So great was his authority, at least among Catholics, that at least two histories of psychology written by Catholics in the twentieth century—one as late as 1945—would maintain that psychology went astray after Aquinas.
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For several centuries after the death of Aquinas in 1274, psychology was again at a standstill. The Saint’s and the Philosopher’s combined authority petrified it, and those few clerics who wrote about psychology had almost nothing new to say. Nor were the times congenial to intellectual endeavors; the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death and other epidemics of the fourteenth century played havoc with the social order. In such a world few were motivated to explore the human psyche scientifically or philosophically. Even the educated turned, in desperation, to astrology, superstition, and demonism. Clerics who in a more benign time might have written yet more commentaries on classic and patristic philosophy instead studied and wrote about the practices of witches and the methods by which inquisitors could prove that accused persons were consorting with the Devil and doing his work.

Delusions and hallucinations in which the Devil or swarms of his demons appeared were widely accepted as authentic experiences; psychotic behavior was interpreted as evidence of possession by a dream or the Devil himself; voices, radiances, visions of angels or the Virgin or Jesus were usually considered actual visitations or communications. Understanding of the mind and emotions, at least in western Europe, was back where it had been several thousand years earlier.

Yet by the fifteenth century certain social changes were bringing about conditions that would foster the first major advances in psychology since the Greeks. The introduction to Europe of gunpowder made castle walls and personal armor obsolete, and thereby outmoded the feudal
system. With the dawning of the Renaissance there was an increase in the number of scholars who were not clerics and not bound by doctrinal orthodoxy. The invention of the printing press using moveable type, around 1440, made it possible for them to study outside the Church-dominated universities. The rediscovery of the learning of the past began to liberate people’s minds from the confines of medieval thought.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scientists in a number of fields made the first significant advances in well over a millennium. Vesalius corrected many of Galen’s anatomical errors; Copernicus proved the sun to be the center of the solar system; Galileo discovered that there were mountains on the moon and that the Milky Way is made up of individual stars; Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; and Agricola made important contributions to mineralogy, Paré to surgery, Mercator to mapmaking, Tycho and Kepler to astronomy, and Columbus and Magellan to geography.

Interest in psychology, too, revived, but at first without producing advances. In the sixteenth century hundreds of works were written, but almost all were routine commentaries on the psychological writings of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Galen, and others, or reworkings of Augustine’s and Aquinas’s discussions of free will and the nature of the soul. Certain thinkers, among them Machiavelli, Paracelsus, and Melanchthon, made shrewed psychological observations of one kind or another in their writings, but none furthered the science in any systematic fashion.