• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1278 0

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.

The Patrist Adapters

The Patrists

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