Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [27]
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.
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