Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [28]
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