Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [29]
An apt and eager student, he was so awed by Plato that he called him a “demigod” and later incorporated much Platonism into Christian doctrine. After completing his studies, he became a professor of rhetoric in Carthage, and later in Rome and Milan. He read widely in the pagan philosophers and the Christian Scripture and became an adherent of Manichaeanism, a heretical Eastern offshoot of Christianity. But he was increasingly influenced by Plato and by Plotinus, whose ascetic and mystical Neoplatonism deeply stirred him. He became ever more troubled by guilt over his way of life and by the decay of his world: the Huns were ravaging the Balkans, the Goths laying waste to Thrace, the Germans surging across the Rhine, while in Italy corruption was worse than ever, taxes higher, and the populace more addicted to gladiatorial combats and circuses.
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