Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [31]
The most important faculty of the mind, for Augustine, is the will, since it offers the only solution to the great theological problem of how to explain the existence of evil. If God is all-powerful, all-wise, and good, He could not have created evil, nor been unaware that it would exist, nor could there be another power as great as He who was responsible for evil. How, then, to explain it? Augustine reasons that for human beings to be good, they must be able to choose to do good rather than not-good (God did not create evil; evil is only the absence of good); God therefore endowed them with free will. But human beings can fail to will to do good, or can even will to do not-good; it is thus that evil comes to be.35
Augustine had personally experienced the failure of his own will to choose the good by living wantonly with his concubine. He found the explanation of that wickedness in our legacy of original sin, which gave sexual lust such power over us that we will to do evil rather than good. Or, rather, in the area of sexuality our will is powerless to do good. Even as a man cannot will an erection, he cannot will himself flaccid when lust overcomes him. Sexual pleasure practically paralyzes all power of deliberate thought, and the flesh commands man, defying his will as he defied the will of God.
Yet any truly good person, Augustine says, “would prefer, if this were possible, to beget his children without suffering this passion.” Had Adam not sinned, he and Eve—and all their descendants—would have been able to procreate sinlessly and without pleasure. How? This is difficult to envision, he admits, but he does not shrink from the task; his thoughts on the matter are an extraordinary mixture of keen psychological observation and ascetic fantasy:
In Paradise, generative seed would have been sown by the husband and the wife would have conceived…by deliberate choice and not by uncontrollable lust. After all, it is not only our hands and fingers, feet and toes, made up of joints and bones, that we move at will, but we can also control the flexing and stiffening of muscles and nerves … [Some persons] can make their ears move, either one at a time or both together… [Others] can make musical notes issue from the rear of their anatomy so that you would think they were singing … Human organs, without the excitement of lust, could have obeyed human will for all the purposes of parenthood … At a time when there was no unruly lust to excite the organs of generation and when all that was needed was done by deliberate choice, the seminal flow could have reached the womb with as little rupture of the hymen and by the same vaginal ducts as is at present the case, in reverse, with the menstrual flux.36
Such is Augustine’s selection and adaptation of what humankind had learned about the human mind in the first eight centuries of psychology; such are the principal notions that received the imprimatur of his authority and became the only acceptable psychology for the next eight centuries.
The Patrist Reconcilers
The Schoolmen
Few people, in the centuries after Augustine’s death, actually gave any thought to these matters. Mighty Rome was repeatedly ravaged and sacked; its people gradually crept away to country towns and fortified villages, until by the sixth century only fifty thousand were living amid the burned ruins and rubble of the once-great city. Its libraries and those of other cities were scattered and destroyed; the scientific learning of the past, along with its hygiene, manners, and art, was lost. Most of western European society came to comprise primitive villages, drafty castles, and walled towns, loosely organized in petty fiefdoms and kingdoms whose illiterate and bellicose leaders constantly raided and laid siege to one another, when not joining forces to fight against invading Normans,