Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [32]
Eventually, chaos gave way to the settled order of the feudal system, but feudal lords, preoccupied by knightly jousting, wars, the Crusades, intrigues, witchcraft, and the rituals of courtly love, had no interest in learning. In a world where life was nasty, brutish, and short, psychology was as forgotten a cultural artifact as the geometry of Euclid or the dramas of Sophocles, and as irrelevant.
From the sixth to the thirteenth century the only people in western Europe who had any opportunity to learn about psychology were clerics, who, in the libraries of a few monasteries, could read about it in the limited form of the Patrists’ writings. But the subject had little appeal for most clerics, whose time and energy were pre-empted by matters of faith and the rigors of feudal existence. Only a handful, whose names mean nothing to us today, became familiar with what had been written and themselves wrote books on the soul and mind. None of these works is more than a compilation and iteration of what could be found in the apologetic writings, particularly the works of Augustine.
Change, however, slowly overtook the feudal order. The Crusades brought hordes of semiprimitive western Europeans into contact with Muslim commerce and industry; trade went where the cross had led; Italian merchant fleets and ships out of northern European harbors began carrying Oriental spices, silks, foods, and tapestries to European ports, and, with them, books and ideas. As seaborne commerce started to revive, so did inland transportation. Rude towns grew into cities, and in some of them, starting with Bologna and Paris, universities were founded; philosophy was revived in the form of scholasticism, the painstaking logical examination of the great questions of faith.
At first the scholastics (or Schoolmen) were constrained by unquestioning reverence for the authority of Scripture and of doctrine as set forth in the Creeds and in the writings of Augustine and other Patrists. The scholastics’ method of examining philosophic and religious problems was to state a proposition, take a negative position, defend that view with scriptural and patristic quotations, then rebut it with an affirmative proposition, defending that with other scriptural and patristic quotations. As time passed, however, they became aware of other and more stimulating sources of knowledge. In part through writings brought from the Middle East, where learning had never died out, and in larger part through the writings of Arab and Jewish scholars in Spain and Constantinople, especially Avicenna, Averroës, and Moses Maimonides, they rediscovered Greek philosophy and psychology and, above all, Aristotle.
To many scholastics, his rigorous logic, vast knowledge, and relatively realistic outlook were a liberation from the arid, otherworldly musings of the Patrists. Aristotle, rather than Plato or Augustine, became the supreme authority for them. But for many years scholastics were divided into two camps: the mystic-Platonic (mostly Franciscans) and the intellectual-Aristotelian (mostly Dominicans). The mystic-Platonic side saw Aristotle’s naturalism and logic as a threat to faith; the Aristotelians, among them Abélard, Peter Lombard, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas, saw them as a support to, and a way of proving, the truth of Christian doctrine. After decades of bitter struggles, the Aristotelians won out: Aquinas’s philosophy, reconciling Aristotelianism with Christianity and using reason to prove the truth of doctrine, became the official one of the Catholic Church and has remained so.
The Angelic Doctor: Saint Thomas Aquinas
What sort of man was the Angelic Doctor, as he is called by his admirers? Not a man to catch one’s attention: a large, quiet lump of a fellow dressed in monk’s garb, usually absorbed in his own thoughts, a man whose pious and studious life was virtually without drama except of an intellectual kind.
Aquinas’s father, the Count of Aquino, whose castle lay halfway between Rome and Naples, came from