Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [35]
This categorization of the emotions, though it may seem artificial and pedantic today, is more systematic and thorough than that of any previous philosopher. More important, Aquinas deserves credit for stressing, almost to a modern degree, that pleasure and pain are the basic substrates of the emotions.
On the subject of the will, Aquinas asserts, as doctrine requires him to, that freedom of the will does exist. But his grounds for saying so are derived from Aristotelian psychology. First he offers abstruse metaphysical reasons for asserting that reason is “more noble and more sublime” in its nature than the will;39 then, more plainly, he says that reason determines what is good, and the will seeks to gratify the desire for that object. We cannot help desiring the objects of our appetites, and we are free to will what we do about those desires, but the will remains subordinate to intellect, which determines what is to be sought or avoided. (If we will to do something evil, it is through lack of true understanding.) In one case, however, the will is a better judge than reason:
When the desired object is superior to the soul in which its nature is understood by reason, then the will is superior to reason…It is better to love God than merely to know God; and conversely it is better only to understand corporeal things than to love them… Through love we cleave to God, who is transcendently raised above the soul; in this instance the will is superior to the reason.40
This again exemplifies the reconciliation Aquinas seeks between faith and reason. He aims to use natural reason to prove the truth of the Catholic faith, but mysteries such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Last Judgment, and the essence of God cannot be deduced from the evidence of the senses or reason and can be known only through faith.41 He thus establishes a two-part epistemology: We know some things through experience and reason, other things through revelation. This amalgam of naturalistic psychology with supernatural Christian doctrine would prove comforting to many believers in the centuries to come but would long impede the development of scientific psychology.
Aquinas’s impact on psychology was thus both positive and negative. In his description of the senses and reason as the means by which we acquire knowledge, he provided a basis on which psychology could someday gain an empirical and scientific outlook. But in describing the higher functions of the intellect as immortal and in insisting that certain kinds of knowledge can be acquired only through faith, he prolonged the grip of supernaturalism on psychology. So great was his authority, at least among Catholics, that at least two histories of psychology written by Catholics in the twentieth century—one as late as 1945—would maintain that psychology went astray after Aquinas.42
The Darkness Before Dawn
For several centuries after the death of Aquinas in 1274, psychology was again at a standstill. The Saint’s and the Philosopher’s combined authority petrified it, and those few clerics who wrote about psychology had almost nothing new to say. Nor were the times congenial to intellectual endeavors; the Hundred Years’ War and the Black Death and other epidemics of the fourteenth century played havoc with the social order. In such a world few were motivated to explore the human psyche scientifically or philosophically. Even the educated turned, in desperation, to astrology, superstition, and demonism. Clerics who in a more benign time might have written yet more commentaries on classic and patristic philosophy instead studied and wrote about the practices of witches and the methods by which inquisitors could prove that accused persons were consorting with the Devil and doing his work.
Delusions and hallucinations in which the Devil or swarms of his demons appeared were widely accepted as authentic experiences; psychotic behavior was interpreted as evidence of