Chapter 7

Aquinas:  THE MIDDLE AGES, RATIONALISM, AND FAITH

 

            Thomas Aquinas, philosopher and saint, is easily the greatest philosophical psychologist of the Middle Ages. His contribution is more understandable when cast against the backdrop of his age.  Consideration of the Dark Ages, the rise and fall of Islam, and the intellectual climate of the later Middle Ages will provide backdrop.

 

The Dark Ages

 

            After the classical twilight and the patristic period came the early Middle Ages.  They extended from about A.D. 400 or 500 to 900, and are often referred to as the Dark Ages.  Although there were still some fathers of the church to come, some scholars argue1 that the creative patristic epoch had closed with the death of Augustine in 430.  In the fifth century the world empire of the Romans collapsed and was broken up.  From then on the West was divorced from the empire in the East.  In 529 the Emperor Justinian closed the Academy of Athens, and one may find this event more emotionally satisfying as the date that brings to a final close both the Greek era and the early period of Christianity.

            During the Dark Ages, the material preconditions for scientific advancement no longer existed.  Misgovernment, top-heavy bureaucracy, civil wars, and the encroachment of neighboring barbarian peoples led to a steady decline.  The uniformity of Roman law gave way to a maze of discordant local customs.  The universal monetary system of the Romans disappeared.  Land became the basic unit of value.  Lack of order among the new kingdoms, further invasions by barbarians, and an utter lack of culture among the rulers produced chaotic systems of government and low standards of living.  There was little leisure time, widespread illiteracy.  Most of the cities were deserted.  What remained were few towns.  Most of the European population lived in self-sustaining but marginally surviving villages, armed both against their neighbors and invading bands of marauders from afar.

            Science and culture inevitably suffered.  To be sure, there were little enclaves in Ireland and at Monte Cassino where some religious scholarship survived.  But the Church did not go under and the Bishops of Rome under their title as Pope successfully claimed spiritual authority over all Christendom and asserted more and more temporal authority.  There was no psychological advance made during this period and insofar as there was any interest in psychology - and there was little - it was based on Augustinian doctrines.  The works of Aristotle and Plato had, by and large, been lost to the West.  They were to return later from the East, where the Arabs, armed with the new religion of Mohammed, were already developing into a formidable cultural and political power.

 

Islam

 

            Mohammed was born in Mecca in Arabia in 570.  In middle age, he received a revelation from Allah and he began to preach.  He fled to Medina in 622 to escape persecution for his teachings.  Known as the Hegira, his flight marks the beginning of the Mohammedan era.  He called his religion Islam, which means a surrender to God, and his followers were known as Muslims.  His message is contained in the Koran.

            The development of Islam was remarkably fast.2  From the Hegira in 622 and the death of the prophet ten years later, to the conquest not only of Arabia and Syria but also of Egypt and Persia in another twenty years, an irrevocable change was wrought upon the face of the Near East.  Sicily and Spain soon came under the domination of Islam.  One hundred years after the death of Mohammed, the Muslim empire extended over an area larger than that of the Roman Empire at its height.

            Muslims assumed positions of leadership in governmental, military, and religious affairs, but scholarship at first fell to non-Muslims.  A series of historical forces had been at work making these non-Muslim scholars available in lands that fell under Muslim rule.3  Egypt and Syria had been Hellenized and had Greek-speaking schools and strong philosophical traditions.  In Persia an ancient oriental culture came under Muslim domination.  With their ties to the ancient civilization still unbroken, the scholars of these lands contributed a great deal to the cultural and scientific advances of the area.  Pagan and heretical Christian scholars, especially the Syrian Nestorian Christians and the Greeks of the Byzantine Empire, fled the Christian empire in the West to take refuge in this region, and helped to graft Hellenic civilization onto Muslim culture.  Christian physicians, driven out of Constantinople, brought their knowledge to the Arabs.

            The jostling proximity of many tongues made translation extremely important for the diffusion of knowledge.  Naturally, the most important translations were from Greek sources.  Material from Greek philosophy and science was available to the Arabs from the newly conquered lands.  By the end of the fifth century much of Aristotle and some of Plato had been translated into Armenian and Persian.  In the eighth century this non-Muslim material became a major portion of the secular intellectual provender of the Muslims.  Aristotle held a particular fascination and his writings were very popular, along with Neoplatonic works which often were not attributed to their correct sources.  The works of Aristotle's writings, in going through several translations, were often, if not always, garbled.  To add to the confusion, many works were falsely attributed to him.  For example, the so-called Theology of Aristotle was actually an abridgement of the last three books of Plotinus' Enneads.  Moreover, Aristotle was often known through the biased works of commentators, rather than from first-hand study.  Hippocrates and Galen were also much translated.  Despite the confusion in the materials available to them, from the middle of the eighth century until the twelfth century, Muslim culture completely overshadowed that of the Latin West.

            The Muslims assimilated Greek and Hellenistic material and then went on to make distinctive contributions of their own.  The philosophical speculation received from the Greek world had much the same effect upon Islam that it was to have upon Christianity.  Attempts at a reconciliation of revelation and reason became a major problem.  Hotly contested arguments arose concerning the question of heresy.  Mystical movements, similar in spirit to those in the Christian world, also appeared.

            Our knowledge of the original contributions made to psychology by Islam is only superficial.  It would appear that, by and large, even the greatest of the Muslim philosophers, Alkindi, Alfarabi, and Averroes,4 were primarily imitative of the Greeks, and often showed a strong Neo-Platonic strain.  Insofar as they were naturalistic, they tended to follow Aristotle.  Nevertheless, their contributions to psychology deserve more study than has so far been given them.

            This same neglect has befallen the Jews who lived during these centuries in the Muslim world.  Treated by the Muslims more often than not in an enlightened fashion, they experienced one of the high points of their scholarship.  Between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries, especially in Spain and Egypt, lived several Jewish scholars who presented psychological thinking of originality and power.  The psychological views of the Jewish philosophers, including Abraham Ibn Daud, Solomon Ibn Gabirol, Abraham Ibn Ezra, Ibn Zaddik, Isaac Israeli, and especially Moses Maimonides, have received far less attention than they deserve.5  Although their influence on later developments in psychology is, to say the least, obscure - their work will not be examined here - they are well worth serious study.

            In fields other than psychology and philosophy, the Muslims made some scientific advances.6  Fired with enthusiasm by Greek and Hindu sources of knowledge, they made contributions in mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, technology, and medicine.  Instead of being members of the clergy, as were their contemporaries in the West, Muslim scholars were often physicians.  With them the study of philosophy, medicine, and some of the rudiments of natural science went hand in hand.  Advances continued even until the fifteenth century, but by the twelfth century Muslim supremacy had come to an end.

            By the eleventh century in Europe, the social characteristics often associated with the Middle Ages had emerged more or less clearly.7  The spread of feudalism gave a measure of personal safety to individuals of all social classes and tended to stabilize social relations among them.  There were three major social classes - the clergy, the aristocracy, and the peasantry.  The Church was influential not only because of its spiritual authority but because of its extensive landholdings.  It was beginning to challenge successfully the secular authority on its affairs and to make its appointments increasingly free from those influences.  It also wielded considerable political power.  The aristocracy was, by and large, a military caste depending for its revenues upon its estates.  Knighthood had already emerged with its code of chivalry.  The rural population worked the estates and was levied for war service, and in return received protection from their liege lords.  By the eleventh century, because of a growth in population, greater political stability, more extensive trade, and increased social mobility, the towns became increasingly important.  These conditions made a growth in scholarship possible.

 

Common Characteristics of Thinking

 

            The thinking of the Middle Ages must be understood in context.  Greek philosophy-science had been based on an attempt to see the world rationally;  Christian doctrine is based on faith.  One solution, the one perhaps most commonly attributed to the Middle Ages, was to deny the value of human reason and embrace dogma,  faith in the supernatural as interpreted by the authority of the Church as the Truth.  Although this attitude was indeed widespread, perhaps even dominant, but there was also an attempt by some churchmen to reconcile faith and reason.  But of the two, faith was primary and fixed; and reason was secondary and precarious.  The dominance of one over the other was never in doubt.  No matter how precise the reasoning, if the conclusion did not conform to dogma, it was not true.  Errors in faith, no matter how they were introduced, were heretical.  Conformity was expected and enforced.

            This common attitude led to a considerable amount of uniformity in intellectual life.  There was a preoccupation with death and life after death.  Life on earth was viewed as a preparation for the life to come after death, either a blissful life everlasting or eternal woe.  Large segments of intellectual life were guided by a contempt for earthly matters, a despising of human joy, a longing for eternity.8 

            Medieval thinking was not all of a piece.  It did not consist of a single integrated system any more than modern philosophy does.  The uniformity of thinking was greater than it is today, but was not all-pervasive.  As Gilson has reminded us, not all Christian philosophy was either Christian or philosophy.9  Fortunately, there were many authorities and these authorities often disagreed with one another.  There was variation and change according to the style of the writer and the particular problem, and contrary to popular opinion the scholastic method did allow for some freedom of thought.

            On the whole, the spirit of the age was not conducive to psychological concerns.  The union of theology and philosophy that gave us Christian philosophy in its spirit of other - worldliness was foreign to psychology.  Most of its problems dealt not with man, but with the relationship between God and man - a quite different proposition.  Only incidentally did the question of man as man occupy these thinkers.  In this small fragment, in this isolated part of the pattern, there were some matters of psychological concern.

 

Sources of Knowledge

 

            Most of the intellectual heritage of the West was derived from the scriptures, from the writings of the Church fathers, including Augustine, and from a smattering of Neoplatonism.  In the early Middle Ages the largest and most important compilation of fact, and of fiction masquerading as fact, was the Natural History of Pliny (23-79 A.D.).10  This work served as a textbook and encyclopedia for the medieval scholar, having within it all sorts of miscellaneous information on what were thought to be facts about nature.

            The Latin writer Chalcidius, who was a contemporary of Plotinus, translated a part of Plato's Timaeus into Latin and also wrote a commentary on it.  Up to the twelfth century, this was the only work of Plato known to the Latin world.  Otherwise, Plato was known through neo-Platonic writers rather than from original sources.  Only much later, in about 1150, were two other dialogues, the Meno and the Phaedo, made available in Latin.  The remainder of Plato's works received little attention until the humanist translations of the fifteenth century.

            The Timaeus we have encountered before because of its influence on Plotinus.  It is a very atypical representative of Plato's writings.  It is Plato's poetic vision of the world, of the universe, and of God.  Its central theme is that the world and man are but incidents or manifestations within the ideal patterns that reside in the mind of God.  The things of the world, the visible things, are not real.  They have significance only to the extent that they conform to the ideal.

            The Timaeus is a mixture of the serious and the fanciful, not always easy to tell apart.  The astronomical lore that it contains - each soul is said to have both a star and a numerical relation among the planets - later contributed to a lot of harmful astrological nonsense.  Because of the style in which it is written, there are problems of interpretation, and the Timaeus probably causes more perplexity among scholars than any of Plato's other dialogues.  Sarton even goes so far as to say that the influence of the Timaeus was largely negative.11

            Insofar as Aristotle had been known to earlier Christian thinkers, he was seen as definitely secondary to Plato and in fundamental agreement with him.  Logic was the one area in which he was acknowledged to be original.  The earlier and more elementary portion of his Organon had come down from the early Middle Ages in the direct tradition.  it was studied along with a widely used commentary by Boethius.  These works were staples of dialectic training; together they formed one of the three subjects of the traditional curriculum of the Middle Ages, the Trivium; the others were grammar and rhetoric.  The rest of the Organon was translated as early as 1150, two generations earlier than those of his works that are of more direct psychological interest.  In the Middle Ages there was a search for premises about which one can be certain, and according to Schiller,12 this goes far to account for the relative neglect of experience during the years since Aristotle.

            Ideas derived from Platonic sources dominated Christian philosophy.  The fundamental theme in Platonism - the dualistic contrast between things of the senses and things of the mind, between body and spirit - was preserved.  Ever the resident of two realms, man can choose either one or the other - he can either take the tangible but temporal things of the senses or turn upward to God and eternal life.  For the Christian the correct choice was clear.

 

Scholasticism

 

            The patristic period, dedicated to the formation of orthodoxy, had passed long before scholasticism made its appearance.  The task of scholasticism was to elaborate a recognized and accepted orthodoxy, to build a system of principles upon accepted dogma.  The scholastics began with this doctrine and then traced its implications for various theological questions.  Along with consciousness of a need for divine salvation, Henry O. Taylor considers two of the common characteristics of medieval thought to be a deference to authority and an all-pervasive scholasticism leading to work that was diligent and receptive rather than original.13  Reverence for the past was a predominant attitude of the scholastic.

            The scholastic method in its generic form is defined by Wilhelm Windelband as follows: 

 

a text used as the basis for discussion is broken up by division and explanation into a number of propositions; questions are attached and the possible answers brought together; finally the arguments to be adduced for establishing or refuting these answers are presented in the form of a chain of syllogistic reasoning, leading ultimately to a decision upon the subject.14

 

Naturally, there was variation in detail from writer to writer.  In more general terms, oral discussion of question and answer, a form of dialectic, characterized the scholastic method.  Scholasticism was especially congenial to the medieval mind because it permitted acceptance of authority and yet proceeded from that point by dialectic.  It was the medieval version of eating one's cake and having it too.

            The scholastic had considerable freedom within the framework of his method, which was limited in latitude by the stipulation that dogma in no way must be put to question.  It should be noted that the scholastic did not merely make an appeal to authority, as is sometimes alleged.  As R. McKeon indicates, an adroit scholastic could find authority for either side of a question and then proceed to find truth by examining the interplay of both sides.15  The scholastic might know the ultimate answer on the basis of revelation and faith, but he did not necessarily, nor even often, cheat to make it come out right.  If his claim led to erroneous conclusions, he did not insist that it did not.  Instead he went back over his earlier arguments for the sources of his error and perhaps sometimes couldn't find them!  Being human, he could delude himself that his doctrine was not contrary to dogma and proceed to argue the point.  He, of course, did so at his peril because his position might eventually be judged heretical.

            During the Middle Ages philosophers were almost always theologians, but it is usually overlooked that they often considered problems that had no theological import whatever.  A philosopher as philosopher, then, could depend upon reason alone, limited only by his skill and the knowledge available to him.

 

The Universities

 

            Although some had been founded the century before, the universities did not come into real prominence until the thirteenth century.16  They had not been important before because there was simply not enough learning to justify their existence.  They came into being with the expansion of knowledge.  Favorable conditions for their presence now prevailed.  Both the gathering together of people into larger communities and the increased ease of travel helped set the stage for them.  The youth of the eleventh century had entered monasteries; those of the thirteenth attended universities.  The universities at Bologna, Paris, and Oxford were among the most important, and Paris was a truly international institution; students came there to study from all over France, as well as from the Low Countries, and from Italy, England, and Germany.  There were, of course, other universities:  Cambridge in England; Padua, Naples, and the medical school at Salerno in Italy; Montpellier, Toulouse, and Orleans in France; Salamanca and Valladolid in Spain; and Lisbon in Portugal.

            Their curricula consisted of an arts course and higher courses in theology, law, and medicine.  Each of these had separate faculties.  The arts course usually involved a study of the seven liberal arts and the "three philosophies" - natural philosophy (natural science), ethics, and metaphysics.  Masters and scholars were usually clergymen, but not always ordained priests.  The newly founded orders of friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, both controlled professorships and did much to further the cause of the Church.  They also served to supply many of the most distinguished professors.

            The universities became a potent intellectual force.  They aided intellectual progress by supplying a setting that made time and resources for study possible and provided a less involved and more disinterested point of vantage than the monasteries from which to approach fields of knowledge.

 

The Recovery of Aristotle's Thought

 

            It was to Spain and to Sicily, retaken by the Christian world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that scholars from the West came to work on translations from the Arabic.17  Such translations could have been done directly from the Greek sources and, as a matter of fact, some of them were, but Arabic sources were usually used.  Use of these sources reflected glory upon the Arabic commentaries and the original Arabic works that were translated at the same time.  Along with the recovery of Galen and Hippocrates, the West acquired the medical works of Avicenna and the philosophical teachings of Averroes, and these immediately became important.  In medicine the Arabic scholars had added valuable observations, and in philosophy they were responsible for a variety of distinctive new perspectives.  The translations from Arabic sources included not only religious, philosophical, and medical works, but also works in the fields of science, such as optics, geology, and mathematics.  Original contributions in alchemy, magic, and astrology (sometimes attributed to Aristotle) had a considerable effect both for good and for ill.  From the end of the twelfth century and for the next hundred years, the proportion of texts translated directly from the Greek gradually increased, and in the fourteenth century translations from the Arabic virtually ceased.

            Renan18 goes so far as to claim that the introduction of these texts into the West divided the Middle Ages into two distinct periods:  the earlier, without knowledge of Greek, the later, with ancient science restored.  This sweeping generalization is not without merit as a summary.  Certainly a major task of the scholars was to assimilate and study ancient knowledge and to express it in a fashion that would be acceptable when viewed against the imperatives of their time.

            As important perhaps for the intellectual history of the West as all other works combined was the recovery of the works of Aristotle.  The first medieval scholar supposed to be familiar with Aristotelian treatises was Alexander of Hales (d. 1245).  The works of Aristotle were imported into the universities of Paris and Oxford between 1200 and 1270.  With this recovery the ideas of the Greek scholars began to work their influence again in Western thought.  It was at this time that Aquinas came upon the scene.

 

Thomas Aquinas

 

            The reconciliation of supernaturalism with rationalism was the task of Aquinas.  He carried on this task with intricate but massive tools:  the teachings of the Church and the recovered works of Aristotle.

 

Life and Labors of Aquinas19

 

            It is perhaps fitting that so far as places and events are concerned, the life of Thomas Aquinas bears an impersonal stamp, an objectivity without many of the towering heights and dark shadows of other great men.  The fire was there, but it burned with a steady glow, not in a great shower of sparks and flame.  He was known to have been really angry only twice in his life.  He led an intense intellectual life, and his solitary mind was always hard at work beneath a placid bulk that won for him from his fellow students at the University of Paris the nickname the "Dumb Ox."  A story is told that characterizes his imperturbability and abstractedness in the service of scholarship, irrespective of circumstances.  Obedient to the orders of his superiors, he had gone to a state dinner at the court of the King of France, Louis IX, later known as St. Louis.  He sat at table, a huge man in the black and white habit of the Dominicans, unheeded and unheeding, surrounded by the pomp, the colors, and the jewels of the most brilliant court of Europe.  All around were people engaged in gossip, intrigue, and idle, inconsequential chatter.  He said little or nothing.  Suddenly a huge fist crashed down on a table, and his voice rang out clearly above the discreet hubbub, "And that will settle the Manichees!"  He had been elsewhere, using his time for his intellectual task in life.

            Besides being a great scholar, Aquinas was also a Christian saint.  This sketch does not even pretend to illustrate this side of his nature.  The omission is mentioned as a warning since some would say that Thomas the scholar cannot be understood apart from Thomas the saint.20

            The family of Aquino was a distinguished and aristocratic one.  The Castle of Roccasecca where Thomas was born in 1225 was midway between Naples and Rome.  His father, Landulfo, was Count of Aquino, a town nearby, and an official in the service of Frederick II, the King of Sicily.  His father had considerable influence at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Jassono, which was only a few miles from the castle.

            At about age five, Thomas entered the abbey and remained there as a student for nine years.  In 1239 the monks were forced to leave the abbey because of a war between Pope Gregory II and Frederick II, whose kingdom included that portion of Italy.  Thomas enrolled as a student at the University of Naples, a state institution founded only a few years before by the same Frederick whose war making had forced him out of the abbey.  At Naples he completed his study of the liberal arts.

            In 1243 his father died.  The next spring Thomas took the habit of the Dominican order.  This step caused considerable consternation in his family, not because of his intention to become a priest - they and expected him to return to Monte Cassino, where in the normal course of events and with his family's influence, he would have become abbot - but because he had joined a mendicant order, one made up of begging friars.  In deciding to become a beggar, he was not only throwing away wealth and power, but also ecclesiastical ambition.  This decision went against the aristocratic grain of the family.  Their anger and exasperation were known to John the Teuton, General of the Dominican Order, who decided to take Thomas to Paris so that he might complete his philosophical and theological studies at a more comfortable distance from his family.  His mother was not one to have the family wishes flaunted and, at her direction, a group of relatives boldly abducted Thomas from the party traveling to Paris.  They took him to the family castle, where he was held prisoner for about a year.  He was not angry with his family at this imprisonment and, indeed, had so persuasive a tongue that he converted his oldest sister to Saint Benedict.  But one thing did make him angry.  His brothers, barbaric nobles of their age, conceived a scheme of trying his chastity.  They slipped into his prison apartment a prostitute, presumably selected for her seductiveness.  On seeing her, he seized a brand from the fire and his expression was such that she fled without saying a word.  He then took the flaming log and drew a cross upon the door of his prison.  G. K. Chesterton says that his anger rose as much from a feeling of insult over his brothers' belief that something so cheap would tempt him, as from the particular nature of the temptation.21

            Even the Pope intervened on the side of the family, but Thomas was adamant in his resolve to be a Dominican.  The Dominicans continued to appeal to both the Pope and the Emperor.  Finally, in 1245, Thomas Aquinas regained his liberty and once again donned the habit of the Dominican order.  He went to Paris to study under Albertus Magnus, Albert the Great.

            Albertus  was already known as a champion of Aristotle, whose works were coming into general use at the University.  In anything more than a sketch of the greatest psychologists, Albertus would have an account of his own.22  More of a scientist and a more original observer than Aquinas and equally if not better versed in psychological matters, he did not have his student's gift for synthesis.  The influence of Aquinas upon subsequent developments was the greater however, and so the student, not the teacher, will be discussed.

            In 1248 Albertus went to Cologne to establish a Dominican House of Studies, and Thomas, his favorite pupil, accompanied him.  After four years, Thomas returned to the University of Paris for still further study and to begin his career in teaching.  As a teacher, he was extremely popular; as a student, he was prodigious.  According to regulations, he could not receive his magistrate (doctorate) in theology until after his thirty-fourth birthday, but a papal dispensation was granted him, and he took it at thirty-one.  He was also appointed to one of the two Dominican chairs at the University of Paris.   As a master, he continued to teach for three additional years at Paris.  For ten years after that he was a teacher of theology in various places in Italy.

            Sometime between 1261 and 1264 Aquinas wrote the Summa Contra Gentiles.23  Designed for use in missionary work, this "Summary Against the Gentiles" is a work addressed to those nonbelievers who are philosophically skilled and unimpressed by a call to believe - whose rationalism prevents an acceptance of revelation.  This work gives not theological, but philosophical arguments, proven by reason alone.  Since some of his arguments concern the nature of man, it becomes important as a source for his views on psychology.

            Late in the year 1268 he returned to teach at the University of Paris only to find himself in a sea of academic troubles in which he took a leading and vigorous part.  Despite his active academic battles, Aquinas found time during his stay in Paris to write additional works.  It was during the Italian decade that he met William of Moerbeke.  At his suggestion, Moerbeke began a new translation of Aristotle directly from the Greek.  Between 1260 and 1271 William translated or revised translations of nearly all of Aristotle's works.  On the basis of this uncorrupted test, Thomas wrote various commentaries on the works of Aristotle, including De Anima.24

            A few years earlier, around 1266, Thomas had begun the Summa Theologica, which was destined to become his most important work.25  It was designed as a summary for the training of beginners in theology.  The first part is concerned with God and creation.  His major treatise on psychology is placed between a discussion of the six days of creation and a study of man in the state of original innocence.  This was a scriptural order of presentation; man was created last and is therefore treated last.  Later parts are concerned with man's moral life and Christ and the sacraments.  This work is more obviously theological than the Summa Contra Gentiles.  But The Treatise on Man,26 a part of it, is a detailed account of his psychology.  It is supplemented in this regard by the Treatise on Human Acts and the Treatise on Habits.27

            Certainly Aquinas was interested in psychology.  In this connection he passed a test that most psychologists might fail; no matter his religious convictions a psychologist could not fail to be impressed by the incident.  A friend of Aquinas, one Friar Romano by name, died.28  Aquinas had a vision in which he saw his friend in Heaven.  Out of all the questions on Heaven, Hell, the World, and Man that he might have asked, the question he put to his friend was this:  "Do we retain our knowledge of this world in the next?"  What more crucial projective test of the primacy of a psychologist's calling could be asked?  Under similar circumstances, would even contemporary learning theorists do as well?

            In 1272 Thomas left the University of Paris and returned to Italy, where he taught at the University of Naples and continued to work on the Summa.  His career as a writer came to a sudden and dramatic end on December 6, 1273.  He had been saying Mass that morning when a great change came over him.  Afterward, whenever he was urged to continue writing his Summa he would merely say, "I can do no more; such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as straw, and I now await the end of my life."  In January, 1274, he received instructions from Pope Gregory X to attend an ecumenical council in Lyons.  On the way he fell ill and was forced to break the journey at the Cistercian Abbey of Fossanova, which was not far from his place of birth.  There, on March 7, 1274, he died.  Less than fifty years later Thomas was canonized by Pope John XXII.

 

Reason and Faith in Aquinas's Thought

 

            Aquinas's interpretation of Aristotle was essentially biological in nature.  Little of what was said would have made Aristotle appealing to medieval theologians.  What was considered irrelevant in this earlier discussion becomes relevant now, and before considering Aquinas further, we must first return to Aristotle.

            From the perspective of psychology as a contemporary science, what follows is not a psychological issue at all.  Nevertheless, it is important because in the opinion of Aquinas, anything that touched the issue of reason and faith had implications for psychology.

            Before dealing with the interpretation of Aristotle by Aquinas, it might be desirable to state how certain matters are sometimes interpreted today by non-Thomistic scholars.  First, we must face the issue of the inseparability of form and matter.  If psyche is the form of the body, what happens when the body dies?  The form must also be gone.  The earlier chapter on Aristotle suggests that he rules out personal immortality completely.  Here we get into one of the most tangled webs of modern scholarship.  The very chapters of Book III of De Anima, described as an interpolation of his earlier views and therefore inapplicable, provide an answer that should in fairness be stated.29  Nous, the highest manifestation of the mind, is there held to be of a different order from the other functions.30  Nous is regarded as imperishable.

            The individual object, including the human body, perishes.  But here we face another perplexing problem; for in the same passage of De Anima31 where Aristotle speaks of Nous (mind) as imperishable, he also tells us that memory and love perish because they are parts of a complex that perishes, namely, the body-psyche unit.  Hence, personal immortality seems to be denied in the very passage that is crucial to the argument in favor of it.  (It was perhaps this very point Aquinas had in mind, when in his dream of Father Romano, he asked about memories of earthly existence in the life hereafter).

            In a broad perspective, one can conceive of Aristotle as being concerned not with the problem of the immortality of the human soul, but with Nous as a human function capable of knowing truth, of rising above man's animal limitations to a direct vision of universals.  He was arguing for the existence of some dominating source of intelligence outside the universe.  It is hard to read religious overtones into what he has to say about movement and the unmoved mover.32  Motion is eternal - it always has been and it always will be.  We can trace movement back from one mover to another - A moves B, B moves C, and so on.  Eventually we have to postulate a mover himself unmoved, a transmitter of movement not moved by an anterior movement.  This unmoved mover of Aristotle is interpreted as God.  The unmoved mover in Aristotle's sense, however, is not an object of worship.  He is not aware of man, nor in any way concerned with him.  Divine providence is completely absent.  God in this view, is a metaphysical necessity, not an object to be loved and worshiped.  What modern science disregards as irrelevant to its enterprise, the cause-uncaused, Aristotle considers necessary to investigate because he believed metaphysics cannot be divorced from physics.

            This striving toward higher existence as conceived by Aristotle was seen in the Middle Ages as a striving toward God.  The scholars of the Middle Ages could not have known that in his later thinking Aristotle may have discarded this theory of a higher existence.  Aristotle, as he was known in the Middle Ages, appealed to the Christian thinkers precisely because this postulation of a supreme intelligence was considered by them as integral part, even the capstone of his thinking.  His work stressed the idea that all living creatures are subject to law, and was seen by the Christian thinkers as demonstrating that this law was personally decreed by God.  The only alternative to His guidance known to thinkers of the Middle Ages was pure chance, to them an abhorrent possibility.  It was not until the time of Galileo and Newton that natural law was put forth as still a third alternative.

            Aristotle had posited four kinds of causality - material, motor (or efficient), formal, and final - and had given weight to each of them.  It was therefore possible for those who came after him to stress one or the other according to their interests.  It was this teleological strain in Aristotle that Aquinas raised to a position of primacy.  There in Aristotle was found an intelligent being who directs all things to their ends - and this was interpreted as God.33  The other causes that Aristotle had used to complete the analysis were subordinated to it.  Efficient causes, said Aquinas, are subordinate to final causes; this corresponds to a soldier's tactical disposition by a subordinate commander who is directed by the high command.34

            Aristotle was interpreted by Aquinas and others as holding that all that exists and all that happens does so for the sake of some end.  Every activity, all change, and all growth are to be understood in relation to the ends they serve.  Everything is pervaded with change, and no change is meaningless.  Change implies preparation, and preparation presupposes becoming.  Hence, Aristotle's view was considered in the Middle Ages to be uncompromisingly teleological.

            All we have just said was interpreted by Aquinas in a way that would reconcile it with Christian dogma.  To his credit, he could do so in a fashion that still satisfies many contemporary thinking men and women who apply to his work their personal test of reason.

 

            Nous in Aquinas's Thought.  Nous, or active reason, minimized in the earlier naturalistic account of Aristotle, became the salient feature of Aquinas' view on man, in general, and on psychology, in particular.  Moreover Aquinas did not divorce metaphysical considerations from those of psychology.  The unmixed separable character of Nous was taken by advocates of religious Aristotelianism, especially that of Aquinas, to mean that Nous was capable of separate existence.  Hence, it was considered to be the Aristotelian counterpart of the immortal soul.

 

            Attacks on Aquinas's Thought.  As a consequence of espousing Aristotle, Aquinas laid himself open to attacks on two fronts.  On one side the Church conservatives saw his corroboration of Aristotle as an attack on Augustine and the other church fathers and the Neoplatonism with which their views had been so completely intermingled.  From Aquinas' point of view the second source of attack was the crucial one; it came in the form of apparent agreement rather than opposition to him.  These opponents were themselves Aristotelians.  Their leader was Siger of Brabant, who followed to some extent the Averroist interpretation of Aristotle and taught that Nous was capable of a separate existence but was conjoined in the individual with a "material intellect."  Both Nous and the material intellect were necessary for thinking, and since the material intellect was corruptible, this precluded personal immortality.  Siger thought that matter exists from eternity, and that after the impersonal Nous left the matter of the body, it became part of a universal and common intelligence.

            Irrespective of one's own interpretation of Aristotle's views about personal immortality and the exact nature of Nous (and it would seem that Russell35 is right and that Siger may have had a case), it is possible, as stated earlier, to take the position of Aquinas and argue for the soul's immortality.  The views of the Averroists concerning the eternity of matter, although definitely expounded by Aristotle, disagree with the teaching of the Church on creation.  On all three counts the position of the Averroists was incompatible with Catholic doctrine.  When this was called to their attention, Siger and his followers agreed that perhaps these teachings of Aristotle did contradict the teaching of faith.  Ostensibly in the interests of defending reason and faith, Siger suggested the compromise known as the doctrine of tow truths.  He argued that there were two truths:  the truth of the material world and the truth of the supernatural world.  When being naturalistic, one may hold in abeyance the truth of the supernatural world; on turning to religion, one accepts this truth.  Aquinas, too, followed Averrones in distinguishing faith from reason.  To Aquinas, Siger said in effect, "You speak of reason and faith as both giving truth; so also do we, but with this difference, one does not need to trouble about reconciling the two.  This fine distinction is all that divides us."

            This doctrine, seeming so near and yet actually so far from what he was teaching, was a flat contradiction of all that Aquinas stood for.  To him, it was merely a subterfuge.  For the second time in his life he was aroused to anger,36 and in his reply to Siger his usually temperate style gave way to such expressions as "puffed up with false knowledge," "if he dares," and "false teaching."37

 

            Aquinas's Doctrine of the One Truth.  To his credit, Aquinas also opposed the opposite error, namely, that one's views about other matters are irrelevant as long as one's religious attitude is correct.38

            What Aquinas championed was the doctrine of the one truth.  There are two paths to the same truth, not two truths.  Nothing that is philosophically demonstrated will ever contradict or ever be contradicted by what is taught through revelation.  This position of Aquinas may be made clearer if we deal more specifically with the issue of reason and faith as he saw it.  Truth in reason and faith (in science and religion) are one; this concept is so important to him that Aquinas opens the Summa on this theme.39  Theology is the noblest of the sciences because of the worth of its subject matter.  The knowledge that we arrive at from the evidence of our senses is not enough to know the essence of God but what we sense does come from God and this permits us to know that he exists.40  It is not that there is no distinction between theology and philosophy - there is.  Theology concerns faith, that which is known immediately and without doubt; philosophy is known only after consideration of the other possible alternatives.41  Because certain truths, such as the mystery of the Trinity, cannot be known by reason, they are matters of consideration for theology alone.  There are many other truths, however, that are within the province of both reason and revelation.42  The theologian and the philosopher both consider the same truths, but from different points of view:  the theologian regards them as given; the philosopher regards them as in need of demonstration.  The philosopher, for example, may through a process of reasoning, arrive at an acceptance of God as the Creator; the theologian, on the other hand, accepts that God is the Creator because He has revealed Himself as such.

            As far as church orthodoxy was concerned, Aquinas decisively disposed of the arguments of Siger.  Nevertheless, during and after his lifetime, Aquinas' teachings continued to be targets for condemnation by Church authorities.43

 

Aquinas's Philosophical Psychology

 

            Three factors make it possible to be briefer in discussing the psychological views of Aquinas than some of the other great philosophical psychologists.  The previous discussion of reason and faith is part of Thomistic psychology (as the systematic views  of Thomas Aquinas are typically known).  Moreover there are much more complete modern statements readily available, which is not the case for the earlier thinkers.44  Most important of all, Aquinas followed Aristotle in much of his psychology, and Aristotle has already received rather detailed treatment.  A possible misunderstanding must be disposed of in this connection.  To put it succinctly, Aquinas followed Aristotle, not because of blind adherence to Aristotle as authority, but simply because much of what he had said Aquinas thought was true.  Aquinas did not hesitate to disagree with Aristotle when he thought the Greek philosopher was wrong.  But since the terminology of Aquinas is different from that of Aristotle, some restatement must be made even of points on which they were in agreement.

 

            Soul and Body.  To Aquinas, man as a species has one substantial form, the rational soul.45  Man is neither soul alone, nor body alone, but soul and body, a united or composite substance.  There are no vegetative sensitive substantive forms or souls.  The person is a unity; the rational soul has not only the function particular to itself but also encompasses the vegetative and sensitive functions.  The human soul thus exercises the functions of the lower forms of life, which have vegetative or sensitive souls.  The rational soul as a totality is united with its body in order to carry on its natural functions.  Unlike some earlier thinkers, Aquinas taught that the soul is neither imprisoned nor carrying out a sentence of punishment; it is doing what is natural and good.  It's union with the body is not to the detriment of the soul but to its enrichment.46  The soul completes human nature and also confers the incidental benefit of allowing the achievement of knowledge through the senses.  It is acting according to its nature, in which matter exists for form, and not vice versa.47

            This view is not materialistic in the sense that soul or mind is made to depend on material substances (or if you prefer, cortical substances).  Nor is it, to use a Thomistic term, angeletic, that is, with mind or soul interpreted as a purely immaterial entity or as an independent spiritual being.

            For Aquinas there are a multiplicity of corporeal substances; that is to say, a multiplicity of substances that have matter in their nature.  Four species may be distinguished - nonliving bodies, plants, animals, and men.48  Inanimate objects perform material activities alone; plants have material and vegetative activities; animals, these two and sensory activities; and man has rational activities in addition to the three lower activities.

 

            Soul and Its Faculties.  In one of his most sustained and detailed psychological statements,49 Aquinas distinguishes between the unity that is soul and its faculties or powers.  He makes further divisions among these faculties or powers.  The soul is not its faculties.  The soul does not exercise these functions directly through its essence as such, but through powers with which it is endowed and that are distinct from its essence.  There is an order or priority among these faculties related to the corporeal substances of which they are composed.  The rational faculty is conceived of as higher than the sensitive and, therefore, as embracing and controlling the sensitive, while the sensitive faculty is above the nutritive one.  The nutriative faculty embraces the powers of nutrition, growth, and reproduction.  The sensitive faculty embraces the five exterior senses, the four interior senses (a description of which follows), sensitive appetite, and locomotion.  The rational faculty comprises the active and passive intellect, and the will.  The nutriative faculty encompasses the subject's own body-soul combination.  The sensitive faculty has as its object, not the body of its sentient subject alone, but every sensible body.  The rational faculty has as its object not only sensible body, but being itself.  The higher the faculty, the more comprehensive its scope, extending from a particular body-soul composite, to sensed bodies, to being in general.

            There is no need to review the powers of the nutriative faculty nor the exterior senses of the sensitive faculty since they are treated in a manner similar to that used by Aristotle.  This is not the case with the interior senses of the sensitive faculty.  In using the expression, interior sense, Aquinas was not referring to additional sense modalities arising from stimulation within the organism but to operations at the level of sensitive life and, consequently, to psychological functioning not involving reason.  For example, a bird goes beyond the outer senses in using vision to select twigs for next-building because, while the exterior senses give awareness of color, they do not inform that the twig is useful for the particular task.  Since the bird does not reason, he must have an interior sense by which to apprehend the utility of the twig.

            Reception of sense data involves the already familiar common sense for reception of those qualities, such as softness, that cannot be perceived by one sense modality alone.  But reception also includes the particular interior sense illustrated in the preceding paragraph.  It becomes necessary because the data received transcends the qualities of the common sense.  It is called via aestimativa, or estimative power.  Animals are dependent on it because they are without the aid of reason.  When a lamb sees a wolf and "estimates" it is to be avoided, this is done, to use a modern term, by instinct.  Estimating is a power to sense what is harmful or what is useful to the organism; it is a power that does not depend on previous experience or training and as such is something like intuition.  In man, estimating is allied to mind, since there is always a background of abstract knowledge and universal principles derived from reason with which it interacts.  This is analogous to instinctive estimating, but because it is carried out through reason, it must be distinguished from it also.  It is given a distinctive name, via cogitativa or cognitive power.

            In addition to reception of sense expressed in the common sense and estimative or cognitive power, both animals and humans conserve the data of sense.  Because it produces sense images, Aquinas refers to imagination as the conservation of sense data.  As for the conservation of those estimative or cogitative powers that transcend sense, such as the recognition of an image as an item of personal experience in past time, this requires still another power.  It is called sensory memory.  Thus the four interior senses are the common sense, the sense of estimation and cogitation, imagination, and memory.

            In considering sensation, Aquinas almost echoes Aristotle, despite differences in terminology.  He holds that sensed material things exist only in the sensing individual, not as material but as immaterial, and the ability to sense is the ability to receive form (species) without matter.

            According to Aquinas, the power of appetite is twofold and involves sensitive appetite at the sensitive level and volition or will at the rational level.  Sensitive appetite desires objects that are sensed.  There are two major kinds of sensitive appetites, the concupiscible, so called because they desire the objects of sensible pleasure, and the irascible, whose function is to urge a fight for the objects in question when there are difficulties in securing them.  The concupiscible emotions include love, desire, joy, hatred, aversion, and sorrow, while the irascible embrace hope, despair, courage, fear, and anger.  Aquinas calls the act of a sensitive appetite a passion.

            In keeping with his teleological emphasis, Aquinas asserts that in volition or will, there must be some knowledge of purpose for the action to be called voluntary50  Perhaps the most typical of the arguments that Aquinas advances for freedom of the will is that it arises from freedom of the intellect; as he puts it, free choice is free judgement.  Some activities forced on one give rise to coercive necessity, but these are involuntary.  Free will is evidenced in voluntary activities about which judgements are made.

            Because it is an appetitive faculty, the will cannot be understood apart from its natural object.  We desire happiness, which is found in the good, by our very nature, proceeding from the will in itself.  This means the desire comes from the will itself and is not imposed upon us from without, as by violence.  We cannot help desiring because we are the creatures that we are.  This naturalness of the desire for happiness does not mean one is not free to make his own individual choices.  In the relation of will and intellect, will is subordinate.  Intellect is dominant.  "Nothing is willed unless known," is a dictum of Aquinas.

            The functioning of the rational faculty as such needs to be considered.  The power of the so-called agens intellectus, intellectual agent or active intellect is concerned with abstraction; and the power of the possible intellect is concerned with understanding, judgment, and reasoning.

            The first power is active or creative; the second is passive or receptive.  Because it is material, a sensible object is only potentially intelligible.  Aquinas is empirical in that he holds with Aristotle that natural knowledge begins with sensation.51  But in order to make sensory experience intelligible, the activity of the active intellect of the mind is necessary.  With the operation of the active intellect we extract the form from the individual substance in which it is embedded and experience "color" or "horse."  When the agens intellectus acts, the concrete nature of the datum is laid aside and what remains is something capable of being understood.  It is no longer material but is intelligible, an object of intellect.  The agens intellectus renders sensible natures intelligible by abstraction for use by the possible intellect.  Sense experience provides the stimulus for setting in operation the agens intellectus.  It makes "possible" the realization of the truth that the possible intellect potentially contains.  As with Aristotle, Aquinas held that human beings alone held the power of abstraction and that this power resulted from the actions of an agens intellectus. To Aristotle, this agent was a naturalistic process but to Aquinas it was an act of God.  In this way, the intellectual process resulting from abstraction becomes an aspect of revelation.

            Prior to sensory experience the possible intellect is like a tabula rasa, a blank tablet, devoid of ideas.  To a certain extent this task is performed by the senses themselves in that through them we perceive the species to which the objects belong, i.e., a green flower and a green glass have the color green, which is its species.  To understand, we must penetrate sensible species to intelligible terms.

 

            Psychology and Theology.  In closing discussion of these aspects of the psychology of Aquinas, a return to theology is particularly fitting.  So far as the teachings of psychology are concerned, a reconciliation with dogma becomes imperative in connection with revealed doctrines about the resurrection of the body and its eventual reunion with the soul.  This, in turn, requires the immortality of the soul.  The issue at hand is how Aquinas reconciled his previously stated views on psychology with these theological imperatives.  To do so Aquinas drew upon previously established teachings.  It will be remembered that Aristotelian Nous, the active reason or active intellect, has been interpreted by Aquinas as deathless.  Aquinas extended this contention of immortality to the rational soul as a unit.  It will also be remembered that Aquinas himself made a distinction between the soul and its faculties.  Both of these points are made use of in the reconciliation.

            To Aquinas, some of the faculties belong to the soul as such.  These faculties transcend the power of matter.  For the rational faculties, the body is not necessary as the organ of activities.  The rational faculties are not intrinsically dependent upon body, even though when united with the body they draw upon sense experience, which is dependent upon the composite.  Other lower faculties, when in the soul-body composite, do depend upon the body for the way in which they are exercised in the composite, and cannot be exercised in that way without the body.  Relying as they do upon the body, the sensitive and vegetative faculties, in the form they functioned in while part of the soul-body composite, perish with the composite.  But the soul is a unity.  It therefore follows that the human soul cannot be said to depend intrinsically upon the body for its existence.  Consequently, the whole substance of the soul shares in the deathlessness of the active intellect (the Nous of Aristotle).  The soul, as distinguished from its faculties, is a unity, and this unity survives separation from the body.

            Self-consciousness, that is, the ability of the active intellect to reflect upon itself, shows the immateriality of the rational soul as contrasted with the body.  So it may be added that while the lower functions may be lost, we do not perish.  Self-awareness, reason, and the will, integral aspects of the rational soul, do survive.

 

The Influence of Aquinas

 

            Some would call this period the Age of Thomism.52  But though Thomas was well known in his time, he certainly was not universally acclaimed.  On the contrary, his views met with considerable opposition.  His originality was recognized, but often this realization was accompanied by the suspicion that his ideas were dangerous.

            The victory of Thomism did not occur overnight.  Thomas's fellow Dominicans were the first to accept him in a more or less official fashion, but opposition continued to be vigorous.  As Sarton reminds us, the gradual triumph was an advantage, stirring less jealousy and opposition when it reached the stage of almost being taken for granted.53  The victory of Aquinas, when it came, was complete.  It set the prevailing position of later Catholic philosophy to this very day.54  The Thomist philosophy was eventually established as the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic church.55  The Papal Encyclical of 1897 confirmed the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas as the true Catholic philosophy.  This does not mean, as it is sometimes mistakenly alleged, that his views must be accepted by Catholics.  Serious consideration of his teachings is required, but not unthinking acceptance of them.

            From the modern perspective, the reconciliation of faith and reason performed by Aquinas still has an intellectual appeal.  For those to whom it is important and relevant, he still provides a means of reconciling faith and reason without compromising the value or nature of either the one or the other.  According to this view, experimental psychology, even psychophysical investigation, is legitimate.  In no way does psychology detract from faith, and faith is neither subordinated to nor contradicted by psychology.

            The work of Aquinas enhanced the stature of both rationalism and empiricism.  The senses were described as the means by which man attained the basis of knowledge.  In accepting the senses, Aquinas was accepting man's ability to use the knowledge that he obtained from them.  He was also saying that man's reason is sovereign while he is in the human state.  The world may be transitory, but reason does have its own domain.  Reason supplements faith; it does not deny it - and while empiricism is a useful tool, rationalism is thus paramount. 

            The appeal to reason argued so eloquently by Aquinas was highly successful, though sometimes in ways not intended by Aquinas or the church.  In many respects the realization that human reason was of value and was not in conflict with doctrines of faith, was a great contribution by Aquinas.  With the belief in the value of reason would come the realization of the value of learning for its own sake.  While it would still take centuries for the new learning to appear, the Renaissance, one can begin to see the glimmer in the teachings of Aquinas and his immediate successors.  His successors were able to draw the conclusion that reason and faith could exist side by side as two separate realms.  Although this did happen, it was not intended by Aquinas.  On many occasions his work was used to help justify the separation of faith and reason, or religion and philosophy.  This controversy foreshadowed the separation of science and theology that was to come.  Meanwhile supernaturalism had been persuasively defended by the closely reasoned appeal of Aquinas who considered nature a part, but as important part, of man's earthly existence.

 

Science in the Later Middle Ages

 

            The recovered works of Aristotle played a double and conflicting role in the scientific development of the later Middle Ages.  It was as if thinkers of the time could not let him alone - they were either for Aristotle or against him.  They never ignored him.  In these developments his various works served different purposes.  On one hand, the works supplying information about biology and physics formed the basis of knowledge for many scholastics.  On the other, his newly recovered methodological works, with their teachings of logic, gave the opponents of the first group of Aristotelians a potent weapon.  When complemented by the recovered Greek and the new Arabic mathematical works, the methodological works became a tool for the development of new ideas on induction and experiment and the use of mathematical demonstration.56  This was especially true in the field of physical dynamics where the greatest scientific advances in these centuries were made.  It was precisely Aristotle's views of motion and space that were most sharply criticized.  The methodological Aristotle was used to demolish the contentual Aristotle.

            In general, the great advance of the twelfth century was a dawning realization "that a particular fact was explained when it could be deduced from a more general principle."57  A mathematical-deductive method was beginning to emerge, reinforced by the mathematical advances that took place during the thirteenth and subsequent centuries.  At Oxford there was a reaction against the almost exclusive attention to theology, logic, and philosophy.  Robert Grosseteste (c. 1170-1253) was the most prominent teacher and the founder of the mathematical-scientific tradition of that great institution.58  He realized, although somewhat dimly, that a distinction could be made among the inductive, experimental, and mathematical approaches to science.

            Developments within philosophy thereafter made it more possible to apply the scientific approach to nature.  This was the developing gap between reason and faith as expressed in the rise of skepticism.  Duns Scotus59 and William of Ockham,60 two Franciscan friars of Oxford at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries, were very important in this connection.  Both contributed to the trends then emerging, which entered on a desire to separate reason from faith.  Scotus and Ockham were at opposite poles in the struggle between realism and nominalism.  Both probably believed that they were working for the greater glory of faith, but the overall effect of their thinking was actually to make easier the separation of faith from reason.  As a consequence, skepticism toward faith went hand in hand with a greater independence of faith.  It was increasingly possible thereafter for reason to go on way and faith another.

 

The Experiment

 

            In view of the grip of scholasticism on the thinkers of the later Middle Ages, it is hardly surprising that observational study of the phenomena of nature was almost nonexistent during these years.  A few observations were made by some scholars.  The work of Albert the Great on botany is a case in point.  More significant for the future than observational excursions were the scattering of halting and imperfectly understood attempts to develop an experimental approach to the problems of nature and man and thus to advance empiricism.

            True experiments were rare in the Middle Ages and continued to be rare even in the Renaissance.61  Working in almost complete isolation from one another, a number of scholars tried to formulate in their writings this "new" way of studying nature.  These lonely pioneers included Roger Bacon, Peter of Spain, Raymond Lull, and Arnold Villanova.   Roger Bacon is by far the best known of these men today.62  In fact, a myth of his singularity grew up among those who came after him.  Bacon himself also believed that he alone in his day had a true appreciation of the scientific spirit.  It is partly as a corrective for this that Peter of Spain, rather than Roger Bacon, is chosen for exposition.

            Peter of Spain (c. 1215-1277) was a remarkably versatile man.  He was educated at Paris, became Rector of Medicine at the University of Sienna, physician to Pope Gregory X, Archbishop of Braga, and, in 1276 was elected  as Pope, taking the name of John the XXI.  He wrote a textbook on logic,63 which was used for centuries, and a compendium of medicine that was also very popular.  But it is for two other accomplishments that he deserves to be rescued from the neglect of psychologists.  Somewhere between 1245 and 1250 he wrote an original account of psychology, De Anima.64  It must be emphasized that this was not a commentary on Aristotle (although he did write such a commentary, however).  Instead, it was perhaps the first avowedly independent work on psychology for over a thousand years; it was concerned with psychology alone.  It even contained a chapter on the history of psychology.  Peter devoted some attention to the relation between the psychological and medical aspects of the field.  The "psychologist pope" has by no means received the attention that he deserves.

            The second of the two accomplishments that make Peter of Spain worthy of our attention more relevant to the issue at hand was his account of the experimental method.  In his Commentaries on Isaac, a work on diets and medicines, Peter formulated his plea for something resembling an experiment.65  He spoke of two methods by which dietary science might be investigated, via rationis and via experimenti.  The path of reason and the way of experiment (or experience) are both necessary but different.  The path of reason proceeds through the use of the intellect, studies causes, and uses syllogistic methods; the way of experiment proceeds through sense, studies effects, and applies induction.  Reason again is a necessary further step to confirm what is found by experiment.  Peter gives a series of six steps or conditions that he considers necessary to carry on medical experimentation.  (1) The medicine should be free of foreign substances.  (2) There should be assurance that the patient has the disease for which the medicine is intended.  (3) It should be given without admixture with other medicines.  (4) The medicine should be of the degree opposite to the disease.  That is to say that if the disease causes an excess, the medicine should be such as to decrease it, as when a medicine cools off a heated condition.  (5) It should be tested, not only once but many times.  (6) The proper body should be used, the body of a man, not an all.  Through the simple and concrete language of his six steps shines a remarkable grasp of some of the implications of how an experiment is conducted today.

 

Medicine

 

            After the classical twilight, medicine became largely overrun by folk-medicine.66  The historical situation of medicine was similar to that of ancient knowledge in general - some medical knowledge persisted, particularly in commentaries on Galen, and much more had come back from the Arabs.  The revival of Western medicine began in the eleventh century when the medical school at Salerno, founded a century or two earlier, came into prominence, perhaps stimulated in its pioneering by contact with the Arabian medicine of nearby Sicily.  In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the university medical schools of Montpellier, Bologna, Padua, and Paris gained prominence.  However, the church prohibited its clergy from carrying out surgery in support of its abhorrence of bloodshed.  This, coupled with a contempt for any form of handiwork, led to the appearance of barber-surgeons as assistants to the professors.  Certainly, knowledge of anatomy was in a poor state, and most university medical teaching was of a theoretical and dogmatic character.

 

Science and Superstition

 

            In the late Middle Ages superstition, the dark underside of supernaturalism, as it were, had great appeal.  The history of medieval science was inextricably bound up with magical, superstitious practices.  Magic was so pervasive that Lynn Thorndike, the historian of science of the Middle Ages, found it eminently fitting to include magic and experimental science.67

            Belief in demons and witches was widespread in the fourteenth century, tough not to the terrifying extent to which it swelled in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  Astrology had many devotees; magic was performed everywhere.  Divination by dreams was taken very seriously.  These and similar superstitions were not confined to the ignorant peasant; a king might be as superstitious as his lowliest subject.  Nor was the scholar-churchman exempt.  The official policies of the Church toward such matters took a complicated and circuitous course, impossible to trace in short compass.  It is sufficient to say that in earlier centuries superstition was tolerated but generally discouraged, but later it became a matter of considerable concern and brought massive persecution of alleged witches on the part of Catholic and Protestant authorities alike.

            An apt illustration of the combination of science and superstition prevalent in these times is to be found in the medical teachings of Arnold of Villanova (c. 1235-1316).68  Simultaneously, he was a thorough Galenist and a believer in the Devil and demons.  He combined Galenic humouralism with demonology in his diagnostic and etiological considerations.  He believed that because the Devil likes warmth, the presence of warm humours in the body makes an individual susceptible to seizure by the Devil.  Hence, warm humours are to be avoided.  Arnold likewise brought Galen into accord with astrology.  Accepting the Galenic contention that epilepsy is caused by the humours, he related the particular humour bringing on an attack to the particular quarter of the moon in which it occurred.  The planet Mars he considered responsible for melancholia, because the planet's color and supposed heat was said to affect the color and heat of the bile, bringing on melancholia.  While bleeding was recommended as a treatment, he argued that it must be applied in accordance with astrological portents involving consideration of the phase of the moon and constellations.

 

The End of the Middle Ages

 

            The period of the medieval revival of learning had spent its force by the close of the first quarter of the fourteenth century.69  Its contributions were again and again reproduced in the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, first in manuscript and then in printed form; but very little creative or original work was done until the new period of the scientific Renaissance came along.

            To be sure, there were changes presaging the future.  In the second half of the fourteenth century there was an increase in the number of scholars who were not clerics.70  This was indicative of changing times.  Works also began to be written in native tongues instead of in Latin.

            The fourteenth century and the first years of the fifteenth century saw many stirring events, the general effect of which was to destroy the synthesis of the thirteenth century.  The Black Death wiped out perhaps a fourth of the population of Europe.  The One Hundred Years' War compounded the usual wastefulness of war with its incredible length.  There was the rise of the commercial classes, the decrease in importance of the feudal aristocracy, the rise of strong national monarchies, and a decline in the moral prestige of the papacy.

            But when did this period end and a new one begin?  Various dates have been advanced, but it is relatively unimportant to try to be precise here.  With Sarton it is agreed that about 1450 is as good a date as any,71  since this date saw the appearance of printing in the West.

 

SUMMARY

 

            The rediscovery of Greek philosophy and science during the Middle Ages brought about great revolution in Western thought, just as it had done to the Arab world during the period we call the Dark Ages.  The rediscovery of many of the writings of Plato and Aristotle were particularly significant. 

            Perhaps the greatest influence of Aristotle was on Thomas Aquinas.  Thomas's philosophy and his psychological concepts show the strong influence of Aristotle. 

            The medieval educational movement called scholasticism also was influenced both by Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle.  While faith and dogma still dominated thought during this period, Aquinas gave a revitilization to the concept of human reason.  Still constrained by the dictates of church and theology, Thomas Aquinas showed the beginnings of what would blossom into a new learning during the Renaissance.

 

References

 

1E.g. H.O., Taylor, The Mediaeval Mind, 4th ed. (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1959).

2P. K. Hitti, Arabs, A Short History (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1946).

3The influence of non-Muslim Scholars and the assimilation of Greek and Hellenistic material is recounted by A. C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, 2nd rev. ed. (New York:  Doubleday, 1959), 2 vols; M. Desruelles, and A. Bersot, "L'assistance aux alienes chez les Arabes du VIIIe au XIIe siecle,"  Annee med. psychol., 96, (1938) 689-709; and D. L. O'Leary, How Greek Science Passed to the Arabs (London:  Broadway House, 1948).

4Averroes is perhaps the only one of the group who has been studied from a psychological point of view.  J. Bakos, Psychologie d'Ibn Sina (Avicenne) d' apres son oeuvre as Sifa (Prague:  Editions de l'academie Tchecoslovaque des Sciences, 1956).  More peripheral but still interesting is the volume by E. Renan, Averroes et L'Averrosime. (Paris:  Alcan, 1869).

5Dimly discernible in such works as I. Husik, A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy (New York:  Meridian Books, 1958).

6G. Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science (Baltimore:  Williams & Wilkins, 1927-1948), 3 vols. in 5.

7Major sources helpful in understanding the relevant aspects of High Middle Ages were Taylor, Mediaeval Mind; Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science; G. Leff, Medieval Thought:  St. Augustine to Ockham.  (Baltimore:  Penguin Books, 1958); E. Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy.  (New York:  Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936); the introductions to Selections from Mediaeval Philosophy, R. McKeon, ed., 2 vols., (New York:  Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929); the article by the same writer, "Aristotelianism in Western  Christianity,"  Environmental Factors in Christian History, J. T.  McNeill et al. ed. (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1939), pp. 206-231; and R. Klibansky, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition During the Middle Ages (London:  Warburg Institute, 1939).

8E. K. Rand, "Medieval Gloom and Medieval Uniformity,"  Speculum I (1926):  253-268.

9Gilson, Spirit of Medieval Philosophy.

10Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 6 vols., trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Dilly (London:  Bell, 1855-1890), (A.D. 77).

11Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science.

12F. C. S. Schiller, Hypotheses, in C. Singer, ed., Studies in the History and Methods of Science (London:  Oxford University Press, 1917), pp. 414-446.

13Taylor, Mediaeval Mind.

14W. Windelband, A History of Philosophy, Greek, Roman and Medieval (New York:  Harper and Brothers, 1901), I, 312-313.

15McKeon, Selections From Medieval Philosophy.

16A standard source is H. Rashdall, in R. M. Powicke, A. B. Emden, ed., The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed., (Oxford:  Clarendon  Press, 1936).

17A good succinct account may be found in O. H. Haskins, "Arabian Science in Western Europe,"  Isis, VII (1925), 478-485.

18Renan, Averroes et L'Averrosime.

19The major source for details and for all dates is the account of his life by V. Bourke, Thomistic Bibliography, 1920-1940 (St. Louis:  St. Louis University, 1945).  Some material has also been drawn from F. C. Copleston's Aquinas (Baltimore:  Penguin Books, 1955), G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (Garden City N.Y.:  Doubleday and Company, 1958), and M. Grabmann, Thomas Aquinas:  His Personality and Thought, trans. V. Michel (London:  Longmans, 1929).

20E.g., Grabmann, Thomas Aquinas.

21Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas.

22Particularly relevant to psychology are his Summa Theologiae and Summa de Homine which form volumes 31-33, and 35 respectively of Opera Omnia, ed.  A. Bourget (Paris:  Vives, 1890).  A good secondary source is G. C. Reilly's, "The Psychology of Saint Albert the Great, Compared with that of St. Thomas," (Philosophical Studies, Catholic University of America, 1934, No. 29).

23T. Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 5 vols., trans. English Dominican Fathers (New York:  Benziger, 1928-1929).  (1258-1264).

24Aristotle's De Anima in the Version of William of Moerbeke and the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. K. Foster and S. Humphries (New  Haven:  Yale University Press, 1951).  (1269-1270).

25R. M. Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World, Vols. XIX-XX, T. Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. by Dominican Fathers and rev. by D. J. Sullivan (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952) (1266-1273).

26Ibid., First Part, QQ. 75-100, Vol. 1, pp. 378-522.

27Ibid., Part 1, Second Part, QQ. 1-48, 49-89, Vol. 1, pp. 644-826, Vol. 2, pp. 1-204.

28K. Foster, The Life of St. Thomas Aquinas:  Biographical Documents (Baltimore:  Helicon Press, 1959).

29Works of Aristotle, trans. under direction of W. D. Ross, in R. M. Hutchins, ed., Great Books of the Western World, Vol. VIII-IX (c. 340-322 B.C.); On the Soul 429a 10 - 430a 25.

30F. Nuyens, L'evolution de la psychologie d' Aristotle (Louvain:  Institut superieur de Philosophie, 1948).

31Aristotle De Anima  408b 17-32.

32Aristotle Physics 241b 24 - 245b 2, 252b 10 - 267b 26; On Generation and Corruption 334a 8-15; Metaphysics 1012b 22-31, 1018b 8-35, 1049b 4 - 1050b 5, 1072a 30-3, 1074b 14.

33Aquinas Summa Theologica First Part, Q. 2, 3.

34Ibid., Part 1, Second Part, Q. 109, 6.

35B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York:  Simon and Schuster, 1945).

36Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas.

37Aquinas, The Unicity of the Intellect, in "The Trinity" and "The Unicity of the Intellect.," trans. by R. E. Brennan (London:  Herder, 1946) (1270).

38Aquinas Summa contra Gentiles Vol. 2, 3.

39Aquinas Summa Theologica First Part, Q. 1, 1-3.

40Ibid., Q. 12, 12.

41Ibid., Part 2, Second Part, Q. 1, 4.

42Aquinas Summa contra Gentiles Vol. 1, 3.

43F. Van Steenbergen, The Philosophical Movement in the Thirteenth Century.  (New York:  Nelson, 1955).

44J. E. Royce, Man and Meaning (New York:  McGraw-Hill, 1969); G. P. Klubertanz, The Philosophy of Human Nature (New York: 

  Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953).

45Aquinas Summa Theologica First Part, Q. 75, 1-7, Q. 76, 3; Summa contra Gentiles Vol. 2, 56, 57.

46Aquinas Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima 1 ad 7, 2 ad 14. (In reference 24)

47Aquinas Summa Theologica First Part, Q. 76, 41.

48Aquinas Summa contra Gentiles Vol. 4, 11.

49Aquinas Summa Theologica First Part, QQ. 77-90.  (With exceptions specified below, this is the source for discussion of his psychological views hereafter.)

50Ibid., Part 1, Second Part, Q. 6.

51Ibid., First Part, Q. 12, 12.

52Leff, Medieval Thought.

53Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science.

54Grabmann, Thomas Aquinas.

55Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science.

56A C. Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science, Vol. 2; Science in the Later Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, 2nd rev. ed. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday 1959).

57Ibid., p. 3.

58A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science, 1100-1700 (Oxford:  Clarendon, 1953).

59John Duns Scotus, Selections from the Oxford Commentary on the Four Books of the Master of Sentences, in R. McKeon ed., Selections from Medieval Philosophers (New York:  Charles Scriner's Sons, 1930), (c. 1300) II, pp. 313-350.

60William of Ockham, Studies and Selections, ed. and trans. S. C. Tornay (Chicago:  Open Court, 1938) (c. 1322).

61Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science.

62Roger Bacon, Selections from the Opus Majus, in R. McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophy, Vol. II, pp. 7-110.

63Petrus Hispanus, The Summulae Logicales of Peter of Spain, ed. and trans. J. P. Mullally (South Bend:  Notre Dame University Press, 1945) (1268).

64Pedro Hispano, De Anima, P. Manuel Alonso, S. I. ed., (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas.  Instituto Filosofico "Luis Vives."  Series A. Num 1, Madrid:  1941).

65L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science During the First Thirteen Centuries of our Era, Vol. 2 (New York:  Macmillan, 1923).

66Crombie, Medieval and Early Modern Science.

67Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science.

68G. Zilboorg and G. W. Henry, A History of Medical Psychology (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1941), p. 137.

69Thorndike, History of Magic and Experimental Science.

70Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science.

71G. Sarton, Six Wings; Men of Science in the Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957).