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 wouldprove 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 possession by a dream or the Devil himself; voices, radiances, visions of angels or the Virgin or Jesus were usually considered actual visitations or communications. Understanding of the mind and emotions, at least in western Europe, was back where it had been several thousand years earlier.
Yet by the fifteenth century certain social changes were bringing about conditions that would foster the first major advances in psychology since the Greeks. The introduction to Europe of gunpowder made castle walls and personal armor obsolete, and thereby outmoded the feudalsystem. With the dawning of the Renaissance there was an increase in the number of scholars who were not clerics and not bound by doctrinal orthodoxy. The invention of the printing press using moveable type, around 1440, made it possible for them to study outside the Church-dominated universities. The rediscovery of the learning of the past began to liberate people’s minds from the confines of medieval thought.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scientists in a number of fields made the first significant advances in well over a millennium. Vesalius corrected many of Galen’s anatomical errors; Copernicus proved the sun to be the center of the solar system; Galileo discovered that there were mountains on the moon and that the Milky Way is made up of individual stars; Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; and Agricola made important contributions to mineralogy, Paré to surgery, Mercator to mapmaking, Tycho and Kepler to astronomy, and Columbus and Magellan to geography.
Interest in psychology, too, revived, but at first without producing advances. In the sixteenth century hundreds of works were written, but
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 possession by a dream or the Devil himself; voices, radiances, visions of angels or the Virgin or Jesus were usually considered actual visitations or communications. Understanding of the mind and emotions, at least in western Europe, was back where it had been several thousand years earlier.
Yet by the fifteenth century certain social changes were bringing about conditions that would foster the first major advances in psychology since the Greeks. The introduction to Europe of gunpowder made castle walls and personal armor obsolete, and thereby outmoded the feudalsystem. With the dawning of the Renaissance there was an increase in the number of scholars who were not clerics and not bound by doctrinal orthodoxy. The invention of the printing press using moveable type, around 1440, made it possible for them to study outside the Church-dominated universities. The rediscovery of the learning of the past began to liberate people’s minds from the confines of medieval thought.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scientists in a number of fields made the first significant advances in well over a millennium. Vesalius corrected many of Galen’s anatomical errors; Copernicus proved the sun to be the center of the solar system; Galileo discovered that there were mountains on the moon and that the Milky Way is made up of individual stars; Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; and Agricola made important contributions to mineralogy, Paré to surgery, Mercator to mapmaking, Tycho and Kepler to astronomy, and Columbus and Magellan to geography.
Interest in psychology, too, revived, but at first without producing advances. In the sixteenth century hundreds of works were written, but
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