Free The Story of Psychology by Morton Hunt Page A

the Patrists to support their religious beliefs. Whatever was naturalistic in it, such as the view that mental processes are due to the movement of atoms within the brain or heart, they assailed as either inadequate or heretical; whatever in it bolstered the Christian belief in the supremacy of the soul and of transcendental reality, such as the Platonic theory of ideas, they welcomed and tailored to fit Christian doctrine.
    One major psychological issue troubling them was whether or not the soul was a part of the godhead and came to the body equipped with innate knowledge, as Platonists held. Christian doctrine indicated otherwise: each soul was newly created at birth, and the mind of the newborn infant was therefore blank. Many Patrists accordingly attacked the doctrine of innate ideas, although they accepted most of the Platonic theory of ideas.
    Another difficult issue was how the soul is linked to mind and to body and whether the soul needs a body in order to perceive and have sensations, as Aristotle had said. But according to doctrine the soul of the sinner or nonbeliever burns in hell after death; unless it can perceive when detached from sense organs, how can it sense suffering?
Ergo
, said most Patrists, the soul does not need the sense organs to perceive.
    Such were the issues—there were many of them—over which theFathers of the Church labored and fought among themselves in their efforts to adjust psychology to the new belief; in this form psychology lived on.
Tertullian
    Although the antenicene Fathers—those who lived and wrote before the Council of Nicaea, in 325—differed widely in their views, the work of Tertullian, the greatest of them, exemplifies how pagan psychological concepts were incorporated in early patristic writings. Tertullian (160–230), the son of a Roman centurion, grew up in Carthage, where he received a first-rate education; he then studied law, went to Rome, and there became an eminent jurist. In his mid-thirties, for unknown reasons he became a Christian and renounced pagan pleasures. He married a fellow believer, took priestly orders (priests were not then celibate), and returned to Carthage, where he lived the rest of his life and turned out a steady stream of fiery apologetics and denunciations of sin. He was the first Patrist to write in Latin rather than Greek; it has been said that Christian literature in the West sprang from Tertullian full-grown.
    A persistently angry man, he was in a constant state of rage at the sybaritic life of Roman pagans and at their cruelty toward Christians. It was he who coined the celebrated maxim “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” He relished his own fantasies of the suffering the pagans would undergo after death:
    That last eternal Day of Judgment [will come] when all this old world and its generations shall be consumed in one fire. How vast the spectacle will be on that day! How I shall marvel, laugh, rejoice, and exult, seeing so many kings—supposedly received into heaven—groaning in the depths of darkness!—and magistrates who persecuted the name of Jesus melting in fiercer flames than ever they kindled against the Christians!—and sages and philosophers blushing before their disciples as they blaze together! 20
    Although married, Tertullian had as poor an opinion of the physical side of marriage as did Saint Paul, the source of much of his thinking. In his late forties he wrote his wife a long letter about marriage and widow-hood—it was meant to instruct other women as well—in which he expressed his contempt for his and her physical desires. Though not apsychological discourse, it is representative of a myriad of patristic writings about sexual desire that had profound effects on the sexuality and emotions of believers for eighteen centuries; the nature and extent of those effects would eventually be revealed when Freud began the practice of psychoanalysis.
    Tertullian, addressing his wife as “my best beloved