Free The Story of Psychology by Morton Hunt Page B

fellow servant in the Lord,” directed her not to remarry if he died before she did; second marriage, he said, was tantamount to adultery. She should view widow-hood as God’s call to sexual abstinence, which He much prefers to married intercourse. Nor should she grieve at her husband’s death, since it would only end their enslavement by a disgusting habit that, in any case, they would have to give up to enter heaven.
    To Christians, after their departure from the world, no restoration of marriage is promised in the day of resurrection, translated as they will be into the condition and sanctity of angels… There will be at that day no resumption of voluptuous disgrace between us. No such frivolities, no such impurities, does God promise to His servants. 21
    History does not record what his wife thought of the letter.
    This hellfire-and-brimstone scourger of the wicked was well versed in psychology as it existed at that time. He preserved a fair amount of it in his works in the form of attacks on those psychological theories which clashed with his religious beliefs and adaptations of those which lent them support. The account in Genesis of God’s creation of Adam was, for instance, reason enough for Tertullian to reject Plato’s theory that the soul of the individual exists before birth:
    When we acknowledge that the soul originates in the breath of God, it follows that we attribute a beginning to it. Plato refuses to assign this to it; he will have the soul unborn and unmade. We, however, from the very fact of its having had a beginning, as well as from the nature thereof, teach that it had both birth and creation… The opinion of the philosopher is overthrown by the authority of prophecy. 22
    But although he believed that after death the soul lives on, he saw no reason to disagree with all those philosophers whom he cited as saying that soul is in some sense corporeal and allied to bodily functions:
    The soul certainly sympathizes with the body and shares in its pain whenever it is injured by bruises, and wounds, and sores; the body, too, suffers with the soul and is united with it whenever the soul is afflicted with anxiety, distress, or love, testifying to its shame and fears by its own blushes and paleness. The soul, therefore, is proved to be corporeal from this intercommunion of susceptibility. 23
    Like some of the Greek philosophers, he defined the mind as the thinking part of the soul, but as a Christian he disagreed with Democritus’s belief that the soul and the mind were the same thing:
    The mind or
animus
, which the Greeks designate
nous
, is taken by us to mean that faculty or apparatus inherent in the soul whereby it acts, acquires knowledge, and is capable of a spontaneity of motion … To exercise the senses is to suffer * emotion, because to suffer is to feel. In like manner, to acquire knowledge is to exercise the senses, and to undergo emotion is to exercise the senses; and the whole of this is a state of suffering. But we see that the soul experiences none of these unless the mind is also similarly affected … Democritus, however, suppresses all distinction between soul and mind, but how can the two be one?—only if we confuse two substances or eliminate one. We, however, assert that the mind coalesces with the soul, not being distinct from it in substance but being its natural function and agent. 24
    And on doctrinal grounds he revises Plato’s views on rationality and irrationality, since he cannot accept the latter as God’s handiwork:
    Plato divides the soul into two parts—the rational and the irrational. To this we take no exception, but we would not ascribe this twofold distinction to the nature of the soul…[For] if we ascribe the irrational element to the nature which our soul has received from God, then the irrational element will be derived from God… [But] from the devil proceeds the incentive to sin. All sin, however, is irrational: therefore the irrational proceeds from the