Medieval psychology. Contributions of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas

Saint Augustine (354-430)

• Transitional figure

• Considered:

  • First thinker of the Middle Ages

• Lived during:

  • Fall of the Roman Empire

  • Beginning of the High Middle Ages

Intellectual contribution:

• First to systematically integrate Christianity with classical philosophy

• Strongly influenced by:

  • Plato

  • Roman intellectual tradition

• Roman who converted to Christianity

The fusion of Platonism and Christianity

Plato seemed the most suitable. He promoted a spiritualists vision of reality, believed in the immortality of the soul, placed goodness at the top of forms, and so on. For this reason, many sought a synthesis between Platonism and Christianity, which did not consist in reducing Christianity to Platonism, but in using some Platonic categories to explain Christian philosophy and theology.

Saint Augustine’s Contributions to psychology

• Converted Plato’s psyche into the Christian anima

• Soul = spiritual substance, created by God

• Integrated the Greek concept of the soul into Western Christian thought

• Identified love as the primary human motivator

• Developed ordo amoris (“order of love”)

• Famous principle: “Ama et fac quod vis” (“Love and do what you will”)

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

• his most substantial contribution to the history of philosophy is arguably the Christianisation of Aristotle.