The Psychology of Thomas Aquinas Having acknowledged the fuzziness of the boundaries between what we now recognize as the separate disciplines of religion, philosophy, and psychology, one must admit that Aquinas’s extensive writings nevertheless delved deeply into psychological subjects. The Scholastic movement, beginning in 1150 with Peter Lombard’s Four Volumes of Opinion—an effort to align human reason with the high value placed on faith during the papacy-dominated middle ages—did not reach fruition until Aquinas succeeded in systematically combining Artistotle’s metaphysics with Christian theology (Brennan, 2003). Aristotle’s view of the metaphysical unity of the body and soul was hylomorphic (the conceptual foundation of most of his theories,
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These unconscious evaluations, Thomas believed, guide us towards that which is pleasing to the soul. In this way, order and beauty act as an intermediate good on the journey of the individual through life on the way towards God (Thomas, 1912). However, such judgments may be based on flawed human understanding; apparent suitability or unsuitability is not enough. So in turn, reason must dominate over emotions in order to evaluate the truth of judgments made by the evaluative powers (Butera, …show more content…
Thoughts were internalized speech, retaining syntactic order and semantic coherence (Klima, 2014). He believed, too, in the formation of a moral character by its own patterns of action. Here is another way in which reason is essential to goodness—as the intellect and will evaluate the lower powers of cogitation and emotion, so we set a pattern of courage and virtuous action, or else a pattern of craven profligacy (McInery, 1997). Aquinas had, in short, developed an integrated philosophy of the human mind, which he applied minutely throughout a broad range of psychological subjects. Thomas’s psychology was oriented towards human knowledge, and, as such, contained two important elemental principles of learning. One elemental principle was that we are dependent on the external world to provide us with sensory input, and the other was that we are guided by the intelligent reason contained in the soul, which organizes and derives meaningful conclusions from our own sensations (J. Brennan,
These unconscious evaluations, Thomas believed, guide us towards that which is pleasing to the soul. In this way, order and beauty act as an intermediate good on the journey of the individual through life on the way towards God (Thomas, 1912). However, such judgments may be based on flawed human understanding; apparent suitability or unsuitability is not enough. So in turn, reason must dominate over emotions in order to evaluate the truth of judgments made by the evaluative powers (Butera, …show more content…
Thoughts were internalized speech, retaining syntactic order and semantic coherence (Klima, 2014). He believed, too, in the formation of a moral character by its own patterns of action. Here is another way in which reason is essential to goodness—as the intellect and will evaluate the lower powers of cogitation and emotion, so we set a pattern of courage and virtuous action, or else a pattern of craven profligacy (McInery, 1997). Aquinas had, in short, developed an integrated philosophy of the human mind, which he applied minutely throughout a broad range of psychological subjects. Thomas’s psychology was oriented towards human knowledge, and, as such, contained two important elemental principles of learning. One elemental principle was that we are dependent on the external world to provide us with sensory input, and the other was that we are guided by the intelligent reason contained in the soul, which organizes and derives meaningful conclusions from our own sensations (J. Brennan,