THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN SINS AND VIRTUES
WHY TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN SINS AND VIRTUES ARE RELEVANT TODAY
Most modern Americans react to the news that Christianity has lost its traditional sins with shouts of joy mixed with "good riddance" and "about time." This contempt has its origins in the widespread idea that Christianity is hopelessly unscientific and behind the times. The contempt may, however, be unjustified, because there is strong evidence supporting the opposite view: When it comes to morality, Christianity was well ahead of modern science.
1) Modern sociobiology and evolutionary psychology have concluded that humans are just animals with a brain that has an exceptional capability to do rational thinking.
2) Late medieval and early modern Christianities held the Bible’s “flesh” to denote the animal urges of the body. In the Creation, God gave the brain’s rational thinking total control of the body. In the fall, the body successfully revolted and took control of the brain. One effect of original sin was that all of Adam’s heirs, i.e., all humans, were now born with the body’s animal urges/flesh in full control of their emotions, thoughts and actions. Most Christian theologians in the late medieval and early modern periods thus held the same "an animal with a rational brain" view of (fallen) human nature that neo-Darwinists have laboriously and noisily rediscovered.
3) The assumption that the body’s animal urges were the root of most sins makes traditional Christian sins easy to understand: Old sins were what today are called the body’s evolution-developed, gene-coded behaviors. The most important and dangerous sins were pride and envy, which motivated Lucifer’s failed revolt against God and thus brought about the devil’s fall from heaven and sins entry into the world. Pride and envy look very much like the psychological and behavioral manifestations of the drive to dominate, which sociobiologists have found in almost all animals that live in groups. The deep root of pride is a desire to rise above others, to rule them and to be admired and praised by them. Envy also stems from a competitive urge, but in this case the competition manifests itself differently. The envious try to surpass others by tearing down those ahead of them. Anger/hate, gluttony and lechery are manifestations of the fighting, feeding and sexual drives respectively.
4) Many basic ideas of modern behavioral sciences have their roots in observations made by psychiatrists and psychologists. These two professions are not the first ones to have access to the inner processes of the human mind. Catholic confessors have had this same access for centuries. Traditional sins’ origin in the body’s gene-coded urges means that confessors searching for sins investigated what today is called gene-cognition interaction. Several centuries of research has already been done on the phenomenon that evolutionary psychologists are just beginning to study. The most important finding of the old research was that the body's evolution-developed, gene-coded behaviors (In theological terms, the flesh and its sins) produced effects, which were utterly destructive to the individual and the society.
5) The assumption that the body's innate urges are harmful implies that we should overcome those urges. According to the current paradigm of evolutionary psychology -- and of behavioral sciences in general -- this overcoming is not possible. Worse yet, too intense efforts to repress the body's innate behaviors will produce serious psychological problems, a neurosis. Intriguingly, the old Christian evolutionary psychology held a totally different view. The innate urges of the flesh/sins could be totally deactivated without any harmful side-effects. Whether this view is correct can be determined by research, because theologians described in great detail how the deactivation was accomplished.
6) The harmfulness of the innate urges also implies that overcoming them should produce beneficial effects. Historical evidence supports this prediction from theory. The strictest form of the ascetic, flesh/genes overcoming variant of Christianity spread to four areas: Calvinist Geneva, Calvinist Netherlands, Puritan England, and the Puritan colonies in America. These areas share a “constellation of experiences” that are rare in history: First there ensued a burst of religious fanaticism, which in the Netherlands and in England led to a civil war. This was followed by several centuries of stability, openness, tolerance, individual freedoms, representative political systems, scientific and technological progress, improving standards of living, remarkable political and economic success, and domestic peace - the U.S. civil war being the main exception to this last shared condition. The correlation between successful society and conservative Christianity is so strong as to suggest a causal connection
The hypothesized correlation between conservative Christian morality and success should also apply inside Catholicism. Historical evidence again supports the hypothesis. Arguably the strictest application of Christianity’s flesh/genes-overcoming morality in the Catholic countries took place in Northern Italy, where Cardinal Borromeo in the late sixteenth century enforced the Counterreformation with exceptional efficiency. It may be more than just coincidence that there still exists a sharp division inside Italy, and that, if it were a separate country, Northern Italy would have one of the highest living standards in the world.
6) The results of the old research on flesh/genes were published in confessors’ manuals, which were produced by the hundreds of thousands already before 1500. For reasons unknown, historians and theologians have overlooked this material. Almost no research has been done on the manuals and not a single one has been translated from Latin to English. The existence of this large cache of unused psychological research is surprising. A bibliometric analysis of the manuals' spread and influence can be found HERE.
7) Confessors used their “research findings” to build a logically coherent psychological system. The purpose of the research described on this site is to extract the old "Christian evolutionary psychology" and its supporting observational evidence from theology and to present the old system using today's terminology, so its validity can be tested using the methods of modern behavioral sciences.
8) A key theme of the old Christian psychology -- at least as that psychology was applied in early modern England -- was the conversion process, which noticeably weakened the body's sinful, animal-like urges, such as pride, and which internalized the Christian virtues opposed to the animal urges, such as humility. The conversion process seems to have come from the late medieval Scales of Perfection. This origin creates an intriguing, potentially very significant, and so far totally overlooked connection between Catholicism and Protestantism. In a very real sense, Protestantism was just the strictest sect of late medieval Catholicism.
The old psychology of sins and virtues will be described in several books. These will be available in the second half of 2024. The exact publication dates and links will be
posted here.
Christianity and Freedom: Religion's Effort to Overcome Human Body's Innate Drive to Dominate/Lust for Power Vols. 1 & 2. About 200 pages each volume. This two-volume book contains a summary of the traditional Christian psychology of sins, virtues, and the conversion process which deactivated sins and turned virtues into a person's instinctive nature.
In addition to the general survey, there will be 7 short, (about 80 pages) nuanced, fully source-evidence-supported and footnoted discussions of the most important details of the old Christian psychology of sins and virtues. The "specialist texts" are based on the most popular (as measured by the number of editions published) early modern English writers. However, the sins and virtues are the same as in Catholicism (at least some branches of Catholicism), because English Protestant theologians sourced their discussions of sins from Catholic confessors’ manuals. Currently the following are available (there may be more to come):
1) Psychology of the Fall and Its Original Sin: Traditional Christianity’s Version of the Primacy of Affect View of Human Nature. [This is a detailed description of the old Christian psychology.]
2) The Most Important Sins, Part 1: Pride and Some of Its Destructive Effects in Today’s America. [An in-depth look at the psychology of the sin of pride. This sin was thought to produce disastrous effects to people and societies, and the book describes examples of these effects in today’s everyday life.]
3) The Most Important Sins, Part 2: Envy, Hate/Anger, and Love.
4) Why Did the Strict, Unpleasant, Nature-Overcoming Variant of Christianity Spread? [A description of the harsh, fire and brimstone preaching of law, which breached people’s psychological defenses and forced them to notice their normally unconscious sins, such as pride, envy, and anger/hate.]
5) Discovering the Sins That Unconsciously Control You: How to do Traditional Christian Self-Analytic Meditation. [This book describes the introspective meditation, which produced full knowledge of sins’ previously unconscious influence. The book was written so it can be used as a manual.]
6) How the Touch of Grace Changes Human Nature: The Thoughts and Feelings of Truly Virtuous Christians.
7) How to Detect Hypocrisy in Yourself and in Others.
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