THE
PSYCHOLOGY OF TRADITIONAL CHRISTIAN SINS AND VIRTUES
Please, post comments, criticisms, and questions here.
For quite some time this site has been promising a detailed investigation of traditional Christian sins and virtues. The project turned out to be quite a bit longer than expected, among other things turning into five volumes. Fortunately, there is now finally light at the end of the tunnel, and the book(s) currently titled How Christianity Changed Human Nature should arrive in the coming months -- the specifics of publication will be posted here. The introductory sections of Main Volume 1 explain the origin, structure, and purpose of the project. The tables of contents provide a more detailed outline of the argument.
To whet appetites, I include my personal favorite short sections of the book: The description of old Christian humility; the "daydream analysis" method of discovering one's unconscious motivations; and insiders' descriptions of the Touch of Grace and the birth of the New Man. For those who want to see the original sources with their own eyes, there are links to Richard Baxter and two Catholic confessors' manuals often cited by English Protestants. Today's intense concern about racism necessitated including a short note showing how traditional Christian psychology was totally incommensurable with racism.
What did it mean to be humble in early modern England. When reading the tests, keep in mind that people who adhered to these moral norms were among the "Darwinistically most successful" known to history. I.e., these people beat just about everybody in the struggle for existence, because they created the British Empire. By 1500, England was Europe's broke backwater. By 1700, she was an empire at the forefront of economic, scientific, technological, and political (in terms of individual rights and freedoms) development. History and psychology seem to have mechanisms that could best be described as "counterintuitive, non-logical causalities."
The "daydream analysis" method of discovering one's (formerly) unconscious motivations. This method is totally superior to Freud's "dream analysis." Far simpler to use and produces results that are very easy to interpret.
Insiders' descriptions of the Toch of Grace and birth of the New Man. People who had gone through successful conversion could look back and see a drastic change in their personalities and behavior. Modern behavioral sciences do not accept the possibility that this kind of a thoroughgoing, permanent change in deep-seated human nature could happen. Yet, the old observational evidence is quite overwhelming. Note how Preston explicitly compares the effect of the Touch of Grace to God putting a new instinctive nature into the person.
FOR READERS INTERESTED IN ORIGINAL SOURCES:
Measured by the number of published editions, Richard Baxter (1615-1691) was the most influential theologian in 17th-century England. His books sold 301 known editions, i.e., somewhere between 450,000 and 900,000 copies between 1650 and 1700. This influence made it natural to use Baxter as the main source in reconstructing the old “Christian evolutionary psychology.” In 1830, William Orme published a 23-volume collection of Baxter's writings on practical theology. As the footnote citations show, Orme's collected edition has been used as the source on Baxter's writings. Thanks to Google's interest in digitizing old books, Orme's 1830 edition is now freely available on the net -- link below. Orme did an exceptionally careful work on editing, because the end of volume 23 contains an excellent index. Combined with the pages it references, this index provides the best Encyclopedia of Puritan Theology and Psychology that I know of. See especially the section on the conversion process, pp. 496 ff. and the sections on "Holiness" and "Hypocrisy" on pp. 514-519. (Note an error in digitizing: The page numbers in the index refer to various volumes in the series. Not to the last volume where the links lead.) LINK
Finding in late medieval and early modern theological writings a highly psychological form of Christianity is not surprising, because in the late fifteenth century confession spread widely. This spread created an intriguing historical parallel, because many core ideas of modern behavioral sciences are based on observations made by psychiatrists and psychotherapists. Catholic confessors have had this same ability to investigate the inner processes of the mind since the 12th century. The similarities do not end there, because modern scientists spread their discoveries by publishing them in specialist periodicals. Confessors published their “research results” in confessors’ manuals, which were printed by the hundreds of thousand already in the late 15th century, immediately after the discovery of printing. Puzzlingly, almost no research has been done on the manuals, and not a single one has been translated from Latin to English. Making the psychology contained in these manuals available to modern readers is an urgent task. Readers interested in original sources are invited to browse the two manuals that were cited by English Protestants: Martinio Azpilcueta (Doctore Navarro), Enchiridion Sive Manuale Confessiorum et Poenitentium, and Guilelmus Peraldus, Summa de Vitiis
