Augustine of Hippo: Father of Christian Psychology

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2006 by Charry, Ellen T

Classical Christianity is thoroughly psychological. Augustine was the first person to write psychologically by sharing his personal struggle to know, love, and enjoy God. He set up the framework wherein this struggle is the basic issue of human life from which all other struggles arise and into which they resolve. Augustine was the first theologian to articulate the ambiguity of love and the instability of desire. He believed that we are all spiritually ill but can be healed. Among four significant differences between Augustine's Christian psychology and modern secular psychology, the chief is Augustine's insight that there is no psychological problem that is not also a spiritual and moral problem. There are four texts in particular in which Augustine thinks as a psychotherapeutic teacher: "On Christian Teaching," "On Catechizing the Uninstructed," "On the Trinity," and the "Confessions."

Modern psychiatric care and modern secular psychology spawned modern psychiatry, which views as ill those people whose thinking and behavior are irrational and uncontrollable.1 Sigmund Freud was a physician, a neurologist; but most of his followers were not medically trained. This led to the separation of treatment for those with mental and behavioral problems into psychology-a new field of experimental research-and psychiatry, a medical specialty. At about the same time, the new field of social work was also forming and eventually was swept up into the new orientation.

When, in the 1940s, psychology and existentialism began their triumphal sweep across the modern mind, they challenged theology in a new way. The 1960s "death of God" movement added momentum. Christian pastors and theologians were quick to pick up the new wave, inventing pastoral theology, pastoral counseling, and pastoral care as additional elements of the theological school curriculum, while adding programs in clinical pastoral education and the like.2 Others turned up their noses at such accommodation to secular currents and proceeded as if nothing had happened.

Today there is growing recognition that the fit between theology and psychology is sometimes too smooth, so that theological content is quite absorbed into psychological notions. At other times it simply does not work. Even so, eschewing psychology has not been beneficial, for psychology has intellectualized faith. It is time to look again at theology s embrace of modern secular psychology. This essay is part of a reexamination of both strategies, absorption and rejection.

We begin by recalling that Christian theology, quite apart from modern secular psychology, is and always has been a psychological enterprise. There is a distinctly Christian psychology and has been for more than 1,500 years. From this vantage point, asking how theology and psychology relate to one another misses the point. The question is not-and never was-whether or how theology and psychology are to relate to one another. Ought they be integrated or remain in separate spheres, on analogy with the religion and science debate? That way of putting the question may work tor religion and science: science is a field outside of religion, and religion must determine how to face it. But this is not the case with theology and psychology. Theology is already psychological, quite apart from any question of its relation to the modem secular discipline.

Classical Christianity is thoroughly psychological because it is based on a biblically inspired understanding of the psyche, the self, the soul. In modern technical theological language, Christianity's reading of human nature is referred to as theological anthropology. It offers an analysis of the soul's strengths and weaknesses, and suggests means for strengthening, repairing, and cultivating the soul. This is to say that Christianity is fundamentally and thoroughly a therapeutic offering, once known as the cure of souls, perhaps today more gently put as the care of souls. The fact that my ministerial students have never heard either phrase indicates why it is so important to reopen a theological conversation about psychology. In the wake of the power of modern secular psychology, Christians, including or perhaps especially Christian theologians, have simply forgotten their own psychology. And so they have failed to tend to it for a very long time-more than 200 years, depending on where we date the beginning of modern secular psychology.

Let us he clear then that to converse about Christian psychology is not to inaugurate a conversation between two disciplines, theology and psychology, in order, for instance, to create a contemporary psychology studded with biblical verses or glossed with theological notions psychologically reconstrued. The structure of Christian psychology is already in place. Genesis 1:26-27, Genesis 3, and Romans 7 are among Western Christian psychology's foundational texts, showing that the human soul teeters between its identity in the divine image and its fallen reality, seeking repair, release, redemption. The task is not to construct but to reclaim this Christian psychology. And that includes correcting its weaknesses, augmenting its strengths, and applying its insights felicitously in language that is presently understandable. In my judgment, this could well be done in conversation with contemporary neurobiology, psychopharmacology, and experimental psychology, and it may be enriched by secular psychodynamic theory as long as its inspiration is properly and fundamentally theological.