The Psychology of the Incarnation in Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-Century Theology

The overall theme of my study concerns the thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century academic discussions about the incarnation from the point of view medieval philosophical psychology. This study will especially explore the following questions: what themes were included in the discussions about knowledge, will, and passions in Christ’s human nature, what the main psychological ideas employed in the psychology of the incarnation were, and whether the teachings about Christ’s human soul were derived from psychology as a discipline of natural philosophy. The method of this study is a systematic analysis of the psychological conceptions. This includes the historical and philosophical construction of psychological ideas in these discussions about Christ’s human soul. The most important sources of this study are commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sentences. The sources of this study are composed, for example, by Alexander of Hales and other early Franciscan theologians, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Peter of Tarentaise, Richard Middleton, John Duns Scotus, William Ockham, Peter Auriol, Walter Chatton, Durand of St. Pourçain and Peter of Palude. As theologians studied the knowledge, will and passions of Christ separately, this study is also divided into a corresponding set of three chapters. In the first chapter, I examine the discussion about the knowledge of Christ. The main questions are what kind of knowledge the human Christ had and whether his soul knew everything that God knows. In the second chapter, I study the discussion about Christ’s will and ask what kind of human wills Christ had and how these wills were related to each other. In the third chapter, I turn to a study of the passions of Christ. I ask how Christ’s human soul was passible, what passions he had and how he was simultaneously able to have pain, sadness and joy. My study proves that some emphases in the discussions about the psychology of the incarnation indicate that the early Franciscan theologians and Aquinas established two traditions about the application of psychology to Christology; while the Franciscan theologians usually followed the Franciscan tradition, the Dominican theologians usually followed the Thomistic tradition. However, the study also shows that the traditions were not unequivocal in terms of their flexibility on all questions, since not all Franciscan theologians followed the Franciscan tradition and not all Dominicans followed the Thomistic tradition. In addition, this study shows that in the discussions about the knowledge, will and passion of Christ, theologians applied various ideas from psychology as a branch of natural philosophy in developing their views about theological matters, but Christological views also influenced the philosophical thought of some theologians.