People Don't Change: Psychoanalysis in the Medieval Era

Self-Help from the Middle Ages: What the Seven Deadly Sins Can Teach Us About Living by Peter Jones is a fascinating book. It combines the author's personal experiences and insights with context-based explanations of how medievals thought alongside a plethora of stories from the medieval era. Well-worth the read!

What I appreciated is that absent Freudian analysis, medieval people still thought about how people thought. Jones shows that the Seven Deadly Sins were a way for people of the era to discuss why and how people did certain things. The medievals weren't a bunch of ignoramuses  incapable of delving into the human experience simply because they lacked terms like "superego" and "id."

Jones writes, 

As priests and preachers now needed to get the public to confront the inner workings of their own minds, the sins emerged as an ideal tool. 

As with most classic Christian texts, the worst sins are those of alienation and disgust: Pride and Envy. The least terrible sins are physical, including Lust, which looks outward and could, potentially, lead towards something bigger and more constructive, such as love, affection, and commitment. 

The terms "alienation" and "constructive" are mine. However, these ideas suffuse medieval texts. Richard Newhauser in his essay "On Ambiguity in Moral Theology: When the Vices Masquerades as Virtues" makes similar points to Jones--medievals were fully capable of contemplating the inner workings of people's minds. They were furthermore capable of pinpointing that "ulterior" motives could be at work. 

Granted, some of the "sins masquerading as virtues" stuff was aimed at practices that the medieval Church disliked, such as people studying the scriptures in private, non-sanctioned meetings. 

But other examples from the time period are fairly sophisticated: the pious woman who claimed Christ spoke to her but truly only wanted attention; the man who claimed great concern for his neighbor's possessions--because he wanted them for himself; the supposedly "prudent" saver who was actually Scrooge McDuck (though naturally, medievals didn't use that term).

The worry over when one impulse turns into the other occupied the medieval mind (as it does modern people's minds) and religious leaders warned against that worry itself becoming a kind of idol.   

Huh! 

Human nature is truly not that different now than it was then.