Taming anger's daughters: new treatment for emotional problems in Renaissance Spain.

Few theological issues troubled Church fathers more deeply than the question of whether the source of sin lay in the body or in the soul. Early desert monks like Anthony and John Climacus seemed to suspect that it was the flesh that initially disturbed the soul's serenity, compelling the will to consent in evil.(1) For this reason they had taken flight from the sensual world of the city to the bleak environment of the heath, avoiding in particular the sight of women who might provoke spontaneous swellings of passion to the temples of their minds. For this reason as well Tertullian encouraged all Christians to engage from time to time in prolonged fasting, in this manner preventing the clarity of their minds from becoming dimmed with the digested heat of earthly matter.(2) The issue concerning the source of temptation was synecdochically illustrated, in the middle ages, by the so-called "cardinal sins" the root vices from which all other human vices were thought to spring.(3) Gluttony and lust, two of the most universally compelling of vices, were believed to surface immediately from the body's instincts to indulge physiological interests of survival and procreation. The five other cardinal sins, identified as anger, sloth, pride, envy, and greed, were regarded as "spiritual" problems connected in some manner to the soul and its ability to contemplate, to wish, and to desire. On the matter of the original impulse behind these vices, however, enormous controversy prevailed. It was admitted by John Cassian (d. 435), the earliest medieval classifier of vice, that with the exception of greed, "all the rest of the incitements to sin planted in human nature seem to have their commencement as it were congenital with us, and are somehow deeply rooted in our flesh, and are almost coeval with our birth."(4) In particular, Cassian described anger, the tendency we have to break out into screaming fits of rage and even physical violence, as a "poison of the heart" that "seems to have its seed plot within us... blinding with its hurtful darkness the eye of the soul."(5) The cardiac state of anger was presented in the dramatic and visual arts of the middle ages bearing its own set of attributes. Indignation, quarreling, swelled head, contumely, clamor, and blasphemy served to warn people, allegorically, of the characteristic appearances of their own uncomely moods.(6) These "daughters of wrath," as they were called by Gregory the Great,(7) were mostly verbal in nature and might present themselves at any moment in the life of our species. They were advocates of personal pleasure and survival, appearing impulsively and often irrationally in the face of perceived threats and affronts to self-esteem. For this reason they were called the appetitus vindictae of humankind.(8)

The strategies employed by western society to discipline the appetites, those "lower" passions that clouded the mind, have varied widely across the ages. Not only does the study of these strategies of control provide useful insight into the development of the science of psychology, it assists understanding of the historical evolution of our emotional dispositions. The various ways in which societies of the past have harnessed the passions, and which passions they have chosen to identify as particularly harmful and inappropriate, or helpful and desirable, relate to critical questions concerning the condition of being human. Are we born with certain undeniable and often profoundly positive drives like hunger ("gluttony" in its excessive form), eroticism ("lasciviousness" in its asocial form), pride, and anger, or have these drives transformed across the centuries, amenable to the dictates of culture? To what degree has culture manipulated or even created our emotional lives? If we grant that ecclesiastics of the past held the power to isolate and define from a potentially infinite range of human moods and behavior a handful of "vices" (as well as "virtues") for contemplation,(9) we must ask how medieval people played out - or as Judith Butler articulates the problem of identity, "performed" - the categories imposed upon them.(10)

Recent historical literature has been solicitous in pointing out that among the early monastic orders of the fourth to the eleventh centuries, regimens to tame the passions were employed that directly impinged upon the human physiological system.(11) Permanent abstinence in cloistered convents under strict vows of poverty and obedience, and regulated periods of manual labor, fasting, sleep deprivation, hairshirts, and flagellation were defining characteristics of the holy life. In this "Christian technology of the flesh" - as Michel Foucault has called medieval asceticism - the body's appetites and pleasures were the focus of an organized set of exercises designed to subdue sensorial arousal and attain a state of chastened equilibrium, and even, at times, pain and distress.(12)

Not until the twelfth century did scholars of the church begin seriously to reconsider, in a fashion that would radically transform the social role of the ecclesiastical estate, the specifically psychic dimensions of human passion. In a book remarkable for the impact that it would have in university curricula, Peter Abelard's Know Thyself [Scito te ipsum] all but wiped clear from the body its stain of sin and corruption, declaring that carnal passions are in themselves morally neutral and are "by no means to be called sin." Evil lies elsewhere, he pointed out, in the soul's acquiescence to bodily demands. Abelard's theological dualism in fact precisely inverted the dualism of early church fathers in affirming that "it is only the consent of the will that is damnable."(13) As the burden of guilt for sin thus transferred from the flesh to the faculties of the mind, the formulation of medieval ethics became deeply concerned with Aristotelian descriptions of the mental processes. Much of the moral literature after the twelfth century is in fact devoted to applying classical psychology to traditional Christian categories of the cardinal vices in order to ascertain how lower bodily appetites might engage the rational powers of the mind. In the eyes of late-medieval penitential law, the more willful and controlled the performance of immoral acts, the more gravely was it to be regarded.

The new emphasis on the mind's participation in sin transformed the medieval "technology of the flesh" from one of ascetic mortification and abstinence to one of concerted mental reflection. Clerics developed the art of introspection to a degree unknown in the classical world, attempting to apprehend the precise organic and meditative processes accompanying undesirable passions in their lives. Protected by "reason" and "will-power" - their new-found means of self-control - mendicant orders of Franciscan and Dominican friars gave up the old reclusive ways to participate in active discussion with the lay population in order to assist in the process of psychic decipherment. Together they began, as Michel Foucault has related, "the nearly infinite task of telling - telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts" involving body and soul.(14) When, in 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council obligated all Christians to confess their sins once a year to trained priests, a new discursive "technology of the flesh" succeeded in structuring consciousness according to the codes of sacramental penance.(15) Examination, confession, absolution, and satisfaction of sin became part of the individual's self-understanding, part of the "civilizing process" that was at work to instill habits of personal reflection and criticism.(16) Properly ritualized confessions to priests involved reconstructing circumstances, articulating motives, and experiencing punishments commensurate with the gravity of particular offenses. More profoundly, it was in the habit of confession that individuals generated meaning concerning their emotional identities.(17)

In the proliferating discourse surrounding the hermeneutics of desire, moral authorities of the confessional age developed theoretical models of the mind that would help them distinguish between voluntary and impulsive acts. Their notions of the soul, compiled in a magnificent corpus of psychological study, the "De Anima" treatises and commentaries of such renowned scholars as Isaac de Stella, Albertus Magnus, Petrus Hispanus, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Juan Luis Vives, rivaled in many ways the modern system of analysis offered by Sigmund Freud.(18) If Freud's great contribution to our understanding of the human mind was to call attention to the play of its "unconscious" as well as its "conscious" motivations,(19) Christian theologians of the middle ages conceived their own ways of identifying and explaining the hidden, conflicting, and often irrepressible aspects of mental life. At a basic theoretical level, it must be emphasized, they did not conceive of the soul as a single monolithic entity whose contents were co-extensive with "consciousness," as many post-Freudian theorists have assumed about the history of psychology.(20) By the late middle ages, scholastic theology had already recognized a variety of "unintentional" or "irascible" impulses motivating human behavior, and confessors were using this understanding formally to examine the consciences of their penitents.

It was in this context that the late middle ages witnessed a remarkable transformation in the diagnosis and treatment of problems with anger. Considered one of the most widespread and habitual vices, wrath in its various verbal manifestations of quarreling, clamoring, contumely, and blasphemy was said to be the most common reaction to "life's inevitable disappointment and hardship."(21) For many centuries the Catholic church had regarded expressions of outrage directed against the sacred order of things as "most serious sins" that demonstrated "rejection of divine love" and "unwillingness to accept the intention of divine providence."(22) For these reasons, public instances of sacrilegious violence were punished severely with both corporal pain and social shaming. Indeed, irreverent tongues were literally silenced with piercing and cutting by the flesh-impugning legal system of the early church.(23)

As more and more clerics trained in sacramental penance focused on intent rather than action in sin, they began reassessing traditional judgments about the seriousness of angry outbursts by exonerating "unintentional" assaults upon religion. Leniency had been recommended by no less an authority than Thomas Aquinas, who observed in the Summa Theologica that it was in fact possible to be oblivious of one's own expressions of speech in a state of anger. "Blasphemy may occur unawares and without deliberation," Aquinas affirmed, "when we are so suddenly provoked by passion that we express the thoughts of our imagination, without heeding to the meaning of the words." On these occasions, Aquinas declared, the utterance constitutes a venial sin because it did not involve rational choice. Blasphemy is only a mortal sin, he stated, "when a person is aware of the significance of the words and knows for certain that they are sacrilegious."(24)

The Thomist view that emotional distress might prevent cognitive apprehension of speech was incorporated by the fourteenth century into penitential guides used by monastic friars and parish priests in counseling the laity. In Spain, the widely disseminated confessional manual of the Castilian curate Guido de Monte Rocherii, for example, posited that blasphemy was a serious offense against religion if it derived from "a desire to obtain revenge," but a pardonable offense if "such desire preceded rational thought."(25) In a similar fashion, Antoninus of Florences's Defecerunt considered irreverent expressions "mortal" sins deserving of eternal punishment when they were "uttered deliberately," and "venial" sins meriting temporary punishment when they were uttered "without reason in a state of anger."(26) The premature nature of blasphemous ejaculations was stressed as well by Melchor Cano in his popular manual of conduct, Victory Over Oneself. Guilt for the "vice of anger" is lessened, the Castilian moralist wrote, under two circumstances. The first "is when the anger that we feel for another is impulsive (liviano), like grabbing at the hair of some young child who has irritated us." The second, related instance, "is when the angry gesture is so sudden that we cannot easily contain it."(27)

In other vernacular guides written for the public, it was common to distinguish serious from venial cases of wrath by evaluating whether or not the expressions "came from the heart" - a metaphor for true desire that has remained even today in the languages of the west. We read in Spanish, for instance, in Martin de Azpilcueta's Confessor's Manual, that "it is a mortal sin to utter damnation upon any creature of God if it comes from the heart." But "if we say something like 'may the devil take you,' aloud and without heartfelt consent," then we commit only a venial offense.(28) Luis de Granada stipulates in his Sinner's Guide that while a modest display of anger toward others is necessary in certain circumstances to maintain public order, and that social superiors in particular are allowed to punish others with either harsh words or deeds, this must not "unleash the wrath of the heart."(29)

There remains, in these conscience-forming manuals of late-medieval Spain, some of the legalistic concern over the formal content of contumelious outcries that characterized early-medieval penitential guides and inquisitorial manuals. Luis de Granada said that one should not, under any circumstances, "call people 'dogs' or 'Moors,'" and Azpilcueta, for all his attention to the subjective nature of sin, exonerated people regardless of their intentions if they cursed "irrational creatures like donkeys, mares, and oxen" which "farmers and muleteers do so frequently." Azpilcueta is lenient also with those who curse "objects that have no sensation such as wind and water, heat, cold, stone, dust, and sand."(30) Presumably, this allowance was made because these "inferior" things, having no immortal souls, could not be hurt by human fancies of eternal damnation.

In general, however, late-medieval penitential literature, both in its priestly Latin language and in its popular Castilian, focused closely on conscious intent in assessing the gravity of vituperative outbursts. Not every act of speech involved rational thought. In the oral metaphor so often employed by church scholars to describe their abstract models of human cognition, many different "modes of utterance" could be heard. The intellect was but one voice, and not always the dominant voice, in the soul's ensemble. There was also the imagination, and the passions of the heart, making their way out of the soul. On this point the Renaissance's most authoritative theoretician of the human psyche, Juan Luis Vives, stated that "the voices of man are expressions that spring from the whole soul, from the imagination and from affections, from the intelligence and from the will."(31) In the opinion of this Valencian humanist, language does not emerge exclusively from the high range of human reason, but from several different sections of the symphonic soul. What Vives said specifically about "the voice of blasphemy" is interesting in this regard, for instead of tracing its source to the imagination, as did Aquinas, or to the passions, as did many other analysts of the soul, he established its font in human instinct. "As to those parts of speech that grammarians call interjecciones," he wrote, "they draw directly from the instincts, as do the sounds made by animals."(32) In making this claim, Vives was tying blasphemy to the most distant flesh-lined boundaries of the scholastic soul, to the place where man's psychic nature merged with biological nature, in congenital and compulsive collusion.

Vives's notion of the primal nature of wrathful outcries was shared in part by nearly all his Spanish colleagues, who admitted that every psychic state, especially the state of anger, was conditioned by the organic body. Clearly these Christian writers of the Renaissance were heirs of the Greek tradition that drew a firm and incontrovertible connection between body and soul in the life of humanity. From Aristotle they had read that the psychological state of anger was stimulated by "a boiling of the blood or warm substance around the heart."(33) From the Galenic medical tradition they understood the combustion-like character of wrath as a surfeit of the blood's choleric humor accumulating around the heart, the same organ that poets identified as the seat of desire and passion.(34) The image of fire was also frequently employed to describe anger in the literature of the Renaissance, expressing immediate recognition of the extraordinarily corporeal nature of this particular psychic condition. The sixteenth-century Aristotelian philosopher and mathematician from the University of Alcala, Pedro Ciruelo, warned of the harmful effects of bad temper by comparing an angry person to a wood-burning oven that hisses and rattles furiously from raging fire.(35) His Dominican colleague Melchor Cano chose the metaphor of a wax candle to convince readers of the shamefully primitive power of passion, suggesting that "in the state of anger it is as if a man's own face suddenly bursts into flames." Cano wrote that "like wax, the facial features slowly turn yellow, become contorted, and melt away." "The tongue," he concluded, "is then sapped of all its juice and becomes mute."(36) Acts of rage like blasphemy therefore could not easily be suppressed unless one gained control over the specific physiological mechanisms that accompanied the soul's appetitus vindictae. The great challenge was to reflect upon the moral implications of myriad feelings while blood was pulsating through the body, driving venomous words through the mouth before they were even registered in the brain.

Among Spanish moralists of the sixteenth century, there were some who agreed with the Stoics of earlier ages that the best means of controlling the base passions was to call upon the superior mental power of reason.(37) Consistent with their classical understanding of hierarchy among the mind's faculties, they took the position that reason was the single most reliable force with which to avert undesirable emotions like anger. Spain's most widely-read moralists, the Dominican preachers Luis de Granada and Melchor Cano, suggested in their devotional manuals that anger might be subdued through critical reflection and the cultivation of patience during adversity. They proposed that in many instances this tranquility could be achieved by taking a moment's pause before responding to stress. As a preliminary strategy, Luis de Granada recommended that one recite the Pater Noster or the Ave Maria, giving the rational faculty of the mind an opportunity to become aware of the burgeoning power of rage.(38) Cano stated simply that "the cure for this vice is a persevering prayer in the presence of God."(39)

At a second and only slightly more profound level, they advised that impulses of anger, even quick verbal gestures like "!reniego a Dios!" or "de la crisma" be averted with the simple reminder that every event in our lives, including one that inspires outrage, is brought on by God. "Remember," said Luis de Granada, "that God has his own reasons, and ours is not to ask why."(40) Cano wrote that we should regard every challenge that life offers as "either punishment for misdeeds of the past, or instruments to make us more humble in the present or to strengthen us in the future."(41) The school master Alexo Venegas (d. 1554), trained in ancient literature and moral philosophy at the University of Toledo, added with caution that it would be wise for sanguine people who are especially vulnerable to fits of rage to rely on reminders of this sort from fellow companions.(42)

Undoubtedly the Spanish writer who was most confident about the therapeutic power of human reason was Miguel Sabuco de Nantes, a classical scholar as well as a physician. In a treatise called A Discussion about Self-Understanding (1587),(43) Sabuco wrote that one of the most effective and yet most neglected remedies against anger was the use of "wise words and counsels of the soul." As an example, he suggested that in stressful situations, it might be useful to reflect back upon one's anger, and say "yes, I know you, you evil beast, and your deeds and the dangers you pose to me" but "I do not want to give myself over to you, as do simple people who cannot anticipate your movement. I would rather suffer through this minor problem, which could have been even greater, than lose everything, my life and all."

Sabuco called this process of discursive reasoning "rhetorical insinuation" became it derived, he said, from the power of words to persuade the will. And he acknowledged that if one's own words fail sufficiently to contravene anger, another person - a close acquaintance or a personal physician - might step in and take over the part of one's ineffective conscience, persuading the enraged soul to patience. In a demonstration of this model of "rhetorical insinuation," Sabuco set up the situation in which a well-meaning counselor begins to subdue an enraged soul by humoring the aggrieved condition. This is accomplished, he specified, "by expressing indignation over the harm that was done, saying something like 'the patience you have surprises me, I couldn't endure this.'" Then, having secured the angry soul's confidence by sharing in the sense of affliction, the friendly voice becomes more subdued and cautions delay before response is taken: "'Look, don't do anything without me tomorrow,' or 'here, at such and such an hour, we will go and get our revenge.'" After this sort of indulgent conversation goes on for a while, the voice becomes more stern and drops a note lower: "Now, my friend, let's consider the outcome of our angry actions, because those who ignore the end result do not make use of human reason." Whispering that while one of any number of vengeful strategies might be pleasant, in the end "it would be wisest simply to ignore the affront. Even greater problems might result from retaliatory action," says the voice of reason, "and this would be to conquer ourselves rather than our enemies." Sabuco claimed that this colloquy of logic worked marvellously well, for he had applied it many times. "It was," he said optimistically, "like brushing away anger with the hand."(44)

Sabuco was operating under a Platonic anthropology that endowed the rational faculty - "that divine member located in the head" - a unique and infallible position within the human soul. For him the rational faculty was the seat of all cognitive functions dealing with memory and recall, with comprehension, logical reasoning, and voluntary thought, the fundamental intellectual skills constituting humankind's superiority over other natural creatures.(45) Indeed, within the classical psychology that Sabuco inherited, the rational faculty was endowed with the same imperative that psychoanalysis attributes to the "ego" in ensuring our survival as a species. "With the understanding," Sabuco wrote, "we apprehend and make sense out of the dangers and evils that confront us in our present lives. With memory we recall the dangers and evils of the past, and with reason and prudence we anticipate and fear dangers and evils in the future." Sabuco subordinated to these crucial cognitive virtues all other psychic powers, including the passions, for it was only under the influence of reason, he held, "that we learn to love and to desire, to fear and to hate, to harbor hope and despair, to experience joy and pleasure, anger, grief, care, and anxiety." As a result of the overarching demands of rational reflection in our mental lives, Sabuco determined, "we are the only creatures on earth to experience the specifically 'spiritual' troubles of anxiety about the present, remorse about the past, fear, concern, and dread about the future."

In Sabuco's classical psychology, therefore, reason is not only humankind's special gift but also its greatest curse. Intellectual reflection and the anxiety it produces pose at times serious challenges, he acknowledged, to human health and well-being. "At the very least," Sabuco indicated, "it can create a flood of bad humors through the blood that results in bodily illness," and "at its most extreme, it can lead to thoughts of suicide." The desire actually to kill the body in order to eliminate psychological distress, itself a product of logical contemplation, was a temptation that constituted part of humankind's rational destiny; this was also why, Sabuco thought, instances of suicide were not found among the lower animals.(46) As physician and moral philosopher, Sabuco resigned himself to trying to overcome the ailments inherent in human existence through intensified self-reflection and rational vigilance.

For Sabuco, "the disease called man" was a disease peculiar to the rational faculty of the mind, but there were other moralists in Spain, inheritors of the same faculty psychology, who granted reason a more limited role. Vives was perhaps the most important and radical theoretician in this regard, the first scholar, it has been said, to definitively challenge reason's preeminent position among the soul' faculties.(47) His treatise On the Soul (1538), a wide-ranging examination of human physiological and emotional processes, argued that the soul does not, fundamentally, speak and act out of rational motivations, but out of desire and love - the same forces that Freud selected centuries later to describe what he considered to be the basic impulse in psychic life. Like Freud, Vives embraced the notion of amore or eros as a positive force in the life of the human species, the psychic spark to which bodily energies are normally directed. As he saw it, we all begin at birth "by mastering the material of the senses." Only later do "we advance to the imagination and fantasy, and from there we move to reason and reflection, and onward to love, which is the final stage."(48) In Vives's Renaissance lexicon, amore designated "an appetite," a "sentiment," or a "temperament" that actively sought goodness and pleasure and rejected pain. In this capacity it differed substantially from the non-corporeal rational drive that had been upheld by the Stoics as the highest expression of the human psyche. Emerging not from the contemplative side of the mind but from its emotional nature, amore was particularly vulnerable to irrational forces like pride, jealousy, and infatuation, as well as to purely physiological impulses like hunger and concupiscence. Amore was, therefore, not only the most worthy condition of human existence in its pure form of selfless caritas and affection, it was also, in Vives's mind, the source of humankind's greatest weakness, in the hedonism that Christianity posited as the original sin.

In tying the essence of life to a psychic force much closer to the sentient body than to reason, Vives effectively broadened the evaluation of human behavior from purely intentional acts (and therefore moral phenomena), to include consideration of its unconscious emotional and physiological dimensions. It was in fact recognition of the bodily and libidinal components of the quintessential form of human behavior - language, formatively articulated by Aquinas and shared by most late medieval penitential authors - that allowed confessors of the scholastic system to assess blasphemy as an unintentional speech ejaculation, and to move beyond the archaic idea that verbal profanities were indications of the soul's heretical proclivities. Blasphemy in the moral literature of the Renaissance came to be regarded for the first time in church history as sensual speech, speech related not to people's rational and volitional powers, but to their imaginative capacities, their passionate nature, and their physiological humors.

The Renaissance re-evaluation of the nature of human motivations elicited not only a more nuanced and generally more lenient attitude toward irreverent speech than was apparent in earlier medieval moral guides; it also stimulated more diverse and sensitive approaches to the problem of controlling impulsive acts of rage. Among moralists in Spain, a special significance was attributed to the advice of Plutarch, whose treatise On Anger emerged as one of the country's most widely-circulated conduct guides from the ancient world.(49) In this treatise, Plutarch discussed the position of Hieronymous of Rhodes, a peripatetic philosopher of the third century B.C., who tried to explain the futility of attempts to suppress anger with rational reflection. Hieronymous articulated the point that we can have no perception of anger "as it is coming into being, but only when it has already come into being and exists, because of the swiftness with which it acts." Indeed all human emotion, Hieronymous argued, is difficult to recognize in its inception, so quickly does it emerge from the soul, so that reason always arrives as a tardy and unreliable guardian. It was Hieronymous's position that the only truly effective remedy against undesirable passions like anger was the cultivation of a tranquil emotional disposition that would prevent these baser passions from ever surfacing. If we can believe the testimony of Plutarch on this matter, Socrates himself valued this kind of emotional discipline more highly than that of rational therapy. In the midst of stress, Plutarch wrote, Socrates would strenuously maintain a mood and a bodily composure of calm serenity and relaxation. He would lower his voice, cause a smile to spread over his face, and make the expression of his eyes more gentle, preserving himself from fault and defeat "by setting up within himself an influence to counteract passion."(50)

The idea that one can counter a bad mood only with another mood seeps through the writings of other classical philosophers read in Spain during the Renaissance, despite all the overt claims for the primacy of reason. Even Aristotle was compelled to grant recognition to the persistent demands of passion in several of his treatises, admitting in his work On Memory, for instance, that although people firmly resolve to control the emotions through the will, they find themselves again and again victimized by their involuntary inclinations, "humming the forbidden air or using the prohibited word."(51) More substantially, in his authoritative and widely-read manual on the art of persuasion, the Rhetoric, he focused painstaking attention on the emotions of public audiences, for these, he affirmed, are what "truly affect their judgments."(52)

Through careful selection of ancient Greek treatises such as these, Renaissance scholars rearranged the hierarchy of drives in traditional systematizations of the soul. Vives criticized both Plato and Aristotle for dealing with the emotions in most of their writings as purely moral phenomena conformable to the dictates of the will, asserting instead that the affections could only be controlled by other affections. As acts of the natural faculties of the soul, he suggested, the emotions are more properly considered within the realm of psychology than of ethics.(53)

Vives's critique against the primacy of reason marked the profound transformation that had taken place not only between Renaissance scholars and their classical heritage, but between Renaissance scholars and the entire medieval intellectual community. Prior to this time, as we have seen, anger, like other human passions of envy, avarice, sloth, gluttony, and lust, had been regarded by church authorities as inherently immoral, and for this reason condemned as "deadly sins." Vives and his other colleagues in moral theology were now examining problems of passion in a fashion that was more discriminating than that of earlier fathers of the church, acknowledging that the moral subject, the subject of rational reflection, is always a step away from immediate apprehension of the world, which is really first achieved through the bodily senses, through passion, and through the imagination.

In the end it must be surmised that anger constituted just one of many behavioral problems that were re-evaluated by moral philosophers of the Renaissance. By Vives's time in the early sixteenth century, confessors operating within the penitential system no longer regarded cases of blasphemy exclusively as mortal sins; they were trained to evaluate irreverent conduct on a graduated scale of moral severity, depending on the degree to which consent was involved.(54)

To accommodate the new pastoral, therapy changed along with diagnosis. Only judges of the state and inquisitors of the Holy Office continued to prescribe tongue-mutilation as a plausible remedy for disrespectful speech. Physicians and priests within the confessional were prescribing a variety of emotional and physical as well as rational forms of treatment for lay people seeking relief from slippery tongues. In this regard, Vives, who acknowledged more readily than most of his colleagues the biological components of anger, recommended "refreshing the bile with food, drink, baths, sleep, and clean air." By moving into the realm of what can only be called "mood" therapy, he suggested as well that an acceptable form of relief for excessive wrath was "contemplation of pleasant landscapes."(55)

Music was also cited in the spiritual literature of the Renaissance as an effective cure for anger. Luis de Granada indicated in the Spiritual Ladder that "the mild melody of the Psalms" had the potential of soothing away anger.(56) Even Sabuco, that indefatigable proponent of "rhetorical insinuation," joined forces with other moral psychologists to admit that song and dance, especially the "small bite of the tarantela," might be marvellous cures for rage. He also recommended a number of purely physical forms of therapy against anger, like "gargling with a mixture of cold water and white vinegar, drinking the juice of sour things, or abstaining from food and drink entirely until the spell is over." More benign cures for the soul's bad temper, he added, were "smelling sweet things, spending time in conversation with good friends, and relaxing among the pleasant sounds of rustling trees and running water in the country."(57)

Perhaps the single most common cure for anger recommended in the moral literature of sixteenth-century Spain was one that was directed specifically to the faculty of the imagination. People in anger were asked to focus their attention on the image of the crucifixion. Melchor Cano wrote, for example, that "if you have a coleric disposition and disdainful words drop from your lips on every occasion, I beg you to keep your eyes on the figure of God's son . . . who endured so many unjust injuries without expressing rancor."(58) The most popular Spanish book of the entire sixteenth century, Luis de Granada's Book of Prayer, which ran through more than twice the editions of any other piece of literature, either fiction or non-fiction, called for a similar strategy of meditation that circumvented reason. "If you are tempted by carnal thoughts," he advised, "hide them in the holes of the stones, that is, in the flesh wounds of the crucified Christ; and if you are trying to combat feelings of anger and revenge, try to think of Christ's patience and sweetness."(59)

It is a commentary on the degree to which Christian theology had come to recognize the passionate demands of the body that it erected as its preeminent meditational object the torn and bleeding flesh of Christ. On the cross, in Christ's frail torso and facial features of sorrow, people were told that they would find a cure for emotional problems like rage. This visual iconography of a man in the prime of life, whose body demonstrated from every angle the sentient nature of human passion, was being called upon to facilitate the moral challenge of imitatio christi, of making one's own disposition conform to that of Christ. Never before had western culture relied quite so much on the psychological power of imagery to alter the public's way of thinking and sensing, to break through the stubbornness of the senses, and to effect a transformation in mood.(60) It was during the Renaissance, when the charms of the printing press put devotional manuals in the hands of the literate, and the artistic talents of countless sculptors and painters set about to enhance the realism of Christ's martyred body, that visual images of the crucifixion began to absorb the weight of human emotion.(61) For the first time in the history of polyphonic music as well, the figure of the suffering Christ came to occupy the most significant place in text repertories as passion rooters played themes of despair and contrition for the comfort of mourners throughout the liturgical year? During the baroque age, pastoral indulgence of the affective states of mind achieved its most widespread public forum in the Counter-Reformation churches' cultivation of imagery, theater, and rhetoric for moral purposes.

The difference between traditional Stoic forms of moral discipline and the disciplinary measures of the Renaissance church marked an enormous change in perspective concerning behavioral psychology. While Stoicism sought to conquer the body's passionate elements through self-conscious reflection and emotional detachment, Christian penitential morality called for a thorough saturation of bodily senses through vicarious participation in Christ's passion on the cross. In psychoanalytic terms, Stoic therapy relied on the "sublimation" of bodily instincts into the logic of pure reason, while penitential therapy invited the "transference" of passionate impulses through meditation on the wounded body of Christ. Stoicism effected its cures, in other words, through conquest and repression, while Renaissance Christianity cured through a sympathetic exchange of suffering between patients and their imagined redeemer on the cross.

This transformation in therapy calls us to reassess the notion that the psychological premise of religion has been one of flight from the body.(63) What the prolonged struggle of Christianity with "sin" demonstrates, particularly during the key period of development in moral theology during the Renaissance, is a growing appreciation for the sensual nature of human behavior. Both the body's uncontrollable urges and its healing potential were being accorded deep respect by moralists in their efforts to discipline social behavior. In handling private cases of verbal invective, confessors were forced to acknowledge what penitents themselves tried to explain, that language was a mode of indulgent self-expression, frequently playful in nature and designed at times to ease pain and recover eros, or self-respect, for the disturbed soul.(64) The psychopathology of wrath revealed to these heirs of antique rationalism that the life of the mind was sensuous and erotic and that it could only be tamed through obedient regard for the demands of the body.

HOBART AND WILLIAM SMITH COLLEGES 

1 Climacus, 169, remarked that "it is truly astounding how the incorporeal mind can be defiled and darkened by the body. Equally astonishing is the fact that the immaterial spirit can be purified and refined by day" - by which he means that material things are capable of cleansing as well as polluting the soul. On Anthony's attitude toward the body, see Anthony, 9; and Athanasius, 58. Further evidence for the scorn heaped on the body by the desert fathers is collected by Zockler, I: 236-68. Dodds, 1-36, argues that condemnation of the body reached new levels of intensity during the early-Christian era, a phenomenon that he attributes to a unique interaction of Greek, Jewish, and Oriental philosophies. See also Peter Brown's attempt to explain the body hatred of the age, especially 163-72.

2 Tertullian, De ieiuno 5.1. In the De Anima, 296 (chap. 53 of Apologetical Works), Tertullian attempts to demonstrate the immortality and purity of the soul by attributing all sinful drives to the body: "It is a fact that the body by enclosing the soul obstructs, obscures, and sullies it by the union with the flesh, and its vision is obscured as if it were looking through the window of horn."

3 The standardization of human vice into "seven cardinal sins" was the product of several centuries of ecclesiastical discussion. Bloomfield, 1952, remains the most comprehensive study of the subject. By the late middle ages, the term "deadly sins" was used to identify a similar set of vices that were considered to lead to damnation and the death of the soul. Manuscript sources concerning the deadly sins have been conveniently compiled by Bloomfield, 1955.

4 Cassian, 11: 248.

5 Ibid., 11:342; 11:257.

6 On the vices in Spanish art, see Allison, 104-09.

7 Gregory the Great, xxxi, 17; lxxv, 544; lxxvi, 621.

8 Classical and Christian scholars concerned with analyzing human emotions were remarkably consistent in their definition of anger. Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Lactantius, Thomas Aquinas, and Juan Luis Vives all maintained that anger was a reaction against a person or object that had done one harm. Theologians of the medieval and early modern periods admitted that in certain circumstances wrath was a proper and even virtuous reaction to an affront. This occurred when the initial insult was clearly unjust and unprovoked and when the defendant's course of action is to punish fairly the offender and restore justice (both the Old and New Testaments offer numerous examples of an angry God lashing out against his people). See Aristotle's Rhetoric, ii, 3; Cicero's Tusculanes, iv, 9; Senecas De Ira, ii, 31; Plutarch, 137; Lactantius's De ira Dei, chap. 17; Aquinas's Summa Theologica, Ia, Iiae, q. 46, a. 3, ad. 1; Vives, 1871, Opusc. 35; and Vives, 1948, i. 493. In the secondary literature, see Aubenque, 300-17; Blais, 247-90; Duboscq, 15-25, 169-83; and Micka, iv.

9 By the twelfth century, "seven cardinal virtues" of fortitude, prudence, temperance, justice, faith, hope, and charity complemented the cardinal sins. See Bloomfield, 1952, 66-67; and Taylor, 2:357-58.

10 Rejecting the notion that the formation of personal identity can be attributed exclusively to either "biology" or "culture," Butler, 1990, 1993, has argued constructively that identity is performatively established in particular historical contexts as individuals live the categories (of gender, sex, and race, etc.) constructed by and for them. See also Lutz, 1:287-309; and Wierzbicka, 584-94. Bynum, 1995, relates current concerns about the body with medieval scholarship.

11 With unparalleled sensitivity and grace, P. Brown, 237, has stressed how important to the early monk's sense of spiritual purpose was a strict regimen of the body. "The material conditions of the monk's life," writes Brown, "were held capable of altering the consciousness itself." Straw, 116, has written of Gregory the Great's attitude toward asceticism that "certainly, both body and soul bear responsibility for sin, but since sin originates with the devil's attack on the body, the body labors under a heavier burden of guilt." See also Bynum, 1987.

12 See Foucauk.

13 The most complete edition of Peter Abelard's book on ethics is now rendered by Luscombe with an English translation and notes. For the place of Abelard's ethics in curricula of the seven liberal arts, see Blomme; and Potts. Abelard's view was shared by Anselm of Canterbury, who had written about the appetites of the flesh that "it is not the desire but the indulgence of desire that is sinful" (Anselm, ii, 144).

14 Foucault, 1:20.

15 On the social consequences of mandatory confession, see Delumeau, 1978; 1990.

16 In secular society, similar forms of discipline over behavior and temperament were being cultivated through manners and etiquette by the knightly class in its efforts to become "courtiers" for monarchs. See Elias's three-volume discussion of aristocratic culture.

17 Foucault's pathbreaking studies focused on the sexual identities elaborated in confessional discourse. See Foucault, 1:155-56. Of course, a much broader range of human thought and behavior than sexuality was involved in this institutional conversation, as surveys of the confessional manuals make clear. Delumeau, 1990, 214, 220-21, has pointed out that the percentage of written material dealing with problems of "concupiscence" was much smaller, for instance, than that dealing with "covetousness" and "pride."

18 On the manuscript sources to an important part of the late-medieval collection, see Raedemaeker, 1963, 149-83; and 1964, 119-34.

19 Freud's own assessment of his contribution affirms that psychoanalysis is "nothing more than the discovery of the unconscious in mental life." Freud, 397.

20 James, 233; and Jung, 37-39. It should be mentioned here that in his later years, Freud granted that the real "discoverers" of the unconscious were poets and philosophers of earlier ages, of whom he made special reference in various works to Blake, Novalis, and Hegel. His own contribution, he admitted, was merely "the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied." Cited in Trilling, 33.

21 Granada, 1942, 122. Little, 38, has demonstrated that among the "seven deadly sins," pride was identified as the greatest problem of clerics who had learned to overcome carnal desires, and that avarice was singled out as the peculiar problem of aristocrats and merchants, particularly in the later middle ages with the rise of a commercial economy.

22 Granada, 122. According to Aquinas, Summa Theologica, IIa, IIae, B, "blasphemare est contumeliam vel aliquod convicium inferre in injuriam creatoris." In the fourteenth-century penitential manual, Summa Astensis, it is written: "est autem blasphemia peccatum morale ex genere suo. Cum repugnet charitati divine quorum derogat bonitati divine" (P.1., L.2, fo. ciiii). Among early church fathers, Tertullian considered malicious blasphemy a mortal sin, punishable with eternal damnation. John Chrysostom and Saint Augustine also believed that cursing constituted a mortal sin, for it indicated "infidelity," "bad faith," and "hatred of God." Chrysostom, De fato et providentia, hom. II, P.G., l., col. 753; and Augustine, in Psalm xci, 10, and Sermon cccxv.

23 The thirteenth-century Spanish law-code, the Siete partidas, inflicted monetary fines on aristocrats and burghers and corporal punishment on the poor, recommending fifty lashes for first offenders and branding the lips with the letter "B" for second offenders. Further relapses were punished by cutting out the tongue. See Las Siete Partidas del Rey Don Alfonso d Sabio, partida vii, titulo 28, ley 4, iii, 689. Early church law on blasphemy and swearing was brought together by Pope Pius V in the constitution Cum primum apostolatus, which confirmed the precedent that citizens who verbally insult public faith or morals must either pay monetary fines or undergo public penance by standing for an entire day before a church door with hands tied behind the back. Subsequent offences were punished by public flogging, exile from the community, piercing of the tongue, or work in the galleys. See Molien, 2: col. 915.

24 Aquinas, Summa, II. q. xiii, art. 2; and Ia. 2ae, 24, 4.

25 Manipulus curatorum, fo. c. Tentler, 30-31, 37-38, attests to the popularity of the Manipulus curatorum, calculating that over ninety incunabular editions were published in Europe in the fifteenth century and that its popularity continued well into the sixteenth century.

26 Antonino, IIa, Tit. VII, c. 1, fo. 83. Antoninus's manual for confession was one of the two most frequently published guides in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, running through well over one hundred incunabular editions in Latin, Spanish, and Italian. See Tentler's investigations, 39-40.

27 Cano; my citations derive from the third edition, 40-41.

28 Azpilcueta, 56-63.

29 Granada, 29.

30 Azpilcueta, 56-63 and Granada, 29.

31 Vives, bk. 2, chap. 7, ii, 1206.

32 Ibid.

33 See Aristotle's On the Soul, chap. 1, 403a25, bk. 1, 403a 30. With misgivings, Vives explained that Aristotle believed that every intense emotional experience involved inflammation of the heart and could therefore be regarded as a form of "rage." Vives preferred to describe passions that were less violent than anger as "pure ardor of desire" rather than "burning blood." On the influence of Greek thought on Fray Luis de Granada, see Lain Entralgo, especially p. 62.

34 Galen, 5:270-71. On the connection between body and soul in Galen's thought, see Seigel, 205-06. Seigel points out that while Galen posited an interrelationship between physiological, emotional, and rational activities, he avoided a deterministic view of human nature by asserting that the will can in most cases control both bodily and emotional processes. On Galenic influence in medieval medical thought, see Temkin.

35 See Ciruelo.

36 Cano, 47-48.

37 A fine discussion of Stoic behavioral discipline can be found in Hadot.

38 Citing Plutarch, he also recommended reciting the alphabet before responding to anger, since "nothing conforms to reason at this time." See Granada, 1863, 129; and 1942, 124.

39 Cano, 47.

40 Granada, 1768, ii:498.

41 Cano, 52.

42 Venegas, 188. Perhaps the most convincing "rational" approach to anger was offered by Vives, who stated in Tratado del Alma that "a good way to get rid of anger is to keep in mind that almost everyone judges things very badly, perhaps because of some twisted inclination of the spirit, in such a manner that precisely those who undermine us are the contemptible ones, or, better said, are the ones who deserve pity." See Vives, 2: 1291.

43 See Coloquio del Conocimiento de Si Mismo in the Biblioteca de Autores Espanoles. The authorship of this treatise has sometimes been attributed to the daughter of Miguel Sabuco de Nantes, Dona Oliva Sabuco de Nantes. See Torner. For Sabuco's medical views, see Granjel.

44 Sabuco, 333-36. Lain Entralgo explores the ancient sources of this technique.

45 The variety of approaches to faculty psychology of the Renaissance is clearly delineated by Park, 465-69.

46 Sabuco, 333.

47 Gardiner, 131; Clements, 232; Zilboorg, 192-94. The most recent analysis of this aspect of Vives's thought has been completed by Norena.

48 Opera Omnia, 3: 388.

49 Beardsley records that Plutarch's treatise went through at least four different Spanish translations in the sixteenth century.

50 English translation by Helmbold, in Plutarch's Moralia (1939), 105.

51 Aristotle, On Memory 453a 31.

52 Aristotle's Rhetoric 1378a 21. For Aristotle's views on anger per se see Renehan, 61-74; Aubenque, 300-17.

53 Vives, iii, 422. Centuries later, Heidegger also lamented the general disregard for feelings and affections in the philosophy of the west and tried to put forward the ontological primacy of "moods" over reason and volition in our existential encounter with the world. lake Hieronymous of Rhodes, he maintained that therapeutically, "when we master a mood, we do so by way of a counter-mood; we are never free of moods." Heidegger, 175-78.

54 Undoubtedly, part of the reason for the Spanish church's greater attention to psychological detail in the period related to the fact that it was no longer simply pursuing heretics who had made conscious decisions regarding matters of faith, but had extended its pastoral concern to the private lives of "Old Christians" against whom accusations of deliberate violation of religious codes did not always pertain.

55 Tratado del alma, Book iii, chap. 14, in Vives, 2: 1291.

56 Granada, 1863,(2) 3: 320.

57 Sabuco, 336.

58 Cano, 52 and 149. Vives's prayer is almost identical in "Preces y oraciones Generales," Obras completas, no. I, 493.

59 Granada, 1768, 20. Whinnom, 194, estimates that Granada's book ran through well over one hundred editions between 1554 and 1679. Twenty-three of these editions came out within the first five years of its life. The use of visual imagery in devotional exercises was by no means limited to Catholic texts. Even mainstream Puritan writers, despite their obvious hostility to icons and stained glass, utilized imagery of the body of Christ to encourage the faithful. Dent's widely-read treatise enjoined its readers to "Nail down all our sinnes and iniquities to the crosse of Christ, burie them in his death, bathe them in his bloud, hide them in his wounds, let them never rise up in judgement against us."

60 The method of mental imaging as a means of focusing psychic energy and fostering pious moods is particularly pronounced in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola.

61 Saint-Saens has vividly described the carnal dimensions of Spanish religious art in several articles and two important books, which demonstrate how much our understanding of religion and internal piety can be enhanced by a perceptive use of the graphic arts. It should be noted as well that the Renaissance movement to present Christ in human form, particularly in a state of misery rather than of glory, was not limited to the Mediterranean world; studies on Renaissance art in the Holy Roman Empire show a similar trend: Bauerreiss, passim; Wagner, 77ff; and Dehio, 182.

62 According to Lowinsky, 1:25, "starting in the last decades of the fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth century there is a significant and increasingly sharp shift from the objective world of hieratic symbolism to the subjective realm of man's relation to God in the face of sin, suffering, and death. Is it not by chance that the motet texts deal time and again with great figures in the depth of despair: Job, David mourning the death of Jonathan or the death of Absalom, innocent Susanna facing calumny and death, Rachel weeping over her lost children, the Prodigal Son, and especially Christ suffering on the Cross - the polyphonic passion as well as the passion motet are creations of the Renaissance."

63 A position that Freud himself shared and that led him seriously to challenge the value of religion in harnessing undesirable psychic impulses and thereby "civilizing" man. His ideas on this issue can be found in the form of letters to Oskar Pfister, one of his closest friends and most fervent opponents, in Menz and Freud. The approach of modern philosophers and historians to religion, however, has been far less pessimistic. Brown; Ricoeuer; and Loewald, 1980, 260, have taken position against Freud's negative view of religion, arguing that Jewish and more especially Christian devotional habits are responsible for "initiating," as Loewald has put it, "the greatest intensification of internalization in Western civilization." The number of studies drawing a connection between religion and psychic development has increased enormously in recent years, and suggests that this revisionary thesis is fast becoming accepted by scientific and academic communities alike.

64 For public responses to ecclesiastical surveillance of cursing, see Flynn, 29-56.

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