Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

These men led the way by personal example. Much the same message was preached by Jesus and by St Augustine. Jesus, for example, emphasised God’s mercy, and insisted on an inner conviction on the part of believers rather than the outward observance of ritual (Chapter 7). St Augustine (354–430) was very concerned with free will and said that humans have within themselves the capacity to evaluate the moral order of events or people and can exercise judgement, to decide our priorities. According to St Augustine, to look deep inside ourselves and to choose God was to know God (Chapter 10). In the twelfth century, as was discussed in Chapter 16, there was another great turning inward in the universal Roman Catholic Church. There was a growing awareness that inner repentance was what God wanted, not external penance. This was when confession was ordered to be made regularly by the Fourth Lateran Council. The Black Death, in the fourteenth century, had a similar impact. The very great number of deaths made people pessimistic and drove them inwards towards a more private faith (many more private chapels and charities were founded in the wake of the plague, and there was a rise in mysticism). The rise of autobiography in the Renaissance, what Jacob Burckhardt called the ‘abundance of pictures of the inmost soul’ was yet another turning in. In Florence, at the end of the fifteenth century, Fra Girolamo Savonarola, convinced that he had been sent by God ‘to aid the inward reform of the Italian people’, sought the regeneration of the church in a series of Jeremiads, terrible warnings of the evil to come unless this inward reform was immediate and total. And of course the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century (Chapter 22) was conceivably the greatest ‘turning in’ of all time. In response to the Pope’s claim that the faithful could buy relief for their relatives’ souls ‘suffering in purgatory’, Martin Luther finally exploded and advocated that men did not need the intervention of the clergy to receive the grace of God, that the great pomp of the Catholic Church, and its theoretical theological stance as ‘intercessor’ between man and his maker, was a nonsense and nowhere supported by the scriptures. He urged a return to ‘true inward penitence’ and said that above all inner contrition was needed for the proper remission of sins: an individual’s inner conscience was what mattered most. In the seventeenth century, Descartes famously turned in, arguing that the only thing man could be certain of was his inner life, in particular his doubt. Late-eighteenth-century/early-nineteenth-century romanticism was likewise a turning-in, a reaction against the Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century attitude/idea that the world could best be understood by science. On the contrary, said the romantics, the one unassailable fact of human experience is inward human experience itself. Following Vico, both Rousseau (1712–1778) and Kant (1724–1804) argued that, in order to discover what we ought to do, we should listen to an inner voice.¹⁴ The romantics built on this, to say that everything we value in life, morality above all, comes from within. The growth of the novel and the other arts reflected this view.

The romantics in particular show very clearly the evolution of the idea of the soul. As J. W. Burrow has observed, the essence of romanticism, and one might say of all the other ‘turnings in’ throughout history, is the notion Homo duplex, of a ‘second self’, a different – and very often a higher or better – self, whom one is trying to discover, or release. Arnold Hauser put it another way: ‘We live on two different levels, in two different spheres . . . these regions of being penetrate one another so thoroughly that the one can neither be subordinated to nor set against the other as its antithesis. The dualism of being is certainly no new conception, and the idea of the coincidentia oppositorum is quite familiar to us . . . but the double meaning and duplicity of existence . . . had never been experienced so intensively as now [i.e., in romantic times].’¹⁵

Romanticism, and its sense of a ‘second self’ was – as we have seen – one of the factors which Henri Ellenberger included in The Discovery of the Unconscious, his massive work on the royal road that led to depth psychology and culminated with the ideas of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. The unconscious is the last great turning in, an attempt, as discussed in the previous chapter, to be scientific about our inner life. But the fact that it failed is important in a wider sense than its inadequacy as treatment, as we shall now see.