Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas occupies a singular and contested position in the depth-psychology corpus. He appears most extensively in Marie-Louise von Franz’s Aurora Consurgens (1966), where he functions simultaneously as the probable author of an alchemical treatise attributed to him and as a case study in Jungian psychological typology: the consummate introverted thinking type whose extreme rationality generated an equally powerful unconscious counterposition. Von Franz argues that Aquinas’s terminal mystical experiences — the ecstatic cessation of writing, the ‘mystic marriage’ imagery at death — represent the irruption of repressed archetypal contents that his scholastic system had systematically excluded. Jung himself, in Psychology and Religion: West and East, cites Aquinas on specific theological points (the Holy Spirit’s namelessness; the independence of prophetic revelation from personal sanctity) while expressing, in his Letters, a nuanced ambivalence: Scholastic philosophy, perfectly summarized by Aquinas, is intellectually admirable yet insufficient for the interpretation of ‘man’s living soul.’ James Hillman, in The Myth of Analysis, foregrounds Aquinas’s Aristotelian biological anthropology as a foundational source for the Western denigration of the feminine. Across these engagements, Aquinas functions as an emblem of the tension between systematic rationalism and the unconscious depths that rationalism leaves unaddressed.

In the library 15 passages

The predominance of rationality in St. Thomas would evoke an equally powerful counterposition in the unconscious psyche, which, to compensate his ‘universalist’ thinking, would reach down to the depths of the psychic past and activate the corresponding archetypal contents.

Von Franz applies Jungian compensation theory directly to Aquinas, arguing that his extreme scholastic rationalism necessarily constellated an equally extreme unconscious counter-movement of archetypal imagery.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis

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they reveal the other, unconscious personality of the saint, which had overpowered him on several occasions before in his trancelike states and now manifested itself again in the mystic marriage at the moment of death.

Von Franz concludes that the Aurora Consurgens transmits Aquinas’s shadow personality — the unconscious, feeling-toned side suppressed by his scholasticism — which broke through definitively in his final ecstatic experiences.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis

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the impassioned elation of the author strikes one with a force one has seldom encountered before… It is difficult to withstand the impression that the whole treatise was composed in an abnormal psychic state.

Von Franz establishes, through textual analysis, that the Aurora was composed under intense psychological dissociation, making it psychologically significant as a document of unconscious eruption regardless of definitive authorship.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis

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Thomas must have been a man in whom there was the greatest tension between feeling and intellect. Presumably, as I have said, he was an introverted thinking type.

Von Franz offers a formal Jungian typological diagnosis of Aquinas as an introverted thinking type whose inferior feeling function generated the psychological crisis expressed in the Aurora.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966thesis

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Woman is ignobilior and vilior than man in the view of Thomas Aquinas. She is on a lower plane. The reasons are, first, biogenetic, in the sense of Aristotle; second, she is qualitatively inferior because she is not able to transform blood into sperm.

Hillman traces the patriarchal devaluation of the feminine in Western psychology to Aquinas’s Aristotelian biology, which systematically ranked woman as a deficient and passive biological principle.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis

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Everything that I have written seems to me worthless in comparison with the things I have seen and which have been revealed to me.

Von Franz cites Aquinas’s own reported words as biographical evidence of the ecstatic mystical experience that effectively terminated his scholastic output and points toward the unconscious dimension explored in the Aurora.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

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It is all very well to have it summarized most beautifully by St. Thomas Aquinas, but when it comes to the interpretation of man’s living soul you need actual knowledge.

Jung acknowledges the intellectual achievement of Aquinas’s scholastic synthesis while insisting that doctrinal formulation is insufficient for the empirical psychological task of understanding the living soul.

Jung, C.G., Letters Volume 1: 1906-1950, 1973supporting

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It is all very well to have it summarized most beautifully by St. Thomas Aquinas, but when it comes to the interpretation of man’s living soul you need actual knowledge.

In a parallel formulation across two letter volumes, Jung maintains his consistent critique that Thomistic scholasticism, however elegant, lacks the experiential depth required for genuine depth-psychological work.

Jung, C. G., Letters Volume 2, 1951-1961, 1975supporting

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St. Thomas emphasizes that prophetic revelation is, as such, independent of good morals—not to speak of personal sanctity (De veritate, xii, 5; Summa theol., I–II, p. 172).

Jung invokes Aquinas’s theological distinction between prophetic revelation and personal sanctity to support his psychological argument that numinous experience transcends the moral condition of the recipient.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958supporting

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Scholastic thinking in general and the Summa in particular, with its rigid division into questions and answers in accordance with the laws of medieval logic, are perfect examples of such an attitude of consciousness.

Von Franz identifies the Summa Theologica as the paradigmatic expression of the one-sided, hyper-differentiated rational consciousness whose repressed opposite she finds encoded in the Aurora.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

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Interpretations like these were undoubtedly known to Thomas, yet underlying them is a primordial experience which may be repeated at any time, and this, in my view, is what caused him to return to the imagery of the mystic marriage.

Von Franz argues that Aquinas’s final use of bridal mysticism was not merely erudite citation but reflected a primordial archetypal experience breaking through his rationalist defenses at death.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

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Many of the suggestions in this section, like much in the entire work, were moulded by Thomas Aquinas into a substantial new theory of the mind and soul in the thirteenth century, and Aquinas’ ideas on this subject are certainly treated with respect by contemporary philosophers.

The introduction to Aristotle’s De Anima credits Aquinas with transforming Aristotelian hylomorphism into a systematic thirteenth-century theory of mind and soul that retains philosophical currency.

Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), -350supporting

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on December 10, 1270, certain of Thomas’s theses were officially condemned… he became more and more the official defender of the Catholic faith against the contemporary heresies.

Von Franz contextualizes Aquinas’s institutional role as doctrinal champion of orthodoxy, establishing the external pressures that reinforced his one-sided rational persona against the compensatory unconscious.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966supporting

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Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy… a Companion Work to C. G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis.

The title page establishes the central scholarly frame: the Aurora is a text attributed to Aquinas and treated by von Franz as a depth-psychological document on the problem of opposites, companion to Jung’s major late alchemical work.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Aurora Consurgens: A Document Attributed to Thomas Aquinas on the Problem of Opposites in Alchemy, 1966aside

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