Dihle Writes

the triad mentoria, intelligentia, voluntas accounts for the whole of the human self (mens), which is, in the view of St. Augustine, entirely spiritual. The three factors or faculties are insepara-bly linked and cannot work independently of each other.

— Albrecht Dihle

Augustine's triad is a closed circuit — memory, understanding, will locked together as one indivisible spiritual substance — and that closure is the point worth pressing. What the structure excludes is as telling as what it unifies: there is no body here, no desire that arrives unbidden from below, no affect that has not already been processed through the spiritual register. The self that results is entirely *mens*, entirely mind-as-spirit, and the integration it promises is real only within those walls. If you begin with the premise that the human being is entirely spiritual, the psychology you build will be coherent, elegant, and blind to everything that doesn't cooperate with that premise.

This is not a minor theological detail. The Augustinian synthesis becomes the template through which the Western interior gets organized for the next millennium and a half — the framework inside which later depth psychology has to work, and against which it has to work. When Jung speaks of the unconscious as something that acts on the psyche from below rather than from above, he is pressing exactly where the triad cannot flex. The faculties are inseparably linked, Augustine insists — which means there is no remainder, no dark material that escapes the spiritual unity. The unconscious is, structurally, what that model forbids.


Albrecht Dihle·The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity·1982