Habitus: Toward a Worked Example in Theology-Psychology Dialogue

Posted on November 22, 2009

[by Peter Hampson, Head of Department of Psychology, University of the West of England, Bristol. Professor Hampson is our blogger for the month of November, and this is his fourth post] 

Positive psychology has opened up possibilities far more congenial than hitherto for the development Christian psychology.  Among these is the rediscovery of the virtues.  In positive psychology, there is, however, a tendency to think of virtues as ‘character traits’, and, when adults are assessed psychometrically, virtues may well show up as relatively stable characteristics.  While this can be a helpful way to proceed, perhaps we should not foreclose on other possibilities.  It may be useful to consider the idea that virtues are, in part at least, acquired dispositions, which are not only differentiated as to their type or content, but also related by similar psychological processes in their different, but converging roles in shaping the person, strengthening their cognitions, guiding their desires and managing their emotions, and steering their actions.  This could help shift our attention to the conditions helpful for appropriate (in a Christian sense) person formation.

To this end, I want to re-introduce a term into our CP vocabulary for exploration, namely ‘habitus’.  Habitus receives extensive treatment in the second part of St Thomas’s Summa Theologiae (ST, 1a2ae, Q49-89). It connotes the generally repeated acts through which our good-seeking character is shaped, and becomes ’strengthened’ and properly or improperly oriented, for good or for ill.  It is the general, primarily ontological concept underlying all virtues and vices, the psycho-theological motor, if you like, through which their strengthening takes place.  In the case of good habits, the virtues, it is the means through which we participate more fully in being.  (There is even room I suspect for those suitably placed to think about this in terms of embodiment and the cognitive developmental neuroscience of neural networks).

But first a warning: it is tempting by way of an easy analogy to assert too direct a connection between habitus and our modern understanding of skill or, without qualification, a habit, and to assume that all we need do is carry over theories and findings from existing literature on skills, habits and expertise to the virtues. Admittedly, habitus bears some family resemblance to skill, and many recent findings on expertise could prove helpful for understanding the virtues (e.g. Anders, Charness, Feltovitch, and Hoffman, 2006).  But it is certainly not correct to reduce it to skill.  Just as, for example, the pre-modern concept of the soul is far richer than the psyche of psychology (Honig, 1993, see also Johnson, 2007), and the emotions as understood by modern physiology and psychology are often conceptually impoverished versions of the passions, affections and sentiments (Dixon, 2006), so too habitus includes the notion of skill, but it is not just a skill.    To see why, we must situate habitus in the wider context of Aquinas’s overall theological anthropology, his account of what people are and how they work in their journey back to God.  Habitus understood as the means whereby dispositions to act in certain ways are formed, has an unavoidable moral component, since acts in this framework are (Aristotelian) motions through which potentiality is actualized away from or toward the good. 

Habitus is a concept we have lost or at least reduced in value over the years, but one which may still have much to offer to psychology.   To be of use it would clearly need to be repristinated and checked against contemporary understanding of cognition, affect and personality for sure.  I am not naively suggesting that we should simply import C13th theological anthropology into psychology without nuance.  Thomas himself would probably not have been that sort of Thomist!  But the linking of character, mind, emotion and morality in a theophanic universe is, I think, worth exploring, and its theoretical possibilities translated into empirical consequences.

Now faith, as I intimated last time is a virtue, i.e. a habitus according to Thomas, through which our knowledge is ultimately perfected and our intellect strengthened, and brought, at last to the visio Dei.    If he’s right, and other strands of the tradition, I realize, may well take a different view, this suggests we can get better at it, we can ‘grow in faith’ and help others do the same - with God’s help of course!  And this is a Christian psychological as well as a theological claim.

References

Ericsson, K. Anders, Charness, N., Feltovitch, P.J. and Hoffman, R. R.,
(eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance.
Cambridge: CUP, 2006.

Dixon, Thomas, From Passions to Emotions: the Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: CUP, 2003.

Honig, Emmanuel, From Soul to Psyche: Memoirs of a Rabbi-Psychiatrist. New
Jersey: Ktav Publishing Inc., 1993.

Johnson, Eric, Foundations for Soul Care: A Christian Psychology Proposal.
Downers Grove, IL: Inter Varsity Press, 2007.

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