A Historical Anthropology of Affectivity in the Medieval Latin West

In the De doctrina christiana, Augustine makes a clear connection between affectivity and morality: with his ultimate sacrifice, Christ forgave humanity’s past sins, and opened an affective way to salvation, which was first blocked by the corrupt nature of the fallen humans. In order to reach the eternal world, the faithful must convert their sinful affect into virtuous affect, and thus redeem themselves. Consequently, I would argue that moral psychology was understood by most Latin medieval theologians as an affective anthropology, due to the deep connection between the affective and moral orders in the economy of salvation. Understanding the affective anthropology of the medieval Latin world as a moral psychology helps us see how religious and spiritual practices were progressively interiorized by the Christians throughout the Middle Ages, so that intangible phenomena were felt as tangible feelings in the body.