ABSTRACT
Recognizing that “moral psychology” is a relatively novel discipline in the contemporary social sciences, this chapter broaches the mature thinking of Greek patristic and monastic theologians on the structure of the moral self and the formative processes of moral identity or personhood. Securing this identity entailed the teleological integration of all the created faculties of mind, soul, and body in the quest toward perfection, but the particular focus here is the role of the affective drives or faculties of desire (epithymia) and temper (thymos). An appeal is made to classicist Robert Kaster’s observation of “emotional scripts” in antiquity: the view that emotions have “histories” and register the story of an individual’s moral formation. Some early Christian moralists such as Basil of Caesarea similarly envisioned emotions as playing out particular scenarios of progress or deviation. Crucial, then, was the cultivation of “virtuous” emotions reflective of healthy dispositions of the self and conducive to moral integrity.
