The tendency to classify human behavior in a system of characters (psychological types representing the variety of attitudes and behaviors present in a community) is very old. In Greece and then in Rome, this tendency was supported by comic theater, which presupposes both characters and social and psychological patterns. Theophrastos’ typology - which includes 30 characters with specific ethical and psychological features (the careless, the suspicious, the adulator, etc.) - is probably connected to comic theater.
Besides the ethical and psychological typologies, like that of Theophrastos, typologies that involve both psychological and somatic features, presupposing an ancient correlation between the two dimensions, are also found in antiquity. This approach is already present in physiognomics, a practice that had much success throughout antiquity and that claimed to infer the character of people (and sometimes also their future development) from their somatic features. A real typology is that founded on humors (the organic fluids present in the human body). The idea is that different humors are the cause of different characters.
Humoralism is the basis itself of the dominant physiology and pathology of medicine from antiquity to William Harvey (1578-1657). The canonic system was that of the four humors established by Polybos, son-in-law of Hippocrates, in the treatise De natura hominis (On the nature of man, ca. 410 bc): blood, phlegm, yellow (or red) bile, and black bile. The same Polybos connected the four humors with the four primary qualities (hot, wet, cold, and dry), with the four seasons, and with the four ages of human life.
Polybos’ typology regards physiology and pathology, not psychology. The passage to a psychological humoral typology took place later, at a time not possible to specify precisely. Testimonies come from late antiquity, but the idea that humors influence characters is already present in Aristotle, who says that the courage and intelligence of animals are the product of the quality of their blood (Parts of animals 647b); Sextus Empiricus says that humors influence sensorial perception ( Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.51); and Galen informs us about the theory that humors influence moral qualities (Commentary on Hippocrates’ On the Nature of Man 1.38, 15.97 Kuhn). Perhaps in Epistles 1.18.89-90, Horace already alludes to the psychological humoral typology (Stok 1997: 164-70).
It is also difficult to determine the cultural milieu in which this typology was elaborated. In the medical tradition, the excess of one of the humors was regarded as pathological; the idea of the balance of the humors (krasis or complexio) excluded the possibility of several physiological states. Galen considers a typology of eight mixtures produced by the prevalence of one of the four primary qualities (hot, wet, etc.), or of two of them, but he includes in the typology also a ninth, well-balanced mixture, the frame of reference for all the others (On Temperaments 2.1, 1.572 Kuhn).
The persistence in the medical tradition of this unitary concept of the human species is attested, from late antiquity to early modern times, by an ambiguity in the use of the term melancholicus, which for physicians denotes a person affected by melancholia, while in the typological system it means one of the four possible temperaments. (The situation is complicated by the pseudo-Aristotelian theory of the melancholia of geniuses, which was very influential in the Renaissance, thanks to Marsilio Ficino and the other humanists.) The humoral typology, on the whole, also remained marginal in medieval and early modern medicine, both of which were characterized by the prevalence of Galenism.
Among late ancient testimonies, the most important is that of the physician Vindicianus, a friend of St. Augustine. He explains the humoral typology in a letter to his nephew Pentadius: the sanguine temperament is characterized by simplicity and a good disposition; the choleric one by anger, shrewdness, and fickleness; the melancholic one by sadness, envy, and shyness; and the phlegmatic one by composure and reflectiveness. In late antiquity this typology is also known to Isidore of Seville (Etymologies 4.5.6; 10.30; 10.176) and Bede (On the Reckoning of Time 30).
In the Middle Ages the humoral typology reappears at the beginning of the twelfth century in the milieu of the School of Chartres, where it is used by William of Conches (ca. 1080-1154). It is uncertain whether the typology was transmitted directly by texts surviving in the West, like Vindicianus’ epistle, or through Arabic medicine and the medical school of Salerno, where, however, Galenic orthodoxy (e. g., in the works of Avicenna and Costantinus Africanus) was dominant. In the school of Salerno the humoral typology appears in the second half of the twelfth century, with the Flores diaetarum (Anthology of treatments) ascribed to a John of St. Paul.
After William of Conches the humoral typology was adopted by many masters of Scholasticism. This presence is a bit surprising, considering that the typology is ‘‘the single most striking example of the habitual preference in ancient, medieval, and Renaissance medicine for materialist explanations of mental and emotional states’’ (Siraisi 1990: 106). As early as the time of Bishop Nemesios of Emesa in the fourth and fifth centuries (Temkin 1973: 81-92), Galen himself was opposed because of his position about the nature of the soul - sometimes he was even compared to the materialist Epicurus. But the humoral typology, just because it did not involve problems of the soul, was indeed ‘‘moralizable’’ and capable of being brought into agreement with Christian doctrine: William of Conches, in his Summa philosophiae (Summation of philosophy), connects the plurality of temperaments with original sin; Hugo of Fouilloy (ca. 1100-1172/3), in the De medicina animae (On the medicine of the soul), locates in the four humors the moral qualities of the soul; and St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), in the Causae et curae (Causes and cures), considers the influence of humors upon sexual behavior and distinguishes between female and male temperaments.
During the Middle Ages the humoral typology also involved astrology: the four temperaments were connected with four of the planets, the melancholic one with Saturn, the phlegmatic one with the Moon, the choleric one with Mars, and the sanguine one with Jupiter. Connections between planets and parts of the body were already known in ancient astrology, but the astrological use of the four humors appears for the first time in Arabic texts of the ninth century and was transmitted to the West through the Latin translation of the Introductorium maius (Greater introduction) of Alcabitius.
In the Renaissance humoral typology was well known and influenced literature and art extensively (Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl 1964; Filipczak 1997). Musicology, too, was interested in typology; for example, in the theory of Bartolome Ramos de Pareja (1440-1522), who connected the four humors and their psychological affections with musical tonalities.
Already in the poetry of the late Middle Ages the word ‘‘melancholy’’ acquired the meaning of‘‘mental disposition’’ or ‘‘psychic condition.’’ The original meaning of ‘‘disease’’ was still used mainly by physicians: for example, in the Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1577-1640), who is, however, acquainted with the new meaning of the term.
Humoral typology was still in use after the fall of Galenism, until the eighteenth century, as a purely psychological typology without real connection with humors. It is used, for example, by Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801) in his treatise on physiognomics, the ancient doctrine rediscovered in the Renaissance and divulged with some success in the early modern age.
After Lavater both physiognomic and humoral typology were degraded to pseudosciences, but temperaments remained alive in literary and artistic memory. They still live again in the recent novel of Rupert Thomson, Divided Kingdom (2005), where an imaginary organization of government and society is founded upon segregation of the people by four character types based on humors.
World History
