107. “While I was deliberating whether I would serve the Lord my God now, as I had long purposed to do, it was I who willed and it was also I who was unwilling. In either case, it was I. I neither willed with my whole will nor was I wholly unwilling. And so I was at war with myself and torn apart by myself. And this strife was against my will; yet it did not show the presence of another mind, but the punishment of my own. Thus, it was no more I who did it, but the sin that dwelt in me—the punishment of a sin freely committed by Adam, and I was a son of Adam” (Augustine, Confessions, 8: 9, 22). On the power of controlling passions, see Descartes, Les Passions de l’ame, 367, I, Art. 45.

108. Augustine, Confessions, 8: 9, 21. Italics are mine.

109. The struggle, however, denied the existence of a genuine moral dilemma and conflicting moral order, from Gregory the Great (540–604) to Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), according to the aphorism “The Eternal Law cannot err, but human reason can” (Cited by Guarde-Paz “Moral Dilemmas in Chinese Philosophy,” 86).

110. In addition to the different cosmological and ontological representation of reality, Qiong Zhang presents the significant case of the convert and physician Wang Honghan 王宏瀚 (17th century) and his creative attempt at a compromise between European scholastic psychology and Chinese Neo-Confucian tradition. The language he used to describe the struggle between principles and sensitive nature was Neo-Confucian, but Neo-Confucianism ignored the body-soul dichotomy and recognized only one mind (Qiong Zhang, “Hybridizing Scholastic Psychology,” 325–343). In his reconstruction of human mind and personality, Wang states: “The difference between intelligent and sensitive natures is delicate indeed! Our ancients often suspect whether intellect and senses are the same thing. However, while senses are the functions of the physical form, intellect is the function of universal moral principles; being so, it can make its presence felt instantly out of nowhere but disappears into nowhere if one searches for it. [...] hence the good and the bad [natures] sit side by side within the same body, and yet being intangible, we cannot tell them apart easily.” (cited by Qiong Zhang “Hybridizing Scholastic Psychology,” 336). Wang’s creative syncretism reformulated the concepts of “heavenly soul” (hun) and “moral nature” (xing)—inherited from Aleni’s soul-body dichotomy for introducing the concept of Christian soul—for a new theory of the mind. Ontologically Wang severed the shen or hun from the body and gave it the status of an immortal soul; he could be fully Catholic while