AQUINAS'S VIEW OF SOUL AND BODY by Gary L. Morella
ass, in TOWARD A MORE NATURAL SCIENCE, says, "The dumb human body, rightly
attended to, shows all the marks of, and creates all the conditions for, our
rationality and our special way of being-in-the-world ... We are more than
just a complex version of our animal ancestors ... The body-form as a whole
impresses on us it inner powers of thought and action. Mind and hand, gait
and gaze, breath and tongue, foot and mouth - all are part of a single package
suffused with the presence of intelligence. We are rational animals, down to
and up from the very tips of our toes." Later, Kass admits that "it (body)
points beyond itself, even to the heavenly and divine." He recognized the
dichotomy in thinking about the body in the: 1) constraints as a function of the
limits of power of thought to free him from embodiment, as opposed to the 2)
liberation he felt in freeing him to wonder about the union of mind and body,
both having roots in Plato and Aristotle respectively. The task left to
Aquinas was to answer the questions at the end of the De Anima in regard to the
union and separation of soul and body by showing how philosophy must culminate
in theology. We will see by Aquinas's answers that the separated soul while
dependent primarily on Divine intervention for any "new" knowledge after death
to supplement knowledge acquired before and retained after death since it is
exclusive of any phantasm experiences still is the form of the body which will
culminate in the resurrection, the meaning of Christianity, without which there
is no faith, no theology to answer philosophy's final questions.
Man is a rational animal is true of human beings only accidentally for Plato.
There exists no real unity for human or human person. Aquinas and Aristotle
argue that man is a rational animal is a proper definition but a definition
gives essentially what the thing is. Animal is the genus for human beings.
The specific difference that sets them apart from all other animals is the
rational capacity. So the intellectual or rational soul is the immediate form
of the body, that which gives being to the body. It is intimately united to
the body as such.
The distinctiveness of the body can be seen as it, even its lower powers, are
transformed and elevated by its union with the soul. The body is restructured
so that it is open to the intellectual capacities of human beings and
transformed appropriately. We share with animals limited power of memory or
recognition, e.g., comparing sensitive particulars. Animals also have
estimative power and compare different things like food, i.e., they share
capacities we have. Aquinas says that, in animals, these are the result of
instinct which is not cooperating with or open to intellectual insight and
judgment of human minds whereas in human beings they are. Humans have memory.
They don't have estimative but rather cogitative power lodged in the imagination
which enables humans at levels of sensible particulars to compare them. This
cogitative power prepares the phantasm for the insight of the intellect. This
power illustrates the intimate unity of the intellectual soul with the body as
it pertains to thinking.
Aquinas makes two observations reinforced by phenomenology and biology - the
importance of the body's sense of touch and upright posture. At first glance
it seems like the human body is deficient in many ways, e.g., other animals can
get food better, survive longer in the desert, etc. Aquinas says that the body
of a human being is not simply made for survival but for knowing the world so
the body must have equable disposition toward this goal. Accordingly, the
body's sense of touch is especially refined. It gives us an analogy for
thinking in that the way the hand grasps something, i.e., takes on its form, is
similar to the way the intellect takes on the form of things that it knows.
The sense of touch provides the key to the external world via the hand which is
called the organ of organs. The hand allows us to make tools which supplement
our other deficiencies. To see the importance of the sense of touch I always
think of the example of Helen Keller who while born blind, deaf, and dumb, was
able to communicate with the external world through phantasms experienced
solely through touch. One might wonder how an individual would know anything
given the requirement for communication via phantasms (sensory experiences) if
he had lost not only all of the senses similar to Keller but also touch. (Let
us assume for the sake of argument that the sense of smell is also lost.) The
answer would have to be in the realm of infused knowledge via Divine
intervention which is Aquinas's argument for new knowledge gained by the
separated soul post death. Upright posture enables the hand not to have to
function as a claw. We have a different orientation to the world. Our senses
are not ordered to mere survival, e.g., getting food, but to higher things, to
knowledge and to love. Our very bodily structure befits our intellectual
nature, e.g., our mouth is designed for speaking, the rational and social
element of human nature given its distance from the ground as opposed to that
of animals whose mouths are primarily for eating.
Our particular kind of body is appropriately united to the intellectual soul
since it is not simply for the sake of survival but also for knowledge and
communion with nature. The soul elevates the body in its natural appropriate
union with same. Per Genesis 2:7, "God made man of the slime of the earth."
Earth and water mingled make slime. Thus, the first human body has elements
that belong to lifeless things, and also to plants and animals. Since man's
soul is a spirit, like the angels, man is called "a world in little," a
microcosm, for he has in himself something of all creatures in the universe,
mineral, vegetal, animal, and spiritual. The slime of the earth was not really
material for making a human being, and did not become human until the soul was
joined to it. Since life begins at conception, this ensoulment of necessity
must also occur at conception else the unity of body and soul would have no
meaning. The human body does not exist as the human body until God's creative
act produced and infused the spiritual soul. Creation is an act which
precludes any medium; hence the first human body was created immediately by
Almighty God. Man's body, then, is admirably suited for its connatural
operations. God gives to every nature the best constitution and equipment for
the purpose it is to serve. This is not absolutely the best, but relatively
the best, that is, in relation to its purpose and use.
Soul and body are married in regard to their interdependence on one another in
the composite to make a human being. And we're talking about human beings from
the time of conception. It doesn't matter if developmental deficiencies
arise from conception to natural birth. The formation of the zygote, the union
of cells constituting the human at his earliest phase of growth contains his
soul else we no longer talk about being human. It is to be emphasized that
even in the course of said development the material brain ceases to grow
properly, we're still dealing with a creation of the Almighty as a function of
ensoulment and we have no right to not let God be God by terminating this human
being, depriving God of the opportunity to allow that soul to enjoy eternal
happiness with Him in Heaven. This is the gravest evil of our time.
For Aristotle and Aquinas the soul is to the body as form is to matter or as an
act is to potency. Plato's rival account of the intellectual soul is that it
is related to the body as a mover to the thing moved. What the intellectual
soul does is to order the body, to command it, to rule over it in the sense
that it moves it in certain directions. Plato holds these positions because of
his view of the disparity of the intellect and the body by underscoring the
distance of the soul from the body. The advantage is that it gives Plato an
account of how the soul can be related to the body without diminishing the
separability of the intellect from the body. A consequence is that the
intellectual soul need not be the substantial form of the body as opposed to
Aristotle and Aquinas. One could have several souls. As Aquinas explains, if
the relationship is as mover to moved, there is nothing to keep us from talking
about intermediate movers. Plato resists the intellectual soul being the
immediate substantial form of the body. The Platonic view says that there
exists different kinds of souls present, i.e., we are living by the lowest
vegatative soul, we are animal by the sensitive soul, and we are the peak of
being, human, by the intellectual soul. In this context to be human is to
contain the universality of all different kinds of souls which are mutually
exclusive. This view seems to safeguard the philosophical argument for the
immateriality of the soul.
Aquinas raises some problems: 1) what makes this human being one, what unites
it? The possibility is proposed that maybe its body does this. But no, it
doesn't. It is not the body that contains the soul but the reverse, the soul
contains the body and makes it one. By contains, the soul is what configures,
permeates, and orders the material into being one sort of thing as opposed to
another. 2) If the vegetative soul is the first actuality of a natural organic
body potentially having life, that makes it human, then all subsequent souls
would seem to be accidental in relation to this, accidental actualizations to
actual process. Thus, these are not for Aquinas separate souls or separate
forms.
The body appropriately is the home of the intellectual soul metaphorically.
The soul pervades the body as its organizing and vivifying principle. Aquinas
says that the intellect has an operation in which the body doesn't share. The
intellect can't think without the phantasm. This seems paradoxical. On the
part of the operation, the intellectual power itself, its activity, it operates
from the body in that it doesn't operate in any material organ. On the part of
the object known by this immaterial operation of the intellect, it does indeed
need the body and the phantasm presented thereby. The distinction here is
operation vs. object. The intellect has an immaterial operation separate from
the body but needs a sensible object or phantasm to focus on. Aquinas captures
the complex unity of human life by these claims which accentuate the
fundamental difference between understanding plants and animals in the world
and understanding humans.
These claims follow on the very notion of knowing. I know myself when I
reflect upon my acts of knowing. I know that what I'm doing is apprehending a
sensible singular, that I'm focusing on that. In my act of knowing, I'm
universalizing which is not limited to merely material things. A difficulty
arises if intellect is separable, if it subsists. Whatever has an operation
proper to itself, subsists. The intellect has said operation, so it subsists.
If something subsists, it is not subject to corruption. Thus, the intellect
must be incorruptible, an argument for the immortality of the soul. The
intellect remains a weaker power than that of the angels and of God. Once
separated from the body, how does the intellect know? Can the intellectual
soul separated from the body know anything at all? Aquinas says, Yes!
Initially, Aquinas says, given Plato's view, it's easy to say this as the
intellect would be much better off separated from the body which is what
intellect has been longing for all along, i.e., to be released from the prison
of the body. The problem is that this cannot explain why the intellectual soul
should have ever been united to the body in the first place. It cannot explain
how this union is not only good for the body but also the intellect. If we
can't explain that then we have a problem not only with the nature of human
beings but why God would have created human beings who would more appropriately
have been created simply as intellectual substances, i.e., separate from the
body.
Aquinas says the subsistent, incorruptible intellect has two modes of knowing:
1) in the body through phantasms, the Aristotelian view, and 2) out of the body
through intelligible species, a kind of Platonic view. The latter is only
possible as the intellect when separated from the body is given, by the Divine
Light, an influx of the intelligible species. There exists something over and
above our natural way of knowing for the intellect to know at all. The
separation of the soul after death is beyond the nature of the soul which still
retains a natural inclination to the body in a magnetic sense. This knowledge
is confused and vague as it is not most appropriate to the nature of our
intellect which is in the phantasms. It is not necessarily a better state for
the soul (to be separated from the body per the Platonic view). We cannot
refer to the soul as a person or human being which is the composite of soul and
body. If we could not bring God and theology into this, we would be left with
the kind of dark obscurity Aristotle is left with at the end of his De Anima.
We seem to be pulled in two directions here from an Aristotelian perspective.
This is a remarkable instance at which questions arising at the peak of
philosophy seem to be leaving us with a knowledge that points us in a certain
direction but yet, there is this gap, a kind of uncertainty, a kind of limit to
philosophy and to natural reason itself. This gives pause to the brilliance of
Aquinas later in the summa when he takes up more explicitly theological
matters. These philosophical puzzles, difficulties reflecting the limits of
the pinnacle of philosophical discourse are resolved by Aquinas through an
appeal to revealed truth. There is no alternative as what philosophy achieves
finally is to leave us with more questions, wanting more.
How is it that revealed truth solves this particular difficulty, the separation
of soul and body, the incorruptibility of the intellect, its relationship to
soul and body? We have in the Christian tradition not just a claim about the
immortality of the soul but about the resurrection of the body promised to all
in the New Testament. The resurrection of the body, an odd notion from a
Platonic standpoint, bridges this gap beyond death and resolves the difficulty
since the union of the soul and body so necessary for the natural life of
humans is equally necessary for supernatural life of humans as a special type
of God's creation distinct from angelic spirits. The defining characteristic
of the human being in the natural realm, this union of soul and body, is also
the case in the supernatural, eternal realm. We don't have to worry about the
soul and body being separate as only the composite makes a human being, neither
by itself does. The soul eternally remains the form of the body having an
aptitude and natural inclination to be united to the body. Revelation here
assists and perfects human reason in its operation and thinking about the most
difficult questions encountered by human beings. This is the message of the
Pope John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason).
In summary, in reference to ST I 89, when the soul is separated from the body
at death, it undergoes a change of mode or manner in the operation of the
intellect. It grasps things that are in themselves understandable by a direct
grasp. It is suffused with the Light from God which gives it the intelligible
species of things knowable and thus it knows natural things in the absence of
phantasms as functions of the Divine Light. It knows individual things by its
retained knowledge, habits, and affections, under the divinely imparted Light
which both supplies intelligible species and compensates for the lack of
phantasms which the intellect naturally requires for its operation. A soul
with no retained knowledge, such as the soul of an infant, has all its
knowledge by Divine ordinance and Divine Light. This would apply, it seems to
me, in the aforementioned cases of pre-born infants regardless of their
physical human condition since from the moment of conception they are children
of God and heirs to His Kingdom. The separated soul does not know all
individual things; it knows to the extent established by the Divine order. It
retains the habit of knowledge such as the grasp of first principles. It can
no longer forget nor can it be deceived by fallacious reasoning. The latter is
why Lucifer and those with him who would not serve were thrust into Hell as
angelic minds reflect perfect knowledge of the Truth which is a Somebody, not a
something to the extent that Divine ordinance grants same in their creation
and, as such, they had no excuse for their rebellion against God, i.e., they
could not claim ignorance. The mode of intellectual operation in a separated
soul is one in harmony with a spiritual being; it depends upon the help of God.
Local distance from the object known does not hinder knowledge of the separated
soul for it knows through species imparted or preserved by God. Separated
souls are naturally ignorant of what takes place on earth. But those who
receive the Beatific Vision are aware of what goes on among people on earth - a
knowledge shared by the angels.
The evidence of God's divine plan is evident in the composite of soul and body
which defines the human being. We would be well advised to follow it as it is
a blueprint for salvation. As Veritatis Splendor reminds us, any view that
treats nature and the body as "raw material for human activity and for its
power" contravenes the Church's teaching on the unity of the human person whose
rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of the body. The spiritual
and immaterial soul is the principle of unity of the human being whereby it
exists as a whole - corpore et anima unus - as a person.
These definitions not only point out that the body, which has been promised the
resurrection, will also share in glory. They also remind us that reason and
free will are linked with all the bodily and sense faculties. The person,
including the body, is completely entrusted to himself, and it is in the unity
of body and soul that the person is the subject of his own moral acts. Right
reason grasps the specific moral value of certain goods towards which the
person is naturally inclined. And since the human person cannot be reduced to
a freedom which is self designing, an unlimited freedom confused with license,
but entails a particular spiritual and bodily structure, the primordial moral
requirement of loving and respecting the person as an end and never as a mere
means also implies, by its very nature, respect for certain fundamental goods
(absolute, universal laws) without which one would fall into relativism and
arbitrariness. A doctrine which disassociates the moral act from the bodily
dimension of its exercise is contrary to the teaching of Scripture and
Tradition. Such is the case of the public heresy in the local media by priests
of the Penn State Catholic Community who tell central Pennsylvania that "there
are healthy forms of homosexuality", that homosexuality is a cause for
celebration, and that the official teachings of the Church on this issue are
subordinate to the filth of ALWAYS OUR CHILDREN. Where are those dear old nuns
in habits of the pre-conciliar Church who told us repeatedly, "your body is a
Temple of the Holy Ghost, treat it as such?"