Volume 12, Number 2 (Spring 2017)
Metaphysics Colloquium
The Institute for Saint Anselm Studies sponsored the 2016 Metaphysics Colloquium at Saint Anselm College, June 8-9, 2016. The topic for this year’s colloquium was The Resurrection of the Body. The yearly Metaphysics Colloquium takes its inspiration from Pope John Paul II who in Fides et Ratio spoke of the need for continuing philosophical and theological speculation to come to an understanding of the Catholic faith.
Montague Brown, Professor of Philosophy, Saint Anselm College, gave the main paper “Philosophical and Theological Perspectives on the Resurrection of the Body in Aquinas.” Commentaries were offered by Kevin L. Hughes, Associate Professor of Theology and Chair of the Humanities Department, Villanova University and Michael Waddell, Edna and George McMahon Aquinas Chair in Philosophy, Saint Mary’s College. The Institute for Saint Anselm Studies is pleased to publish the three papers from the colloquium: Montague Brown, “Philosophical and Theological Perspectives on the Resurrection of the Body in Aquinas”; Kevin L. Hughes, “Strengthened for All that Will Delight Us: Love and the Metaphysics of Resurrected Bodies In response to Montague Brown”; Michael M. Waddell, “Thomas Aquinas and the Resurrection of the (Disabled) Body.”
The Saint Anselm Lecture
The Saint Anselm Journal is pleased to publish the 2017 Saint Anselm Lecture, presented by Fr. David Pignato, St. John’s Seminar, Brighton, MA. Theology, April 21, 2017. The lecture was also the keynote address for the Sixth Saint Anselm Conference: Saint Anselm, the Church, and the Reformers, April 20-22, 2017. The title of his paper is “The Primacy of Faith and the Priority of Reason: A Justification for Public Recognition of Revealed Truth.”
Philosophical and Theological Perspectives on the Resurrection of the Body in Aquinas By Montague Brown
Strengthened for All that Will Delight Us: Love and the Metaphysics of Resurrected Bodies In response to Montague Brown By Kevin L. Hughes
Thomas Aquinas and the Resurrection of the (Disabled) Body By Michael M. Waddell
The Primacy of Faith and the Priority of Reason: A Justification for Public Recognition of Revealed Truth By Fr. David Pignato Philosophical and Theological Perspectives on the Resurrection of the Body in Aquinas
Montague Brown Saint Anselm College
The question of what happens after death has been entertained by religious traditions and philosophical reflection from the earliest times, and the answers to the question have been various, from the annihilation of the person in materialist accounts, to the immortality of the soul and reincarnation, to mystical union with the One. Saint Thomas Aquinas thought that there were philosophical reasons in favor of the resurrection of the body; however, he did not think that these philosophical reasons were sufficient to account for the resurrection. This essay focuses on three main points: first, the philosophical reasons for holding that there will be a resurrection of the body; second, the philosophical reasons which force us to consider something beyond what philosophy can provide; and third, what revelation has to say and why this is so essential to our understanding the human person.
The resurrection of the body is a key doctrine of Christianity. It is intimately tied up with the mission of Jesus to redeem humanity. As Jesus is fully human and fully divine, our redemption must also be fully human, that is personal; and that would seem to include the redemption of our bodily life as well as our souls. The question of what happens after death has been entertained by religious traditions and philosophical reflection from the earliest times, and the answers to the question have been various, from the annihilation of the person in materialist accounts, to the immortality of the soul and reincarnation, to mystical union with the One. Saint Thomas Aquinas thought that there were philosophical reasons in favor of the resurrection of the body; however, he did not think that these philosophical reasons were sufficient to account for the resurrection. Considering the issue through the lens of Aristotle’s four causes, Thomas thought that an examination of human nature as we find it provides reasons for immortality and the resurrection of the body based on the formal and final causes of humanity, but that the efficient cause and, less clearly but significantly, the material cause for the resurrection must be supernatural. In this discussion, I propose to consider first the philosophical justifications for holding that there will be a resurrection of the body, second, the philosophical reasons which force us to consider something beyond what philosophy can provide, and third what revelation has to say and why this is so essential to our understanding the human person.1
Philosophical Justifications for the Resurrection of the Body
The history of philosophy includes a number of answers to what happens to the human person after death. One can hardly present all the possible responses to the question that have been given, but perhaps we can mention the major contestants that would have been available to Saint Thomas. Those thinkers who considered that whatever was real was material did not grant
1 I have discussed some of the philosophical arguments and their limits in an earlier paper: “Aquinas on the Resurrection of the Body,” The Thomist, 56.2 (April 1992), 165-207.
The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 1 the human individual any substantial unity: the stuff of the universe is all the same, either an irreducible many, as the atomists held, or all one, as the Stoics held. Those who considered the soul to be an immaterial reality provided the basis for distinguishing, not just quantitative differences between human beings and other things, but substantial differences. Still, there was a good deal of disagreement (sometimes within the same philosopher) about what this meant. If the soul is the real person and it is indestructible, as seems to be Plato’s basic position, then the soul is intrinsically immortal. But then questions arise as to its relation with the body and the material world which are not easily answered. Is the soul trapped in the body as in a prison house (suggesting that the body is a kind of punishment)? Will the soul come back in different bodies—perhaps as a goat or a lion or a bee—depending on how one lives one’s life? Will the soul eventually transcend the material world and break the cycle of rebirth? And if it does this, will it exist forever as individual, or will it merge with the World Soul or the Intelligence or the One? Such questions about individual immortality are raised by Aristotle’s understanding of human intelligence and its transcendence of materiality, and the issue is a major question for Neo-Platonism.
Thomas thinks that the resurrection of the body is a better philosophical answer to what happens after death than any of those offered by philosophers. In fact, he argues in his Commentary on 1 Corinthians, that it is hard if not impossible to prove the immortality of the soul without the resurrection of the body.2 Such a claim might seem puzzling since the major argument for the immortality of the soul is its immateriality based on the insight that it has operations—understanding and willing—that transcend the body. Let us see how Thomas arrives at this rather startling conclusion.
Thomas agrees with the basic Platonic insight that the fact of human knowledge is evidence that the soul transcends the body and therefore does not die when the body ceases to function. The objects of mathematics and metaphysics are not ultimately material things and so cannot be understood by a material organ. No one has actually seen or heard or weighed a point, line, triangle, or circle. They are known by definition, by acts of intelligence, not sensation. If a point has no dimensions, then it obviously cannot be seen or weighed. There is no physical circle in the precise sense of a planar figure with points equidistant from a center. Equally, algebraic equations are intelligible not physical realities.3 The same is true for essential knowledge of the world in which we live, whether of physical beings, moral ideals, or aesthetic intelligibilities. Such things are understood apart from matter, so much so that the ultimate reality of even material things is immaterial. Thus, for Plato, knowledge is innate, gained by the soul communing with the world of the Forms. The learning we do is recollecting what the soul already knows, learned apparently before this life.4
2 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (hereafter Com. 1 Cor.), 15.2.924, trans. Fabian Larcher, O.P. (987-1046 by Daniel Keating), Html-edited by Joseph Kenny, O.P., http://dhspriory.org/thomas/SS1Cor.htm. 3 It is interesting that for Plato and many contemporary mathematicians these equations and geometrical shapes are held to explain physical reality. 4 See Plato, Meno 81d.
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Aristotle, of course, thinks that there is no innate knowledge, that all knowledge is abstracted from sense experience. Still, even for him, knowledge transcends the senses: that is, knowledge is of the universal and unchanging, while the objects of sensation are particular and changing. There is, of course, a good deal of debate about the immortality of the soul in Aristotle, whether it is personal, or just for the one agent intellect which makes possible all thought.5
Saint Thomas agrees with the basic insight of Plato and Aristotle that the rational soul has activities of its own that transcend the body, so much so that when he talks about the human being, he thinks we are in a way two substances: a rational soul that can exist on its own (a bit of Plato and possibly Aristotle), and the soul/body composite in which the rational soul is the form of the body (Aristotle).6
In addition to the activity of knowing, the activity of freely willing indicates the transcendence of the soul over the body. This is more fully developed in Thomas than in Plato and Aristotle. As it was for Augustine, the proof for freedom of the will is moral responsibility, which makes no sense except under the condition that the will is free.7 The argument is a reductio ad absurdum: the entire moral life—virtue and vice, rewards and punishments—is absurd if human beings are not free. Plato and Aristotle are certainly deeply interested in ethics, and there are clear indications of their recognition of the natural moral law. However, when they (Plato especially) attempt to explain wrongdoing, they do so in terms of metaphysical or psychological explanation, that is, not in essentially moral terms. Virtue is ultimately knowledge, and vice is ignorance.8 It is the insight of Augustine (and in general the Judeo-Christian tradition) that one can only do what is wrong if one knows it is wrong and still does it; that is, far from making wrongdoing impossible, knowledge is essential for wrongdoing.9 Aristotle’s discussion of the voluntary comes close to this insight when he suggests the absurdity of our taking responsibility for our good actions but not for our bad ones (which we blame on other people or the circumstances, or something else).10 One can, perhaps, make a case for a greater depth of insight into moral freedom in Plato and Aristotle than I have suggested. The essential point is that moral freedom is another indication that there is something about being human that transcends our materiality. If we are responsible for our moral actions (good or bad), then they are not reducible to psychological states, social pressures, biological drives, or other non-moral
5 See Aristotle, De Anima, III, 5. 6 “Of man Who Is Composed of a Spiritual and a Corporeal Substance.” Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae (hereafter ST), trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (Allen, Texas: Christian Classics, 1981), 1.75.1. 7 Aquinas, ST 1.83.1. 8 Perhaps knowledge need not be restricted to physics, mathematics, and metaphysics: there could be knowledge of moral truths. However, in this view, will is ultimately determined by intellect, so that the intellect’s knowledge that something is wrong precludes the will from pursuing it. 9 See Augustine’s discussion of stealing the pears in Confessions 2.4-9, in which he denies all the “reasons” for his sin besides his evil free choice. 10 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III, 1.
The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 3 causes. Nor are they random, which might be claimed by a materialist. As freedom of choice is neither necessary nor random, our choices transcend our external and internal circumstances, indicating the immateriality of the soul. As immaterial, the soul which knows and chooses is not subject to dissolution, and hence is immortal.11
But how does Saint Thomas get from these insights to the requirement that the soul be reunited with the body? His route philosophically is through Aristotle, especially his understanding of formal and final causes of the human being. Thomas recognizes that Plato’s account of human nature (that it is essentially the soul) faces a problem—the plain fact that as we sit around and discuss these matters, we do so as embodied. How and why did we get here? On Plato’s account that the body is bad for the soul, how can Plato make sense of our “imprisonment”? The fact that there is in Plato a recognition of something like a “fall,” that we are not what and where we should be, is a genuine human insight, consistent with the moral foundations of Christian theology. Metaphysically, however, it is hard to explain in Platonic terms. To the question why the soul is associated so intimately with the body, Plato cannot say that it is good for the soul (in fact, he says the opposite). But the other alternative—that is for the sake of the body—makes even less sense, for this assumes that the body is more perfect than the soul; and is absurd, for in distinguishing body and soul, soul is clearly more perfect than body (as human beings are more perfect than animals, than plants, than stones). For these reasons, Thomas, following Aristotle’s position, affirms that the reason the soul is in the body is that it is good for the soul: that is, the human soul is the kind of rational soul that requires the body to learn and to act well in the human community.12
When it comes to explaining human activities, Thomas argues that the whole individual is prior to the parts. Thus, it is more proper to say that I see, than that my eyes see, and to say that I know, than that my soul knows.13 As Thomas notes in his Commentary on 1 Corinthians, “the soul, since it is a part of man’s body, is not an entire man, and my soul is not I.”14 He brings the same insight to the debate about whether the agent intellect (the key for the idea of immortality in Aristotle) is individual or universal. How is it that Socrates knows, and not someone else?15 Thomas insists on the insight of Aristotle that what is most real (primary substance) is the individual.16 Thomas’s doctrine of creation, with its claim that esse is most fundamental in each thing helps him underline the importance of the individual metaphysically. But the experience of reflecting on what it is to know—that it is I knowing, not just it knowing— is the experiential confirmation of the metaphysical insight. And the moral insight that I am responsible for my free acts confirms this.
11 Aquinas, ST 1.75.6. 12 Aquinas, ST 1.85.1. 13 Aquinas, ST 1.75.2ad2. 14 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.2.924. 15 Aquinas, ST 1.76.1.c. 16 There is some inconsistency on this matter in Aristotle, for he ends up grounding intelligibility in what is universal and unchanging, which only belongs to the species.
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Thus, the essence of the human being is rational animal, not just rational nor just animal. This is what we find ourselves to be. Physical death is not annihilation, for the soul has operations that transcend materiality and so is not subject to the material dissolution of the body. However, Thomas says that this state is unnatural and that an unnatural state cannot last forever: therefore, there will be a resurrection of the body.17 Here Thomas invokes final causality to make his case.
There are three basic arguments, one about nature in general, and the other two more specific to human nature. The first focuses on a basic metaphysical theme, the other two on the individual human being’s desire for happiness and his or her knowledge of moral obligation.
Given that it is natural for us to be what we find ourselves to be—namely, unities of body and soul—it is unnatural for the soul to exist apart from the body. But no unnatural state lasts forever—nature is not in vain.18 Therefore, the soul and body will be reunited. Otherwise, what is unnatural (the division of soul from body) would last forever, that is, would appear to be the ultimate natural state. Water can exist on a granite slope, but not permanently. Given the nature of the world (gravity, water as fluid, granite as hard), such a state is not permanent. The water flows to the lowest point. So the division of the soul from the body is not permanent:
For it is clear that the soul is naturally united to the body and is departed from it, contrary to its nature and per accidens. Hence the soul devoid of its body is imperfect, as long as it is without the body. But it is impossible that what is natural and per se be finite and, as it were, nothing; and that which is against nature and per accidens be infinite, if the soul endures without the body.19
The second argument takes up the peculiar orientation of human beings to happiness. Whatever happiness may be, it is the happiness of the individual person, not an abstract tendency of nature in general or of the species. Therefore, if happiness is to be complete (and as Aristotle pointed out, incomplete happiness is not happiness20) it must involve the entire human person, body and soul.
Man naturally desires his own salvation; but the soul, since it is a part of man’s body, is not an entire man, and my soul is not I: hence, although the soul obtains salvation in another life, nevertheless, not I or any man does. Furthermore, since man naturally desires salvation even of the body, a natural desire would frustrated.21
17 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (hereafter CG), On the Truth of the Catholic Faith, Book Four, trans, Charles J. O’Neil (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1957), 4.79.10-12; Compendium theologiae (hereafter CT) 151; ST 1.76.1ad6 18 Thomas refers to Aristotle, De Caelo, I, 2 (269b9). 19 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.1.924. 20 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 7. 21 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.2.934.
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The third argument is also based on final causality of the human being, grounded in our knowledge of responsibility and justice. Whether or not people actually are rewarded for their good deeds and punished for their evil deeds, we know they ought to be. But these deeds are the deeds of the human being—I act, not by body or soul—and therefore the entire human being, body and soul, deserves to be rewarded or punished.22
Philosophical Challenges
However, although there are arguments for the resurrection of the body based on formal and final causality, it is clear that there is no natural efficient cause capable of restoring the unity of soul and body after death, and the extent to which the material cause could be said to be natural is unclear. Thomas freely admits as much. “The resurrection is natural as to its end inasmuch as it is natural for the soul to be the form of the body; but its active principle is not natural, but is caused solely by divine power.”23 Natural generation is a temporal sequence, which does not double back on itself. Certainly essences are passed on by reproduction, so that from daisies come daisies and from dogs come dogs, but individuals are not passed on and cannot be repeated. Obviously, individuals are not passed on by themselves, for they would have to be before they are, which is impossible. Neither are individuals reproduced by nature: efficient causality in terms of matter in motion is unidirectional, the exact same temporal and spatial conditions do not obtain again. As Aristotle says, nature cannot make the same thing twice.24 And in the case of human generation, even the species is not passed on entirely by reproduction, for every rational soul is created ex nihilo by God, as Thomas says.25 So human conception, although clearly involving natural biological procreation, also requires a supernatural act. Thus, as the integration of the human being (body and soul) requires divine activity, so would the reintegration of the resurrection.26
As for the continuity between the living person and the resurrected person, Thomas thinks that the soul provides the link, for the entire blueprint for the body is contained in the rational soul, for there is just one form of the human being—the rational soul.27 Still, Thomas raises numerous questions about the material for the body, how it will be gathered, what happens when it has been in two different people, etc. In other words, it is not quite enough to say that the soul is sufficient to explain everything about the human being, for such a position would not
22 Aquinas, CG 4.79.12. 23 Aquinas, CG 4.81.14. “The dusts into which human bodies are reduced differ from other dust only according to God’s plan, inasmuch as these dusts are ordained by divine wisdom that human bodies be formed from them again. Hence the active cause of the resurrection is God alone” (Com. 1 Cor. 15.5. 969). 24 Aristotle, De Generatio et Corruptione, II, 9. 25 Aquinas, ST 1.90.2. 26 For this reason Thomas speaks of the resurrection as miraculous. See IV Sententia, dis. Xliii, a. 1, q. 3; and CT, 154. 27 On numerical identity, Thomas writes: “I do not do violence to the intermediary forms, because I do not hold that there is any other substantial form in man except the rational soul, from which the human body will have it that it is animated by a sensible and vegetable nature, and that it is rational. Accidental forms in no way hinder the numerical identity that we maintain” (Aquinas, Com 1 Cor. 15.9.1015). See also, ST 1.76.3.
The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 6 differ from Platonism, and Thomas certainly rejects that.28 Just as the efficient cause of the resurrection is God alone, so the solution to puzzles about how the same numerical matter can be restored is found only in God’s infinite power. “What is wanting will be supplied by the Creator’s omnipotence.”29
It is true that Aristotle’s notion of matter (ultimately, pure potentiality), which Thomas adopts, is not the same as the atomist’s notion of matter as smallest quantitative bits. Matter is an analogical term, applicable to the complex human body in its relation to the soul, to the cellulose of plant in relation to its life, to genus in relation to species, and even to species in relation to the individual. Prime matter seems to indicate a continuity among all material things—the potentiality, on some level, of one thing changing into another. But if the soul is entirely without matter, then it cannot restore to itself its body, nor can any natural cause. Only an infinitely powerful cause (God the creator) can bring something into being from nothing—restore the naturally impossible integration of immateriality with materiality. As creation is ex nihilo, so is the recreation that is the resurrection of the body. “For the power of nature restores what is the same in species, but not the same numerically; but God’s power can restore even the same numerically.”30
Thus, it is clear that the natural arguments for the resurrection of the body are not sufficient to make it happen. For just as there was no nature prior to creation which might cause God to create, so nature once created does not cause God to recreate it. That is, as intelligible as are the reasons for the resurrection of the body based on the formal and final causality of the human being, they are not sufficient to cause God to act. The creation was (is) a free act of God; and the resurrection must be equally free. Thus, our confidence in the resurrection depends on our confidence in God, and this is based on God’s revelation of the fundamental act of God: the Father sending the Son to give the Holy Spirit.31
One point I made in an earlier paper on this topic may be of interest. When the issue of identity is raised against the philosophical arguments for the resurrection) when it is objected that because there is a time when the soul exists without the body, the resurrected person is not the same individual), one can reply that since the soul is immaterial, it does not exist in space and time, and so there really is no “time when” the soul exists without the body. As far as it goes, this is a point well taken, as is the argument that Plato’s forms do not literally exist in a “world apart” for the reason that they are not spatial. However, this point only says that it is possible that the resurrection is in some sense immediate and that God could bring it about that there is no break
28 One of the problems with the idea of reincarnation, suggested in the Platonic myths, is that it assumes that the human soul could exist in some other kind of body. But for Thomas, the only proper matter for the human soul to inform is the human body, for that is what the human rational soul requires. 29 Aquinas, CG 4.81.13, p. 307. 30 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.5.970. 31 As Thomas says, “faith is concerned with things that are above reason. Hence, an article of faith begins where reason falls short” (Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 17.1.896).
The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 7 in the unity of soul and body.32 It does not change the fact that the act of continuity (its efficient cause) is the act solely of God, not of our doing and not of Nature.
Revelation and the Theological Perspective
Let us turn, then, to what theology offers us in way of making the resurrection of the body intelligible and compelling. As we are here at a transitional point from philosophy per se (if there is any such thing) to theology, let me affirm what I see as being the permanent contributions of Plato and Aristotle to our discussion, whether philosophical or theological. Plato (or perhaps Socrates) insists that for some reason we are not where we ought to be, that there has been some kind of disruption, some fall from perfection. This position is implied in Socrates’ humble admission that he does not know and does not live in perfect virtue, but that he strives to rectify this situation, to fulfill both ends—truth and goodness. Whatever metaphysical attempts are made at explaining what, how, or why the fall happened, this Socratic/Platonic insight is essential to our human condition. Our awareness of our indigence and alienation is fundamental to the ongoing search for truth and goodness in which is embedded our confidence in our freedom of choice. As Paul says in Philippians, “forgetting what is behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3.13-14). Aristotle, for his part, contributes the methodological refusal of reductionism. It is the very spirit of his thought: gather up all that is true and good, rejecting only what is false and evil. Rather than the elements or atoms being the currency of intelligibility, for Aristotle, it is the human being that is the prime analogate, and even the human individual. He, of course, is not entirely consistent on this point, but it is the spirit of his philosophy. The attributes he attributes to his God—life, intelligence, and to some degree love—are irreducible aspects of the human person. Theology protects and perfects this insight: the perfect honoring of all these elements in humanity and divinity is of course Jesus Christ and human beings insofar as they are images of Christ.
As we said at the beginning, the resurrection of the body is an essential doctrine of creedal Christianity. It is intimately bound up with the notion of the good creation, the fall, and the redemption. According to revelation, the creation (which is in Christ—John 1.3, Ephesians 2.10, Colossians 1.6) is good and even very good. There is no room in God’s free creative act for a necessary defect in nature which leads to the fall of humanity. On the contrary, it is the free act of human sin which leads to the disruption of nature, which disruption can only be healed by the healing of sin, its forgiveness. As Paul writes in Romans, “for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8.20-21). There is a world of difference between the explanation of
32 There are some theological reasons to deny this in terms of the importance of time and history. Thus, Ratzinger writes that, if we are the Body of Christ, then the fullness of the Body, the consummation of history, is required for the fullness of the resurrection. See Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein, Volume 9 of Dogmatic Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 190.
The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 8 how things are based on natural reason and the world as we find it, and the explanation based on what is revealed to us. Nature, for the doctrinal tradition, is what God created, not the world of conflict we experience, which has been disrupted by sin. All is created in Christ, and Christ is the first-born of all creation. This would suggest that there is no nature that is not graced with the grace of Christ.33 Human nature is Christ, not a presupposed natural humanity without the grace of Christ.
Donald Keefe, SJ, insists on the primordiality of Christ, as against the fairly common theological contention that it is the immaterial Trinitarian Son who creates and who becomes Christ by taking on our humanity. Keefe insists, following Irenaeus and Chalcedon, that Jesus Christ is “one and the same,” the son of God and the son of Mary. Creation is in the person Jesus Christ, who is from the beginning. There is no creation apart from Jesus, the Son of God and the son of Mary.34 The bastion against all reductionism and falsification is the most personal name. Jesus is Lord: there is no getting behind this bold liturgical statement of faith to some deeper reality. As Keefe puts it:
‘Name’ in the Old Testament and the New is always a personal designation. . . . [Mary’s] Naming of her Son has been accepted without question by all the generations of Christians who are so by their baptism and their faith in his name: the faith that the Man whom Mary names Jesus is the Lord. The liturgical interpretation of ‘Son’ trumps all secondary speculation: it is by the liturgy that the faith is nourished, and the criterion of its truth can only be liturgical: it is in his Name that we are baptized.35
Saint Thomas, when speaking of the Incarnation, affirms the same unity of the divine and human nature in Jesus Christ. “Only in this way can we save what the Scriptures hand on about the
33 When commenting on Paul’s admission that he is the least because he persecuted Christians, but that he is what he is he is by the grace of God, Thomas interprets: “Therefore, he says first: of myself I am nothing, but what I am, I am by the grace of God, i.e., from God, not from me. . . . And he says, what I am, because without grace a man is nothing.” (Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.1.908). 34 I am grateful for a clarification on Keefe’s position from Kevin McMahon, a colleague of mine in the Theology Department at Saint Anselm College. He writes: “I think it’s closer to Keefe to say that it is not the immaterial second person of the Trinity in whom the Father creates. On the contrary, when Colossians says that all was created in Christ, the reference is to the person of Jesus, born of Mary. The primordiality of Jesus means that the order of creation is structured by his free relation to his mother, even though that free relation emerges in time. The Son is incarnated in the act of creation, and in a sense the son who is Jesus is present from that first moment, even though it is very much—though not exclusively—by anticipation, being truly born as a person only when born of the woman. The person of the Son is begotten eternally from the Father. The birth of the person of Jesus, like his coming to full measure (Ephesians 4:13), embraces the event of creation. The Incarnation, rather than simply the eternal Son entering into creation, is the Son uniting creation to himself—and doing so by creating himself as the person born of Mary, as the body that is Jesus’s is formed from her body. That is what is somewhat controversial in Keefe’s interpretation of Chalcedon’s “one and the same”: he takes it to mean that there is only one, and what is said of the eternally begotten Son must be said of Jesus, namely, that he is a person, even though a created person: the created person who is the uncreated person of the Son. Two persons, but only one subject having only one identity” (email communication), 35 Donald J. Keefe, S.J., “‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us’ (John 1.14),” Studia Missionalia, 51 (2002): 23-52, at 27.
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Incarnation. Since, then, sacred Scripture without distinction attributes the things of God to that man, and the things of that man to God . . . , He of whom each class is said must be one and the same.”36
How one understands matter and its nature will be radically different according to whether one takes matter as having a nature independent of grace or whether one sees matter and all creation as graced. Thomas’s explanation of the state of humanity before the fall is one of original justice overcoming the natural tendency of matter to disintegrate.37 According to Thomas, it is the nature of matter to fall apart, which is why we die. In the state of original justice, God had given us a disposition of grace which kept soul and body together—so that there would be no death. That original justice was lost by original sin, and so the natural material processes of decay and death asserted themselves in human nature and the rest of creation. This account does suggest the grace of God before the fall, but it seems to presuppose a human nature without Christ, a nature naturally ordained as material to dissolution and death that is graced by God so that it has immortality, body and soul. But if Christ is human nature, and all creation is in Christ, then all creation was created in harmony, and matter in that creation did not have the tendency to disintegrate.38
This integral good creation suggests a notion of matter rather like Aristotle’s idea of prime matter, that is, the foundational continuity among all things. Clearly, one can affirm a continuity on some level among all created things. Some medieval thinkers such a Bonaventure and Alexander of Hales and the Franciscan tradition in general, held that there is a kind of universal matter in all things, angels included. Thomas, of course, rejects this claim, for he follows Plato and Aristotle in affirming that understanding and choice transcend all material conditions. Of course, Thomas does affirm a continuity, but he does so in terms of what all things share in common—their existence (esse). This is a notoriously difficult matter to get clear on, for esse is to form as form is to matter; that is, it is more actual than form, not a potency dependent on and activated by form. Now of course, created esse is dependent on God, and this dependency is true for all creatures. Their ability (potentiality) to exist is their createdness, is the grace of God given in creation.
Thomas’s notion of esse is a great metaphysical contribution to understanding the faith, for the very commonality that it brings to all things is radically individual. That is, the existence of anything, any human person most obviously, but every creature on every level, is its very own—the direct presence of God to it in all its particularity. Thus, the good creation, the intimate presence of God to his creatures, is never broken. If it were, all would cease to be.39
36 Aquinas, CG 4.39.1, p. 189. 37 See Aquinas. ST 1.97.1c & ad3, and 1-2.82.3; CG 4.81.1-2; CT, 152. 38 As Donald Keefe notes, “The creation of humanity—and all things—in Christ carries no implication of fallenness. Further, it cannot but freely entail free membership in his Body, the Church, whether this membership be fallen or unfallen.” Donald J. Keefe, SJ, “Bāśār-Nepeś: Sarx-Pneuma; Body-Soul: Death-Resurrection: An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” in Christianity and the Human Body: A Theology of the Human Body, Proceedings of ITEST Workshop, October, 2000, ed. Robert A. Brungs (St. Louis: ITEST/Science Press, 2001), 105-152, at 127. 39 Aquinas, ST 1.8.1.
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Of course, it is broken in a way, but the break is a matter of sin, not nature. God creates things to be what they are. To be human is to be free, and for some reason we (in the beginning, in Adam and Eve) chose to affirm our freedom by defying our Creator.40 This was sin only because we knew it was wrong and still did it deliberately. This has to be the case: if we acted in complete ignorance, the act was not willful and therefore not ours. The result of this choice was the violation of our covenant with God, with each other (most dramatically in the violation of the nuptial covenant), and of the unity of body and soul—which spelled death. Thus, the upshot of revelation is that moral infidelity preceded metaphysical fragmentation. Against all forms of Gnosticism, it is not matter that is the cause of physical and moral evil, but moral evil that is the cause of physical fragmentation and decay in general. Love is primary: it is the way of unity, and its violation is the cause of disunity. And only through love’s activity can unity be restored.
The continuity between the good creation and our present situation is in the obligation to love and the gift that makes the fulfillment possible. This implies freedom of the will, for no one can be forced to love. However we find ourselves falling short in love, we know that we do this freely. Augustine is unrelenting in his judgment: the only thing we do independently of God (that is of love) is sin.41 All our good acts are done in covenant with God. Thomas says the same thing.42 So the way back from the fall is through love. And as John says, “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4.10). Our salvation, our way back, must be initiated by God.
If the fullness of our redemption includes the resurrection of the body, then that is dependent on God’s activity. Our resurrection is an effect of Christ’s resurrection. But there is no way back for us without our loving, too; and all love is free. So it makes no sense to say that we are saved against our will, nor, of course, that we are damned against our will: the fundamental reason for our damnation lies in our rejection of God’s love. When arguing for the numerical identity of the resurrected body, Thomas makes use of an analogy from free will: our self- knowledge of ourselves as free is an intelligible transitional element between this world and the world to come. “Just as free will is of the same nature and the same numerically, while it is in a changeable mode to either side, and when it will be firmly fixed in the final state, so too the body will be of the same nature and the same numerically, in that corruptible mode and then, when by free will it will be firmly fixed by the glory of the soul, it will be incorruptible.”43
40 The doctrine of original sin is a very difficult teaching to understand correctly, inasmuch as all sin must be free but we in some sense inherited this sin. Keefe insists that ultimately, we must judge of the original sin of the first Adam in light of the second Adam. The second Adam came to set us all free, who were enslaved to sin and death. “The only possible source of the solidarity of man in the first Adam is his solidarity in the Second Adam, which at bottom is his creation in Christ. . . . [O]ur sole positive solidarity is our recapitulation in Christ, apart from whom we can understand nothing of a solidarity with the fallen first Adam” (Keefe, “Bāśār-Nepeś: Sarx-Pneuma; Body-Soul: Death-Resurrection: An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” fn.14, 146). In other words, we can only understand the bad news (original sin) in the light of the good news (our salvation in Christ). 41 See Augustine, Confessions 12.11. 42 See Aquinas ST 1.83.1ad3 and 1-2.79.2. 43 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.8.1015.
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Here is a radical difference in approach between traditional philosophical metaphysics, and a properly theological metaphysics. Plato tries to shed light on our moral failure by presenting metaphysical reasons for it. We do wrong because we are ignorant, and ignorance is ultimately ignorance of the way things are. It is too simple to say that the Platonic answer to sin is matter, but it is at least a recurring theme and is picked up by Neo-Platonism and the Gnostics.44 As I said above, Plato saw that we have a responsibility that we are not fulfilling. But it can only be our responsibility if we are somehow free to fulfill it. If our salvation is freedom from the body and this cycle of rebirth—to leave the material world behind, to fly alone to the alone, as Plotinus puts it—then this whole material world is just some kind of giant mistake or illusion. On the other hand, if our salvation depends on our love—that love given to us and our response to it—then questions of materiality and immateriality, change and permanence, time and eternity, are secondary.
This point is captured in St. Paul’s discussions of the distinction between “flesh” and “spirit.” This is a complicated issue, and there are grounds in some passages for interpreting this distinction as between the body as material and the spirit as immaterial. However, the key to the distinction is what it is we love. This is not so much a question of loving material things or immaterial things as loving ourselves or God.45 Yes, there are times that we are wearied of this world and all the things we have to do to continue in it—pay our taxes, correct bad grammar, vacuum the house—when we long for an end to this ongoing drudgery. But this is not the main issue. It is not that material things are bad and immaterial things are good, that temporal things are bad and eternal things are good: it is that loving things for myself apart from God is bad, and loving things for God is good. As Paul says, “But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you” (Romans, 8.9). Of course, Paul and those listening to him were still in the “flesh,” in the sense of in bodies, but they were also (not perfectly, but in the cause, that is, in the resurrected Jesus) in the “spirit.” Christ says, “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25). This life is offered to us now and always. As Thomas says, commenting on this passage from Paul, “unless you live, namely, the life of grace, you cannot attain to the kingdom of God, i.e., to the life of glory, because flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God. What we must not think, as some heretics say, is that flesh and blood will not rise again according to substance.”46 It is not our corporeality that cannot attain heaven; in fact, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body insists that it will inherit heaven. Spiritual matter, which is what Paul says we will have in the resurrection, is solidarity with Christ in the sense of being part of his body. It is the universally given grace of God—matter in the deepest sense. “We must not think that by flesh and blood, he means that the substance of the flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, but rather flesh and blood, i.e., those devoting themselves to flesh and
44 “The bodily kind, in that it partakes of Matter, is an evil thing” (Plotinus, Ennead I, 8, p. 59). 45 Augustine, in Book I of On Free Choice of the Will, seems to argue that the problem is that we love things that are changeable, that we can lose. Later, however, he develops his theory of the two cities, the City of God and the City of man, which are distinguished by love of God and love of self. See Augustine, City of God, Book XIV. 46 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.7.999.
The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 12 blood, namely, men given to vices and lusts, cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”47 Even physical death is not altogether bad, though it is the wages of sin. As Augustine says, because we know that it is coming, and we know that we are not where we ought to be, its possibly immediate advent can help turn us to what is important, to a conversion to the life that is love which alone conquers death.48 This, of course is not automatic, but must be freely chosen. So the life of grace transcends the distinction between immaterial and material for us, and even for all creation. For our rejection of life lived toward ourselves and our acceptance of life lived toward Christ spells the redemption of the entire universe. Thomas quotes Paul from Romans at the end of this discussion: “Because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8.21).49
Let us now reconsider the notions of material cause and efficient cause from the perspectives of what is revealed. Scripture tells us many times that we are the body of Christ; that is, the totus Christus is Christ the head and the Church the body. On one level this is established in the good creation, which is in, through, and for Christ. No one can separate us from the love of Christ, who is from the beginning.50 As Paul says, there are two Adams, the first through whom sin and death came into the world, the second through whom we are saved and given life. Commenting on Paul’s discussion, Thomas writes: “there are two principles of human generation; one according to natural life, namely Adam; the other according to the life of grace, namely Christ. But animality is distributed in all men by the first principle, namely Adam. Therefore, it is certain that to a much greater extent, by means of the second principle, that is to say Christ, spiritual life is distributed in all men.”51 But the grace of Christ ultimately precedes the sin of Adam. According to Thomas, Paul “lays down the condition of the second principle, saying, the last true Adam, i.e., Christ. And he is called the last Adam because Adam introduced one state, namely of guilt; Christ [the state] of true glory and life.”52 Christ is the true Adam, the true man, who is from the beginning. Thus, Thomas adds here the words of Christ: “I am the
47 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.7.1000. 48 God’s mercy counteracts both despair and presumption. “Therefore, because of those who are endangered by despair, he has proposed the harbor of forgiveness; because of those who are endangered by hope and deluded by delays, he has made the day of death uncertain. You who do not know when the last day may come. Are you ungrateful because you have today, in which you may be corrected?” Augustine, Tractates on John, 33.8.4, in The Fathers of the Church, A New Translation, v. 88, trans. John W. Rettig (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993) p. 59. According to Keefe, death is the universal way back to salvation. Everyone faces that moment, believer and nonbeliever. Christians can, through the sacraments, die in this life, and live the life of Christ. “The Christian, in the here and now of salvation history, having been restored by baptism to the free unity of personal integrity, is objectively—sacramentally—freed from sin and death, and enabled freely to enter into the full measure of historical freedom” (Keefe, “An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” 124). 49 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.7.1000. 50 As Keefe says, the body is never without the head; the spouse is never without her husband. “It must be understood at the outset that the Church is primordial, at one with her Head in the Beginning, and thus is prior in being to all those who are her members” (Keefe, “An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” 115). “It is thus that our fallen history is salvific: viz., by the Eucharistic immanence of the Second Adam, One Flesh with his Bridal Church, the Second Eve. . . . This is the nuptial unity of the Christus integer, the One Flesh of Christ and his Church” (Keefe, “An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” 116). 51 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.7.991. 52 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.7.992.
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First and the Last” (Rev. 1.17), and “I am the Alpha and the Omega” (Rev. 21.6). All things are created in Christ, and Christ is ever present to his creation and never separated from it.
We, however, do separate ourselves. The grace is always offered, but we can refuse it. We know that we can freely reject God because we do so. Keefe says that because of the fall (this free turning away from God), the mission of the Son from the Father to give the Spirit involved the suffering, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ.53 And his resurrection is the cause of our resurrection. But the resurrection to Life, which is the only one that really matters, must be freely accepted by us. As Keefe puts it, “The fact of this universal grace of our creation, which is not overcome by the Fall, means that the sinfulness, the mortality, which afflicts every human person is not a bar to moral freedom: upon maturity, every human being is free at every moment to choose to be free.”54
There is no great bonus to existing forever if it involves endless alienation or if it is a matter of being reabsorbed into the One. The first is infinite loss; the second is annihilation. Just as Jesus’s resurrection is the resurrection of the person Jesus, so resurrection is a personal event for each of us. Here, philosophical reflection, that is, reflection without adverting to explicit Revelation, can aid us. For who among us sees his or her happiness as a meaningless or painful existence without end, or as mere absorption into the One. There is no happiness in either. There is no happiness for me unless I am happy. If death is fearful, it is because life is good. Thus, death and resurrection to life are really moral categories, not mere facts. Why should endless existence or annihilation be fearful, unless they imply loss of good? But in the context of the good creation, loss of good only occurs because of sin, because of our moral failure. Thus, although the resurrection is in some way a universal fact of human nature, the efficient cause of the resurrection to Life is both the personal gracious act of Jesus the Christ and one’s own personal grateful assent. This is personal to the depths, bestowed on us in the Name by which we are to be saved and in the name given us by Jesus.55
As the most fundamental meaning of “flesh” is sin, not temporal-spatial stuff, there is a way in which the material cause or continuity among all human beings (and indeed among all creatures) is our sin. But we are also included in the body of Christ—a material cause of redemption, in which case, the continuity (solidarity) among all human beings is grace. This is
53 The mission of the son is prior to the fall. “However, the Christ could not abandon the Good Creation by reason of its Fall, for he cannot abandon his Mission from the Father; thus his outpouring of the Spirit bars the final dissolution upon which the world and flesh are intent” (Keefe, “An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” 114). 54 Keefe, “An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” 109. 55 “Thereby it may be understood that Jesus, the human source of the free unity of our redeemed humanity, cannot but be Personally consubstantial ‘with us.’ His consubstantiality with us, like his consubstantiality with his Father, cannot be assigned merely to ‘his humanity,’ as distinct from his divinity, for it is as Named, as Jesus, that the Nicene Creed teaches that he is the Only-begotten Son, consubstantial with the Father; it is as Named, as Jesus the Lord, the one and the same Son, that the Formula of Union and the Symbol of Chalcedon teach that Jesus is the Head of our human substance, the Personal source of our free created unity, thereby consubstantial with us as the Father, his Head, is consubstantial with Jesus and with the Holy Spirit whom the Father sent Jesus to give.” Donald J. Keefe, Covenantal Theology, Volume III: A Historical Vindication of Covenantal Metaphysics, Unpublished, Forward, p. 5.
The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 14 what Keefe calls participation in sarx (flesh) and pneuma (spirit) passively speaking.56 We find ourselves in a reality in which there is real community in sin and community in the offer of grace. But Keefe sees that we also participate in sarx and pneuma actively: that is, we sin and we turn to Christ. We are responsible for our sin, even though we are born into a world disoriented by the sin of another. Thomas deals with this question in Summa theologiae 2-2.2.9 where he recognizes that if there is universal responsibility for not turning to God, then everyone must on some level know about God, that there is in each of us a kind of interior instinct of God.57 In his Commentary on John, he expands on Jesus’s statement that “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day” (John 6.44). To be drawn by God (trahi a Deo) is part of being created in Christ. But an objection can be raised that if one is drawn, then one is compelled; and then whether or not one comes to Christ is determined. If this is so, there is no human freedom; and hence no one really, that is personally, comes to Christ at all. Thomas presents three basic ways in which this drawing can happen without coercion. In the first place, one can be persuaded by a reason, either through some interior revelation or through miracles. The second way is by way of attraction. “Again, one person draws another by attracting or captivating him.”58 This also works on a level that is not grounded in revelation whether interior or exterior. We are drawn to Christ when we are drawn to truth, and goodness. Here he follows Augustine’s interpretation from his Tractates on John. “They are also drawn by the Son, through a wonderful joy and the love of the truth, which is the very Son of God himself. For if, as Augustine says, each of us is drawn by his own pleasure, how much more strongly ought we to be drawn to Christ if we find our pleasure in truth, happiness, justice, eternal life: all of which Christ is?”59 Now we are naturally drawn to all these things: it is part of our human orientation, even in our fallen state. And we are not forced to pursue these things; in fact, they can only be pursued freely. Finally, Thomas says that, in addition to external revelation and objects of virtue, “there is also an interior impulse (interior instinctus) that incites and moves us to believe. And so the Father draws many to the Son by the impulse of a divine action, moving a person’s heart from within to believe.”60 God calls all; if some do not come, it is their choice. In our present state of fallen nature, we are all called, and we are all held back from this drawing by the obstacle of sin; “and so all need to be drawn.” Thomas writes, “God, insofar as it depends on him, extends his hand to every one, to draw every one. . . . Therefore, since God is ready to give grace to all, and draw them to himself, it is not due to him if someone does not accept; rather, it is due to the person who does not accept.”61 It is a personal call, and the response can only be personal.
56 For Keefe’s discussion of our passive and active solidarity in pneuma and sarx, see Keefe, “An Essay in Pauline Anthropology,” 127-129 and 134-135. 57 Aquinas, ST 2-2.2.9ad3, and 2-2.5.1 58 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, (hereafter, Com. John), 6.5.935, trans. James A. Weisheipl (Albany, NY: Magi Books), hspriory.org/thomas/SSJohn.htm. 59 Aquinas, Com. John, 6.5.935. 60 Aquinas, Com. John, 6.5.935. 61 Aquinas, Com. John 6.5.937. One might ask why God does not draw all who turn away from him. Thomas answers that it is the order of divine justice, but this is not really for us to parse out. The answer, and he follows Augustine here, is not to try to sort out why or why not others do not convert, but to pray that we do and that they do. “So Augustine says, ‘whom he draws and whom he does not draw, why he draws one and does not draw another,
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Thus, we are responsible for our salvation (which includes the resurrection), even though neither is possible without the lead of Christ. Solidarity in sin is not merely someone else’s doing; nor is solidarity in salvation merely someone else’s doing. Covenantal relations are free unities. Given that such a covenant is always offered us, we are complicit in rejecting it. And although initiated by God, our covenantal restoration (if it is to be ours) must be our doing, too. Salvation is freely given and can only be freely received.62 The resurrection of the body, in the full sense of the resurrection to Life, is freely given and can only be freely received. That is, it is primarily a moral event, not just a fact of nature. As Thomas says in this passage on John, hearing and free judgment “are necessary for every teaching of faith.”63 God teaches within by a free act of grace, but our free assent is required. “These two things are necessary for every teaching of faith. Everyone who has heard the Father, teaching and making known, and has learned, by giving assent, comes to me.”64
Conclusion
According to Thomas Aquinas, there are reasons for the resurrection based on what we know from our experience, and yet they are not the full explanation. To be a human being is to be seeking truth and goodness. These objects of our intelligence are not limited to any particular instance. Every recognition of a limitation of truth or goodness encourages us to seek further. Thus, we are made for on-going participation and growth. But, such on-going participation and growth seem to end with physical death. However, nothing natural is in vain, as Aristotle pointed out. Thus, there will be the opportunity for ongoing seeking for the fullness of truth and goodness. But these activities are activities of the human person, body and soul. Although one can understand that some aspect of us even now transcends the material world and that there is reason to believe that this (the rational soul) is immortal, it is impossible that only this should live on. For it would mean that what is naturally a unity of body and soul for the good of the person is to be forever fragmented—that what is not natural is to be natural, an obvious contradiction. Therefore, based on human nature as we know it, there will be a resurrection of the body. However, the efficient cause for the resurrection is strictly supernatural, and the material to be resurrected and the disposition which makes it incorruptible must also be supplied by the creator.65 To explain how this happens or what spiritual matter might be is impossible for natural reason, for neither has a natural cause. At best we arrive at the affirmation that there is such an efficient cause and such matter.
do not desire to judge if you do not wish to err. But accept and understand: if you are not yet drawn, then pray that you may be drawn’” (Aquinas, Com. John 6.5.938). 62 Of course, the resurrection of the body is for all, including the damned; but here we are considering the fullness of salvation. 63 Aquinas, Com. John 6.5.946. 64 Aquinas, Com. John 6.5.946. 65 Thomas says that it will be the same numerical body, with anything missing supplied by God, but that it will be given a special disposition from God to make it incorruptible. See Aquinas, CG 4.84-85 and CT 155.
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Would we know more, we must turn to revelation. Revelation is all about the personal, from the personal call of Abraham, to the personal gathering of the chosen people, to the personal calling of the prophets, to the most personal Incarnation—Jesus the Christ. The personal is free, and so even the most universal conditions of our creation and fall and redemption are free. As mysterious as is original sin, it is not sin without human freedom. And as universal as is the forgiveness of sin through the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, salvation is also impossible without human freedom. The call to each human being (trahi) is a personal call, which can only be answered personally. When Mary Magdalene meets Jesus outside the tomb after his resurrection, she does not recognize him until he calls her name, addressing her personally (John 20.16). And it is in the name of Jesus that Peter and John work their miracles (Acts 3.6). The source of grace is personal, and the response to grace is personal. As Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” (Luke 8.48)). Obviously, the woman is healed through the power of Christ, but that power operates in covenant with her free choice to be healed.
Thus, the notions of efficient and material causes are at once more universal and more personal in theology than in philosophy. They are more universal: all things are created in Christ, fallen in Adam and Eve, and redeemed in Christ. They are more personal: the resurrection of the body is personal in Jesus’ case, and that personal touch is extended to each member of the Body of Christ. Thus, community is more personal, and the individual within the community is uniquely in covenant with the Redeemer. Redemption is not inevitable, for each of us can freely turn away from the offered grace. Nor, as Ratzinger says, is our salvation merely personal, for we are part of the Body of Christ, and the history of the body of Christ is not complete.66
Near the end Chapter 15 of his Commentary on 1 Corinthians, Thomas reflects on Paul’s contention that corruptibility must put on incorruptibility and why there must be a resurrection of the body. Here he gives three reasons. The first two are much like those he gave earlier, from human nature and the nature of justice. The first is “for the completion of human nature.” The soul separated from the body is imperfect, and for perfect human happiness, the soul must be united with the body forever. The second is “for the necessity of divine justice, so that those who have done good or evil in the body are rewarded or punished likewise in the same bodies.” But the third reason is the most essential, complete, and personal, for it is rooted in God’s revealed truth about Christ and his mission. One must put on incorruptibility, the resurrection of one’s person—body, soul, and spirit—“for the conformity of the members to the head, so that ‘just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life’ (Romans, 6:4).”67
66 “The Body of Christ means all human beings are one organism, the destiny of the whole the proper destiny of each. True enough, the decisive outcome of each person’s life is settled in death, at the close of his earthly activity. . . . But his final place in the whole can be determined only when the total organism is complete, when the passio and actio of history have come to their end” (Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, 190). 67 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.8.1013.
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“Strengthened for All that Will Delight Us”
Love and the Metaphysics of Resurrected Bodies In response to Montague Brown
Kevin L. Hughes Villanova University
né potrà tanta luce affaticarne: ché li organi del corpo saran forti a tutto ciò che potrà dilettarne.1 Dante, Paradiso XIV.58-60
This paper responds to the essay offered by Montague Brown, bringing Saint Bonaventure and Dante Alighieri into conversation with Brown’s excellent discussion of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In this conversation, I take up the question of the “resurrection to punishment” and ask about its relationship to the “resurrection to life” as Brown discusses it. I then explore the fittingness of the resurrection to life in the communion of saints. Lastly, I inquire into the nature of numerical identity—the conviction that the body that is raised is the same body (in some sense) as the body that died.
Montague Brown’s paper begins by noting that the resurrection of the body is clearly an issue central to Christian understanding of what it means to be saved.2 He then goes on to describe the philosophical and theological warrants for belief in the resurrection of the body. In a nutshell, Brown argues that, in Thomistic terms, questions of formal and final causality can point philosophically to the fittingness of the resurrection of the body, but philosophical reasoning alone cannot, in its own terms, account for the efficient and material cause of resurrection. The invitation of Christ into his Body and the free human response together constitute the very personal cause of the resurrection of the blessed; as he says, “the source of grace is personal, and the response to grace is personal.” This conformity between head and members is, he says, the force that draws the resurrected one, body, soul, and spirit, into glory in patria. What I would like to do with our time this evening is highlight a few elements of this excellent paper and place them in conversation with two figures connected intimately with Thomas—Bonaventure and Dante. I hope this will be of interest and provide fruitful ground for a rich conversation.
Surnaturel
1 “Nor will such shining have the power to harm us,/ for our body’s organs shall be strengthened/ to deal with all that can delight us.” Dante, Paradiso XIV.58-60. Translation by Robert and Jean Hollander. 2 I want to thank Kevin McMahon and Saint Anselm College for the invitation to be a part of the Metaphysics Colloquium this year, and I want to thank Montague Brown for offering such a rich paper, difficult to respond to, not for any flaws within it but for the very abundance of insights it offers. I suffered an embarrassment of riches in responding, and, I fear, in a worse predicament Buridan’s Ass, may have found myself stranded between so many delights that this paper may be only a meager gesture of my deep appreciation.
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Let me say first of all that Brown’s argument gives an exemplary case in the relationship between faith and reason and between “the natural” and the “supernatural.” Never in this essay are the battle lines drawn in an explicit way between de Lubac and Garrigou-Lagrange, or between Milbank and Feingold or Long, nor do we see a covert war waged in the footnotes. (And for this I thank him). And yet the treatment of the resurrection of the body reveals the fundamental contours of an argument that, I think, illustrates the very paradoxical stance that de Lubac was trying to articulate in a general way in his Surnaturel. That is, formally and finally, the shape of human life is fittingly ordered to the resurrection of the body, and this can be known, or at least argued, through natural reason. It is natural, says Brown, following Aquinas, for us to be what we find ourselves to be, i.e., a unity of soul and body, and so it is unnatural for the soul to live apart from the body. And yet the conditions of death and corruption would seem to prevent this and thus frustrate nature. Similarly, humans are ordered to happiness, and as such “Man naturally desires his own salvation; but the soul, since it is a part of man’s body, is not an entire man, and my soul is not I: hence, although the soul obtains salvation in another life, nevertheless, not I or any man does. Furthermore, since man naturally desires salvation even of the body, a natural desire would frustrated.3 (That’s Thomas in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, as cited in Brown’s paper.) So a compelling case has been made that nature would be frustrated in several ways if body and soul were not reunited in a personal unity. And yet, as Brown shows with great clarity, Thomas does not see any natural material or efficient cause which can bring this fitting state of affairs into being. So, stepping back and painting with broad strokes that, indeed, risk obscuring the precision with which Brown develops his case, I will hazard to say that, for Thomas, humans, in our very nature as hylomorphic unity of body and soul, are naturally ordered to an end that nature cannot deliver. We are in need of supernatural grace to achieve our natural end. This is so in our present state, as broken by sin, but, Brown points out, it would have been the case even if Adam had not fallen: “Thomas’s explanation of the state of humanity before the fall is one of original justice overcoming the tendency of matter to disintegrate. According to Thomas, it is the nature of matter to fall apart, which is why we die. In the state of original justice, God had given us a disposition of grace which kept soul and body together—so that there would be no death.”4 So even pre-lapsarian humanity was ordered to an end that exceeded its own natural powers and that depended on God’s gift of a disposition of grace to overcome the natural powers of corruption. Whether considered before or after the fall, humanity as such is naturally ordered to an end that requires the work of supernatural grace. This is Thomas’s case, as presented by Brown, but it seems that Brown may want to present even a stronger case for the primordial grace present in the act of creating itself.
Drawing on the Pauline scholarship of Donald Keefe, Brown invites us briefly to consider whether our creation in Christ would shift our attention from a distinct human nature with a natural end that is forever in need of supplemental grace. He claims rather boldly, following Keefe, that “human nature is Christ, not a presupposed natural humanity without the grace of Christ” (8). If this is the case, then unfallen nature, in Christ, does not tend to
3 Aquinas, Com. 1 Cor. 15.2.934. 4 Montague Brown, “Philosophical and Theological Perspectives on the Resurrection of the Body in Aquinas,” The Saint Anselm Journal, 12.2 (Spring 2017), 9-10.
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disintegrate; in this view, if I have it correctly, what we can see and understand as “nature” with its limits is a postlapsarian phenomenon. But, if I have it right, this is to go well beyond even what de Lubac proposes, offering a deeply Christocentric anthropology that elevates the category of “nature” theologically in such a way that, for traditional Thomists of a certain sort, would seem to endanger the proper gratuity of grace. I hasten to say that I am not troubled by this, since such attention to the intimacy of Christ to all creation calls attention to the sheer gratuity of creation itself and sets the brokenness of the fall and the gratuity of our restoration in the broader context of the complete gratuity of creation itself. But I wonder how others might respond. That is, I take this to be a very strong intervention in the often-wearisome Surnaturel debates, fanned into flame once again in the last decade or so, an intervention that aims to outflank even Thomas’s own view in the service of a deeper Pauline and Irenaean vision. If that’s a fair reading of Brown’s work, let me suggest that is has the great advantage of sidestepping some of the usual pitfalls in these conversations, and the particular focus on the dilemma of resurrection brings needed clarity to a muddled argument in Catholic theology.
So that’s a first contextual comment—an appreciation of the work from 30,000 feet, as it were. For the rest of my comments, I’d like to offer three brief meditations on the resurrection of the body as I find them Dante’s Divine Comedy, and to use these glimpses as a way to engage with some of the fundamental questions raised by Brown’s paper.
Resurrection to Punishment
Brown’s paper begins with the clear statement that the resurrection of the body is “a key doctrine of Christianity…intimately tied up with the mission of Jesus to redeem humanity.” He continues, “As Jesus is fully human and fully divine, our redemption must also be fully human, that is personal; and that would seem to include the redemption of our bodily life as well as our souls” (1). He then draws out of Aquinas this positive case for the resurrection of the body through a consideration of the proper and fitting end of the soul as it finds happiness and completion in God in a fully personal way, body and soul. And he makes a very strong case as such. “Thus,” he says, “although the resurrection is in some way a universal fact of human nature, the efficient cause of the resurrection to Life is both the personal gracious act of Jesus the Christ, and one’s personal grateful assent. This is personal to the depths, given in the name by which we are to be saved and in the name given us by Jesus” (14).
But he does note in passing, near the end of his paper (17), that Thomas, like many of his contemporaries, gives three different kinds of reason for the resurrection of the body: “the completion of human nature,” “the necessity of divine justice, so that those who have done good or evil in the body are likewise rewarded or punished in the same bodies”; and third, “the conformity of head to members,” whereby the souls of the blessed, as members of the Body of Christ, are drawn into conformity with Christ, ‘the firstborn of the dead.’ Brown spends a fair amount of time on the first and the third, but it is the second reason, the necessity of divine justice, that I want to consider briefly. That is, if the supernatural efficient and material causes of
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resurrection to life are due to the personal gracious act of Christ, what is the efficient and material cause of the resurrection to punishment?
In Dante’s Inferno, there are two particularly striking discussions of the resurrection of the body that may merit some reflection. The first, in the circle of heresy in Inferno X, Dante encounters Farinata and Cavalcante, both “Epicureans” who “hold the soul dies with the body.” Farinata and Cavalcante stand waist-deep in an open tomb. Farinata’s solemnity in this tomb is a kind of unintentional mirroring of the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Virgil tells Dante that “all will be shut and sealed when the souls return from Jehosaphat with the bodies they have left above.” 5 Those who believe that the soul goes to the tomb with the body will perversely get exactly what they wished for and expected—the soul will go with the body into the tomb, but now not to death or annihilation but to eternally living in death’s tomb, buried alive, body and soul.
Deeper into Hell, Dante encounters the souls of those who committed suicide. These souls dwell within thick gnarled thornbushes, like sap. Indeed, these souls, like invasive weeds, caught upon the ground and sprung up into these brambles. The soul of a suicide, in Dante’s imagining, is, in a sense, incarnate in these thorns. “It spreads into a shoot, then a wild thicket.” At the resurrection, one of these souls says, “we will come to claim our cast-off bodies like the others. But it would not be just if we again put on the flesh we robbed from our own souls. Here we shall drag it, and in this dismal wood our bodies will be hung, each one upon the thorn-bush of its painful shade.”6 Here, the resurrected body is “reclaimed,” as it were, but divine justice precisely prevents a full reunion of body and soul—the torment of hell, in this case, is the very continuation of the sin—the body and soul that the suicide has unjustly separated will be reunited and yet remain still separate, for all eternity.
These two rather vivid accounts are not the only discussions of the resurrection of the body in the Inferno, but they invite speculation about the “resurrection to punishment” of the damned. How does this resurrection fit with Brown’s claim that “the efficient cause of the resurrection to Life is both the personal gracious act of Jesus the Christ, and one’s personal grateful assent? This is personal to the depths, given in the name by which we are to be saved and in the name given us by Jesus” (14). What, then, is the efficient cause of the resurrection to judgment or the resurrection to damnation? Is it something like “the personal just act of Jesus Christ? Or…? Are the efficient causes different, here? Or are they the same, differently expressed, due to the lack of “personal grateful assent”? Bonaventure, for sure, spends an awful lot of time reflecting on the nature of the resurrected flesh of the damned, “perfected” in such a way that it can endure eternal punishment. But he is quite clear that the resurrection of the just and the unjust is one simultaneous act: “The bodies of all human beings will arise in a general resurrection, with no interval of time existing between them, but with a great difference in the order of their dignity. For evil persons will arise with the deformities and punishments, the
5 Dante, Inferno, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), X.10-12. 6 Dante, Inf. XIII.100-108.
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miseries and defects, they incurred during this present life. But in the good, ‘blemishes will be taken away from their bodies, but their nature will be preserved.’”7 For Bonaventure, this single act of resurrection is due to the act of God who is “all powerful, all merciful, and all just.” Bonaventure proceeds to examine how the “work of retribution” can be brought about “in a way that respects the rectitude of justice, the restoration of grace, and the completion of nature.”8 As Brown’s paper notes, Thomas has a similar set of arguments in his commentary on 1 Corinthians. But Brown’s paper has so enriched the understanding of the “restoration of grace” and the “completion of nature,” bringing Thomas’s insights together with Donald Keefe’s Pauline theological anthropology. I wonder how, in this enriched sense, we would characterize the efficient, supernatural cause of the resurrection to punishment and damnation, and what is its relationship to the efficient cause of the “resurrection to life”? They have to be one, of course, but how would we describe their unity?
Resurrection into Life in the Body of Christ
As Dante the Pilgrim sojourns in the sphere of the Sun, his long conversation with Thomas Aquinas draws to a close with two questions still on the tip of his tongue. Ever the gracious guide and hostess, Beatrice intuits his questions and casts them before Thomas and the other wise souls before them: (1) Will the luminous quality of their souls abide even after the resurrection of the body? And, if so, (2) won’t that light hurt their physical eyes? These questions elicit an answer from none other than Solomon, the wisest king. He answers thus: “When we put on again our flesh, glorified and holy, then our persons (la nostra persona) will be more pleasing for being all complete, so that the light, granted to us freely by the Highest Good, shall increase the light that makes us fit to see Him. From that light, vision must increase, and love increase what vision kindles, and radiance increase which comes from love… Nor will such shining have the power to harm us, for our body’s organs shall be strengthened to deal with all that can delight us.”9 Dante continues to narrate, “So quick and eager seemed to me both choirs to say their Amen that they clearly showed their desire for their mortal bodies, not perhaps for themselves alone, but for their mothers, for their fathers, and for others whom they loved before they all became eternal flames.”10 This brief portion of Dante’s poem contains multitudes. Solomon suggests that the souls in heaven, although they currently enjoy beatitude, will be much better off when they are resurrected in their bodies, and his affirmation is quickly picked up and restated by the glorified souls around him. One of the vexing questions about the “beatific vision” in Dante’s lifetime was whether souls in glory fell short of the fullness of glory before the resurrection of the body—in what sense could the beatific vision be experienced if the souls of the just still experienced the absence of the body as a deficiency or loss? But in the context of the narrative thrust of the whole Commedia, these questions seem rather moot. When Dante meets Piccarda, who had been dragged out of the convent and married off against her will, whether she laments
7 Bonaventure, Breviloquium, ed. & trans. Dominic F. Monti (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute Press, 2005) VII.5.1. 8 Bonaventure, Brev. VII.5.2. 9 Dante, Par. XIV.43-51, 58-60. 10 Dante, Par. XIV.61-66.
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her placement in the lowest sphere of heaven. She responds, “Brother, the power of love subdues our will so that we long for only what we have and thirst for nothing else.”11 So the desire for the resurrected body is not exactly a sense of loss or lack. At each stage of the Paradiso, Dante encounters souls who are eager to speak with him, as “here is one who can increase our love.”12 We might imagine the “desire without lack” to be something of this sort. The just desire the promised return of their bodies so as to become “complete.” Completion, here, is not static repose, but the increase of light which leads to increased vision, which leads to increased love, which leads to an expanded radiance.
One might think that this expanded radiance refers simply to the exchange between the soul and God. But the echoing “Amens” of the other souls suggests that this radiance will be social, shared among all the blessed: “their mothers, their fathers, others whom they loved before they all became eternal flames.”13 The syntax is ambiguous here, both in the Italian and in the English translation: are the blessed hoping that our loved ones also share in the good of the resurrection? Or, with a slightly stronger reading, the blessed desire the restoration of their own bodies, and this they desire for their own delight and for the delight of those they love. That is, the restoration of our own bodies allows us to make of our selves a radiant gift to those with whom we share heavenly bliss. The blessed may hope to enjoy the full, embodied, personal presence of their loved ones in heavenly glory, and for this they desire their mortal bodies. It seems that Dante is commenting on, and expanding, Augustine’s speculation that the glory of God will be seen with our own eyes as it is reflected in the faces of those we love. Brown’s paper brings Aquinas together with Ratzinger to sketch how the supernatural material and efficient cause of the resurrection of the body is entailed to our membership in the Body of Christ; here, Dante notes the social dimension of our salvation in a particularly intimate way—we long for the resurrection not only of our own bodies, but of those intimates we can no longer see. For Dante, our resurrected bodies will be strengthened to sustain the delights that come from the radiance of the communion of saints, reflecting the radiant love of God himself. We will be “strengthened for all that will delight us,”14 as he says. In this light, the resurrection and glorification of the body becomes not an end in itself, and not the mere continuation of life into eternity, but a necessary concomitant to the fully human (and therefore embodied) enjoyment of the “love that moves the sun and other stars.”15
On perhaps a bit of a tangent, but I hope a fruitful one, I think this particular dimension of a kind of material continuity—that, in glory, we will have our own body, but strengthened to sustain the perception of that glory—invites some connection between this consideration in patria and the transformation of perception that we encounter here in via. Bonaventure is one of the great medieval exponents of “the spiritual senses,” but scholars since Rahner’s early work on the subject have wrestled with exactly what these “spiritual senses” are. Some have thought them
11 Dante, Par. III.70-72 12 E.g., Par. V.105. 13 Dante, Par. XIV.65-66. 14 Dante, Par. XIV.60. 15 Dante, Par. XXXIII.145.
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a special, separate sensorium. But recent work I have done, along with the rather striking collaborative work of Paul Gavrilyuk, Sarah Coakley, Boyd Taylor Coolman, and Mark McInroy, among others, have begun to see the “spiritual senses” as we find them in Bonaventure, in Gregory of Nyssa, in Origen, and others, not as separate “spiritual sensorium,” but as a kind of intensification of perception of the one sensorium we possess. That is, under the influence of grace, here, in via, the soul can begin to perceive in a kind of sensible way the presence of God within our sense knowledge. Boyd Coolman, in particular, has highlighted the orientation of the spiritual senses toward a consummating eschatological transformation of perception. In what ways can we begin to see not only material continuity of the matter of bodies, but a kind of continuity of transformation across the boundaries of via and patria. As Catherine of Siena is supposed to have said, “All the way to heaven is heaven, because Jesus is the way.” Can we begin to think of this “heavenly strengthening,” as Dante describes it, as a process of transformation that we can begin, in a very partial and participatory way, to share in in this present life? And so here we might consider the intuitive insight of popular pious interest in the “sensible ecstasy” of Saint Teresa, preserved perhaps infamously by Bernini, and in things like the incorruptibility of certain saintly bodies, already beginning to share, in a partial and limited way, in the resurrection, precisely because of the holiness that follows from the saint’s free response to the offer of Christ’s love. I don’t know; I think this bears investigation.
How Essential is Numeric Identity to Thomas? And How Essential is it to us?
Brown’s paper rightly notes that Thomas argues for the numeric identity of the body that dies and the body that rises, and he very clearly shows why the soul needs the body to rise. But it is not clear (to me, at least) why, for Thomas, that numeric identity is required. I think Thomas does cite that passage from St. John of Damascus wherein the very term “re-surrection” would seem to require numerical identity, lest it be only “surrection.” For thinkers like Bonaventure, the belief in the multiplicity of form in the human being allowed him to imagine the body on its own, with its own sort of ‘agency.’ For Bonaventure, the material parts of the dead body, however far flung they may be, have coded within them the rationes seminales, the “seminal reasons” that bind this body, as its own quasi-integral substance, to this proper soul. For Bonaventure, body and soul can be said to “desire” each other, and he will use bridal images to describe this passionate and even erotic desire of body for soul and vice versa.16 “Body must rise, that it may be blessed through co-participation in and the overflowing of blessedness.”17 And the soul is “a complete substance composed of its own form and matter,” and yet it “nonetheless needs a body for completion”; the longing for its body, in Bynum’s words, “is thus lodged in its very being.”18 So, curiously, the multiplicity of forms in Bonaventure’s anthropology gives the soul and the body a kind of a separability, but it also makes the numerical identity of the risen body all the more important.
16 Bonaventure, Breviloquium VII.7.7. 17 Bonaventure, Opera Theologica Selecta (Quarrachi: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1949) vol. 4. Comm in Libro IV Sententiarum. Dist. 49, pt. 1, art. 1, q. 3, p. 989. 18 C.W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 248.
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Bonaventure struggles so mightily, as does Thomas, to ensure the numerical identity of the resurrected body with the mortal one, down to the last hair, because only then will it be, properly speaking, a true “resurrection.”19 The vehemence with which Bonaventure and Thomas assert this, I think, may follow from Aristotle’s principle, in de Anima 2.2, that “the actuality of any given thing can only be realized in what is already potentially that thing, i.e., in a matter of its own appropriate to it.”20 For Bonaventure, each human body is itself particularly attuned to the soul that gives it life. “The nature of the rational and immortal soul demands that, as it has perpetual existence, it also have a body to which it may forever give life.”21 This means that the body itself has “a disposition to perpetual incorruption.”22 Bonaventure is careful to distinguish this disposition in its various aspects: The whole form and life of the body is disposed necessarily to incorruption, but the particular parts, the flesh as materiality, and “whatever pertains in general to physical well-being,” is disposed “in terms of fittingness only.”23 In this way, Bonaventure can distinguish what the resurrected bodies of the damned and the saved have in common—the overall wholeness of the individual as such; and what they do not—the state and character of the flesh, perfected in the just and retaining affliction in the damned.
Caroline Walker Bynum has pointed to the fact that, in the wake of Aristotle, scholastic theologians effectively ignored, sidelined, or explained away the metaphors of transformation such as the seed “sown a mortal body, raised a spiritual body” in 1 Corinthians 15.24 The hylomorphic imagination, and the 13th-century understanding of the nature of matter, seemed to require a rather narrow and, well, frankly very terrestrial understanding of the resurrected body, much like we see depicted visually in Luca Signorelli’s fresco of the resurrection of the dead in the Orvieto cathedral. Not that these bodies will simply be resuscitated corpses; to the contrary, Bonaventure and his peers held to the notion that the “dotes,” the dowry gifts of the glorified soul, overflow into the body, giving new or perfected qualities of “luminosity, subtlety, agility, and impassibility.”25 So perhaps we might imagine the resurrected body to be something more like Matthias Grünewald’s image, which is rather rare in my experience of depictions of resurrection. In any event, it’s quite clear for Bonaventure that the body resurrected is first of all the same numerical body, and only then considered in its perfection and glorification.
But Thomas’s anthropology is quite different from Bonaventure’s, and, as I say, it’s not clear internally to his argument why numerical identity should be so important. This was driven home to me by another example from Dante, this time in the Purgatorio in his portrayal of souls in the “intermediate state,” prior to the general resurrection. As Dante journeys through Hell and Purgatory, those he encounters are called “shades,” and their materiality is deeply ambiguous—
19 This appears in the Glossa Ordinaria on 1 Cor 15, attributed to John of Damascus. 20 Aristotle, De Anima: On the Soul, ed. and trans. Mark Shiffman (New York: Focus Philosophical Library, 2010) 2.2 (414a 25-28). 21 Bonaventure, Brev.VII.5.5 22 Bonaventure, ibid. 23 Bonaventure, ibid. 24 Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 224ff. 25 Bonaventure, Brev. VII.7.1.
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e.g., on the one hand, Virgil has no weight and so does not weigh down Charon’s boat, but later, his body seem to be substantial enough to cover Dante’s eyes from Medusa’s stare and to protect him from Geryon’s stinging tail. In the Purgatorio, Dante is shocked and terrified when Virgil casts no shadow, and he fails to embrace the shade of his friend Casella three times, with his arms comically passing right through. Similarly, when the poet Statius realizes that his idol Virgil stands before him, he tries to stoop and embrace Virgil’s feet. Virgil cautions him, “Brother, do not do so, for you are a shade and you behold a shade.” Statius, perhaps a bit chagrined, replies, “Now you can understand the measure of the love for you that warms me, when I forget our emptiness and treat our shades as bodied things.”26
To some degree, we may say that these “aerial bodies” are Dante Poet’s literary device, a way to make his characters visible to Dante Pilgrim and to us. But the poem constantly calls attention to the strange in-between state of shades before the resurrection, and so it provides a sort of photographic negative meditation on the resurrected body. In Purg. XXV, when Dante is perplexed by the fact that the penitent gluttons appear emaciated and drawn. “How can it be,” he asks, “that one grows thin here where there is no need for nourishment?” Statius finally offers Dante Pilgrim an explanation. At the point of death, the human soul, both rational and animal, “unfastens from the flesh, carrying with it potential faculties, both human and divine. . . . As soon as space surrounds it . . . the formative force radiates upon it, giving shape and measure as though to living members . . . the neighboring air is shaped into that form of the soul, which stays with it, imprints upon it by its powers. And like the flame that imitates its fire, wherever that may shift and flicker, its new form imitates the spirit.”27 Here, the soul, as form, in a sense cannot help but inform whatever matter it finds. In the presence of air, it informs air, making an aerial body. “Through this we speak and through this we smile,” says Statius. “Thus we shed tears and make the sighs you may have heard here on the mountain. And as we feel affections or desires, the shade will change its form . . . .”28 In this meditation on aerial bodies, Dante has drawn the Thomistic doctrine of the soul to a natural conclusion. The soul informs matter, whether substantial or insubstantial, and it does so as a mode of relation and communication. Bodies are communicative expressions of soul, but it seems that they can be constituted in various ways out of various material.
Caroline Walker Bynum, in a fascinating essay on material continuity and the resurrection, has wondered at Thomas’s reluctance to follow this insight all the way through in the way that Dante begins to. This “philosophically elegant new identity theory” implied by Thomas and Giles of Rome and later articulated explicitly by Dante’s contemporaries, Peter of Auvergne and John of Paris, “never caught on.”29 Bynum argues that it never caught on because it arose in a context much broader than the university schoolroom, in the midst of a religious
26 Dante, Purgatorio, trans. Robert & Jean Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), XXI.130-136. 27 Dante, Purg. XXV.20-21. 28 Dante, Purg. XXV.103-108. 29 Caroline Walker Bynum, “Material Continuity, Personal Survival, and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in its Medieval and Modern Contexts,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 239-98; this quote, 258.
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world heavily invested in the material continuity of bodies. That is, medieval religious culture was deeply invested in relics. Relics were material connections to the blessed in heaven. The matter of a saint’s body remained the saint’s body in some fashion, well after the soul of the saint had taken its place in the heavenly communion of the blessed. The material cult and culture of medieval Catholicism framed what Charles Taylor calls a “social imaginary,”30 a set of shared images and boundaries that set the terms of what was thinkable in a holistic way. In a religious imaginary framed by the cult of the saints, the numerical and material continuity of bodies from death into resurrection, from womb to tomb to glory, was an unshakeable assumption. This informs the sometimes-obsessive concern of medieval authors with hair, fingernails, foreskins, and various other material, bodily “pieces” that to us seem macabre.
Bynum helpfully sets these very medieval concerns for material continuity alongside some of our own particular perplexities in an age of organ transplants—a situation made all the more perplexing by the more recent progress in limb, face, and even head and brain transplants. At a less dramatic level, we now know that the material content of our bodies is constantly renewed, and carbon-14 dating allows us even to determine the age of individual cells or cell types within our bodies.31 In the wake of such change, the question of material continuity (or the lack thereof) comes upon us with even greater force. We find ourselves in the midst of a neuroscientific imaginary that, at one and the same time, is tempted to a complete materialist determinism and a dawning knowledge of a lack of material continuity. In what limited sense can we say that there is “numerical identity” in the body even before death, and how might that affect our thinking about it in the resurrection? Might we return to Thomas’s own hylomorphic principles to think past material continuity as a principle for bodily resurrection? What would the consequences of this decision be? What would be lost, if anything?
On the other hand, the Bonaventurean in me wonders whether there is something to be explored anew in thinking about material continuity and a kind of shared “desire” between body and soul. If some in the scientific community are tempted to a materialist reductionism, others have critiqued the sufficiency of such an account to explain the phenomenon of consciousness, among other phenomena.32 As we learn more about the relationship of, say, memory, to a kind of holistic and embodied experience, not limited to specific neurons that “store” memories like data, a new portrait of a kind of mutuality between matter and spirit seems to open up, and Bonaventure’s consideration of the mutual desire of body and soul has a certain resonance.33 Indeed, considered negatively, in terms of what we seem to be worried about in our own age, it seems to me that our current cultural obsession with zombies—now not Voodoo’s magically-
30 Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004). 31 Skin cells typically last 14 days; gut cells typically live 5 days. Fat cells last 10 years. The brain cortex neurons are likely original. The hippocampus, which houses the memory, is totally renewed in a span of about 30 years. See http://www.radiolab.org/story/carbon/. 32 See Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 33 See Robert Epstein, “The Empty Brain: Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer,” Aeon (https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process- information-and-it-is-not-a-computer), accessed June 7, 2016.
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resuscitated bodies from the grave but infected bodies evacuated of personality and transformed into mindless consumers of flesh, betrays a deep anxiety about the relationship between bodies and persons. If a virus can erase the personal character of the soul but still leave the body animate and sensate, if only a vessel of appetite, then what is the nature of the person, considered as an integral whole of body and soul? Some of the most troubling moments in the first season of The Walking Dead involve encounters between the living and their now-undead family and friends, with the difficulty in killing so familiar a body, so familiar a face, even in the full knowledge that the person to whom that face and body belonged has ceased to be. Here we have a sustained level of reflection on the possibility of biological and numerical continuity in the absence of an intellectually compelling doctrine of the soul. In this light, however quaint medieval discussions of relics and the resurrected body “even down to the last hair” may seem, we cannot seem to shake some deep concern with the question of material continuity and identity, and we are not as far from their concerns as we may imagine. Thomas and Bonaventure (and even Dante) remain resources for us to return to, precisely because they have engaged these questions with such rigor and creativity. In fact, as we continue to awaken in our own scientific imagination from the temporary insanity of a kind of brute mechanistic materialism to consider anew the nature of consciousness and embodiment, medieval grapplings with the resurrection of the body may become more and more relevant and helpful. And for this, we’re in Montague Brown’s debt, for bringing fresh eyes to Thomas on this question.
What I hope I have offered here in this paper is a series of responsive evocations to Brown’s excellent paper and the questions it raises. I agree with him that the question of the resurrection of the body is central to Christian faith, as it is wrapped up with the question of the salvation of persons and life in the Body of Christ. As Saint Paul said, “if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (1 Cor 15.16-17). It is striking that the Christian imagination has faltered in its capacity to consider the resurrection. As we come to terms with new quantum paradigms in our material sciences, I think the kind of ressourcement represented in Brown’s paper is all the more vital. Let us wait in joyful hope that we may indeed be strengthened for all that can delight us.
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Thomas Aquinas and the Resurrection of the (Disabled) Body
Michael M. Waddell Saint Mary’s College (Notre Dame, IN)
Montague Brown states that “As Jesus is fully human and fully divine, our redemption must also be fully human, that is personal; and that would seem to include the redemption of our bodily life as well as our souls.” What does it mean, though, for redemption to be “personal”? And what, in particular, would it mean for redemption to be “personal” for a person with disabilities? In this paper, I explore these questions by examining St. Thomas Aquinas’s teachings on the human person and the resurrection of the body in dialogue with contemporary debates about disability and resurrection.
Introduction
Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on the resurrection of the body is as much “of the moment” today as it was when Thomas first wrote it. By virtue of working to incorporate an Aristotelian respect for the body and for the hylomorphic unity of the human person into a Christian worldview that had been articulated primarily in neo-Platonic terms for several centuries, Aquinas was on the cutting edge of philosophical and theological anthropology in the 13th century. And Thomas’s view of the resurrection and the unity of the human person is no less timely in the 21st century. It figures prominently in the so-called “gappy existence” debate, which hangs on the question of whether the separated soul constitutes a human person between the time of death and the resurrection of the body.1 And though it might be less well known in Thomistic circles, Thomas’s teaching on the human person and the resurrection of the body is also playing a role in a current debate about disability. This debate is focused on the question of whether human disabilities will exist after the resurrection. Some people have argued that disabilities are imperfections—e.g.,
1 Some scholars—including, most notably, Eleonore Stump—argue that the human person does continue to exist during this time. The majority of scholars who have weighed in on this debate, though, including Christina Van Dyke, Patrick Toner, and Turner Nevitt, contend that Thomas’s own writings clearly state that a human person must be comprised of both body and soul, which implies that a separated soul is not a human person. For more on this debate, see Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 51–54. Jason Eberl, “Aquinas on the Nature of Human Beings,” Review of Metaphysics 58.2 (2004): 333-365. Christopher Brown, Aquinas and the Ship of Theseus: Solving Puzzles about Material Objects (London: Continuum, 2005), esp. 76–9. Christopher Martin, “Is There Identity of Person Between a Human Being and a Separated Soul?” Studia Theologica 6 (2008): 249–53. Christina Van Dyke, “Human identity, immanent causal relations, and the principle of non-repeatability: Thomas Aquinas on the bodily resurrection,” Religious Studies 43.4 (2004): 373–394. Patrick Toner, “Personhood and Death in St. Thomas aquinas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 26.2 (2009): 121–38. Patrick Toner, “St. Thomas Aquinas on Death and the Separated Soul,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91 (2010): 587–599. Patrick Toner, “St. Thomas Aquinas on Punishing Souls,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 71 (2012):103–116. Patrick Toner, “Hylemorphism, remnant persons and personhood,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 44.1 (2014): 76–96. Turner Nevitt, “Survivalism, Corruptionism, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 31.1 (January 2014): 1–19. Turner Nevitt, “Aquinas on the Death of Christ: A New Argument for Corruptionism,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (2016): 77–99. Turner Nevitt, “Annihilation, Re-creation, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas,” The Metaphysics of Personal Identity, Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Volume 13 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016).
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privations—and that they will therefore be healed in the perfection of the resurrected body.2 Others, however, regard disabilities not as imperfections but rather as part of a person’s identity, and believe that identity must be maintained between the living human being and the resurrected one.3 For these individuals, preservation of personal identity demands that disabilities continue to exist in the resurrected body.
The question of what it is that constitutes the human person is at the center of both of these contemporary debates. And the notion of the “personal” is also a recurring motif in Montague Brown’s discussion of the resurrection. As he states in the introduction of his paper:
2 See, for example, Terrence Ehrmann, CSC, “Disability and Resurrection Identity,” New Blackfriars 96 (2015): 723–38. 3 See, for example, John Swinton, Harriet Mowat, and Susannah Baines, “Whose Story Am I? Redescribing Profound Intellectual Disability in the Kingdom of God,” Journal of Religion, Disability and Health 15 (2011): 5– 19, esp. 8–9. Nancy Eiesland, “Liberation, Inclusion, and Justice: A Faith Response to Persons with Disabilities,” Impact 14.3 (2001/2), 2 (retrieved on 2 June 2016 from https://ici.umn.edu/products/impact/143/143.pdf). Amos Yong, Theology and Down Syndrome: Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007), 269. Stanley Hauerwas, “Marginalizing the ‘Retarded,’” in The Deprived, the Disabled, and the Fullness of Life, ed., Flavian Dougherty (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1984), 69.
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As Jesus is fully human and fully divine, our redemption must also be fully human, that is personal; and that would seem to include the redemption of our bodily life as well as our souls.4 (Emphasis mine.)
What precisely does it mean, though—in Thomistic terms—for redemption to be “personal”? And what, in particular, would it mean for redemption to be “personal” for a person with disabilities?
In what remains of this paper, I want to explore these questions by thinking through the implications of Professor Brown’s claim that redemption must be personal in dialogue with Aquinas’s teaching on resurrection of the body and the contemporary debate about disability and resurrection. I will begin (in part one) by examining Thomas’s view of the human person, and teasing out some questions about the implications of this view for the resurrection of persons as such. Then (in part two), I will turn to some of Thomas’s explicit remarks about the resurrected body to explore his understanding of the resurrection and the healing of disabilities. Finally (in part three), I will consider a tension between Thomas’s view of the human person and his understanding of healing in the resurrection, examining this tension in particular in light of some concerns that have been raised by disability theorists, and showing how Thomas seems to resolve this tension.
1. The Person as This Body and This Soul
We should begin, then, by examining what Aquinas thinks the human person is. Thomas follows Boethius in defining “person” as “an individual substance of a rational nature” (persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia).5 By “substance,” Aquinas here means a “suppositum,” that is, a thing that exists individually (or “subsists”) without depending on another to be the subject of its existence.6 With respect to the second part of the definition, Thomas indicates that
4 Montague Brown, “Philosophical and Theological Perspectives on the Resurrection of the Body in Aquinas,” The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (2017), 1. See also 9 and 14-17. 5 See, for example, Summa theologiae (hereafter, ST) 1.29.1, 1.29.3, and 3.2.2. Cf. De potentia 9.1. Aquinas appropriates this definition from Boethius’s Liber de persona et de duabus naturis contra Eutychen et Nestorium, ch. 2. 6 In ST 1.29.2 c., Thomas explains that the term “substance” has two basic meanings: in one sense, it can mean the quiddity of a thing, or what is signified by its definition, and thus be a synonym of the term essence; in the other sense, “substance” means a subject or suppositum that subsists in the genus of substance. The definition of person as an “individual substance” takes the term in the second sense. Unless otherwise noted, English translations of the ST are taken from Summa Theologica (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947). Latin texts of Aquinas’s works are taken from the Busa edition. Cf. De potentia 9.2 co. Boethius seems to have intended to employ the same meaning of the term “substance” in his definition of “person,” for he states: “Again, some substances are universal, others are particular. Universals are those which are predicated of individuals, as man, animal, stone, plank and other things of this kind which are either genera or species; for man is predicated of individual men just as animal is of individual animals, and stone and plank of individual stones and planks. But particulars are those which are never predicated of other things, as Cicero, Plato, this stone from which this statue of Achilles was hewn, this plank out of which this table was made. But in all these things person cannot anywhere be predicated of universals, but only of particulars and individuals; for there is no person of man as animal or a genus; only of Cicero, Plato, or other single individuals are single persons named”
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the term “nature” is here taken in the sense of “essence,” or what is signified by the definition (quiddity).7 Accordingly, every individual substance that contains rationality as part of its essence (or whose nature has rationality as part of its quiddity) will be a person. Since Thomas takes the essence (or quiddity) of “human being” (homo) to be “rational animal,”8 it follows that every individual possessing human nature—which is to say, every human being—is a person.9
Now, of course, Thomas regards reason as a power of the human soul.10 And given Thomas’s definition of a person as being an “individual substance of a rational nature,” one might be tempted to infer that, on Thomas’s account, what makes human beings to be “persons”
(Boethius, “A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius,” in Theological Tractates. The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Stewart and Rand [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973], ch. 2, ll. 38–52). 7 See ST 1.29.1 ad 4: “According to the Philosopher (Metaph. v, 5), the word ‘nature’ was first used to signify the generation of living things, which is called nativity. And because this kind of generation comes from an intrinsic principle, this term is extended to signify the intrinsic principle of any kind of movement. In this sense he defines ‘nature’ (Phys. ii, 3). And since this kind of principle is either formal or material, both matter and form are commonly called nature. And as the essence of anything is completed by the form; so the essence of anything, signified by the definition, is commonly called nature. And here nature is taken in that sense. Hence Boethius says (De Duab. Nat.) that, ‘nature is the specific difference giving its form to each thing,’ for the specific difference completes the definition, and is derived from the special form of a thing. So in the definition of ‘person,’ which means the singular in a determined ‘genus,’ it is more correct to use the term ‘nature’ than ‘essence,’ because the latter is taken from being, which is most common. / Ad quartum dicendum quod, secundum philosophum, in V Metaphys., nomen naturae primo impositum est ad significandam generationem viventium, quae dicitur nativitas. Et quia huiusmodi generatio est a principio intrinseco, extensum est hoc nomen ad significandum principium intrinsecum cuiuscumque motus. Et sic definitur natura in II Physic. Et quia huiusmodi principium est formale vel materiale, communiter tam materia quam forma dicitur natura. Et quia per formam completur essentia uniuscuiusque rei, communiter essentia uniuscuiusque rei, quam significat eius definitio, vocatur natura. Et sic accipitur hic natura. Unde Boetius in eodem libro dicit quod natura est unumquodque informans specifica differentia, specifica enim differentia est quae complet definitionem, et sumitur a propria forma rei. Et ideo convenientius fuit quod in definitione personae, quae est singulare alicuius generis determinati, uteretur nomine naturae, quam essentiae, quae sumitur ab esse, quod est communissimum.” Cf. De ente et essentia (hereafter, De ente), par. 9. 8 See, for example, Commentary on the Metaphyscis (hereafter, In MP), bk. 7, lect. 3, par. 1326: “For ‘animal’ is predicated of man essentially and in a similar way ‘rational.’ Hence the expression ‘rational animal’ is the definition of man. / Animal vero praedicatur de homine per se, et similiter rationale de animali. Et ideo hoc quod dico, animal rationale, definitio est hominis.” English translation taken from Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. Rowan (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1961). See also De ente, ch. 2, par. 9; ST 1.29.4 ad 2; ST 2-2.34.5 c.; ST 2-2.180.7 c.; De malo 12.3 ad 9; Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter, In NE) bk. 5, lect. 12, par. 1019; De veritate (hereafter, DV) 11.12 c.; DV 21.1 c.; DV 22.11 c.; De potentia 9.1 ad 1; De malo 4.2 ad sc 1; De spiitualibus creaturis a.3; Compendium, part 1, ch. 10; Compendium, part 1, ch. 90; Compendium, part 1, ch. 2;Compendium, part 1, ch. 148; Commentary on the Posterior Analytics (hereafter, In Post. Anal.), bk. 1, lect. 22; Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima (hereafter, In DA), bk. 3, lect. 4, par. 631; In MP, bk. 7, lect. 3, par. 1317; In MP bk. 7, lect. 4, par. 1344; In MP bk. 7, lect. 5, par. 1378; In MP bk. 7, lect. 9, par. 1462; In MP bk. 8, lect. 3, par. 1722; In MP bk. 8, lect. 3, par. 1724. 9 Sadly, not everyone recognizes that every human being is a person. See, e.g., Peter Singer, “Speciesism and Moral Status,” in Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, ed. Kittay and Carlson (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 331–44, esp. 343–44. Cf. Jeff McMahan, “Cognitive Disability and Cognitive Enhancement,” in Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, ed. Kittay and Carlson (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 345–67, esp. 347. 10 See, for example, ST 1.79.1 c. and 1.79.8 c.
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is the soul, and not the body, so that, say, a human soul separated from the body would satisfy the conditions for human personhood.11
11 In fact, in one place, Thomas even states that “the distinctive form of man is that which makes him a rational animal / propria autem forma hominis est secundum quam est animal rationale” (In NE, bk. 2, lect. 2, par. 257). English translation taken from Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Litzinger (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1964). See also ST 3.50.4 obj. 2: “Further, the Philosopher says (Ethic. ix) that ‘each man is his intellect’; consequently, when we address the soul of Peter after his death we say: ‘Saint Peter, pray for us.’ But the Son of God after death was not separated from His intellectual soul. Therefore, during those three days the Son of God was a man. / Praeterea, philosophus dicit, in IX Ethic., quod unusquisque homo est suus intellectus. Unde et, post mortem animam Petri alloquentes, dicimus, sancte Petre, ora pro nobis. Sed post mortem filius Dei non fuit separatus ab anima intellectuali. Ergo in illo triduo filius Dei fuit homo.” In ST 3.50.4 c., Thomas states that Hugh of St. Victor, without intending to err against the faith, maintained that Christ continued to be a human being (homo) during the three days that followed his death because Hugh believed that the soul alone is a human being (“dicebat anima esse hominem”). He claims that Peter Lombard also believed Christ continued to be a human being during this period, but for a slightly different reason: Lombard thought being a human required both soul and body, but did not think it was essential that they be united, so that having a separate soul and body sufficed to make one human. Aquinas, of course, rejects both of these views in ST 3.50.4. See also Compendium, part 1, ch. 229.
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But this would be a mistake. In Summa Theologiae 1.75.4 ad 2, Thomas states that “Not every particular substance is a hypostasis or a person, but that which has the complete nature of its species. Hence a hand, or a foot, is not called a hypostasis, or a person; nor likewise is the soul alone so called, since it is a part of the human species.”12 And again at De potentia 9.2 ad 14, Thomas writes: “The separated soul is a part of a rational nature . . . and not a whole rational human nature: wherefore it is not a person.”13 These texts indicate clearly that, for Thomas, the human soul alone does not constitute a human person. Why not? The reason is that, in Thomas’s mind, “human nature is constituted of body and soul.”14 And therefore, to be an individual substance of this particular rational nature—in other words, to be a human person—is to be comprised of both body and soul. So, if we think of a human soul as separate from its body—as it could be in the time between death and the resurrection—the soul might continue to be an individual and to have the faculty of reason, but it is not a human person.15 A part of a human person, perhaps; but not a human person as such. As Thomas puts it so poetically in his commentary on First Corinthians: “anima mea non est ego . . . my soul is not me.”16
In a striking passage from his second Quodlibet, Thomas goes even further with this holistic understanding of the human person, asserting that,
12 ST 1.75.4 ad 2: “non quaelibet substantia particularis est hypostasis vel persona, sed quae habet completam naturam speciei. Unde manus vel pes non potest dici hypostasis vel persona. Et similiter nec anima, cum sit pars speciei humanae.” See also ST 3.2.2 ad 3: “Yet we must bear in mind that not every individual in the genus of substance, even in rational nature, is a person, but that alone which exists by itself, and not that which exists in some more perfect thing. Hence the hand of Socrates, although it is a kind of individual, is not a person, because it does not exist by itself, but in something more perfect, viz. in the whole. And hence, too, this is signified by a ‘person’ being defined as ‘an individual substance,’ for the hand is not a complete substance, but part of a substance. / Sciendum est tamen quod non quodlibet individuum in genere substantiae, etiam in rationali natura, habet rationem personae, sed solum illud quod per se existit, non autem illud quod existit in alio perfectiori. Unde manus Socratis, quamvis sit quoddam individuum, non est tamen persona, quia non per se existit, sed in quodam perfectiori, scilicet in suo toto. Et hoc etiam potest significari in hoc quod persona dicitur substantia individua, non enim manus est substantia completa, sed pars substantiae.” Cf. Quaestiones disputatae de anima, art. 1 c., art. 1 ad 3, and art. 1 ad 4; Compendium, part 1, ch. 229; ST 3.50.4; Commentary on the Sentences (hereafter, In sent.), bk. 4, d. 43, q. 1, a. 1, qc. 1 ad 2. 13 De potentia 9.2 ad 14: “anima separata est pars rationalis naturae, scilicet humanae, et non tota natura rationalis humana, et ideo non est persona.” 14 Summa contra Gentiles (hereafter, ScG) 4.35.14: “humana natura ex anima et corpore constituatur.” See also ScG 4.35.3, ScG 4.37, ScG 4.40, ScG 4.41; ST 1.19.1 co., ST 3.2.5 ad 2, ST 3.2.10 ad 2, ST 3.5.3 c., ST 3.6.5 c., ST 3.50.3 ad 2, ST 3.52.3 ad 2; De potentia 3.10 c.; Compendium, part 1, ch. 204, Compendium part 1, ch. 209, Compendium part 1, ch. 211, Compendium part 1, ch. 229; Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, ch. 3, lect. 1, par. 443 and ch. 3, lect. 2, par. 467; and Quaestiones disputatae de anima, a. 2 ad 11. 15 In question 71, article 12 of the supplementum to the Summa, one finds the term “persons” used to describe separated souls. But this usage is not authoritative since Thomas did not write the supplementum himself. 16 Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (hereafter, In I Cor), ch. 15, lect. 2, par. 924: “but the soul, since it is part of man’s body, is not an entire man, and my soul is not I. / Anima autem cum sit pars corporis hominis, non est totus homo, et anima mea non est ego.” English translation taken from Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians, trans. Larcher (retrieved on 11 May 2017 from http://dhspriory.org/thomas/SS1Cor.htm).
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While it pertains to the ratio of the human species that it be composed of soul and body, the determination of body and soul is beyond the ratio of the species, and it is accidental to a human being, inasmuch as it is a human being, that it be [composed] out of this soul and this body; but it belongs per se to this human being that, if he were defined, it would pertain to his ratio that it be [composed] out of this soul and this body, just as it pertains to the ratio of human being in general that it be [composed] out of soul and body.17 (My translation.)
17 Quodlibet 2, q. 2, a. 2 ad 1: “Cum enim de ratione speciei humanae sit quod componatur ex anima et corpore, determinatio corporis et animae est praeter rationem speciei, et accidit homini in quantum est homo, quod sit ex hac anima et ex hoc corpore; sed convenit per se huic homini, de cuius ratione esset, si definiretur, quod esset ex hac anima et ex hoc corpore; sicut de ratione hominis communis est quod sit ex anima et corpore.” (Note: what is operative here seems to be the first mode of perseity, not the second: that is, the attributes in question belong to the subject according to its definition [the first mode of perseity] and not just according to its material cause or “subject” [the second mode of perseity]. See In Post. Anal., bk. 1, ch. 4, l. 10.) See also, De ente, par 23: “We should notice, therefore, that the principle of individuation is not matter taken in just any way whatever, but only designated matter. And I call that matter designated which is considered under determined dimensions. Such matter is not placed in the definition of man as man, but it would be placed in the definition of Socrates, if Socrates had a definition. Rather, it is non-designated matter which is placed in the definition of man; for this bone and this flesh are not placed in the definition of man, but bone and flesh absolutely. These latter are man’s non-designated matter. / Et ideo sciendum est quod materia non quolibet modo accepta est individuationis principium, sed solum materia signata. Et dico materiam signatam, quae sub determinatis dimensionibus consideratur. Haec autem materia in diffinitione hominis, in quantum est homo, non ponitur, sed poneretur in diffinitione Socratis, si Socrates diffinitionem haberet. In diffinitione autem hominis ponitur materia non signata; non enim in diffinitione hominis ponitur hoc os et haec caro, sed os et caro absolute, quae sunt materia hominis non signata.” English translation taken from Aquinas on Being and Essence, trans. Bobik (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965). Or, ST 1.75.4 c: “For as it belongs to the notion of this particular man to be composed of this soul, of this flesh, and of these bones; so it belongs to the notion of man to be composed of soul, flesh, and bones / Sicut enim de ratione huius hominis est quod sit ex hac anima et his carnibus et his ossibus; ita de ratione hominis est quod sit ex anima et carnibus et ossibus.” (Emphasis mine.) And again, Compendium, part 1, ch. 154, par. 5: “The term ‘man’ signifies man’s essential principles, but not to the exclusion of other factors, even though these other factors are not actually, but only potentially, contained in the notion of man. Hence ‘man’ signifies as a whole, per modum totius, whereas ‘humanity’ signifies as a part, per modum partis, and is not predicated of man. In Socrates, then, or in Plato, this determinate matter and this particular form are included. Just as the notion of man implies composition of matter and form, so if Socrates were to be defined, the notion of him would imply that he is composed of this flesh and these bones and this soul. / Hoc nomen homo significat sua essentialia principia, non tamen cum praecisione aliorum, licet alia non includantur actu in eius ratione, sed potentia tantum: unde homo significat per modum totius, humanitas vero per modum partis, nec de homine praedicatur. In Socrate vero aut Platone includitur haec materia et haec forma, ut sicut est ratio hominis ex hoc quod componitur ex anima et corpore, ita si Socrates definiretur, ratio eius esset quod esset compositus ex iis carnibus et iis ossibus et hac anima.” (Emphasis mine.) English translation taken from Compendium of Theology, trans. Vollert (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co., 1947).
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Aquinas here states not only that the individual human being, i.e., the human person, is comprised out of soul and body, but that it belongs per se to this person as such to be comprised out of this soul and this body.
Elsewhere, Thomas also suggests that the human person is the whole or complete (totum) subsisting being, a hoc aliquid, such that the person comprises the entirety of the subsisting being’s parts, including not only matter but also accidents and individuating principles. For example, in Quodlibet 2, q. 2, a. 2, Thomas states:
In the signification of the term “nature,” there is included only that which pertains to the notion of the species; the suppositum, however, has not only those things that pertain to the notion of the species but also other things that befall it as accidents; and therefore the term “suppositum” is said with respect to the whole (totum), but “nature” or “quiddity” [is said] as the formal part.18 (My translation.)
18 Quodlibet 2, q. 2, a. 2 c.: “Nam in significatione naturae includitur solum id quod est de ratione speciei; suppositum autem non solum habet haec quae ad rationem speciei pertinent, sed etiam alia quae ei accidunt; et ideo suppositum signatur per totum, natura autem, sive quidditas, ut pars formalis.” My use of square brackets in another author’s translation indicates that I have emended or made an interpolation in the translation. See also ST 3.2.2 c.: “Person has a different meaning from ‘nature.’ For nature, as has been said, designates the specific essence which is signified by the definition. And if nothing was found to be added to what belongs to the notion of the species, there would be no need to distinguish the nature from the suppositum of the nature (which is the individual subsisting in this nature), because every individual subsisting in a nature would be altogether one with its nature. Now in certain subsisting things we happen to find what does not belong to the notion of the species, viz. accidents and individuating principles, which appears chiefly in such as are composed of matter and form. Hence in such as these the nature and the suppositum really differ; not indeed as if they were wholly separate, but because the suppositum includes the nature, and in addition certain other things outside the notion of the species. Hence the suppositum is taken to be a whole (totum) which has the nature as its formal part to perfect it; and consequently in such as are composed of matter and form the nature is not predicated of the suppositum, for we do not say that this man is his manhood. But if there is a thing in which there is nothing outside the species or its nature (as in God), the suppositum and the nature are not really distinct in it, but only in our way of thinking, inasmuch [as] it is called ‘nature’ as it is an essence, and a ‘suppositum’ as it is subsisting. And what is said of a suppositum is to be applied to a person in rational or intellectual creatures; for a person is nothing else than ‘an individual substance of rational nature,’ according to Boethius. / Persona aliud significat quam natura. Natura enim significat essentiam speciei, quam significat definitio. Et si quidem his quae ad rationem speciei pertinent nihil aliud adiunctum inveniri posset, nulla necessitas esset distinguendi naturam a supposito naturae, quod est individuum subsistens in natura illa, quia unumquodque individuum subsistens in natura aliqua esset omnino idem cum sua natura. Contingit autem in quibusdam rebus subsistentibus inveniri aliquid quod non pertinet ad rationem speciei, scilicet accidentia et principia individuantia, sicut maxime apparet in his quae sunt ex materia et forma composita. Et ideo in talibus etiam secundum rem differt natura et suppositum, non quasi omnino aliqua separata, sed quia in supposito includitur ipsa natura speciei, et superadduntur quaedam alia quae sunt praeter rationem speciei. Unde suppositum significatur ut totum, habens naturam sicut partem formalem et perfectivam sui. Et propter hoc in compositis ex materia et forma natura non praedicatur de supposito, non enim dicimus quod hic homo sit sua humanitas. Si qua vero res est in qua omnino nihil est aliud praeter rationem speciei vel naturae suae, sicut est in Deo, ibi non est aliud secundum rem suppositum et natura, sed solum secundum rationem intelligendi, quia natura dicitur secundum quod est essentia quaedam; eadem vero dicitur suppositum secundum quod est subsistens. Et quod est dictum de supposito, intelligendum est de persona in creatura rationali vel intellectuali, quia nihil aliud est persona quam rationalis naturae individua substantia, secundum Boetium.” And again, In sent., bk. 3, d. 5, q. 1, a. 3: “For nature, as we are using the term here, is the quiddity of the thing that is signified by its definition. Person, however, is the thing that subsists in that nature. . . . Human being, though, signifies both essential things and individuating things, albeit in different ways, since it signifies essential things determinately, but individuating things indeterminately, whether
The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 36
they be these or those. And therefore human being, since it is a whole, can be predicated of Socrates, whereas he is said to have humanity. / Natura enim, secundum quod hic loquimur, est quidditas rei quam significat sua definitio. Persona autem est hoc aliquid quod subsistit in natura illa. . . . Homo autem significat utrumque, et essentialia et individuantia, sed diversimode; quia essentialia significat determinate, indivuduantia vero indeterminate, vel haec vel illa. Et ideo homo, cum sit totum, potest praedicari de Socrate et dicitur habens humanitatem.” (Translation mine.) Cf. De spiritualibus creaturis, a. 5, ad 9: “it must be said that in things composed of matter and form, the individual adds, beyond the nature of the species, a designation of matter and individual accidents / dicendum quod in compositis ex materia et forma, individuum addit supra naturam speciei designationem materiae et accidentia individualia.” English translation taken from Disputed Questions on Spiritual Creatures, trans. Fitzpatrick and Wellmuth (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1949). See also Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 240–41.
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I suspect that this holistic understanding of the suppositum, or the individual that subsists in a nature, originates, at least in part, from Thomas’s sense that a single act of existence (esse) runs through the entirety of the subsisting being.19 In any case, the implications are clear enough, namely, that the suppositum contains all components of the individually subsisting thing: form and matter, essence and individual accidents. And since, as Thomas states elsewhere, “what is said of a suppositum is to be applied to a person in rational or intellectual creatures,” what is meant by “person” must also contain not just form but matter too, and not just essence but also individuating accidents.20
This helps us to flesh out—with apologies for the pun—Professor Brown’s claim that redemption must be personal. For the resurrection to be a resurrection of human persons, it must include both body and soul. More than this, though: it must include this body and this soul, the particular flesh and bones and soul that make an individual to be who she is.
This robust conception of the particularity and integrity of the human person helps to make sense of a striking feature of Thomas’s understanding of the identity of the resurrected person. Aquinas states:
19 See De ente, par. 86: “And because it has more potency than other intellectual substances, the human soul is so close to material things that a material thing is drawn to share its existence, in such a way, to wit, that from soul and body there results one existence in one composite thing, though this existence, inasmuch as it belongs to the soul, is not dependent on the body. / Et propter hoc quod inter alias substantias intellectuales plus habet de potentia, ideo efficitur in tantum propinqua rebus materialibus, ut res materialis trahatur ad participandum esse suum, ita scilicet quod ex anima et corpore resultat unum esse in uno composito, quamvis illud esse, prout est animae, non sit dependens a corpore.” 20 ST 3.2.2 c.: “And what is said of a suppositum is to be applied to a person in rational or intellectual creatures; for a person is nothing else than ‘an individual substance of rational nature,’ according to Boethius. / Et quod est dictum de supposito, intelligendum est de persona in creatura rationali vel intellectuali, quia nihil aliud est persona quam rationalis naturae individua substantia, secundum Boetium.”
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For a man to rise with numerical identity (idem numero) there must also be numerical identity in his essential parts. Therefore, if the body of the man who rises [will not be from] [this] flesh and [these] bones [out of which it is now composed], the man who rises will not be numerically the same.21
21 ScG 4.84.7: “Ad hoc quod homo idem numero resurgat, necessarium est quod partes eius essentiales sint eaedem numero. Si igitur corpus hominis resurgentis non erit ex his carnibus et his ossibus ex quibus nunc componitur, non erit homo resurgens idem numero.” English translation taken from On the Truth of the Catholic Faith (New York: Hanover House, 1955–57).
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Thomas implies here that the numerical identity of the risen person requires continuity of flesh and bones. And while there are notable passages in which Thomas appears to make numerical identity of the human person dependent primarily on the individuating act of esse of the rational soul,22 there are other passages in which he claims that numerical identity demands that the very same “dust” from which the living body was composed be gathered together by angels so that God might use it to reconstitute a numerically identical resurrected body.23 It’s hard to think of a stronger commitment to material identity than that!
22 See, for example, ScG 4.81.10–81.11. See also De ente, par. 93, “And, therefore, there is not found among such substances a multitude of individuals in one species, as has been said, with the exception of the human soul on account of the body to which it is united. And although its individuation depends on the body as upon the occasion for its beginning because it does not acquire its individuated existence except in the body of which it is the actuality, it is not necessary that its individuation be lost when the body is taken away because that existence, since it is absolute, always remains individuated once the soul acquires it by being made the form of this individual body. And this is why Avicenna says that the individuation or multiplication of souls depends on the body as regards its beginning, but not as regards its end. / Et ideo in talibus substantiis [i.e., created intellectual substances] non invenitur multitudo individuorum in una specie, ut dictum est, nisi in anima humana propter corpus, cui unitur. Et licet individuatio eius ex corpore occasionaliter dependeat quantum ad sui inchoationem, quia non acquiritur sibi esse individuatum nisi in corpore, cuius est actus, non tamen oportet ut subtracto corpore individuatio pereat, quia cum habeat esse absolutum, ex quo acquisitum est sibi esse individuatum ex hoc quod facta est forma huius corporis, illud esse semper remanet individuatum. Et ideo dicit Avicenna quod individuatio animarum vel multiplicatio dependet ex corpore quantum ad sui principium, sed non quantum ad sui finem.” 23 See, for example, In I Cor 15, lect. 9, par. 1015: “But since the renewal and the resurrection, as was said, will occur by divine power, we say that bodies will be the same numerically, since the individual principles of that man are nothing other than this soul and this body. In the resurrection the soul too will return the same numerically, since it is incorruptible, and this body will be the same numerically from the same dust from which it was dissolved, restored by divine power; thus it will be the same numerical man who rises. / Sed cum reintegratio et resurrectio, sicut dictum est, fiant virtute divina, dicimus quod corpora erunt eadem numero, cum neque principia individuantia huius hominis sint aliud, quam haec anima, et hoc corpus. In resurrectione autem redibit et anima eadem numero, cum sit incorruptibilis, et hoc corpus idem numero ex eisdem pulveribus, in quibus resolutum fuit, ex virtute divina reparatum, sic erit idem homo numero resurgens.” See also In I Cor 15, lect. 5, par. 969: “For the resolution of human bodies into elements happens in the same way as other mixed bodies; hence, the dust into which human bodies are resolved has no other active power than other dust, in which there is no evidence of any active power to constitute a human body, but only in man’s seed. However, the dusts into which human bodies are reduced differ from other dust only according to God’s plan, inasmuch as these dusts are ordained by divine wisdom that human bodies be formed from them again. Hence the active cause of the resurrection is God alone, even though for this he uses the service of angels to collect the dust. / Fit enim resolutio corporis humani in elementa, sicut et aliorum mixtorum corporum, unde pulveres in quos humana corpora resolvuntur, nullam aliam habent virtutem activam quam alii pulveres, in quibus constat non esse aliam virtutem activam ad corporis humani constitutionem, sed solum in semine hominis; differunt autem pulveres in quos humana corpora resolvuntur, ab aliis pulveribus solum secundum ordinationem divinam, prout huiusmodi pulveres sunt ex divina sapientia ordinati, ut iterum ex eis humana corpora reintegrentur. Unde resurrectionis activa causa solus Deus erit, etsi ad hoc utatur ministerio Angelorum, quantum ad pulverum collectionem.” Or, In I Cor 15, lect. 8, par. 1007: “Because if we refer this to the gathering of dust (which will be done by the ministry of the angels), then a ‘moment’ is taken for an imperceptible time. For since in the gathering of that dust there is a change from place to place, it is necessary that there be a certain time. If we refer it to the reuniting of bodies and for their union with souls, all of which will be done by God, then a ‘moment’ is taken for an instant of time, because God in an instant unites the soul to the body, and vivifies the body. / Quia si nos referamus hoc ad collectionem pulverum (quae fiet ministerio Angelorum), tunc momentum accipitur pro tempore imperceptibili. Cum enim in collectione illorum pulverum sit mutatio de loco ad locum, oportet quod sit ibi tempus aliquod. Si autem referamus ad reunitionem corporum et pro unione animae, quae omnia fient a Deo, tunc momentum accipitur pro instanti temporis, quia Deus in instanti unit animam corpori et vivificat corpus.”
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And, just to be clear, Thomas explicitly states that the resurrected person is to be numerically identical with the living person:
It should be noted that [St. Paul] compares incorruption itself or immortality to a garment, when he says, “put on.” For a garment is present to the one having vested, and absent, [with the substance of the one having put on the garment remaining the same in number], so that by this he shows that the same numerical bodies will rise and the same men will be the same numerically in the state of incorruption and immortality, in which they are now. Thus by this the error is excluded that says that the same numerical body will not rise. Hence he says expressly, this corruptible, namely the body, must put on incorruption, for the soul is not corruptible. Likewise, the error is excluded that says that glorified bodies will not be the same as these, but will be heavenly . . .24
We might infer from this quotation that Thomas thinks the resurrected body not only is numerically identical with the living body, but must be so for the meaning of Scripture to be preserved. And we might infer from other statements that he also thinks the resurrected person must be numerically identical with the living person for the basic demands of justice to be met. For example, Thomas states:
24 In I Cor 15, lect. 9, par. 1014: “Notandum autem quod ipsam incorruptionem seu immortalitatem assimilat vestimento, cum dicit induere. Vestimentum enim adest vestito et abest, manente eadem numero substantia vestiti, ut per hoc ostendat quod corpora eadem numero resurgant et iidem homines iidem numero erunt in statu incorruptionis et immortalitatis, in quo sunt modo. Unde ex hoc excluditur error dicentium quod corpora non resurgent eadem numero. Unde signanter dicit oportet corruptibile hoc, scilicet corpus, nam anima non est corruptibilis. Excluditur etiam error dicentium quod corpora glorificata non erunt eadem cum istis, sed caelestia . . .” The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 41
For both the good and the evil will rise for this: that in their very own bodies they may receive their reward or their punishment for the deeds they performed while they lived in the body.25
So, Thomas believes that the resurrected person will be—maybe even must be—numerically identical with the living person. As we saw above, he also believes that the numerical identity of the person requires the numerical identity of the essential parts of the person, namely, the soul and the body. And the numerical identity of the body requires not just that flesh and bones be resurrected, but, as Thomas puts it, that this flesh and these bones—i.e., the very same flesh and bones of the living person—be resurrected.
What, then, if the flesh and bones of a particular person contain a disability? Would it pertain per se to her ratio as this person to have this disability? If it were possible to define this person, would this disability then be a defining characteristic (not the only defining characteristic, to be sure, but a defining characteristic nonetheless)? And would it then follow that this disability must continue on in the resurrection for personal identity to be preserved, i.e., for this person to be rewarded or punished for the life she lived?
2. Aquinas on the Perfection of the Resurrected Body
25 ScG 4.85.4: “Ad hoc enim resurgent tam boni quam mali, ut etiam in propriis corporibus praemium consequantur vel poenam pro his quae gesserunt dum vixerunt in corpore.” See also ScG 4.79.12.
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Thomas seems to think not. Throughout his various discussions of the resurrection, Aquinas maintains that the resurrected body must be perfect: “Since the resurrection is to restore the deficiencies of nature, nothing that belongs to the perfection of nature will be denied to the bodies of the risen.”26
26 ScG 4.88.1: “Quia, cum per resurrectionem sint reparandi defectus naturae, nihil eorum quae ad perfectionem naturae pertinent, a corporibus resurgentium auferetur.” See also Compendium, part 1, ch. 160: “For the same reason that God, in restoring the risen body, does not reclaim all the material elements once possessed by man’s body, He will supply whatever is wanting to the proper amount of matter. Nature itself has such power. In infancy we do not as yet possess our full quantity; but by assimilating food and drink we receive enough matter from outside sources to round out our perfect quantity; nor on this account does a man cease to be the same individual he was before. Surely, then, divine power can do the same thing much more easily, so that those who do not have sufficient quantity may be supplied from outside matter with whatever was lacking to them in this life as regards integrity of natural members or suitable size. Consequently, although some may have lacked certain of their members during this life, or may not have attained to perfect size, the amount of quantity possessed at the moment of death makes no difference; at the resurrection they will receive, through God’s power, the due complement of members and quantity. / Sicut autem non totum quod materialiter fuit in corpore hominis, ad reparationem corporis resurgentis Deus resumet, ita etiam si quid materialiter defuit, Deus supplebit. Si enim hoc officio naturae fieri potest ut puero qui non habet debitam quantitatem, ex aliena materia per assumptionem cibi et potus tantum addatur quod ei sufficiat ad perfectam quantitatem habendam, nec propter hoc desinit esse idem numero qui fuit, multo magis hoc virtute divina fieri potest ut suppleatur minus habentibus de extrinseca materia, quod eis in hac vita defuit ad integritatem membrorum naturalium, vel debitae quantitatis. Sic igitur licet aliqui in hac vita aliquibus membris caruerint, vel perfectam quantitatem nondum attigerint, in quantacumque quantitate defuncti, virtute divina in resurrectione perfectionem debitam consequentur et membrorum et quantitatis.” Or again ScG 4.81.12: “It is also like this in the human body, for the form and species of its single parts remain continuously through a whole life; the matter of the parts is not only resolved by the action of the natural heat, but is replenished anew by nourishment. Man is not, therefore, numerically different according to his different ages, although not everything which is in him materially in one state is also there in another. In this way, then, this is not a requirement of man’s arising with numerical identity: that he should assume again whatever has been in him during the whole time of his life; but he need assume from that matter only what suffices to complete the quantity due, and that especially must be resumed which was more perfectly consistent with the form and species of humanity. But, if something was wanting to the fulfillment of the quantity due, either because one was overtaken by death before nature could bring him to the quantity due or because mutilation perhaps deprived him of some member, the divine power will supply this from another source. This, however, will be no obstacle to the unity of the body of the one rising, for even the work of nature adds to what a boy has from some other source to bring him to his perfect quantity. And this addition does not make him numerically other, for the man is the same in number whether he is boy or adult. / Sic etiam est in humano corpore. Nam forma et species singularium partium eius continue manet per totam vitam: sed materia partium et resolvitur per actionem caloris naturalis, et de novo adgeneratur per alimentum. Non est igitur alius numero homo secundum diversas aetates, quamvis non quicquid materialiter est in homine secundum unum statum sit in eo secundum alium. Sic igitur non requiritur ad hoc quod resurgat homo numero idem, quod quicquid fuit materialiter in eo secundum totum tempus vitae suae resumatur: sed tantum ex eo quantum sufficit ad complementum debitae quantitatis; et praecipue illud resumendum videtur quod perfectius fuit sub forma et specie humanitatis consistens. Si quid vero defuit ad complementum debitae quantitatis, vel quia aliquis praeventus est morte antequam natura ipsum ad perfectam quantitatem deduceret, vel quia forte aliquis mutilatus est membro; aliunde hoc divina supplebit potentia. Nec tamen hoc impediet resurgentis corporis unitatem: quia etiam opere naturae super id quod puer habet, aliquid additur aliunde, ut ad perfectam perveniat quantitatem, nec talis additio facit alium numero; idem enim numero est homo et puer et adultus.”
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Even the bodies of the damned, Thomas believes, will rise with a kind of integrity and incorruptibility:
For those bodies, too, must be proportioned to the souls of those to be damned. Of course, the souls of the wicked have a good nature, indeed, since it is created by God, but they will have a disordered will which will be failing its very own end. Their bodies, then, so far as nature is concerned, will be restored to integrity; because, as one can see, they will rise in the perfection of age, without any members diminished, without any deficiency or corruption which the error or the weakness of nature has introduced. Hence, the Apostle says: “The dead shall rise again incorruptible” (1 Cor. 15-52); and clearly this ought to be understood of all, both the good and the evil, according to what precedes and follows in his text.27
27 ScG 4.89.2: “Oportet enim et illa corpora animabus damnandorum proportionata esse. Animae autem malorum naturam quidem bonam habent, utpote a Deo creatam: sed voluntatem habebunt inordinatam, et a fine proprio deficientem. Corpora igitur eorum, quantum ad id quod naturae est, integra reparabuntur: quia videlicet in aetate perfecta resurgent, absque omni diminutione membrorum, et absque omni defectu et corruptione quam error naturae aut infirmitas introduxit. Unde apostolus dicit I Cor. 15-52: mortui resurgent incorrupti: quod manifestum est de omnibus debere intelligi, tam bonis quam malis, ex his quae praecedunt et sequuntur in littera.” The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 44
In fact, Thomas makes a highly unusual move when he states his own personal belief about the bodies of the damned. Commenting on St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Thomas writes:
He [Paul] establishes however two effects. One is common, because the dead will be raised imperishable, i.e., renewed without any diminution of their members. That indeed is common to all, because in the resurrection the reparation of nature pertains to all, because all have communion with Christ in nature. And although Augustine [Enchir. 92] leaves open a doubt whether deformities will remain among the damned, I believe (ego credo) that whatever pertains to the reparation of nature is conferred entirely on them; but what pertains to grace is conferred only on the elect. And therefore all will rise incorruptible, i.e., renewed, even the damned.28 (Emphasis mine.)
Here we have a rare “ego statement”—and one that risks parting ways with St. Augustine at that!
Of course, while Thomas believes that the bodies of the damned will be incorruptible and without deformity or defect, he also believes that the bodies of the blessed will be elevated even more, receiving what he calls the “marks of glorified bodies”:
28 In I Cor 15, lect. 8, par. 1010: “Ponit autem duplicem effectum. Unus est communis, quia mortui resurgent incorrupti, id est integri, sine aliqua diminutione membrorum. Quod quidem est commune omnibus, quia in resurrectione est commune omne quod pertinet ad reparationem naturae, quia omnes habent communionem cum Christo in natura. Et licet Augustinus relinquat sub dubio, utrum deformitates remaneant in damnatis, ego tamen credo quod quidquid pertinet ad reparationem naturae, totum confertur eis: sed quod pertinet ad gratiam, solum electis confertur. Et ideo omnes resurgent incorrupti, id est, integri, etiam damnati.”
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These marks are four which the Apostle touches on here. First, he touches on the mark of incapacity of suffering, when he says: what is sown is perishable. . . . What is raised is imperishable. Here he says imperishable not only to exclude separation of the soul and the body, because even the bodies of the damned will have this imperishability, but to exclude both death or any harmful suffering either from within or from without. And in regard to this is the imperishability of the glorified understood: “They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more” (Rev. 7:16). Secondly, he touches on the mark of clarity, when he says: It is sown in dishonor, i.e., the body, which before death was subject to many deformities and miseries. . . . But it is raised in glory, which signifies clarity, as Augustine says (On John). For the bodies of the saints will be clear and shining: “The righteous will shine as the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matt. 14:43). Thirdly, he touches on the mark of agility, when he says, It is sown in weakness, i.e. the animal body, which before death is weak and slow and not easily moved by the soul: “A perishable body weighs down the soul” (Wis. 9:15). It is raised in strength, namely, because it will come to pass that from such strength it can be moved by the soul and in no case will it show difficulty being moved, which pertains to the mark of agility. For there will be as much facility as felicity, as Augustine says. Hence it says in Wisdom (3:7): “The just will shine forth and will run like sparks through the stubble”; and in Isaiah (40:31): “They who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” Fourthly, he touches on the mark of subtility, when he says, It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.29
29 In I Cor 15, lect. 6, par. 980–983: “Et agit hic de corpore resurgente glorioso, cuius propriae qualitates dotes corporis gloriosi dicuntur. Quae quidem sunt quatuor, quas hic apostolus tangit. Primo enim tangit dotem impassibilitatis, cum dicit seminatur in corruptione, et cetera. . . . Sed resurget in incorruptione. Dicitur autem hic incorruptio, non solum ad excludendum separationem animae a corpore, quia hanc incorruptionem et corpora damnatorum habebunt, sed ad excludendum tam mortem quam quamlibet noxiam passionem, sive ab interiori, sive ab exteriori. Et quantum ad hoc intelligitur impassibilitas corporis gloriosi, secundum illud Apoc. VII, 16: non esurient, neque sitient amplius, et cetera. Secundo tangit dotem claritatis, cum dicit seminatur in ignobilitate, id est corpus quod ante mortem, et in morte est deformitatibus et miseriis multis subiectum. . . . Sed resurget in gloria, quae claritatem significat, ut Augustinus dicit super Ioannem. Erunt enim corpora sanctorum clara et fulgentia, secundum illud Matth. XIII, v. 43: fulgebunt iusti, sicut sol, et cetera. Tertio tangit dotem agilitatis, cum dicit seminatur in infirmitate, id est, corpus animale, quod ante mortem est infirmum et tardum, et ab anima non facile mobile, secundum illud Sap. IX, 15: corpus quod corrumpitur aggravat animam. Sed surget in virtute, quia scilicet fiet ut ex tanta virtute ab anima moveri possit, ut in nullo difficultatem ad motum exhibeat, quod ad dotem agilitatis pertinet. Tanta enim erit ibi facilitas, quanta felicitas, ut Augustinus dicit. Unde dicitur Sap. III, 7 de iustis: fulgebunt iusti, et tamquam scintillae in arundineto discurrent. Et Is. XL, 31: qui sperant in domino habebunt fortitudinem, assument pennas, et cetera. Quarto tangit dotem subtilitatis, cum dicit seminatur corpus animale, et cetera.” See also ScG 4.86.1– 4.86.2. The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 46
In a sense, then, we might say that Thomas regards the resurrection of the body as bringing perfection at more than one level. There is what we might regard as the perfection of nature, which is apparent even in his description of the resurrected bodies of the damned. And there is the perfection of glory, which is apparent only in his description of the resurrected bodies of the blessed. But in Thomas’s descriptions of each of these modes of perfection, we see evidence of things we might nowadays regard as disabilities being healed: “deficiencies” are restored; diminished members are rendered whole and bodily integrity is made complete; deformities are healed; bodies are made incorruptible, and all forms of harmful suffering are excluded; and weakness, slowness, and difficulty of movement are transformed into strength, speed, and agility. Indeed, Thomas reminds us, “The just will shine forth and will run like sparks through the stubble” (Wisdom 3.7); and “They who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (Isaiah 40.3).
3. Objections from Disability Theorists
At this point, we can begin to see a tension emerging in Thomas’s account of the resurrection of human persons, a tension between what John Swinton calls continuity and discontinuity.30 On one hand, Thomas believes that the numerical identity of the living person must be preserved in the resurrected person and that this identity requires that the person be resurrected, not only with a body and a soul, but with the numerically same body and soul—to the point that he expects angels to collect the dust into which our bodies decompose after death. On the other hand, Thomas also believes that our bodies will be different in the resurrection: some will be made agile and incapable of suffering; all will be made incorruptible and will be healed of every natural defect and deformity.
30 Swinton regards this tension as being present already in Paul’s account of the resurrection in I Corinthians 15; he does not think it is peculiar to Aquinas’s theology. See Swinton et al., “Whose Story Am I?,” 9.
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This tension, and especially the element of discontinuity, troubles some disability theorists. For example, Nancy Eiesland, who has been disabled since birth, believes that she would be “unknown to [herself] and perhaps to God” if she were no longer disabled in heaven.31 And John Swinton wonders why, if there is to be both continuity and discontinuity in the resurrection, we assume that disabilities should provide a point of discontinuity rather than continuity.32 I think Thomas has something to say to each of these concerns.
3.1. Interestingly, Thomas seems to have thought that St. Paul was concerned with precisely the sort of objection that Eiesland raises when Paul wrote chapter 15 of the First Letter to the Corinthians. Commenting on this text, Aquinas states:
Since someone could say “how is it possible that the dead re-assume body and flesh if they are not going to have the same quality of body?”, in order to exclude this, [Paul] introduces diverse qualities of body and flesh so that it will be clear that it is not necessary that, if the quality be not the same, the same body or the same flesh be not re-assumed. Therefore, he first says that not all flesh is the same flesh according to form, but [there is one kind] for humans, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish, and so forth. Similarly, [there is one kind] for those dying and another for those rising. . . . But the flesh of a rising man is the same in species as the flesh of a dying man, though it will be different in quality. “For it will be of the same nature but of a different glory,” as Gregory says of the body of Christ.33 (My translation.)
31 Eiesland, “Liberation, Inclusion, and Justice,” 2. 32 Swinton et al., “Whose Story Am I?,” 9. 33 In I Cor 15, lect. 6, par. 976: “Quia posset aliquis dicere: quomodo est possibile quod mortui resumant corpus et carnem, si non sint habituri eamdem corporis qualitatem? Ideo ad hoc excludendum introducit diversas qualitates corporis et carnis, ut sic manifestum sit quod non oportet, si non erit eadem qualitas, quod non resumatur idem corpus, vel eadem caro. Dicit ergo primo quod non omnis caro est eadem caro, secundum formam, sed alia est caro hominum, alia piscium, alia pecorum, alia volucrum, et cetera. Et similiter est alia morientis, et alia resurgentis. . . . Sed caro hominis resurgentis est eadem secundum speciem cum carne morientis, sed tamen erit alia secundum qualitatem. Erit enim eiusdem naturae, sed alterius gloriae, ut Gregorius de corpore Christi dicit.”
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Thomas seems to regard St. Paul as responding to an objection that is, broadly speaking, similar to the one raised by Eiesland: how can we say that the same body is taken up again at the resurrection if the resurrected body is qualitatively different from the living body? And the answer Thomas finds in the text is that the mere fact that these bodies have different qualities does not mean they are different in every way. As Thomas states in the Summa contra Gentiles, although they have different dispositions, “the bodies of the risen are to be the same in species as our bodies are now.”34 And, indeed, Thomas maintains that the bodies of those rising will also be numerically identical with their living bodies:
Hence, it is clear that man returns numerically the same both by reason of the permanence of the rational soul and by reason of the unity of matter.
34 ScG 4.85.1: “Corpora resurgentium sint futura eiusdem speciei cuius nunc sunt corpora nostra.” The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 49
However, what is said in the third argument—that being is not one because it is not continuous—rests on a false foundation. For, clearly, the being (esse) of matter and form is one; matter has no actual being except by form. Nonetheless, in this respect the rational soul differs from other forms. For there is no being of other forms except in their concrete union with matter, since they exceed matter neither in being nor in operation. But the rational soul plainly exceeds matter in its operation, for it has an operation in which no bodily organ takes part; namely, the act of understanding. Hence, its being, also, is not merely in its concrete union with matter. Its being (esse), therefore, which is that of the composite, remains in the soul itself (ipsa) even when the body is dissolved; and when the body is restored in the resurrection, it is returned to the same being (idem esse) which persisted in the soul.35
So, Thomas believes that while the resurrected body will have different dispositions and qualities from the living body—including especially incorruptibility—the resurrected body will nevertheless be specifically and numerically identical with the living body because it subsists in the same individual act of esse.36 Thus, Thomas is able to maintain that:
35 ScG 4.81.10–4.81.11: “Unde patet quod et homo redit idem numero in resurrectione, et humanitas eadem numero, propter animae rationalis permanentiam et materiae unitatem. Quod vero tertio obiicitur, quod esse non est unum quia non est continuum: falso innititur fundamento. Manifestum est enim quod materiae et formae unum est esse: non enim materia habet esse in actu nisi per formam. Differt tamen quantum ad hoc anima rationalis ab aliis formis. Nam esse aliarum formarum non est nisi in concretione ad materiam: non enim excedunt materiam neque in esse, neque in operari. Anima vero rationalis, manifestum est quod excedit materiam in operari: habet enim aliquam operationem absque participatione organi corporalis, scilicet intelligere. Unde et esse suum non est solum in concretione ad materiam. Esse igitur eius, quod erat compositi, manet in ipsa corpore dissoluto: et reparato corpore in resurrectione, in idem esse reducitur quod remansit in anima.” See also ScG 4.81.6–4.81.7. 36 See also De ente, par. 89: “the quiddity or nature of a genus or species, in the case of those things that have a genus or species, is not multiplied according to the notion of the nature; rather, the existence is diverse in these diverse things / quiditas vel natura generis aut speciei non distinguatur secundum rationem naturae in illis, quorum est genus vel species, sed esse est diversum in diversis.” Or again, De ente, par. 93, “And, therefore, there is not found among such substances a multitude of individuals in one species, as has been said, with the exception of the human soul on account of the body to which it is united. And although its individuation depends on the body as upon the occasion for its beginning because it does not acquire its individuated existence except in the body of which it is the actuality, it is not necessary that its individuation be lost when the body is taken away because that existence, since it is absolute, always remains individuated once the soul acquires it by being made the form of this individual body. And this is why Avicenna says that the individuation or multiplication of souls depends on the body as regards its beginning, but not as regards its end. / Et ideo in talibus substantiis [i.e., created intellectual substances] non invenitur multitudo individuorum in una specie, ut dictum est, nisi in anima humana propter corpus, cui unitur. Et licet individuatio eius ex corpore occasionaliter dependeat quantum ad sui inchoationem, quia non acquiritur sibi esse individuatum nisi in corpore, cuius est actus, non tamen oportet ut subtracto corpore individuatio pereat, quia cum habeat esse absolutum, ex quo acquisitum est sibi esse individuatum ex hoc quod facta est forma huius corporis, illud esse semper remanet individuatum. Et ideo dicit Avicenna quod individuatio animarum vel multiplicatio dependet ex corpore quantum ad sui principium, sed non quantum ad sui finem.”
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When a human being rises she will be immortal, not because she has assumed another body that is incorruptible . . . but because this same body that is now corruptible will become incorruptible.37 (My translation.)
In other words, Thomas believes that the living body can undergo changes that will make it become immortal without losing its numerical identity. And, presumably, as long as the same individual act of being that now actualizes the living human person continues to exist, the body could also undergo changes that would heal disabilities of various sorts without losing its numerical identity. This, I think, would be Thomas’s way of understanding how a resurrected person could be healed of disabilities without ceasing to be the same person.
37 ScG 4.85.8: “Non igitur per hoc homo resurgens immortalis erit quod aliud corpus incorruptibile resumat . . . sed quia hoc ipsum corpus quod nunc est corruptibile, incorruptibile fiet.” The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 51
3.2. This still leaves us, though, with the question of why Thomas might think that defects and deformities would not exist in the resurrected body. And I gather that this is the kind of question that John Swinton means to raise when he asks why we assume that the absence of disabilities is one of the ways in which the resurrected body will be discontinuous with the living body. 38 Swinton concedes that this assumption makes sense in light of certain cultural assumptions about beauty and perfection, but he clearly intends to raise questions about whether Christian theology should accept these assumptions or contest them.39 And I think these are good questions to be raised.
For his part, Aquinas offers a number of arguments aimed at proving that the resurrected body must be perfect. In fact, I find as many as ten different arguments for this conclusion in Aquinas’s writings.40 And while I will not be able to discuss each of these arguments here, I would like to look briefly at a few of the more important ones, considering, among other things, whether they reveal the same cultural assumptions about beauty and perfection against which Swinton cautions or whether they are founded on more substantive principles.
Let us begin with an intriguing argument Thomas makes about the absence of defects in the resurrected body:
38 See Swinton et al., “Whose Story Am I?,” 8–9. 39 See Swinton et al., “Whose Story Am I?,” 9. 40 In addition to the arguments I discuss in the text above, see those contained in the following passages: ScG 4.81.12, ScG 4.86, ScG 4.88.1, ScG 4.89.2, ST 1-2.3.3, ST 1-2.4.5, ST 1-2.4.6, Compendium, part 1, ch. 167, Compendium, part 1, ch. 168, Compendium, part 1, ch. 176, In I Cor 15, lect. 6, par. 988, In I Cor 15, lect. 5, and In I Cor 15, lect. 8.
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In like manner, it is fitting that all natural defects should be corrected in the risen body . . . these defects arose from a deficiency in the natural power which is the principle of human generation. But in the resurrection there will be no active causality other than the divine, which does not admit of deficiency. Therefore such defects as are found in men naturally begotten, will have no place in men restored by the resurrection.41
41 Compendium, part 1, ch. 158, par. 1–2: “Similiter autem conveniens est ut omnes naturales defectus a corporibus resurgentium auferantur. . . . Huiusmodi defectus ex defectu virtutis naturalis, quae fuit generationis humanae principium, provenerunt. In resurrectione autem non erit virtus agens nisi divina, in quam defectus non cadit. Non igitur huiusmodi defectus, qui sunt in hominibus generatis, erunt in hominibus per resurrectionem reparatis.” The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 53
One matter disability theorists would undoubtedly want to draw our attention to here is the notion of “defect”: the logic of the argument excludes natural defects from the effects of divine causality, but it does not determine for us precisely what counts as a “defect.” And questioning whether something traditionally regarded as a “disability” is really a “defect” is precisely what, for example, some autistic self-advocates are doing today when they describe autism as an “identity” or a different way of being human rather than a “disability” (and perhaps what some members of the Deaf community have been doing for quite a long time).42 So, one could accept the premises and the logical validity of Thomas’s argument, but still dispute whether an individual “disability” counts as a “defect” and, therefore, whether the argument requires that this “disability” be changed or cured in the resurrection.
A second argument Thomas offers is also worth noting because it runs so close to the nerve of Thomas’s conception of beatitude as the complete fulfillment of desire:
The soul which will enjoy the divine vision, united to its ultimate end, will in all matters experience the fulfillment of desire. And since it is out of the soul’s desire that the body is moved, the consequence will be the body’s utter obedience to the spirit’s slightest wish. Hence, the bodies of the blessed when they rise are going to have agility. This is what the Apostle says in the same place: “It is sown in weakness, it shall rise in power.” For weakness is what we experience in a body found wanting in the strength to satisfy the desire of the soul in the movements and actions which the soul commands, and this weakness will be entirely taken away then, when power is overflowing into the body from a soul united to God. For this reason, also, Wisdom (3:7) says that the just “shall run to and fro like sparks among the reeds”; this is not said because there is motion in them by
42 The claim that autism is an identity, or a distinctive way of being human, rather than a disability has been made by many in the autism community. See, for example, the following. Emine Saner, “It is not a disease, it is a way of life,” The Guardian (July 8, 2007), retrieved on 16 April 2016 from http://www.theguardian.com/society/2007/aug/07/health.medicineandhealth. Steve Silberman, NeuroTribes: the Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (New York: Avery, 2015), 430. Paul Heilker and Jason King, “The Rhetorics of Online Autism Advocacy: A Case for Rhetorical Listening,” in Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication, ed. Stuart Selber (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), 113–33, esp. 122. Lydia Brown, “Identity-First Language,” retrieved on 3 March 2016 from http://autisticadvocacy.org/home/about-asan/identity-first-language/. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network, “Position Statement on Autistic Identity” and “Position Statement on Respectful Use of Therapies,” both retrieved on 26 April 2016 from http://autisticadvocacy.org/policy-advocacy/position-statements/. And Barry Prizant, Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 1 and 4. Some people have also claimed that disability in general is an identity. See, for example, the following. Dana Dunn and Erin Andrews, “Person-First and Identity-First Language: Developing Psychologists’ Cultural Competence Using Disability Language,” American Psychologist (April 2015): 255–64, esp. 257 and 259. Carol Gill, “Four types of integration in disability identity development,” Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation 9 (1997): 39–46, esp. 41 ff. And Simi Linton, “Reassigning Meaning,” in The disability studies reader (3rd ed.), ed. Lennard Davis (New York: Routledge, 2010), 223–36, esp. 225.
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reason of necessity—since they who have God want nothing—but as an indication of their power.43
43 ScG 4.86.3: “Anima etiam quae divina visione fruetur, ultimo fini coniuncta, in omnibus experietur suum desiderium adimpletum. Et quia ex desiderio animae movetur corpus, consequens erit ut corpus omnino spiritui ad nutum obediat. Unde corpora resurgentium beatorum futura erunt agilia. Et hoc est quod apostolus dicit ibidem: seminatur in infirmitate, surget in virtute. Infirmitatem enim experimur in corpore quia invalidum invenitur ad satisfaciendum desiderio animae in motibus et actionibus quas anima imperat: quae infirmitas totaliter tunc tolletur, virtute redundante in corpus ex anima Deo coniuncta. Propter quod etiam Sap. 3-7, dicitur de iustis, quod tanquam scintillae in arundineto discurrent: non quod motus sit in eis propter necessitatem, cum nullo indigeant qui Deum habent, sed ad virtutis demonstrationem.”
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This argument, it seems to me, is also vulnerable to objections that might be raised by disability theorists. For example, such a person might wonder: what if a particular blessed soul does not have a desire to move from one place to another with agility? Thomas himself appears to recognize that there is something problematic about the notion that someone in heaven should want to run to and fro because he hastens to add that there is no necessity of locomotion in heaven since the blessed who see God can want for nothing, and thus they only move as an indication of their power. But what if they feel no desire to show their power either? Would their bodies still need to be made agile? More to the point at hand: what if a particular person actively wishes not to be healed of a trait some regard as a disability?44 Would not-being-cured of that disability count precisely as the fulfillment of desire for that individual, and being-cured count precisely as the frustration of desire?
44 I am grateful to Montague Brown for helping me to reflect on the role the individual’s wishes might play in determining whether or not her body will be healed of disabilities in the resurrection.
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Thomas does not seem to ask these questions. And, in a way, this is not surprising since the notion that disability could be part of an individual’s identity—and that to be healed of a disability might therefore be regarded as a threat to one’s existence—appears to be an idea that has arisen only relatively recently. It is worth mentioning, though, that it is not only modern disability theorists who have posed questions like these. Consider this passage from the Gospel of John:
There was a festival of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool, called in Hebrew Beth-zatha, which has five porticoes. In these lay many invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be made well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; and while I am making my way, someone else steps down ahead of me.” Jesus said to him, “Stand up, take your mat and walk.” At once the man was made well, and he took up his mat and began to walk. Now that day was a sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who had been cured, “It is the sabbath; it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” But he answered them, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’” They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had disappeared in the crowd that was there. Later Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you have been made well! Do not sin any more, so that nothing worse happens to you.” The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well. Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath.45 (Emphasis mine.)
45 John 5:1–16 (NRSV). The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 57
What is usually noted about this passage, of course, is the misplaced indignation of those who object to Jesus’s healing on the Sabbath. What is more important to note for our purposes, though, is that Jesus asks the man whether he wants to be healed before healing him.46 By posing this question, Jesus raises the possibility that the man might not want to be healed. And if it is possible that a person might not want to be healed of a disability in this life, might it also be possible that a person might not want to be healed of that disability in the resurrection? The extent to which we are willing to entertain this possibility—a possibility not only raised by modern disability theorists but at least implied by Scripture itself—is the extent to which we must also question whether bodies must be healed of disabilities in the resurrection in order for the desires of the soul to be fulfilled.
Finally, what is perhaps the most common argument that Thomas offers for the perfection of the resurrected body proceeds along the following lines:
46 Even when Thomas comments on this passage, it is not clear whether he seriously entertains the possibility that the man in this story might actually not want to be healed: Thomas simply asserts that “it was evident enough that the man did want to be healed” (nam satis constare poterat quod sanus fieri volebat), and explains that Jesus asked the man whether he wished to be healed in order to “excite the man’s desire” (excitet desiderium) to be healed rather than to learn the man’s wishes. But perhaps Thomas thought it was sufficiently clear that the man wanted to be healed because he had been lying by the well for a long time, so that Thomas’s assertion would not betray a biased assumption that a person would necessarily want to be healed of a disability. See Thomas’s Commentary on the Gospel of St. John, ch. 5, lect. 1, par. 713.
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We must say that perfect disposition of the body is necessary, both antecedently and consequently, for that Happiness which is in all ways perfect . . . . [It is necessary] Consequently, because from the Happiness of the soul there will be an overflow (redundantia) on to the body, so that this too will obtain its perfection. Hence Augustine says (Ep. ad Dioscor.47) that “God gave the soul such a powerful nature that from its exceeding fullness of happiness the vigor of incorruption overflows (redundet) into the lower nature.”48
47 “Now, perfect health of body shall be the consummation of the immortality of the whole man. For God has endowed the soul with a nature so powerful, that from that consummate fullness of joy which is promised to the saints in the end of time, some portion overflows also upon the lower part of our nature, the body—not the blessedness which is proper to the part which enjoys and understands, but the plenitude of health, that is, the vigour of incorruption. Men who, as I have said, do not see this war with each other in unsatisfactory debates, each maintaining the view which may please his own fancy, but all placing the supreme good of man in the body, and so stir up crowds of disorderly carnal minds, of whom the Epicureans have flourished in pre-eminent estimation with the unlearned multitude.” Augustine, Letter 118: from Augustine to Dioscorus, trans. by J.G. Cunningham, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. 1, ed. Schaff (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1887). Retrieved on 2 June 2016 from http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102118.htm. 48 ST 1-2.4.6 c.: “Et ideo dicendum est quod ad beatitudinem omnibus modis perfectam, requiritur perfecta dispositio corporis et antecedenter et consequenter . . . . Consequenter vero, quia ex beatitudine animae fiet redundantia ad corpus, ut et ipsum sua perfectione potiatur. Unde Augustinus dicit, in Epist. ad Dioscorum, tam potenti natura Deus fecit animam, ut ex eius plenissima beatitudine redundet in inferiorem naturam incorruptionis vigor.” The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 59
I should note that while Thomas is here describing how the perfection of the body arises out of the perfection of the soul in the state of happiness, the same basic logic seems to apply to his thinking about the incorruptibility and integrity of the bodies of the damned.49 What is different in the case of the souls of the blessed is that the glory of the soul—i.e., the soul’s participation in the light of glory that makes the beatific vision possible—overflows into the glory of the resurrected body, giving it the “marks of the glorified body”: the incapacity for suffering, clarity, agility and subtility.50
It is precisely here that I think we must ask Swinton’s question: does the litany of properties Thomas thinks glorified bodies will possess merely reflect cultural assumptions about beauty and perfection—and therefore reveal biases about the undesirability of disabilities that affect sense perception, physical movement, health or appearance? To this question, I think the answer is a qualified “no.”
To begin with, there is a kind of neo-Platonic logic that leads Thomas to conclude that the resurrected body must be perfected. The terms “redundantia” and “redundet,” translated respectively as “overflowing” and “overflows” above, hint at the neo-Platonic roots of Thomas’s thinking here.51 And these roots are laid bare more clearly in other passages in which Thomas presents versions of this same argument using the term “participabit”—“participates”—to describe how the glorified body comes to share in the perfection of the glorified soul. For example, in Summa contra Gentiles 4.86.5, Thomas states:
49 See In I Cor 15, lect. 8, par. 1010. 50 As noted above, see In I Cor 15, lect. 5, par. 980–983. See also ScG 4.86.1–4.86.2. 51 For more on Thomas’s account of the light of glory and its neo-Platonic overtones, see Michael Waddell, “Aquinas on the Light of Glory,” Tópicos: Revista de Filosofia 40 (2011): 105–32. See also Michael Waddell, “The Importance of Rapture in the Thought of Aquinas,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition, 12.1 (2014): 255–85, esp. 258– 9 and 283–4.
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Furthermore, the soul which is enjoying God will cleave to Him most perfectly, and will in its own fashion share in (participabit) His goodness to the highest degree; and thus will the body be perfectly within the soul’s dominion, and will share in (participabit) what is the soul’s very own characteristics so far as possible, in the perspicuity of [the senses], in the ordering of bodily appetite, and in the all-round perfection of nature; [for inasmuch as a thing is more perfect in nature, so much shall its matter be more perfectly subordinate to its form]. And for this reason the Apostle says: ‘It is sown a natural body, it shall rise a spiritual body’ (1 Cor. 15:44).52
I take the language of participation to be clear evidence that in these passages and in others like them, Thomas does seem to be making a kind of neo-Platonic argument that the perfection of the glorified soul will necessarily overflow into the perfection of the body. Inasmuch as Thomas is following the logic of neo-Platonic metaphysics to the conclusion that the body, as well as the soul, must be made perfect in the resurrection, I do not think we can accuse him of merely succumbing to cultural assumptions about beauty and perfection.
52 ScG 4.86.5: “Rursus, anima Deo fruens ipsi perfectissime adhaerebit, et eius bonitatem participabit in summo, secundum suum modum: sic igitur et corpus perfecte subdetur animae, et eius proprietates participabit quantum possibile est, in perspicuitate sensuum, in ordinatione corporei appetitus, et in omnimoda perfectione naturae: tanto enim aliquid perfectius est in natura, quanto eius materia perfectius subditur formae. Et propter hoc dicit apostolus: seminatur corpus animale, surget corpus spirituale.” The Saint Anselm Journal 12.2 (Spring 2017) 61
And yet, I do think that questions could be raised about the basic neo-Platonic logic that would seem to require perfection to overflow into perfection in the state of glory. Aquinas believes that Christ’s human soul enjoyed the beatific vision throughout his earthly life, and that this required the light of glory; but Aquinas also holds that the perfection of Christ’s glorified soul did not overflow into the perfection of a glorified body until the Passion.53 Similarly, Aquinas believes that both Moses and Paul enjoyed the gift of rapture, which entailed a participation in the light of glory in this life; but Thomas explicitly says that the glory enjoyed in rapture does not overflow into the body.54 So, it does not seem to be necessary—even on Aquinas’s own terms—that a glorified soul overflow into a glorified body. And we might, then, ask why (beyond the need for incorruptibility) Aquinas thinks the body must participate in the perfection of the soul in the first place, setting in motion the logic that justifies his attribution of sense perspicuity, agility, and beauty to the glorified body. Now, it is possible that Aquinas believes that Scripture makes these attributions, and that he merely intends to defend what is revealed. It is also possible he thinks the complete perfection of happiness in the resurrection requires the perfection of the entire human being in ways that were not required for Christ’s earthly participation in the beatific vision or for the state of rapture. In light of these other instances in which Aquinas concedes that the glory of the soul does not overflow into the glorified perfection of the body, though, one might reasonably wonder with Swinton whether there is a bias toward perfection and beauty at work here even if that bias is not the only factor that leads Thomas to represent the resurrected body in the way he does.
53 On the claim that Christ enjoyed the beatific vision during his lifetime, see ST 3.9.2. On the claim that Christ must have participated in the light of glory in order to enjoy the beatific vision during his lifetime, see ST 2-2.175.4 ad 2. And on the claim that the light of glory did not overflow to Christ’s body until the Passion, see ST 3.34.4 (esp. ad 1 and ad 2). For an excellent treatment of all of these issues, see Simon Gaine, Did the Saviour See the Father? Christ, Salvation and the Vision of God (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), esp. 5, 77–8, 81, and 91–2. 54 See, for example, DV 13.2 co. See also Michael Waddell, “The Importance of Rapture in the Thought of Aquinas,” n. 9.
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It is also worth noting that Thomas does not only maintain that the resurrected body must be perfect; he also claims, in various places, that the perfection of the resurrected body entails certain specific characteristics: incorruption55; perspicuity of the senses56; health, beauty, and agility of movement.57 And one might ask whether these various specifications of bodily perfection reflect the kind of cultural assumptions regarding beauty and perfection against which Swinton cautions. It seems to me that the logic behind Thomas’s claims is less explicit here. I do think, though, that there are arguments that can be brought forward. To begin with, Thomas argues that incorruptibility is required in the resurrected body so that happiness (or, for that matter, punishment) might be permanent.58 Health, considered as the well-functioning of the body, seems by definition to be a good or perfection.59 And while Thomas does merely seem to assume that perspicuity of the senses is a perfection without arguing for it, it stands to reason that insofar as the human soul has sense faculties whose operations are naturally carried out through bodily organs, the well-functioning of the senses (in their biological and psychological entirety) would constitute a human good. In addition, Thomas describes “agility” merely as the power for mobility, and, once again, inasmuch as the human soul has a faculty of movement (i.e., locomotion), it is not unreasonable to regard the power that allows that faculty to act as a perfection. Finally, inasmuch as Thomas regards beauty as a transcendental, and construes perfection as the highest level of being, it simply follows that he would take perfection to entail beauty (though one might still ask what counts as beautiful).60 In ways like these, it seems that principles of Thomas’s metaphysics and anthropology at least imply that the perfection of the glorified body would include properties such as incorruption, perspicuity of the senses, health, beauty and agility. Accordingly, I do not think we can conclude that Thomas’s ascription of these properties to the glorified body is merely an effect of cultural assumptions about beauty or perfection—even if I agree that such assumptions need to be scrutinized.
55 ST 1-2.4.6 c. 56 ScG 4.86.5. 57 In I Cor 15, lect. 6, par. 988. 58 See, for example, ScG 4.85.4: “One reason is taken from the very purpose of the resurrection. For both the good and the evil will rise for this: that in their very own bodies they may receive their reward or their punishment for the deeds they performed while they lived in the body. But the reward of the good, felicity, that is, will be everlasting; in like fashion, too, everlasting punishment is due to mortal sin. Each of these points was established in Book III. Necessarily, then, in each case an incorruptible body must be assumed. / una quidem sumitur ex fine resurrectionis. Ad hoc enim resurgent tam boni quam mali, ut etiam in propriis corporibus praemium consequantur vel poenam pro his quae gesserunt dum vixerunt in corpore. Praemium autem bonorum, quod est felicitas, erit perpetuum; similiter etiam peccato mortali debetur poena perpetua: quorum utrumque patet ex his quae in tertio determinata sunt. Oportet igitur quod utrumque corpus incorruptibile recipiatur.” 59 See, for example, In MP bk. 3, lect. 4, par. 374; In NE bk. 7, lect. 13, par. 1507; DV 26.8 ad 2; ScG 3.71.8; and ST 1-2.2.4 c. 60 There is, of course, debate about whether Thomas regards beauty as a transcendental. See Michael Waddell, “Integrating Beauty: Reflections on the Psychology, Ontology and Etiology of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae 1.5.4,” The Saint Anselm Journal 8.1 (2012): 1–18. Jan Aertsen, “Beauty in the Middle Ages: A Forgotten Transcendental?,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 1 (1991): 68-97. Jan Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: the Case of Thomas Aquinas (Köln: Brill, 1996). Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Bredin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Armand Maurer, About Beauty: A Thomistic Interpretation (Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1983). Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism, in Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry, trans. J. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974) (originally published as Art et Scolastique [Paris: Art Catholique, 1920]).
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4. Conclusion
So, to return to the questions with which I began this paper, questions prompted, in part, by Professor Brown’s essay: what would it mean—in Thomistic terms—for redemption to be personal? And what, in particular, would it mean for redemption to be personal for a person with disabilities?
It seems clear that for resurrection to be personal, it must be resurrection of numerically the same person, which entails having numerically the same essential parts, including the same soul and the same body . . . this flesh and these bones. For Thomas, though, having numerically the same soul and numerically the same body does not preclude the possibility of change. As long as the same individual act of being abides, corruptible bodies can become incorruptible. Senses can be sharpened. Incomplete bodies can be made complete. Powers of movement can be increased or even restored. And deficiencies, deformities, and imperfections of all sorts can be healed. Here, though, we must be careful not merely to buy into ableist assumptions about beauty and perfection that are deeply embedded in our culture. And I think there is reason for us Thomists to be cautious about this because there are places in Thomas’s discussions of the perfection of the glorified body at which one might reasonably wonder whether Thomas’s teaching has been affected by these assumptions. But the fact that Thomas has a robust metaphysics of human flourishing—an account of what precisely it would mean for the human soul and the human body to be perfected, and why—provides Thomists with resources for thinking about disabilities and the healing of disabilities that are simply not available to schools that have eschewed metaphysical anthropology. And for those of us Thomists who are interested in disability, the task, moving forward, is to avail ourselves of those resources in a way that also takes seriously and respectfully the legitimate questions, concerns, desires and insights of those who live with disabilities.
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