Thomas Aquinas, Augustine, and Aristotle on “Delayed Animation”

1 Interview on Meet the Press, 24 August 2008. 2 For example, Most Rev. C. Chaput, “On the Separation of Sense and State: A Clarification for the People of the Church in Northern Colorado”; USCCB News Release, “Bishops Respond to House Speaker Pelosi's Misrepresentation of Church Teaching against Abortion”; Archdiocese of Washington News Release, “Archbishop Wuerl on the Church’s Constant Teaching on Abortion”; William E. May, “Abortion and Ensoulment: Augustine and Aquinas vs. Pelosi and Biden, Part I,” Culture of Life Foundation Briefs September 16, 2008; E. Christian Brugger “Pelosi on Abortion,” Culture of Life Foundation Briefs September 2, 2008. To these may be added innumerable more or less well-informed discussions on the topic on various blogs. 1 The Thomist 76 (2012): 1-36 THOMAS AQUINAS, AUGUSTINE, AND ARISTOTLE ON “DELAYED ANIMATION” D. A. JONES Anscombe Bioethics Centre Oxford, United Kingdom O N 24 AUGUST 2008, the Speaker of U. S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, was asked in an interview “if [Obama] were to come to you and say ‘help me out here, Madam Speaker, when does life begin?’, what would you tell him?” She replied: “I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time. And what I know is, over the centuries, the doctors of the Church have not been able to make that definition. St Augustine said ‘at three months.’ We don’t know. The point is that it shouldn’t have an impact on a woman’s right to choose.”1 These comments where widely reported at the time and generated not a little critical reaction.2 This is not surprising given that Pelosi had chosen to label her own view as that of an “ardent, practicing Catholic” and given that it was an election year. In contrast, there was scarcely any reaction in the United Kingdom, earlier that same year, to similar remarks made by the newly D. A. JONES 2 3 S. Byrnes “There Is a Debate to be Had—A Serious Debate—about Conscience: Sholto Byrnes talks to Lisa Jardine,” New Statesman May 26, 2008, 24-27. 4 This paper will use the terms “ensoulment” and “animation” interchangeably to refer to the advent of the rational soul at the beginning of the life of an individual human being (and not, unless stated explicitly, to refer to the vegetative or sensitive souls). The paper avoids the terms “hominization” (as used, for example in J. Donceel’s article, “Immediate Animation and Delayed Hominization,” Theological Studies 31 [1970]: 75-105) and “personhood” (as used for example by Carol Tauer, “Personhood and Human Embryos and Fetuses,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 10 [1985]: 253-66) as neither term is used by the ancient authors who are the focus of the present paper. Furthermore, each of these modern terms would require dedicated critical examination on its own. 5 The history of this argument merits its own investigation. It has its roots in the 1950s in the attempt by scholars outside and inside the Church to neutralize Catholic opposition to abortion, and later to embryo experimentation, by appealing to the Church’s own tradition. See for example Glanville Williams, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1957); J. Keown and D. A. Jones, “Surveying the Foundations of Medical Law: A Reassessment of Glanville Williams’s The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law,” Medical Law Review 16 (2008): 85-126. See also Lisa Cahill, “The Embryo and the Fetus: New Moral Contexts,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 124-42; and M. Johnson, “Delayed Hominization : Reflections on Some Recent Catholic Claims for Delayed Hominization,” Theological Studies 56 (1995): 743-63. From the 1970s this argumentpassed from scholarship into popular and overtly political genres in newspaper, magazine articles, and pamphlets, and later onto the Internet. appointed chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority. Asked about the Catholic Church’s view on the embryo, Lisa Jardine asserted that, “it was only relatively recently that the date at which the soul enters the embryo was moved back to fertilisation. St Augustine believed that it happened when the baby kicked in the...