“To Be or Not To Be?”: Pasnau on Aquinas’s Immortal Human Soul

The Thomist 68 (2004): 1-39 "TO BE OR NOT TO BE?": PASNAU ON AQUINAS'S IMMORTAL HUMAN SOUL DENIS J. M. BRADLEY Georgetown University Washington, D.C. THE HISTORICAL ORIGINALITY and doctrinal importance of Aquinas's account of the embodied but immortal human soul-form can hardly be overestimated. Anton Pegis, who over his lifetime studied, with an unmatched profundity, the sources and internal development ofAquinas's doctrine, described it as "a revolutionary contribution to Aristotelian psychology"1revolutionary because the contribution involved "a much greater loyalty to Augustine than [Aquinas's] acceptance of Aristotle is ordinarily supposed to allow."2 Especially in the notable treatise "on man" (de homine) found in the Summa Theologiae (STh I, qq. 75-89), Aquinas's abiding Augustinian commitments, and not just Aristotelian terminology and doctrines, play a constitutive role in how the problems are set forth and resolved. Thomistic man is a paradoxically composite being, soul and body, a composite animated by a spiritual soul but one needing and created for incarnation, a soul living in the world of matter so as to know and, thereby, enable the whole man to attain eternal truth and beatitude.3 In being so incarnated, the human soul, least of all the 1 Anton Pegis, "St. Thomas and the Unity of Man," in Progress in Philosophy, ed. James A. McWilliams, S.J. (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1955), 153. 2 Anton C. Pegis, At the Origins of the Thomistic Notion ofMan, The Saint Augustine Lecture 1962 (New York: The Macmillan Company; London: Collier-Macmillan Limited, 1963), 24. 3 See ibid., 54-59. 1 2 DENIS J. M. BRADLEY intellectual substances, "raises [matter] to something higher"-the world of spirit.4 Recently, Robert Pasnau has devoted, in what his publishers rightly call "a major new study,"5 twelve thick chapters of "commentary"-taking that term broadly so as to include running historical and philosophical asides, numerous boxed obiter dicta, and occasional opinions, some intimately cast, about morals, theology, and the current academic zeitgeist-to the treatise on man On these fourteen important questions, Pasnau has "tried to write a book that would help the novice, stimulate the nonspecialist , and provoke the specialist" (xi). Of these three goals, Pasnau undoubtedly attains the last. This large, sometimes repetitious, argumentativelysprawling, intentionally provocative, and, to use the author's own accurate hut unapologetic characterization, "tendentious" (ibid.) book solicits from the provoked specialist what cannot be easily given, a comprehensively alternative, and on some issues counter, interpretation to Pasnau that would far exceed the compass of a single essay. In this essay, I shall mostly consider (since it is the primary topic of STh I, qq. 75-89) how Pasnau construes Aquinas's account of the human soul as both the form of a perishable body and, postmortem, a separate albeit incomplete spiritual substance. For his part, Pasnau repeats and embraces Norman Kretzmann'snegative judgmentabout the philosophical success of the Thomistic revolution in Aristotelian psychology. Pasnau bluntly rejects the probity of Aquinas's arguments for the postmortem subsistence of the soul that was once the form of a living body: they are "among the least persuasive parts of his thought" (457 n. 4). But Pasnau's rejection obliges the reader of his book to ponder, more explicitly and critically than the author himself, the philosophical standards by which the Thomistic • See ScG Il, c. 68 (ed. Pera-Marc-Caramello, 2:203a, n. 1452). Cf. Anton C. Pegis, "Between Immortality and Death: Some Further Reflections on the Summa Contra Gentiles," TheMonistSS (1974): 1-15. 5 Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa theologiae Ia 75-89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Parenthetical page references hereafter, unless otherwise noted, are to this book. PASNAU ON AQUINAS AND THE SOUL 3 revolution is being judged. Finally, there remains one of the basic questions of twentieth-century Thomism: What is the status of the philosophy putatively found in Aquinas's theological works? I. THE SUBSTANTIAL UNITY OF THOMISTIC MAN Questions 75-89 of the Prima Pars constitute, so the prologue to question 75 states, a treatise on human nature (de natura hominis). Human nature, as Aquinas portrays it, is mysteriously dual but not...