Elements of a Thomistic Philosophy of Death

ELEMENTS OF A THOMISTIC PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH ONE TASK OF any philosopher who holds that the human soul survives .separation from its body is to resolve the dilemma of death: to assign consistent meanings, in terms of both intelligibility and value, to both of our lives, the here and the hereafter. If primacy is given to this life, death easily becomes an inexplicable disaster. If separation is our truly meaningful state, then this life is easily reduced to the trivial or even to evil. Both views have serious moral conse·quences . The first, as Heidegger has shown, raises the threat of final meaninglessness so that even bodily life can become humanly unlivable. The second is the root of that contemptus mundi which overlooks social injustice and other forms of human suffering. The novelty of Thomas Aquinas's view of the unity of man, which defines the intellectual soul as the one and only substantial form of the body, has long been well recognized.1 One question that has drawn little explicit attention from his interpreters , however, is whether his view of death is consistent with his view that the natural, humanly good way for a soul to exist is as the form of matter.2 This paper attempts an introductory 1 Its classic exposition is in Anton Charles Pegis, St. Thomas and the Problem of the Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1934) . Sec also his " St. Thomas and the Unity of Man " in Progress in Philosophy, ed. James A. McWilliams et al. (Milwaukee, Bruce Publishing Co., 1955), pp. 153-173. 2 Pegis has recently pointed out a significant development of St. Thomas's doctrine on the separated soul's mode of existing and operating; early texts make separated souls entirely like the angels and endow them with knowledge and volition superior to what they enjoyed while embodied, while later texts emphasize the nature of the soul as distinct from that of the angels and make our post-mortem mode of being and acting somewhat alien, and even contrary, to our nature. See his "The Separated Soul and Its Nature in St. Thomas," in St. Thomas Aquinas, 581 582 MARY F. ROUSSEAU answer to that question; it focuses on Aquinas's philosophy 0£ death, to the exclusion of the theological elements which would have to be included in a complete presentation 0£ his thought. It is further restricted to the Summa Theologiae as its source. The legitimacy of a philosophical focus is based on Aquinas's own distinction between philosophy and theology, a distinction which he makes at the very beginning 0£ his master-work (S.Th. I, I) .3 Thomas recalls this distinction twice in the Question which forms the basis of this study, S. Th. I, 89, "On the Cognition of the Separated Soul." Thus he says, " We are speaking of the natural cognition of the separated soul. Its knowledge by reason of glory is another question" (article 2). And again: " By reason of their natural knowledge, which we are discussing now, the souls of the dead do not know what is happening here" (article 8). The theory of the separated soul's natural cognition is thus subject-matter for the philosopher. We shall use it as a principle for deducing how Aquinas viewed death in abstraction from such theological doctrines as original sin, grace, redemption, the vision of the divine essence as our supernatural end, and the resurrection of the body. From that deduction we shall unfold some implications for that soul's other activities, both cognitive and appetitive. We shall then assess the consistency 0£ the natural meaning 0£ J:J!,74-1974; Commemorative Studies, ed. Etienne Gilson et al. (Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), pp. 181-158. This doctrinal development was overlooked by several earlier interpreters of Aquinas's philosophy of death, notably P. Glorieux, in "Endurcissement final et gritces dernieres," Nouvelle Revue ThCologique LIX, 10 (1932), pp. 865-892; by Glorieux again, in "In Hora Mortis," Melanges de Science Religieuse, VI (1949), pp. 185-216; by Victor Edmund Sleva, The Separated Soul in the Phuosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (Washington, The Catholic University of America Press, 1940...