Ecological Ethics and the Human Soul: Aquinas, Whitehead, and the Metaphysics of Creation

Chapter Three: Thomas' Conception of the Human Soul

77 Chapter Three Thomas’ Conception of the Human Soul The thirteenth century was, doctrinally speaking, a time of roiling controversy. Much of this controversy was precipitated by the flood of Aristotelian writings that engulfed the intellectual centers of the Latin West beginning in the twelfth century. These writings, with their unsparing criticism of some major tenets of Platonism, broke in on an age whose Christian doctrines, developed by Saint Augustine and his followers, owed more to Plato than to any other non-Christian thinker. Further, Aristotle’s writing came accompanied by commentaries, especially those of the Arabian philosophers Avicenna and Averroës, which emphasized a number of positions at odds with Christian teaching. Despite condemnations of Aristotle and prohibitions against the use of his work by local church authorities and the papacy, the study of his thought, often as interpreted through his commentators, spread through many of the institutions of learning. At the University of Paris, nearly all of his works were mandatory reading in the faculty of arts. This led to sharp clashes that pitted those who took their philosophical bearings from Plato against those who sided with Aristotle. Some of the deepest disagreements between Platonists and Aristotelians centered on the nature of the human being. The Platonic conception of the soul, which seemed to fit so well into the Christian scheme of things, came under strong criticism, especially in the work of Thomas. This happened as the full implications of the underlying 78 The Human Soul Platonic metaphysics became clear through a careful and detailed examination of the criticisms to which Aristotle had subjected his teacher. The Christian followers of Plato took safeguarding the immortality of the soul as their central concern. They did this by adopting a basically Platonic position that the soul is a complete substance and therefore independent of the body and not doomed to finally perish with it. The problem with this conception for Christians became how to explain the substantial or real unity of the soul and the body. For Plato, according to Thomas, the soul uses a body in the way a sailor sails a ship. There was no substantial unity. Thomas argues that this conception is philosophically untenable for a number of reasons. For example, if the soul is only joined to the body as its motor, then the body does not receive its specific character from the soul. Therefore, the body would have the same species with or without the soul. This, Thomas argues, is clearly false since with the separation of the body and soul (that is, with death), the body no longer possesses an operation that is specifically human. Further, Christianity demands a substantial union between soul and body. Any accidental unity of the two would pose serious theological problems, such as explaining why God, in creating the human being, saddled the soul with a body that was in no way essential to its own operation. To be sure, Christian Platonists left nothing to be desired in their insistence upon the unity of the human as a composite of body and soul. While they formulated various ways to account for that unity, they steadfastly refused to allow that being the form of the body is essential to the soul. That is, they refused to countenance Aristotle’s argument that the soul is the form of the body. To do this would be to endanger the immortality of the soul since as a form of a material thing (united essentially with matter), the soul would, seemingly, perish when the unity between body and soul was dissolved with the corruption of the body. Since it is as a form of the body that the soul is essentially or substantially united with it, this refusal was criticized as making true unity between body and soul impossible. This, then, is the way the problem of the soul presented itself to Thomas: the soul is either a purely material form or a complete substance. If the soul is a purely material form (that is, the substantial form of matter), then the unity of the human being is safeguarded but at the cost of the immortality of the soul. If the soul is a complete substance, then it is immortal, but the unity of the human being is shattered. Given this context, Thomas’ opening question in his disputation, Questions on the Soul, was almost certain to have generated considerable inter- Thomas’ Conception...