- Surviving Corruptionist ArgumentsResponse to Nevitt
I. Introduction
I greatly appreciate Turner Nevitt’s elucidation and critical engagement with what he describes as the “deeper and more problematic disagreements between survivalists and corruptionists about how to understand some of the most basic principles of Aquinas’s metaphysics,” his goal being to “advance some more systematic reasons for thinking that corruptionists are right and survivalists are wrong—both about how to understand the basic principles of Aquinas’s metaphysics, and about how to apply them to the question about the status of human beings or persons between death and resurrection.”1 In responding to Nevitt’s argument on behalf of survivalism, I have two goals: first, to defend a particular survivalist interpretation and application of Aquinas’s basic metaphysical principles and second, to argue that even if Aquinas himself was a corruptionist, he (and we) ought to be survivalists.2
II. Immaterial Animality
The fundamental point of disagreement between Nevitt and myself concerns the following claims of his argument for corruptionism:
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• Human beings or persons are natural substances.
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• A natural substance cannot exist without the parts of its essence. [End Page 145]
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• Thus human beings or persons cannot exist without both form and matter.
One approach to challenging these claims is to deny Nevitt’s premise that human beings or persons are natural substances, but this is a nonstarter within the Thomistic hylomorphic framework. Another approach that some survivalists have taken would be to affirm that human beings or persons are natural substances normatively but can nevertheless subsist in a nonsubstantial way in the interim state.3 On this construal, the death of a human animal occasions a substantial change insofar as one’s soul has ceased to inform the matter that, along with the soul, composes that animal. Thus the human animal qua material biological organism has ceased to exist.
Yet I contend that, in an extended sense, a human animal persists by virtue of its substantial form persisting and, with it, all the inherent capacities—understood in the Aristotelian sense of intrinsic potentialities—relative to a human being’s essential nature as a living, sentient, rational animal. For what does matter contribute to the actualization of a human being’s essential capacities in the absence of form? Nothing. Matter, considered in itself, has no inherent properties other than the passive potentiality to be informed. As I have argued elsewhere, bodily resurrection requires God to provide matter for one’s soul to reinform, but the numerical identity of one’s resurrected body as his or her body is due to the persistent numerical identity of one’s soul as that body’s substantial form.4 While, admittedly, this view requires accepting the counterintuitive notion of an “immaterial animal” persisting between death and resurrection, which Patrick Toner along with David Hershenov and Rose Hershenov have criticized,5 Mark Spencer, [End Page 146] Allison Thornton, and I have each independently defended the logical coherence of this concept.6
Aquinas distinguishes between what is essential to the persistence of the same animal (namely, the same form proper to an animal, which is either the sensitive soul or the rational soul that includes the capacities of the sensitive soul) that serves as the metaphysical principle of an animal’s existence and what is accidental (namely, the sensitive capacities or operations) that serves as the epistemic principle by which an animal may be properly classified as such. Aquinas thus denies that a corpse is an animal: not because sensitive capacities and operations do not persist in the corpse but because the corpse is no longer informed by a sensitive soul. Conversely, insofar as a sensitive soul—by virtue of its definitive capacities—may persist after death as part of a rational soul, animality persists in the separated soul.7 This claim is congruent with the conclusion that the persistence of the same substantial form is the principle of substantial identity and not any of the nonessential properties that follow from form, such as the actual configuration of matter in the case of the rational soul. Hence although without her body a human being is unable to actualize many of her capacities, she...