- After Survivalism and CorruptionismSeparated Souls as Incomplete Persons
Thomas Aquinas consistently defended the thesis that the separated rational soul that results from a human person’s death is not a person. Nevertheless, what has emerged in recent decades is a sophisticated disputed question between “survivalists” and “corruptionists” concerning the personhood of the separated soul that has left us with intractable disagreements wherein neither side seems able to convince the other. In our contribution to this disputed question, we present a digest of an unconsidered middle way: the separated soul is an incomplete person. We define survivalism, corruptionism, and incomplete persons as follows:
Survivalism The human person survives death along with the separated rational soul because the separated rational soul is a person.
Corruptionism The human person corrupts at death; the separated rational soul survives death, but it is not a person.
Incomplete persons The human person corrupts at death; the separated rational soul survives death as the incomplete person of the deceased complete human person.
Just as Thomist survivalists and corruptionists claim to have exegetical, philosophical, and theological justifications for their view, we also maintain that our position on incomplete persons rests on the plausible consequences of an exegetically cogent reading of Aquinas’s anthropology. More importantly, our position secures the philosophical and theological strengths of both corruptionism and survivalism without their weaknesses.
Elsewhere, we have articulated in detail the exegetical and philosophical criteria that justify our position that the separated soul is an incomplete person.1 Here we first outline our position and introduce the principled [End Page 161] criteria we employed to justify it. After situating our view, we argue that the separated soul satisfies two of our three criteria and that it is an incomplete rational supposit. Next, we argue that the separated soul satisfies our third criteria enough to consider it an incomplete person. Finally, we turn to Mark Spencer’s helpful and challenging objections in his response paper.2
I. Situating Our View
On the exegetical front, we hold that Aquinas clearly defended the corruptionists’ thesis that the separated soul is not a person because the human person corrupts with the death of the human. The survivalists’ thesis that the separated soul is the same person or “I” of the human person not only finds little textual support in Aquinas’s works; Aquinas explicitly rejects the survivalists’ position.3 On the philosophical and theological front, we contend, with the survivalists, that the corruptionists’ position entails unacceptable consequences—for example, that the separated soul is a nonperson that performs quintessentially personal operations, like being eternally rewarded and punished based on the merits of a person, undergoing purgation, praying for persons, beholding the beatific vision of the three-person God, and so forth.
We also hold on the ontological front that neither survivalists nor corruptionists have presented a plausible or sufficiently nuanced ontology of what precisely a separated soul is. The survivalists leave us with views that gesture toward either implausible, if not incoherent, metaphysical positions that vaguely or suggestively claim separated souls are somehow still “persons”—but not “human persons” because they are not “humans”—or views that introduce foreign ontological theories into Thomist hylomorphism, [End Page 162] producing ersatz ontological accounts that neither Thomists nor ontological constitutionalists find plausible. Such survivalist views tend to ignore, leave unaddressed, or downplay how these positions clearly conflict with Thomist anthropology. The most consistent survivalists are those who, like Spencer, self-consciously abandon some of these Thomist anthropological principles in order to secure more Platonic and dualistic views of the rational soul, wherein the human person is essentially a rational soul that is contingently hylomorphically united to the body. Corruptionists defend Thomist anthropological principles, but they fail to provide any metaphysical analysis of the separated soul’s ontological composition, of what kind of entity it is, and of its connection to Thomist concepts like hoc aliquid and suppositum and principles like actiones sunt suppositorum.
These concerns do not raise decisive objections to either survivalism or corruptionism, but they do challenge them to advance their inquiries and to articulate more clearly the details, justifications, and implications of their views. We believe that...