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Chapter 12 PURITY OF SOUL AND IMMORTALITY It is said of St. Thomas Aquinas’ teacher, St. Albert the Great, that he grew forgetful towards the end of his life and began to say mass for himself as though he were dead: quasi defunctus est. The fact that he was one of the most learned persons of Western Europe during his lifetime did not save him from a pathetic loss of memory. The story illustrates a bitter knowledge known from time immemorial: that age may steal away one’s innermost possessions. Of course, it has always been known too that a blow upon the head in the prime of life may rob a person of consciousness and leave him or her permanently impaired. To this general wisdom about the fragility of conscious life, researchers have lately added an increasingly complex and precise knowledge of just how the brain and its various regions participate in our conscious life. So that this new detailed knowledge fills out the ancient recognition of the soul’s reliance upon its physical base; it gives new weight to that dependence, and confirms the human spirit’s immersion in matter. And if it does not quite overwhelm us with the intimacy of the alliance between soul and body, it bids fair to change the tone and degree of our awareness of that connection, so that the claim to the soul’s immortality is likely nowadays to fall upon less receptive ears. Indeed, talk about the soul sounds strange to the ears of many present-day psychologists and philosophers. And even Christian theologians write copiously today about the resurrection of Christ and of the dead, but little about the immortality of the soul. On the other hand, in the face of the frailty of human knowing, yet buoyed up by an ancient intuition of survival after death, Thomas Aquinas has formulated what seems to me to be one of the strongest arguments yet presented in support of the immortality of the human soul.1 200 Reprinted from The Monist 69, no. 3 (1986): 396–415. Copyright © 1986 by The Monist . 1. I have in mind STh I, q. 75, esp. a, 1, 2, and 6; and q. 76, a. 1. But from among a variety of texts in other works, see also Quaestiones disputatae de anima, esp. qq. 1, 2, and 14; and SCG II, cc. 79, 80–81. Of course, a complex of metaphysical principles and prior conclusions underlies the proof, for he drew upon the Aristotelian principles of causality, form, and matter, even while he transformed them by situating them within a deeper and broader context of analysis. That context permitted him to arrive at a more definitive conclusion regarding the soul’s immortality than his master seems to have.2 The metaphysical basis is broader, because to the question: Is it? Thomas responded with a distinct constitutive principle of actual existence (esse, sometimes designated actus essendi). It is not enough, he thought, then, to determine the various principles (the factors and causes) that enter into the definition of a thing and that determine what it is; it is also necessary, in any metaphysical or ontological analysis, to acknowledge that the thing contains within its constitution a distinctive principle of existence which is its own but which it has received through a web of causes from the primary source of existence, and without which the thing would quite simply not be at all. This broader, more complete analysis is, therefore, also deeper because it reaches to the very origin of the being of things, and takes seriously the philosophical pertinence of the absolute question: Why anything at all, why not rather nothing? In more technical terms: to the four causes that accounted for the generation of things and which he had learned from Aristotle (matter, form, agent, and end), Thomas joined a doctrine of creatio ex nihilo and recognized a principle (esse) which not only plays the primary role in the coming to be of things but sustains them in their very being. The things in the world including ourselves are not merely the limited things of a certain kind (after the manner of Aristotle’s primary substances, which are composites of matter and form within an unbegotten cosmos), but are rather creatures. That is to say, taken in themselves and apart from the ultimate source of their being, they (along with their Aristotelian principles and factors) are, quite simply : nothing. The shift from Aristotelian limited substances...

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