The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity

Chapter 5. Thomas Aquinas on the Body and Bodily Passions

83 ChApter 5 Thomas Aquinas on the Body and Bodily Passions Corey Barnes ( ( sCholAstiCism exerCised A profound influenCe on Christianity in the medieval West, and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was one of its foremost figures.1 Aquinas’s writings both reflect general trends in medieval Christian thought and display a brilliance of their own. Aquinas employed the methods and newly available sources of Scholasticism. At the same time, he broke from typical views in recognizing concupiscentia (concupiscence , sensual appetite) as a natural aspect of human nature rather than a corruption of that nature.2 Aquinas’s personal narrative lacks a dramatic conversion parallel to Augustine’s own experience of struggling with concupiscence , but Aquinas’s apparent relative freedom from such struggles should not be confused with ignorance of or unconcern about the body and bodily passions. Aquinas discussed the body and bodily passions in several contexts, ranging from questions on the soul to treatments of ethics to discussions of the afterlife. The task of summarizing Aquinas’s views on the body and 84 The Embrace of Eros bodily passions requires much framing and exposition to avoid erroneous assumptions and to highlight the typical and the novel aspects of his thought. From a modern perspective, Aquinas could seem to harbor very negative views of the body and bodily passions; yet, compared to the standards of medieval thought, Aquinas viewed the body and bodily passions in a remarkably positive light. This essay will present various contexts where Aquinas discussed the body and bodily passions and gesture toward how Aquinas’s approach might be recontextualized to apply, with limitations, to contemporary reflections on the body and sexuality. A theme underlying many of Aquinas’s theological works is the common medieval metaphor of life as a journey to God. This appears both on the grand level of structural organization and in Aquinas’s detailed responses to specific questions. For Aquinas, God is the answer to the question of happiness every individual invariably asks. God as the supreme good (summum bonum) stands alone as the unchanging good capable of fulfilling the human yearning for happiness. After the fall and the diverse effects of original sin, human beings mire themselves in a futile pursuit of lesser, mutable goods. These goods are not necessarily bad or harmful, but preferring lesser goods to the supreme good cannot help but remain a selfdefeating enterprise. Aquinas identified this as a basic truth of the human condition, but his theological vision stressed that the pessimistic reality of sin does not determine the story of humanity. Aquinas’s reflections on the body and bodily passions offer a distant glimpse of the deeper optimism with which he views the unfolding human drama. At the same time, they reveal the subordinate status of the body and the provisional nature of the bodily passions and sensible goods. IntEllECtual BaCkground Scholasticism often has an ill-deserved reputation as a stagnant investigation of minutiae; however, this reputation ignores the fundamental dynamism of Scholastic thought. Aquinas taught, thought, and wrote in a Scholastic idiom representing the confluence of several factors, including the rise of universities, the use of dialectical procedures, and the acquisition of Greek and Arabic philosophical texts. These factors placed Scholastic thinkers at the center of an impressive intellectual movement open to new questions and new answers to perennial questions.3 The most important of these factors for understanding Aquinas’s intellectual background is the availability of new sources, most notably the writings of Aristotle. Arabic translations of Aristotle ’s works and Arabic commentaries on Aristotle became available to the Thomas Aquinas on the Body and Bodily Passions 85 Latin West during the rise of Scholasticism. Use of Aristotelian philosophy, in varying degrees, became a hallmark of Scholastic thought.4 Prior to the Scholastic period, the dominant philosophical influence of Christian thought was Neoplatonism. This influence persisted due especially to the stature of Augustine (354–430) and the later fifth- or sixth-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, both of whom learned much from Neoplatonic sources (Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus). Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius were held in the highest regard throughout the Middle Ages. To this Neoplatonic inheritance were added the libri naturales (works on natural science and philosophy) of Aristotle and commentaries on Aristotle. These works quickly developed a following despite prohibitions to teaching them at the University of Paris. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the curriculum was largely Aristotelian. Thomas...