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appetite for fulfillment. Rather, each has a powerful appetite to be joined to the
other, the soul to perfect the body, the body to be perfected by the soul. So, even
though the soul can exist after the dissolution of the body, it is fully actualized only
when it is united to the body. Hence, the soul is not, as Plato thought, imprisoned
in the body. Rather, the soul longs for the body. “The completion of nature,”
Bonaventure said, requires that humans be composed both “of body and soul, just
as of matter and form.” This is
how body and soul, though two substances,
constitute a genuine unity.
7
Is resurrection, then, a natural or a supernatural event? Bonaventure answered
that reconstituting the body after bodily death, which is required for there to be
a resurrection, is contrary to nature and hence a supernatural event. Reuniting
body and soul in the reconstitution is in accord with nature (secundum naturam)
and hence a natural event. However, reuniting body and soul inseparably, as
occurs in the afterlife, is not natural but supernatural. The reason for this is that
the body is naturally corruptible. In its being joined to the soul in the resurrec-
tion, what had been corruptible—the body—becomes incorruptible—but this
supernaturally.
Even though reconstituting the body is contrary to nature, the body reconsti-
tuted, Bonaventure said, is still the same body: “If an ark is dismantled and then
remade from the same planks, according to the same order, we do not say it is
another ark, but the same.” Bonaventure said that, in the resurrection, God,
“like a good craftsman” uses the stuff into which the human body has dissolved,
in the same arrangement, to reform the same human body. Bonaventure may
have been the first to point out that certain misleading biological analogies, such
as one finds in St. Paul, are not good analogies for the resurrection. But neither,
he claimed, is his own ark analogy. In the resurrection, when body particles are
brought together, they are not bits of inert stuff but infused with something akin
to feeling. So the resurrection should be analogized psychologically, on the model
of yearning. In particular, it should be understood by analogy with the love of a
man for a woman.
8
Like Bonaventure, Aquinas was an Italian, but a Dominican who spent the
important part of his career at the University of Paris.
9
Following his interpretation
of Aristotle, he held that the human soul is a unity in which there are faculties or
powers of acting. These faculties are hierarchically arranged: vegetative, sensitive,
and then rational. The passive intellect, a power neither wholly sensitive nor wholly
rational, is at the lowest level of the rational faculty. It deals only with particular
knowledge, not with universals. Above the passive intellect are the
active and
possible (or potential) intellects, including intellectual memory, which have as their
object being in general.