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like Albert, felt that some forms can become substances not by combining with
matter but by combining with existence!
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On this point, the main difference between Bonaventure and Aquinas is that
Bonaventure held onto a two-substance view of humans, while Aquinas tried to
move to a single-substance view. So, in moving from Bonaventure to Aquinas,
the shift is from a fundamentally Neoplatonic to a modified Aristotelian view of
the soul, with the important exception, derived from Neoplatonism, that form
can combine with existence to make a substance. This exception allows Aquinas
to hold on to something like Aristotle’s view while preserving the doctrine of
personal immortality.
Another of Aquinas’s innovations was to hold that each angel is the only
member of its own species. He was forced to this view by the reflection that since
angels are immaterial and matter is the principle of individuation, there cannot
be two angels of the same species. So, either there is just one angel or separate
angels are assigned to their own species, of which each is the only member! This
drastic solution might have been required for humans as well, if human rational
souls had never joined with matter in the first place to form a human being. For
then, in accordance with Aristotelian metaphysics, there would be only one
human rational soul. In Aquinas’s view, what individuates the rational souls of
different humans while the humans live is partly the fact that God had created
those souls in the first place to be the souls of the particular human bodies they
inform and also their actually informing those bodies. After bodily death, when
human rational souls separate from the bodies they informed, what makes them
different from other disembodied human souls is their having been associated
historically with different human bodies. In other words, even though there is in
each human just one substantial form, the rational soul, which as a substantial
form is the same in all humans, God’s intentions and human history differentiate
human rational souls after bodily death.
Because Aquinas held that a human being is a whole person or self only when
a human body—either naturally generated or resurrected—is informed by a
rational soul, he took the view that the soul separated from the body after death is
a continuation not of the self, but only of a part of the self. In his commentary on
1 Corinthians he states, “My soul is not I.”
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He also viewed the separated state as
radically incomplete in other ways. Because human knowledge of particulars
requires sensation, or imagination, and these powers of the rational soul require a
living body, this knowledge perishes with the body at death. Thus, the separated
soul has only abstract, not concrete, knowledge of its own previous activities and
of the life of the individual. Instead, and perhaps in compensation, during this
phase of its existence, the soul acquires better knowledge of universals and of