 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
other intelligences or intelligibles and can acquire
a deeper understanding of
God. Only when it is reunited with a body at resurrection does the soul reacquire
concrete knowledge of the whole person’s life. But the resurrected person retains
powers that the soul acquired during its period of separation from the body.
Like Bonaventure, Aquinas rejected the Platonic idea that the rational soul is
related to the body as a pilot to his ship in favor of the view that the connection is
more intimate. Aquinas held that the soul’s uniting with the body to form a
human is natural and appropriate. It is not, as Origen and then later Eriugena
had thought, punishment to the soul for sin in a preceding state. Rather, the soul
joins a body because it is its natural destiny to do so. Even so, Aquinas explicitly
rejected the idea, which Bonaventure and others had favored, that the particles
into which our bodies decompose yearn to be reunited. In his view, the dead
particles are inert. The body into which they are reunited is not only free from
sinful desire, that is, from “noxious passions, internal and external,” but from
desire altogether. There is no yearning in heaven, let alone lust or sex. The goal
is a stasis that marks the end of human yearning.
14
Toward the end of his life, Aquinas wrote that St. Paul’s seed metaphor might
seem to imply both that resurrection is natural—an unfolding of a preordained
pattern from within the organism—and that the second organism in question—
the sheaf—is different from the first. Aquinas wrote that the resurrection is not
natural since nature reproduces species, not number, that is, it produces the same
kind of thing, not the very same thing. Thus, the very same body returns not
naturally but only by divine power. So, as far as the qualities of the risen body
itself are concerned, Aquinas, this time in the tradition of Origen, interprets
Scripture to mean that the body returns lighter, or more subtle, as a consequence
of the beatification of the soul. Yet, he claimed, not all bodies rise the same.
In response to
the chain-consumption argument, Aquinas said that human
flesh will rise to be reformed into the body of the human whose flesh it first was.
So, in the case of a cannibal who ate both human flesh and other food as well,
“only that will rise in him which came to him materially from the other food,
and which will be necessary to restore the quantity to his body.” In the case of a
cannibal who “ate human flesh only, what rises in him will be that which he
drew from those who generated him, and what is wanting will be supplied by
the creator’s omnipotence.” But suppose that “the parents too have eaten only
human flesh.” In that case, “the seed, indeed, will rise in him who was generated
from the seed, and in its place there will be supplied in him, whose flesh was
eaten, something from another source.”
15
So, Aquinas concluded, “if something
was materially present in many men,” in the resurrection “it will rise in him to
whose perfection it belonged more intimately.”
16