Some questions on the soul, Part I

In a recent post I spoke of the soul after death as essentially the human being in a “radically diminished state.”  The Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical reasons for this characterization were set out in an earlier post.  A reader asks how I would “answer [the] challenge that it appears the Bible suggests our souls in communion with God are better off than those of us here alive in this ‘vale of tears.’”  After all, St. Paul says that “we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord,” and Catholics pray to the saints, who are obviously in a better state than we are.  Isn’t this clearly incompatible with the claim that the soul after death is in a “radically diminished state”?  Furthermore, wouldn’t the conscious experiences that Christian doctrine attributes to the saved and the damned after death be metaphysically impossible on an Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul?  Wouldn’t a Cartesian view of the soul be more in harmony with Christianity?  Do we have here a case “where Aristotelian philosophy is just at odds with revealed Christian truth”?

 
No, we don’t.  First of all, in the posts in question I did not say that the soul post-mortem is in a radically diminished state full stop, in every respect.  I was not giving a complete theology of the afterlife, but just addressing a specific metaphysical question.  What I said is that the soul is in a radically diminished state qua substance.  A human being is a single substance, and after death but prior to bodily resurrection most of its activities (walking, seeing, hearing, digesting, etc.) are no longer naturally possible for it.  Hence it is in that sense -- and obviously -- radically diminished.  However, the capacities that naturally survive are the highest ones -- intellect and will -- and divine assistance also raises the otherwise diminished soul to something it never had even when the body was present, viz. the beatific vision.   In that sense the soul is of course in a much better state.  Obviously, something can be worse off in some respects and better off in others, and indeed worse off in some respects but still better off overall.  That’s a familiar fact of life and, as it happens, a fact of the afterlife too.

Second, as to the experiences of the soul after death and prior to its reunion with the body at the resurrection, consider the suffering of the damned from hellfire.  What can the nature of this suffering be given that the senses are bodily and the body is not present?  Aquinas considers this issue in several places, including Article 21 of Disputed Questions on the Soul, from which it is worth quoting at some length:

[S]ometimes a thing is hindered in one way by its contrary as regards its very act of existing which it receives from some inhering form; and in this way something is acted upon by its contrary through alteration and corruption, as wood, for example, is consumed by fire.  Secondly, a thing is hindered by an obstacle or a contrary with respect to its inclination, just as the natural inclination of a stone is to tend downward, but it is hindered in this by some obstacle and opposing power so that it is brought to rest or is moved contrary to its nature…

[I]n a being which possesses knowledge, torment and punishment are the natural effects of both kinds of suffering, although in different ways.  For the suffering [or being-acted-upon] which is the effect of change by a contrary, results in affliction and punishment by sensible pain, as when a sensible object of the greatest intensity corrupts the harmony of a sense.  Therefore when sensibilia are of too great intensity, particularly those of touch, they inflict sensible pain… However, the second kind of suffering does not inflict punishment by sensible pain, but by that sadness which arises in a man or in an animal because something is apprehended by an interior power as being repugnant to the will or to some appetite.  Hence things which are opposed to the will and to the appetite inflict punishment, and sometimes even more than those which are painful to sense…

[T]he soul cannot suffer punishment by corporeal fire according to the first kind of suffering [i.e., being acted-upon], because it is impossible for the soul to be altered and corrupted by suffering of this specific kind.  Hence the soul is not afflicted by fire in this way, namely, that it suffers sensible pain thereby.  However, the soul can suffer by corporeal fire according to the second kind of suffering, inasmuch as it is hindered from its inclination or volition by fire of this kind. This is evident.  For the soul and any incorporeal substance, inasmuch as this belongs to it by nature, is not physically confined in any place, but transcends the whole corporeal order.  Consequently it is contrary to its nature and to its natural appetite for it to be fettered to anything and be confined in a place by some necessity; and I maintain that this is the case except inasmuch as the soul is united to the body whose natural form it is, and in which there follows some perfection.

End quote.  The way in which the disembodied soul suffers from hellfire, then, is in Aquinas’s view not via sensory pain but rather by having its will frustrated.  And the way in which its will is frustrated is by being confined to something corporeal -- the fire in question -- when its natural state qua immaterial is not to be confined to anything corporeal except to the body it is the form of.  Thus there is no conflict between the Aristotelian-Thomistic view that the soul retains only its intellectual and volitional functions between death and resurrection, and the Christian teaching that the souls of the damned are tormented by hellfire.  There is torment, but it is a matter of the frustration of the will rather than of sensory pain.

It might be objected that this is not faithful enough to the relevant biblical texts.  But that this is not a good objection is clear from some remarks Aquinas makes in Summa Contra Gentiles Book IV, Chapter 90:

[T]here is no reason why even some of the things we read in Scripture about the punishments of the damned expressed in bodily terms should not be understood in spiritual terms, and, as it were, figuratively.  Such is the saying of Isaiah (66:24): “Their worm shall not die”: by worm can be understood that remorse of conscience by which the impious will also be tortured, for a bodily worm cannot eat away a spiritual substance, nor even the bodies of the damned, which will be incorruptible.  Then, too, the “weeping” and “gnashing of teeth” (Mat. 8:12) cannot be understood of spiritual substances except metaphorically, although there is no reason not to accept them in a bodily sense in the bodies of the damned after the resurrection.  For all that, this is not to understand weeping a loss of tears, for from those bodies there can be no loss, but there can be only the sorrow of the heart and the irritation of the eyes and the head which usually accompany weeping.

End quote.  Obviously a disembodied soul cannot weep or gnash its teeth, since it lacks eyes and teeth.  Nor can it be nibbled at by worms, since it has no flesh for them to eat.  If these biblical passages must be taken figuratively when applied to disembodied souls, though, so too must passages that might seem to imply that a disembodied soul experiences pain of a sensory sort.

It is worth noting that an implication of Aquinas’s view seems to be that hellfire punishes the souls of the damned (at least prior to their reunion with their bodies at the resurrection) precisely by confining them to matter in the manner in which Cartesian souls are tied to matter.  On the Aristotelian-Thomistic view, the disembodied soul is only an incomplete substance, and qua form of the living body is in its natural state only when conjoined to the matter of its body.  It is inherently suited to that particular bit of the material world, and only to that one.  On the Cartesian view, by contrast, the soul is a complete substance in its own right, so that its relation to any and all material objects is entirely contingent.  It is no more inherently tied to any particular human body than it is inherently tied to a pig’s body, or a tree, or stone, or a vacuum cleaner.  It is related to the body not as form to matter but rather more like the way a demon would have been related to one of the Gadarene swine it possessed in the famous biblical passage, or the way a poltergeist is related to the vacuum cleaner it moves around the room it is haunting.  (Hence Ryle’s “ghost in the machine” characterization of Cartesianism.) 

Aquinas’s view seems to be that a disembodied soul tormented by hellfire is essentially forced to “haunt” that hellfire (as it were), and is tormented by the fact of being confined, contrary to its will, to that particular bit of matter to which it has no natural connection.  (And perhaps the knowledge that that very fire will one day cause sensory pain to its resurrected body is part of the torment as well.)  You might say loosely that hell (prior to the resurrection) is, in effect, being forced to live like a Cartesian soul.

Be that as it may, the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul is, I submit, far more in harmony with the Bible than the Cartesian view is, not less in harmony with it.  The Cartesian view makes the biblical idea of bodily resurrection pointless, since the Cartesian soul is a complete substance all on its own, and apart from the body.  It is no accident that the Platonic view of the soul, which was the precursor of the Cartesian one, tended to see the body as a prison, as something positively unnatural and confinement to which is undesirable.  It is bound to be that if the soul is a complete substance in its own right. 

By contrast, the psychosomatic unity that the Aristotelian-Thomistic view insists upon but the Cartesian-Platonic view effectively denies is just what one sees in scripture from Genesis onward.  The resurrection is necessary precisely because without the body, we are, however otherwise better off, to that extent radically diminished, and our complete beatitude thus calls for the restoration of the body.

Of course, what Aristotle himself thought about the post-mortem soul is a matter of controversy, but it is in any event irrelevant.  What matters is not what Aristotle thought but what Aristotelianism entails and/or is compatible with.   (“Aristotle thought such-and-such; therefore Aristotelianism entails such-and-such” is a common fallacy, but a fallacy for that.)  That the Aristotelian view of human nature is in fact much more consonant with Christian teaching than the Platonic view is is precisely the reason it won out in Catholicism and why treating the soul as the “form of the body” is official Catholic teaching.  Tired anti-Thomist caricatures notwithstanding, the motivation is to do justice to the biblical conception of man, not a commitment to Aristotle über alles.

I’ll address some other recent reader questions about the soul in a follow-up post.