Abstract
According to the Aristotelian canons of definition to which Aquinas subscribed, a complete definition of something necessarily involves an articulation of its final cause. The final cause of a being is its end or telos in the sense of what it would be if it were to become fully realized, perfected, or completed according to its kind or nature. Understood as such, the final cause of a being is essentially connected to its formal cause because it expresses what it would mean for the form to realize its capacity for development into a perfected instance of its kind. In the light of this logic, it can be easily seen why the question of human nature is inextricably connected to the question of human destiny: it is impossible to understand what human nature is without knowing what it it is meant to become when fully realized. And since Aquinas’s overarching perspective is explicitly theocentric and theological, this means that considerations of human nature and human destiny must be set within the context of creation. In this light, what human nature is can only be understood in the light of what God the Creator intends as its end.
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References
ST I, 93, 4. On the doctrine of imago dei in Aquinas, a magisterial overview with good bibliographical references can be found in Jean Pierre Torrell, O.P., Saint Thomas d’Aquin, maître spirituel (Fribourg, Switzerland: Editions Universitaires de Fribourg, 1996), 105–132.
An overview of this debate can be found in Stephen J. Duffy, The Graced Horizon: Nature and Grace in Modern Catholic Thought (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1992).
See the overview in the first chapter, pp. 13–16.
Another development worthy of note in Thomistic anthropology is the dynamic and relational metaphysics of the person articulated by W. Norris Clarke in Person and Being (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1993).
At the Origins of the Thomistic Notion of Man (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1963).
See Bernardo C. Bazan, “La coporalité selon saint Thomas,” La revue philosophique de Louvain 81 (1983): 369–409.
STI,76,5.
Aquinas sometimes refers to the soul as an intellectual substance, but he is careful also to point out that the human soul does not meet all the requirements for being a substance and can only be designated as such in a qualified sense. See Bazan’s “La corporalité selon Saint Thomas.” He has made this same point more recently in “The Human Soul: Form and Substance? Thomas Aquinas’ Critique of Eclectic Aristotelianism,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 64 (1997): 95–126. See also Michael Sweeney, “Soul as Substance and Method in Aquinas’s Anthropological Writings,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age 66 (1999): 143–187.
SC 2, ad 16. See also ST I, 75, 4.
STI,75,2ad2.
For an interesting account of how Aquinas’s views show the inadequacy of the contemporary dichotomy of dualism against materialism, see Eleonore Stump, “Non-Cartesian Dualism and
Materialism without Reductionism,” Faith and Philosophy 12 (1995): 505–531. For a more ambitious attempt in this vein, see David Braine, The Human Person: Animal and Spirit (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), especially 480–531.
Two helpful accounts of Aquinas’s position are Herbert McCabe, “The Immortality of the Soul,” in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Anthony Kenny (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), 297–306 and Kenneth L. Schmitz “Purity of Soul and Immortality,” The Monist 69 (1986): 396–415. A useful classification of Aquinas’s arguments with some critical commentary can be found in David Ruel Foster, “Aquinas on the Immateriality of the Intellect,” The Thomist 55 (1991): 415–438. Negative verdicts on Aquinas’s reasoning can be found in Joseph A. Novak, “Aquinas on the Incorruptibility of the Soul,” The History of Philosophy Quarterly 4 (1987): 405–42 and Robert Pasnau, “Aquinas and the Content Fallacy,” The Modern Schoolman 76 (1998): 293–314.
STI,75,2.
ST I, 75, 6. For a penetrating commentary on the key point in this text, see Joseph Owens, “Aquinas on the Inseparability of Soul from Existence,” New Scholasticism 61 (1987): 249–270.
Aquinas derives the claim that each individual soul is directly created by God from the claim that the soul is immaterial and subsisting. No material power can produce an immaterial soul. See ST I, 118, 2. This topic is discussed more fully on pp. 86–88.
ST I, 84, 7.
See Anton Pegis, “The Separated Soul and its Nature in St. Thomas,” in St. Thomas Aquinas. 1274–1974. Commemorative Studies. Volume I., ed. Armand Maurer et alia (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), 130–158.
STI,89,1.
STI,89,2.
ST I, 89, 3.
“Elements of a Thomistic Philosophy of Death,” The Thomist 43 (1979): 587.
SCG IV, 79. See Anton Pegis, “Between Immortality and Death: Some Further Reflections on the Summa Contra Gentiles,” The Monist 58 (1974): 1–15.
DA 1 ad 2. See also 2 ad 5 and 3. Joseph Owens has argued that Aquinas thinks that esse is the ultimate cause of the individuation of all beings, not just human souls, in his “Thomas Aquinas” in Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation (1150–1650), ed. Jorge Garcia (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994), 173–194.
Aquinas does think that the souls of the blessed will animate matter in a higher mode. See CT, 168.
Peter Geach endorses Aquinas’s doctrine of immortality without appreciating, however, the role played by esse in “Immortality,” God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 17–29.
SCG IV, 79.
“The Highest Encomium of Human Body,” in Littera, Sensus, Sententia, ed. A Lobato (Milan: Massimo, 1991), 99–116.
ST I-II, 4, 5 and 6.
The standard book on this topic is Jorge Laporta, La destinée de la nature humaine selon Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: J. Vrin, 1965). A short masterful analysis of the problem treated in this section is Etienne Gilson, “Sur la problématique de la vision béatifique,” Archives d’histoire doctrinales et litéraire du moyen âge 31 (1964): 67–88. See also Joseph Owens, C.S.S.R, Human Destiny (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1985).
See David Gallagher, “Thomas Aquinas on the Will as Rational Appetite,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (1991): 559–584.
ST I-II, 3, 8.
ST I-II, 5, 8.
ST I, 62, 1.
STI,5,5.
ST I, 12, 4.
(Paris: Aubier, 1946). Perhaps the most perspicuous Thomistic philosophical response to DeLubac was Anton Pegis, “Nature and Spirit: Some Reflections on the Problem of the End of Man,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 23 (1949): 62–79.
STI,12,1.
See Pegis, “Nature and Spirit,” 73.
On this topic see Bernard Lonergan’s Grace and Freedom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).
Gilson and LaPorta both make this point.
The problem of human finality has recently been the object of debate again because of the publication of Denis Bradley’s Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1997). I discuss Bradley’s thesis, with which I am in sympathy, in Chapter Six. More traditional readings of Aquinas are offered by Stephen Long in “On the Possibility of a Purely Natural End for Man,” The Thomist 64 (2000): 211–237 and Peter A. Pagan-Aguiar, “St. Thomas Aquinas and Human Finality: Paradox or Mysterium Fidei?” The Thomist 64 (2000): 375–399.
“If any single topic offers the best access to Rahner’s immensely prolific and varied work, it is surely the nature/grace controversy.” Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 179.
Theological Investigations, Vol. 1, trans. Cornelius Ernst (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), 297–318.
Richard Reno describes Rahner’s position as formally extrinsicist because he distinguishes nature and grace but materially intrinsicist because of the tight fit between human longing and grace in The Ordinary Transformed: Karl Rahner and the Christian Vision of Transcendence (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995), 109–133.
Ibid., 299.
Ibid., 302–3.
Ibid., 312.
This claim has obvious implications for an approach to non-Christian religions that will be explored in Chapter Eight.
Ibid., 313.
See Nicholas H. Healy, “Indirect Methods in Theology: Karl Rahner as an Ad Hoc Apologist,” The Thomist 56 (1992): 613–630.
Rahner’s style of thinking, and Transcendental Thomism in general, is not at all congenial to Analytical Thomists.
See the overview in Chapter One, pp. 13–16.
Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych, S.J. (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968).
The second revised edition was published in German in 1963 and translated into English as Hearers of the Word, trans. Michael Richards (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969). The revised edition bears such a strong imprint of Johannes Baptist Metz, a former student to whom Rahner entrusted the revisions, that it is not clear where Rahner leaves off and Metz begins. Because of Metz’s heavy hand, and because some Rahner scholars think that Richards’s translation is not entirely reliable, Joseph Donceel did a new translation of the first edition that has been published as Hearer of the Word, edited and with an introduction by Andrew Tallon (New York: Continuum, 1994). In what follows I shall be refering to this translation because I am persuaded by Donceel and Tallon that it is a more accurate reflection of Rahner’s thought.
“In Hearer of the Word we have the single most accessible and necessary book of philosophy and pretheology Rahner ever wrote.” Andrew Tallon, “Editor’s Introduction,” xix.
“Karl Rahner,” in The Modern Theologians, Second Edition, ed. David Ford (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), 124.
Hearer of the Word, 5.
Ib1d.
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 30.
“Erkennen ist Beisichsein des Seins, und dieses Beisichsein ist das Sein das Seinden” is the way Rahner puts it in Spirit in the World, 69.
It should be noted that when Aquinas uses this kind of language to describe knowing, he is consciously adopting a Neoplatonic formulation from the Liber de causis to describe self-knowledge.
Hearer of the Word, 33.
Ibid., 46.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid., 47–48.
Ibid., 51.
See Spirit in the World, 135–226 where Rahner interprets agent intellect as excessus ad esse.
A classic traditional Thomistic critique is James P. Reichmann, “The Transcendental Method and the Psychogenesis of Being,” The Thomist 32 (1968): 449–508. While Reichmann’s critique is directed more at Emil Coreth than at Rahner, nonetheless it articulates the basic traditional complaint against any form of Transcendental Thomism: it never gets out of the head to the real.
Hearer of the Word, 53.
Ibid., 68.
See “On the Concept of Mystery in Catholic Theology,” in Theological Investigations, Vol. 4, trans. Kevin Smyth (New York: Seabury Press, 1966), 36–73.
Hearer of the Word, 81.
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 82.
Ibid., 83.
Ibid.. 88.
This is the complaint of Fergus Kerr in Theology After Wittgenstein (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 14: “there is surely a prima facie case for suggesting that Rahner’s most characteristic theological profundities are embedded in an extremely mentalist-individualist epistemology of unmistakably Cartesian provenance. Central to his whole theology, that is to say, is the possibility for the individual to occupy a standpoint beyond his immersion in the bodily, the historical and the institutional.”
Hearer of the Word, 103.
Ibid., 110.
Ibid., 142.
Ibid., 153.
Rahner’s own mature presentation of his transcendental theology is Foundations of Christian Faith, trans. William V. Dych, S.J. (New York: Seabury, 1978). Dych authored a short overview of Rahner’s theology in the Liturgical Press’s Outstanding Christian Thinkers series as Karl Rahner (Collegeville, MN: 1992). For more on Rahner’s anthropology, see Andrew Tallon, Personal Becoming. Karl Rahner’s Metaphysical Anthropology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1982). A nice collection of Rahner’s writings is in A Rahner Reader, ed. Gerald A. McCool (New York: Seabury Press, 1975).
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Shanley, B.J. (2002). Human Nature and Destiny. In: The Thomist Tradition. Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9916-0_7
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