The Metaphysics of Personal Identity [1 ed.] 1443890545, 9781443890540

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Introduction
William of Auvergne, Albertus Magnus and the Metaphysics of the Individual Agent of Thought
Individuation and the Afterlife in Thomas Aquinas and Some Muslim Philosophers
Aquinas and Locke on Person and Resurrection
Annihilation, Re-creation, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas
The Problem of “Gappy Existence” in Aquinas’ Metaphysics and Theology
Appendix
Contributors

Citation preview

The Metaphysics of Personal Identity

The Immateriality of the Human Mind, the Semantics of Analogy, and the Conceivability of God Volume 1: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Categories, and What Is Beyond Volume 2: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Knowledge, Mental Language, and Free Will Volume 3: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Mental Representation Volume 4: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Universal Representation, and the Ontology of Individuation Volume 5: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Medieval Skepticism, and the Claim to Metaphysical Knowledge Volume 6: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Medieval Metaphysics; or Is It “Just Semantics”? Volume 7: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics After God, with Reason Alone-Saikat Guha Commemorative Volume Volume 8: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics The Demonic Temptations of Medieval Nominalism Volume 9: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Skepticism, Causality and Skepticism about Causality Volume 10: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Metaphysical Themes, Medieval and Modern Volume 11: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Maimonides on God and Duns Scotus on Logic and Metaphysics Volume 12: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics

The Metaphysics of Personal Identity: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Volume 13 Edited by

Gyula Klima and Alexander W. Hall Guest Editor

Stephen Ogden

The Metaphysics of Personal Identity: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Volume 13 Series: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Edited by Gyula Klima, Alexander W. Hall and Stephen Ogden This book first published 2016 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2016 by Gyula Klima, Alexander W. Hall, Stephen Ogden and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9054-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9054-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ............................................................................................... vii Stephen R. Ogden William of Auvergne, Albertus Magnus and the Metaphysics of the Individual Agent of Thought ............................................................. 1 Matthew Robinson Individuation and the Afterlife in Thomas Aquinas and Some Muslim Philosophers .............................................................................................. 33 Stephen R. Ogden Aquinas and Locke on Person and Resurrection ....................................... 63 Peter Weigel Annihilation, Re-creation, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas .......... 101 Turner C. Nevitt The Problem of “Gappy Existence” in Aquinas’ Metaphysics and Theology ........................................................................................... 119 Gyula Klima Appendix ................................................................................................. 135 Contributors ............................................................................................. 137

INTRODUCTION STEPHEN R. OGDEN

The Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (PSMLM) collects original materials presented at sessions sponsored by the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (SMLM). SMLM was founded in 2000 by Gyula Klima (Director), Joshua Hochschild, Jack Zupko and Jeffrey Brower, in order to recover the profound metaphysical insights of medieval thinkers for our own philosophical thought. The Society currently has over a hundred members on five continents. Alex Hall took up the position of Assistant Director and Secretary in 2011, with secretarial duties passing to Timothy Kearns in 2014. The Society’s maiden publication appeared online in 2001 and the decade that followed saw the release of eight more online volumes. In 2011, PSMLM transitioned to print and republished volumes 1-8 as separately titled editions. Sharp-eyed readers of these volumes will note the replacement of our (lamentably copyrighted for commercial use) lions, who guarded the integrity of the body of an intellectual tradition thought to be dead, with the phoenixes that mark this print rebirth. Volumes 9 and 10 appeared in a dual print/online format. With Volume 11 PSMLM switched to print only. Friends of the lions will be happy to note that they remain at their post, protecting the first ten volumes of the PSMLM at http://faculty.fordham. edu/klima/SMLM/, where interested readers can also keep up with SMLM activities and projects. In 2014 SMLM sponsored sessions at the annual meetings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (hosted by The Catholic University of America) and the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, annual SMLM venues since 2001 and 2011, respectively. This volume, on the theme of philosophical accounts of personal identity (number 13 in the PSMLM), collects the year’s revised proceedings along with work drawn from our 2013 call for papers on the same topic. Forthcoming volumes take up Aquinas on self-knowledge (Volume 14) and mereology and hylopmorphism (Volume 15).

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Introduction

Many philosophers think that everything has the property of being selfidentical. That is, for all x, x = x. This entails that I (along with all other human beings) have the property of being self-identical. But why is that so? And for how long? For medieval philosophers, the first of these questions was related to the principle of individuation. After all, in a way I am also identical with anything that shares my essence, humanity. Socrates, Hannah Arendt, and I are identical with respect to our shared humanity and species. Of course, one might suppose it is simple enough to distinguish the three of us in all kinds of ways. True, but what might distinguish me from other living human beings who exhibit many identical properties – living philosophers with brown hair, of the same age, etc., etc.? This question about what distinguishes two present members of the same species or essence (or, as Aristotle sometimes puts it, the same form) is the question of the principle of individuation. Some medieval philosophers, such as Thomas Aquinas, held that matter is the principle of individuation – ultimately you can only distinguish two different human beings (both with the form of humanity) on account of the particular space-time coordinates of their individuating matter, also known as their bodies. Other medieval philosophers found this solution wanting. Scotus argued that none of the normal Aristotelian metaphysical “hardware” (matter, form, accidents, etc.) could actually account for individuation, so he proposed a new entity, the individual haecceitas, which could do the job. Others ultimately questioned this entire, roughly “realist” understanding of shared form or essence, and proposed the “nominalist” alternative on which things simply come individuated – there is no universal shared form, the numerical individuation of which only the realist thinks needs explaining. The second question is even trickier – for how long do I get to be selfidentical and what shall determine that? This is a question about the persistence of my identity and the principle that accounts for that persistence. Some philosophers will say that whoever/whatever is going to be identical with me over time must have my memories, my mind, or my soul. Others will point instead (or in addition) to certain continuity requirements, whether mental or physical. Could I be identical with anyone over some metaphysical “gap” in continual existence? If so, are such gaps bridged naturally or are they only possible given some act of God’s divine omnipotence?

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This volume presents several papers concerned with such questions, especially as seen by certain medieval philosophers. The first three pieces are comparative papers examining the thought of two or more thinkers, while the final two form a debate about interpreting the single figure of Thomas Aquinas. Matthew Robinson’s William of Auvergne, Albertus Magnus and the Early Thirteenth-Century Metaphysics of the Personal, Individual Agent of Thought primarily concerns two different philosophers on the importance of meshing conceptions of the faculty of the intellect with our personal experience of our selves as thinking agents. In rudimentary terms, Aristotle held that the soul is the form of living, organic bodies. It accounts for what the living substance is (the kind of substance it is) and for its existence. For a living thing to exist is for it to be matter ensouled. Naturally, living things have different capacities which Aristotle roughly analyzed according to three different, potentially nested, types of soul – the vegetative, sensitive, and rational souls. William of Auvergne and Albert the Great are concerned with an aspect of the rational soul, specifically the interpretation of Aristotle’s agent or active intellect, found in De Anima, book III, chapter 5, which is somehow responsible for producing all intelligible forms, i.e., concepts inhering in the intellect. This (kind of) intellect was distinguished by Aristotle and most medieval philosophers from a different (kind of) intellect known as the possible or material intellect (featured in De Anima III.4, as well as III.5), which is described as receiving the intelligible forms. William considers several interpretations of this agent intellect, but determines that they all render this agent intellect foreign or inimical to the idea of the individual human being as an active agent who pursues understanding over time and discursively. Avicennian and Augustinian versions falsely attribute the agent intellect to an extrinsic source – which could not possibly be compatible with the notion of myself as a personally active thinker. On the other hand, if the agent intellect is intrinsic to the human being, it is either “full” of the intelligible forms and already completely in second actuality (i.e., not merely having a developed capacity for a certain kind of intellectual activity – which would be first actuality – but rather the occurrent exercise of such capacity), or it is “empty.” The former option contradicts every person’s own experience of her partial, piecemeal knowledge, while the latter, empty and dormant intellect would be unable, by Aristotelian standards, to act as an agent of understanding at all. Robinson develops the case that Albert argues pointedly against William’s interpretations and objections. In doing so, Albert develops the further influential idea that

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Introduction

Aristotle’s agent intellect can be made compatible with the notion of the individual and active human thinker by proposing a version of the agent intellect as “empty” of forms, but instrumentally active in a way that allows it to serve as an efficient cause. My own paper, Individuation and the Afterlife According to Some Muslim Philosophers and Aquinas, offers a basic comparison between Aquinas and three Muslim philosophers (Avicenna, al-GhazƗlƯ, and Averroes) on the main themes of this volume. I first look at the more familiar view of Aquinas on the principle of individuation (namely, designated matter), the principle of persistence (namely, the substantial form or soul), and then how Aquinas can make sense of these doctrines with his further claims that the human soul survives the death of the human being in an individuated way and then receives “the same” body again in the resurrection. On my view, this means there is a gap in the existence of the human person, but the gap is bridged by the natural survival of the human soul and the supernatural act of restoring (at least some modicum of) the previous body. I show that he shares some of these doctrines with the three philosophers of the Islamic tradition – especially matter as the principle of individuation (with Averroes), the survival of the individuated soul (with Avicenna), and the possibility of resurrection (with al-Ghazali); however, he alone tries to hold all three views consistently. Peter Weigel, in turn, compares ideas of identity and persistence in Aquinas and a more modern figure who has had a major impact on contemporary discussions of identity, i.e., John Locke. In his Aquinas and Locke on Person and Resurrection, Weigel first shows that Locke’s idea of a forensic notion of personal identity tied to memory opens the door to the possibility of gaps in existence as well as a notion of Christian resurrection which de-emphasizes the requirement of having the same body. He then gives his own detailed account of Aquinas’s contrasting views on these matters, where persistence is grounded in a more robust metaphysical account of the substantial form and resurrection requires careful analysis of how the numerically same body can be restored to the separated soul. Turner Nevitt and Gyula Klima offer us a penetrating debate on whether Thomas Aquinas allows for the metaphysical possibility of God annihilating and recreating certain substances. At issue between them is a text from Aquinas’s Quodlibet IV which seems to state that God certainly can annihilate and recreate some substances as numerically identical, thus

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allowing for at least supernaturally caused gaps in the existence and identity of certain things. While both agree that Aquinas says essentially continuous things (like motions) cannot remain identical over gaps, even supernaturally, Nevitt, in his Annihilation, Re-creation, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas, argues that Aquinas does believe material creatures like human beings can be annihilated and recreated numerically identical by God because their existence is only tied to motion and time per accidens. Nevitt takes Aquinas to name sublunary material substances specifically in the Quodlibet IV passage as among “permanent things,” just like the heavenly bodies, which possess their existence and essence completely at once, and he works to demonstrate how this text should be understood in relation with the rest of Aquinas’s corpus. On the other hand, in The Problem of “Gappy Existence” in Aquinas’ Metaphysics and Theology, Klima argues on the basis of other texts in Aquinas that the existence of material substances, like human beings, even though subject to motion and time only per accidens, is still necessarily subject to time; thus, its unity demands its continuity. On Klima’s view, it is only because of the continuing existence of the human soul that the human being can be resurrected numerically the same (despite a real gap in the human being’s having that existence of the soul between death and resurrection).

WILLIAM OF AUVERGNE, ALBERTUS MAGNUS AND THE METAPHYSICS OF THE INDIVIDUAL AGENT OF THOUGHT MATTHEW ROBINSON

In his De anima, published in Paris in 1240, William of Auvergne, the philosophically-attentive bishop of Paris, rejects every interpretation he encounters of the Aristotelian agent intellect because he does not see the possibility of coherently reconciling it with an account of the individual intellect, even despite Peripatetic claims to the contrary.1 William analyzes three competing interpretations of Aristotle’s noetic on their own terms,2 concluding that Aristotle’s account of causation cannot explain how the individual human intellect 1) acts spontaneously from within itself and

1

The question as to whether William equates the agent intelligence with God has sparked a scholarly debate worth noting. In his “Pourquoi St Thomas a Critiqué St Augustin,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 1 (1926-7): 5127, esp. p. 49 n. 3, Gilson maintains that William of Auvergne probably accepted the Avicennian-Augustinian version of Aristotle’s noetic that takes God as the direct illuminator of the soul, as accurately highlighted by Roland Teske, “William of Auvergne’s Rejection of the Agent Intelligence,” In Greek and Medieval Studies in Honor of Leo Sweeney, ed. William J. Carroll and John J. Furlong (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 211-35, esp. pp. 228-35. Teske, with whom I am sympathetic, argues that Gilson’s is an unlikely reading and that William aimed to reject the Aristotelian noetic entirely. Stephen Marrone, William of Auvergne and Robert Grosseteste: New Ideas of Truth in the Early Thirteenth Century (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), 58, also takes William as rejecting all forms of the Aristotelian noetic. On the other hand, Richard Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History (New York: E.J. Brill, 1995), esp. pp 34-5, holds that William’s work is so ambiguous that there is a reasonable case to be made for both sides. 2 In fact, he analyzes and rejects four interpretations, but since the difference of the fourth does not significantly contribute to my analysis, I omit it here for the sake of my paper’s clarity.

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William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus

also 2) comes to understand the forms gradually and discursively.3 In The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century, Richard Dales notes that William of Auvergne’s writings “have great value in reflecting [the major intellectual currents of his day], although their influence on subsequent authors is not yet clear.”4 Partly in an effort to respond to Dales’ call for better clarity regarding William’s influence, this paper attempts to demonstrate that Albert the Great’s interpretation of the agent intellect in his early Parisian work, De homine, is a carefully-conceived and thorough refutation of William’s distinctive argumentation. In his response, the relatively young Albert outlines a coherent reconciliation of the Aristotelian noetic with the claim that the act of intellection properly belongs to the individual, thus demonstrating that psychological individuality is metaphysically tenable by at least one version of the Aristotelian noetic.5 3

At the outset of his De anima, William explains that he will proceed to analyze the Aristotelian claims about the soul, not dogmatically, but philosophically, i.e. in terms of arguments: “[L]et it not enter your mind that I want to use the words of Aristotle as authoritative for proving what I am going to say. I know that authority can only amount to a dialectical argument and can only produce belief, while my aim both in this treatise and everywhere I can is to provide demonstrative certitude, after which you are left with no trace of doubt” (William of Auvergne, The Soul, trans. Roland J. Teske, Mediaeval Philosophical Texts in Translation; No. 37 [Milwaukee (Wis.): Marquette University Press, 2000], chapter 7, part 3, manuscript p. 205a, translation p. 428). When citing Teske’s translation of William’s De anima, I will indicate Chapter and Part followed by the pagination from William of Auvergne, “Opera Omnia,” ed. F. Hotot with Supplementum edited by Blaise Le Feron (Orléans-Paris: 1674; reprint, Frankfurt am Main: Minerva, 1963), followed by Teske’s translated page number. The above citation, for instance, would read as follows: William, DA 7.3, 205a, Teske 428. ). Any quotations of the Latin will also be taken from the Orleans-Paris/Frankfurt manuscript since, as far as I am aware, the critical edition of William’s De anima has not yet been completed. 4 Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul, 36. 5 My focus on the metaphysical underpinnings of the self’s individuality in the first half of the thirteenth century is influenced by Alain de Libera, who traces the origins of Heidegger’s “modern self” to the high Middle ages. In investigating the origins of the subject, or self, Alain de Libera has demonstrated in his ongoing Archaeologie du Sujet series that what has been erroneously labelled the “modern subject,” or the “modern self” by contemporaries like Heidegger was in fact a conceptual innovation of medieval philosophy. De Libera maintains that the “self” was not an invention of Descartes or of any modern, and sets out to correct a widespread under-appreciation of the contributions of the High Middle Ages to the concept of selfhood.

Matthew Robinson

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William’s Critical Survey In the De anima, one of his later works, William of Auvergne, who was the bishop of Paris from 1228 until his death in 1249, examines extensively the question of how the intellect is structured. For the sake of brevity, I highlight his analysis and rejection of three alternative interpretations of the Aristotelian noetic. First, there is the AvicennianAugustinian illuminationism that proposes to explain human intellection by positing an agent intelligence outside the individual. According to this position, which William mistakes for Aristotle’s own position, thinking is explained by the agent intelligence’s directly donating actually intelligible forms to the human thinker.6 However, in William’s reading, this Peripatetic stance posits the agent intelligence’s illuminating as the only active cause of human knowing. If intellectual discovery were thereby reduced to the soul’s passively receiving forms from a super-psychological agent, William objects that we would be unable to account for the phenomenon of intellectual work.7 In this scenario, studying, reading, attending lectures, philosophizing, or conducting research would become irrelevant to acquiring knowledge.8 In William’s estimation, however, the 6

Gilson, “Pourquoi St Thomas,” 46 identifies the translator Dominic Gundissalinus, as the author of a text entitled, “De anima,” which adapts Avicennian illuminationism to the requirements of Christian theology. For a recent endorsement of Gilson’s reading of Gundissalinus’ illuminationism, see Leen Spruit, Species Intelligibilis: From Perception to Knowledge, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), 116. Although Gundissalinus’ name does appear on one of three manuscripts of this text, his authorship of the De anima text is still in question (Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 211. 7 See William of Auvergne, DA 5.7, 122a, Teske 201: “For if the agent intelligence pours knowledge into our souls, as sensible things imprint on the organs of our senses the modifications through which sensible apprehensions are produced, no study, no discovery, and no art of invention is needed by us for the sake of intelligible apprehensions or cognition. Rather . . . the application [applicatio, or joining] of our material intellect to the agent intelligence will be sufficient for us— or just the opposite: its application [i.e. its joining to our material intellect will be sufficient] for them—that is, for intelligible apprehensions and acts of cognition.” 8 William, DA 7.4, 207a, Teske 436-7: “For what purpose, then, are books of the sciences written and printed with such great effort? To what purpose do people listen to the lectures of masters or doctors? To what purpose do they attend their classes, when in each soul the intellect is so handy and so ready to pour out acts of understanding and the sciences into the material intellect, in accord with which alone or by which alone the human soul understands and knows intellectually?”

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William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus

energies expended by the thinker in researching and analyzing, or the thinker’s experience of thinking as labour, provides evidence persuasive enough to reject the tenet that the agent of our intellection is outside us.9 The individual’s thinking must be through her own agency, as evinced by these phenomena, and therefore, William concludes, her thinking cannot be through a super-psychological agent intelligence. The individual’s act of thinking must belong to the individual, but in a way that is metaphysically tenable: Moreover, how do they understand that the intellect is in us the principle of scientific knowledge [i.e. which they do claim it is]? For, if it is merely an instrument for receiving these sciences, it is not correctly said to be their principle, since reception or receptivity does not make it necessary to call a vessel or some other receptacle the principle of liquids or of anything else it receives. Those, then, who claim that the intellect in us is the principle of sciences, undoubtedly claim that it is an active principle or one productive of the sciences (William, DA 5.7, 122b, Teske 202).10

If the agent of human understanding cannot be understood as extrinsic to the soul it might, alternatively, be understood as within the soul. The great advantage of an intrinsic agent of understanding would seem to be its resolution of the problem above; an intrinsic agent should explain that rational thinking arises spontaneously from within the soul, in which case the individual would then be the agent of her own intellectual work. To determine whether interpreting the agent intellect as within the soul remedies the problems that stem from the Avicennian extrinsic agent intelligence outlined above, it is important to see how William interprets what is perhaps the single most important Aristotelian metaphysical 9

See William, DA 5.8, 123a, Teske 203-4: “Moreover, why do we toil [sudamus]? Why do we philosophize? Why do we investigate, since, just as sensible things present themselves to us without any investigation and even thrust themselves upon our senses, so the agent intelligence offers [intelligible things] or even thrusts them upon our intellect by itself? . . . Hence, just as this visible sun frees all who see from the labor [labore] of the investigation of visible things, so the intelligible sun frees us from the labor [labore] of [the investigation of] intelligible things, since it reveals them to us by its rays.” 10 William, DA 5.7, 122b, Teske 202: “Amplius qualiter intelligunt quia intellectus est in nobis principium scientiae; si enim non est nisi instrumentum recipiendi scientias ipsas, non recte dicitur principium earum, cui receptio, neque receptibilitas facit debere, ut vas sive aliquid receptibile dicatur principium liquorum, vel cuiuscumque alterius recepti. Qui igitur ponunt intellectum in nobis esse principium scientiarum, proculdubio ponunt ipsum esse principium agens, sive effectivum scientiarum.”

Matthew Robinson

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principle guiding his reading of the Aristotelian noetic. Generally speaking, an agent must itself already be in act to move what is potential into act.11 For Aristotle, actuality is prior to potentiality in the order of generation and time because for the agent to be the originative cause that moves what is potential into act, it must give something to what is potential in order to activate it.12 So as to avoid implying that something comes from nothing, absolutely speaking,13 the activating agent must itself exist in second actuality, possessing completely whatever it donates. William articulates this conclusion in terms of the intellect, writing that the agent must exist as “knowledge in act [scientiae in effectu].”14 In other words, the agent of the act of understanding must continuously possesses all the objects of knowledge in second actuality. In William’s view, this is possible only if the agent is a thinker constantly and always thinking them: Since everything that acts or impresses something naturally and through itself impresses either [i.] a likeness of itself or [ii.] a likeness which is in it or present to it, it is necessary that all modifications or any dispositions whatever that flow into the material intellect from the agent intellect are likenesses of the agent intellect or of one or many dispositions that are in it 11

See n. 16 below. Aristotle articulates this principle of causation in Book 9, Chapter 8 of his Metaphysics, a text that would have been available to Latin thinkers by at least the end of the twelfth century, although the translations were updated several times until William of Moerbeke’s translation in the mid-13th century. Aristoteles, Metaphysics, ed. Gudrun Vuillemin-Diem, trans. Anonyma sive ‘Media,’ (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 1049b 19-26, Emphasis added: “Dico . . . hoc quidem homine iam ente secundum actum, et frumento et vidente prius est tempore materia et sperma et visibile, que potentia sunt homo et frumentum et videns, et nondum actu; sed horum tempore priora diversa sunt entia actu ex quibus ea facta sunt; semper enim ex potestate ente fit quod est actu ens ab in actu ente, ut home ex homine, et musicus ex musico, semper movente aliquo prius, sed movens actu iam est.” My translation is: “I say indeed that this man now existing in act, and [this] wheat and [this] seer seeing are in time prior to the matter, sperm and the visible, which are man, wheat, and seeing in potentiality and not yet in act; but prior to these in time are different beings in act from which these are made; for always being in act comes from being in potentiality by being [already] in act, as man from man, and musical from musical, always something moving first, but a moving that is already in act.” 13 As Aristotle cautions against in Aristotelis, Physica (translatio uetus), trans. Iacobus Veneticus, A.L. VII.1, fasc. secundus, edd. F. Bossier et J. Brams, 1990, Aristoteles Latinus Database (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), Clavis : 07.1, liber 1, cap. : 8, p. 36, l. 7 (Bekker : 191a) - p. 37, l. 5 (Bekker : 191b). 14 See n. 15 below. 12

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William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus or present to it. And so, such dispositions are either intellective operations in act or acts of understanding or of knowledge in act, since it is not possible to imagine that they would otherwise be likenesses of the agent intellect. Hence, the agent intellect will be understanding or knowledge in act. . . . (William, DA 7.3, Teske 432).15

Similarly, William’s interpretation forbids the agent from being receptive as it would be if, for instance, it should receive the intelligible form. Such receptivity, William argues, would disqualify the agent intellect from being an agent, properly speaking. In fact, if the “agent” should be receptive, it would be no different from the material or possible intellect: [The agent] must also understand through itself by a continuous act of understanding. For if it were understanding only in potency, this name by which it is called the agent intellect would in no sense be appropriate for it. Moreover, it would need another agent intellect by which it might be brought from potency to the act of understanding, and in this way the regress would be infinite. . . Moreover, since it is truly an agent intellect in definition and in name, it will not receive from elsewhere or from outside any disposition by which it is helped so that it comes to understand something in act; otherwise, it would not be an agent, but a potential, possible or material intellect. (William, DA 7.3, Teske 430-1).16

William sees his conclusion that Aristotelian activity requires an agent that pre-posses the forms and whose act is thus complete, also at work in a version of Platonic recollection that I take to be Roger Bacon’s. For 15

William, DA 7.3, 206b: “Quoniam omne quod naturaliter, ac per se ipsum agit vel aliquid imprimit, imprimit vel [i.] similitudinem suam, vel [ii.] similitudinem quae in ipso, et apud ipsum est, necesse est passions omnes seu quascumque dispositiones qua influentur intellectui materiali ab intellectu agente similitudines esse ipsius intellectus agentis, vel dispositionis unius aut plurium quae in ipso vel apud ipsum sunt. Quapropter unaquaeque earum est agens, vel similitude intellectus agentis secundum aliquam dispositionem quae in ipse vel apud ipsum est. Quare huiusmodi dispositiones vel intellectus sunt in effectu, sive intellectiones sive scientiae in effectu; Quare intellectus agens erit intellectus, sive scientia in effectu .” 16 William, DA 7.3, 206a: “. . . et propter hoc intelligens etiam per semetipsam actu continuo intelligendi: si enim potentia tantum intelligens esset, nullo modo congrueret ei nominatio haec qua nominatur intellectus agens. Amplius necessarius ei esset alius intellectus agens per quem educeretur de potentia in effectum intelligendi, et hoc modo iret res in infinitum. . . . Amplius cum sit verae rationis, et veri nominis intellectus agens, non erit recipiens aliunde vel a foris dispositionem aliquam, qua adjuvetur ut fiat intelligens aliquid in effectu; alioquin non esset intellectus agens, set potens, possibilis, et materialis.”

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Bacon, the finitude of human knowing is then accounted for by maintaining that the agent intellect within my soul contains all the forms in act, but is known only partially.17 On the one hand, it is significant that Bacon’s noetic adheres to the conclusion William also reaches, that the agent intellect’s act is constantly complete and therefore not receptive. However, in William’s eyes, there is a different flaw in Bacon’s noetic; it pre-supposes a divisible soul. William writes, It is obvious to every [soul] that understands through itself that it is understanding, and it understands that it understands. And it does not understand that it understands in part or in a part of itself and that something of it or about it, if one may speak this way, does not understand. And as you have often heard in the preceding parts, it understands that its own act of understanding and its being are indivisible. It is, therefore, obvious to it that its essence is nothing but the material intellect, and on this account the agent intellect is itself neither its essence nor part of it (William, DA 7.3, Teske 431-2).18 17 Quaestiones supra Undecimum Primae Philosophiae Aristotelis in Opera Hactenus Inedita Rogeri Baconis (Oxford, 1909-40) 7.110.1-17: “Alius est intellectus creatus materie transmutabili conjunctus, scilicet corpori, et hic est duplex; quidam est agens, scilicet una pars intellectus elevata ad superiora contemplandum, et hec vocatur intellectus agens, et hec non intelligit per administrationem sensuum, set per exempla sibi innata, confusa tamen; et quantum ad hanc partem non suscipit intellectus lassitudinem, langorem in intelligendo, et hic est intellectus agens (qui) remanet in anima quando a corpore separata est. Alter est intellectus possibilis, scilicet altera pars intellectus vel rationis quando ratio se inclinat ad inferiora, et hic intelligit per administrationem sensuum, de quo dicitur ‘nichil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu’; de quo dicitur,’ omne nostrum intelligere est cum continuo et tempore’. Et hic lassitudinem, et fatigationem, langorem suscipit in consecutione intelligendi; set non agens quamvis idem sint in substantia quia intelligere agentis non est mensuratum a tempore.” Timothy Noone, “The Franciscans and Epistemology: Reflections on the Roles of Bonaventure and Scotus,” Medieval Masters: Essays in Honor of Msgr. E.A. Synan (Houston, Texas: Ctr. for Thomistic Studies, 1999), 73 drew my attention to Bacon’s authorship of this noetic in relation to Bonaventure’s text. See n. 18 below for Bonaventure’s reiteration of this argument. 18 William, DA 7.3, 206b: “Amplius manifestum est unicuique intelligenti per semetipsam quod ipsa intelligens est, ipsaque intelligit se intelligere, et non intelligit se intelligere in parte, sive in partem sui, sed ut ita dicatur intelligit aliquid sui, sive de se non intelligere in parte, sive in partem sui, sed ut dicatur intelligit aliquid sui, sive de se non intelligere, et sicut saepe audivisti in praecedentibus ipsa intelligit, et suum intelligere, et suum esse impartibile esse, quapropter manifestum est ei quod suum intelligere in sua essentia est, non autem est nec esse potest, nisi in ipso intellectu materiali. Manifestum igitur est ipsi quod

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Here, William follows Augustine in maintaining that the soul is a strong unity, which means that while it has different powers like the intellect and the will, the soul is ontologically simple and cannot be divided into parts.19 For William, it would therefore make no sense to say that the agent intellect is a subconscious intellectual “part” that gradually transfers forms into the soul’s consciously aware intellect (i.e. the material intellect) since by virtue of its real, strong unity, the human intellect is fully transparent to itself. It follows, contrary to Bacon’s proposal, that none of the intelligible forms in the soul’s agent intellect could ever be hidden from consciousness. Thus, such an intrinsic agent intellect would imply that the soul knows all things always. This is effectively, for William, a reductio of Bacon’s position that there is a “full,” i.e. one that continuously possesses the intelligibles, agent intellect within the soul: Hence, the agent intellect will be understanding or knowledge in act, and in this way the reasoning will return to the point that they who make this assertion find it necessary to admit that the human soul understands or knows in act all the intelligibles that are naturally knowable by it, and this is so whether the agent intellect is a part of the human soul or the human soul itself or whether it is some habit (William, DA 7.3, Teske 432).20

essentia sua non est nisi intellectus materialis: et propter hoc intellectus agens sive formalis, nec ipsa essentia ejus est, nec de ipsa.” The very same argument against this Baconian position appears in Bonaventure’s Sentence Commentary. See Bonaventure, 2 Sent. distinction 24, part 1, article 2, question 4, Respondeo (CS 2.571a-b): “Non debemus cogitare . . . et aliquid cognoscat intellectus agens, quod tamen homo, cuius est ille intellectus, ignoret. Haec enim vana sunt et frivola, ut aliquid sciat intellectus meus, quod ego nesciam.” 19 See William’s rejection of the notion that the soul is composed of faculties, or powers at DA 3.1-3.6. Following William’s conclusion, I am connecting “full” with “act” and “part” with “receptive/potential,” in the sense that only an intelligence constantly thinking all the intelligibles, and therefore “full” of forms, is active enough to cause intellection. Later in his De anima 7.6, 211b, Teske 445, William explicitly uses the language of fullness [plena formis] in describing what he takes to be Aristotle’s own understanding of the agent intellect. Teske correctly points to the Liber de causis, para. 92 as William’s actual source for this claim. 20 William, DA 7.3, 206b: “Quare intellectus agens erit intellectus, sive scientia in effectu, et per hoc redibit ratiocination ad id ut necesse habeant confiteri qui ita ponunt animam humanum esse intelligentem vel scientem omnia intelligibilia sibi naturaliter scibilia in effectu; et hoc sive intellectus agens sit pars animae humanae sive ipsa anima humana, sive habitus aliquis ut praeaudivisti.”

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Having dismissed any version of Platonic recollection, and so leaving Bacon behind, William acknowledges there is yet another way the agent intellect could be conceived as existing within the soul. In this view, which I suggest is held by two of William’s contemporaries, the Franciscan John of La Rochelle and the still-unidentified author of Summa Fratris Alexandri, book 2, the agent intellect is within the soul, but is not full of forms. Significantly, this is also the position that Albert will defend. First, William describes this stance writing, If anyone [holds that] the agent intellect is created only for illuminating the material intellect, since it does not shine upon itself for the purpose of some knowledge, for it does not know anything, it follows that it shines only upon the material intellect and is light for it and impresses upon it its likeness. . . . (William, DA 7.3, Teske 432-3).21

Unlike the intrinsic, hidden “full” agent intellect proposed by Bacon, the “empty” agent intellect is an instrumental intellectual light, a power of the soul that does not pre-possess the forms. Like Bacon’s intrinsic, full agent intellect, this interpretation could account for the phenomenon that the individual is agent of her own intellect. At the same time, the position also avoids Bacon’s proposal to divide the indivisible soul into parts, one hidden beneath the soul’s awareness. However, despite these seeming advantages, William takes this third interpretation to fail in another respect. On William’s reading of Aristotelian causation, an empty agent simply could not be the efficient cause of intellection since it would lack the intelligible forms; if it were empty of forms, the agent would then lack the completeness of knowledge that it donates to the material intellect in causing the material intellect to actually think.22 As William sees it, then, the only agent conceivable as an efficient cause is the “full” agent intellect with all of its untenable implications: . . . If, then, it impresses knowledge in act upon the material intellect, it is necessary that the agent intellect be knowledge in act or knowing in act through itself and, on this account, knowing all things that are naturally 21

William, DA 7.3, 207a, Teske 432-3: “Si quis est non est creatus nisi propter illuminandum materialem; cum in seipso nec sibi luceat ad cognitionem aliquam, cum nihil cognoscat. Quapropter soli intellectui materiali lucet, et ipsi est lux, similitudinemque suam imprimit. . . .” 22 See n. 16 above.

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William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus knowable. Hence, whether it is the soul itself or a part of it or a habit, it is necessary that the human soul through itself or in accord with it know everything that is naturally knowable, since it naturally has in itself the knowledge in act of everything knowable of this sort (William, DA 7.3, Teske 432-3).23

To clarify his argument that an “empty” agent is simply a contradiction in terms, William attacks the Peripatetic use of Aristotle’s analogy between sunlight and the agent intellect. Beginning from within a Peripatetic account of vision, William explains that the different colors exist as such regardless of whether light is or is not present: “And [it is obvious] that it is not true that colors do not exist at night, unless colors are understood as I have said, namely, as reflections mixed from the dispositions of bodies, which they call “potential” colors, and from the light cast upon bodies” (William, DA 7.3, Teske 434).24 In William’s clarification, the role of light is simply to transfer the already-existing act of the determinate colors to the eye by increasing their strength to the degree required to impress the eye: “But in every colored body there is in actuality that disposition which they want to be color in potency, which is undoubtedly so thin and weak 23 William, DA 7.3, 207a: “ . . . Si igitur scientiam in effectu imprimit intellectui materiali; necesse est ipsum intellectum agentem esse scientiam in effectu vel scientem in effectu per semetipsum; et propter hoc scientem omnium naturaliter scibilium. Quapropter si vel ipsa anima est, vel pars ejus, sive habitus, necesse est ipsam animam humanam per ipsum sive secundum ipsum scientem esse omnium naturaliter scibilium; cum in seipsa naturaliter habeat scientiam in effectu omnium hujusmodi scibilium.” 24 William, DA 7.4, 207b: “Et quonia non est verum colores non esse de nocte, nisi colores intelligunt quemadmodum dixi, videlicet reflexiones mixtas ex dispositionibus corporum, quas ipsi vocant colores scilicet potentiales, et lumine corporibus superasperso.” Although the question to what thinker William refers here is beyond the scope of my present argument, it is possible that William has in mind Avicenna’s account of vision, as expounded in The Cure, and summarized in McGinnis, Avicenna, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 104-107. While asserting, against the traditional Aristotelian account, that the transparent is always actual, Avicenna also maintains that “in those bodies that are not luminous, and so not visible in themselves, a radiant light coming from a luminous body must fall upon them and blend or mix with the potential color or disposition in the body. The resultant of this mingling of radiant light and potential color is for Avicenna what one, then, perceives as the actual perceptible color” (McGinnis, Avicenna, 107). I need to check these page numbers against the hard copy. The parallel I see is that both in William and Avicenna, the colour by itself has a determination as ‘this colour,’ or ‘that colour,’ but requires the boost provided by light if it is to be actually visible.

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that only by the help of the light poured out upon it is it able to act upon the organ of sight” (William, DA 7.4, Teske 434).25 When it comes to the material intellect’s acquiring knowledge of the intelligibles, however, this analogy to visible light is misleading as the agent intellect’s role is not simply to transfer to the material intellect intelligibles that are independently in act by boosting the force of their existing activity. To suppose that the activating power (the agent intellect) could be separated from what is in act (the intelligible form) suggests that the intelligibles are already in act without the agent intellect, a feature that would render the agent intellect redundant and therefore unnecessary: Moreover, if between the senses and the sensibles there is no need of an intermediate power of acting upon the senses that would make the sensed sensibles, which are in potency in the organs of the senses, to proceed into act and to be in act, but the external sensible things are sufficient for this, how are the intelligibles not sufficient for impressing their intelligible likenesses upon the material intellect? To put this more clearly, just as there is no agent sense, if I may say this, between the sensible and the sense, so it is not necessary that there be an agent intellect between intelligibles and the material intellect” (William, DA 7.4, Teske 434).26

In William’s analysis, the Peripatetic argument must maintain that the intelligibles are actually intelligible only so far as they are within the agent intellect. In other words, the “light” of the agent intellect is itself inseparable from the actually-being-thought-intelligibles, i.e. from the concrete intelligibility of the intelligibles: Hence, it is necessary that those things that come from the agent intellect into the material intellect be complete sciences, since they cannot be parts of them, and nothing else whatsoever can come from it into the material intellect. And thus the example of the sun or of its rays upon colored bodies

25

William, DA 7.4, 207a: “[I]n corpore vero omni colorato actualiter est dispositio illa quam volunt colorem potentia, quae proculdubio adeo tenuis est, et debilis, ut nonnisi adjutorio supereffusi luminis in instrumentum visus agere sufficiat.” 26 William, DA 7.4, 207b: “Amplius si inter sensus, et sensibilia non est necessaria virtus media agens in sensus quae faciat sensata sensibilia que potentia sunt in organis sensuum exire in effectum, et ea esse in effectu: sed ad hoc sufficiunt sensibilia quae extra sunt. Quomodo non sufficient intelligibilia ad imprimendas similitudines suas intelligibiles in intellectum materialem: et ut clarius hoc dicatur sicut non est sensus agens, ut ita dicatur inter sensibilia et sensum medius, ita non est necesse ut sit intellectus agens inter intelligibilia, et intellectam materialem.”

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William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus or colors has no place here, since it is obvious that the rays from the sun or its light upon bodies are not color (William, DA 7.4, Teske 434).27

As I have indicated above, the upshot of William’s understanding of Aristotelian activity requires that the agent intellect be full of forms in the sense that it is a thinker thinking them continuously: Moreover, how or for what reason is it called the agent intellect if it does not understand through itself and no other intellect understands by it or through it? And I understand “by it” formally. For only irrationally or falsely can something be called knowledge that itself does not know, and nothing else knows by it or through it formally. So too, something cannot be called whiteness truly and properly that is itself not white, and nothing else is white by participation in it.28

Since it would itself lack the intelligible form, an empty agent intellect would be unable to impress the knowledge-in-act of that form on the material intellect (and thus cause the material intellect also to know). William therefore rejects the interpretation of Aristotle’s noetic as proposing an intrinsic, empty agent intellect.

Albert’s Reply I now turn to Albert’s De homine, the title that the recently-published Aschendorf Verlag critical edition gives to the second half of Albert’s Summa de creaturis. Since Albert was in Paris from ~1242-1248, during which time he composed the De homine,29 the setting allows that Albert 27

William, DA 7.4, 207b: “Quare necesse est ea quae ab intellectu agente veniunt in intellectum materialem scientias esse completas, cum partes earum esse non possint, nec omnino aliud venire ab eo in intellectum materialem, et ita non habet locum exemplum solis, sive irradiationis ejus ad corpora colorata et colorem; cum manifestum sit irradiationem a sole vel luce ejus super corpora non esse colorem.” 28 7.4, Teske 435, 207b: “Amplius quomodo et qua de causa nominator intellectus agens si nec ipse intelligat per semetipsum, nec alius eo, sive per illum, et intelligo eo formaliter: non enim nominari potest nisi irrationabiliter, et false scientia quae nec sit, nec alius est sciens ipsas, sive per ipsam formaliter: quemadmodum albedo nominari non potest vere vel proprie quod nec albet, nec aliud participatione ipsius.” 29 Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (REP) 1998, s.v. “Albert the Great (1200-80),” by Alain de Libera, translated by Claudia Eisen Murphy, accessed November 08, 2015, https://www-rep-routledge-com.proxy.hil.unb.ca/articles/ albert-the-great-1200-80/v-1/introduction-of-philosophy-to-the-latins, maintains that, “Albert’s teaching in Paris was dominated by his writing the Summa de creaturis (Book of the Creatures) before 1246.”

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could have had direct access to William’s criticisms, which, as outlined above, were published in Paris in 1240. In looking at the portion of Albert’s De homine that analyzes the agent intellect, I aim to show that Albert’s defense of the third interpretation outlined above is directed against objections that are identifiable as William’s. I argue that Albert defends his interpretation against William by interpreting the agent intellect as what I will label a “limit concept.” Albert outlines his interpretation of the agent intellect in article three of his treatment of the agent intellect, which asks whether the agent intellect is a separate intelligence or not. His answer in the solutio is that “the human agent intellect is conjoined to the human soul, and is simple and does not have intelligibles, but acts itself on the possible intellect from the phantasms, just as Averroes says in his De anima Commentary.”30 Although I do not have enough room to explore the ramifications of the link to Averroes, it is noteworthy that Albert draws on the Arabic Commentator’s account of Aristotelian activity to maintain that there can be an “empty” agent that is a legitimate efficient cause of intellection.31 In objection fourteen of the same article, Albert outlines what I take to be the larger argument of William’s criticism of every interpretation of the agent intellect: The Aristotelian agent intellect fails to explain the agency of 30

Albert the Great, De homine (DH), De anima rationali, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3. Utrum intellectus agens sit intelligentia separata vel non, Solutio, vol. XXVII, Pars II of Alberti Magni Opera Omnia edenda curavit Institutum Alberti Magni Coloniense Bernhardo Geyer praeside (Münster: Aschendorff, 1951-), 412.72-76: “[D]icimus intellectum agentem humanum esse coniunctum animae humanae, et esse simplicem et non habere intelligibilia, sed agere ipsa in intellectu possibili ex phantasmatibus, sicut expresse dicit Averroes in commento libri de anima.” Subsequent references to Albert’s text are to the Cologne edition. All translations of Albert’s Latin are my own. 31 For a helpful analysis of Albert’s adoption of Avicenna’s account of preintellectual abstraction and Averroes’ account of intellectual abstraction, see Richard Taylor, “Albert the Great’s Account of Human Knowledge in his De homine: A Concoction Formed From the Writings of Avicenna and Averroes” (conference paper, DWMC, KU Leuven 5 June 2012), accessed November 8, 2015, http://academic.mu.edu/taylorr/Research_&_Teaching/Draft__Taylor_Leuven_5_J une_2012.html, esp. §’s 2.3, 2.4, 4.3, and 4.4. Taylor argues, interestingly, that the portion of Albert’s noetic drawn from Averroes is a mis-reading of Averroes’ study of Farabi, acknowledging that Albert’s goal was to “to conciliate [Aristotle’s De Anima] with fundamental Christian doctrines and the teachings of Augustine” (§2.4).

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individual thought because if it is to be an effective cause of intellection, the agent would have to already possess all intelligible forms, and would thus be a separate intelligence. Albert’s formulation of William’s position is more systematic than William’s own, but begins from William’s two possible causal elements: (i.) the agent intellect’s essence, or else (ii.) the intelligible forms present within the agent intellect:32 The agent intellect either acts on the possible [i.] by the action of its own substance, or [ii.] [by the action] of some form existing in itself. If in the first way [i.], since by its own substance it is itself one thing, it would not make an action in the possible intellect unless in [only] one way, being itself [that] one thing, which is manifestly false since there are many intelligibles according to which the possible intellect is activated. . . .33

The second sentence invokes Aristotle’s insight that precisely in order to explain how, in discursive thinking the learner’s intellect possesses a plasticity that becomes, and thereby knows all things, the possible intellect cannot itself be any one of these intelligibles.34 Since the role of the agent intellect is to activate within the material intellect any of the full set of 32

See William, DA 7.3, as cited in n. 15 above. William uses slightly different language than Albert, but I take [i.] in that passage to be the agent intellect’s essence, understood as some singular thing distinct from [ii.] the intelligibles taken as knowledge-in-act, or some kind of accident of the agent intellect’s essence as conceived in [i.]. 33 Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, Obj. 14, 409.58-65: “Fortius autem ad idem obicitur sic: Intellectus agens aut agit in possibilem actione suae substantiae, aut alicuius formae existentis in ipso. Si primo modo, cum sua substantia sit eodem modo se habens et una, non faceret in possibili actionem nisi uno modo se habentem et unam, quod manifeste falsum est, cum sint multa intelligibilia secundum quae intellectus possibilis efficitur in actu. . . .” I discuss Albert’s argument regarding [ii] below. 34 Cf. William’s iteration of this premise at DA 7.4, 207a, Teske 433-4: “For the material intellect by itself has in actuality no disposition except receptivity alone [intellectui namque materiali secundum se nulla dispositio est actualiter nisi sola receptibilitate].” Both thinkers are referring to Aristotle’s De anima 429a 18-24: “Oportet igitur si intelligit omnia ut sit non mixtum, sicut dixit Anaxagoras ut imperet, scilicet ut cognoscat. Si enim in eo apparuerit apparens impediet alienum, quia est aliud. Et sic non habebit naturam nisi istam scilicet quod est possibilis. Illud igitur de anima quod dicitur intellectus (et dico intellectum illud per quod distinguimus et cogitamus) non est in actu aliquod entium antequam intelligat.” (Aristoteles, De anima in Averrois Cordubensis, commentarium magnum in Aristotelis de anima libros, ed. F. Stuart Crawford [Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1953]), pp. 383 and 387).

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intelligibles, there is a correlative requirement that the causal impression made on the material intellect by the agent intellect also be unrestricted to any one determinate intelligible like the agent intellect’s own single essence.35 Otherwise, one could not explain the thinking of anything other than that single essence. I have indicated above that William does initially distinguish between (i.) and (ii.), but quickly collapses this distinction because legitimate causation requires the agent intellect to give to the material intellect knowledge-already-in-act, a self-complete activity of thinking that does not permit a distinction between what thinks (the agent intellect’s essence) and what is thought (the intelligible form).36 Albert’s objection analyzes this distinction, specifying the Aristotelian reason why the agent intellect’s single essence, taken alone, is insufficient to cause intellection, thus making William’s objection more thorough. After demonstrating that the agent intellect’s essence, understood as one determinate form, cannot cause intellection, the objection then turns to consider (ii.), an agent intellect that shapes the possible intellect by donating in one way or another the forms that it possesses: . . . If in the second way [ii.], then the agent intellect will have species and forms of all intelligibles, since according to one species it could not activate diverse intelligibles; therefore it will have in its power the specific intelligibles [specialitates=special qualities] and the general intelligibles [generalitates] of all things. Therefore, either [a] it has them through receiving, so that at some time it will not have [them], or [b] it is and was always in act according to them. If in the first way [a], then the agent intellect would be in potency and would not differ from the possible intellect. If in the second way, then the agent intellect will be an intelligence full with more and less universal forms [i.e. the specialitates and generalitates mentioned above]. Since, therefore this is fitting of the separate intelligence, the agent intellect will be a separate intelligence.37 35

Cf. n. 34. The correlative point that Albert makes about the agent intellect can be supported by Aristotle, DA 430 a17-18, Crawford 440: “Et iste intellectus etiam est abstractus non mixtus neque passibilis, et est in sua substantia actio.” 36 See Teske 432, 206b, as cited above in n. 15. 37 Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, Obj. 14, 409.65-76: “ . . . Si secundo modo, tunc intellectus agens habebit species et formas omnium intelligibilium, quia secundum unam speciem non posset agere diversa intelligibilia; ergo habebit penes se specialitates et generalitates omnium rerum. Aut igitur habet eas per acceptionem, ita quod quandoque non habuerit, aut semper est et fuit in actu secundum ipsas. Si primo modo, tunc intellectus agens esset in potentia et non differret a possibili. Si secundo modo, tunc intellectus agens erit intelligentia plena formis minus et magis universalibus. Cum igitur hoc sit proprium intelligentiae separatae, intellectus agens erit intelligentia separata.”

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This part of objection 14 follows the same logical sequence in William’s De anima text, arriving at the same conclusion: Only an agent that prepossesses all the forms can cause intellection, and this kind of agent cannot be within the soul. The objection first describes what I have labelled an “empty” agent intellect that, although not specified by Albert, might be within the soul, i.e. one that does not pre-possess the forms, but itself receives them. The problem with interpretation (ii.a) is that it would identify the agent intellect with the material intellect, which is also William’s argument.38 As I have illustrated, from William’s standpoint it follows that in proposing an agent intellect, one must be proposing interpretation (ii.b), the proposal that the agent intellect is extrinsic and “full.”39 Note that in arriving at this conclusion, Albert’s objection fourteen presents every step in William’s argument, including William’s conclusion that each interpretation of the agent intellect fails to support the premise that the individual causes his own thinking: (i.), that the agent intellect causes by its own essence, taken as something other than knowledge in act, (ii.a), that the “empty” agent intellect first receives and then passes on the intelligible forms to the material intellect, and (ii.b), that the “full” agent causes by impressing the intelligible forms, but this agent must be conceived as an intelligence, existing outside the soul. Objection seventeen in Albert’s text provides a more complete defense of William’s conclusion that, since receptivity and Aristotelian activity are mutually exclusive, and since the agent donates understanding-in-act, interpretation (ii.b) is the only tenable interpretation of the agent of human thinking: [1] Everything that receives something is in potentiality to that thing. [2] The agent intellect is not in potentiality to anything because it is an agent, universally speaking. [C1] Therefore, the agent intellect does not receive anything. Thence it follows that: [3] Everything that does not receive something to be understood [i.e. an intelligible form] understands by an understanding not caused by [extrinsic] things. [4] The agent intellect does not receive anything to be understood [i.e. any intelligible form]. [C2] Therefore, it understands by an understanding not caused by [extrinsic] things. 38 39

See William, DA 7.3, as cited in n. 16 above. Cf. n. 23 above.

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But, . . . [5] Everything that understands by an understanding not caused by [extrinsic] things is an intelligence and separate substance. [6] The agent intellect understands in this fashion; [C3] Therefore, the agent intellect is an intelligence and a separate substance. The first [premise] of this last syllogism is proved from this [premise], that the rational soul is not in the body unless it is perfected by science and virtue, as the saints and philosophers say. The second [premise] is proved in the preceding syllogisms. Truly, the propositions of the preceding syllogisms are evident.40

This argument also supports William’s conclusion that (ii.b) is the only tenable interpretation of the agent intellect by focusing on the difference between, on the one hand, human thinking, which is partial and discursive, and thus dependent on extrinsic causation and, on the other hand, the intellectual activity of the agent intellect. The argument implies that the 40

Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, Obj. 17, 410.28-43: “[1] Omne quod recipit aliquid, est in potentia ad illud; [2] intellectus agens non est in potentia ad aliquid, eo quod ipse est agens universaliter; ergo [C1] intellectus agens non recipit aliquid. Inde sic: [3] Omne quod non recipit aliquid intelligendo, intelligit intellectu non causato a rebus; [4] intellectus agens non recipit aliquid intelligendo; ergo [C2] intelligit intellectu non causato a rebus; [5] sed omne quod intelligit intellectu non causato a rebus est intelligentia et substantia separata; [6] intellectus agens sic intelligit; ergo [C3] intellectus agens est intelligentia et substantia separata. Prima huius ultimi syllogismi probatur ex hoc quod anima rationalis non est in corpore nisi ut perficiatur scientia et virtute, ut dicunt sancti et philosophi. Secunda vero probatur in syllogismis praecedentibus. Propositiones vero syllogismorum praecedentium per se sunt manifestae.” The argument of DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.6, Obj. 1, 420.1-7 re-iterates William’s assumption that, when it is applied to intellection, Aristotelian activity logically requires the agent intellect to be a thinker continuously thinking the forms: “[7] Every intellect [that is] understanding understands something. [8] The agent intellect understands. [C4] Therefore, it understands something. The first [premise] is proved from this, that every understanding is of something intelligible. The second [premise], however, is written in De anima 3, where the Philosopher says that the agent intellect ‘does not sometimes understand and sometimes not,’ meaning through this that it always understands.” The Latin text is: “[7] Omnis intellectus intelligens aliquid intelligit; [8] intellectus agens intelligit; [C4] ergo aliquid intelligit. Prima probatur ex hoc quod omnis intellectus est alicuius intelligibilis. Secunda vero scribitur in tertio de anima, ubi dicit Philosophus quod intellectus agens ‘non quandoque intelligit et quandoque non’, innuens per hoc quod semper intelligat.”

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agent intellect’s activity is self-complete repeatedly denying that it is caused by anything extrinsic. Premise (5), supported by the final paragraph’s note that incarnate intelligence is marked by discursive improvement in science and virtue, is logically identical to William’s argument that to posit a “full” intrinsic agent intellect is contrary to our experience of our thinking, which we experience as proceeding discursively, part by part, rather than as a continuous knowing of all things.41 Premise (6), supported by the preceding premises, denies any extrinsic causation, and therefore implies William’s argument that the agent intellect would have to already possess the full set of intelligibles as continuously being thought. To judge from Albert’s responses, I suggest that he sees the rejection of (ii.a) as deriving from William’s flawed interpretation of the agent intellect’s activity. William’s interpretation leads him from the correct minor premise (2) and the correct conclusion (C1) to infer premise (6), which states that the agent intellect must be a thinker, a thing that thinks. Indeed, when interpreting the agent intellect’s activity as he does, William must conclude that (ii.a) is untenable. However, Albert’s ad 14 defends (ii.a) by proposing a different interpretation of the agent’s activity than William’s, one that is simple42 and oriented towards the phantasms: The agent intellect acts through its own substance and not through some intelligible species that it has within itself. . . . For the act of the agent intellect is determined toward the phantasms [determinatur ad phantasma], and so determined, it moves the possible intellect and leads it out into act, just as the action of light is determined toward colours [determinatur ad colores], and so determined, leads vision out into act. And through this it is clear that the agent intellect is not a separate substance, full with forms.43

On the one hand, this account of a “simple” agent intellect, whose act is outwardly-directed, complements Albert’s claim, also in ad 14, that the “diversity of actions of the agent intellect comes from the phantasms and

41

Cf. n. 23 above. See n. 30 above. 43 Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, ad 14, 414.22-38: “[I]ntellectus agens agit per suam substantiam et non per aliquam speciem intelligibilium, quam habeat apud se. . . . Actio enim intellectus agentis determinatur ad phantasma, et sic determinata movet intellectum possibilem et educit eum in actum, sicut actio luminis determinatur ad colores, et sic determinata visum educit in actum. Et per hoc patet quod intellectus agens non est substantia separata plena formis.” 42

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not from [the substance of] the agent intellect.”44 Proposing that the intelligible activated by the agent intellect need not be already within the agent intellect also agrees with argument (i.) of objection 14, namely that the agent does not cause intellection by impressing its own single essence as such.45 At the same time, in claiming that the intelligible content of the act of intellection is not within the agent intellect, Albert rejects William’s assumption that this content is necessarily within the agent intelligence’s continuous act. This is Albert’s critical move in defending (ii.a) against William’s critique. However, in evaluating Albert’s claim that the agent activates content derived from the phantasms since its act is outwardlydirected, William’s further question in obj. 14 becomes more pressing: How does the agent intellect take from the phantasms the intelligible content that it activates in the possible intellect without the agent itself being receptive, and thus being identical to the possible intellect?46 The answer comes in clarifying that when Albert describes the act of the agent intellect as “determinatur ad phantasma,”47 he is describing a simple agent intellect whose activity is in itself complete, purely formal ‘intelligibility’ that is, despite being exclusively formal, nevertheless an existent activity. Existing in this way, the agent also continuously provides the universal mode of intelligibility that activates the potentially-intelligible content in any available phantasm. It is important to see that in this description, Albert is answering William’s question about the agent’s receptivity, not by positing that the agent’s activity is made complete in activating the potentially-intelligible phantasm’s content, but is instead presenting the agent intellect’s activity as both complete even without reaching the phantasm and, as an epiphenomenon of its being pure, formal intelligibility, as an efficient cause that continuously activates the potentially-intelligible content of any available phantasms. In Albert’s account of vision, which supplements his analogy at the end of the last quotation, light activates colour, not by giving the colour its determinate species like its whiteness or its blackness, but by giving to the colour, which already possesses this esse materiale, an esse formale, a formal mode of existence by which the colour’s specific content can be seen:

44 Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, ad 14, 414.25-28: “[D]icendum quod diversitas actionis intellectus agentis non est ex intellectu agente, sed ex phantasmate.” Cf. William’s critique of the interpretation of the agent intellect as strictly an instrumental intellectual light, as cited in nn.’s 21 and 23 above. 45 See n. 33 above. 46 See n. 37 above. 47 See n. 43 above.

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William of Auvergne and Albertus Magnus Colour has a two-fold esse, namely an esse materiale, which it has in a dense body, which is not penetrable, but sets the boundaries of vision; and an esse formale, according to which it moves the sense. . . . For when the Philosopher says in [his] book De anima, “Indeed, the visible is colour, and that is to say by [colour’s] ratio,” he understands that colour is visible, not in every mode, but in a formal respect, that is through the act of light, which gives to it the act and species according to which it can act on vision;48

In this account, the act of light is oriented toward the colours [determinatur ad colores] in the sense that light transforms the colours, neither by creating them ex nihilo, nor by drawing them out of its own essence, but by simultaneously donating and activating their own esse formale, which allows the colours into the activity that is vision. When, for instance, a flashlight illuminates a white wall in an otherwise dark room, the light does not make the wall white, as opposed to blue, or black, or red; prior to being illuminated, the wall sitting there in the dark already possesses whiteness materially, as caused by its first qualities [primas qualitates].49 Instead, in illuminating the wall’s whiteness, the light of the flashlight provides a new mode of existence that comes from the light; this ‘being-visible’ is a mode added to the colour’s own proper, non-visible mode of existence, its esse materiale.50 Albert indicates that the content of 48

Albert, DH, De anima sensibili, Partes apprehensivae deforis, De visu, 1.3.3.1. Quid sit color, Solutio, 166.23-26 and 166.54-59: “Color habet duplex esse, scilicet esse materiale, quod habet in corpore spisso, quod non est pervium, sed terminat visum; et esse formale, secundum quod ipse movet sensum. . . . Cum enim dicit Philosophus in libro de anima: ‘Visibile quidem est color, et quod ratione est dicere’, intelligit quod color sit visibilis non omni modo, sed in ratione formali, hoc est per actum luminis, qui dat ei actum et speciem, secundum quod potest agere in visum.” For Aristotle’s argument, see DA 2.7, 418a26 ff., Crawford 229 ff. Although it is outside the scope of my paper, it would be interesting and probably fruitful to compare Albert’s interpretation of Aristotle’s analogy to light and colour to Averroes’ interpretation, at Long Commentary, Crawford 232.64 ff. 49 Albert, DH, De visu, 1.3.3.1., Solutio, 166.43-53: “Dicamus igitur quod est considerare colorem secundum relationem ad primas qualitates, quae causant ipsum in corpore determinato. Et hoc est esse ipsius quod habet in materia, hoc est in corpore determinato; et sic color bene est in tenebris, et sic non diffinitur in aliqua dictarum diffinitionum, quia sic non infert passionem in potentia visiva. Est etiam considerare colorem secundum relationem ad agens illud quod dat ei esse formale, quo possit immutare visum et medium visus. Et sic color habet esse in lumine et non in tenebris.” 50 Albert, DH, De visu, 1.3.3.1., Solutio, 166.30-32: “Cum igitur color per se non sit qualitas activa vel passiva, alterabit non actu proprio, sed actu alterius agentis.”

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the visible colour’s esse formale belongs to the colour, as even in the first sentence, which positions “colour” as the grammatical subject, the owner of a “two-fold esse.”51 The wall’s illuminated ‘visible whiteness’ is therefore an esse formale that is at once given to and activated from within the wall’s whiteness. Almost as if he had William’s explanation of the same analogy in mind, Albert agrees that colour is a determination in itself (the esse materiale), but that the role of light is not merely to strengthen that already-existent act. Rather, light adds the new formal mode required if that original determination is ever to be seen.52 In other words, against William’s claim that the analogy to light is misleading, Albert holds that there is a true parallel between light and the agent intellect; neither is redundant or unnecessary. It is also important to emphasize that light’s esse formale, taken in itself as a pure, formal mode of existence without any further determination, does not become more truly what it already is when it provides ‘visibility’ to colour. Further on in his analysis of vision, Albert follows Aristotle, explicitly characterizing light as active, while the transparent is its passive counterpart: The nature, which air and water share in common with the everlasting body above is duplex, in one part potential and in the other part actual. That which is potential is the diaphanous, that is the transparent . . . However, that which is actual is the received light, which makes the transparent to be transparent in act.53

Although I do not wish to wander too far into Albert’s account of vision and away from my focus on Albert’s account of the agent intellect, I think it is sufficient for my purpose to indicate that Albert’s Aristotelian 51

See also Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.6. Qualiter [intellectus agens] intelligat, et de modo actionis eius, ad 9, 422.39-45: “[S]i quaeritur, secundum quid phantasma movet intellectum possibilem, dicendum quod secundum naturam universalis, quae est in ipso, licet non sit in eo ut universalis, sed ut particularis. Et propter hoc phantasma movens est in potentia movens respectu intellectus agentis, et haec natura quae est in particulari, per actum agentis efficitur actu universalis in intellectu possibili.” 52 Cf. William’s interpretation of Aristotle’s analogy to light at n. 25 above. 53 Albert, DH, De visu, 1.3.4., ad 1, 180.31-39: “natura, in qua communicant aër et aqua cum perpetuo superius corpore, duplex est, una ex parte potentiae et altera ex parte actus. Illa quae est ex parte potentiae, est diaphanitas, hoc est transparentia . . . Illa vero quae est ex parte actus, est lumen receptum, quod facit transparens in actu esse transparens.”

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characterization of light as what activates the passive, receptive transparent medium, shows that Albert understands light as an exclusively active principle. Even without illuminating anything, light is already a complete activity in its pure, formal mode. Since it is the activating actuality, it does not receive anything and thus is not made more complete as light when it illuminates colour. This relation between light and colour is the foundation for Albert’s explanation of the relation between the agent intellect and the intelligible form. In ad 17, Albert further refines his response to William’s objection that the only tenable version of the agent intellect is (ii.b):54 [It] should be said that we agree [with C1] that the agent intellect receives nothing because otherwise it would not [i.e. as against minor premise 2] be an agent universally. [W]e also agree [with C2] that the agent intellect does not understand by an understanding caused ‘by’ [exterior] things, if the preposition ‘by’ denotes an efficient cause because the [exterior] things do not produce their own likenesses in the agent intellect; on the contrary, in this manner the possible intellect understands by an understanding caused by [exterior] things. If, however, the preposition ‘by’ denotes a material cause, which, nevertheless, it does not commonly denote, then we agree [against C2] that the agent intellect understands by an understanding caused ‘by’ [exterior] things, because its [“]understanding[“] is over things by abstracting from them the universal. For the [“]understanding[“] of the agent is just as if we should see [by] extramission, receiving nothing within; for so would vision be above the [exterior] things and would lead visibility into them. The understanding of the possible [intellect], however is just as if we should see, receiving within, and not sending anything out; for so the [exterior] thing acts on sight and generates in it its own likeness. From this, however, [C2] that the agent so understands by an understanding not caused by [exterior] things, it does not follow [C3] that it is a separate intelligence because the understanding of a separate intelligence is oriented toward a form, which it possesses. The agent intellect, however, is oriented to a phantasm, which is outside itself.55 54

See n. 40 above. Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, ad 17, 414.61-415.6: Ad aliud dicendum quod bene concedimus quod intellectus agens nihil recipit, quia aliter non [premise 2] esset agens universaliter. Et bene concedimus etiam quod intellectus agens non intelligit intellectu causato a rebus, si haec praepositio ‘a’ notat causam efficientem, quia res suas similitudines non faciunt in intellectu agente; immo per hunc modum intellectus possibilis intelligit intellectu causato a rebus. Si autem haec praepositio ‘a’ notat materiam, quam causam tamen non notat proprie, tunc bene concedimus [against C2] quod intellectus agens intelligit intellectu causato a rebus, quia intellectus eius est super res abstrahendo ab eis universale. Intellectus enim agentis est sicut si videamus extra mittentes nihil intus suscipientes; sic enim visio esset supra res et ageret in eis visibilitatem. Intellectus 55

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In this response to William, Albert first accepts conclusion (C1) and minor premise (2), agreeing that insofar as it is in act, the agent intellect is not in potentiality to anything and is therefore not itself receptive. Albert’s disagreement with William is, however, in his interpretation of the way the agent’s activity is related to the intelligible content originating from the exterior thing. Albert puts this in terms of a disagreement as to how conclusion (C2) is interpreted; while William can only interpret (C2)’s preposition ‘by’ as indicating that the exterior object acts as the efficient cause of intellection. Instead, the preposition “over” indicates that the agent intellect remains entirely distinct from the exterior thing, while at once providing it the mode ‘intelligibility,’ a mode superior to the object’s natural mode of material existence. His point is that the agent intellect’s donating, even while unlocking the exterior thing to thinking, remains purely active; all the receiving is done, the second half of the quotation states, by the possible intellect, which then receives the form. Furthermore, the agent intellect’s unlocking the exterior object’s determinate content is, Albert proposes, the agent intellect’s “understanding.” Albert’s use of “understanding” in a way that could hardly be called common. Still, if “understanding” is interpreted in the exclusively active sense of providing the formal mode ‘intelligibility,’ then against (C2), the agent intellect’s “understanding” is indeed caused by the exterior thing; without the exterior sensible, there is no origin of the content that the agent intellect makes intelligible. It follows then, against (C3), that an agent intellect whose activity is oriented towards phantasms need not be a separate intelligence continuously thinking all intelligibles. autem possibilis est sicut si videamus intus suscipientes et nihil extra mittentes; sic enim res agit in visum et generat in eo suam similitudinem. Ex hoc autem [C2] quod agens sic intelligit intellectu non causato a rebus, non sequitur [C3] quod sit intelligentia separata, eo quod intellectus intelligentiae separatae est determinatus ad formam quam habet. Intellectus autem agens determinatur ad phantasma, quod est extra se.” Cf. Albert’s concise reiteration of this account in literal terms in Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.5. Quid sit intellectus agens secundum substantiam et diffinitionem, ad 2, 419.16-23, where Albert defends his claim that the agent’s act is itself the formal mode, intelligibility, oriented towards the phantasms, and his correlative claim that the phantasms provide the content to be made intelligible, answering William’s objection that a single, “empty” agent could not activate a thinking of the wide variety of different intelligibles: “Ad aliud dicendum quod omnia intelligibilia inquantum intelligibilia sunt in eodem modo, et illum modum agit in eis intellectus agens, et determinabitur in sequenti quaestione. Quod autem intelligibilia sunt diversa, hoc est inquantum sunt diversorum intelligibilia, et hoc non habent ab intellectu agente. Unde bene concedimus quod intellectus agens eodem modo se habens facit idem in omnibus intelligibilibus.”

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Having argued that the agent intellect’s activity is outwardly directed, in article 6 Albert adds to his position the further claim that neither the agent intellect nor even the possible intellect is the thinker that thinks. Instead, ad 1 argues, the individual human soul understands, and does so through the agent and possible intellects, taken as the soul’s intellectual powers [vis]: To the first [objection], therefore, it should be said that to understand is properly [said] of the intellective soul itself, because acts and operations are of particulars; but there is in the soul, in the same way the agent intellect, and the possible intellect toward which the agent intellect operates as the efficient and formal causes; however, the possible intellect is as it were receiving and the subject of the intelligibles. And this is to speak properly. For Aristotle says in De anima, book 1, that “it is better not to say that the soul suffers or learns or understands, but man through the soul.” And likewise there is not an understanding of the intellect, but of the soul through the intellect. . . . 56

Revealing that his interpretation of the Aristotelian noetic is driven by a commitment to the notion of an intellectual self, Albert argues that the soul, rather than either the agent or possible intellect, is the individual to which the intellectual operations of abstraction and reception are referred. That is, the individual soul understands through the activating and receiving of its own agent and possible intellect, understood as psychological powers. Furthermore, neither one of these powers can act independently; each one requires the other’s operation in the soul’s single act of understanding. In relation to the possible intellect, the agent intellect behaves as the efficient cause of the soul’s understanding by activating the intelligible from the phantasm at once within the possible intellect just as, for instance, a potter activates the form of the bowl and shapes the clay in one and the same act. On the other hand, the agent intellect behaves as the formal cause by itself continuously being the pure, universal “intelligibility,” the formal activity that, in turn defines the soul’s act of understanding as specifically intellective. It is noteworthy that in likening 56

Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.6, ad 1, 421.25-38: “Ad primum ergo dicendum quod intelligere proprie est ipsius animae intellectivae, quia actus et operationes particularium sunt; sed est animae secundum intellectum agentem et possibilem, ad quod operatur intellectus agens sicut efficiens et forma, intellectus autem possibilis sicut recipiens et subiectum intelligibilium. Et hoc est proprie loqui. Dicit enim Aristoteles in primo de anima quod ‘melius est non dicere animam miserere aut discere aut intelligere, sed hominem per animam’.Et similiter intellectus non est intelligere, sed animae per intellectum.”

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the agent intellect’s activity to only the efficient and formal causes of the soul’s act of understanding, and not the final cause, Albert recognizes two critical points that are easier to see now that Albert’s account of the esse formale and esse materiale is before us. First, in assuming that the agent intellect’s activity must stand as an exemplar of the activity of thinking, pre-possessing the intelligibles, William’s (ii.b) necessarily takes the agent intellect’s full activity as the final cause of the intellective act.57 Secondly, the agent intellect’s activity need not exist as this perfect activity of knowledge in order to be a metaphysically tenable efficient-formal cause of knowledge-in-act, thus allowing (ii.a). The possible intellect, in Albert’s description, behaves as the material cause of the soul’s act of understanding, a role complementary to the agent intellect’s role as efficient and formal causes.58 For Albert, the possible intellect is the plasticity that, in receiving the form activated by the agent intellect, paradoxically becomes the object of understanding without itself ever being the object of understanding.59 In 57

It is important to note that William does not put his assumption in terms of the Aristotelian final cause. Albert’s formulation highlights a fundamental assumption in William’s analysis of the agent intellect, although an assumption that need not be made. This critical move allows Albert to hold (ii.a), thus reconciling the agent intellect with Augustine’s individual self. 58 In Albert’s account, there are two significantly different material causes at work in the act of understanding, the esse materiale, originating from the exterior sensed object described above, and the possible intellect, described here. One way of illustrating the difference between these two material causes is to see that the object’s esse materiale is the not-yet-intelligible origin outside the soul of the content that specifies the act of understanding. Although Albert does not use the distinction at this point in his text, the phantasm’s content could be conceived as the materia circa quam. On the other hand, the potential intellect is the nonphysical subject within the soul that can only receive this content once it has been made actually-intelligible. Likewise, this plasticity might be conceived as the materia in qua. For a useful analysis of Thomas Aquinas’ later distinctions between materia in qua, materia ex qua, and materia circa quam, which Thomas uses in a way similar to Albert’s use of them earlier in the De homine, see Joseph Pilsner, The Specification of Human Actions in St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially Chapter 6, part 1. 59 See Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.4.2. Utrum intellectus speculativus in actu sit res scita, Solutio, 434.60-68: “Aliam habet comparationem ad id in quo est ut in subiecto, et sic non est principium intelligendi, sed principium esse; et quia in intellectu est similitudo accidentalis, causat in ipso esse accidentale; quia vero in re est forma naturalis, facit in ipsa esse naturale. Et hoc attendens Philosophus dicit quod scientia modo quodam est res scita, et in alio loco dicit quod intellectus est idem actu cum eo quod intelligitur, sed esse est aliud.” In DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.4.1. Quid sit intellectus speculativus, Solutio, 432.55-60, Albert

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proposing that both intellectual powers are required to make the soul’s act of understanding what it is, Albert also indicates that to know the agent intellect’s activity requires considering it alongside the receptivity of the possible intellect, taken as its partner power.60 Once he has explained the inseparability of the agent and possible intellects, interpreted as psychological powers, Albert is in position to refine his analysis of the agent intellect’s act. As I have illustrated, in rejecting what I have labeled the “empty, intrinsic” agent intellect, William rejects (ii.a)’s proposal that the agent intellect “is created only for illuminating the material intellect, since it does not shine upon itself for the purpose of some knowledge, for it does not know anything.”61 Again, William’s reason for rejecting (ii.a) is that it seemingly fails to explain how the agent impresses knowledge in act on the possible explains that the speculative intellect is not a distinct kind of intellectual power, but rather the possible intellect in act: “Cum enim distinguitur possibilis intellectus a speculativo, non distinguitur ex parte subiecti, sed ex parte potentiae et actus. Possibilis enim est, qui est in potentia, et speculativus est, qui est in actu, et propter hoc a philosophis potius dicitur gradus intellectus quam alius intellectus.” 60 Although Albert makes this point in ad 1, as quoted in n. 56 above, he re-iterates it in ad 2 of the same article, writing, “[I]t should be said that the agent intellect, when understood according to itself, separated from the possible intellect, understands nothing. Now, it has not been separated except in potentiality [i.e. in the thinking of our above considerations], but it is joined in actuality [i.e. in being]. And on account of this [inseparability] that something which it understands actively is the intelligibles [intelligibilia] in which it understands itself as their act, just as if light could see itself, it would see itself in the colors as their act. But whether or not the agent intellect understands itself in this way because it is reflected over itself, many things of various kinds determine. To us, however, it seems that [the answer is] no, because we do not attribute any intellectual perfection to the possible intellect or to the agent through itself, but to each [in its relation to the other]. But we concede absolutely that the intellective soul understands itself.” The Latin text is: “Ad aliud dicendum quod intellectus agens secundum se separatus a possibili nihil intelligit. Non enim separatus est nisi in potentia, coniunctus autem actu. Et propter hoc illud aliquid quod intelligit active, est intelligibilia in quibus intelligit se ut actum ipsorum, sicut si lumen posset videre se, videret se in coloribus ut actum ipsorum. Sed utrum intellectus agens intelligat se hoc modo quod reflectatur super se vel non, multi diversimode determinant. Nobis autem videtur quod non, eo quod non attribuimus aliquem intellectum perfectum intellectui possibili vel agenti per se, sed utrique; sed bene concedimus animam intellectivam intelligere se” (Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.6, ad 1, 421.39-50). 61 See n. 21 above.

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intellect, since as far as William is concerned, knowledge in act is the selfcomplete activity of an intelligence thinking an intelligible form. In proposing that the agent intellect’s act is the single, formal, contentless mode of ‘intelligibility’ oriented to the phantasms, Albert has responded to William’s criticism, but still incompletely. If the agent intellect’s activity is really Aristotelian activity, it must be continuous whether or not phantasms are present. Otherwise, William would be justified in objecting that yet another agent would be required whenever a phantasm should appear.62 We are now in position to directly ask what the unceasing act of Albert’s proposed empty agent intellect would look like in itself and whether it could legitimately cause the individual soul’s spontaneous intellection of any determinate object. Recall that at the beginning of article 3, ad 14, Albert describes the agent intellect’s act as inseparable from the agent intellect’s substance, writing, “The agent intellect acts through its own substance and not through some intelligible species that it has within itself.”63 In specifying that the agent’s activity is through the agent’s substance (rather than being merely added on as an accident), Albert implies that the activity is continuous; so far as the agent exists, its activity persists.64 An activity through the agent’s substance is selfcomplete in the sense that the substance is constantly what it does. Such

62

See n. 16 above. See n. 43 above. 64 Also see n. 66 below. In discussing the perfect motion of the heaven as activity in his Metaphysics, written in 1263-67 (REP, s.v. “Albert the Great”), Albert identifies universal agency, which he explicitly identifies as the kind of agency belonging to superior intellects, with what is in act through its essence, a ceaseless, perfect, self-complete activity. This confirms, at least from his later text that the existence and essence of perfect activity are inseparable, which is the point I wish to make relative to Albert’s claim about the agent intellect in the DH text: “Hic autem motus [secundum quod est intellectus per seipsum universaliter agens et explicans seipsum in ea quae agit et perficit] non proprie motus est, sed est actio existentis in actu essentialiter et per seipsum, et haec actio quia essentialis est, numquam cessat manente ipsius intellectus substantia, et cum illa incorruptibilis sit, semper manebit in esse et agere. Et haec actio non est aliquid habens imperfectionis, sed est perfecti, quod suas exserit ex seipso perfectiones. Et talis est contemplatio intellectus, qua contemplatur seipsum et id quod ante eum est indeficiens sibi, et id quod post eum est, secundum quod est ex ipso. Ipse enim intellectus, contemplans se, contemplatur ex indeficienti in esse et agere indeficiens in esse et agere, et ideo haec actio nihil habet imperfectionis, sed tota est substantialis et naturalis et delectabilis” (Albert, Metaph. XI, tr. 3, c. 2, 536.647). 63

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activity is, like every Aristotelian activity, inseparable from the end it achieves.65 However, even while linking the agent intellect’s activity to its substance and maintaining that the agent intellect’s activity is continuous, Albert illustrates in article 6, ad 3, that it is intrinsically difficult to describe this continuous activity in positive terms. Adhering to the conclusion of ad 1, Albert examines the agent intellect not as if it were isolated, but in its relation to the possible intellect. What is new here is that the agent intellect-possible intellect partnership is considered in separation from the intelligible species, thus providing a glimpse of the agent’s act in itself, although once again through the analogy to light: To this which is asked whether it always understands itself, we say that yes, in that way by which we speak improperly, the agent intellect understands itself; for this is to understand itself as act of the possible; for its own understanding is to understand its being, since it is always in act. And this is because it is the act of the possible, but that act [when taken apart from any species] does not perfect the possible [intellect] unless [only] in a certain respect, just as if light through itself alone were in the eye without color, for then the eye would not be transformed by the act of colors, but there would not be a distinct transformation to some determinate species of color. Likewise when only the light of the agent is in the possible, then the possible is in an indistinct act according to any [aliquam] intelligible species, and the agent intellect understands itself as such a kind of act always [semper].66 65 In Metaphysics, 9.1048a 19-36, Aristotle illustrates the difference between the metaphysical categories of motion (by which he intends a means or process that does not possess its end) and, on the other hand, activity (which is perfect in the sense that it possesses its end completely) by contrasting the example of dieting to lose weight (here, the process is finished at the very moment the end is achieved) with the example of seeing an object (here the end is possessed at every moment during the activity). Cf. n. 64 above. 66 Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.6. ad 3, 421.51-70: “Ad hoc quod quaeritur, utrum semper intelligat se, dicimus quod sic, eo modo quo improprie dicimus intellectum agentem intelligere se; hoc enim est intelligere se ut actum possibilis; suum enim intelligere est suum esse, cum semper sit in actu. Et hoc est quod sit actus possibilis, sed ille actus non perficit possibilem nisi secundum quid, sicut si lumen per se solum esset in oculo sine colore, tunc enim esset immutatus oculus ab actu colorum, sed non esset distincta immutatio ad aliquam speciem coloris determinatam. Similiter quando solum lumen agentis est in possibili, tunc possibilis est in actu indistincto secundum aliquam speciem intelligibilis, et intellectus agens intelligit se ut talem actum semper. Et iste motus non excludit

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Despite the similarities between the agent intellect as activator of the intelligible and physical light as the activator of the visible, there is also an important difference. Although when there is no colour or medium present, there is no vision whatsoever, when there is no content from a phantasm, the agent intellect still understands itself as the (indeterminate) power that can always activate the possible intellect, given the presence of a phantasm’s content. However, as Albert’s continued reliance on the light analogy illustrates, the attempt to describe the agent intellect’s pure selfunderstanding, the attempt to isolate the agent intellect’s continuous activity as “intelligibility” itself, is an attempt to capture a particularly evasive limit concept, a concept discovered at the edge of both language and thought. The absence of concrete determination in the agent intellect’s activity makes the agent intellect, or its activity, intrinsically difficult both to think and to describe affirmatively. After all, the agent intellect’s continuous act is not concrete and determinate, like ‘understanding the form of humanity,’ or ‘understanding the form of house.’ Instead, it is the pure, self-reflexive ‘understanding of itself as intelligibility in general,’ and must be so if it is simple, as Albert claims it is. However despite this difficulty in capturing the agent intellect’s activity for thought, this activity is also not a mere abstraction. The existence of the agent intellect’s continuous, unceasing knowledge of itself as universal intelligibility, the intelligibility of any intelligible, allows it to spontaneously activate within the possible intellect any available phantasm, so causing the individual soul’s understanding of that thing. In ad 4, Albert re-iterates this subtle, but incisive claim: Because, however, it is objected that it is not always in act, it is clear from the above demonstrations [ex praehabitis] that [this] does not follow, but it follows that it is not in a distinct act toward an intelligible. Likewise, it does not follow that it does not understand itself, although it does not always understand itself as an intelligible distinct from others, still it always understands itself as an act of the intelligibles or of the possible intellect, as we have shown above through the simile to light and colors.67

motum intelligibilium, eo quod intellectus agens secundum illum sit actus omnium intelligibilium, sicut etiam motus luminis non excludit motum coloris in oculo, eo quod sit actus eius. Dictum autem Philosophi intelligitur de motibus animae diversis secundum diversas potentias et diversa obiecta.” 67 Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.6 ad 4, 421.71-422.5: “Quod autem obicitur quod non semper sit in actu, patet ex praehabitis quod non sequitur, sed sequitur quod non sit in actu distincto ad intelligibile. Similiter non sequitur quod non intelligat se, licet enim non semper intelligat se ut intelligibile distinctum ab

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So, although the agent intellect’s continuous activity is a limit concept that cannot be thought or described as a specific form, it nevertheless exists as the continuous, self-reflexive act of pure “intelligibility,” a simple psychological power, the efficient-formal cause of the individual’s thinking any and every form. I now return to article 3 of Albert’s treatment of the agent intellect in order to show that Albert intends his interpretation of the agent intellect as a psychological power, simple and without determinate forms, to designate for the soul a thinking of its own, natural and independent. At the tail end of article 3, Albert positions his account of (ii.a) against the sort of Avicennian-Augustinian illuminationism that William also rejects, responding directly to the question whether his interpretation of the agent intellect also preserves the independence of the thinking self. Objection 21 of Albert’s article 3 first proposes that Augustine’s De magistro supports this illuminationism: It seems that Augustine agrees on the same [point, i.e. that the agent intellect is God’s intellect] in his De magistro, where throughout he proves that man can understand nothing unless God teaches interiorly. Since, therefore the understanding of all men is by the light of the agent intellect, it seems that the agent intellect is nothing other than God instructing interiorly.68

Objection 22 would find 2 Cor 3:5 also claiming that the human intellect has no independence in intellection: “The Apostle seems to say the same thing to the Corinthians, where he says, ‘not because we are sufficient to think anything from ourselves as if out of ourselves, but because our sufficiency is from God.’”69 Responding to objection 21, Albert disagrees that the De magistro posits an exclusively receptive human intellect: “Augustine means that all light of our understanding is from the first cause and without it we can do nothing; but the agent intellect has from it and aliis, tamen semper intelligit se ut actum intelligibilium vel intellectus possibilis, ut supra ostendimus per simile in lumine et coloribus.” 68 Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, obj. 21, 411.29-33: “In idem videtur incidere Augustinus in libro De magistro, ubi per totum probat nihil posse hominem intelligere nisi deus doceat interius. Cum igitur omnis intellectus sit a lumine intellectus agentis, videtur intellectus agens nihil aliud esse quam deus instruens interius.” 69 Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, obj. 22, 411.34-37: “Idem videtur dicere Apostolus ad corinthios, ubi dicit: ‘Non quod sufficientes simus cogitare aliquid a nobis quasi ex nobis, sed quod sufficientia nostra a deo est’.”

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under it the nature of illuminating over the intelligibles of the understanding.”70 While preserving an open link between God and the agent intellect, Albert at once proposes that the agent intellect has been created and given to the human creature as one of its own distinctive powers. Albert’s reply to objection 21 clarifies the determination and limitation of this psychological power: “In this [letter, i.e. 2 Corinthians], he indicates that we do not understand certain intelligibles unless by the illuminating grace of God, as those things which are above reason; certain rational things, however, we do understand from ourselves, not out of ourselves, but out of the power of the agent intellect, which has been given to us by God.”71 While super-natural things like the divine Trinity, the incarnation, and so on, are outside the range of those things the agent intellect illuminates, Albert concludes article 3 by arguing that the agent intellect, as he has interpreted it, nevertheless gives to the individual human a borrowed (i.e. created) power and independence to know natural, rational things. This indicates that, despite his disagreement with William as to how to understand the agent intellect’s act, Albert is equally committed to a notion of individual selfhood that includes the individual’s possessing the spontaneous capacity for intellection.

Conclusion Through my analysis of this Medieval dialectical argumentation, I hope to have responded in one respect to Richard Dales’ call for greater clarity on William of Auvergne’s influence. First, I hope to have demonstrated that William and Albert the Great are both committed to giving an account of intellection that preserves the individual self in the sense that a self, properly speaking, is agent of its own intellection. Secondly, William cannot reconcile this demand with the Aristotelian account of causation. Thirdly, for Albert, who I hope to have illustrated, is responding to William’s distinctively-formulated objections, the agent intellect can be a simple power of soul rather than a thinker continuously thinking all the forms, and still be the efficient cause of intellection, even according to 70

Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, ad 21, 415.25-29: “ Ad aliud dicendum quod Augustinus in libro De magistro intendit quod omne lumen nostri intellectus est a causa prima et sine ipso nihil possumus facere; sed naturam illuminandi super intelligibilia intellectus agens habet ab ipso et sub ipso.” 71 Albert, DH, Vires apprehensivae, 2.2.3, ad 22, 415.32-36: “In hoc innuit quod quaedam intelligibilia non intelligimus nisi gratia dei illuminante, sicut ea quae sunt supra rationem; quaedam autem rationabilia intelligimus a nobis, sed non quasi ex nobis, sed ex virtute agentis intellectus, quae data est nobis a deo.”

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Aristotle’s accounts of activity and causation. The key to Albert’s claim is recognizing that the agent intellect’s continuous activity is by definition a limit concept, difficult to capture in thought and language, but nevertheless real and constantly present within the soul. Conceived in this subtle way, the agent intellect does indeed permit the individual to think at will.

INDIVIDUATION AND THE AFTERLIFE IN THOMAS AQUINAS AND SOME MUSLIM PHILOSOPHERS STEPHEN R. OGDEN

Many contemporary scholars have rightly shown interest in ancient and medieval hylomorphic metaphysics (the Aristotelian view that humans are composed of matter and form, body and soul), including especially the version developed by the Christian philosopher and theologian, Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). The result has been an engaging body of research on topics including individuation, persistence (i.e., identity over time) – including that of the postmortem soul, and resurrection. Yet, Aquinas’s positions themselves and the resulting secondary literature still display much ambiguity. If his view is inconsistent on any of these points, his general picture of the human person will fall prey to various competing theories of Aquinas’s coevals1 and to present-day philosophical dismissal.2 Furthermore, no one has sufficiently compared Aquinas on this full range of issues to his Muslim philosophical predecessors. Therefore, in this paper I aim to clarify in a basic way the concepts of human individuation and persistence over the entire course of life, death, and resurrection in Aquinas and (more briefly) three Muslim philosophers: Avicenna (Ibn SƯnƗ) (d. 1037), al-GhazƗlƯ (d. 1111), and Averroes (Ibn Rushd) (d. 1198).3 1

These theories include Scotus’s and Henry of Ghent’s theories of human individuation through individual haecceities or a creative act of divine will, respectively. Other potential threats are the nominalist rejection of the entire problem of individuation and various alternatives offered by some Muslim philosophers. For an interesting discussion of Aquinas’s view in relation to the first three problems noted here, see Klima (2005). I will discuss the Muslim philosophers in this paper. 2 As just one example, consider Swinburne in Shoemaker and Swinburne (1984), p. 32, who rejects Aquinas’s conception because it seems inconsistent, too great a “distortion” of Aristotle’s general hylomorphic approach. 3 In my dissertation, I discuss these issues in Averroes and Aquinas in much more detail. My treatment of the three Muslim philosophers is necessarily brief, but I

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These three are indebted to a faith tradition (Islam) with similar doctrines and to roughly the same Aristotelian philosophical heritage. Muslim and Christian thinkers were faced with two important questions in this arena. First, if (according to one plausible interpretation of Aristotle) matter is the principle of individuation, then how could human souls possibly remain individuated without matter after death? Second, even if the individual soul can somehow survive, is there a coherent account of bodily resurrection? The three major Muslim thinkers I will discuss proposed distinct answers to these questions – Averroes adopting a strict interpretation of matter as the principle of individuation (to the exclusion of separated souls and resurrection); Avicenna arguing for the survival of individuated immaterial souls (to the exclusion of resurrection); al-GhazƗlƯ concluding for the possibility of resurrection (whatever the other philosophers may have thought). I will show, in contrast, how Aquinas manages to consistently uphold all three of the privileged tenets from the aforementioned philosophers – matter as the principle of individuation, souls remaining individuated post mortem, and a workable hylomorphic account of the resurrection. Reviewing these alternatives will provide not only a deeper understanding of the topic in the medieval milieu but should also give guidance to contemporary philosophers interested in hylomorphic metaphysics and philosophy of religion.4 In order to better set up this comparison, I will begin largely by explaining what I take to be Aquinas’s views (against some other interpretations), then we will turn to the Muslim philosophers to see their contrasting positions and what he has appropriated and rejected from each.

I. The Principles of Individuation and Persistence What individuates one human being from another (or, for that matter, one dog from another)? One common answer to this question in the medieval period following a particular interpretation of Aristotle is that matter is the want to highlight different aspects of each view in relation to the more familiar and studied account of Aquinas. In turn, I cannot fully settle the scholarly debates on Aquinas either; my point is rather to give a kind of overview of the latter, according to my own reading of the debates, so that it can be fruitfully compared with the Muslim philosophers at the end. 4 Much work has been done recently on philosophical explanations of the resurrection particularly from within a Christian context – van Inwagen (1978), Zimmerman (1999), Van Dyke (2007). The current paper will provide further historical resources for such work and ideally inspire more work from the Muslim perspective.

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individuating principle of different composite individuals of the same species.5 Aquinas seems to be a proponent of this view: “the principle of individuation is matter….”6 To be sure, on both Muslim and Christian views there are immaterial beings (angels) which are not individuated by matter.7 However, creatures composed of matter and form within a species must be individuated in some way by matter, since their specific form is not the only one of its kind. Socrates and Plato both are humans, so Socrates’s humanity must differ from Plato’s humanity not by the essence humanity but by their matter – the same goes for the dogs Fido and Fluffy, and any other individuals of the same species. Consider the intuitive difference between different copies of the same book – they may look virtually the same and contain the exact same intellectual content; nevertheless, each copy can be individuated in virtue of its varying matter or spatial location, this one and that one.8 Yet beneath this simple way of construing the position lies a thicket of detail which can easily lead to problems. Christopher Hughes, for example, has written several treatments of Aquinas’s view of matter, individuation, and identity over time which all ultimately conclude that there must be some sort of inherent inconsistency in Aquinas’s metaphysics.9 We can raise a number of sets of related problems for Aquinas’s general conception, including three preliminary questions about individuation and persistence and then the two main questions of religious import mentioned at the beginning of the paper: 1) 2)

3) 4)

5

What kind of matter and dimensions are supposed to individuate? If it is matter under certain dimensions that individuates, what is supposed to secure identity over time (i.e., persistence)? After all, those dimensions will change over time for intuitively one and the same composite substance. Why does Aquinas speak in certain texts of the substantial form having its own proper individuation, even without matter? Indeed, if the human soul is a substantial form, how could it possibly exist and be individuated when separated from the body at death?

See Aristotle, Metaphysics VII.8, 1034a5-8. DEE, c. 2, ll. 66-67: Sed quia individuationis principium materia est…. All translations are my own unless noted otherwise. 7 According to Aquinas, angelic beings differ from each other in virtue of their very essence, and thus each angel constitutes its own species—cf. ST I.50.4; SCG II.93. 8 This example is taken from Klima (2005), p. 70. 9 Hughes (1996), (1997), and (1998). 6

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36 5)

Does Aquinas think that the human person survives death? If not, how can a substance which has been destroyed somehow come back as numerically identical in the resurrection?

In this section, I will briefly discuss answers to the preliminary questions 1)-3).10

1) Designated matter We cannot say that it is just any kind of matter that individuates a composite substance because Aquinas refers to both “prime matter” (materia prima) and “designated matter” (materia signata or designata).11 One text in which he defines prime matter in contradistinction to designated matter is De Principiis Naturae, c. 2: But it must be known that some matter has the composition of form, just as bronze, which is matter with respect to a statue, is itself nevertheless composed from matter and form. And therefore bronze is not called prime matter, because it has matter. However, the same matter which is understood without any form and privation, but is rather subjected to forms and privations, is called prime matter because there is no other matter which is before it. And this is also called hyle.12

In this sense, prime matter is the matter that underlies all substantial changes and is thus considered being in potentia (cf. ST Ia.76.1, resp.; DSC 1.1, ad 8). It does not exist in actuality in itself. In contrast, designated matter is matter, like the bronze described above, informed – some substantial form gives it actual existence and order. It is only the latter, matter under certain dimensions, which Aquinas names the principle of individuation (hereafter “PI”): “Therefore it must be known that matter taken in any way is not the principle of individuation, but only designated matter. And I call designated matter that which is considered under

10

More detail is provided on these points in my dissertation, where I can also address various other interpretations and objections, especially those of Hughes mentioned above. Despite those competing interpretations, I think many other scholars of Aquinas will agree with the basic points I make here in Section I and find it to be common ground. 11 Some of the secondary literature refers loosely to these two concepts as “thin matter” and “thick matter” respectively – cf. Hughes (1996) and (1998); Odberberg (2002). I doubt that these labels are actually helpful, so I will avoid them. 12 DPN, c. 2, ll. 70-78.

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determinate dimensions.”13 Thus, the work of individuation must be done through discrete chunks of matter with determinate dimensions. To deal with some recent counterexamples to this hylomorphist view of individuation (e.g., Kit Fine’s cannibal example), I think that the dimensions of designated matter should also include time.14 At least one authentic passage from Aquinas says this explicitly: “Indeed, form is not individuated by what is received in matter, except as far as it is received in this distinct and determinate matter here and now.”15 Therefore, we can most appropriately think of designated matter as materia hic et nunc.

2) Persistence A critique of this view of designated matter as the PI (which circled widely among other medieval philosophers) is that the slightest change to those four dimensions – e.g., simply passing from time t1 to time t2 – would mean that the same substance fails to be individuated.16 How could designated matter (as a mere changing accident) secure the individuation of the substance over time? As a few scholars have pointed out, however, such an objection conflates the principle of individuation (at a time) with the principle of persistence (what secures identity over time).17 Aquinas does, in fact, have a separate principle of persistence (hereafter “PP”) which is non-circularly related to the PI-namely, the substantial

13

DEE, c. 2, ll. 73-77. For the cannibal example, see Fine (1994) and Oderberg (2002), pp. 133ff. All Fine is after is the possibility of complete matter transfer. Not only by including the dimension of time, but perhaps further features of Aquinas’s view of substantial form can one likewise defeat Fine’s counterexample. Another counterexample occurs in Hughes (1997), pp. 104-105, concerning the destruction and recreation of an angel (of its own unique species). Temporal individuation handles this as well (as Hughes concedes), and he clearly recognizes the importance of time for individuation in (1996), esp. p. 2. 15 BDT 4.2, co. 6, ll. 206-208: Non enim forma individuatur per hoc quod recipitur in materia, nisi quatenus recipitur in hac materia distincta et determinata ad hic et nunc. 16 Gracia and Kronen (1994), p. 526, note that the objection is considered (if not propounded) by Aquinas, Scotus, Suárez, Cajetan, and John of St. Thomas (the main figure of their article). 17 Ibid. and Oderberg (2002). 14

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form. The form is that which causes a substance to exist simpliciter and is also that which remains throughout every accidental change.18 While the substantial form is the primary PP,19 it also seems that Aquinas must assume some sort of continuity of the composite’s substantial form and matter, as several commentators have remarked.20 In other words, while parts of Socrates’s matter come and go, and this does not disturb his remaining numerically identical over time, a substantial change (namely corruption) would occur if Socrates’s matter completely went out of existence (or gave out) or if his substantial form were somehow destroyed by God. So, substantial form grounds persistence, but we must (at least as far as ordinary events of nature are concerned) rule out intermittent existence: “But things which are corrupted according to substance are not repeated numerically the same according to the operation of nature, but only specifically the same.”21 Since composite substances would thus substantially corrupt if either form or matter were wholly corrupted, those essential principles must remain continuous, as Aquinas explicitly states in the SCG and Quodlibet.22 18

DPN c. 1, ll. 47-51; Klima translation, p. 158: “For when the substantial form is introduced, something is said to come to be, without further qualification. But when an accidental form is introduced, we do not say that something comes to be, without qualification, but that something comes to be this; just as when a man comes to be white….Generation and corruption absolutely speaking are only in the category of substance, while those with qualification are in the other categories” – i.e., accidents. 19 Cf. Stump (2003), p. 46: “For any substances x and y, x is identical to y if and only if the substantial form of x is identical to the substantial form of y.” 20 Cf. Hughes (1996) and (1997), discussed below. Also, Oderberg (2002), pp. 135-136; and Stump (2003), p. 48. 21 CT I.154, ll. 1-6; cf. SCG IV.80, §2-4. 22 SCG IV.80, §3: Item, impossibile est esse idem numero cuius aliquod essentialium principiorum idem numero esse non potest…. Note that in the response to the objection in IV.81, §6, Aquinas does not deny the principle, but denies that the principle has been violated in the case of resurrection. Cf. QQ 11.6, resp. Therefore, I think something like the continuity principles (C1) and (C2) in Hughes (1997), pp. 99 and 100, are probably true on Aquinas’s view: “(C1) Necessarily, in the course of nature: if a and b are identical, and if a exists at time t, and b exists at time tc, then a is not corrupted between t and tc.” & “(C2) Necessarily, if a and b are identical, then if a exists at time t, and b exists at time tc, (not just some, but all) the essential principles of a exist at every time between t and tc.” And I do think that it is crucial that “in the course of nature” be kept as a part of these principles, although Hughes considers jettisoning the phrase on p. 106, for reasons that I discuss below related to resurrection and because Aquinas

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The inconsistencies commentators like Hughes attempt to draw from these points do not follow once we understand the correct view of designated matter as the PI and the substantial form as the PP outlined above. It helps us see that while some continuity of matter is necessary, a substance need not have all the same matter over time.

3) The role of the substantial form But it might seem that it is actually substantial form that individuates, rather than the designated matter. The substantial form is what gives a substance being simpliciter, and therefore also unity and individuation: Insofar as things have existence, so they have plurality and unity, for insofar as each thing is a being, so also is it one. But forms do not have existence because of matter. Rather, matter [has existence] because of forms….Therefore, forms are not diverse because they belong to different matters, but rather matters are diverse as they belong to different forms.23

How can Aquinas say such things? He also teaches throughout his writing that the human soul (the substantial form of a human body) survives death and remains apart from matter (e.g., ST Ia.75.6). So which is the primary PI, matter or form? The solution can be seen most clearly at the origin of a material substance.24 Of course, there must be some prior materia ex qua (“matter out of which” the substance comes about) that is appropriate for receiving references a “nature” rider in the relevant quotes from CT I.154 and SCG IV.80. For now, this will also be enough to avoid the debate about whether Aquinas admits that God, by divine power, could entirely annihilate a composite substance and restore it numerically the same – see the pieces by Turner and Klima in this same volume for detailed argument on that issue. 23 CT I.71. Earlier in the same passage, he also says explicitly that “it is clear that the cause of the diversity of things is not the diversity of matter”! Cf. QDA 1, ad. 2; DPN, c. 2, ll. 100-101; DUI, c. 5, ll. 88-90. 24 Hughes (1996), p. 16, n. 9, says this is a tension between “early” and “late” works of Aquinas, but the texts cited above disprove that possibility. Pasnau argues that matter only individuates the form, which, in turn, individuates the composite substance – see Pasnau (2001), p. 32; (2002), ch. 12; Pasnau and Shields (2004), p. 58. But we still have Aquinas speaking of the substantial form as dictating the quantity and existence of the designated matter somehow prior to that designated matter itself, which is supposed to individuate the substantial form. So I don’t think either of these proposals work.

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the generated form.25 But once the new substance is originated, Aquinas thinks the substantial form has its own individuation and identity as this individualized form from thenceforward. This is especially the case with the human soul: In such [created intellectual] substances, multiple individuals in one species cannot be found, as has been said, except in the case of the human soul because of the body with which it is united. And although its individuation is temporarily26 dependent on the body with respect to its beginning (individuatio eius ex corpore occasionaliter dependeat quantum ad sui inchoationem), since it does not acquire individuated existence except in a body of which it is the act [of existence], nevertheless it is not necessary that it lose its individuation in its removal from the body. Because when it has absolute existence from its having acquired individuated existence on account of the fact that it is the form of this body, that existence always remains individuated (semper remanet individuatum). Thus, Avicenna says that individuation and multiplication of souls depend on the body with respect to their beginning, but not with respect to their end.27

This is a critical passage of DEE c. 5 which proves designated matter is the PI at the origin (ad sui inchoationem) and is the initial occasion for the individuation of the substantial form (occasionaliter), after which the substantial form has its own individuation and act of existence.28 But if it were not for that beginning and occasion, substantial forms could not be individuated – thus, human beings (as essentially composite) could not have been created (even by God) as separately existing souls of the same species. Therefore, designated matter is the proper sine qua non PI, and the substantial form is the proper PP.29 25

DPN, c. 4, ll. 66ff. Or perhaps, “at an opportune time” or “at times” (occasionaliter) – “temporarily” seems to allow for all of these readings, so I have adopted it from Klima’s translation of the DEE. 27 DEE, c. 5, ll. 56-71. Note that my translation is from the Leonine edition; this is often placed in c. 4 of other editions of the DEE. 28 Which makes the form apt to serve as the PP. This also explains many of the above texts in which Aquinas describes the substantial form as self-individuating. 29 As Klima (2001b), p. 42, argues in a response to Pasnau: “…even if designated matter primarily individuates the substantial form of a singular substance, and then the singular substance can exist in its singularity on account of the actuality of this individualized form, this does not render the form the principle of individuation. For the principle of individuation is supposed to be that on account of which two individuals of the same species are primarily distinct, meaning that they could not be distinct if they were not distinct at least in that principle in the first place.” 26

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II. The Separated Soul and Resurrection The above passage from DEE returns us to the main questions about the survival of the soul after death and subsequent resurrection.

4) The separated soul The soul can remain individuated of itself after the origin of the human being. But still we might ask, if the soul is the substantial form of the human body, how could it (unlike all other substantial forms of composite creatures) survive the corruption of its matter? Aquinas faces this objection in several places in his corpus (primarily from Averroes and Averroists of Aquinas’s own day, as we shall also see below). But, Aquinas rejects the premise that the human soul cannot be both (i) inherent in a human body (sharing the same act of existence) and (ii) a subsistent being itself separable from a human body. I (like others) think that Aquinas negotiates a third alternative to the two major players in the contemporary mind-body debate, materialism and dualism.30 Aquinas is able to maintain that the soul’s act of being (esse) is the very same esse of the composite human.31 Yet, it is also the case that the soul has its own per se activity which is not attached to or operational through any part of the body, namely, understanding (intelligere). But if it has an operation on its own, in which the body takes no part, then the soul must also be itself subsisting: “Therefore, the principle of understanding, which is called mind or intellect, has its own per se operation in which the body does not share. But nothing can act per se unless it subsists per se, for [nothing can] act unless it is a being in act. Hence, the way in which something acts is that in which it exists.”32

30

E.g, Klima (2002); Pasnau and Shields (2004); to some degree Stump (2003). ST I.75.1, resp.; cf. I.76.1, ad 5; I.76.2, ad 1 and 2. 32 ST I.75.2, resp.; cf. QDA 14. One modern response to this argument is that understanding is clearly intrinsically tied to the brain. Aquinas agrees that the brain (and the sensitive faculties of the body more generally) are required in order for human beings to acquire and process information which is then used in the activity of understanding. Indeed, the activity can be severely hampered or naturally ended if the brain is injured. Thus, in order to understand, the postmortem separated intellective soul must gain its information miraculously from God; otherwise, it could only consider universals (cf. ST I.89). Nevertheless, none of these points entails that the per se activity of understanding is done by the body as an instrument. Cf. ST I.76.2, ad 3; In DA I.2, ll. 46-81. 31

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It is not my intention here to defend Aquinas’s arguments for the immateriality of the intellect.33 However, the important thing for us to grasp is that Aquinas has arguments for the soul existing in two different modes, one with respect to the body, the other with respect to its activity independent of the body. In QQ 9.2.2, resp., Aquinas says that an “act of being [esse] is attributed to something in two ways”: either a) “as that which [quod] properly and truly has being,” i.e., substances that have per se existence, OR b) “as that by which [quo] something is,” i.e., accidents, substantial forms, or parts.34 As is well known, being (ens) is a term of analogy for Aquinas. So, when considering the soul as the substantial form of the body, we can say the being of the soul is identical to the being of the human composite, but they each have the same esse in a different way. And, the soul itself can also have the same esse in both modes. As Klima argues, there is nothing impossible about an analogous term signifying two of its significations in the same thing at the same time.35 Consider another example of an analogous term with different significations, like good. There is no difficulty in someone’s being good in two modes at the same time, say, i) as morally good and ii) as skillfully good (e.g., good at baseball). Moreover, just like the soul, something can be beautiful in both modes (a) quod and (b) quo – a beautiful melody within a larger piece of music is both beautiful itself and that by which the piece is beautiful. I think this point holds even if beautiful is not a term of analogy – it will be true on many metaphysical systems that a part of a whole can have some property which (only) it gives to the whole.36 And this is precisely what Aquinas argues: That act of being, in which it itself subsists, the soul communicates to physical matter; this matter and the intellectual soul form a unity such that the act of being of the compound whole is the soul’s act of being. This does not happen in other forms which are non-subsistent. And for this reason the

33

See Aquinas’s arguments in ST Ia.75.2 and 6; Sent. II.19.1.1; etc. For good discussions of whether Aquinas’s arguments are successful, see Klima (2001a), Pasnau’s response (2001), and Klima’s replies (2001b); also Klima (2009). 34 Translated and quoted by Klima (2009), p. 168. Cf. ST I.89.1, resp.: “The soul has a different mode of being (modum essendi) when united to the body and when it is separated from the body, even though maintaining the same nature of the soul….” 35 Klima (2004), p. 13, fn. 18. 36 Cf. ST I.75.2, ad 2.

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human soul continues in its act of being when the body is destroyed, whereas other souls do not.37

Thus, the human soul has its esse in two ways, both as (b) quo [aliquid aliud] est (insofar as it is the substantial form of the human body) and as (a) quod est (insofar as it has its own per se activity of thinking which continues even after the body dies). That means it is possible for it to lose one of its modes (b), without thereby losing the other (a), just as an orchestra could play the primary melody alone without playing the entire symphony. Given the above discussions, I think we can conclude against two more contemporary interpretations of Aquinas on the PI of the separated human soul.38 First, Eleonore Stump has argued that separated souls are individuated by a kind of retrospective reference to their ante-mortem bodies: “It is possible for one separated soul to be distinguished from another on the basis of its past connection with matter….”39 This statement might be true in the sense that separated souls never would have been individuated if not for their ante-mortem bodies. Yet, in context, Stump does not seem to consider the DEE c. 5 passage in which Aquinas states that the soul, after the occasion of its being individuated by matter, has its own act of existence which keeps it individuated thereafter.40 I actually think Stump is closer to Avicenna’s position on this point than Aquinas (more on that below).41 For roughly the same reasons (textual and philosophical) we 37

ST Ia.76.1, ad 5; Suttor’s translation, p. 49. Cf. DEE c. 4, ll. 189-192: “…from the soul and the body a single existence in one composite results; although that existence, insofar as it is the existence of the soul, is not dependent on the body.” 38 I agree here with Swinburne (1998), p. 45, that individuation of souls must be done in terms of some actual intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, properties. 39 Stump (2003), p. 54. 40 Despite Stump’s overlooking this text, it is furthermore not clear philosophically how the soul could keep some sort of record or how that connection would somehow individuate it if it were not for its having its own activity. Perhaps such a “record” could be sustained by divine power (similar to God’s provision in the cognition of separated souls). But Aquinas does not say so, and we might expect him to make clear when instances of the consistency of his view depend upon divine power (as in separated cognition, the resurrection, etc.). 41 In Stump (2006), pp. 163-164, she agrees with Swinburne that separated souls can be individuated additionally by intrinsic properties, such as different knowledge attained. I agree that Aquinas could in principle account for individuation in this way, but deny that he ever in fact utilizes such an explanation. Stump in (2006) also still emphasizes “historical” individuation as well.

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should reject Peter Geach’s opposite proposal, that separated souls could only be individuated by prospective reference to a resurrection body.42

5) Intermittent existence and resurrection The human soul, then, survives death, retaining its own act of existence, individuation, and identity. Yet, the separated soul exists in a radically defective and unnatural state. Hence, Aquinas’s position is that, though the soul survives death, the human being or person does not.43 On the one hand, this position is intuitive – the human being, Socrates, actually dies. On the other hand, it might seem strange that personal identity on Aquinas’s view is not continuous. Stump, for example, argues that, because constitution is not identity for Aquinas, a composite supposit can lose one of its integral metaphysical parts and still exist so long as the remaining part has its own existence: “Aquinas thinks a human being can exist without being in the normal condition… and so the existence of a human soul is sufficient for the existence of a human being.”44 Now there is significant textual evidence against Stump’s position. First of all, though the soul is per se subsistent, Aquinas still calls it an incomplete substance.45 Furthermore, the soul is not identical with the human being, as Aquinas proves in ST I.75.4.46 Stump concedes all these points. Yet, she responds that Aquinas’s metaphysics allow her the inference and that in other places he acknowledges the appropriateness of using the proper name to refer to separated souls.47

42

Geach (1969), pp. 23 and 28. He thinks the possibility of individuated separate souls depends on the possibility of resurrection bodies. Yet, if that is all prospective reference amounts to, as with retrospective reference it seems difficult to conceive of how such a link to a merely possible body would play the robust metaphysical role of individuating a being. Similar to Kripke’s response to Lewisstyle counterpart theory, what metaphysical good could the possibly re-embodied souls do for the actually disembodied ones! Cf. Kripke (1980), p. 45. 43 I can only briefly here delineate my argument for this interpretation, which has become known as “corruptionism,” as opposed to “survivalism.” The latter is most famously defended by Stump (2003) and (2006); cf. Eberl (2009). For a defense of the former, see Toner (2009) and Nevitt (2014). 44 Stump (2003), p. 52; (2006), pp. 165-166, 168. 45 QDA 1, resp.; DSC 1.2, ad 5; ST I.75.2, ad 1; SCG II.94. 46 Cf. Super 1Cor, c. 15, 1.2: anima mea non est ego. 47 Stump (2003), pp. 52-54; cf. (2006), p. 159, for a passage regarding St. Paul which essentially appeals to the same logic.

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I do not think this will do. Though we may still use the proper name which did refer to the supposit, it is not the case that the existence of the form is sufficient for the existence of the supposit. In ST II-II.83.11, obj. and ad 5, Aquinas grants the premise of the objection (that it is only the soul of St. Peter and not St. Peter who prays for us in heaven), but simply gives reasons why it is still appropriate to use the name.48 The practice is essentially one of synecdoche, where it is appropriate to use the name of the whole to refer to what is actually only a part.49 For example, you might hear an Egyptian say, “I’m going to Misr,” which is Arabic for Egypt, when she means the capitol city Cairo. This pragmatic fact about language does not justify the metaphysical existence of the supposit (or person referred to by the name). In this case, the true supposit is a human being, and a human being cannot properly be said to exist without matter.50 Nor can the soul be called a “person” as Aquinas explicitly states in ST I.75.4.51 Whence then can Aquinas really speak of the human being or of personal identity postmortem?52 Therefore, in death, a part of the human survives, but it cannot be the whole human being or the person. This leads to perhaps the most pressing objection to Aquinas’s views on the resurrection. If the human being goes out of existence at death and then 48 The names connote the past complete being of the saint, they are better known to us, and this practice signals our belief in the resurrection, i.e., that they will be human beings again, but are not yet. 49 Cf. ST Ia.75.4, ad 1. 50 SCG IV.81, §10: “But humanity is the essence of the human being, and the essence of a thing is what the definition signifies. But the definition of a natural thing does not signify only form, but form and matter. Since these things are the case, it is necessary that humanity signifies something composed of matter and form, just as does human being.” Cf. DEE, c. 2; CT I.154. 51 ST Ia.75.4, ad 2; Suttor translation, p. 21: “Not every particular substance is a hypostasis or person, but rather that which has the full nature of the species. Thus a hand or foot cannot be called a hypostasis or person. Nor, likewise, can the soul, as it is a part of human nature.” 52 In ibid., resp., where Aquinas denies that the soul is the man, his principle of the unity of the substantial form allows him to muse (somewhat confusedly) on a way in which one might claim that “this soul” is “this man,” namely by positing that the activities of the sensitive soul might be said to be in the separate soul if the activities of the man might be attributed to the soul. I suppose this could be construed as evidence for the validity of Stump’s inference from constitution’s not equating to identity. But he seems to then renege the possibility: “But it has been shown that sensation is not the activity of the soul alone. Sensing is an activity of the whole man.”

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comes back into existence in the resurrection, does not this scenario violate the continuity conditions we ascribed to Aquinas in discussing the PPnamely a continuity of all essential principles?53 Christina Van Dyke has written an enlightening paper in which she examines Aquinas’s response. Along with some other contemporaries on persistence (e.g., Shoemaker and Zimmerman), she thinks temporal gaps in a person’s existence are not problematic per se as long as the right kinds of “immanent” causal connections intervene. She is certainly right in holding that Aquinas’s view of the survival of the substantial form as the continuous esse of Socrates’s ante-mortem body, separated soul, and resurrection body helps meet the contemporary standards of immanent causation.54 The substantial form seems to be the major factor in preserving the human being’s essential principles: “For none of the essential principles of the human being yields entirely to nothingness through death, for the rational soul which is the form of the human being remains after death…the matter, also, which was the subject of such a form remains in the same dimensions from which it was able to be the individual matter.”55 But how can the person’s ante-mortem matter be said to remain, especially if that matter has dissolved into the elements or has been cannibalized? Aquinas explains that, as long as the substantial form remains, it turns out fairly easy to come up with “the same body”: “Corporeity, however, can be taken in two ways. In one way, as the substantial form of a body as it is categorized in the genus of substance. Thus, the corporeity of any body is nothing other than its substantial form….”56 The second sense is simply the accidental form of a body’s quantity. As we have seen, it is the substantial form that ensures someone has one and the same body (in the first sense) over the course of multitudinous physical changes. On this reading, Socrates’s identical body is simply whichever matter is informed by Socrates’s soul, sharing the same esse. The form will ensure that just the right amount of needed matter is brought back to the resurrection body, and God will make sure anything lacking is provided.57 Hence, it seems that the persistent substantial form, as long as God unites some matter to 53

This is the main worry for Hughes about resurrection in (1996), (1997), and (1998), p. 76, n. 19. Two of the main texts which substantiate the continuity claims are in objections to the resurrection in SCG IV.80 and CT I.154. 54 Van Dyke (2007), p. 88-89. 55 SCG IV.81, §6. 56 Ibid., §7. See also DEE c. 2, ll. 105-150; CT I.154; and Klima (2002) for a very useful distinction of the different uses of ‘body’ in Aquinas (esp. in DEE) and its relation to soul and the composite. 57 Ibid., §§12 and 13.

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it, can make virtually any matter automatically the numerically same matter.58 Yet, this discussion, as reproduced by Van Dyke (and similarly by Stump), seems to miss part of Aquinas’s view of resurrection (and, I will suggest below, is closer to al-GhazƗlƯ’s position). The above picture makes it seem that just about any matter will do. Perhaps the best way of getting at what is lacking in this description is through a thought experiment. Consider that God decides to completely destroy the material universe – this act wipes away all matter from existence, though, of course, immaterial spiritual creatures and separated human souls go on existing. God then creates ex nihilo some sort of material world, and the resurrection follows – each separated soul is given some piece of matter which, presto chango, becomes her or his numerically “identical” body. Such a scenario is certainly possible. But would it really be resurrection? The problem is that it appears as if God has brought nothing back materially; God has simply scrapped the old and re-created matter anew. (Recall here the relevant quote from CT about God not bringing back things numerically when the continuity of essential principles is broken.)59 Hence I propose that Van Dyke has ignored the essential principle of matter.60 Aquinas says that “it is clear that the human being returns numerically the same both because of the permanence of the rational soul and because of the unity of matter,”61 and I think there is evidence that he must mean at least some modicum of continuity of literally the same 58 As Aquinas succinctly puts it in CT I.153: “Therefore, it is necessary that since the numerically same rational soul remains, it is united again to the numerically same body in the resurrection.” Van Dyke (2007), p. 389, reaches a similar conclusion: “David’s body was the way it was at death primarily because of David’s structuring, vivifying, life-preserving soul, and David’s resurrected body is the way it is primarily because of that same soul, whose existence continues uninterrupted throughout earthly life, death, and the bodily resurrection.” 59 I think I may differ here slightly from Nevitt, in this same volume, who thinks resurrection is a properly theological concept for Aquinas which is rooted in what the Christian Scriptures in fact promise. That is certainly true, but my intuition here is that Aquinas could argue against this kind of intermittent existence for the resurrected human being just from a general concept of resurrection and what seems entailed by it. 60 Stump (2003), p. 208, and (2006), pp. 169-170, also, in attributing all the work to the substantial form, ignores the weight Aquinas puts on continuity of some matter, for which I will argue below. 61 SCG IV.81, §10.

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matter. In arguing that it is not a requirement that a human being’s resurrection body include “whatever has been in him during the whole time of his life,” Aquinas says, he needs to take up again “from that matter (ex eo) only what suffices to complete the due quantity.”62 While happily ensuring that resurrection bodies are not monstrously massive, this passage (more to our point) also seems to require that the matter assumed in the resurrection be taken from that matter (ex eo) which had belonged to the person during the time of her life. Furthermore, Aquinas includes in this article a detailed discussion of what matter gets restored to which people, given that many people will have shared matter over the course of time (including via cannibalism). He holds to this basic principle: “If something was materially in many human beings, it will rise in him to whose perfection it pertained more….[Or] it will rise in him in whom it first existed.”63 Applied, this means that the seed will rise in the begotten, the cannibal will rise with nothing received from his victims (when possible), and the rib formerly-known as Adam’s will rise in Eve! Setting aside the relative credibility of these applications, this principle clearly presumes some sort of continuity of the same material parts, even if having passed through multiple transfigurations. Thus, it seems that everyone is promised at least some material part which belonged at one time to her ante-mortem body. One might balk at whether this suggestion is plausible; however, it certainly seems possible given: (a) that matter is infinitely divisible (such that regardless of how many people ever existed on earth and how much matter was shared in common, the matter could always be divided into smaller chunks); (b) the law of the conservation of mass (such that nothing natural could ever bring about the scenario of the above thought experiment in which God destroyed all matter completely); and (c) God’s divine power (to not only rejoin bodies to some matter but also to perform the unfathomable task of tracing at least one part of every person’s antemortem body to be used in restoring a body to them).

III. Some Muslim Philosophers Now that we have Aquinas’s detailed view in hand, we can consider the Muslim philosophers. I take them here out of chronological order to better highlight comparisons with Aquinas and with one another in relation to the questions considered above.

62 63

Ibid., §12. Ibid., §13; my translation. Cf. CT I.161.

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Averroes (Ibn Rushd) Averroes shares Aquinas’s commitment to matter as the PI for composite substances like humans. But his commitment is more unwavering in this regard, for he is not willing to secure the individuation of human souls postmortem of themselves (and especially not on the authority of Avicenna!).64 Thus, he says in the TahƗfut al-TahƗfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence): Concerning the position of numerically many immaterial souls, it is unknown among those of the philosophical school (madhhab al-qawm), because according to them, matter is the cause of numerical multiplicity and form is the cause of agreement in the case of numerical multiplicity. And it is impossible that things one in form could be numerically many without matter.65

Although in the dialectical context of arguing against al-GhazƗlƯ in the TahƗfut Averroes later entertains the possibility for some sort of individuation of separated souls through subtle matter and animal warmth,66 it is clear that he only means to minimally defend a broader group of more Neo-Platonic philosophers with whom he does not readily identify himself.67 The quote above is the best statement of his own position, confirmed by his narrow view of what is held by “those of the philosophical school” – viz., the true, Aristotelian philosophers who have the correct understanding. It is also the plain view of his Long Comm. on Metaphysics.68

64

Averroes was a staunch critic of Avicenna on many issues, from the proper subject matter of metaphysics to what counted as legitimate commentary on Aristotle. For one example, see Averroes’s dismissal of Avicenna in the Long Commentary on De Anima (LCDA) III, c. 30, p. 470; Taylor translation, pp. 374375: “[Current thinkers err regarding Aristotle] on account of Avicenna, who followed Aristotle only in dialectics, but in other things he erred, and chiefly in the case of metaphysics. This is because he began, as it were, from his own perspective.” 65 Averroes, TahƗfut al-TahƗfut (TT), d. 1, pp. 26-27. 66 TT, d. 19, p. 577; van den Bergh translation, p. 357. Cf. van den Bergh (1954), p. xxxiv. 67 His entertaining the possibility is introduced simply as what one should say who is already committed to numerically individuated souls postmortem. 68 Long Comm. on Met., vol. II, Z, c. 28, pp. 866-870. For a full discussion of Averroes on matter as the principle of individuation, see Di Giovanni (2007).

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Of course, Aquinas appeals not only to Avicenna but also to the Aristotelian principle that if the soul has its own per se activity (viz., the understanding of intellect), then it can subsist per se individually after death. On this point, however, Averroes’s strict adherence to matter as the PI coheres seamlessly with his own interpretation of Aristotle on intellect in the De Anima (DA). Despite some confusion, I think most scholars now agree that on this issue Averroes was indeed an Averroist!69 That is to say, in his most mature philosophical commentary on the DA,70 he holds that not only is the agent or active intellect a separate celestial substance, but so also is the material or possible intellect.71 While many previous commentators had attributed at least the material intellect to human beings and Aquinas holds that both are aspects of our one human intellect, Averroes breaks the mold and sends all intellectual activity (properly speaking) into orbit. We take part in such activity by “logging on” (so to speak) to the proper intellectual activity of the separate celestial intellects. Consequently, the highest cognitive capacity of human beings is the cogitative or imaginative faculty, corresponding to Aristotle’s phantasia, which is a bodily power and, therefore, corruptible. The upshot of his views on both matter as the PI and the separate intellects is that nothing of the individual human being survives death and the corruption of the body – the immortal intellects are not us, and even if we had an immaterial intellect, Averroes sees no way to keep things individuated without matter. Human beings may be said to be “immortal” only insofar as the human species is eternal (like all species for Averroes, following Aristotle).72 69

The primary text issue is that Averroes wrote his customary three commentaries (Short, Middle, Long) on Aristotle’s De Anima, and his view developed. His most distinct thesis on the intellect appears only in the Long Comm. on De Anima. On the debate in the secondary literature concerning whether Averroes was himself an “Averroist” (as the term came to be used for a number of controversial doctrines associated with him among later Christian philosophers), see Gómez Nogales (1976), Gauthier (1982), Bazán (1985), and Taylor (2009), pp. c-cii. 70 I.e., the Long Comm. on De Anima (LCDA). 71 The first is found in Aristotle’s DA III.5 and is called [nous] poiƝtikos (maker or agent intellect). The second is generally regarded as the intellect described in III.4 as being capable of receiving all intelligible forms, described as dunatos (possible). Many interpreters also identify this latter intellect with the nous pathƝtikos at the end of III.5, but Averroes does not. In Averroes’s texts, the first is called al-ҵaql al-faҵҵƗl or intellectus agens; the second is al-ҵaql al-haynjlƗnƯ or intellectus materialis. 72 LCDA, III, c. 5, pp. 406-407ff; Taylor translation, pp. 322ff. Thus, I largely agree with Taylor (1998) and his assessment of Averroes and his denial of personal immortality.

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Averroes stays true to his Aristotelian sources and arrives at a position that is straightforwardly consistent. Of course, the cost of this consistency, from the standpoint of his Islamic context, is that he must categorically deny the persistence of the human soul and, a fortiori, the bodily resurrection. Although he has things to say about afterlife and the resurrection in his theological and dialectical writings, Averroes develops a rubric for esotericism and the allegorical interpretation of the Qur‫ގ‬Ɨn on matters where philosophy can demonstrate a passage’s or doctrine’s literal falsehood. We should see that this is his approach to the question of the afterlife and resurrection. So, in his Fa‫܈‬l al-MaqƗl (The Decisive Treatise), while he says denying the existence of the afterlife is “unbelief” (kufran), he intimates that that is because to speak thus openly would lead other non-philosophers to unbelief.73 For philosophers, Averroes offers the following proper methodology on questions of the afterlife and interpretation of Scripture in general: “For this reason it is necessary that interpretations (al-taҴwƯlƗt) not be set forth except in books of demonstrations (al-barƗhƯn).”74 Averroes’s true views of the afterlife will only be found in books where Aristotelian demonstration (ਕʌȩįİȚȟȚȢ or burhƗn) is the means of argumentation – viz., his most thorough Aristotelian commentaries, like the LCDA. And in the LCDA the most we can say (as fully informed philosophers) is that we are immortal in virtue of the eternality of our species, and perhaps the part that humanity at large plays in eternal acts of intellection.

Avicenna (Ibn SƯnƗ) In many ways, Avicenna is much closer to Aquinas than Averroes on these issues, and I have noted above Aquinas’s dependence on Avicenna. They agree that souls do not temporally precede their composites but are generated as individuated ab initio at least in virtue of the matter of the composite.75 They also agree that souls survive the death of the body and remain individuated in that state. However, Avicenna remains distinctive in some smaller details and on two fundamental points. Although Aquinas quotes Avicenna for support of his view, Avicenna himself seems less certain about how this happens and also seems to allow for a solution which I ruled out as an interpretation of Aquinas above – 73

Fa‫܈‬l al-MaqƗl, p. 21, ll. 9-10, 15-16. Ibid., l. 17. 75 I say “at least” because Avicenna seems to allow for further possibilities of individuation, which I have denied appear explicitly in Aquinas. See below. 74

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viz., that the soul might remain individuated by retrospective reference to the ante-mortem body of the composite. Avicenna reasons: We say that after the souls are separated from the bodies, there is no doubt that each one of them really exists as a singular thing (munfarida) by the difference of the matters they were in, by the difference of the times of their origination, and by the difference of their dispositions (hayҴƗtihƗ) which belong to them because of their different bodies.76

Avicenna seems more agnostic or open concerning the possibilities for various “dispositions” in the soul that could serve to individuate it,77 but his bottom line is that “souls are made distinct by the things in them that make them particular in the bodies, whether the bodies exist or no bodies exist, whether we know about those states or not....”78 While Aquinas could agree in principle that souls are distinct from one another in some of these ways,79 and while such difference in properties would seem enough to distinguish souls in light of Leibniz’s Law, this is not how Aquinas chooses to explain the individuation of the separated soul (as I argued above, contra Stump). What he does say emphasizes the per se activity and the being of the soul in virtue of its proper act of understanding.80 In contrast, the body to which the soul was joined before death no longer exists as a unit which could perform such an important metaphysical role.81 This leads us to one of the more fundamental disagreements. In the Psychology of the Healing, Avicenna does later argue for the (individuated) 76

Avicenna, al-Nafs (Psychology) of al-ShifƗҴ (The Healing), V.3, p. 225, reading the passage without the ϥϮϜΗ , in l. 14, as omitted by a majority of the manuscripts. The perfect after qad by itself makes more sense of Avicenna’s argument. 77 Ibid., p. 226; McGinnis and Reisman translation, p. 195, slightly modified: “…that thing belonging to the soul is a certain disposition, or a certain potentiality, or a certain accidental incorporeal quality, or the sum of them together [that] collectively individuates the soul, even if we do not know what it is.” 78 Ibid., p. 227; McGinnis and Reisman, p. 195. 79 For example, if one of the dispositions were the knowledge acquired during embodied life – see Aquinas, ST I.89.5. 80 ST I.76.1, corp., and ad 5; DUI, c. 5, ll. 88-95. 81 One would think the same constraint applies to Avicenna, who (as we shall see) thinks the soul is far less bound up with its particular body than does Aquinas – see NajƗt (The Salvation), II.6, p. 220; Rahman translation, p. 54. Aquinas’s reasoning seems consistent enough with the last quotation from Avicenna – “…whatever makes them particular in the bodies….”

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continuing existence of the soul in terms that Aquinas prefers.82 And these are the passages that Aquinas chooses to cite; not the ones above about individuation by retrospective reference to the body or some disposition or another. But interestingly, in these passages Avicenna argues for further conclusions that Aquinas is not willing to embrace. For Avicenna, it is unsurprising (and more straightforward) that he can speak of different acts of being for the soul and the body because he is a substance dualist – the body and soul are two different substances, the latter simply assigned to govern the former, as Avicenna makes clear.83 As I suggested above, Aquinas resists substance dualism. He argues that the being of the composite is the same, shared being of the soul.84 Aquinas’s solution here attempts to remain fully within the frame of a holistic Aristotelian hylomorphism. Averroes objects to Avicenna’s position that it entails an actual infinite, since Avicenna also holds that the world is eternal – thus, the number of separated souls will be infinite.85 But on this basis, Avicenna agrees with Averroes on a major conclusion about the afterlife that Aquinas rejects. The afterlife for Avicenna is an immaterial one; he (like Averroes) rejects the resurrection in his philosophical works.86 Avicenna thinks the impossibility of resurrection is proved by the infinite number of souls since there is only a finite amount of matter. Aquinas does not concern himself with either Averroes’s objection or Avicenna’s argument regarding the infinite souls since he does not believe in the eternity of the

82 Al-Nafs (Psychology) of al-ShifƗҴ (The Healing), V.4, p. 229; McGinnis and Reisman, p. 197. 83 Ibid., p. 231; McGinnis and Reisman, p. 198: “I say categorically that these two states [i.e., the potentiality to corrupt in virtue of the body and the actuality of the soul] cannot be combined in something that is essentially one. Cf. V.7, p. 255; McGinnis and Reisman, p. 207; also, NajƗt (The Salvation), II.6, p. 223; Rahman translation, p. 58, slightly modified: “[If the soul and body were essentially interdependent], then neither the soul nor the body would be a substance; but in fact they are two substances (jawharƗn).” Given this underlying reason, it is somewhat strange that in the earlier passages Avicenna seeks to explain the individuation of souls in any other way. See Druart (2000). 84 ST I.76.1, ad 5. 85 Averroes, TT, d. 1, p. 27; van den Bergh translation, p. 14. Cf. Marmura (1960). 86 Cf. Avicenna, IlƗhiyyƗt (Metaphysics) of al-ShifƗҴ (The Healing), IX.7, p. 347, where he says resurrection could only be established by the religious law. But Avicenna (similarly to Averroes) also argues explicitly contra resurrection in his esoteric Risala on the afterlife – see Marmura (1960), p. 233.

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world, nor does he think the latter doctrine demonstrable.87 Hence, not only does Aquinas think resurrection is possible (and analyzable in hylomorphic terms); it is much more important philosophically (and not just theologically) for him than for Avicenna because Aquinas embraces a unifying hylomorphism and rejects substance dualism.

Al-GhazƗlƯ In his TahƗfut al-FalƗsifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers), which elicited the response of similar name by Averroes, al-GhazƗlƯ seeks to undermine the philosophers’ (mainly Avicenna’s and al-FƗrƗbƯ’s) cases for having demonstrated various theses by philosophical proof and reasoning alone. Although he does not disagree with all the theses considered, he thinks some of them cannot be proven by philosophy and must be accepted instead on the basis of revelation. Thus, on these topics of the afterlife, alGhazƗlƯ’s general strategy is to argue that the immateriality of the soul has not been demonstrated by the philosophers, and therefore, neither has the immortality of the soul. Furthermore, he insists that even if they had proven these things, one can still consistently believe in the resurrection. In fact, in the TahƗfut, al-GhazƗlƯ suggests that he agrees with the philosophers regarding the soul’s immortality, but argues that it must be accepted on the basis of revelation or the religious law. He insists that we begin from revelation’s assurance of resurrection and then infer from that the doctrine of immortality (which the philosophers have tried in vain to prove by reason alone): Nor do we deny the survival of the soul after separation from the body. But we know this through the religious law, since it has conveyed [that there is] resurrection. And the resurrection is only understood in terms of the soul’s survival. We have previously denied only their claim that they know this by reason alone. What is contrary to the religious law among [the things they hold] is the denial of the resurrection of bodies….88

Despite some conflicting evidence elsewhere in al-GhazƗlƯ’s corpus, I shall assume that this is probably his settled view.89 One thing is certain – 87

Aquinas, DUI, c. 5, ll. 311-343. Al-GhazƗlƯ, TahƗfut al-FalƗsifa (TF), d. 20, pp. 213-214, Marmura’s translation. 89 There is some evidence (in Iqti‫܈‬Ɨd and the I‫ۊ‬yƗҴ) that al-GhazƗlƯ agrees with Ash‫ޏ‬arite views of soul as always embodied, some sort of material accident of the body, etc. See Marmura (2000), pp. xxv-xxvi. But given contradictory evidence here in the TF and elsewhere, Griffel concludes that al-GhazƗlƯ probably preferred 88

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he does not think that resurrection is simply a part of Scripture that can be interpreted allegorically, for there is no demonstration (burhƗn) of its impossibility. Aquinas disagrees with al-GhazƗlƯ’s opposition to philosophical arguments for the immortality of the soul, though he agrees with al-GhazƗlƯ that one must accept resurrection on the basis of revelation (rather than philosophical argument). However, al-GhazƗlƯ considers three explanations for the possibility of resurrection, and the one that he accepts is a version of an interpretation of Aquinas on resurrection that I have argued against. The three alternatives are90: 1) 2) 3)

The soul does not survive, but resurrection is the return of the living body, which was annihilated (and perhaps matter survives). The soul does survive, and the body is changed back into existence. The soul survives and returns to a body, i.e., some body or another.

The philosophers had entertained these three alternatives and rejected all of them. Having believed the list was exhaustive of the possibilities, they concluded that resurrection was impossible. They reject 1) because they do not think a substance can go completely out of existence and then somehow be brought back as numerically identical – at most a “replica,” something similar would be the result. Furthermore, matter or the body is not a suitable PP.91 They reject 2) because the same body would either have to be the body at the time of death (which many times is in quite an awful state!) or the body as containing all the parts that ever accrued to it (which won’t work because of cannibalism and the infinite number of souls).92 The philosophers also reject 3) because of the infinite number of souls, the fact that not just any matter is appropriately receptive to human souls, and also because this doctrine would simply amount to “transmigration” of souls, not resurrection (since it is not the same body that returns).93

Avicenna’s view of a self-subsisting soul, yet knew that he could not prove this doctrine (or the opposing one) by demonstration; therefore either was acceptable/possible. See Griffel (2009), p. 71. 90 TF, d. 20, p. 215. 91 Ibid., pp. 215-217. 92 Ibid., pp. 217-218. 93 Ibid., p. 218.

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Interestingly, al-GhazƗlƯ accepts 3). Similarly to Aquinas, he demurs with respect to the problem of the infinite number of souls. But his main reasoning for accepting 3) is simply that the survival of the soul (as the PP) can alone ensure resurrection – the matter will be shaped by the form and (even if souls were infinite) God can simply create bodies ex nihilo: Resurrection “is possible by returning [the soul] to the body, whatever body this might be, whether [composed] of the matter of the first body [or from that] of another or from matter whose creation commences anew. For [an individual] is what he is by virtue of his soul, not his body….”94 AlGhazƗlƯ says it is merely a semantic debate if the philosophers insist on calling this “transmigration,” for he thinks this explanation is a sufficient match for what Scripture calls “resurrection.”95 This is essentially the interpretation of Aquinas offered by Van Dyke and Stump – the same soul alone is sufficient to ensure resurrection of the same human being, provided some body or another. I have argued, like the Muslim falƗsifa whom al-GhazƗlƯ discusses, that this would not be a true resurrection of the same body but simply a re-creation of different bodies to fit surviving souls. Furthermore, the alternative overlooks Aquinas’s keen attention to at least some minimal continuity of matter (as a principle of the essence of a human being) between prior bodies and resurrected bodies, in addition to the admittedly more crucial survival of the soul as the substantial form and PP. On my view, Aquinas ends up endorsing something more like 2), but he denies that the alternatives al-GhazƗlƯ discusses within that option are exhaustive. The resurrected body is not identical with the matter of the corpse nor with the complete aggregate of all matter ever informed by the soul in question; rather, there is simply some modicum of matter that is present in both, the rest of the matter being supplied by divine power from other sources or created anew. AlGhazƗlƯ, however, seems content if none of my previous matter returns. Resurrection is not a “return” (ҵawd) of anything but merely the new union of the persistent soul with a body.

IV. Conclusion I have argued for several different conclusions about Aquinas on individuation and persistence over life, death, and resurrection. In doing so, I have attempted to illustrate how Aquinas’s hylomorphic metaphysic 94 95

Ibid., p. 219. Ibid., p. 220.

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of the human being can be consistent. Attaining consistency on these matters was no small feat, as he tried to balance Aristotelian metaphysics and the doctrines of his Christian faith. I suggest that he had the benefit of learning from his Muslim predecessors in their analyses. He takes something from everyone – matter as the PI (from Averroes), the individuated persistence of the human soul of itself post mortem (from Avicenna), the resurrection of the body (from al-GhazƗlƯ). He makes these views his own in many particular details, as I have shown, but uniquely and consistently adopts all three, the first two based on philosophical reasoning, the latter (in the same manner as al-GhazƗlƯ) as a tenet of faith.

Bibliography Primary Sources Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. The Revised Oxford Translation. Vols. 1-2 Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. —. De Anima. [DA] Greek. Aristotelis De Anima: Recognovit brevique adnotatione instruxit. Ed. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956. Greek. Aristotle, De Anima. Ed. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. Arabic. Aris‫ܒ‬nj‫ܒ‬ƗlƯs fƯ-l-Nafs. Ed. Abdurrahman Badawi. Cairo: Imprimerie Misr S.A.E., 1954. Reprint. Kuwait and Beirut: DƗr alQalam, 1980. English. In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Transl. J.A. Smith. —. Metaphysica [Met.]. Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Vols. 1-2. Ed. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Aquinas, Thomas. —. Compendium Theologiae [CT]. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 42. Rome: Editori di San Tommaso, 1979. —. De Ente et Essentia [DEE]. Latin. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 43. Rome: Editori di San Tommaso, 1976. English. In Klima (2007). Transl. Gyula Klima. —. De Principiis Naturae [DPN]. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 43. Rome: Editori di San Tommaso, 1976. —. De Unitate Intellectus [DUI]. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 43. Rome: Editori di San Tommaso, 1976. —. De Spiritualibus Creaturis [DSC]. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 24-2. Ed. J. Cos. Rome and Paris: Commissio Leonina-Éditions Du Cerf, 2000.

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—. Quaestiones de Quolibet [QQ]. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 25. Rome and Paris: Commissio Leonina-Éditions du Cerf, 1996. —. Quaestiones Disputatae de Anima [QDA]. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 24-1. Ed. B.C. Bazán. Rome and Paris: Commissio Leonina-Éditions Du Cerf, 1996. —. Scriptum Super Sententiis [Sent.]. Scriptum super libros Sententiarum magistri Petri Lombardi episcopi Parisiensis. Ed. P. Mandonnet. Vols. 1-2. Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1929. —. Sententia Libri De Anima [In DA]. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 45. Ed. R.A. Gauthier. Rome: Commissio Leonina, 1984. —. Summa Contra Gentiles [SCG]. In S. Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia. Ed. Robert Busa. Vol. 2. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich FrommannHolzboog, 1980. —. Summa Theologiae [ST]. In Opera Omnia. Vols. 4-5. Rome: Ex Typographia Polyglotta S.C. de Propaganda Fide, 1888-1889. Latin and English. Summa Theologiae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Vol. 11. Ed. and transl. Timothy Suttor; Vol. 12. Ed. and transl. Paul Durbin. —.Super Boetium De Trinitate [BDT]. In Opera Omnia. Vol. 50. Rome and Paris: Commissio Leonina-Éditions Du Cerf, 1992. Averroes (Ibn Rushd). Fa‫܈‬l al-MaqƗl (The Decisive Treatise). Arabic and English. Decisive Treatise & Epistle Dedicatory. Ed. and transl. Charles Butterworth. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2008. —. Long Commentary on De Anima [LCDA]. Latin. Averrois Cordubensis Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis De Anima Libros. Ed. F. Stuart Crawford. Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953. English. Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle. Transl. Richard Taylor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Includes in footnotes the Arabic fragments. —. Long Commentary on Metaphysics. TafsƯr mƗ baҵd a‫ܒ‬-ܑabƯҵat. Ed. Maurice Bouyges. Vols. 1-4. Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique, 19381952. —. TahƗfut al-TahƗfut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence). [TT] Arabic. Averroès Tahafot at-Tahafot (L’Incohérence de l’incohérence). Ed. Maurice Bouyges. 2nd Ed. Beirut: Dar el-Mashreq, 1987. English. The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Vols I-II. Transl. Simon Van Den Bergh. Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust and Cambridge University Press, 1954 and 2008.

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Avicenna (Ibn SƯnƗ). NajƗt (The Salvation). Arabic. Ed. Majid Fakhry. Beirut: DƗr al-ƖfƗq al-JadƯda, 1985. English. Avicenna’s Psychology. Transl. F. Rahman. London: Oxford University Press, 1952. —. ShifƗҴ (The Healing). al-IlƗhiyyƗt (Metaphysics). Arabic and English. The Metaphysics of The Healing. Ed. and transl. Michael Marmura. Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2005. —. ShifƗҴ (The Healing). al-Nafs (Psychology). Arabic. Avicenna’s De Anima. Ed. Fazlur Rahman. London: Oxford University Press, 1959. English. In Classical Arabic Philosophy. Eds. and transl. Jon McGinnis and David Reisman. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007. al-GhazƗlƯ. TahƗfut al-FalƗsifa (The Incoherence of the Philosophers). [TF] English and Arabic. Ed. and transl. Michael Marmura. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2000.

Secondary and Contemporary Sources Bazán, Bernardo Carlos (1985). “Le commentaire de S. Thomas d’Aquin sur le Traité de l’âme.” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 69: 521-547. Davidson, Herbert (1992). Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Di Giovanni, Matteo. (2007). “Individuation by Matter in Averroes’ ‘Metaphysics.’” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 18: 187-210. Druart, Therese-Anne (2000). “The Human Soul’s Individuation and Its Survival After the Body’s Death: Avicenna on the Causal Relation Between Body and Soul.” Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 10: 259273. Eberl, Jason (1999). “Do Human Persons Persist between Death and Resurrection” in Metaphysics and God: Essays in Honor of Eleonore Stump. Ed. K. Timpe. London: Routledge, 2009. Fine, Kit (1994). “A Puzzle Concerning Matter and Form” in Unity, Identity, and Explanation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Eds. Scaltsas, Charles, and Gill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994: 13-40. Gauthier, R.A. (1982). “Notes sur les début (1225-1240) du premier ‘Averroïsme.” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 66: 321-374.

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Geach, Peter (1969). God and the Soul. 2nd Ed. South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press. Gómez Nogales, Salvador (1976). “Saint Thomas, Averroès et l’Averroïsme” in Aquinas and Problems of His Time. Eds. G. Verbeke and D. Verhelst. Louvain: Leuven University Press. Gracia, Jorge J.E. (1994). Ed. Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and the Counter-Reformation, 1150-1650. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Gracia, Jorge J.E. and John Kronen (1994). “St. John of Thomas” in Gracia (1994): 511-533. Griffel, Frank (2009). Al-GhazƗlƯ’s Philosophical Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hughes, Christopher (1996). “Matter and Individuation in Aquinas.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 13: 1-16. —. (1997). “Aquinas on Continuity and Identity.” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 6: 93-108. —. (1998). “Matter and Actuality in Aquinas” in Thomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives. Brian Davies (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Originally in Revue International de Philosophie 52. Klima, Gyula (2001a). “Aquinas’s Proofs of the Immateriality of the Intellect from the Universality of Human Thought.” Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics 1: 19-28. —. (2001b). “Reply to Bob Pasnau on Aquinas’s Proofs for the Immateriality of the Intellect.” Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics 1: 37-44. —. (2002). “Man=Body+Soul: Aquinas’s Arithmetic of Human Nature” in Thomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives. Ed. Brian Davies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. (2004). “Thomistic Monism vs. Cartesian Dualism.” Presented at International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI) Ninth International Conference, Workshop. University of Navarra. Pamplona, Spain. 3 Aug. 2004.

—. (2005). “Thomas Sutton on Individuation” in Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics. 5 (2005): 70-78. —. (2007). Ed. Medieval Philosophy: Essential Readings with Commentary. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007.

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—. (2009). “Aquinas on the Materiality of the Human Soul and the Immateriality of the Human Intellect.” Philosophical Investigations 32: 163-182. Kripke, Saul (1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marmura, Michael (1960). “Avicenna and the Problem of the Infinite Number of Souls.” Mediaeval Studies 22: 232-239. —. (2000). Ed. and transl. Al-GhazƗlƯ’s The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press. McGinnis, Jon (2010). Avicenna. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nevitt, Turner (2014). “Survivalism, Corruptionism, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 31: 1-19. Oderberg, David (2002). “Hylomorphism and Individuation” in Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions. Ed. John Haldane. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Owens, Joseph (1994). “Thomas Aquinas” in Gracia (1994): 173-194. Pasnau, Robert (2001). “Comments on Gyula Klima: ‘Aquinas’s Proofs of the Immateriality of the Intellect.’” Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics 1: 29-36. —. (2002). Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pasnau, Robert and Chris Shields (2004). The Philosophy of Aquinas. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Shoemaker, Sydney and Richard Swinburne (1984). Personal Identity. Oxford: Blackwell. Stump, Eleonore (2003). Aquinas. New York: Routledge. —. (2006). “Resurrection, Reassembly, and Reconstitution: Aquinas on the Soul.” Die Menschliche Seele: Brauchen wir den Dualismus? Ed. B. Niederbacher and E. Runggaldier. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2006: 151-171. Swinburne, Richard (1998). “Soul, nature and immortality of the” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 9. London: Routledge, 1998: 44-48. Taylor, Richard (1998). “Personal Immortality in Averroes’ Mature Philosophical Psychology.” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 9: 87-110. —. (2009). Ed. and transl. Averroes’s Long Commentary on the De Anima of Aristotle. New Haven: Yale University Press. Toner, Patrick (2009). “Personhood and Death in St. Thomas Aquinas.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 26: 121-138.

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Van den Bergh, Simon (1954). Ed. and transl. Averroes’s The Incoherence of the Incoherence. Vols I-II. Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust and Cambridge University Press. Van Dyke, Christina (2007). “Human Identity, Immanent Causal Relations, and the Principle of Non-Repeatability: Thomas Aquinas on the Bodily Resurrection. Religious Studies 43: 373-394. Van Iwagen, Peter (1978). The Possibility of Resurrection and Other Essays in Christian Apologetics. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978. Zimmerman, Dean (1999). “The Compatibility of Materialism and Survival: The ‘Falling Elevator’ Model.” Faith and Philosophy 16: 194-212.

AQUINAS AND LOCKE ON PERSON AND RESURRECTION PETER WEIGEL

I. Introduction Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and John Locke (1632-1704) present two historically influential views of the human person. Both consider the continuity of persons in light of the Christian bodily resurrection. Thomistic philosophical anthropology remains influential in Catholic circles and of vital interest to scholars. Locke’s views on personal identity are a staple of contemporary analytic philosophical discussions. But exchange between the two schools remains limited, with few extended comparisons. The accounts of Aquinas and Locke face similar problems and decisions, but use markedly different approaches to the nature of the self. Comparison highlights the choices each makes and the consequences endured. Perhaps each side can learn something, even where their views substantially diverge. This treatment can only sketch the two positions on persons and resurrection. Brevity prevents offering much assessment or wading into long-standing interpretive conundrums. The hope is that this basic comparison inspires others. Since most philosophically trained people tend to be familiar with Locke’s position, his account comes first. A concluding section offers summary comparisons.

II. Locke A. Locke on personal identity Locke’s self reflects his particular concerns for empirical verification and the subject as a moral agent. Locke philosophizes aware of the emerging physics, including Boyle’s corpuscular atomism and Newton’s laws. Locke sees the emerging empirical science offering a model for other

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areas of philosophy, such as the workings of the mind. The physics of the day suggest to Locke the mind as passive, and as the place where complex ideas (in atomistic fashion) arise from simple ones. Locke’s epistemic agnosticism about essences helps him stay above nominalist-essentialist controversies of his day. He finds Cartesian dualism and Scholastic hylomorphism overly speculative about minds and souls for proper use.1 This does not stand in the way of his forming some definite views. The Essay in Book 1 Chapter 2 rules out “innate ideas” and suggests mental content originates in sensations flowing in from one’s ambient natural and social environments. One aim is undermining prominent Calvinist teaching on the total depravity (and double predestination) weighing on the moral spirit of the era. The mind as a clear slate also leaves people, “barely by the Use of their natural Faculties” (Essay 1.2.1), free to harmonize their ideas and conduct with the order in nature created by God.2 Locke’s epistemic and anthropological projects thus dovetail with his theological and moral aims. His empirical parsimony is tempered by needing the self to be a moral agent and bearer of rights, capable of bearing responsibilities and being judged in this life and the next. This negotiating of Christian and natural philosophical aims yields a self both 1

In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke notes his concern for the self as a moral agent and his not approaching the person through a traditional metaphysics of substance: “Nor let anyone object that the names of Substances are often to be made use of in Morality, as well as those of Modes, from which will arise Obscurity. For as to Substances, when concerned in moral Discourses, their divers Natures are not so much enquir’d into, as supposed; v.g. when we say that Man is subject to Law: We mean nothing by Man, but a corporeal rational Creature: What the real Essence or other Qualities of that Creature are in this case, is no way considered.” An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Book 3, chapter 11, section 16. The work was originally published in December 1689 (dated 1690), with a second and revised edition in 1694. Sylvana Tomaselli discusses the larger seventeenth century scientific and epistemic context for Locke’s theory of personal identity, in “The First Person: Descartes, Locke and Mind-Body Dualism,” History of Science 22 (1984): 185205; see also K. Joanna Forstrom’s John Locke and Personal Identity: Immortality and Bodily Resurrection in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (New York: Continuum Publishing, 2010). 2 The early twentieth century historian Carl Becker in his influential study cites Locke’s motives to suppress the notion of total depravity and open the road for harmonizing thought, morality, and society with nature, in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers, Second Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 64-65, originally published by Yale in 1932.

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verifiable by inner experience, but still ontologically robust enough to be a moral agent concerned for its future happiness and able to be reconstituted in the afterlife. This theological dimension in Locke is often underplayed in philosophical treatments and is worth a glance. Although a baptized member of the Church of England, Locke inclines away from traditional institutional or creedal commitments. The Reasonableness of Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695) is notably silent, for example, on Christology or the Trinity. Scripture is emphasized for its moral upbuilding. It also is the sole Christian authority one needs. Scripture is to be read “in the plain direct meaning of the words and phrases.”3 This biblical literalism and doctrinal minimalism will figure prominently in discussing the resurrection. Locke regards as the essential (sole) tenet of Christianity accepting Christ as Messiah and Savior of the world, although this acceptance must also be accompanied by repentance for sin and amending one’s conduct.4 Christian moral conduct is to be guided by the sayings of Jesus, Moses, and the prophets.5 But people in practice act on primarily hedonistic motives. Thus Locke sees fear of divine punishment or reward as indispensable to ensure virtuous conduct in most people. Christianity for Locke is thus primarily about moral instruction and motivation. Locke’s self is structured for Christian moral purposes, ideally guided by concern for one’s ultimate happiness or misery. 3

He notes in the Preface: “The little satisfaction and consistency that is to be found in most of the systems of divinity I have met with made me betake myself to the sole reading of the Scriptures . . . for the understanding of the Christian religion.” The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures, ed. George W. Ewing (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), p. xxvii. He notes afterward in the opening of the body of the text that the Scriptures “being designed by God for the illiterate bulk of mankind,” should generally “be understood in the plain direct meaning of the words and phrases, such as [the sense] they may be supposed to have in the mouth of the speakers . . . ,” paragraph #1, p.2. (The Ewing edition uses the paragraph numbering standard for other editions of the work.) See also paragraphs #248-252 on pp.186-195. Locke’s basic views on Christian belief are discussed in Nicholas Wolterstorff’s “Locke’s Philosophy of Religion,” The Cambridge Companion to Locke, ed. Vere Chappell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 172-198. See also Victor Nuovo’s introduction to his edited volume, John Locke: Writings on Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). 4 Reasonableness of Christianity, paragraph #165, pp.123-124; see also #26-31, pp.16-20. 5 Reasonableness of Christianity, paragraph #212, pp.148-149.

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Locke’s second edition (1694) of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding adds his famous Chapter 27, “Of Identity and Diversity.” It comes in a series of chapters on types of relations (chapters 25-28). Locke sees the concept of identity emerging from comparing something existing at one time with another time. He views the basic principle of individuation as “existence itself; which determines a being of any sort to a particular time and place, incommunicable to two beings of the same kind.” (Essay 2.27.3) An individual being’s existence is incommunicable, i.e., incapable of being shared by multiple beings. (In a different way, Aquinas will also forge a strong connection between an individual’s continuity of identity and its act of existing (actus essendi).) Here Locke considers different persistence conditions for different kinds of entity. (Essay 2.27.2) It should be noted that contemporary philosophers speak of a thing’s diachronic identity, across time and change, as opposed to the synchronic identity of what something is at a given moment. At the atomic level, a “particle of matter,” Locke thinks, has a relation to a definite time and place where its existence begins. Masses of (two or more) atoms are “only the Cohesion of Particles of Matter any how united” (2.27.4) and have no lasting identity. Locke believes a different mass is involved if one particle changes out of the set. Material objects have no Aristotelian form (contra Aquinas) conferring unity, essence, and teleological function. Living organisms such plants and animals are another matter. They have identity through “an Organization of Parts in one coherent body, partaking of one Common Life,” (2.27.4) so the continuing identity of living things lasts for the lifespan. Locke in this context introduces a man, a human being, as being no more than an animal of a certain form. Its continuity as a living thing lies “in nothing but a participation of the same continued Life, by constantly fleeting Particles of Matter, in succession vitally united to the same organized Body.” (Essay 2.27.6) Locke then famously argues a human being and human person are different things with different identity conditions. A human being is the biological organism, a person is something else constituted by mentalistic criteria. He prepares the reader saying, “‘Tis not therefore Unity of Substance” determining identity but considering “what Idea the word it is applied to stands for . . . if Person, Man, and Substance, are three Names standing for three different Ideas . . . such must be the [differing] Identity.” (2.27.7) The initial method is more a conceptual investigation of linguistic convention, not a metaphysical inquiry into essences and properties one will see in Aquinas. But the

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outcomes would not have had a conventional ring to them in Locke’s age. The approach yields a divorce of person from substance, and person from human being. The self will not be a substance, nor will it even be something uniquely bound to one substance. What it is to be a self and a human being will be two quite different entities. What Locke retains is consciousness as the locus of moral responsibility, considering the human person to be: a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it: It being impossible for any one to perceive, that he does perceive. (Essay 2.27.9)

A person is a being capable of rational thought, while reflective consciousness is an essential accompaniment of all thinking. Here one should also distinguish person from the personal identity over time that Locke sees as guaranteed by the continuity of self-consciousness: For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ‘tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls a self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person; it is the same self now as it was then; and ‘tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done. (2.27.9)

The self extends from present consciousness to an awareness of certain past actions and experiences one attributes to oneself. Thus, the thinking being (whatever it is) with its rational and reflective capacities grounds the self, but does not constitute the self. Instead, it is continuity of consciousness, through memory, appropriating past thoughts and experiences with the same consciousness now as then. It is as a process that one derives the idea of an enduring self.6 Of course, much depends on 1) what Locke means by consciousness and 2) exactly what constitutes its 6

“For whilst we are thinking, or whilst we receive successively several Ideas in our Minds, we know that we do exist; and so we call the Existence, or the Continuation of the Existence of our selves, or any thing else, Commensurate to the succession of any Ideas in our minds, the Duration of our selves, or any such other thing co-existing with our Thinking.” (Essay 2.14.3)

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ongoing unity. Locke earlier in the Essay offers that “consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind,” (2.1.19) but scholars recognize that Locke does not elaborate.7 Locke sees this conscious self-appropriation of actions in memory as the condition for being assessed moral praise or blame in this life and on “that Great Day”. (3.27.22) The emphasis on mentalistic criteria frees him from speculative ontology about essences, focusing on “what idea the word it is applied to stands for.” Thus, person is “a Forensik Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery.” (2.27.26) What entity does the thinking remains ultimately unknown. The Essay suggests it is probable that consciousness is “annexed to, and the affection” (2.27.25) of a single immaterial substance. Much has also been made of Locke’s suggestion that an all-powerful Creator can place in “some Systems of Matter fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think.”8 (4.3.6) The upshot is that Locke’s self reflects his epistemic caution, while still suggesting something ontologically firm enough to function as a locus of moral responsibility and self-concern for one’s future. Memory is also a crucial unifying element, since the unification of consistent patterns of rationality, thought, feeling, psychology, and moral decision significantly depend on it.9 Some implications of this reliance on mentalistic criteria are nevertheless striking, which Locke realizes. Locke considers memory to be a present awareness representing past awareness of thoughts and actions. It is in fact a present reconstruction of past content, while also noting a sameness (or at least similarity) of past and present content. But sameness of mental content does not in principle require the same subject (or faculties). So, one implication for Locke is that self-consciousness can in principle 7

Gideon Yaffe tries to reconstruct a theory of consciousness in Locke relevant to personal identity, in “Locke on Consciousness, Personal Identity and the Idea of Duration” Noûs (2011): 1-22. The lack of much of an explicit theory is at least in line with his limits on knowing the underlying nature of things. 8 In his correspondence with Edward Stillingfleet on the resurrection, Locke repeats this idea – Mr. Locke’s Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, in The Works of John Locke, new 12th edition, corrected, vol. 4 of 10 vols. (London, 1823), p. 474. Whatever Locke’s private convictions, his overarching tendency is to use the language of dualism in the Essay and in his correspondence with Stillingfleet. 9 John Yolton, Locke: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 27-30.

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transfer between subjects. Since “whatever has the same consciousness of present and past Actions, is the same Person,” the same self does not require “whether I consist of all the same Substance [over time], material or immaterial, or no.”10 (2.27.16; also 27.14) Locke’s example of the dayman and night-man proposes a situation where “two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting in the same Body, one constantly by Day, the other by night; and on the other side the same consciousness acting by Intervals in two distinct bodies.” (2.27.23) The latter part of the passage notes selves can switch subjects. However, Locke notes that de facto he doubts a good God would transfer a particular consciousness “which draws Reward or Punishment with it.” (2.27.13) But the overall picture is still that of consciousness having its own self-contained identity apart from other entities affiliated with it in a given setting. A further plausible implication of Locke’s theory appears to be that the same self can in principle have interrupted existence. If I “wholly lose the memory of some parts of my life” beyond retrieval, I now am not that person. (2.27.20) Locke then continues (2.27.20) with an example, in a judicial setting, wherein humane laws do not punish the sane person for the insane person’s actions, nor the sane person for the insane person’s actions, the reason being that in both cases “that self was changed, the self same Person was no longer in that Man.” By this reasoning, a period of temporary insanity followed by recovery of one’s normal sensibilities would seem to interpose an alternate self between two periods of the sane self. Locke also brings up the matter of extreme intoxication where “the Drunkard perhaps not be conscious of what he did,” and thus the sober person should not be judged morally culpable on “that Great Day.”11 The implication seems that the normal self is temporarily not present and then later is. Locke then once again refers to the day-man and night-man example, “Make those [alternating] intervals of Memory and Forgetfulness to take their turns regularly by Day and Night, you have two persons with the same immaterial Spirit, as much as in the former instance of two Persons with the same Body.” (2.27.23) Here he notes two persons 10

Kenneth Winkler discusses this in “Locke on Personal Identity,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (April 1991): 201-222, 204. 11 Essay 2.27.22. Locke here also notes the problem of adjudicating real cases of alcoholic blackout, and he precludes allowing it as a defense. See below where Locke probably believes the human soul is inactive and unconscious in the interim between death and resurrection. Such a position would further suggest Locke is amenable to selves having interrupted existence.

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alternating in one subject, with at least no indication that one continues in another (or the same) subject while the other is manifest. Earlier on, Locke offers another example where if the same consciousness now had seen the Biblical Deluge the two are the same person. (2.27.16) The context of the example does not seem to assume that the consciousness in question has to be temporally unbroken since that era. These examples and Locke’s metaphysics of the self make interrupted existence a plausible reading, though Locke is not explicit. If he thinks the self is merely suppressed in any of the examples, he does not say so or explain.12 Thomas Reid’s (1710-1796) Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785) offers three prominent criticisms of Locke’s theory which still inspire variation and debate. The aim here is not final assessment, but to highlight some aspects of the above identity conditions. First, Reid suggests memory is neither necessary nor sufficient evidence for identity, “I knew who bore and suckled me, [however] I do not remember these events.”13 Joseph Butler (1692-1752) a half-century before Reid similarly criticizes Locke’s account as circular: “Anyone should really think it selfevident, that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute personal identity, anymore than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes.”14 Recalling a past self is an epistemic claim. Butler thinks this requires 1) a prior, metaphysical self there to be remembered and 2) this self has to function as an objective standard for correct memories. Memory is not the self if a separate ‘I’ has

12

In Essay 2.27.1 Locke states as one condition for identity that “one thing cannot have two beginnings of Existence.” Some argue that Locke here only means one thing cannot have two original (first) beginnings. Thus, the point of Locke allowing interrupted existence is debatable. Daniel Kaufmann regards Locke as at least leaving open the possibility of the self having interrupted existence in “The Resurrection of the Same Body and the Ontological Status of Organisms: What Locke Should Have (and Could Have) Told Stillingfleet,” in Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy, ed. David Owen, Paul Hoffman, and Gideon Yaffe (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2008), 191-214, see p.208. See also Joshua Hoffman on “Locke on Whether a Thing Can Have Two Beginnings of Existence,” Ratio 22 (1980), 106-111. 13 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785), ed. Derek Brookes (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2002), Essay III, chapter 4, p.264. 14 Joseph Butler, The Works of Joseph Butler, vol.1 of 2 vols., ed. W. E. Gladstone (Oxford: Oxford Press, 1986) [reprinted from the 1898 edition], 385.

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to do both the remembering and be that self which is remembered.15 One remembers walking in this room before because one is the same self; one is not the same self then as now in virtue of remembering walking into the room. This underscores that Locke relies on the inner determination, in memory, of sameness of past and present mental content, which critics see as raising the question of verification. A second problem Reid notes is that the ability of consciousness to transfer between subjects allows for duplication of selves, “for two or twenty intelligent beings to be the same person.”16 One can imagine content-wise the “same” consciousness exists in multiple beings, but identity is normally thought of as something unique to numerically a single being. Reid thinks something extrinsic to consciousness must be an individuating factor or factors. The duplication problem also underscores the unity problem, anticipating contemporary paradoxes of consciousness undergoing “fission” into multiple selves or multiple streams fusing into one. The issue has given rise to an entire branch of literature in recent decades. Reid’s most famous objection appeals to the transitivity of identity, where if A=B and B=C then A=C. In Reid’s example, a brave young officer remembers being flogged as a boy for stealing apples. As a young officer in battle he captures the enemy’s standard. Later in life he is made a general. Suppose that the general in his dotage remembers doing the actions of the young man but not those of the boy.17 Reid thinks Locke’s 15

Shelley Weinberg notes of Butler’s objection: “So, either there is no truth to ground the knowledge claim that I am the same person or the account commits circularity.” “Locke on Personal Identity,” Philosophy Compass 6 (2011): 398407, 401. Winkler also addresses the tension between a subjectively constituted self and the possibility of external assessment, “Locke on Personal Identity,” 206209. 16 Reid, Essays, III 6, p.276. In the significant body of literature on duplicating, branching, or fusing consciousness, influential discussions inspiring responses or variations include: Bernard Williams, “The Self and the Future,” Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 161-180; Derek Parfit responding in “Personal Identity,” Philosophical Review 80 (1971): 3-7; and Carol Rovane’s “Branching SelfConsciousness,” Philosophical Review 99 (1990): 355-395. 17 Reid, Essays, III.6, p.276. Reid does not claim to have thought of the example. George Berkeley (1685-1753) includes a related difficulty in his Alciphron; Or, The Minute Philosopher (1732). The Brookes edition of Reid’s Essays gives further details, 276 note 10.

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theory implies the general is not the same person as the boy, and seems to violate transitivity. The example might also make peoples’ lives an odd compilation of distinct selves with overlapping periods. When one is three one remembers being two, but at twelve one remembers being three but not two, and so on. Brevity prevents weighing the merits of these objections. Some commentators think some or all can be mitigated. One common defense against the transitivity and related memory objections is to read (or reconstruct) Locke as not endorsing a strict memory criterion, or perhaps one can widen the interpretation of memory to include forms of memory beyond present consciousness.18 Locke might only mean that the continuity includes what the self can remember (when prodded) or, alternately, has remembered at an earlier time. The latter case allows an intermediary version of oneself to remember on behalf of the current self. Thus the young officer remembering the boy is an intermediary connection from the old general to the boy.19 Recursive layers of such intermediaries could in principle connect the significant once-remembered moments in a lifespan. Other commentators look for an enduring unity for consciousness apart from memory, as when Locke possibly suggests consciousness has a kind of intrinsic duration that one can intuitively recognize.20 (2.27.25) In any case, with a large number of varied defenses over the years, a consensus has yet to emerge regarding which ones are effective and still plausibly represent Locke.

18

Those citing Locke as not holding the memory criterion include Margaret Atherton, in “Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 8 (1983): 273-294, 276; Peter Lopston, in “Locke, Reid, and Personal Identity,” The Philosophical Forum 35 (2004): 51-63, 54; and Johan Gustafson, “Did Locke Defend the Memory Continuity Criterion of Personal Identity?,” in Locke Studies 10 (2010): 113-129. Prominent supporters for the traditional view Locke held the memory criterion include: Anthony Flew, “Locke on Personal Identity.” Philosophy 26 (1951): 53-68, 55; J.L. Mackie in Problems From Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 178-179; and Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 205. 19 See Winkler, “Locke on Personal Identity,” 207, and Anthony Quinton, “The Soul and Spiritual Substance,” The Journal of Philosophy 59 (1962): 393-409. 20 Shelley Weinberg, “Locke on Personal Identity,” Philosophy Compass 6 (2011): 398-407; see also Gideon Yaffe, “Locke on Consciousness, Personal Identity and the Idea of Duration,” Noûs (2011): 1-22.

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B. Locke on Resurrection Locke in the Essay seeks an account of personal identity compatible with the Christian bodily resurrection: And thus we may be able without any difficulty to conceive, the same Person at the Resurrection, though in a Body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here, the same consciousness going along with the Soul that inhabits it. (2.27.15)

If self-consciousness is sufficient for continuity of personal identity, which human body is connected to the person in the resurrection matters little (so long as that body is reasonably humanly proportioned). Locke inclines toward the self being situated in a soul, and likely the same one pre- and postmortem, but we saw he regards this as neither certain nor essential. Locke is aware this avoids many classic problems philosophers and theologians grappled with through the centuries. Will it be the same body? If so, how or in what sense? Must (or can) it involve the same matter? But what would that involve? Aquinas will face some of these questions. How Locke arrives at his views on the resurrection and the role of the body is instructive. Locke discusses the resurrection in an unpublished and unfinished Latin treatise, Resurrectio et Quae Sequuntur (c. 1699), and in his remarks on I Corinthians in A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul (published 1705-1707). Yet, many of his background assumptions emerge in the “Stillingfleet Correspondence,” historically prominent letters Locke exchanges with Edward Stillingfleet (1635-1699), Bishop of Worcester (1687-1699).21 Stillingfleet is mostly known today as Locke’s opponent. In 21

Stillingfleet’s objections to key tenets of Locke’s Essay were originally couched in his A Discourse in Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity: With an Answer to the Late Socian Objections Against It from Scripture, Antiquity, and Reason (1697). Therein Stillingfleet proposes Locke’s “new way of ideas” features a skeptical epistemology undermining certain tenets of Christian belief. Locke responds in his A Letter to the Right Reverend Edward, Lord Bishop of Worcester in 1697. Stillingfleet replies to Locke in March of that year with The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Letter. Locke replies again in July with a second letter. Stillingfleet answers him directly a second time (1698). Locke musters a third reply (1699) in answer to Stillingfleet’s second letter, before Stillingfleet dies in 1699. Treatments of Locke’s resurrection controversy with Stillingfleet which were particularly helpful include Daniel Kaufmann’s “The Resurrection of the Same

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his day, he was a highly accomplished scholar and defender of Anglican orthodoxy.22 Stillingfleet objects to Locke’s view of personal identity in the Essay as undermining the “article of faith” that persons will be resurrected “in the same body.”23 Locke, as just seen, offers the person rises “in a Body not exactly in make or parts the same.” Locke’s initial response is to deny rising in the same body is a key Christian doctrine, explicit “nowhere in Scripture” by his reckoning of its plain sense. Even St. Paul, traditionally an important source on the resurrection in Protestantism, only says that every man is raised “in his body,” not the same body (in 2 Corinthians 5).24 But Locke is likely aware that rising in the same body is a long-standing Christian teaching, and one generally held by his Anglican and Puritan contemporaries.25 Locke’s Protestant contemporaries also denied the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory, bringing more emphasis on a final judgment and prompting the question of the soul’s fate in the interim period before the resurrection. Some Protestant thinkers then held the soul dies with the body, or it goes Body,” also Matthew Spooner’s “Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity and Belief in Resurrection,” in the Cornell undergraduate journal, Logos (Spring 2005): 8-21. 22 Cf. Richard Popkin, “The Philosophy of the Bishop of Stillingfleet,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 9 (July 1971): 303-320. 23 Stillingfleet as quoted by Locke, Mr. Locke’s Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, in The Works of John Locke, new 12th edition, corrected, vol. 4 of 10 vols. (London, 1823), 303, and see also 312. 24 In the King James Bible. Locke expresses the same view in Resurrectio et Quae Sequuntur (c. 1699), dating from near the time of his debate with Stillingfleet. The English translation from the Latin appears in John Locke: Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 232-237, 237. A similar view appears in his discussion of 1 Corinthians 15 in A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul. John Marshall gives further detail how Locke seems to have over time come to the view human persons will not rise in the same body, in John Locke: Resistance, Religion, and Responsibility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 399-401. 25 A general rising from the dead is taught by the pre-Nicene Church Fathers in the second century – e.g., Justin Martyr, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna. The Catholic Church affirms the teaching at Fourth Lateran Council (1215) and reaffirms it at Second Council of Lyon (1274). Protestant Anglican and Puritan theologians in Locke’s day tended to agree on resurrection in the same body, as does Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (#998). Daniel Kaufmann’s “The Resurrection of the Same Body,” 200, cites a number of relevant sources among Locke’s British contemporaries.

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unconscious and inactive, perhaps “sleeping” with the body until the resurrection. Locke is often linked to the latter view by commentators, which would add another dimension where the self’s interrupted existence seems a real possibility, in this case for every human person.26 Stillingfleet does not think rising in the same body requires material continuity. That is, the “same” body does not need to contain a measure of the same material substrate, involving (according to a tradition) particles from the original body or at least one of its pre-mortem stages. He also does not believe rising in the same body means the same physiological constitution or shape at the time of death. For example, a man dead of consumption or a dead embryo do not suggest states of the body worthy of restoring for eternity. Stillingfleet holds only that, “the Resurrection is consistent with its Identity [the body], if its Organization and Life be the same. From whence it follows no more is required but restoring Life to the Organized Parts of it.”27 This might suggest Stillingfleet sees the same body along the lines Locke himself sees living organisms or the human being. (Essay 2.27.4, 8, 13) Locke agrees with Stillingfleet that 1) one should not receive one’s exact pre-mortem physical constitution, and that 2) material continuity is 26

Views propounding the death or inactivity of the human soul during the postmortem and pre-resurrection interim are historically termed “soul sleep” or in recent decades “mortalism” is used. A commonly cited passage on Locke’s position is when Locke speaks about death as the punishment for sin in the opening pages of The Reasonableness of Christianity, “I must confess by death here [his emphasis], I can understand nothing but a ceasing to be, the losing of all actions of life and sense” (paragraph #4, p.4 in the Ewing Edition). Brian Ball regards it as uncontroversial that Locke holds a version of mortalism in The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley (Cambridge, UK: James Clarke, 2008), 125-127. John Marshall sees Locke’s belief in mortalism as more “probable” (p. 402) than certain. Cf. Nicholas Jolley’s aptly titled Locke’s Touchy Subjects: Materialism and Immortality (Oxford: Oxford Press, 2015), chapter 8. 27 Edward Stillingfleet, The Bishop of Worcester’s Answer to Mr. Locke’s Second Letter (London: Henry Mortlock, 1698), 42. On that same page Stillingfleet discusses the identity of a plant being the organization of the parts in one coherent body and partaking of one common life. Kaufman points out these two important passages in Stillingfleet, “The Resurrection of the Same Body,” 203. Some commentators think Stillingfleet’s emphasis on an “organization of parts” could suggest he sees the soul as an Aristotelian form, and thus his position bears more resemblance to Aquinas’s than Locke’s. The initial evidence here is at least not explicit.

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unnecessary, since he denies Scripture even calls for the same body. If one wants to gather some particles from the former body, it seems to Locke arbitrary as to which particles and from which stages this would be done to insure material continuity. Should one, for instance, require certain percentages from this stage and not that one?28 Yet, for these reasons Locke is also inclined to think the same body is irrelevant to the self and it having to undergo judgment. However, Locke is clear that whatever body a person has at the rising will still be his body.29 He also does not deny God could give the same body back. By gathering the old particles together, “God may, if he please, give to every one a body consisting only of such particles as were before vitally united to his soul.”30 So far, this could seem like Locke and Stillingfleet mostly agree, except for the point of Christianity requiring rising in the same body. Yet, Locke throughout the controversy generally seems to regard the “body” as only a mass, i.e., a set of arranged particles. Remember that Locke thinks masses have a fleeting or nominal identity at best, which lasts only as long as an exact set of particles is present.31 But this criterion of identity for a “body” means one has innumerable bodies over a lifetime, with the identity of the body changing as often as a single particle comes or goes. Thus, God giving back the same body here just means receiving one of a person’s innumerable former sets of atoms. In addition, who knows for how long one would possess this former mass involving an exact set of particles? One might, for example, receive the same mass again, or one of them, from one’s former life for a mere moment before it is gone; or perhaps one is given the same mass for an eternity. On such terms, Locke allowing God might attach to one’s consciousness some previously owned body-mass, for perhaps only a brief while, suggests there is a good deal of daylight between his views and what Stillingfleet and most Christian theologians of Locke’s day might mean by the same body.

28

Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, in The Works of John Locke, new 12th edition, corrected, vol. 4 of 10 vols. (London, 1823), 309-310. 29 Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, in Works, vol.4, 324. 30 Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester in Works, vol.4, 332. 31 “It suffices to make the same body in which the things were done, that it consists of some of the particles, and no other but such as were sometime, during his life, vitally united to his soul.” Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, in Works, vol. 4, 308-309; see also 323. The point is underscored by Daniel Kaufmann near the conclusion of his “The Resurrection of the Same Body.”

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If Stillingfleet himself has in mind the same organism returning, this seems to present a problem for Locke. The Essay always refers to the life of the living organism in question as “continued life” or being “continuous” (e.g., several times in Essay 2.27.4 alone). In Essay 2.27.10 he speaks of “one, continued life.” Locke could well mean by this that living organisms cannot have interrupted existence, at least as the Essay customarily speaks of them. A telling passage has Locke say that Scriptural references appearing to speak of the resurrection in the same body are only using linguistic convention to speak of one’s body as if it were always the same, “though in a strict and philosophical sense, as your lordship speaks, [the body] would not be the same.”32 Locke curiously never brings up with Stillingfleet the body considered as a living organism. It is not clear why. Perhaps to do so concedes Stillingfleet’s original point: Locke’s views of identity probably are not conducive to the same body rising in the stable, robust sense the Christian tradition has in mind. The discussion with Stillingfleet also underscores that, for Locke, the identity of the human body is negligible for personal identity and the resurrection, a position Aquinas will go against.

III. Aquinas on Person and Resurrection A. Aquinas on the person Aquinas works in the tradition of Boethius (c. 480-525) defining a person as “an individual substance of a rational nature,” as Aquinas notes in Summa Theologiae Ia q.29 a.1 obj.1.33 By Boethius’s time the Latin term persona and its Greek equivalents had seen extensive use in discussions of the Trinity and Incarnation. The notion already existed in Greco-Roman theatrical, legal, moral, metaphysical, and social contexts. Aquinas elsewhere emphasizes that a person is an “individual substance” signifying

32

Second Reply to the Bishop of Worcester, in Works, vol.4, 324. “persona est rationalis naturae individua substantia,” Aquinas quoting Boethius in Summa Theologiae Ia q.29 a.1 obj.1, in vols. 4-12 of 50 vols. [projected] of the Leonine Edition, in Sancti Thomae de Aquino, Opera Omnia, Iussa Leonis XIII P.M. edita (Rome: 1882-). Summa Theologiae is translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province as Summa Theologica, 3 vols. (New York: Benziger Bros., 1947). Latin texts from Aquinas are from the Corpus Thomisticum online. The English translations normally follow an available published translation (where there is one), with occasional modifications by the author of this article. 33

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“a complete substance subsisting of itself apart from all other things.” 34 The emphasis here is on something that is incommunicable and cannot be duplicated or shared with other things. Personhood for Aquinas is not a degreed category or property; something counts as a person or it does not. Importantly, the human person is the individual human being. Unlike Locke, Aquinas does not separate the two. The human being includes a hylomorphic composition of Aristotelian prime matter and a substantial form. The substantial form of the body is also the soul, for Aquinas. This soul-form organizes the matter into the structure that is the body. Thus, for Aquinas, the human person is an ontological composition of distinct items; it is not a single and uniform entity, feature, or aspect. The whole composite is the person, and the soul alone is not. This is so even though the soul is both the form of the body and able to exist separately from it (more about this presently). Aquinas also regards the soul as directly created by God in the developing body.35 With this snapshot in place it helps to unpack a few of these points. 34 “substantia, completa, per se subsistens, separata ab aliia,” in Summa Theologiae III q.26 a.12 ad 2. Aquinas focuses on issues of philosophical anthropology in various texts, which include: his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard in Book I; Summa Contra Gentiles II c.58-90; Disputed Questions on the Soul; Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima; and Summa Theologiae Ia q.75-102. Significant discussion of the resurrection occurs in Sentences I; in Summa Contra Gentiles IV c.79-95; and in Summa Theologiae q.69-99 of the Supplement. The Supplement is an addendum Aquinas’s students fashioned after his death using material from the earlier Sentences commentary. This section on Aquinas on the human person is particularly indebted to Gyula Klima’s excellent study of Aquinas on the human person in “Thomistic ‘Monism’ vs. Cartesian ‘Dualism’,” Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 10 (2007): 92-112; also Silas Langley, “Aquinas, Resurrection, and Material Continuity,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 75 (2001): 135147; and Bruno Niederbacher’s “The Same Body Again? Thomas Aquinas on the Numerical Identity of the Resurrected Body,” in Personal Identity and Resurrection. How Do We Survive Our Death?, ed. Georg Gasser (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate 2010), 145-159. Also, J.P. Moreland and Stan Wallace’s “Aquinas versus Locke and Descartes on the Human Person and End-of-Life Ethics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1995): 319-330, has been helpful for comparative purposes, although their focus is mainly on ethical matters. 35 In his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard III d.2 q.5 a.2 resp., Aquinas speculates that the rational soul is present at 40 days for males and probably 80 or 90 days for females. Here he follows Aristotle’s History of Animals in Part 3 of Book VII. Prior to this the fetus has a non-rational soul in a developing process, one Aquinas explains in Summa Contra Gentiles II c.89. This postconception delay of what is often termed “ensoulment” has prompted some to

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To understand the human being as a unified composition of metaphysical parts, it helps to consider the terms ‘body’ and ‘soul’ in Aquinas. For Aquinas, words signify (significare) things by means of how concepts in the mind represent these things. (Summa Theologiae Ia q.13 a.1) ‘Body’ and ‘soul’ in one sense can both signify the substantial form of the human being. But each term does this through different concepts, and thus through different perspectives. For instance, ‘body’ can signify as including or excluding certain aspects or information. ‘Body’ in one sense can signify the entire individual substance. In this sense a person is a body. ‘Body’ in another sense conceptually carves out limited aspects of the whole individual. In this second sense ‘body’ connotes just the concept of threedimensionality or mere corporeality, but as not including, and hence prescinding from, additional human features and capacities that come with the form, such as the capacities for life, sensation, and reason. In this sense a body is a limited “part” of a human being, signifying just the aspect of its corporeity. ‘Soul’ can signify the substantial form but as including the distinctively human capacities for life, sensation, and reason.36 Thus think that Aquinas’s view of human nature permits early abortion. Others counter that Aquinas’s criteria, updated with contemporary biology, would place ensoulment at (or very near) conception. It is not feasible to sort out the complex issues right here. It will suffice to say that Aquinas himself stands with Augustine and longstanding Christian tradition for protecting human life in the womb, or at least the materials for it. See Scriptum Super Libros Sententiarum IV d.31 a.3 expositio. 36 This is a simplified explanation of a lengthy passage in Aquinas’s youthful treatise On Being and Essence: “The name ‘body’ can be taken in several senses. For a body, insofar as it is in the genus of substance, is said to be a body because it has such a nature that three dimensions can be designated in it . . . But it happens that something that has some perfection also has a further perfection, as is obvious in the case of man, who has a sensitive nature, and beyond that also an intellective one. . . .The name ‘body’, therefore, can signify something which has a form from which there follows the designability of three dimensions with precision, namely, so that from that form no further perfection would follow, but if something is added, then it is beyond the signification of ‘body’ in this sense. And in this sense the body will be an integral and material part of an animal, for in this way the soul will be beyond the signification of the name ‘body’, and it will be superadded to the body itself, so that the animal will be constituted from these two, namely, from the soul and the body, as its parts. But the name ‘body’ can also be taken so that it should signify something which has a form on account of which three dimensions can be designated in it, whatever that form may be, whether it may give rise to some further perfection or not. And in this sense body will be a genus of animal, for an animal contains nothing which is not contained implicitly in a body.” De Ente et Essentia c.1, ed. L. Baur (Monasterii Westfalorum, 1933), amended J.

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‘body’ and ‘soul’ can intellectually designate different aspects of the person, depending on the concepts associated with the words. A person can be said to be a body, in the wide sense, and also be said to have a body, in a more restricted sense of ‘body’. The substantial form of a material substance confers identity on the substance, it does so by actively organizing the matter to make the substance exist as the (species) kind it is. E.g., Fido the dog’s substantial form confers on the matter canine structure and related capacities. In the Aristotelian scheme the form is not just an abstract consideration of the structural information. It is an entity (an ontological component) in its own right imposing an organization on the matter and conferring the essential or identifying features and capacities the substance has. In this way the form possesses, and shares with the matter, the substantial act of existence (actus essendi) of the whole human being. Here the composition of prime matter, substantial form, and accidental features or properties together constitutes one unified substance for Aquinas. (Summa Theologiae Ia q.76 a.1 resp., q.76 a.8 resp.) The human soul is initially individuated by being the form of a parcel of prime matter. Aquinas approves of Avicenna’s (c.980-1037) observation, the soul’s individuation and multiplication depends on the body at the beginning, but not at its end.37 That is, the soul first acquires numerical Koch 1956. Translated by Joseph Bobik as Aquinas on Being and Essence (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965). Gyula Klima offers further thoughts on the passage in “Thomistic ‘Monism’ vs. Cartesian ‘Dualism’,” Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy 10 (2007): 92112, 100-102. See also Klima’s “Man= Body+ Soul: Aquinas’s Arithmetic of Human Nature,” in Thomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Brian Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 257-274. 37 Lynne Rudder Baker objects in a brief treatment that, since souls in Aquinas are individuated solely by being the form of the body, thus, she concludes, disembodied souls must lack any individuation, in “Persons and Metaphysics of Resurrection,” Religious Studies 43 (2007): 333-348, see 343-344. Aquinas in a passage in On Being and Essence speaks to this: “Now the individuation of [the soul] depends on the body, in an occasional manner, as to its inception, for the soul does not acquire for itself individual existence unless in the body of which it is the act. But nevertheless, if we subtract the body, the individuation does not perish because, since the soul was made the form of a given body, the form has absolute existence from which it has acquired individuated existence, and this existence always remains individuated. And thus Avicenna says (De Anima V c. 3), that the individuation and multiplication of souls depend on the body for their beginning

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identity by informing this bit of matter as opposed to that. One might imagine a hypothetical set of identical twins receiving qualitatively identical souls or substantial forms, where each form will nevertheless be individuated by informing two different parcels of matter. Each person begins with a distinctive space-time career in different matter. By analogy, two manufactured pens of the same design model might look to the naked eye to be indistinguishable in their qualities when brand new, but have different space-time careers, one here and the other over there. Later they individuate in their (visible and structural) qualities as one gets scratched or another uses ink faster and such. So too, a person grows distinctive in features or properties over time. Aquinas underscores the unity of soul and body in his Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima: “We must not think, therefore, of the soul and the body as though the body had its own form making it a living body, to which a soul is superadded making it a living body; but rather the body gets its being and its life from the soul.”38 In Aquinas, prime matter and the single substantial form share a single act of existence deeply uniting body and soul. At the same time, the soul is the seat of all essential human capacities, including (as the intellectual soul) the person’s rational life. Aquinas also speaks of the power of intellection belonging to the soul alone, while the power of sensation, providing raw material for thinking and reasoning, exists in virtue of the unity of the soul with the body and its senses.39 A person’s intellectual powers inhere in the soul and depend on it for the existence and individuation they have. Thoughts and experiences too are thus individuated by and exist in virtue of the subject they inhere in.

but not for their end.” De Ente et Essentia c.5. Aquinas has earlier qualified in De Ente c.2 that technically forms are individuated in “signate matter” (material signata), where “I call signate matter that which is matter considered under determinate dimensions.” Socrates has his particular parcel of a quantity matter. See also Summa Theologiae Ia q.119 a. 1 resp. and his Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics V l.8 n.876. Below is further interpretive discussion regarding matter, souls, bodies, and individuation, as these issues apply to the disembodied soul and also the risen person. 38 Sentencia Libri De Anima II l.1 n.15, ed. A. Pirotta, 5th edition (Rome: Marietti, 1959). Translated by Kenelm Foster and Sylvester Humphries as Aristotle’s De Anima with the Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951). 39 Summa Theologiae Ia q.76 a.5, Ia q.89 a.1.

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Aquinas’s opting for a single substantial form unifying the substance is significant.40 In this, he sides with Albert the Great (c.1200-1280) and others. Henry of Ghent (c.1217-1293) and John Duns Scotus (c.12661308), in contrast, will endorse the existence of a plurality of substantial forms in substances, offering a different view of their unity. The plurality of different forms would later see Aristotelian hylomorphism give way to atomistic accounts of the physical world, a view already central in the writings of Nicholas of Autrecourt (c.1298-1369). Locke’s atomism and his uncertainty about essences and souls would obviously align him with the latter tradition. Locke seeks a principle of unity for the self in primarily mentalistic terms. Aquinas, on the other hand, approaches the person as a complex metaphysical entity. His doing so is partly predicated upon some epistemological confidence in the Aristotelian account of physical objects. This is not to say Aquinas is uncritical about our ability to know the essences of things presented in experience.41 In any case, a single substantial form (with its own act of existence) unifies the account of human persons. The form acts as an ontological guarantor, a primary though not sufficient one, of diachronic identity throughout life in this world and at the resurrection. Aquinas also explicitly countenances the soul’s interim period between death and the resurrection.

B. Aquinas on the Post-Mortem Soul The pre-mortem person includes the soul and body. And although Aquinas thinks that the soul survives the death of the body, he is explicit that the

40

Caroline Bynum notes: “If soul is the one form of body (unica forma corporis) and bears the nature of homo . . . then soul guarantees self. What self is (including what the body is) will be packed into soul; body will be the expression of that soul in matter,” The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 259. Aquinas will underscore (right below) that the self requires “expression of that soul in matter.” 41 Aquinas suggests people tend to grasp and designate things mainly through their visible, surface accidents. His epistemological realism is not quite as “naïve” as sometimes thought. “In sensible things their very essential differences are unknown to us; and thus they are signified through accidental differences that arise from essential differences, just as cause is signified through its effect, as biped is posited as the difference of [the essence of] man.” De Ente et Essentia, c.5. Similar assessments grace the Disputed Questions on Truth (De Veritate) q.4 a.2 ad 8; Summa Theologiae Ia q.77 a.1 ad 7; and the Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle (In Metaphysicorum) VII l.2 n.1304.

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post-mortem soul without the body is not a human person.42 Commenting on 1 Corinthians he says “my soul is not I,” and while he is expounding upon the Book of Job 19:26, which states “in my flesh I will see God,” Aquinas further notes, “Not only my soul will see God but I myself who subsist as soul and body.” Several passages spanning his corpus underscore the disembodied soul is not technically the person, while it does carry on the basic structure of the person.43 However, as will now be 42

Aquinas argues for the intellectual soul’s immortality in Disputed Questions on the Soul article 14 and Summa Theologiae Ia q.75 a.2 and a.6. His argument is fairly complex and will not be treated here. Gyula Klima offers a technical treatment in “Aquinas on the Materiality of the Human Soul and the Immateriality of the Human Intellect,” Philosophical Investigations 32 (2008): 163-182. Cf. Herbert McCabe, “The Immortality of the Human Soul: The Traditional Argument,” in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Anthony Flew (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 297-306. 43 In his Commentary on the Book of Job (regarding Job 19:25-29) Aquinas explains: “And so Porphyry in ignorance of this fact [of our receiving incorruptible bodies] said that ‘In order to become blessed the soul must flee every body’ [quoting from Augustine’s City of God XXII c.26], as if the soul but not the man (homo) would see God. To exclude this belief Job adds ‘whom I myself am going to see,’ as if to say not only my soul alone will see God but ‘I, myself’ who subsists from soul and body. . . . And so that it may be believed that the same man in number, not merely in species, is restored to see God, [Job] adds ‘and no one else,’ namely, numerically so.” Expositio Super Job ad Litteram c.19 l.2 (Job 19:21-25), in vol. 26 of the Leonine Edition, Sancti Thomae de Aquino, Opera Omnia, Iussa Leonis XIII P.M. edita. Translated by Anthony Damico into English as Literal Exposition on Job (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). In Summa Theologiae Ia q.75 a.4 ad 2 Aquinas argues the soul is only part of a person, just as a hand or foot is not the whole man. See also IIa-IIae q.83 a.11 obj.5 & ad 5. In Disputed Questions On the Power of God q.9 a.2 ad 14: “The separated soul is part of rational nature, namely humanity, and not a complete rational human nature, and for that reason it is not a person (persona).” Quaestiones Disputatae De Potentia Dei, in Quaestiones Disputate, vol. 2 of 2 vols., ed. P. Bazzi et al., 9th edition (Rome: Marietti, 1953). Translated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province as On the Power of God (Westminster, Maryland: Newman Press, 1952). Also, the Disputed Questions On Spiritual Creatures sees Aquinas allow that the disembodied subsisting soul warrants being called a “this something” (hoc aliquid) but cannot be called a person (personem): “Now the soul, although incorruptible, is still in no other genus than the body because, since it is a part of human nature, to be in a genus or in a species or to be a person or a hypostasis is not characteristic of the soul, but of the composite. And hence it also cannot be called ‘this something,’ if by the phrase is meant an hypostasis or a person.” Quaestio Disputata De Spiritualibus Creaturis a.2 ad 16, in Quaestiones Disputatae, vol.2 of 2 vols., ed. P. Bazzi et al., 9th edition (Rome: Marietti, 1953).

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explained, multiple considerations show Aquinas does not have in mind a radical interruption of the person. The substantial form remains even if the complete person does not. An initial consideration is that the disembodied soul possesses the same substantial act of existence (actus essendi) it had while being the form of the body. In the Disputed Questions On Spiritual Creatures one finds: “Insofar as, then, it surpasses the being (esse) of corporeal matter, being able through itself to subsist and act [emphasis added], the human soul is a spiritual substance; but insofar as it is brought in contact with matter and confers its own being (esse) on matter it is the form of the body.”44 In a passage in the Sentences, Aquinas marks out the human soul as an exceptional circumstance where the form of a corruptible being retains its actus essendi in a manner allowing for the whole substance to be reconstituted later: The form of other things that are generable and corruptible is not subsistent through itself (per se), so that it could continue existing after the corruption of the composite, such as is the case with the rational soul, which retains the esse that it acquires for itself in the body, even after the body [corrupts]. And through resurrection the body is brought to participate in that being, since the existence of the body is none other than the being of the soul in the body; otherwise the union of the body and soul would be accidental. Thus no interruption is made in the substantial being such that it would not be possible for numerically the same man (idem numero) to return on account of interruption in his being, as occurs with all other corruptible things. Their being is completely interrupted, their forms not remaining [in existence], although [their] matter endures under some other form.45

The final two sentences note the crucial factor is that the substantial act of existence is not interrupted, even though the [complete set of] essential components, and hence the person, is no longer present during the interim state. The same article of the Sentences has Aquinas affirm that, where the act of existence is cut off, something cannot resume as numerically

Translated by M. FitzPatrick and J. Wellmuth as On Spiritual Creatures (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1949). 44 De Spiritualibus Creaturis a.2 resp. 45 IV d.44 q.1 a.1 qc.2 ad 1 in Scriptum Super Libros Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi. The Latin translated here is from the Parma Edition of the Opera Omnia, 25 vols. (Parma: Fiaccadori, 1853-73). (The often used Latin edition by Mandonnet and Moos [Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1929-1947] only goes up to IV d.22, leaving Sentences IV d.23-50 incomplete.)

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identical: “for that which has completely fallen into non-being cannot be resumed as numerically the same, which is clear from the fact that nothing can be numerically the same where the existence (esse) is divided. But an interrupted esse, which is the act of a being, is divided, just as just as any other interrupted act.” 46 Unity and continuity of identity thus is preserved by continuity of the act of existence. For Aquinas, the essence of a created being (ens) is considered a separate ontological principle from the existence (esse) or act of existence (actus essendi) of the entity. This is a way of talking about the contingent status of all created beings; he does not mean essences of things lurk in some pre-existing state and then receive existence like an injection of air into a balloon. On Being and Essence (c.4) states, “Therefore it is evident that esse is other than essence or quiddity . . .”47 Thus, Aquinas’s distinction between a substance’s 46

Sentences IV d.44 q.1 a.1 qc.1 arg.4. A difficult and controversial passage in the Quodlibetal Questions IV q.3 a.2 ad 1 is sometimes cited suggesting Aquinas allows for the interrupted existence of certain material substances. Limited space here does not allow a lengthy treatment the passage deserves. Aquinas initially notes that some things such as processes or time must have continuity of duration. But he mentions some other material beings, enduring things wherein their existence is measured by time, which can be restored at least by divine power. The question then is what this involves. To some readers it suggests Aquinas thinks there are multiple kinds of beings that can endure gaps in their existence, at least by divine power. However, if we consider the two Sentences passage just cited (IV d.44 q.1 a.1 qc.2 ad 1 and IV d.44 q.1 a.1 qc.1 arg.4), Aquinas denies something can completely fall into nothing, with its act of existence interrupted, and then be returned to existence. But, remember, human persons are unlike “other things that are generable and corruptible” in that they are able to cease to exist as a substance, but still have the substantial form survive and retain the same act of existence the person had. Thus, Gyula Klima argues for properly contextualizing the passage in Questiones Quodlibetales with the ones in the Sentences. The decomposition of the human persons is limited in the sense that the essence or one of the essential components of the person can dissolve, while the act of existence that was once the person’s still remains in the human soul, and thus the actus essendi of itself is not interrupted existence (save in a qualified sense of a decomposition of the essence). Klima thus argues that human persons are the exception. See his “The Problem of ‘Gappy Existence’ in Aquinas’ Metaphysics and Theology” in this same volume. For a different view on the above passage in Questiones Quodlibetales see Turner C. Nevitt, “Survivalism, Corruptionism, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 31 no.1 (2014): 1-19, and “Annihilation, Re-creation, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas” also in this volume. 47 For more on Aquinas’s metaphysics of existence, and the composition of essence and existence in material and immaterial substances, see chapter 2 on

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essence and existence allows him to say that, because the same act of existence stays with the immortal soul the person’s actus essendi is never interrupted. This allows Aquinas a way to hold that numerically the same human person returns at the resurrection. An additional consideration is that the basic structural framework, a “blueprint” of the individual, remains with the soul (substantial form). For Aquinas, the post-mortem intellectual soul still functions in some of its important capacities. The vegetative and sensitive capacities are not actually present, since they require the body, but are “virtually” present as embedded in the form. (Summa Theologiae Ia q.77 a.8 resp.) But he holds that the intellect and will remain and can function in a qualified manner appropriate to their disembodied state.48 The disembodied intellectual soul thinks according to “[an intellectual] mode suited to a soul existing apart from the body.”49 The imagistic aspects of memory are destroyed with the body, although Aquinas thinks memory traces of universal concepts remain in the intellect. (Summa Theologiae Ia q.79 a.6 resp.) Aquinas notably thinks intellection and volition are not operations of a bodily organ, [the intellect’s] “activity is not completed through a bodily organ.”50 Aquinas thus considers the disembodied soul and thinking subject both suitable for, and immediately capable of, receiving punishment or reward; in Summa Contra Gentiles he notes, “We can gather that immediately after death the souls of men according to their merits receive either punishment or reward.”51 This for Aquinas helps explain why Christians are entreated to ask for the intercession of saints “Metaphysical Composition” in Peter Weigel, Aquinas on Divine Simplicity: An Investigation into the Foundations of his Philosophical Theology (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). See also Gyula Klima’s “The Semantic Principles Underlying Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysics of Being,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 5 (1996): 87-141. 48 Summa Theologiae Ia q.77 a.8 resp. 49 In Summa Theologiae Ia q.89 a.6 resp. 50 Summa Contra Gentiles II c.69 n.5: “If, however, its operation is not completed through a bodily organ, its power will not be the actuality of some body. And because of this the intellect is said to be separated.” Aquinas, however, is still clear that thinking and cognitive activities are to be ascribed to the whole human being when the soul is embodied – Summa Theologiae Ia q. 75 a.2 ad 2. Contra Gentiles is edited by C. Pera et al., 3 vols (Rome: Maretti, 1961). Translated by Anton Pegis, James Anderson, Vernon Bourke, and Charles O’Neil as Summa Contra Gentiles, 5 vols. (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1955-57), reprinted by University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. 51 Summa Contra Gentiles IV c.91 n.1.

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and pray for souls in purgatory. Moreover, the soul remains individuated as once having been the substantial form of the matter of the body. In this way, the soul carries the basic plan or code of who one is, i.e., one’s physical shape, intellectual capacities, and moral character. Not surprisingly then, Aquinas treats the disembodied soul as if it were a person when he sees theological reasons for doing so. But it is important to keep in mind that the soul in this state is still technically not the person for Aquinas. While the soul continues to subsist, Aquinas thinks it remains incomplete in important ways. (Here the sense of “incompleteness” does not preclude the major points of continuity explained above.) The disembodied soul still lacks key features and functions Aquinas views integral to the full human being. He speaks instructively on this in the Disputed Questions on the Soul: Although the soul has a complete act of existing (esse) of its own, it does not follow that the body is united to it accidentally: first, because the same act of existing that belongs to the soul is communicated to the body by the soul, so that there is one act of existing for the whole composite; also, because, while the soul can subsist of itself, it does not have a complete species (speciem completam), for the soul needs the body in order to complete its species [essence].52

The essence of the person includes the body, not just the plan of it in the substantial form. The soul alone cannot perform certain normal functions characteristic of the whole person, significantly the sensitive and vegetative functions. Also, understanding normally requires the use of bodily phantasms, so in the case of the disembodied soul Aquinas thinks this must be directly supplied by God. Even the functions of the rational soul in the disembodied state are rendered abnormal. Thus, Aquinas thinks the full person lacks due actuality and expression. Still, one can speak colloquially of St. Peter in heaven or Abraham being freed from limbo, even though technically only the souls of each are present.53 52

Quaestiones Disputatae De Anima a.1 ad 1, in Quaestiones Disputatae, 2 vols, ed. R.M. Spiazzi, 9th edition (Rome: Marietti, 1953). Translated as The Soul by John Rowan (St. Louis: Herder, 1949), and also as Questions on the Soul, by James Robb (Milwaukee: Marquette Press, 1984). 53 In Summa Theologiae IIa q.50 a.3 the article takes up the question, Whether Christ was a man during the three days of his death? Aquinas says in response that Christ was not a human being during this time. In the objections and replies he gives an example where the separated soul of St. Peter is called by his name:

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Despite the soul not being the full person, it is now clear that this is not a case of full-blown interruption of existence. Aquinas does not see a complete destruction and recreation. Nevertheless, the disembodied soul remains a fragment of a self, and much of what full human persons are and do requires the soul’s physical instantiation. Aquinas notes in Summa Contra Gentiles (IV c.79) that the soul separated from the body is “in a way, imperfect” (aliquod modo imperfect) and in a situation “contrary to the nature of the soul” (contra naturam animae), which makes proper its reuniting with the physical body.54 In the Compendium of Theology (c.151) Aquinas speaks of the soul having “a natural desire to be united with the body” (naturale ei desiderium inest ad corporis unionem). Thus, resurrection is motived philosophically as well as theologically.

C. Aquinas on Resurrection Aquinas maintains the self-same person rises with the same “essential parts”. This includes rising in what Aquinas considers the same body. In Contra Gentiles IV c.84 one finds: In order that numerically the same human being resurrects, it is necessary that the essential parts be the same. Therefore, if the body of the resurrected

“when we address the soul of St. Peter after his death we say ‘St. Peter, pray for us.’” Patrick Toner explains here the concept of using a synecdoche, a part of speech where something is spoken of as if it were the whole thing in question, in “Personhood and Death in St. Thomas Aquinas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 26 (2009): 121-138, 124-125. With this noted, he corrects some recent commentators believing, if only in passing reference, that Aquinas regards the disembodied soul as the human person continuing to exist after death. (Note that above several passages are explicitly to the contrary.) Examples of attributing the view to Aquinas include Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 5154; David Oderberg, Real Essentialism (London: Routledge, 2008), 245; and J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae, in Body and Soul (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2000), 201. Dennis Bradley reasserts the traditional reading that for Aquinas the disembodied soul is not a person, in “Ephemerides Thomisticae Analyticae, Metaphysics and Ethics in Stump’s Aquinas,” The Thomist 69 (2005):593-620, 604-607. Other examples of the traditional reading include Robert Pasnau in Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 380-393; Brian Davies in The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 215-220; and Leo Elders in The Philosophy of Nature of St. Thomas Aquinas (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1997), 274284. 54 Summa Contra Gentiles IV c.79 n.10.

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human being were not of his flesh and his bones out of which he is now composed, the resurrected human being would not be the same.55

Before this passage, writing in Contra Gentiles IV c.80, Aquinas notes that a key objection to bodily resurrection is that something cannot be numerically the same even “if one of its essential principles cannot be numerically the same.” Among the issues raised is that “the body is dissolved” along with its sensitive and nutritive powers. Aquinas in this context allows that “what is returned altogether to nothingness cannot be taken up again with numerical identity” by natural causes.56 In previous 55 Contra Gentiles IV c.84 n.7; a similar statement is in the Supplement to the Summa Theologiae q.79 a.2 ad 2. The Thomistic literature on Aquinas and bodily resurrection is vast. The discussion here is particularly indebted to Bruno Niederbacher’s “The Same Body Again? Thomas Aquinas on the Numerical Identity of the Resurrected Body,” in Personal Identity and Resurrection. How Do We Survive Our Death?, ed. Georg Gasser (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate 2010), 145-159; and also Silas Langley’s “Aquinas, Resurrection, and Material Continuity,” in Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 75 (2001): 135-147. Similar territory is covered in Jason Eberl in “The Metaphysics of Resurrection: Issues of Identity in Aquinas,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 74 (2000): 215-230. Other sources consulted include: Christina Van Dyke, “Human Identity, Immanent Causal Relations, and the Principle of Non Repeatability: Thomas Aquinas on the Bodily Resurrection,” Religious Studies 43 (2007) 373394. (She discusses Peter Van Inwagen’s views of resurrection, treated below.) Carol Bynum’s The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Stephen Davis addresses the material continuity of the risen body, with some reference to Aquinas, in Risen Indeed: Making Sense of the Resurrection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 94102. 56 The larger passage notes an objection posed to the same person rising again: “Again, it is impossible for something to be numerically the same if one of its essential principles cannot be numerically the same; for if an essential principle would vary, the essence of the thing is varied, by which it is how it is and is also one. But what is returned altogether to nothingness cannot be taken up again with numerical identity; this is the creation of a new thing, rather than the reparation of the same thing. But, it seems that several essential principles of the human being return to nothingness by his death. And first his very corporeity and the form of the mixture (compound), since the body is manifestly dissolved. Then the part of the sensitive and nutritive soul, which cannot be without bodily organs.” Summa Contra Gentiles IV c.80 n.2. The same line of reasoning is dealt with in Compendium Theologiae c.154. To summarize Aquinas’s response, the single substantial form, as the soul, is responsible for the corporeality of the person and the (missing) sensitive and nutritive powers. Hence, Aquinas says, the corporeity

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discussion it was noted that the form retains the basic plan for the body and (virtually if not actually) the necessary capacities, with also the original dispositions of the composite person. The main issue remaining is the sense in which Aquinas thinks one receives the “same” body at the resurrection. Locke remember denies receiving the same body back in the resurrection is necessary for either personal identity or as a point of Christian revelation. Before treating Aquinas’s response it is worth noting, for contrast, a contemporary view on the continuity of the body in resurrection. Peter Van Inwagen, in a position commonly cited in the philosophical literature, objects to what he terms the ‘Aristotelian’ view of resurrection. He is skeptical personal identity can involve interrupted existence and sees the body as the focus of continuity. Suppose an original manuscript written in Augustine’s own hand is consumed by fire. Van Inwagen thinks not even God could recreate it as numerically the same document. A reconstruction from the same atoms is no more than a perfect duplicate. So too, God omnisciently locating and reassembling Napoleon’s body cannot bring back Napoleon. The basic idea in Van Inwagen seems to be the one needs 1) not just sameness of atoms, but also needs 2) the right sort of naturally ordered causal connections to the original object.57 But God’s activity is supernatural, not a natural process where different stages of an object’s existence unfold in a recognizable causal and historical progression. An object ceasing to exist breaks the progression. The manuscript is written over time. Then, its space-time career unfolds in an unbroken sequence where each stage of its existence happens because of what happened to it in this case is no different from the rational soul itself insofar as the soul is responsible for the physical plan and organization of the body (c.81), while the soul also retains the relevant powers in a virtual way, absent only it actually informing the matter of the body so its capacities are fully present. His point seems to be that, since prime matter has no formal properties of itself, the same entity that is the soul and substantial form is responsible for the ‘corporeity’ the body has. Basically, Aquinas sees preservation of the same substantial form plus material continuity as enough to call it our receiving the same body back. See Niederbacher, “The Same Body Again?,” 151-152. 57 Peter Van Inwagen, “Possibility of Resurrection,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 9 (1978): 114-121. His own solution is the unusual suggestion that God somehow “preserves our corpses contrary to all appearance,” and only a simulacrum of the human body disintegrates, p.121. Van Inwagen’s sympathies here and in a more recent work incline to a “physicalist” view of persons, Metaphysics, fourth edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 2015), chapters. 10-11.

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in its previous moments, such as being moved from place to place and so on. The complete destruction of Augustine’s manuscript, Van Inwagen thinks, precludes adding on any more stages. Even God restructuring the pieces Van Inwagen thinks is too casually artificial and arbitrary a contrast with how events unfold in nature. He is also worried about what would stop the material duplication of items or persons at a resurrection. Van Inwagen says little about the soul in the whole matter, an important piece left out if one is assessing Aquinas’s “Aristotelian” picture, or other historically orthodox Christian proposals. As already discussed, the person’s substantial form continuing with the same act of existence presents a different state of affairs from a kind of wholesale recreation of a physical object or the body. It is also worth asking whether either of the above mentioned two conditions Van Inwagen mentions are necessary conditions. Frank Dilley suggests that, given that atoms in the body are already periodically replaced over a lifetime, “it is difficult to see why such an identity [of the body] would not be preserved through a sudden replacement of all the atoms at once.”58 Van Inwagen (given the above positions) would probably say that gradual replacement is natural, while sudden replacement is unnatural and like cessation. In any case, Aquinas offers a different analysis of the resurrection from Locke or Van Inwagen. First, Aquinas sees the right image for resurrection of the person as being closer to the repair (reparatio) of a damaged object, rather than a re-generation of something completely destroyed, as suggested by the manuscript image in Van Inwagen. Focusing on just the resurrected body, Aquinas holds that matter rejoins the still existing substantial form (soul) of the body, with a person’s original matter normally being involved. One good place to start in elaborating this view is with a passage from the Compendium Theologiae: The matter of this human body, whatever form it may receive after the death of a man, does not elude the power or knowledge of God. Such matter remains numerically the same insofar as it is understood as existing under dimensions, according to which it can be said to be this [particular] matter and is the principle of individuation. If then, this matter remains the same, and the human body is refashioned from it by divine power, and also the incorruptible rational soul remains the same and is united to the same body, 58

Frank Dilley, “Resurrection and the ‘Replica Objection’,” Religious Studies 19 (1983):459-474, 462. Stephen Davis further discusses competing pictures of identity in bodily resurrection, Risen Indeed, 97-100.

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A similar passage occurs in the Contra Gentiles in IV c.81 n.6: The matter, which was subject to such a form, remains under the same dimensions which made it able to be individual matter. Therefore, by conjunction with numerically the same soul with numerically the same matter, the human being will be restored.

How might one understand this issue of matter “under the same dimensions”? Aquinas realizes a body does not maintain the same spatial dimensions or elemental particles over a lifetime. He also believes with Aristotle that the four elements – earth, air, fire, and water – can change into each other. One can further complicate things with modern characterizations of elemental units, such as quarks or quantum matterenergy and the like. For Aquinas, there is no moment when prime matter exists in some rarified state; it is always organized under some form. One way to see his basic point here is to consider that prime matter in all concrete situations occurs as a certain determinate quantity of “this much matter” now under such and such a form. Prime matter can thus be designated as of a certain quantity, and thus viewed in abstraction through the continuous flow of changes and forms it has.60 An orange and a buffalo have different amounts of stuff, whatever elemental units one wants to discuss. Resurrecting a buffalo with only the quantity of matter in the orange would not work.

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Compendium Theologiae c.154, or Compendium Theologiae seu Brevis Compilatio Theologiae ad Fratrem Raynaldum, ed. R. Verado in Opuscula Omnia, Opuscula Theologica, vol.2 of 2 vols. (Taurini-Rome: Marietti, 1954). Translated by Cyril Vollert as Compendium of Theology (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1947); and under the same title by Richard Regan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 60 Ernan McMullin discusses, with frequent reference to Aquinas, the medieval notion of the same quantity of matter preserved through change in his introduction to his edited anthology The Concept of Matter in Greek and Medieval Philosophy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963). Also relevant in that same volume are Joseph Bobik’s “Matter and Individuation,” 281-292, and James Weisheipl’s “Matter in Fourteenth Century Science,” 147-169, particularly 152.

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Moreover, Aquinas in certain passages indicates it takes more than just a certain quantity of any matter to do the job.61 He emphasizes the numerical sameness of the matter, as just seen in the Compendium and Contra Gentiles. A passage in the Sentences helps underscore the direction of his thought: What is understood in matter before [receiving] form, remains in matter after corruption. For when the posterior is removed, there still can remain what was prior to it. Now the Commentator [Averroes] in Physics I and De Substantia Orbis says that in the matter of things subject to generation and corruption before their substantial form one must think of indeterminate dimensions, according to which matter is divided so as to be able to receive different forms in different parts. Therefore, after the separation of a substantial form from matter, these dimensions still remain the same. Hence, whatever form matter may receive, when matter exists under these dimensions, it will have a closer identity with something that was generated from it than it has with some other part of matter existing under any other form. And thus the same matter will be used to restore the human body which was his matter before.62

This passage is complicated. It will have to suffice to treat a couple relevant points. Aquinas, drawing on Averroes, speaks of matter being divided off and remaining the same irrespective of the form it is under. There is curious mention that when the matter remains under a series of forms that an object will have a “closer identity” with something that is subsequently made from it. Identity is normally not spoken of as happening in degrees. What Aquinas could well mean is that there is a greater commonality between two things sharing some underlying matter. They both have a place in a causal and temporal chain of different items possessing the matter at different times. For example, the pre-mortem body and the recent corpse may be largely indistinguishable, though they are different substances. Material continuity in this way could be seen as 61

Sandra Edwards appears to interpret Aquinas as not holding for the desirability of numerically the same matter. Even though the material particles and dimensions of the body change, “Still there must be some location, some dimension, some position of parts, and these are what dimensive quantity contributes to matter.” (p. 91) She uses the example of a pond changing water, but in the end it is the volume filled and the same water or not does not matter. “Saint Thomas Aquinas on ‘The Same Man’,” The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 10 (Spring 1979): 89-97. 62 Sentences IV d.44 q.1 a.1 qc.1 ad 2, in the Parma Edition. Bruno Niederbacher points out this passage and offers a helpful treatment of it in “The Same Body Again?” A similar passage occurs in Summa Theologiae, Supplement q.79 a.1 ad 3.

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enhancing the connection between the pre-mortem and post-resurrection body. This, however, is part of a larger picture in which they already share in common the same actus essendi of the same substantial form as well as presumably certain dispositions and accidental features. Aquinas’s emphasis on material continuity is also clear in his responses to questions about cannibalism. Prominent discussions occur in Contra Gentiles IV c.81 and also in Compendium Theologiae c.161. There are historically different versions of the quandary. One version poses a man who is a strict cannibal, consuming nothing but flesh, and asks how both he and his victims will properly rise. Another version poses indirect cannibalism – most people have some atoms and molecules in them that have been present others. An animal consumes a human corpse and is then eaten by people. Another version of the problem poses an ongoing chain where the matter passes through several human bodies, perhaps even imaging a chain of cannibals where each is a victim to the next. Aquinas in this context is also cognizant of the point Locke and Stillingfleet discuss where conceived embryos die, leaving little available original matter. Before going further into Aquinas’s response, it is worth considering why the problem captures the interest of Aquinas. It garners considerable interest by theologians going back to Augustine and the Church Fathers. Thus, Aquinas already speaks from a lengthy and impassioned theological tradition. Modern treatments going back well into the last century occasionally regard such discussions with bafflement, irony, or mild disdain. Early Christians and the Church Fathers had reason for their concern. In their writings they square off with contemporary objections to bodily resurrection citing cannibalism or digestion of the human body by animals. The latter image particularly resonated in light of the waves of Roman persecution. Moreover, Christians often found themselves accused of being cannibals, stemming from distorted rumors about their rituals. Athenagoras of Athens (c.133-190), in both his On the Resurrection of the Dead and Embassy for Christians, defends material continuity and shows cannibalism as a problem for resurrection taken seriously in his day.63 Early Christianity also faced Gnostic (or similar leaning) groups who 63

Athenagoras in De Resurrectione Mortuorum (On the Resurrection of the Dead) chapters 4-8, while Legatio pro Christianis (Embassy for Christians) chapter 37 affirms the very same elements will rise in our bodies. Caroline Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body, particularly in chapter 1, offers a general treatment of issues related to the significance of cannibalism and the resurrection in the Church Fathers.

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reinterpreted Christianity to be hostile to the material world and deny the importance of the human body. Augustine (354-430) still invokes the objections about digestion by beasts, and inclines to the risen body receiving some of its original matter, in the closing pages of City of God.64 Aquinas himself considers an intensified version of cannibalism. He considers the case of two parents who eat only human flesh, and then have children who are also strict cannibals. Aquinas notes, with Locke, that it is not necessary that people receive back all the matter they ever possessed. His initial response is that matter present in multiple people at different times will be returned “in that one in whom it fulfilled the highest function.” For instance, in the case of the child whose parents are strict cannibals, Aquinas thinks the child will receive back the matter the child received from the father’s semen, which Aquinas views as originally forming the embryo. His examples generally favor the persons where the matter in question played a key role in their generation. For instance, Eve gets the matter of Adam’s rib. If two people had the matter in a similar way (constituting the same organs or functions) then it goes to whomever had it first. Otherwise, Aquinas invokes the general principle that God supplies any missing matter that is needed, noting in the Compendium c.161: “As was also said, if anyone is lacking in the matter needed for perfect quantity, divine power will supply what is needed.” The Summa Contra Gentiles (IV c.81 n.12) also states as an operative principle that in such cases, where matter would go missing from a risen body, that “divine power will supply from [another] source” (aliunde hoc divina supplebit potentia) other than the original body. In the Compendium of Theology c.160 Aquinas summarizes: “Therefore, although some in this life may have lacked certain of their members, or may not have attained to perfect size [e.g. an embryo], in whatever way the quantity [at death] is lacking will make no difference; they will receive at the resurrection, by divine power, due complement of members and quantity.” Why might one care about material continuity at all? Why does the matter of matter matter? Aquinas regards it as enhancing continuity. But one can think of other, if more speculative, reasons. One consideration emerges in noting that Aquinas regards Christ’s resurrection as an exemplary model for the general one. (He develops the point in Compendium Theologiae c.261.) Jesus getting his body back models an ideal for everyone. Early Christians wanted to emphasize Christ’s tomb was empty as proof that his 64

XXII c.20. Cf. his Handbook of Faith, Hope, and Charity, ch.89.

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body, the same corpse lying there, had risen. It was not there to be found by opponents, if, say, Christ had risen in some kind of facsimile of his original body. Similarly, Jane rising in a new body with her remains still in the grave could seem odd, as if a kind of duplicate body rose.65 In addition, Christian theology views the body as sacred and an intimate part of the person; it is the temple of the Spirit. One sees this sensibility, for instance, in how relics of saints, and human “remains” generally, are treated as being closely connected with the original person. Who one is physically is not a matter of spiritual indifference, and from a certain perspective this may include the stuff of which one is made having a connection to the self.

IV. Conclusion This final section offers summary comparisons, augmenting particular ones already made. Aquinas and Locke both respond to contemporary challenges to the Christian view of persons and their destiny. Each wants to integrate his view of persons with emerging secular and scientific thinking, without compromise to their faith. Each responds to problems from a particular set of theological and metaphysical commitments brought to bear on the ontology of the bodily resurrection. The translation of a number of Aristotle’s scientific and metaphysical works into Latin posed for the medieval schools a systematic view of the world and human beings independent of orthodox Christianity and in some respects at odds with it. Aquinas wants to avoid a reactionary dismissal or uncritical acceptance. His solution is to see a positive use for Aristotelian hylomorphism in conceptualizing the metaphysics of the human person. But he also sees the need to augment this orientation for Christian theological and philosophical aims. The effect is a profound unity-indistinction of body and soul. His is a middle course between an extreme Platonic dualism and reductive materialism, by making the soul the substantial form of the body but still capable of independent existence and function. The soul as the substantial form of the whole human being also helps underwrite the continuity of the person from this life to the next. It also allows for what Aquinas regards as the resumption of the same body in the resurrection. 65

Robert George and Patrick Lee have mentioned this point in public discussion. Patrick Toner briefly looks at the significance of material continuity, and some similar considerations, at the close of his “Personhood and Death in St. Thomas Aquinas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 26 (2009): 121-138.

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However, the continuity of the person and the body he grounds in the identical and uninterrupted act of existence residing in the substantial form across the pre-mortem and post-resurrection situations. This affords a kind of balancing solution where the self decomposes but does not completely fall into nothing. Thus the person goes away in the interim period, but the person’s basic structure, carried in the substantial form, is not interrupted in a way Aquinas views as problematic. The disembodied soul is not the full self, but retains its capacities and dispositions enough to undergo judgment of its moral status. Aquinas has the body rise with the same premortem substantial form and some of the original prime matter. The sense of the sacrality of the body as created by God Aquinas extends to the very material substrate underlying the form. Yet, the rational soul as able to exist and function separately signals the primacy of the spiritual aspects of the human person. Aquinas affirms the continued existence of the human soul in clearer terms than Aristotle. This primacy of the spiritual requires an epistemological investment in persons having an immortal soul. Critics appealing to modern epistemological standards are skeptical of this, using standards which Locke’s own empiricism has helped shape. Locke’s more ontologically minimal self considers the empirical and atomistic approaches of the emerging sciences, along with the skeptical currents shaping the philosophical landscape of that time. Seventeenthcentury atomism accepts the basic conclusions of its ancient, Democritean predecessor. It denies physical objects possess a substantial unity, stable species essence, or require teleological account.66 Locke pursues no Aristotelian (or Boethian) unity of substance in accounting for the person. Locke’s approach to personhood begins with conceptual analysis, “what idea the word it is applied to stands for,” and ends up crucially dividing “Person, Man, and Substance.” (Essay 2.27.7) His ontology of the self reflects less ordinary language than what Locke thinks one can safely verify by inner experience as having an ongoing identity. Locke’s theological views also figure prominently in his views of the person and resurrection. Locke’s Post-Reformation England heatedly debated the authority of religious institutions and what constitutes authentic Christian teaching. Locke adheres to what he sees as the plain sense of Scripture, while happy to go his own speculative way on longstanding theological issues. In keeping with this, Locke in his controversies with Stillingfleet dispenses with accepted Christian teaching 66

Ernan McMullin notes this in The Concept of Matter, 369-370.

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regarding resurrection in the same body. Aquinas’s view of the person as a substance resurrecting in the same body harkens back to the Early Fathers, councils, and creeds. Christianity for Locke significantly functions as a moral bulwark for achieving good conduct for ultimate happiness in the next life. So too, his self is primarily a moral self concerned for its future state. Locke thinks this requires continuity of mental content and not an elaborate ontology seen in Aquinas. He does not think the basic truths of Scripture command it. However, contrasting with the striking thought experiments which tend to be the focus of the literature, Locke still thinks it probable that our thinking is de facto grounded in a continuous soul or subject. Balancing his use of mentalistic criteria is the need for something metaphysically robust enough to function as a moral agent and a rightsbearing entity in a political order. Personal identity for Locke is not merely a useful social construction. Aquinas, by contrast, does not require the full person to be present for punishment or reward. One need not have to remember one’s actions to be held morally responsible. Since for Aquinas to be a human person is to possess a type of species-form, he does not divide human being from a human person. As J.P. Moreland and Stan Wallace observe, personhood in Aquinas “is not a supervenience relation in which [the distinguishable property] of personhood supervenes upon a properly structured, functioning human being.”67 But for all this Aquinas faces the challenge of how a complex substance, including the body, can maintain continuity at the resurrection. Locke, by contrast, distances the physical body from personal identity. The resurrected body Locke treats identity-wise as a mass of particles in the correspondence with Stillingfleet. Locke can hold persons only need to receive back some reasonably well-proportioned human body, which will be theirs in virtue of being attached to their consciousness. This, it was noted, frees Locke from some of the conundrums about the resurrected body traditionally exercising Christian philosophers and theologians. In detaching person from substance, Locke ends up appealing to similarity of mental content, namely in memory, as the basis for the unity of the self. This basic emphasis on consciousness will resonate in a modern philosophical mind inclined to jettison non-empirical, speculative factors such as souls, substantial forms, or spiritual minds. Yet, the same reliance 67

J.P. Moreland and Stan Wallace, “Aquinas versus Locke and Descartes on the Human Person and End-of-Life Ethics,” International Philosophical Quarterly 35 (1995): 319-330, 323.

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on mentalistic criteria raises questions from critics about verification returning on another level. Locke bequeaths a functioning consciousness as the locus of personhood not only to philosophy, but to a great deal of popular discussion. The reasoning and relatively well-functioning adult human, particularly in its conscious capacities, has become the default ontological model for personhood. How one assesses the nature of persons and selves impinges on a vast array of other judgments. This too brief comparison hopefully suggests the value of examining the key decisions of both of these influential thinkers.

ANNIHILATION, RE-CREATION AND INTERMITTENT EXISTENCE IN AQUINAS TURNER C. NEVITT

Introduction Contemporary interpreters of Aquinas have given a lot of attention to his view of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection. It is well known that throughout his career Aquinas defends the possibility of the resurrection by appealing to the natural survival of the human soul immediately after death. There is an ongoing disagreement about whether Aquinas thinks the continued existence of the separated soul between death and resurrection is sufficient for the continued existence of the human being or person.1 But everyone seems to agree that Aquinas thinks the continued existence of the 1

According to survivalists, Aquinas thought the continued existence of the separated human soul is sufficient for the continued existence of the human being or person; the separated soul constitutes, but is not identical to, the human being or person. According to corruptionists, however, Aquinas thought the continued existence of the separated soul is not sufficient for the continued existence of the human being or person; the soul survives death, but the human being or person, strictly speaking, does not. The leading defender of corruptionism is Patrick Toner. See, for example, Patrick Toner, “Personhood and Death in St. Thomas Aquinas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 26/2 (2009): 121-138 and “St. Thomas Aquinas on Death and the Separated Soul,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 91/4 (2010): 587-599. For a list of some other corruptionists with references to their works, see Toner, “Personhood and Death,” 135, n. 1. These include Anthony Kenny, Brian Davies, Robert Pasnau, Patrick Lee and Robert George, and Leo Elders. The leading defender of survivalism is Eleonore Stump. See, for example, Eleonore Stump, “Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism Without Reductionism,” Faith and Philosophy 12/4 (1995): 505-531 and “Resurrection, Reassembly, and Reconstitution: Aquinas on the Soul,” Die Menschliche Seele: Brauchen wir den Dualismus?, ed. B. Niederbacher and E. Runggaldier (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2006), 151-171. For a list of some other survivalists with references to their works, see Toner, “St. Thomas Aquinas on Death,” 597, n. 1. These include David Oderberg, Christopher Brown, and Jason Eberl.

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separated soul is metaphysically necessary in order for God to bring about the resurrection of the dead. If the soul perished at death along with the body, as a number of early Church fathers believed, then not even God could bring the same human being back to life.2 Or so Aquinas is supposed to think, according to the contemporary consensus. In this paper I shall argue that this contemporary consensus is mistaken. In a widely neglected quodlibet question debated fairly late in his career Aquinas argues that God can annihilate material substances, which include human beings, and then re-create them numerically the same.3 That means Aquinas does not think that continuity of anything other than God’s power is metaphysically necessary for the identity of human beings over time. Given the contemporary consensus, such an interpretation of Aquinas might seem wildly implausible. But the contemporary consensus is in fact a novelty. Earlier interpreters of Aquinas as eminent as John Capreolus (c. 1380-1444), Francis Sylvester (c. 1474-1528), and Cardinal Cajetan (1469-1534) all recognized that Aquinas reserves to God the power to annihilate and re-create the numerically same material substances.4 Even as recently as the mid-twentieth century the editors of the Marietti Summa note that if God annihilated the substance of bread and wine – both material substances – still, they say, “it is certain that what is annihilated could be reproduced numerically the same, as the Holy Doctor himself confesses.”5 The opposing consensus of these earlier interpreters should at least give some reason to doubt the contemporary consensus. If nothing else, you will want to examine the evidence for yourself.

2

The natural mortality of the human soul was taught by such early Church fathers as St. Justin Martyr (c. 100-165), Tatian (c. 120-180), and Tertullian (c. 160-225). For quotations from and references to their works, see note 4 to chapter IX of Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), p. 462. 3 Quaestiones Disputatae de Quolibet (henceforth QQ) IV, q. 3, aa. 1-2. Many thanks to Adam Wood for pointing this text out to me. 4 John Capreolus, Defensiones Theologiae Divi Thomae Aquinatis in Quarto Sententiarum d. 43, vol. 7, ed. C. Paban and T. Pègues (Tours: Alfred Cattier, 1908), pp. 1-29; Francis Sylvester, Commentaria in Summa Contra Gentiles IV, c. 81, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, vol. 15 (Rome: Leonine Comission, 1930), pp. 254-259; Thomas de Vio Cajetan, Commentaria in Summa Theologiae III, q. 77, a. 5, in Sancti Thomae Aquinatis Opera Omnia, vol. 12 (Rome: Leonine Commission, 1906), pp. 200-201. Many thanks to Adam Wood for pointing Capreolus and Sylvester out to me. 5 Summa Theologiae III, q. 77, a. 5 (Rome: Marietti, 1948), note 8, p. 520.

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Before I present the evidence, however, I should say that I do not mean to be arguing that the annihilation and re-creation of human beings would still count as resurrection for Aquinas. Resurrection is a properly Christian doctrinal hope, so what events would or would not count as resurrection is a properly theological question. The answer concerns what God has in fact promised to do. I think the survival of the soul immediately after death is in fact required for the Christian doctrine of the resurrection (not to mention a number of other doctrines). Even Cajetan admits that the soul “ought not to be annihilated if the notion of resurrection is to be saved.”6 But, again, that is a question for theology. All I mean to be arguing in this paper is that Aquinas thinks God can annihilate human beings and then recreate them numerically the same, whether or not such an event would count as resurrection. Let me turn, then, to the evidence for that.

I. In Quaestiones Disputatae de Quolibet IV, q. 3, aa. 1-2, which he debated in Lent of 1271, Aquinas raises and answers two related questions. In the first article he asks whether God could reduce something to nothing. In the second article he asks whether God could restore something numerically the same if it were reduced to nothing. In reply to the first question Aquinas says that as far as God’s absolute power is concerned, he can reduce every creature to nothing. But as far as God’s wisdom and foreknowledge are concerned, it cannot happen that something is reduced to nothing, since such an event is not ordained by the divine wisdom. “For God created so that all things might be,” Aquinas says, “and not so that they might fall into nothing.”7 Aquinas’s reply to the first question makes it clear that he is talking about annihilation in the technical sense. In this sense annihilation is the opposite of creation. Just as creation is God’s making something to exist from literally nothing, so annihilation is God’s making something to cease to exist, leaving literally nothing of the thing behind – not its matter, not its form, and not its existence. In this sense of annihilation, Aquinas thinks God will never annihilate anything.8 So Aquinas thinks there are no actual 6

Cajetan, Commentary on Being and Essence (In De Ente et Essentia d. Thomas Aquinatis), trans. Lottie Kendzierski and Francis Wade, SJ (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1964), p. 201. 7 QQ IV, q. 3, a. 1. All translations are my own. 8 Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (henceforth QDP), q. 5, a. 4; Summa Theologiae (henceforth ST) I, q. 65, a. 1, ad 1; ST I, q. 104, a. 4.

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cases of annihilation. Most importantly, death and corruption are not cases of annihilation. Corrupted substances return to the potentiality of matter, Aquinas says; accidents return to the potentiality of their subjects.9 But an annihilated thing returns to literally nothing whatsoever. And Aquinas thinks that never happens. Since he thinks God will never annihilate anything, the question whether God could re-create the numerically same annihilated thing is pure speculation for Aquinas. His reply is worth quoting in full: Response. It should be said that there is a certain difference to be noticed among those things which can be reduced to nothing [i.e. the whole of creation]. For there are some things whose unity has continuity of duration in its very notion, as is clear in the case of motion and time, and for this reason the interruption of such things is indirectly contrary to their unity according to number. But things which imply a contradiction are not contained under the number of things possible to God, since they fall short of the notion of being. And therefore if things of this kind are reduced to nothing, God cannot restore them the same in number: for this would be to make contradictories true at the same time, namely if there were one interrupted motion. But there are other things whose unity does not have continuity of duration in its very notion, as the unity of permanent things, except per accidens, insofar as their existence is subjected to motion; for as such, things of this sort are both measured by time and their existence is one and continuous according to the unity and continuity of time. And since a natural agent cannot produce these things without motion, hence it is that a natural agent cannot restore things of this sort the same in number, if they have been reduced to nothing, or if they have been corrupted according to substance. But God can restore things of this sort both without motion, since it is in his power that he produce effects without intermediate causes; and therefore he can also restore [them] the same in number, even if they have fallen into nothing.10 9

QDP q. 5, a. 4 & ad 9; ST I, q. 65, a. 1, ad 1; ST I, q. 104, a. 4 & ad 4. QQ IV, q. 3, a. 2: Respondeo. Dicendum, quod in his quae in nihilum redigi possunt, est quaedam differentia attendenda. Quaedam enim sunt quorum unitas in sui ratione habet durationis continuitatem, sicut patet in motu et tempore; et ideo interruptio talium indirecte contrariatur unitati eorum secundum numerum. Ea vero quae contradictionem implicant, non continentur sub numero Deo possibilium, quia deficiunt a ratione entis: et ideo, si huiusmodi in nihilum redigantur, Deus ea non potest eadem numero reparare. Hoc enim esset facere 10

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In this reply Aquinas makes three important distinctions. The first distinction is between successive things and permanent things. Successive things, he says, are those things whose unity involves continuity of duration in its very notion. Permanent things, on the other hand, are those things whose unity does not involve continuity of duration in its very notion. As examples of successive things Aquinas mentions motion, by which he means any process of change, and time. Because the unity of successive things involves continuity of duration in its very notion, God cannot re-create them numerically the same if they have been annihilated, since doing so would involve a contradiction – the interrupted duration of a thing that is made one and the same thing by its continuous, i.e. uninterrupted, duration. The second important distinction Aquinas makes is among permanent things themselves. Permanent things, again, are those things whose unity does not involve continuity of duration in its very notion. Such things fall into two sorts. Aquinas signals the distinction between these two sorts with the phrase: “except per accidens, insofar as their existence is subjected to motion; for as such, things of this sort are both measured by time and their existence is one and continuous according to the unity and continuity of time.” It is these permanent things, whose unity involves continuity of duration per accidens, that Aquinas goes on to say God alone can restore numerically the same if they have been annihilated or corrupted. He never explicitly draws that conclusion about the other sort of permanent things, whose unity does not involve continuity of duration at all. And, unfortunately, Aquinas appears not to mention any examples of either sort of permanent things. So what exactly are the two sorts of permanent things that Aquinas is distinguishing here?

contradictoria simul esse vera; puta si motus interruptus esset unus. Alia vero sunt quorum unitas non habet in sui ratione continuitatem durationis, sicut unitas rerum permanentium, nisi per accidens, in quantum eorum esse subiectum est motui: sic enim et mensurantur huiusmodi tempore, et eorum esse est unum et continuum, secundum unitatem et continuitatem temporis. Et quia natura agens non potest ista producere sine motu, inde est quod naturale agens non potest huiusmodi reparare eadem numero, si in nihilum redacta fuerint, vel si fuerint secundum substantiam corrupta. Sed Deus potest reparare huiusmodi et sine motu, quia in eius potestate est quod producat effectus sine causis mediis; et ideo potest eadem numero reparare, etiamsi in nihilum elapsa fuerint.

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Gyula Klima suggests that when Aquinas makes this “except per accidens” distinction among permanent things he is distinguishing between heavenly bodies and immaterial substances such as angels on the one hand, and sublunary material substances such as brute animals and human beings on the other.11 And on this point I agree with him. But Klima then claims that Aquinas makes this distinction in order to “set aside certain permanent things from those that can be restored numerically the same by divine power.”12 So, according to Klima, Aquinas is saying in Quodlibet IV that angels and the heavenly bodies can be annihilated and re-created numerically the same by God, but sublunary material substances such as brute animals and human beings cannot. And on this point I disagree with him. I think Aquinas is saying that God can annihilate and re-create not only the numerically same angels and heavenly bodies, but also the numerically same sublunary material substances. Let me explain why I think so. As I noted already, it is precisely the permanent things whose unity only involves continuity of duration per accidens – which we both agree include sublunary material substances – that Aquinas says God alone can restore numerically the same. After he introduces the “except per accidens” distinction among permanent things, Aquinas repeats the phrase “things of this sort” and its equivalents (which I put in bold) in order to refer back continually to just those permanent things whose unity only involves continuity of duration per accidens. The entire subsequent discussion and conclusion is only about these latter permanent things. And it is clear that Aquinas means to retain sublunary material substances among the things that he concludes God can annihilate and re-create numerically the same, because he explicitly mentions such substances in the immediate lead up to his conclusion. Aquinas says that if these things “have been reduced to nothing, or if they have been corrupted according to substance… God can restore things of this sort… the same in number, even if they have fallen into nothing.” Now, the only permanent things that can be “corrupted according to substance” are sublunary material substances such as brute animals and human beings; immaterial substances and the heavenly bodies are incorruptible. So when Aquinas concludes that God can restore things of this sort numerically the same, even if they have been annihilated, or corrupted according to substance, he can only be referring to sublunary material substances, since they are the only 11

Gyula Klima, “The Problem of ‘Gappy Existence’ in Aquinas’s Metaphysics and Theology,” in this volume. 12 Ibid.

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corruptible ones. So although Aquinas appears not to mention any examples of the sort of permanent things he says God can annihilate and re-create numerically the same, he does mention an example, albeit indirectly, when he mentions things that can be “corrupted according to substance.” The third important distinction Aquinas makes in the reply above is between the power of natural agents and the power of God. Aquinas thinks God’s absolute power extends to doing anything that does not involve a contradiction.13 In the first half of the reply he explains why God cannot re-create successive things if they have been annihilated, since doing so would involve a contradiction. In the second half of the reply he explains why God can re-create permanent things if they have been annihilated or corrupted, since doing so would not involve a contradiction. The annihilation and re-creation of permanent things would not involve a contradiction, Aquinas argues, because the unity of permanent things does not involve continuity of duration in its very notion, or if it does, it is only per accidens. Unlike successive things such as motion, what makes a permanent thing one and the same thing is not the continuity in its duration, and therefore God can annihilate permanent things and re-create them numerically the same. But natural agents cannot do this. Natural agents cannot produce things without motion, Aquinas says, and therefore they cannot reproduce the numerically same things if they have been annihilated or corrupted. But God can act without motion, and therefore he can reproduce such permanent things numerically the same even if they have fallen into nothing. The text of Quodlibet IV leaves a number of questions unanswered. Aquinas does not explain what he means by a thing’s “unity having continuity of duration in its very notion.” He does not explain what he means by a permanent thing’s “existence being subjected to motion” and “being one and continuous according to the unity and continuity of time.” And he does not explain why a natural agent’s having to act by means of motion prevents it from being able to reproduce the numerically same permanent things if they have been annihilated or corrupted. I shall return to some of these points below. But the text of Quodlibet IV does answer a number of other questions. First, Aquinas clearly thinks that some things 13

Scriptum Super Sententiis (henceforth In Sent.) I, d. 42, q. 2, a. 2; In Sent. III, d. 1, q. 2, a. 3; QDP q. 1, a. 7; QDP q. 5, a. 3; QQ III, q. 1, a. 1; QQ IV, q. 3, a. 2; QQ V, q. 2, a. 1; QQ XII, q. 2, a. 2; Summa Contra Gentiles (henceforth SCG) II, c. 22, n. 3; SCG II, c. 25, nn. 10ff; ST I, q. 25, a. 3.

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can be annihilated and re-created by God. To this extent he admits the metaphysical possibility of intermittent or “gappy” existence. Second, Aquinas clearly thinks that successive things like motion and time cannot be annihilated and re-created by God. And third, Aquinas clearly includes things that can be “corrupted according to substance,” that is, sublunary material substances, among the permanent things he concludes that God alone can annihilate and re-create numerically the same. On the basis of these answers Aquinas’s earlier interpreters recognized that he reserves to God the power to annihilate and re-create material substances. But this recognition appears to bring them into conflict with Aquinas himself, since elsewhere Aquinas seems to deny precisely what he affirms in Quodlibet IV. These interpreters were aware of this conflict and they tried to give alternate readings of the problem texts. Their readings aren’t always very convincing, though, and I think they are mostly unnecessary. Most of the problem texts do not actually contradict Quodlibet IV. But a few of them certainly seem to. So let me turn briefly to them.

II. In a number of texts spanning his entire career Aquinas seems to endorse what Christina Van Dyke calls “the principle of non-repeatability.”14 The principle actually comes in two importantly different versions. One version, which is taken from Aristotle, claims that what is corrupted cannot return again numerically the same. Another version claims that what ceases to exist or what is annihilated cannot return again numerically the same. Aquinas states the principle in at least four different contexts. Sometimes it comes up in his commentaries on Aristotle.15 Sometimes it comes up in his discussions of the Christian sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist.16 But most often it comes up in his discussions of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection.17 I have already dealt elsewhere with the bulk 14

Christina Van Dyke, “Human Identity, Immanent Causal Relations, and the Principle of Non-Repeatability: Thomas Aquinas on the Bodily Resurrection,” Religious Studies 43/4 (2007): 373-394. 15 Commentaria in Libros Physicorum V, l. 6, n. 6 & n. 8. 16 In Sent. IV, d. 12, q. 1, art. 2, qc. 4; In Sent. IV, d. 22, q. 1, a. 1; ST III, q. 77, a. 5. 17 In Sent. IV, d. 44, q. 1, a. 1, qc. 1, obj. 4 & ad 4; In Sent. IV, d. 44, q. 1, art. 1, qc. 2, obj. 1-3 & ad 1-3; In Sent. IV, d. 44, q. 3, a. 3, qc. 1, obj. 6 & ad 6; SCG IV, c. 80, nn. 2-4 & c. 81, nn. 5-11; Compendium Theologiae I, c. 154; Quaestiones

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of the problem texts from Aquinas’s discussions of the resurrection and from his Aristotelian commentaries.18 Here I shall just briefly summarize my take on them. Of the two versions of the principle of non-repeatability, only the second version contradicts the text of Quodlibet IV. The first version, taken from Aristotle, is about the impossibility of repeated generations and corruptions of the numerically same thing. But generation and corruption involve the activity of natural agents. So the first version of the principle says nothing else than what Aquinas himself says in Quodlibet IV, namely that natural agents cannot reproduce things numerically the same if they have been annihilated or corrupted. Indeed, the first version of the principle is quoted in one of the first objections in Quodlibet IV. And Aquinas does not even bother to write a reply to it, since, he says, “the response to the first [objection] is clear.”19 But the second version of the principle of non-repeatability is about the impossibility of any gaps in existence at all. So the second version of the principle does seem to contradict the text of Quodlibet IV. Since only the first version of the principle comes up in the commentaries on Aristotle, they can be set aside. In the discussions of the resurrection both versions of the principle come up, but with one exception the principle only occurs in objections to the possibility of the resurrection, not in Aquinas’s replies.20 When an objection contains the first version of the principle, sometimes Aquinas just passes it over in silence in his replies. But sometimes he points out that the first version of the principle is not relevant to the case of the resurrection, since the principle is only about the limits of natural agents, whereas the resurrection is brought about by God alone. I think Aquinas’s replies in this case confirm my interpretation of the first version of the principle. When an objection contains the second version of the principle, which is only a couple of Disputatae de Anima (henceforth QDA) q. 19, obj. 5 & ad 5; QDA q. 19, obj. 13 & ad 13. 18 Turner Nevitt, “Survivalism, Corruptionism, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 31/1 (2014): 1-19. 19 QQ IV, q. 3, a. 2, ad 1. 20 At In Sent. IV, d. 44, q. 1, a. 1, qc. 2, ad 1, the exceptional case where Aquinas mentions the principle of non-repeatability in a reply, I think he can be read as merely restating the principle for the purpose of pointing out that it does not apply to the case of death and resurrection, rather than as actually endorsing the principle himself.

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times, Aquinas always passes over the principle in silence in his replies; he never accepts it or rejects it himself. One could argue that Aquinas’s silence about the second version of the principle is best explained by his implicit endorsement of it. Elsewhere I give what I think is a better explanation of his silence in these contexts.21 But the most important thing to note here is that we are not forced by these texts to conclude that Aquinas himself endorsed the second version of the principle of nonrepeatability. So these texts can be set aside too. Yet even if Aquinas had endorsed the principle of non-repeatability in his commentaries on Aristotle and in his discussions of the resurrection, at most that would prove that Aquinas later changed his mind, since all of those texts were written before Quodlibet IV. The same is true for Aquinas’s mention of the principle of non-repeatability in his discussion of the sacrament of Penance. But his discussions of the Eucharist are much harder to deal with, since they occur both before and after Quodlibet IV and they seem clearly to endorse the second version of the principle of non-repeatability. In his Commentaria in Libros Sententiarum and in the third part of the Summa Theologiae Aquinas addresses the question whether anything can be generated from the Eucharistic species. He takes it as obvious that something can be generated from them, since, for example, when they are burned they turn into ashes and when they rot they turn into worms. The question is about how this obvious fact could be the case, given the doctrine of transubstantiation. In the course of evaluating the opposing answers to this question, Aquinas says in the commentary In Libros Sententiarum, “what is reduced to nothing cannot be taken up again numerically the same.”22 In the parallel discussion in the Summa he says, “If the substance of bread or wine were annihilated, it cannot return again, since what has fallen into nothing does not return numerically the same, unless perhaps the aforementioned substance were said to return because God creates de novo a new substance in place of the first.”23 In both these texts Aquinas appears to flatly contradict what he himself says in Quodlibet IV. Aquinas’s earlier interpreters, at least, thought these texts do not have to be read as an endorsement of the principle of non-repeatability. They claim that in these texts Aquinas is only talking about God’s wisely ordained power rather than about his absolute power. Sylvester, for 21

Supra n. 18. In Sent. IV, d. 12, q. 1, art. 2, qc. 4. 23 ST III, q. 77, a. 5. 22

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example, says the term “impossible” should be read as “unfitting,” since it would be unfitting for God to superfluously annihilate something if he intended to reinstate it in existence.24 Cajetan is more sensitive to the immediate context, appealing to the sacramental order under discussion in the text. According to Cajetan, when Aquinas says it is impossible for bread and wine to be annihilated and restored numerically the same, he just means that such a miracle is not a part of what God has ordained in the sacrament of the Eucharist.25 Capreolus reads the texts similarly.26 I think it is worth pointing out that these problem texts occur while Aquinas is evaluating the opposing views of others. So it is possible that his remarks are merely ad hominem. If those who held the views he is evaluating did not themselves allow for the annihilation and re-creation of the numerically same material substances, then it would make sense for Aquinas to grant as much for the sake of refuting their position on their own terms. The same thing can be said of his use of the principle of nonrepeatability in the discussions of the resurrection and of the sacrament of Penance. My point is that Quodlibet IV is the only place where Aquinas addresses the topic of annihilation and re-creation for its own sake. Presumably, then, his most considered remarks about the topic are given there. They are certainly his most extended remarks about it. The problem texts, on the other hand, are all incidental remarks Aquinas makes while discussing other topics. Out of all the texts, then, Quodlibet IV should be taken the most seriously.

III. Suppose Aquinas did in fact change his mind about the possibility of the annihilation and re-creation of the numerically same material substances. I want to consider an objection arguing that Aquinas shouldn’t have done so. The objection is based on Gyula Klima’s paper in this volume. Klima argues that one of Aquinas’s metaphysical commitments is incompatible with the view I take him to express in Quodlibet IV. He grants that sublunary material substances are permanent things. As such, they have all the parts of their essence wholly at once, rather than having them successively one after another. Aquinas says as much himself.27 But, 24

Sylvester, Commentaria, p. 256. Cajetan, Commentaria, pp. 200-201. 26 Capreolus, Defensiones, p. 23. 27 Sententia Libri Metaphysicae (henceforth In Met.) VII, l. 12, n. 27. 25

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according to Klima, although the essence of such substances is not successive, their existence is successive.28 He thinks this is what Aquinas means by saying in Quodlibet IV that such things are measured by time per accidens insofar as their existence is “subjected to motion.” If the existence of sublunary material substances is itself successive, however, then a gap in their existence would result in the same sort of contradiction that follows from a gap in motion. If Klima is right that Aquinas thinks such substances have a successive existence, then Aquinas should not have said what I take him to have said in Quodlibet IV. In defense of his interpretation Klima cites Aquinas’s major discussions of the difference between divine eternity, angelic aeviternity, and time; he cites a quodlibet question on the duration of angels; and he cites Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s De caelo et mundo.29 But as far as I can tell, none of these texts force us to conclude that Aquinas thinks the existence of sublunary material substances is itself successive. He certainly never says so explicitly. Indeed, he seems to say the opposite in some of these very texts. In the text from the De caelo commentary, for example, Aquinas says: Motion has a quantity, which is measured by time… But the very existence of any thing (ipsum esse alicuius rei), considered according to itself, is not quantified: for it does not have parts, but is whole at once (totum simul). But it happens to it that it is quantified, in one way according to duration, insofar as it is subjected to motion and consequently to time, as the existence of variable things.30

Here Aquinas makes nearly the same point he makes in Quodlibet IV. The existence of some things is accidentally quantified insofar as it is subjected to motion and therefore to time. But what he says here makes it clear that having an existence “subjected to motion” does not mean having an existence that is itself successive, composed of parts ordered one after another. Considered in itself, Aquinas says, the existence of any thing other than motion does not have parts, but is whole at once. Aquinas 28

Cf. Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes, 1274-1671 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 374-398, esp. pp. 397-398; Robert Pasnau, “On Existing All At Once,” in God, Eternity and Time, eds. C. Tapp and E. Runggaldier (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 11-28, esp. pp. 23-27. 29 In Sent. I, d. 8, q. 2, aa. 1-3; In Sent. I, d. 19, q. 2, a. 1; In Sent. I, d. 37, q. 2, a. 1, ad 4; In Sent. II, d. 2, q. 1, aa. 1-2; ST I, q. 10, aa. 1-6; QQ X, q. 2; In libros Aristotelis De caelo et mundo expositio (henceforth In De caelo) I, l. 6. 30 In De caelo I, l. 6, n. 5.

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makes the same point in the De Potentia, where he says, “the very existence of permanent things (esse rerum permanentium) is not divisible except per accidens, insofar as it stands under some motion; according to itself, however, it is in an instant.”31 And in a number of places he applies this point about being “in an instant” to the existence of human beings, which are sublunary material substances.32 In his commentary In Libros Sententiarum, for example, Aquinas says: Something is said to be in time per accidens [when] nothing that is required for the completion of its species is expected in the future, as the existence of a human being (esse hominem) which is completed in one instant; but it is conjoined to motion, which is in time per se, insofar as the existence of a human being (esse hominis) is variable.33

But if Aquinas thinks the existence of sublunary material substances such as human beings is not composed of parts, is whole at once, is indivisible per se, and is completed in one instant, as he says in these texts, then he cannot think the existence of such things is successive like motion. What then does Aquinas mean by saying that some permanent things are in time per accidens insofar as their existence is “subjected to motion,” “stands under motion,” and is “conjoined to motion”? I think the beginnings of an answer can be pieced together even from the texts Klima cites. In the text from the Summa Theologiae, for example, Aquinas says: Certain things recede from permanence of existing, because their existence is the subject of transmutation, or consists in transmutation; and these sorts of things are measured by time; as every motion, and also the existence of all corruptible things.34

Here I think Aquinas is making a distinction between successive temporal things like motion, whose existence “consists in transmutation,” and permanent temporal things, whose existence is merely “the subject of transmutation.” Aquinas makes the same distinction in the commentary In Libros Sententiarum, where he says, “there are some things whose existence consists in becoming (in fiere)… as are motion and successive things of this sort. But there are some things whose existence consists in 31

QDP q. 5, a. 1, ad 2. In Sent. IV, d. 17, q. 1, a. 5, qc. 3 arg. 1 & ad 1; In Sent. IV, d. 17, q. 2, a. 1, qc. 3, arg. 3 & ad 3; In Sent. IV, d. 49, q. 3, a. 1, qc. 3. 33 In Sent. IV, d. 49, q. 3, a. 1, qc. 3 (emphasis mine). 34 ST I, q. 10, a. 5. 32

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remaining (in permanendo).”35 Having an existence that is the subject of transmutation, and that consists in remaining, then, does not mean having an existence that itself consists in transmutation or motion. But, then again, what does it mean to say that the existence of certain permanent things is “the subject of transmutation”? Aquinas gives a hint in the quodlibet question Klima cites. He says there that the existence of an angel is immutably preserved “since there is neither motion in it, nor is it subjected to any motion, as the existence of corruptible things is subjected to the heavenly motion.”36 Here I think Aquinas is making the same distinction between successive temporal things whose existence “consists in motion,” and permanent temporal things whose existence is merely “the subject of motion” or “subjected to motion.” And he says the existence of corruptible things is “subjected to motion” by being related somehow to the motion of the heavens. In his commentary In Libros Sententiarum Aquinas explains how they are related. He says: Time per se is the measure of the first motion; hence the existence of temporal things is not measured by time except insofar as it is subjected to variation from the motion of heaven. … And hence all things which are ordered to the motion of heaven as to a cause, which time first measures, are measured by time.37

Corruptible material substances are in time per accidens, then, insofar as their existence is variable by being subjected to the motion of the heavens as an effect is subjected to a cause. At this point I imagine Klima would want to suggest that the variability in the existence of corruptible things, which is caused by the heavenly motion, consists precisely in the succession of parts ordered one after another. But I think Aquinas has something else in mind, which comes out in some of his other discussions of the difference between being in time per se and being in time per accidens. In the Summa Theologiae, for example, he says: But those things whose ratio does not have any succession, but nevertheless stand under something successive, are said to be in time according to 35

In Sent. I, d. 8, q. 2, a. 3, ad 4. QQ X, q. 2. 37 In Sent. I, d. 19, q. 2, a. 1, ad 4. 36

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another, and not per se. In the same way, the existence of a human being (esse hominem) does not have succession in its ratio, for it is not a motion, but the terminus of a motion or a mutation, namely its generation; however, since human existence (humanum esse) stands under changeable causes, according to this a human being’s existence (esse hominem) is in time.38

Here again Aquinas seems to deny precisely the view Klima attributes to him. A human being’s existence does not have succession in its ratio since it is not a motion, Aquinas says. But human existence is in time per accidens, he says, insofar as it stands under changeable causes responsible for its generation. In a parallel discussion in the commentary In Libros Sententiarum Aquinas makes the same point about the causes of a human being’s corruption. He says: Although the motion of the intellect and will has its whole species in one instant, as a permanent thing; nevertheless, it is measured by time per accidens, insofar as its causes are variable by time. For thus the existence of a human being (esse hominis), which is in an instant, is measured by time. And as long as the causes of a human being’s existence (esse hominis) remain the same, the existence itself also remains; but if the causes change, that existence is changed, with the prior being destroyed, since the generation of one thing is the corruption of another.39

The existence of a human being is measured by time per accidens, then, because it is variable by time insofar as its causes are variable by time. When its causes change, the existence of a human being itself changes by being generated or corrupted. And Aquinas says the same is true of permanent things generally. Taken together, I think these texts form a helpful gloss on Aquinas’s claims that permanent things such as sublunary material substances are in time and are measured by time per accidens insofar as their existence is the subject of or subjected to variation, transmutation, and motion. Aquinas does not mean that the existence of sublunary material substances such as human beings is itself successive like motion. He denies that explicitly. Rather, he means that their existence is subjected to motion insofar as it is the terminus of motion, namely generation and corruption. A human being’s existence is variable by being conjoined to such generating and corrupting motions. Insofar as a human being’s existence is the terminus ad quem of the generating motion by which a human being 38 39

ST I-II, q. 31, a. 2 (emphasis mine). In Sent. IV, d. 17, q. 2, a. 1, qc. 3, ad 3 (emphasis mine).

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comes to be, and the terminus a quo of the corrupting motion by which it ceases to be, a human being’s existence is in time and is measured by time, but only per accidens. Between its generation and corruption a human being’s existence is in time and is measured by time, but again only per accidens, insofar as a human being’s existence remains the same in every instant of time in which it is said to be.40 Considered in itself, however, Aquinas thinks a human being’s existence, like its essence, is completed in one instant. And the same goes for every other sublunary material substance, indeed for every permanent thing. Since Aquinas does not think the existence of sublunary material substances is itself successive, what I take him to say in Quodlibet IV cannot be objected to on those grounds. If the view Aquinas expresses there is inconsistent with his other metaphysical commitments, it must be for some other reason.41

Conclusion By way of conclusion let me briefly place Aquinas’s view in the context of some contemporary discussions of composition, persistence, and identity over time. Aquinas’s distinction between permanent things and successive things is like the contemporary distinction between three-dimensional or enduring objects and four-dimensional or perduring objects.42 Successive things like motion have the parts of their essence and existence ordered one after another in time and have a unity with continuity of duration in its very notion. In other words, successive things are composed of “temporal parts,” which Aquinas thinks only together constitute one and the same thing by the unbroken continuity in their duration. As such, Aquinas thinks God cannot annihilate successive things and then re-create them numerically 40 Cf. In Sent. IV, d. 17, q. 1, a. 5, qc. 3, ad 1; In Sent. IV, d. 17, q. 2, a. 1, qc. 3, arg. 3. 41 Adam Wood argues that my interpretation of Quodlibet IV is incompatible with one way of interpreting Aquinas’s theory of designated matter as the principle of individuation. See his “Mind the Gap? The Principle of Non-Repeatability and Aquinas’s Account of the Resurrection,” Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 3 (2015): 99-27. For my reply to Wood, see my “Don’t Mind the Gap: A Reply to Adam Wood,” Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 4 (forthcoming 2016). 42 For an introduction to the contemporary distinction between enduring and perduring objects, see Andre Gallois, “Identity Over Time,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

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the same. Permanent things, on the other hand, have their existence and the parts of their essence wholly in an instant and have a unity without continuity of duration in its very notion, except per accidens, insofar as their existence is subjected to motion, especially generating and corrupting motions. In other words, permanent things are either simple or composed of parts present wholly in an instant; they are not composed of any “temporal parts.” As such, Aquinas thinks God can annihilate permanent things and then re-create them numerically the same, since what makes them one and the same thing is present wholly in an instant, and does not depend on the unbroken continuity in their duration. Since Aquinas reserves to God the absolute power to annihilate sublunary material substances such as human beings and then to re-create them numerically the same, he must not think that continuity of anything other than God’s power is metaphysically necessary for the identity of such substances over time. That means Aquinas would reject a couple of popular views about identity over time. One popular view is that spatiotemporal continuity is necessary for an object’s identity over time. Aquinas would obviously reject this view. Another popular view is that an object’s spatiotemporal continuity can be broken as long as immanent causal relations are maintained between its earlier states and its later states. Aquinas would reject this view as well, since it rules out the possibility of annihilation and re-creation from the start. The only way that an annihilated material substance could make a causal contribution to its recreation would be by providing a sort of blueprint of itself in God’s mind. But the causal contribution of blueprints is not immanent. If Aquinas is right that a material substance can be annihilated and re-created by God, then immanent causal relations cannot be necessary for its identity over time. Whether or not Aquinas is right, of course, will depend on what we make of his remarks in Quodlibet IV and elsewhere.

THE PROBLEM OF “GAPPY EXISTENCE” IN AQUINAS’S METAPHYSICS AND THEOLOGY GYULA KLIMA

Recently there has been some controversy in the literature as to whether Aquinas’ metaphysical principles allow the disrupted (“gappy”) existence of material substances, with obvious implications concerning his theology of the resurrection, but also concerning the metaphysics of personal identity. This paper argues that in a sense Aquinas’ principles do allow the “gappy existence” of a sublunary material substance (as we shall see, the case with the heavenly bodies of Aristotelian cosmology is somewhat different), but only if the existence (esse) of the sublunary material substance in question itself is continuous, even if the complete material substance discontinuously has it. Well, how is that possible? A crucial passage in Aquinas’ Quodlibetal Questions (IV, q. 3, a. 2.) makes a distinction between successive and permanent things. The former, successive things, such as motions or processes, are such that they cannot have all their essential parts together at the same time, but only one after the other, so they are complete only when they “have run their course”; they stop, and that is the end of their existence. Hence, they cannot be repeated as the same individual token, although another token of the same type can come to exist and cease to exist just as the first did. Permanent things, on the other hand, can and must have all their essential parts together at the same time, so their existence can be disrupted, and yet numerically the same token-substance can be restored. However, as I will argue further, since the existence of a permanent sublunary material substance itself is successive, in the case of such a substance, numerically the same individual can be restored after it ceases to exist only if the existence it previously had is not interrupted, i.e., provided that its existence is continued in one of its surviving parts. This is why Aquinas’ theology of supernatural resurrection has as its metaphysical pre-condition the natural immortality of the human soul.

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Before getting down to the analysis of Aquinas’ doctrine itself, one tangentially related issue needs to be clarified, namely, the issue of the recent debate about two competing interpretations of Aquinas’ doctrine of immortality: the so-called “survivalist” and “corruptionist” interpretations. In my view, the “survivalist” interpretation is downright untenable for several reasons. In the first place, it makes the nonsensical claim that human persons, on account of the survival of their immortal soul, should survive their death. However, for someone to survive an episode means that the person still lives after the episode, whereas for a person to die, since death is the end of life, means that the person does not live after death. So, the episode of death is not a survivable episode in one’s life, but rather it is the absolutely last episode of that life, terminating that life. Thus, surviving your death would be like having your cake and eating it too, or rather still having it, after having eaten it. Or it would be like still playing a game of chess in which you already got checkmated, which is sheer nonsense. Therefore, nobody can survive their death, even if some of the items that used to constitute the person continue to exist after the person’s death. However, survivalists would contend that this is precisely what is happening in the case of the death of a human person. The person’s soul, which used to constitute the person together with the person’s body, continues to exist, and now it constitutes the person alone, without the body, and that is why the person can be said to survive death. But this is just twisting the meaning of the word ‘constitute’. Any “survivalist” would certainly be outraged by the similar argument of a cheeky pizza boy, who, after having eaten the topping off the pizza’s crust, would want to charge them for the pizza on the grounds that although the topping is gone, the pizza is still “constituted” by the crust alone. If the topping is gone, then the pizza is gone, even if the crust stays, for the crust alone will not “constitute” a pizza, just like the soul alone does not “constitute” a person. Finally, the “survivalist” position offered as an interpretation of Aquinas is untenable simply because Aquinas explicitly rejects the survival of a person after death. As he says: In response to the question [namely, whether the separated soul, which does survive death, is a person], we have to say that among ancient thinkers there were two opinions about the union of the soul with the body. One opinion was that the soul is united to the body as one complete entity to another, so that it would be in the body like a sailor in a ship; therefore, as Gregory of

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Nyssa reports, Plato posited that man is not something constituted from body and soul, but rather man is the soul clad in a body. And on this opinion, the whole personhood of a human being [tota personalitas hominis] would consist in the soul, indeed, so much so that the separate soul could truly be said to be a human being, as Hugh of St. Victor held. And on this opinion it would be true what the Magister (Peter Lombard) says, namely, that the soul is a person, when separated. But this opinion [which is the one endorsed by “survivalists”] is untenable, for in this way the soul would be joined to the body accidentally, whence the term ‘man’, the understanding of which implies both body and soul, would not signify something one per se, but merely per accidens, and thus man would not be in the category of substance. The other opinion is that of Aristotle, whom all modern authors follow, that the soul is united to the body as form to matter; therefore, the soul is a part of human nature, and not some nature in itself; and so, since the notion of a part is contrary to the notion of a person, as has been said, the separate soul cannot be said to be a person, for although when it is separated, it is not actually a part, nevertheless, it has the nature to be a part.1

The surviving soul, therefore, is not a person, and does not constitute a person any more than the mere crust is or constitutes a pizza. So, having eliminated “survivalism”, it appears that we are stuck with “corruptionism”. However, “corruptionism” seems to face the tremendous objection that allegedly, according to Aquinas, nothing that has ceased to exist can recur numerically the same. So, if the death of a person is the end of the existence of that person, it would seem that it is not possible for

1

“Respondeo dicendum, quod de unione animae ad corpus apud antiquos duplex fuit opinio. Una quod anima unitur corpori sicut ens completum enti completo, ut esset in corpore sicut nauta in navi: unde, sicut dicit Gregorius Nyssenus, Plato posuit quod homo non est aliquid constitutum ex corpore et anima, sed est anima corpore induta: et secundum hoc tota personalitas hominis consisteret in anima, adeo quod anima separata posset dici homo vere, ut dicit Hugo de s. Victore: et secundum hanc opinionem esset verum quod Magister dicit, quod anima est persona quando est separata. Sed haec opinio non potest stare: quia sic corpus animae accidentaliter adveniret: unde hoc nomen homo, de cujus intellectu est anima et corpus, non significaret unum per se, sed per accidens; et ita non esset in genere substantiae. Alia est opinio Aristotelis quam omnes moderni sequuntur, quod anima unitur corpori sicut forma materiae: unde anima est pars humanae naturae, et non natura quaedam per se: et quia ratio partis contrariatur rationi personae, ut dictum est, ideo anima separata non potest dici persona: quia quamvis separata non sit pars actu, tamen habet naturam ut sit pars.” SN3 d. 5 q. 3 a. 2 co.; There are several other passages making the same point. SN2 d. 1, q. 2, a. 4, ad 3; SN2 d. 17, q. 2, a. 2 co.; SN3 d. 2, q. 1, a. 3, qc. 2 co.

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numerically the same person to recur, i.e., to be resurrected after their death. In a recent article, Turner Nevitt, biting the bullet, has argued for the claim that Aquinas, despite possible appearances to the contrary, would actually endorse at least the supernatural possibility of “gappy existence”, that is, the claim that God by his absolute power is able to recreate numerically the same created substance, even if it previously ceased to exist.2 Nevitt bases his case on the following, rather difficult passage in Aquinas’ Quodlibetal Questions: Response. It should be said that there is a certain difference to be noticed among those things which can be reduced to nothing. For there are some things whose unity has continuity of duration in its very notion, as is clear in the case of motion and time, and therefore the interruption of such things is indirectly3 contrary to their unity according to number. But things which imply a contradiction are not contained under the number of things possible to God, since they fall short of the notion of being. And therefore, if things of this kind are reduced to nothing, God cannot restore them the same in number: for this would be to make contradictories true at the same time, for instance, if there were one interrupted motion. But there are other things whose unity does not have continuity of duration in its very notion, as the unity of permanent things, except per accidens, insofar as their being is subjected to motion; for in this way they are both measured by time and their being is one and continuous according to the unity and continuity of time. And since a natural agent cannot produce these things without motion, hence it is that a natural agent cannot restore things of this kind the same in number, if they have been reduced to nothing, or if they have been substantially corrupted. But God can restore things of this kind without motion, since it is in his power to produce effects without intermediate

2

Nevitt, T.C., “Survivalism, Corruptionism, and Intermittent Existence in Aquinas”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 31-1(2014): 1-19. 3 The reason why interruption is merely indirectly contrary to the unity of motion and time is that the unity and continuity (as well as the divisibility) of both ride on the primary unity of dimensive quantity, the only kind of thing that is directly and per se divisible (having parts of the same species directly opposed to each other by their spatial differences, being up or down, etc.), the unity of which can consist only in its continuity. Thomas Sutton beautifully explains this in several questions on the principle of individuation. See especially Thomas of Sutton, Quaestiones ordinariae, ed. J. Schneider, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften: München 1977, q. 27, pp. 744-770. See also SN1 d. 24 q. 1 a. 1 co.; Sententia De anima, lib. 3 l. 11 n. 7; Sententia Metaphysicae, lib. 10 l. 1 n. 3; Super I Cor., cap. 12 l. 3.

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causes, and therefore he can restore these things the same in number, even if they have fallen into nothing.4

In connection with this passage, Nevitt makes two important observations. First, that the passage clearly endorses the metaphysical possibility of the interrupted existence of at least some created things, and second, that the passage claims only the natural impossibility of interrupted existence in the case of these things, leaving open the supernatural possibility of the same. In connection with the latter observation, we should note, nevertheless, that Aquinas here explicitly claims the supernatural impossibility of the intermittent existence of successive things, such as motion or time. So, clearly, it is only permanent things that can be recreated numerically the same, even by supernatural power. But can they all? Apparently, there is another restriction on what is possible even by divine omnipotence in the case of at least some of these things, too, as Aquinas notes in this sentence in the Quodlibetal passage quoted above: But there are other things whose unity does not have continuity of duration in its very notion, as the unity of permanent things, except per accidens, insofar as their being is subjected to motion; for in this way they are both measured by time and their being is one and continuous according to the unity and continuity of time.5 4

“Respondeo. Dicendum, quod in his quae in nihilum redigi possunt, est quaedam differentia attendenda. Quaedam enim sunt quorum unitas in sui ratione habet durationis continuitatem, sicut patet in motu et tempore; et ideo interruptio talium indirecte contrariatur unitati eorum secundum numerum. Ea vero quae contradictionem implicant, non continentur sub numero Deo possibilium, quia deficiunt a ratione entis: et ideo, si huiusmodi in nihilum redigantur, Deus ea non potest eadem numero reparare. Hoc enim esset facere contradictoria simul esse vera; puta si motus interruptus esset unus. Alia vero sunt quorum unitas non habet in sui ratione continuitatem durationis, sicut unitas rerum permanentium, nisi per accidens, in quantum eorum esse subiectum est motui: sic enim et mensurantur huiusmodi tempore, et eorum esse est unum et continuum, secundum unitatem et continuitatem temporis. Et quia natura agens non potest ista producere sine motu, inde est quod naturale agens non potest huiusmodi reparare eadem numero, si in nihilum redacta fuerint, vel si fuerint secundum substantiam corrupta. Sed Deus potest reparare huiusmodi et sine motu, quia in eius potestate est quod producat effectus sine causis mediis; et ideo potest eadem numero reparare, etiamsi in nihilum elapsa fuerint.” QDL4, q. 3, a. 2, co. 5 QDL4, q. 3, a. 2, co.

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This sentence very clearly makes an important exception: it sets aside certain permanent things from those that can be restored numerically the same by divine power without any restriction whatsoever, namely those whose existence is measured by time. The permanent things noted here as those whose being is measured by time are the sublunary material substances (and their permanent material accidents, such as quantities and qualities, as opposed to their actions and passions, for instance), with which we are familiar, indeed, the kind of sublunary material substances we ourselves are. Our being, our existence, that is, our life, is clearly measured by the years (months, weeks, days, minutes, seconds, etc.) we have lived, and it is equally clear that we cannot have our entire life all together at once, but only in a temporal sequence, one part after another. So, our existence (esse) is successive, just like motions or processes are, even if we are permanent beings, insofar as our essence is not successive, as the essence of motions and processes is, which in view of Aquinas’ thesis of the real distinction of essence and existence in creatures is of course entirely possible without contradiction. In contrast to these temporal permanent things, there are those nontemporal permanent things whose being is not measured by time, such as angels, and the celestial bodies of Aristotelian cosmology, whose existence is measured by another dimension, which Aquinas calls aevum. Aevum differs from time, because it is non-successive, whereas time is. Accordingly, aeviternal existence differs from temporal existence precisely in being non-successive vs. successive, insofar as parts of temporal existence have to be simultaneous with successive parts of time, whereas aeviternal existence is all together at once, just as aevum, the measure of aeviternal existence, is all together at once. So, in this regard, an aeviternal being is like an eternal being, that is, God, whose eternity, according to Boethius’ definition accepted by Aquinas, is “the perfect possession of an interminable life, the whole, together, at once”,6 whereas the difference is that an aeviternal being’s simultaneous possession of its life is not perfect, because its existence is distinct from its essence, whence it is given to it by its cause, that is, God.7 6

SN1 d. 8, q. 2, a. 1, arg. 1. “Et ponitur definitio aeternitatis a Boetio, 5 de Consol. aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio.” 7 SN1 d. 8, q. 2, a. 1 co. “Dico ergo, quod ad excludendam primam terminationem, quae est principii et finis totius durationis, ponitur, interminabilis vitae; et per hoc dividitur aeternum ab his quae generantur et corrumpuntur. Ad excludendum autem secundam terminationem, scilicet partium durationis, additur, tota simul: per hoc enim excluditur successio partium, pro qua unaquaeque pars finita est et

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Thus, among permanent things, we have these three basic forms of possessing a thing’s existence: (1) Perfectly, non-successively (God) (2) Imperfectly, non-successively (angels, celestial bodies) (3) Imperfectly, successively (sublunary material substances)

In addition to these, we would have the imperfect, successive possession of existence by successive things, which would be successive not only in their existence, but also in their essence, representing the lowest form of actuality, in contrast to mere potentiality.8

transit: et per hoc dividitur aeternum a motu et tempore, etiam si semper fuissent et futura essent, sicut quidam posuerunt. Ad excludendum tertiam terminationem, quae est ex parte recipientis, additur, perfecta: illud enim in quo non est esse absolutum, sed terminatum per recipiens, non habet esse perfectum sed illud solum quod est suum esse: et per hoc dividitur esse aeternum ab esse rerum immobilium creatarum, quae habent esse participatum, sicut spirituales creaturae.” 8 Cf. ST1, q. 10, a. 5: “Est ergo dicendum quod, cum aeternitas sit mensura esse permanentis, secundum quod aliquid recedit a permanentia essendi, secundum hoc recedit ab aeternitate. Quaedam autem sic recedunt a permanentia essendi, quod esse eorum est subiectum transmutationis, vel in transmutatione consistit, et huiusmodi mensurantur tempore; sicut omnis motus, et etiam esse omnium corruptibilium. Quaedam vero recedunt minus a permanentia essendi, quia esse eorum nec in transmutatione consistit, nec est subiectum transmutationis, tamen habent transmutationem adiunctam, vel in actu vel in potentia. Sicut patet in corporibus caelestibus, quorum esse substantiale est intransmutabile; tamen esse intransmutabile habent cum transmutabilitate secundum locum. Et similiter patet de Angelis, quod habent esse intransmutabile cum transmutabilitate secundum electionem, quantum ad eorum naturam pertinet; et cum transmutabilitate intelligentiarum et affectionum, et locorum suo modo. Et ideo huiusmodi mensurantur aevo, quod est medium inter aeternitatem et tempus. Esse autem quod mensurat aeternitas, nec est mutabile, nec mutabilitati adiunctum. Sic ergo tempus habet prius et posterius, aevum autem non habet in se prius et posterius, sed ei coniungi possunt, aeternitas autem non habet prius neque posterius, neque ea compatitur.” Cf. In De Caelo I, l. 6, n. 5 “...Motus autem quantitatem habet, quae mensuratur tempore et magnitudine, ut patet in VI Physic... Ipsum autem esse alicuius rei secundum se consideratum non est quantum: non enim habet partes, sed totum est simul. Accidit autem ei quod sit quantum, uno quidem modo secundum durationem, inquantum est subiectum motui et per consequens tempori, sicut esse rerum variabilium...”; De potentia, q. 5 a. 1 ad 2. “Ad secundum dicendum, quod Deus non alia operatione producit res in esse et eas in esse conservat. Ipsum enim esse rerum permanentium non est divisibile nisi per accidens, prout alicui motui subiacet; secundum se autem est in instanti. Unde

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Since the first case is the mode of existence of God, which is interminable by absolute necessity, the question of the possibility of recurrence is simply inapplicable in this case. One can, however, legitimately raise the question whether an entity possessing existence in the second or the third way can be annihilated and re-created by God by his absolute power, which is the same as to ask whether the interrupted existence of an entity of these sorts is logically possible, i.e., free of self-contradiction. Alas, the above-quoted Quodlibetal passage in itself does not determine this issue. However, based on his remarks in other contexts, we can piece together what Aquinas’ answer to this question would have to be. For Aquinas, the question of numerical identity is that of numerical unity, in the sense that asking whether A and B are numerically the same item amounts to the question whether A and B (not collectively, but distributively, i.e., taken not together, but one by one) count as one item and not two items. For instance, if we started counting the students of Socrates, we might proceed as follows: Phaedo, one, Simmias, two, Plato, three, but then we could not go on by saying, Aristocles, four, because Plato and Aristocles count only as one, since the names ‘Plato’ and ‘Aristocles’ name one and the same person. By contrast, the question of numerical diversity or non-identity is the question of whether the items being considered would count as two in a similar process of counting. It is precisely on these grounds that Aquinas says that if someone walked from one place to another yesterday, and then, after having walked back and taken a rest, he walks again from the same place to the same second place today, then these two acts of walking are not identical, for they are two distinct acts of walking, even if performed by the same person to the same place from the same place in the same way, because the first act was completed yesterday, and now it is gone forever, and so the other one today is a new one, numerically distinct from the first.9 However, even in the Quodlibetal passage under consideration (and of course in many other passages as well),10 Aquinas describes the existence operatio Dei quae est per se causa quod res sit, non est alia secundum quod facit principium essendi et essendi continuationem.” 9 In Physic., lib. 5 l. 6. 10 Quodlibet X, q. 2, corp. “Impossibile est enim esse alicuius durationis duas partes simul, quarum una alteram non includat: sicut mensis includit diem, unde simul est aliquid in die et in mense, sed duo dies et duo menses simul esse non

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(esse) of sublunary material substances, insofar as it is subject to time, in the same way as any successive acts, such as the act of walking. Therefore, he is committed to saying that if such an act of being is interrupted, then it cannot be resumed numerically the same, as indeed he explicitly claims in his Commentary on the Sentences: … that which has totally fallen into non-being cannot be resumed numerically the same, which is clear from the fact that nothing can be numerically one whose existence is divided. But an interrupted existence, which is the act of a being, is a divided act, just as any other interrupted act is.11

To be sure, this explicit formulation can be found in an objection to the metaphysical possibility of resurrection. However, Aquinas’ response is not that the same form can recur with one interrupted act of existence, but rather it rests on the claim that the surviving soul of the resurrected person never had its existence interrupted; that is, implicitly accepting the requirement of the continuity of this esse for its numerical unity, he asserts its continuity. Therefore, one and the same thing having an interrupted act of existence would have to be, in contradiction to this requirement, a possunt. Unde quandocumque in aliqua duratione ponuntur duae partes, quarum una est prior et altera posterior, oportet quod una transeunte, alia de novo adveniat; et sic oportet in omni duratione in qua est prius et posterius, quod fiat innovatio. Mensura autem durationis innovationem habere non potest, nisi illud quod per durationem mensuratur, innovationem recipere possit. Esse autem Angeli est absque innovatione, quia ex quo coepit esse, immutabiliter perseverat; cum nec in eo sit motus, nec sit alicui motui subiectum, sicut esse rerum corruptibilium est subiectum motui caelesti.” In De Caelo I, lect. 6, 5. “Ipsum autem esse alicuius rei secundum se consideratum non est quantum: non enim habet partes, sed totum est simul. Accidit autem ei quod sit quantum, uno quidem modo secundum durationem, inquantum est subiectum motui et per consequens tempori, sicut esse rerum variabilium.” Summa Theologiae I-II, q.31, a2, corp. “Secundum aliud vero, et non per se, dicuntur esse in tempore illa de quorum ratione non est aliqua successio, sed tamen alicui successivo subiacent. Sicut esse hominem de sui ratione non habet successionem, non enim est motus, sed terminus motus vel mutationis, scilicet generationis ipsius, sed quia humanum esse subiacet causis transmutabilibus, secundum hoc esse hominem est in tempore.” 11 SN4 d. 44, q. 1, a. 1, qc. 1, arg. 4. “Illud enim quod penitus cedit in non ens, non potest idem numero resumi; quod patet ex hoc, quia non potest esse idem numero cujus est esse diversum. Sed esse interruptum, quod est actus entis, est diversum, sicut quilibet alius actus interruptus. Sed forma mixtionis penitus cedit in non ens per mortem, cum sit forma corporalis, et similiter qualitates contrariae ex quibus fit mixtio.”

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single thing with two distinct acts of existence, although successively, since the unity of temporal existence demands continuity, just like the unity of anything that is divisible into some parts along any dimension. As Aquinas explicitly says: “It is obvious that division causes multitude”, which is the opposite of unity, and so of identity.12 Hence, the ultimate reason why nothing can be one and the same item with two distinct acts of existence, whether simultaneously or successively, is the convertibility of unity and being. As Aquinas puts it, in connection with a supernatural phenomenon, namely, the hypostatic union: It is impossible for one thing to have two substantial acts of being, because unity is grounded in being; therefore, if there are several acts of being, on account of which something is said to be a being absolutely speaking, the thing cannot be said to be one.13

So, here we have it, without any consideration of the difference between natural and supernatural agency, the purely metaphysical constraint on the possibility of having one and the same thing with two acts of being, even in a purely supernatural context. Accordingly, if a created substance, such as an angel or a celestial body in Aquinas’ cosmology, has aeviternal existence, which it has all at once, then metaphysically nothing prevents its re-creation, if God were to annihilate and create it again, because the esse of the re-created substance and the esse of the substance He annihilated would be one and the same whole esse. By contrast, if the esse of a sublunary substance is interrupted, whether by corruption, or by 12

In Physic., lib. 3 l. 12 n. 4. [...]-1. “Et dicit quod possumus semper intelligere quolibet numero dato alium maiorem, per hoc quod magnitudo dividitur in infinitum. Manifestum est enim quod divisio causat multitudinem: unde quanto plus dividitur magnitudo, tanto maior multitudo consurgit; et ideo ad infinitam divisionem magnitudinum sequitur infinita additio numerorum. Et ideo sicut infinita divisio magnitudinis non est in actu sed in potentia, et excedit omne determinatum in minus, ut dictum est; ita additio numerorum infinita non est in actu sed in potentia, et excedit omnem determinatam multitudinem.” Cf. De potentia, q. 9 a. 8 arg. 4. “Praeterea, multitudo causatur ex divisione, sicut iam dictum est. Ubi autem est divisio sequitur diversitas”; De potentia, q. 9 a. 5 arg. 3. “Praeterea, uni opponitur multitudo, secundum philosophum”; Sententia Metaphysicae, lib. 4 l. 3 n. 1. “…uni autem opponitur multitudo”; Sententia Metaphysicae, lib. 4 l. 3 n. 4. “Uni enim multitudo opponitur, ut dictum est.” 13 SN3 d. 6, q. 2, a. 2 co. “Impossibile est enim quod unum aliquid habeat duo esse substantialia; quia unum fundatur super ens: unde si sint plura esse, secundum quae aliquid dicitur ens simpliciter, impossibile est quod dicatur unum.”

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annihilation, then it cannot be re-created, because the interruption would prevent the unity of the esse of the thing in question, unless this continuity is preserved by the survival of its substantial form in the same esse, as in the case of human beings, indeed, in their case alone. Therefore, even if in the case of permanent things such as sublunary material substances there would be nothing to prevent their re-creation on account of what they are, that is, their essence, they cannot be re-created on account of how they are, that is, on account of the kind of existence that this sort of essence determines for them, which is temporal, and hence successive, because it is divisible secundum prius et posterius, and which therefore requires continuity for its unity. But then, since the successive character of temporal being would yield two acts of being and not one “gappy” act if it is interrupted, Fido’s death is his absolute demise, with no hope even of a supernatural resurrection. But for us humans alone among sublunary material beings, there is hope. Because even if our death is the end of our existence absolutely speaking, nevertheless, with our death our existence just ceases to be our existence, but still, the same existence is continued in the same, uninterrupted act of existence of our immortal soul. Therefore, we can be resurrected to the same life that ceased to be ours when we ceased to be, but which itself never ceased to be, and will be ours again forever, once our immortal souls are reunited with our bodies in the supernatural act of resurrection. As Aquinas explicitly states: The form of other generable and corruptible things is not subsistent, so that it could remain after the corruption of the composite, as is the case with the rational soul, which retains the act of being that it acquires in the body even after the corruption of the body. That is the act of being that the body will be driven to share in by the resurrection, because there is no one act of being of the body and another of the soul in the body, for otherwise the conjunction of the body and the soul would be accidental. Thus there is no interruption in the substantial act of being of man, so that numerically the same could not recur because of the interruption of the act of being, as is the case with other corrupted things, whose act of being is totally interrupted, so that their form does not remain, and their matter remains under another act of being.14 14 SN4 d. 44 q. 1 a. 1 qc. 2 ad 1. “… aliorum generabilium et corruptibilium forma non est per se subsistens, ut post compositi corruptionem manere valeat, sicut est de anima rationali, quae esse, quod sibi in corpore acquiritur, etiam post corpus retinet, et in participationem illius esse corpus per resurrectionem adducitur, cum non sit aliud esse corporis et aliud animae in corpore; alias esset conjunctio

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So, to summarize: as I see it, what we are facing here is one of those typical balancing acts of Aquinas (such as that between nature and grace, or that between materiality and immateriality of the human soul, etc.) that Thomists love him for (and other people hate him for). The balance in this case concerns positioning the esse of sublunary permanent substances between purely successive things, such as motion, on one hand, and aeviternity or aeviternal being, on the other. The crucial issue then is to see how this kind of esse is similar to motion and how it is not, and how it is similar to aevum, and how it is not. Even without saying that this esse is a process, we can clearly argue that it must have some temporal parts that differ secundum prius et posterius. For if this esse has no parts, then it is indivisible; therefore, at any instant of time it is an indivisible whole had by the entity it actualizes. But then it is the same whole esse that the same entity had in the past and will have in the future as long as it exists. However, what is in the present is actual, and what is in the past is no longer actual, and what is in the future is not yet actual.15 This means that the assumed indivisible esse is present and is no longer present, which is clearly a contradiction. To be sure, Aquinas says in many places that the esse even of temporal things on its own account (secundum se or per se) is indivisible. However, he always adds that the esse of temporal things is divisible, insofar as it is subject to motion (secundum quod subiacet motui), just as he did in the incriminated Quodlibetal passage.16 But just because something belongs to something not on its own account, but on account of some coincidental factor, it doesn’t mean that it does not belong to the thing in question at all, indeed, necessarily, as long as that coincidental factor demands it, just

animae et corporis accidentalis; et sic nulla interruptio facta est in esse substantiali hominis, ut non possit idem numero redire propter interruptionem essendi, sicut accidit in aliis rebus corruptis, quarum esse omnino interrumpitur, forma non remanente, materia autem sub alio esse remanente.” 15 The emphatic additions of the phrase ‘in the’ (past, present, future) indicate that I am talking about an esse that is supposed to be subject to time, in contrast to an esse, such as that of an angel, which can be together with some time, which is merely at that time, but is not in that time. Sutton very clearly makes this distinction in q. 28 of his Quaestiones ordinariae, ed. J. Schneider, Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften: München 1977, esp. pp. 780-782. See also the passage from Aquinas quoted at n. 18. 16 But see again the texts quoted in n. 10 as well.

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as any form or any act is not divisible on its own account, but a material act is divisible on account of the dimensive quantity of matter it must actualize, because it is the only way it can actually exist at all. This is the point of Aquinas’ often made remark that if whiteness were separate, then there could only be one whiteness (si albedo esset separata, non posset esse, nisi una tantum). But this is precisely the case here. Just because the esse of temporal things is not divisible on its own account, it does not mean that it is not divisible on account of something else, namely, its duration and succession measured by time that it must have as the actuality of generable and corruptible things.17 Indeed, as Aquinas himself very clearly states: For that is perfect which has nothing of it outside itself. However, our esse has something of it outside itself: for something of it is missing that is already in the past and [something of it] that is still in the future. However, of the divine esse nothing is in the past or in the future; therefore, He has all His esse as perfect.18

Accordingly, on Aquinas’ view it is only dimensive quantity that is per se divisible, and everything else that is divisible is divisible per accidens, on account of being somehow conditioned for its existence on quantity.19 As a result, I think I have a really plausible reading of Aquinas’ QDL 4, 3, 2. Aquinas there is speaking about what pertains to permanent creaturely entities per se, on account of their essence, having just set aside what could or should belong to them per accidens, on account of their temporal condition. That is why he can say that if we disregard, i.e., abstract from, their temporal condition, and consider strictly what can belong to them on account of their permanence, then we can say that permanent substances as such are numerically repeatable. Thus, per se loquendo, he can say without 17

In De Caelo I, l. 6, n. 5. “Ipsum autem esse alicuius rei secundum se consideratum non est quantum: non enim habet partes, sed totum est simul. Accidit autem ei quod sit quantum, uno quidem modo secundum durationem, inquantum est subiectum motui et per consequens tempori, sicut esse rerum variabilium...” 18 In Sent. I, d. 8, q. 1, a. 1: “Illud enim est perfectum cujus nihil est extra ipsum. Esse autem nostrum habet aliquid sui extra se: deest enim aliquid quod jam de ipso praeteriit, et quod futurum est. Sed in divino esse nihil praeteriit nec futurum est: et ideo totum esse suum habet perfectum...” 19 See, e.g., Super De Trinitate, pars 2, q. 4, a. 2, ad 3: “Ad tertium dicendum quod de ratione individui est quod sit in se indivisum et ab aliis ultima divisione divisum. Nullum autem accidens habet ex se propriam rationem divisionis nisi quantitas. Unde dimensiones ex se ipsis habent quandam rationem individuationis secundum determinatum situm, prout situs est differentia quantitatis.”

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further ado that permanent beings as such, disregarding any further conditions of how they actually exist, are supernaturally repeatable, without contradiction. However, given that the esse of corruptible things is necessarily temporal, and so, insofar as they are temporal, their esse is successive, and the unity of this kind of esse demands continuity, among corruptible substances it is only in the case of human beings (whose esse is uninterrupted on account of the survival of their soul) that this repeatability can actually be realized. In the case of all other sublunary substances, however, if they cease to be, whether through annihilation or natural corruption, then they cannot recur numerically the same, because the esse that they had is now gone, whence the same esse cannot be resumed because of its interruption, and a new esse would constitute a new individual. But then, Aquinas does not make this last point clear in the text simply because that was not the question. Therefore, I believe Nevitt’s interpretation is actually a classic case of the fallacy of accident: all permanent beings (per se, i.e., qua permanent beings) are repeatable, but all (per accidens) temporal permanent beings (not qua temporal, but qua permanent) are permanent; therefore, all temporal permanent beings (per se, i.e., qua temporal permanent beings) are repeatable – of course, without the parenthetical qualifications, which just point out wherein the fallacy lies.20 Thus, on my interpretation (which by the way has recently been adopted and further expanded in an excellent paper by my former student, Adam Wood),21 the essence of generable things is permanent, but what actualizes it is not a permanent, indivisible esse, but one that is divisible into past, present and future parts, commensurate with past present and future times, secundum prius et posterius. In other words, such a being is not successive per se, but only on account of its temporal condition, on account of its actualizing an essence that can only have the kind of esse that is actually subject to time, i.e., not all of it can be realized at once, but only in a sequence. However, the unity of such an extended, since divisible, esse requires continuity; therefore, its interruption prevents its unity, i.e., its numerical identity over time. 20

Consider the following parallel, but perhaps more obvious fallacy: humans per se can walk; humans (per accidens) without both legs (not qua without both legs, but qua humans) are humans; therefore, humans without both legs (per se, i.e., qua humans without both legs) still can walk. Cf. Aquinas (?), De Fallaciis, c. 12. 21 “Mind the Gap? The Principle of Non-Repeatability and Aquinas’s Account of the Resurrection,” Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 3 (2015): 99-127.

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Finally, just to show that I am not the first to have such an apparently “outlandish” idea, and that this is an interpretation that squarely fits into the early Thomistic tradition, here is a passage from a work coming from that tradition, which presents the exact same interpretation: We should take into consideration that time is differently related to motion than to other things. Because motion is essentially continuous and successive, it is measured by time not only with regard to its being and its succession or duration, but also with regard to what it is, since its essence consists in succession. Mobile things, on the other hand, are not measured by time with regard to what they are, because their essence is present in any ‘now’ of time, neither does it have earlier and later, or succession; therefore, to these corresponds the ‘now’ of time. However, they are measured by time with regard to their being and its succession or duration, because their duration is not the whole together (tota simul). Therefore, just as for motion to be in time and to be measured by time is for it to be measured by time with regard to what it is and with regard to its duration, so for other things to be in time is to be measured by time not with regard to what they are but with regard to their duration.”22

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Ignoti Auctoris De tempore, cap. 3: “Est autem considerandum, quod aliter comparatur tempus ad motum, et ad alias res. Cum enim motus sit continuus et successivus essentialiter; ideo non solum mensuratur tempore quantum ad suum esse et suam successionem vel durationem, sed etiam quantum ad id quod est; quia ejus essentia in successione consistit. Mobilia vero quantum ad id quod sunt, sicut homo aut lapis, non mensurantur tempore: quia essentia eorum est in quolibet nunc temporis, nec habet prius nec posterius, sive successionem: unde his respondet nunc temporis, et non tempus. Mensurantur autem tempore quantum ad suum esse et suam successionem vel durationem, quia duratio eorum non est tota simul. Sicut ergo motum esse in tempore est ipsum mensurari tempore quantum ad id quod est, et quantum ad suam durationem; ita alias res esse in tempore, est ipsas mensurari tempore non quantum ad id quod sint, sed quantum ad suam durationem.” According to Enrique Alarcón, who, upon my request, kindly provided me with information on the scholarly literature on this work: “The “De tempore” is an inauthentic, but excellent recompilation of texts quoted ad litteram of In Physic. IV by Aquinas (chapters 1-3) and Albert (chapter 4).”

APPEN NDIX

Volume 13,, 2016 The Proceeedings of thee Society for Medieval Loogic and Meetaphysics (P.S.M.L.M M.) is the pubblication of th he Society forr Medieval Logic L and Metaphysicss, collecting original o materrials presentedd at sessions sponsored s by the Socieety. Publicatioon in the Proceedings consstitutes prepu ublication, leaving the authors’ rightt to publish (aa possibly moodified version n of) their materials elssewhere unafffected. The Society for Medievall Logic and Metaphysics M (S S.M.L.M.) is a network of scholars founded withh the aim of fostering f collaaboration and d research based on thee recognition that t ™ recovvering the proofound metaph hysical insight hts of medievaal thinkers for oour own philosophical thou ught is highly desirable, and, despite the vvast conceptuual changes in the intervvening period d, is still possiible; but ™ this rrecovery is onnly possible if we carefullyy reflect on th he logical frameework in whhich those in nsights were articulated, given g the paraddigmatic diffe ferences betw ween medievaal and moderrn logical theorries. The Societty’s web sitte (http://facu ulty.fordham.eedu/klima/SM MLM/) is designed to serve the puurpose of keeeping each otther up-to-datte on our current projeects, sharing recent r results,, discussing sccholarly questtions, and organizing m meetings. If you are innterested in joining, pleasee contact Gyuula Klima (Ph hilosophy, Fordham Unniversity) by e-mail e at: klim [email protected] © Society foor Medieval Logic L and Mettaphysics, 20116

CONTRIBUTORS

Gyula Klima, Fordham University Turner C. Nevitt, University of San Diego Stephen Ogden, Johns Hopkins University Matthew Robinson, St. Thomas University Peter Weigel, Washington College