I cannot repent after death, or make moral progress; can I make intellectual progress post-mortem? Maybe Ed Feser can answer this question along Thomistic lines, assuming the question has a sense clear enough to answer. Aquinas takes no position on it, at least not in the sections of Summa Contra Gentiles where he discusses the will‘s fixity after death. See SCG, Book Four, sections 92-95.
Category: Aquinas and Thomism
Aquinas and Hylomorphism Again
Over lunch on Sunday, Brian B asked me to explain my disagreement with Ed Feser and others over Aquinas’ hylomorphism. Here is a pithier statement than the ones I’ve already posted.
I will assume with Aquinas that human beings after death continue to exist as disembodied souls until the general resurrection. The question I and others have posed is how the persistence of individual souls after death is conceivable on the Aristotelian hylomorphic principles to which Thomas subscribes. Why should this be a problem? The problem is that the following propositions, each of which is a doctrinal commitment of Thomas, are collectively logically inconsistent: they cannot all be true.
a) Designated matter in material substances both individuates their forms and accounts for the substances’ numerical difference. Thus Peter and Paul are two and not one because of the difference in their designated matter. And their forms are individuated by designated matter as well. This implies that (i) Peter’s substantial form is numerically different from Paul’s, and that (ii) neither form is an individual form without the matter that individuates it.
b) The souls of living things are substantial forms of their bodies: anima forma corporis. Peter and Paul are living things; hence their souls are individual substantial forms of their bodies. To put it more precisely, Peter and Paul are form-matter composites. The psychic or soulic component in each is the individual substantial form, and the material component in each is the parcel of designated matter. Each component needs the other to be what it is: the psychic-formal component needs the material component for its individuation, and the material component needs the psychic component for its animation. And neither component can exist without the other: each exists only together with the other. Thus the whole of which they are proper parts is not a whole compounded of parts that can exist on their own, as substances in their own right, but a whole the parts of which are mere ‘principles’ in scholastic jargon and thus not substances in their own right. This implies that the hylomorphic whole, which is a substance in its own right, is ontologically prior to the morphic and hyletic parts which are not substances in their own right. Bear in mind that a primary substance, by definition, is a basic entity that is metaphysically capable of independent existence.
c) The souls of humans, unlike those of non-human animals, are subsistent: they are metaphysically capable of independent existence. So the souls of Peter and Paul will continue to exist after their bodily death in a disembodied intermediate state prior to their re-embodiment in the general resurrection.
The triad is inconsistent because (a) and (b) taken together entail the negation of (c). Indeed any two of the propositions, taken together, entails the negation of the remaining one.
In a nutshell: it cannot be the case that souls depend on material bodies for their existence and individuation but continue to exist as individual souls after bodily death in a bodiless state.
What Thomists want to say is that SOMEHOW a substantial form that achieves individuation ‘here below’ pre-mortem by marriage with a hunk of matter, thereby animating said hunk of matter, continues to exist as a disembodied individual soul ‘up yonder’ post-mortem AFTER the individuating factor has been removed. That makes no sense. What would make sense is that the individual soul cease to exist after the death of the body. Bear in mind that the soul on an Aristotelian hylomorphic mereological analysis is a mere ‘principle’ of the hylomorphic composite entity and not itself a substance.
The conclusion to be drawn from this is that despite the Angelic Doctor’s noble attempt to stay as close as possible to The Philosopher (philosophus), he is in the end a substance dualist of sorts, though not quite along Platonic, Augustinian, or Cartesian lines.
There was a time when I thought that, with respect to the soul, Thomas was an Aristotelian ‘on earth,’ but a Platonist ‘in heaven.’ (I may have picked up that line from Anthony Kenny.) But then the problem of the SOMEHOW, the problem of how a human soul can go from a mere non-subsistent ‘principle’ to a subsistent upon the removal of the soul’s individuating factor, becomes insoluble. I now think that it would be better to say that, with respect to the soul, the doctor angelicus was a Platonist in both the sublunary and superlunary spheres, both ‘on earth’ and ‘in heaven,’ and this in consequence of his Christian theological commitments which exercise ‘veto power’ over his philosophical assertions.
Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?
Burnout or viso mystica? A Substack article.
Our frenetic and hyperkinetic way of life makes it difficult to take religion seriously and what is essential to it, namely, the belief in what William James calls an Unseen Order. Our communications technology in particular is binding us ever tighter within the human horizon so that the sense of Transcendence is becoming weaker and weaker. It therefore comes as no surprise that someone would point to ‘burnout’ as the explanation of Aquinas’ failure to finish his sum of theology when the traditional explanation was that he was vouchsafed mystical insight into the Unseen Order:
Klima on Intellective Soul and Living Body in Aquinas and the Immortality of the Human Soul
The composition from intellective soul and living body, and the natural immortality of the human soul (a section of a long paper)
. . . given the immateriality of the intellect, which I will not attempt to prove now, but let us just assume for the sake of the argument, the activity of the intellect cannot have as its subject the composite of body and soul, or as Aquinas would put it, this activity does not communicate with matter. What this means is that its acts are not acts of any parts of the body, in the way in which, say, my acts of sight are obviously the acts of my visual apparatus enformed [informed] by my sensitive soul.
BV: The first sentence above strikes me as obviously true. For example, when I contemplate the theorem of Pythagoras, what in me thinks that thought? No part of my living body, not even my brain or any part of my brain. Nor is it the soul-body composite that thinks the thought. In the schema ego-cogito-cogitatum, where the cogitatum is the theorem in question, the ego cannot be any material thing, and thus no proper or improper part of my material body. As for the act of thinking, the cogitatio, it cannot be any state of, or process in, any part of my material body. In particular, it cannot be a brain state or process. So far, I agree with Klima and Thomas. But suppose I am having a coherent, ongoing, visual experience as of a tree. Is it obvious that this act of visual experiencing requires eyes, optic nerves, visual cortex, etc. , which is what I take Klima to be referring to with “visual apparatus”? No, it is not obvious, but to explain why would take us too far afield.
The point of agreement so far is that intellective acts do not “communicate with matter.” But if sensory acts do so communicate, then are there two souls involved in my cognitive life, an intellective soul and a sensitive soul? Or is there only one soul? Only one according to Klima.
But the same sensitive soul also has intellective acts, which Aquinas argues cannot be the acts of any bodily organ, or to put it simply, I am not thinking with my brain (or any other organ for that matter): my brain merely provides, so to speak, “food for my thought”, in the form of phantasms, the singular representations of sensible singulars, which then my intellect further processes in its own acts of abstraction, concept formation, judgment formation and reasoning, all of which are acts of the intellect alone, which therefore cannot have the body and soul composite as their subject, but the soul alone.
BV: Right, we don’t think with our brains. But we live in a world of concrete material particulars or singulars many of which are also sensible, i.e., able to be sensed. My knowledge that the tree is green is sensory not intellective. Phantasms are singular representations of singular sensibles. But it is quite unclear to me how the brain can “provide” or “serve up” these representations for the intellect to “feast on” and intellectively process. Are the phantasms located in the brain where the intellect gets hold of them for “processing”? A representation is a representation of something (genitivus obiectivus) and it is is difficult to understand how any part of a hunk of meat can represent anything. What gives bits of brain matter representational power? But I won’t pursue this question further here. I pursue it elsewhere. We now come to the gravamen of my complaint against the hylomorphic attempt to explain personal survival of bodily death.
We are told that the soul-body composite cannot be the subject of sensory knowledge any more than it can be the subject of intellective knowledge. This, however, has the consequence that the intellective soul is not only a form, enforming [informing] the body, but is also a subject of its own power, the intellect, and its acts. But then, it exists not only as that by which the living body is, but also as that which is the underlying subject of its own acts which it does not communicate with the body. Therefore, upon the death of a human person, when the soul gets separated from the body, the soul ceases to be the form of the body, but that does not mean that it also has to cease to be. Since its own operations are not acts of the body, they can continue without its union with the body. But to operate, it must exist; so, it can naturally go on existing, as the underlying subject of its own intellectual operations. So, when a person dies, the person ceases to exist, but the person’s soul merely ceases to be a form of their body, which can persist in its being, naturally continuing the life that used to be the life of the person, as a separate soul, until the same person will be miraculously restituted in the resurrection, resuming the same life, now as a whole person again.
I agree with the first three sentences up to ‘therefore’ the bolding of which I have added. Klima appreciates that the human soul for Aquinas has a dual function. It not only animates the body of which it is the soul, thereby making it a living body, but it is also that which thinks when a human being engages in intellective acts. The human soul is not only that by which the living body is alive; it is also “the underlying subject of its own [intellective] acts,” acts which do not “communicate with matter” and are therefore not the acts of the soul-body composite, the unitary psychophysical complex. So it is not Socrates qua soul-body composite who ponders whether virtue is teachable or whether there is more to knowledge than true belief; it is the intellect alone in Socrates that is the subject of these acts. That sounds right to me.
But we are then told, in the sentences after therefore, that this individual (not universal) intellective soul will survive the death of its body. But this is very hard to make sense of for several reasons. Indeed, it smacks of a blatant non sequitur. I will present only one reason in this entry. “Brevity is the soul of blog,” as some wit once observed.
It is in virtue of forms that things are intelligible. If what thinks in a human being post-mortem is a form, however, then that form is not only intelligible but also intelligent. It is not only intelligible, but intelligible to itself, which is to say that it is at once both intelligible and intelligent. I find it hard to understand how a pure immaterial form, a form that does not inform anything, a form that is not a form of anything, can be both intelligible and intelligent. I find it hard to understand how the subject and the object of acts of intellection could be one and the same. I don’t intend this as a merely autobiographical comment. I am suggesting that anyone ought to find it hard to understand, indeed impossible to understand, and therefore intrinsically unintelligible. But in philosophy we are not allowed to make bare or gratuitous assertions. Quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur. So I need to argue this out. I will begin by giving two examples of intrinsically unintelligible notions.
a) The first example of intrinsic unintelligibility is the notion of a thing that causes its own existence. Since nothing can exercise causality unless it exists, nothing can cause its own existence. Not even God in his omnipotence could cause his own existence. For there cannot be an exercise of (efficient) causality unless there exists something or someone that/who exercises it. Necessarily, no action without an agent. But more than that: no action without an agent the being of which is not exhausted in its acting on a given occasion. What that means is that the agent cannot be identical to his action. If Guido makes a meatball, there has to be more to Guido than that particular act of making that particular meatball, which is to say: no agent is identical to any of its actions, or the sum of them. Suppose, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, that agent S performs action A. Even in a case like this the agent is not identical to any of his actions or the sum of them.
b) A second example of intrinsic unintelligibility is the notion of an open sentence that has a truth value. ‘___ is wise’ is an example of an open sentence. It can also be depicted using the free variable ‘x’ thusly: ‘x is wise.’ This open sentence, which picks out what Russell calls a propositional function, is neither true nor false: it lacks a truth value. A (closed) sentence results if we either substitute a name for the variable ‘x’ or bind the variable with a quantifier. Both ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘For all x, x is wise’ are closed sentences which attract a truth value. That is a philosopher’s way of saying that they can be evaluated as either true or false. The first is true, the second false. The claim that ‘x is wise’ has a truth value, however, is intrinsically unintelligible: it makes no sense and cannot be understood, by me or anyone.
A pure immaterial form that is both intelligible and intelligent is like an open sentence that has a truth value. Why? Well, consider the sentences ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is human.’ The first predicates an accidental form of a substance, the second a substantial form of a substance. Those sentences are both meaningful and true. What makes them meaningful is that they express complete thoughts or propositions: each has a subject-term, a copula, and a predicate-term. What makes them true is the inherence of the forms picked out by the predicates in what the subject-terms name, something that is not a form. Socrates is not a form. He is a composite entity, a hylomorphic compound. Just as it is unintelligible to suppose that there could be an action that was not the action of an agent distinct from the action, it is unintelligible to suppose that there could be a form that was not the form of something (genitivus subiectivus) that was not itself a form.
More tomorrow.
Aquinas on Angels and Human Souls: Examination of a Passage in De Ente et Essentia
I found a passage in De Ente et Essentia that is relevant to my claim that Thomas is not a hylomorphist with respect to the human soul but a substance-dualist. Here is the passage in the Armand Maurer translation. The numbers in brackets are my interpolation. My commentary follows.
[1] This is why among these substances [created intellectual substances] we do not find a multitude of individuals in the same species . . . except in the case of the human soul because of the body to which it is united. [2] And even though the individuation of the soul depends on the body as for the occasion of its beginning, because it acquires its individuated being only in the body of which it is the actuality, it is not necessary that the individuation cease when the body is removed. [3] Because the soul has a separate being, once the soul has acquired its individuated being by having been made the form of a particular body, that being always remains individuated. [4] That is why Avicenna says that the individuation and multiplication of souls depends on the body as regards its beginning but not as regards its end. (On Being and Essence, 2nd rev. ed, 1968, The Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, pp. 62-63.)
Commentary
Ad [1]. Created intellectual substances are either angels or human souls. Angels, of which there are many, are wholly immaterial. They are nonetheless composite beings in that they do not exist in virtue of their essence (quiddity) but receive their existence from God. Since there is no matter-form (hylomorphic) composition in them, what makes them many cannot be matter. And so each is a species unto itself. Their numerical difference is a difference in species.
Human beings, by contrast, all belong to the same species where the genus is animal, the species is human, and the specific difference is rationality. “Man is a rational animal.” The numerical difference of human beings among themselves is therefore not a difference grounded in a difference of species but a difference grounded in a difference in designated matter (materia signata).
Ad [2]. We are then told that a human soul first begins to exist when it acquires a body. Human souls do not pre-exist their embodiment. This is because the human soul is individuated — made to be an individual soul — by its acquisition of a body. Before Socrates acquired a body, there was no individual Socrates. Socrates cannot exist in reality except as an individual human being and he cannot exist as an individual human being without a material body. It is embodiment that brings about his individuation. So far, so good.
Now comes the crucial inference: because the human soul acquires its individuated being (existence) in the material body of which the soul is the actuality, it is not necessary that the individuation cease when the body is removed. Why not?
Ad [3]. The reason is because the soul’s individuation brings it about that the soul is a separate being. Unfortunately, Aquinas appears to be equivocating on ‘separate.’ No doubt the individuation of the soul of Socrates bring it about that his soul is separate from Plato’s soul in the sense of numerically different from Plato’s soul. But that is not to say that the soul of either is separate in the sense of existing without a body either before or after death.
I now explain the two senses of ‘separate.’
The cat is on the mat. The cat is separate from the mat, and the mat from the cat. That is equivalent to saying that cat and mat are numerically different. But neither is separate from designated matter. So ‘separate’ has these two different senses. Separation in the first sense is a symmetrical dyadic relation. It is existence-entailing on both ends: if x is separate from y, then x, y both exist. Separation in the second sense is not a relation at all. A separate substance such as an angel is not separated from anything. There is no parcel of designated matter that the angel Gabriel has to be separate from to be a separate substance.
So it looks as if Thomas is equivocating on ‘separate.’ One hesitates to tax such a great thinker with the fallacy of equivocation. But even if Thomas is not equivocating on ‘separate,’ his argument remains puzzling. Angels are separate substances: although not self-subsistent like God, they subsist without matter. They are individual in themselves, as forms. They need no individuation ab extra. They are already, logically speaking, individuals. Socrates does need individuation ab extra, and it comes from matter. Before he began to exist, he was nothing in reality: he was not a subsistent individual form that acquired a body. He became an individual only when a certain soul-body/ form-matter composite came to be. How then can the soul or form of that composite continue to exist when the composite is no more? This is impossible on Aristotelian hylomorphism, according to which the ‘principles’ of a hylomorphic compound substance are not themselves substances but non-independent ontological ‘parts’ or constituents of the substance of which they are the constituents.
Is Aquinas telling us that when Socrates died he became an angel? I reckon not. (That would be quite the metabasis eis allo genos!) Not even the doctor angelicus became an angel at death. He is however telling us that when the philosopher died he became a separate intellectual substance, and thus like an angel in that respect. Bear in mind that for Thomas, an incomplete substance is a substance. An incomplete substance is logically capable of independent existence: it is not an accident of a substance nor a ‘principle’ of a substance.
So, while Socrates post-mortem is no angel, sensu stricto, he is a separate intellectual substance, a substance that exists in reality on its own without matter. How exactly, given that for humans, as opposed to angels, (designated) matter is the principium individuationis?
The Aquinate line seems to be that the individuation that human souls acquire from matter before death remains with those souls after death. But what is the argument for this surprising thesis? The only argument I discern in the above text is this:
a) Designated matter individuates human souls;
b) Such individuation by designated matter makes of the soul a separate substance;
c) A separate substance does not depend on matter for its subsistence; ergo,
d) A human soul once individuated is forever after a separate substance.
But what reason do we have to accept (b)? No reason at all on a strictly hylomorphic approach. In fact, such an approach rules out (b). The form or soul of a living substance such as Socrates is merely a ‘principle’ of this compound sublunary substance — as I have stated many times already. These principles are not themselves substances. So they cannot exist on their own. Hence they cannot exist without matter. On strict hylomorphism, the soul of Socrates cannot continue to exist upon the dissolution of his body.
Everything falls into place, however, once you see that Aquinas is not a hylomorphic monist, but a substance-dualist. He simply presupposes the truth of (b). This presupposition is logical ‘fallout’ from Christianity as he understands it.
More on Hylomorphic Dualism and the Distinctness of Souls Post Mortem
Edward Feser writes,
Hey Bill, many thanks for your Substack post on Immortal Souls. I’ve written up a reply As you’ll see, at the end I give a shout out to your book Life’s Path: Some Trail Notes which I have enjoyed and profited from. You are the rare contemporary philosopher who has both technical chops and the virtue of wisdom in the broad sense that includes understanding of concrete human life. It’s amazing and depressing how many academics are utterly devoid of the latter.
Thanks for the kind words, Ed. Now on to your criticisms.
You say that on the A-T theory, “while each individual physical substance has its own substantial form, with physical substances of the same species their substantial forms are of the same kind.” You suggest that this is something I haven’t understood, but I don’t disagree with you. Your point is that each physical substance has its own substantial form. That’s right; we all understand that Aristotelian forms are not Platonic Forms. Unlike Platonic Forms, which enjoy a transcendent existence in a topos ouranios whether or not they are instantiated here below, Aristotelian forms can exist only in concrete particulars. Platonic Forms are transcendent, Aristotelian forms immanent. As I see it, Platonic Forms are transcendent in two senses: (i) they exist whether or not any concrete particulars participate in them; (ii) they do not enter into concrete particulars as constituents of them. Aristotelian (substantial) forms, by contrast, are not transcendent but immanent, and in a two fold-sense: (iii) they cannot exist on their own but only in concrete particulars; (iv) they exist in concrete particulars as their constituents. Thus Platonic participation (methexis, μέθεξις) is very different from the relation that obtains between a complete Aristotelian primary substance and its ontological constituents or ‘principles’ which are not themselves substances. Plato and Aristotle thus offer two very different theoretical explications of the pre-analytic or pre-theoretical notion of instantiation.
As you say, and I agree, an Aristotelian substantial form “is a concrete principle intrinsic to a substance that grounds its characteristic properties and powers.” You also say, and I agree, that on the A-T theory, “the soul is a substantial form of the kind that gives a physical substance the distinctive properties and powers of a living thing.” It follows from these two points that each living physical substance has its own soul or psyche, where the soul of a living thing is its life-principle. This holds for both human animals such as Socrates and Plato and for non-human animals. We also agree that humans, unlike other living things, have both corporeal and noncorporeal properties and powers. So far, I believe we are ‘on the same page’ at least with respect to what the A-T theory says. I take it we agree on the content of the theory; our dispute concerns its coherence.
But let’s dig a little deeper. It seems to me that the A-T conception further implies that matter (materia signata) plays a dual role: it both individuates and differentiates. These are different ‘ontological jobs’ even though on the A-T scheme signate matter does both of them. Two questions.
(Q1) Why do Socrates and Plato each have their own individual substantial forms and thus — given that souls are substantial forms — their own individual souls? Answer: because forms, which cannot exist Platonically, but only in concrete particulars, are individuated or particularized by the parcels of matter which they inform or in which they inhere.
(Q2) Why do Socrates and Plato differ numerically? Why are they two and not one? Because each is a numerically different hunk of matter. So matter (designated matter) is the ground both of the individuation of forms — that which makes them individuals and not universals — and that which grounds the numerical difference of the two complete physical substances.
So much for the pre-mortem situation of Socrates and Plato. With respect to the pre-mortem situation, Aristotle and Thomas pretty much agree about human beings (rational animals). Post-mortem, however, important differences surface due to Thomas’s Christian commitments which, needless to say, are not shared by Aristotle. And so we need to ask how well these Christian commitments comport with the Aristotelian scheme.
For Thomas, human souls after death are (1) subsistent, (2) separable, (3) multiple, (4) incomplete, (5) personal, and (6) such that the soul no longer functions as a life-principle but only as a ‘seat’ of noncorporeal intellectual operations. I’ll explain these points seriatim.
Ad (1). The souls of rational animals, unlike the souls of nonrational animals, continue to exist after death.
Ad (2). The souls of rational animals can and do exist after death in a disembodied state, i.e., apart from matter. So they don’t merely subsist; they subsist in an immaterial way.
Ad (3). Just as there are many human beings ‘on earth,’ i.e., in the physical realm, there are many disembodied human souls after death. Whatever the number is, it is neither one nor zero. Moreover, for each human being that existed ‘on earth,’ there is exactly one soul after death (whether in heaven, hell, purgatory, or limbo) and this soul after death is numerically identical to the soul of the human before death. Thus the soul of Socrates after death is numerically the same as the soul he had before death.
Ad (4). Human souls after death, but before resurrection, are substances all right, but incomplete substances in that they lack a body when it is their nature to exist in an embodied state.
Ad (5). Human souls after death are persons in that they are conscious and self-conscious, albeit in non-sensory ways. In Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, chs. 92-95, Aquinas elaborates on the will’s fixity after death: “souls immediately after their separation from the body become unchangeable in will with the result that the will of [a] man cannot further be changed, neither from good to evil, nor from evil to good.” (Ch. 92, top.) Suppose you go straight to heaven after death. Your will will be eternally fixed upon the good. This fixity of will is a modality of consciousness and also of self-consciousness inasmuch as the soul will be aware of its fixity of will. That is, the soul is aware that it wills, and what it wills. What’s more, the souls in heaven presumably can ‘hear’ petitionary prayers from souls ‘on earth’ and ask God to grant those petitions. This non-sensory ‘hearing’ is a modality of consciousness. The souls in heaven are aware of the petitions and formulate the intention to intercede with God for the benefit of the earthly petitioners.
Ad (6). Dead humans are no longer alive. So the soul of a human after death and before resurrection does not function as a life-principle. It can so function only if it is joined to an animal body that it enlivens or animates. But the soul of a human after death does function as the subject of conscious states such as the volitional state of willing only the good. The soul of a human before death, however, functions in both ways, as an animating principle, and as that in a human which is aware when it is aware of this or that. The difference is between the soul as life-principle and the soul as subject or ego or I.
I hope I have made clear that I really do understand what the A-T theory maintains. My disagreements with Ed Feser are not about the content of the theory, but about its coherence and thus its tenability.
The point I was making in the Substack piece could be put like this. After the death of a mortal man such as Socrates, and the dissolution of his material body, the soul he had can no longer be his soul. The reason for this is that the individuating or particularizing factor, signate matter, which made the soul he had his soul, is no longer present after death. To appreciate this point you must not forget that the form of a (primary) substance is not itself a (primary) substance, but a ‘principle’ — Ed uses this very word — or constituent of a substance which together with the material constituent constitutes a (primary) substance. Thus the constituents or ‘principles’ of a substance are not themselves substances and therefore not themselves metaphysically capable of independent existence. Bear in mind that for Aristotle, primary substances are basic entities in the sense that they do not depend on anything else for their existence in the way a smile depends on face. But what I have just argued — that the soul of Socrates after death cannot be his own soul — contradicts (3) which is a non-negotiable doctrinal commitment of Thomism. The lesson to be learned from this is that Aristotelian hylomorphism is not consistent with the characteristic commitments of Thomism. Note that I am not denying the doctrinal commitments listed above. My point is that they cannot be rendered intelligible by the use of Aristotelian conceptuality, in particular, hylomorphism.
My point can also be made from the side of differentiation. Thomas is committed to saying that Socrates and Plato are as soulically or psychically distinct in the afterlife as they are in this life. But in the afterlife before resurrection they lack material bodies. Lacking bodies, they lack that which could ground their numerical difference. So if the two men after death are two numerically different souls, then souls are not mere Aristotelian forms. They are substances in their own right. This is why Richard Swinburne, no slouch of a philosopher, speaks plausibly and indeed correctly of “Thomist substance dualism.” (Are We Bodies or Souls? Oxford UP, 2019, p. 82)
Aristotle is not a substance dualist, but Thomas is. This is not to say that Thomas is a substance dualist in the very same sense that Descartes is. But he is a substance dualist nonetheless.
I expect Ed to balk at this and reiterate the bit about ‘incomplete’ substances formulated above in point (4). Let’s think this through as sympathetically as possible. If a life-principle is actually functioning as such, then there must be a physical body it enlivens or animates. It therefore makes perfect sense for Thomas to say to say that it is the nature of a life-principle to be joined to a body. For a life-principle to be a life-principle of a material thing, there must be a material thing whose life-principle it is. So if human souls are life-principles, then it is the nature of the human soul to have a body. But post-mortem souls before resurrection are not functioning as life-principles. And yet Thomas insists that after death and before resurrection human souls continue to exist and are numerically the same as the souls that existed before death. One survives one’s bodily death as a person, as a self, as a subject of conscious states. So is it not obvious that human souls before death and after death (but before the re-embodiment consequent upon resurrection) are not mere substantial forms but substances in their own right? I say it is obvious and it puzzles me that what is obvious to me is not obvious to Ed. Try this syllogistic chain on for size.
- No forms for Aristotle are substances.
- All souls for Aristotle are forms. Therefore:
- No souls for Aristotle are substances. (1, 2)
- All and only substances for Aristotle are capable of independent existence. Therefore:
- No souls for Aristotle are capable of independent existence. (3, 4)
- Some souls for Aquinas are capable of independent existence. Therefore:
- Some souls for Aquinas are not souls in Aristotle’s sense of ‘soul.’ (5,6)
I conclude that Aquinas’s conception of the soul is not hylomorphic sensu stricto but substance-dualist. Hylomorphism does not render the angelic doctor’s doctrinal commitments intelligible. And that was my point.
I have heard it said that Thomas is an Aristotelian on earth, but a Platonist in heaven. That is an approximation to the truth, but it just now occurred to me that it is not quite right, and may be more clever than truthful. For Aquinas is committed to the diachronic numerical identity of the person or self both in this life and on into the after life. So even in this life there has to be more to the soul than a life-principle. I conclude that even in this life Thomas is not wholly Aristotelian. If Thomas is a substance-dualist in heaven, he must also be one on earth as well .A follow-up post will make this more clear.
Addendum (10/29). This morning I found a section on Aquinas in John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, Eerdmans 1989, p. 11-13. Cooper makes points that support what I argue above. He states that Thomas “combined important features of the Aristotelian body-soul relation with a basically Augustinian dualistic framework.” Although “Thomas uses Aristotle to emphasize the unity of human nature,” he “remains with Augustine in affirming that the soul is a distinct substance which can survive biological death.” Cooper appreciates that a Christian cannot take an Aristotelian approach to the soul. “For Aristotle’s soul is only the form of the body and not a substance as such. Therefore it cannot survive death as an individual entity.” (13) Thomas abandons Aristotle by holding that “the soul is both the form of the body and an intellectual substance in its own right.”
Swinburne, Cooper, and I are saying the same thing.
A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind
Top o’ the Stack.
Edward Feser’s Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available. I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have.
The problem I discuss in this installment is whether an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylomorphic analysis of human beings can make sense of our post-mortem existence as numerically distinct persons.
Mind-Body Dualism in Aquinas and Descartes: How Do They Differ?
Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, views the soul as the form of the body. Anima forma corporis. Roughly, soul is to body as form is to matter. So to understand the soul-body relation, we must first understand the form-matter relation. Henry Veatch points out that "Matter and form are not beings so much as they are principles of being." (Henry B. Veatch, "To Gustav Bergmann: A Humble Petition and Advice" in M. S. Gram and E. D. Klemke, eds. The Ontological Turn: Studies in the Philosophy of Gustav Bergmann , University of Iowa Press, 1974, pp. 65-85, p. 80) 'Principles' in this scholastic usage are not propositions. They are ontological factors (as I would put it) invoked in the analysis of primary substances, but they are not themselves primary substances. They cannot exist on their own. Let me explain.
An ordinary 'sublunary' particular such as a man, a horse, a tree, a statue, a 'primary substance' in Aristotelian nomenclature, is a this-such. The thisness in a this-such is the determinable element while the suchness is the determination or conjunction of determinations that determines (delimits, characterizes, and informs) the determinable element. Veatch's point is that the determinable element cannot be an ontological atom, an entity more basic than the composite into which it enters; it is not an ontological building block out of which, together with other such 'blocks,' the this-such is constructed. The determinable element cannot be a basic existent; it must be a principle of a basic existent, where the basic existent is the this-such. And the same holds for the determining element, the form.
This implies that what is ontologically primary is the individual substance, the this-such, which entails that matter and form in an individual substance cannot exist apart from each other. They are in some sense 'abstractions' from the individual substance. They are nonetheless real ontological factors, as opposed to theoretical posits having a merely mental being; they cannot, however, exist on their own. They are not themselves substances. That is what I mean by my use of 'abstractions.'
But what exactly is a (primary) substance?
A substance is a thing to which it belongs to be not in a subject. The name 'thing' (res) takes its origin from the quiddity [quidditas = whatness], just as the name 'being' (ens) comes from 'to be' (esse). [Ens is the present participle of the infinitive esse.] In this way, the definition of substance is understood as that which has a quiddity to which it belongs not to be in another . (Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk 1, Ch 25)
The form and the matter of a material substance, then, are are not themselves substances because it does belong to them to be in another, namely, in the substance of which they are the form and the matter. Hylomorphic dualism is not a dualism of substances. Here we appear to have an important difference between Aquinate and Cartesian dualism. But the difference may be less than at first appears.
Now the form in a material this-such is not merely tied to matter in general, in the way that Bergmannian first-order universals are tied to Bergmannian bare particulars in general; the form is tied to the matter of the very this-such in question. This is because Aristotelian forms are not universals. And the same goes for the matter: the designated matter (materia signata) of Socrates is tied to the very form that is found in Socrates: that parcel of matter cannot exist apart from Socrates' substantial form. The two ontological factors (as I call them) are necessarily co-implicative. Neither can exist without the other. The two together constitute the individual substance, which is being in its most basic sense. For Aristotle, "being is said in many ways," to on legetai pollachos, and the most basic sense is being as substance (ousia). Aristotelian ontology is ousiology. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1028b4)
I said that hylomorphic dualism is not a dualism of substances, and thus that it appears that soul-body dualism in Aquinas is very different from soul-body dualism in Descartes. But the picture is complicated by the Thomist doctrine that the souls of rational animals, unlike the souls of non-rational animals, are subsistent. What this means is that human souls are capable of existing in a disembodied state. This capacity is exercised at death when we humans shed our bodies. We continue to exist as disembodied souls and thus as matter-less forms. But now a tension, if not a contradiction, comes into view. It is not clear how all of the following propositions can be true:
a) The form of a material substance is not itself a substance, but a principle that cannot exist on its own, but only in tandem with a material factor together with which it constitutes a substance. A form-matter composite is not constructed from pre-existing 'building blocks.'
b) The souls of humans are not substances along Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian lines, but forms of the bodies whose souls they are.
c) The souls of humans are subsistent forms that can exist on their own after the deaths of the bodies whose forms they are.
Can someone explain how all three propositions could be true? On the face of it, the first two, taken together, entail the negation of the third. What we have here is an inconsistent triad. Although collectively inconsistent, the members of the triad are individually plausible. Why plausible?
(a) is plausible given that (i) there is such a thing as ontological analysis and (ii) its style is hylomorphic. The authority of philosophus, The Philosopher, as Aquinas calls him, stands behind (a). The authority of Aristotle may also be invoked in support of (b) if the soul (anima, psyche) of a living thing is its life-principle. (The soul animates the material body of an animal, making it alive.) As for (c), it is a Christian commitment of the doctor angelicus that he cannot abandon.
The three propositions are collectively inconsistent but individually plausible. We've got ourselves a problem. Something has to give.
It has been said that Aquinas is a Platonist in heaven, but an Aristotelian on earth. These super- and sub-lunary tendencies comport none too well. One solution is to drop the Aristotelianism with its combined commitment to (i) hylomorphic ontological analysis and (ii) soul-as-life-principle and go the Platonic-Augustinian-Cartesian substance-dualist route. Richard Swinburne exemplifies this approach in Are We Bodies or Souls? (Oxford UP, 2019) A second solution would be to drop the Christian commitment to the immortality of the soul and embrace a form of materialism about the human person. A third solution would be to somehow uphold Christianity while accepting materialism about the human person. (See my Could a Classical Theist be a Physicalist?)
What other solutions are there?
Edith Stein: Faith, Reason, and Method
August 9th is the feast day of St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross in the Catholic liturgy. She is better known to philosophers as Edith Stein (1891-1942), brilliant Jewish student of and assistant to Edmund Husserl, philosopher in her own right, Roman Catholic convert, Carmelite nun, victim of the Holocaust at Auschwitz, and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. One best honors a philosopher by re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically but critically. Herewith, a bit of critical re-enactment.
In the 1920s Stein composed an imaginary dialogue between her two philosophical masters, Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas. Part of what she has them discussing is the nature of faith.
Read the rest at Substack.
The piece concludes:
So there you have it. There are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, one based on the autonomy of reason, and with it the exclusively internal validation of all knowledge claims, the other willing to sacrifice the autonomy of reason for the sake of truths which cannot be certified by reason or subjectively validated but which are provided by faith in revelation, a revelation that must simply be accepted in humility and obedience. It looks as if one must simply decide which of these two conceptions to adopt, and accept that the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason.
Addenda (8/9/2025)
- I say above that there are two opposing conceptions of philosophy, but is that right? Perhaps not. It might be closer to the truth to say that philosophy by its very nature rests on the autonomy of reason, and that the "other conception" is not philosophy sensu stricto but a worldview. If so, any view according to which "faith is its own guarantee" is not philosophy or a philosophy, but beyond philosophy.
- Thomas wears at least four 'hats.' He is a philosopher, a Christian, a Christian theologian, and a mystic. You could be any one of these without being any one of the others. He plays the philosopher in the praeambula fidei of the Summa Theologica wherein he attempts to demonstrate the existence of God in his quinque viae or Five Ways. These proofs make no appeal to divine revelation via Scripture nor do they rest on the personal deliverances of mystical experience. They proceed by discursive reason alone on the basis of sense experience.
- So you could say to me that Thomas's theistic worldview is not beyond philosophy inasmuch as the philosophy of the praeambula is an integral part of his defense of the Christian worldview. My response will be that the Five Ways do not conclusively prove the existence of God, let alone provide any support for such specifically Christian doctrines as Trinity and Incarnation (which of course they were not intended to do). So in the end, a will-driven leap of faith is required to arrive at Thomas's theistic worldview. So at best, the Five Ways are arguments (not proofs) that render rationally acceptable Christian belief. Rationally acceptable, but not rationally mandatory. In the end you must decide what to believe and how you will live. My concluding sentence, "the decision cannot be justified by (natural) reason" is not quite right. I should have written: the decision to accept the Christian worldview, while neither it, nor the generic theism at its base, can be proven from natural reason operating upon the deliverances of the sense, can nonetheless be rendered rationally acceptable.
- "Go ahead, believe!" Thus spoke Wittgenstein. "What harm can it do?" I add: you won't be flouting any canons of rationality.
Thomas Aquinas: Unity is Our Strength!
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis added:
. . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects. And so it goes until one arrives at the lowest of things. And because in the highest summit of things, God, one finds the most perfect unity — and because everything, the more it is one, is the more powerful and the more worthy – – it follows that the farther one gets from the first principle, the greater is the diversity and variation one one finds in things. The process of emanation from God, must, then be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms.
Key ideas in and suggested by the above passage:
1) Unity admits of degrees. Some unities are 'tighter' than others.
2) The supreme unity is the divine unity. It is the 'tightest' of all, so tight in fact, that God is devoid of all complexity or internal diversity and is therefore ontologically simple, as I explain in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on divine simplicity. God is pure unity, Unity itself in its highest instance.
3) At the other extreme is pure diversity, a mere collection of items that cannot even be called a collection in that that there is nothing real that collects them, nothing real that they share and that makes them that collection as opposed to some other actual or possible collection. Such a collection is so 'loose' that it does not deserve to be called a collection. We could aptly refer to it as a mere manifold, a mere many-ness. Think of the membership or extension of a mereological sum of utterly disparate items. That would be a pure diversity or mere many-ness.
4) Perfection comes in degrees, and so the divine unity is maximally perfect. A mere many-ness is maximally imperfect.
5) The notion of perfection in Aquinas and thinkers of his stripe blends the ontic with the axiological/normative. To be is to be good. A being is good in the measure that it is, and in the measure that it is, it is good. That, I take it, is the meaning of ens et bonum convertuntur. The terms 'a being' and 'a good thing' are convertible terms, which is to say, in Carnapian material mode: necessarily, for any x, x is or exists if and only if x is good, valuable, pursuit-worthy. (That I reference Carnap in this context should have the old positivist rolling in his grave.)
'In the measure that' conveys the idea that there are degrees of being, an idea anathema to most contemporary analytic philosophers. Divine unity is maximally perfect unity, and thus the unsurpassably best unity and the unsurpassably most real unity. God is really real, ontos on; at the other extreme, non-being, me on, or an approach thereto as in the limit concept (Grenzbegriff), material prima.
6) God's unity is the unity of the transcendent One which does not and cannot form with the Many a super-manifold in which God is just one member among the others. The One and the Many do not, taken together, form a many of which the One is just one more item among the others. Why not? Well, the One is other than or different from the Many both in its nature and in its way of existing. God, for Aquinas, is One to the Many of creatures, but is neither a creature, nor a member of a super-manifold of beings each of which is or exists in the same sense and the same way.
7) Aquinas says above that the more unified a thing, the more powerful it is. So God, the maximally unified being — so unified that this being (ens) is (identically) Being or To Be (esse) itself — is the maximally powerful being.
And so, in conclusion, I say to Canadian pretty boy Justin Trudeau, that diversity is precisely not "our strength," and that you and like-minded State-side fools are to be condemned for your willful self-enstupidation.
My point stands whether or not one accepts Thomism.
Incarnation: A Mystical Approach
A Substack meditation for Christmas Day drawing upon Thomas Aquinas, Juan de la Cruz, and Josef Pieper.
Soul a Mere Life-Principle? How then Explain Conscience?
Aristotle, and following him Aquinas, thinks of the soul as the life-principle of a living body, that which animates the body's matter. A natural conception, but a dubious one, as it seems to me, one not up to the task of accounting for conscience. We humans are not just alive, we are also conscious both in the mode of sentience and in the object-directed mode as when we are conscious of this or that. The philosophers' term of art for this object-directed type of consciousness is intentionality. A special case of object-directed consciousness is knowledge of things and states of affairs. Beyond this factual knowledge there is presumably also moral knowledge, knowledge of right and wrong. Whether or not conscience is indeed a source of knowledge, it is a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation. An exercise of this faculty results in an occurrent state of consciousness which is a state of conscience.
So life, consciousness, and conscience are all different. Panpsychism aside, something can be alive without being sentient, a unicellular organism, for example, and of course anything sentient is conscious. Now we are not merely sentient, but also conscious of this and that. Beyond this, we command a faculty of moral discernment and evaluation which is what conscience is.
It is clear that to be alive is not the same as to have a conscience. Plants and non-rational animals are living things but have no conscience. My cats, for example, are alive, and moreover they are conscious, but they cannot tell right from wrong. If they think at all, they do not think in moral categories. They do not evaluate their actions or omissions morally. They lack the capacity to do so. Humans have the capacity for moral discernment and evaluation, if not at birth, then later on, whether or not they exercise it, and whether or not their consciences have been well formed.
Now the soul is presumably the seat of conscience: it is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience, not in virtue of my having a body.* But then it would seem to follow that the soul of a man cannot be a mere life-principle. For it is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience. The argument, then, is this:
1) Being alive and having a conscience are different properties. Therefore:
2) It is not in virtue of my being alive that I have a conscience.
3) It is in virtue of my having a soul that I have a conscience. Therefore:
4) The soul cannot be merely the life-principle of my body.
Possible Objection
At best, what you have shown is that the soul cannot be merely a life-principle. But what is to stop this principle from doing other jobs as well? However it is with non-rational animals, in a human being, the soul is not merely (i) a life-principle but also (ii) the locus of conscience, (iii) the subject of intentional states, and (iv) the free agent of one's actions.
In a later entry I will respond to the objection.
__________
*If there is post-mortem judgment, it will be the soul that will be is judged, and judged morally, not the body, which implies that the soul is the seat of conscience and free agency. "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world but suffer the loss of his immortal body soul?"
A Problem for Hylomorphic Dualism in the Philosophy of Mind
Edward Feser's Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature may well be the best compendium of Thomist philosophical anthropology presently available. I strongly recommend it. I wish I could accept its central claims. This entry discusses one of several problems I have.
The problem I want to discuss in this installment is whether an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) hylomorphic analysis of human beings can make sense of our post-mortem existence as distinct persons. Thomas Aquinas maintains that after death the souls of rational animals, but not the souls of non-rational animals, continue to exist as disembodied forms, numerically distinct among themselves. What the following argument seems to show is that the survival of distinct souls is impossible on hylomorphic dualism. I will not be questioning whether in fact we survive our bodily deaths. In question is whether A-T style hylomorphism renders it intelligible.
1) A primary substance (a substance hereafter) is a concrete individual. A man, a horse, a tree, a statue are stock examples of substances. A substance in this technical sense is not to be confused with stuff or material. Substances are individuals in that they have properties but are not themselves properties. Properties are predicable; substances are not. Substances are concrete in that they are causally active/passive.
2) Material substances are analyzable into matter (ὕλη, hyle/hule) and form (μορφή, morphe). A-T ontological analysis is thus hylomorphic analysis.
3) The soul of an animal, whether rational or non-rational, is not a complete substance in its own right, but the (substantial) form of its body. Anima forma corporis. Hylomorphic dualism is not a Cartesian dualism of complete substances, but a dualism of ontological constituents of one and the same complete substance.
4) Substances of the same kind have the same substantial form, where the substantial form of a substance is the conjunction of the essential (as opposed to accidental) properties that make the substance the kind of substance it is. Unlike Platonic Forms, Aristotelian forms cannot exist except as instantiated in matter.
5) There are many numerically different human beings (human substances). I assume that the reader is familiar with the distinction between numerical and qualitative identity and difference. (Comments are enabled if you have questions.)
6) Since these substances of the human kind have the same form, it is not their form that makes them numerically different. (4, 5) What then grounds their numerical difference?
7) It is the matter of their respective bodies that makes numerically different human beings numerically different. (2,6) Matter, then, is the principium individuationis, the principle of individuation, the ontological ground of the numerical difference of material substances, including human beings. It is matter that makes Socrates and Plato numerically different substances, not the substantial form they share.
8) A human being is a person.
9) A person is an individual substance of a rational nature. (Thomas, following Boethius)
10) There are many numerically different persons. (5, 8)
11) Only embodied, 'enmattered,' persons are numerically different from one another: embodiment is thus a necessary condition of difference of persons. (7) It is matter that makes a person the particular person that he is. The matter in question is not materia prima, but what Thomas refers to as materia signata (designated matter, signate matter) in his De Ente et Essentia. As Feser puts it in his Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (2014, p. 199): "The matter that is the principle of individuation is, in Aquinas's view, matter as made distinct by quantity or dimension — designated matter . . . .
12) At death a person suffers the loss of embodiment, which implies that after death, a person survives, if at all, as a disembodied form (until the general resurrection, at which time the disembodied soul/form acquires a resurrection body).
Therefore
13) After death a human person ceases to exist as the particular person that it is. But that is to say that the particular person, Socrates say, ceases to exist, full stop. What survives is at best a form which is common to all persons. That form, however, cannot be me or you. Thus the particularity, individuality, haecceity, ipseity of persons, which is essential to persons, is lost. (11, 12)
Are the Souls of Brutes Subsistent?
Aquinas says No but his argument is inconclusive.
Substack latest.
Reader Zacary writes,
I am just a layman who likes studying Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy, and recently I haven’t been studying the issue of animals in the afterlife. I stumbled across your post from many, many years ago (all the way back in 2009!) that was about the unity of consciousness argument and the subsistence of animal souls.
Thank you for writing, Zacary. That post from 2009 left a lot to be desired, so I rewrote it almost completely and published the result over at Substack. I have no time now to respond to the rest of what you wrote, but if you read the Substack entry and have questions or objections I will try to answer them here.
Is Hegel the Protestant Aquinas?
Substack latest.
UPDATE (5/8/2024). This from Kai Frederick Lorentzen:
You write:
" . . . It does annoy me, however, that Kainz doesn't supply any references. For example, we read:
Hegel was critical of Catholicism at times, in his writings and lectures. For example, he once made a scurrilous remark about the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist . . . .
Very interesting, but what exactly does he say and where does he say it? Inquiring minds want to know . . . . "
That's from § 552 of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften where it says in context of the thought that religion is for the Selbstbewußtsein [self-consciousness] the basis of ethics and the state:
Es kann aber das Verhältnis der Unfreiheit [of the Selbstbewußtsein on the one and the content of truth on the other side – kfl] der Form nach stattfinden, obgleich der an sich seiende Inhalt der Religion der absolute Geist ist. Dieser große Unterschied, um das Bestimmtere anzugeben, findet sich innerhalb der christlichen Religion selbst, in welcher nicht das Naturelement den Inhalt des Gottes macht, noch auch ein solches in den Gehalt desselben als Moment eintritt, sondern Gott, der im Geist und in der Wahrheit gewußt wird, der Inhalt ist. Und doch wird in der katholischen Religion dieser Geist in der Wirklichkeit dem selbstbewußten Geist starr gegenübergestellt. Zunächst wird in der Hostie Gott als äußerliches Ding der religiösen Anbetung präsentiert (wogegen in der lutherischen Kirche die Hostie als solche erst und nur allein im Genusse, d.i. in der Vernichtung der Äußerlichkeit derselben, und im Glauben, d.i. in dem zugleich freien, seiner selbst gewissen Geiste, konsekriert und zum gegenwärtigen Gotte erhoben wird). Aus jenem ersten und höchsten Verhältnis der Äußerlichkeit fließen alle die anderen äußerlichen, damit unfreien, ungeistigen und abergläubischen Verhältnisse; namentlich ein Laienstand, der das Wissen der göttlichen Wahrheit wie die Direktion des Willens und Gewissens von außen her und von einem anderen Stande empfängt, welcher selbst zum Besitze jenes Wissens nicht auf geistige Weise allein gelangt, sondern wesentlich dafür einer äußerlichen Konsekration bedarf. Weiteres, die teils nur für sich die Lippen bewegende, teils darin geistlose Weise des Betens, daß das Subjekt auf die direkte Richtung zu Gott Verzicht leistet und andere um das Beten bittet, – die Richtung der Andacht an wundertätige Bilder, ja selbst an Knochen, und die Erwartung von Wundern durch sie, – überhaupt, die Gerechtigkeit durch äußerliche Werke, ein Verdienst, das durch die Handlungen soll erworben, ja sogar auf andere übertragen werden können, usf., – alles dieses bindet den Geist unter ein Außersichsein, wodurch sein Begriff im Innersten verkannt und verkehrt und Recht und Gerechtigkeit, Sittlichkeit und Gewissen, Zurechnungsfähigkeit und Pflicht in ihrer Wurzel verdorben sind.
(G.W.F. Hegel, Werke 10, Frankfurt a.M. 1986, pp. 356-357)
Here it is in English:
As the inseparability of the two sides has been indicated, it may be worth while to note the separation as it appears on the side of religion. It is primarily a point of form: the attitude which self-consciousness takes to the body of truth. So long as this body of truth is the very substance or indwelling spirit of self-consciousness in its actuality, then self-consciousness in this content has the certainty of itself and is free. But if this present self-consciousness is lacking, then there may be created, in point of form, a condition of spiritual slavery, even though the implicit content of religion is absolute spirit. This great difference (to cite a specific case) comes out within the Christian religion itself, even though here it is not the nature-element in which the idea of God is embodied, and though nothing of the sort even enters as a factor into its central dogma and sole theme of a God who is known in spirit and in truth. And yet in Catholicism this spirit of all truth is in actuality set in rigid opposition to the self-conscious spirit. And, first of all, God is in the ‘host’ presented to religious adoration as an external thing. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the host as such is not at first consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e. in the annihilation of its externality. and in the act of faith, i.e. in the free self-certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exalted to be present God.) From that first and supreme status of externalization flows every other phase of externality – of bondage, non-spirituality, and superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine truth, as well as the direction of its will and conscience from without and from another order – which order again does not get possession of that knowledge in a spiritual way only, but to that end essentially requires an external consecration. It leads to the non-spiritual style of praying – partly as mere moving of the lips, partly in the way that the subject foregoes his right of directly addressing God, and prays others to pray – addressing his devotion to miracle- working images, even to bones, and expecting miracles from them. It leads, generally, to justification by external works, a merit which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even to be capable of being transferred to others. All this binds the spirit under an externalism by which the very meaning of spirit is perverted and misconceived at its source, and law and justice, morality and conscience, responsibility and duty are corrupted at their root.
BV: I see no reason to think that Kainz is to referring to the above passage from Hegel's Encyclopedia. In a later article I just now found, Corpus Christi and Reality, Kainz writes,
My reference was to one of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, in which he criticized the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, causing a Catholic student to report him to the authorities. Hegel had attempted what we might call a sick joke: he asked whether, if a mouse had come across a consecrated Host and eaten it, Catholics might be obliged to act worshipfully to the mouse, and so forth.
But again Kainz gives no reference! So I consulted Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827), but found no reference to any host-eating mouse in the passage in which Hegel refers to communion, which he calls Genuss which means enjoyment but also partaking of as in the eating or drinking of something. (In some contexts, geniesßar has the connotation, edible.)
Back to Lorentzen:
Heavy stuff, no? Well, with a little stretch you could say that Hegel is more Lutheran here than Martin Luther himself. Luther's theological approach, as I recently learned from Volker Leppin's brilliant study Die fremde Reformation: Luthers mystische Wurzeln (München 2016: C.H. Beck), was rooted in medieval mysticism in the line of Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart, whose idea to give birth to an inner divine child was strongly appreciated by Luther. Regarding extensive philosophical framing of the religious practice he became more and more critical. Here Luther's negative view of the traditional doctrine of the Eucharist finds its place: It's the Scholastics with their detailed Aristotelian understanding of the Eucharist that Luther has a problem with. The flesh and the blood of Christ is absolutely real, but no philosopher can prove how! Instead, the affection of the baptized members of the community validates the ritual. Same problem in the other direction with the merely symbolic understanding of bread and wine, as we find it expressed by Zwingli and his successors like Calvin. Here Luther suspects Neo-Platonist hubris against God.
Lorentzen's take strikes me as basically correct. Here is a little under four minutes of Volker Leppin.
In his 1827 lectures on the philosophy of religion Hegel mentions three views about the host or communion wafer:
According to the first, the host — this external, sensible thing — becomes by consecration the present God, God as a thing in the manner of an empirical 'thing.' The second view is the Lutheran one . . . here there is no transubstantiation . . . the presence of God is utterly a spiritual presence — the consecration takes place in the faith of the subject. The third view is that the present God exists only in representation, in memory, and to this extent he does not have this immediate subjective presence. (Hodgson one-volume edition, U. of Cal Press, 1988, 480-481.)
Alles klar?
This may help: Transubstantion, Consubstantiation, or Something Else?
Also of interest: Must Catholics Hate Hegel?
Herr Lorentzen signs off:
With best wishes!
Ex toto cordeKai (who likes your recent Sunday meditation - Hyperkinetic and Hyperconnected - a lot!)