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Are We Born and do We Die?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
The stranglehold on our imagination by the mind-body dualisms that permeate the culture is such that most people seem to suppose that “body” and “soul” name distinct and separable entities. Resisting such dualisms in favour of an old-fashioned Aristotelean view of the soul as the form of the body, this essay considers two questions: do human parents produce human beings, and do human beings die? The doctrine of the special creation of the individual soul seems to require us to answer the first question in the negative because, according to this doctrine, parents only produce matter for the God-given soul to form. As to the second, many people seem to suppose that human beings do not die, only their bodies do. Arguing against the view that immortality is a natural property of human minds, the essay suggests (with the help of Joseph Ratzinger) that, whether we speak of “immortality” or of “resurrection”, life from death is neither nature, nor achievement, but gift.
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- Copyright © The author 2009. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council 2009
References
1 As reported by John Cornwell in The Tablet (“Soul Searching”, 29 July 2006, pp. 8–9), European bishops called for more debate following an EU decision to fund embryonic stem-cell research. In response to this call, John Cornwell, Eamon Duffy and I convened a twenty-strong interdisciplinary group to discuss the question of the soul (see John Cornwell, “How to conceive of humanity”, The Tablet (14 April 2007, pp. 4–5). This paper is a revised version of my contribution to that conversation.
2 Sorabji, Richard, “Soul and Self in Ancient Philosophy”, From Soul to Self, edited James, M. Crabbe, C. (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 8Google Scholar.
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6 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 75, art. 2, c. “The Latin word intellectus is connected with the verb intellegere: this is commonly translated ‘understand’, but in Aquinas’ Latin it is a verb of very general use corresponding roughly to our word ‘think’” (Anthony Kenny, “Body, Soul, and Intellect in Aquinas”, From Soul to Self, pp. 33–48, p. 34). Many years ago, Herbert McCabe told me that, when translating Aquinas, he often found that the most appropriate translation of “intellectus” was “imagination”.
7 Aidan Nichols, “Anglican Uniatism: A Personal View”, New Blackfriars (July 2006), pp. 337–356, p. 348. No reference was given to where Ratzinger expressed this view in these terms.
8 John Paul II, “Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences”, Origins, 26, 1996, pp. 350–3; cited from McMullin, Ernan, “Biology and the Theology of Human Nature”, Controlling Our Destinies, ed. Sloan, Philip (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000)Google Scholar.
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10 According to Cross's Dictionary of the Christian Church, “no precise teaching about the soul received general acceptance in the Christian Church until the Middle Ages”.
11 McMullin says of the papal address to which I referred earlier that it “simply restates traditional doctrine in regard to the human soul, with a fuller philosophical commentary than any other recent Roman pronouncement on the issue”.
12 The argument that, since the soul is “an immaterial substance it cannot be caused through generation, but only through creation by God” (Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 118, art. 2, c) seems vulnerable to his own insistence – rejected, after his death, by the universities of Paris and Oxford – that, in each human being, there is “only a single substantial form, namely the rational or intellectual soul” (Kenny, “Body, Soul, and Intellect in Aquinas”, p. 34), because the vegetable and animal functions of the human are clearly parentally generated. It is, I think, significant, that his attempt, in the reply to the second objection, to square these two convictions, is of exceptional length and complexity.
13 The text of this brief, “On the place of the human embryo in the Christian tradition and the theological principles for evaluating its moral status”, can be found on the website of the Linacre Centre.
14 “I have already stressed that it is permissible to say – and indeed that we must say – that man is made up of body and soul. This is of course frequently stated in the catechism. All the same I believe that every Thomist theologian and philosopher will be bound to agree with me when I say that this mode of expression is really an empirically inexact one. It only conveys man's essential being in a highly primitive way, because man is not really built up out of body and soul, but out of spirit and materia prima, or ‘first matter’– what one might translate as empty otherness” (Rahner, Karl, “The Body in the Order of Salvation”, Theological Investigations, XVII[London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1981], pp. 71–89Google Scholar; p. 83).
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16 Edited John Cornwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
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21 Ratzinger, Joseph, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), p. 305Google Scholar, his stress. Arising out of lectures given in Tübingen in 1967, this book was first published in German in 1968.
22 Ratzinger, Introduction, p. 351.
23 Ratzinger, Introduction, p. 306.
24 In the discussion in Cambridge after this paper, I was asked whether my position was not “fideistic”. It would, I think, only be fideistic if [a] by “soul” I meant the curious entity that is Cartesian consciousness, the ghost in the machine, and [b] if, in saying something like “I believe in the immortality of the soul”, I meant something like: human minds possess some characteristic or natural property that is inaccessible to scientific scrutiny. Since I mean neither of these things, and since most people who hear talk of the “immortality of the soul” take it for granted that the speaker means both of them, it seems to me that Christians in our time and place would do well to try to avoid using the language of immortality and concentrate on trying to get across what it is that we are talking about when we speak of “resurrection”.
25 Rahner, “Theological Considerations concerning the Moment of Death”, Theological Investigations, XI (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1974), pp. 309–321; p. 319Google Scholar. For more detail, see his essay, “Ideas for a Theology of Death”, Theological Investigations, XIII.
26 See Nicholas Lash, “The Impossibility of Atheism”, Theology for Pilgrims, pp. 19–35.