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The Human Body and Human Happiness in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
There appears to be no serious treatment of the positive role played by the body in Aquinas's account of human happiness. This would seem to be a significant gap in the literature given Aquinas's well known insistence on the human person as a body-soul unity. This paper aims at taking a first step in filling-in the gap by considering Aquinas's discussion of the body's part in human happiness in the Secunda Pars of the Summa theologiae. In particular it considers the place of the body in each of the three different forms of happiness that Aquinas talks about there. It is perhaps the role of the body in the third form of happiness – the perfect happiness of the beatific vision – that is most crucial to understand since this is human happiness simpliciter. Although the body has a part to play here too, Aquinas's understanding of it is not without problems.
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- Copyright © 2011 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2011 The Dominican Council.
References
1 A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), pp. 458–459Google Scholar.
2 The Philosophy of Aquinas (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2004)Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., pp. 197–215.
4 “Happiness (Ia IIae, qq. 1–5),” in The Ethics of Aquinas, Pope, S.J., ed. (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), pp. 57–68Google Scholar.
5 Ibid., p. 62.
6 Ibid., p. 64.
7 Ibid.
8 I-II.3.5. In most cases, the English translation of the Summa is taken from the 1920 translation by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province.
9 Aquinas discusses these different forms of happiness in any number of places. Here I am mostly drawing on what he says about them in I-II.1–5.
10 Ibid.
11 Thomas Gilby seems to have a similar worry. Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 16, Purpose and Happiness (1a2ae. 1–5) (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 103, note cGoogle Scholar.
12 I.75.1.
13 I.75.3–4.
14 I.118.3.
15 I.75.1 ad 2; 75.2.
16 I.75.5.
17 I.75.4.
18 Ibid.
19 I.118.3.
20 I.76.1; 118.3.
21 I.84.6; 118.3.
22 Cf. O’Callaghan, J.P., Thomist Realism and the Linguistic Turn: Toward a More Perfect Form of Existence (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), pp. 237–274Google Scholar; Pouivet, Roger, After Wittgenstein: St. Thomas (South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 2006), pp. 2–4, 124–125, 127Google Scholar.
23 I.75.2.
24 I.75.2 ad 2.
25 See Aristotle's remarks in De Anima, 416b15–20; Parts of Animals, 645b14–19.
26 I.70.3.
27 I-II.2.5.
28 Ibid.
29 Thomism: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, Shook, L.K. and Maurer, A.A., trans. (Toronto: PIMS, 2002), p. 222Google Scholar; Cf. ST, I.65.2.
30 I.1.5 ad 2.
31 I.65.1 ad 2. Cf. II-II.25.5.
32 I.65.1 ad 2.
33 I-II.4.5.
34 I-II.4.6.
35 I-II.4.7.
36 I-II.4.5.
37 In Contra gentiles IV.91 Aquinas says that this is the error quorundam Graecorum. Cf. Gilby's note on pp. 102–103 of vol. 16 of the Blackfriars' Summa. Incidentally, Gilby mistakenly references Book III of the Contra gentiles and may have some of Aquinas's Latin wrong.
38 PG 6, 485–489; 664–668.
39 Cf. Luckock, H.M., The Intermediate State Between Death and Judgment (New York: Thomas Whittaker, 1890), p. 23Google Scholar.
40 Ibid., pp. 22–26; Cf. Gilby's note on pp. 102–103 of vol. 16 of the Blackfriars’ Summa; Lubac, H. de, Catholicism, L.G. Sheppard, trans. (New York: Longmans, 1950), pp. 54–57Google Scholar.
41 I-II.4.5.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.
45 I-II.4.6 ad 2.
46 A slightly different draft of this paper was presented at a satellite session of the American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana on November 1, 2009. I am very grateful to Barry David and James Jacobs for their helpful comments on that draft.