¹ One of the earliest works to take up this topic is G J McAleer's book, Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics: a Catholic and antitotalitarian theory of the body (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). McAleer comments on the paucity of discussions of the role of the body in Thomas’ thought, saying that when he began work on Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics he ‘had been struck by the fact that no book-length study of Thomas on the body existed’ (Ecstatic Morality and Sexual Politics, xi).

² In particular, Joseph G. Trabbic, Peter Dillard and Christopher Conn have discussed the role and fate of the body after death and in the beatific vision. Trabbic's ‘The Human Body and Human Happiness in Aquinas's Summa Theologiae’ highlights the relative paucity of discussion of the role of the body in human happiness, pointing out that although the body is necessarily present in the final beatitude of the human person, the question of whether the body is as important in beatitude as Thomas elsewhere argues it must always be in human nature is a complex one (New Blackfriars 91.1041 (2011), pp. 552–564). Christopher Conn's ‘Aquinas on Human Nature and the Possibility of Bodiless Existence’ (New Blackfriars 93.1045 (2012), pp. 324–338) discusses Thomas’ account of the status of the body between the death of the individual and the general resurrection, arguing that Thomas consistently and coherently holds that, although individuals are not straightforwardly identified with their souls, they can and do exist for a time as disembodied souls. Finally, Dillard's, Peter ‘Keeping the Vision: Aquinas and the Problem of Disembodied Beatitude’ (New Blackfriars 93.1046 (2011), pp. 397–411)CrossRefGoogle Scholar elucidates the complex philosophical manoeuvring by which Thomas was able to maintain that disembodied souls were able to clearly and openly see the divine essence alongside the claim that the body would ultimately come to participate in the beatific vision. None of these papers explicitly relate their discussion of human embodiment to ethical questions, although Trabbic does discuss the need for greater discussion of the role of the body in Thomas’ account of the virtues and the sacraments; however, insofar as all focus on the question of the final destiny and nature of the human person, all have implications for ethics in the context of Thomas’ thought which sees all of human life as directed towards its final end in God.

³ They say, for example, that since ‘bread and wine are now transubstantiated, something material is in excess of our spirits, and our minds must obey our senses, here reattuned.’ (Truth in Aquinas, (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 64Google Scholar).

⁴ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

⁵ Miner's book was critiqued by Leonard D. G. Ferry, in his article ‘Passionalist or Rationalist? The emotions in Aquinas’ moral theology’ (New Blackfriars 93.1045 (2012), pp. 292–308CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Ferry argues that Thomas’ attitude to the passions is both more complex and more negative than Ferry allows. While Miner's account of the passions is broadly positive and Ferry's broadly negative, I would argue that both positions should be situated within the broader context of Thomas’ account of the body which (as I argue below) is caught between two contradictory tendencies. Where Miner places Thomas on the side of the passions and Ferry sides with Thomas against the passions, I would want to emphasise the centrality of the body to human existence and ethics against those elements in Thomas’ thought which ultimately fail to give ultimate meaning or value to embodiment.

⁶ As McAleer says, ‘this book argues that a return to Thomas's metaphysics of the body provides the theologian and the philosopher with a unique analysis of the body: a conception that avoids conceiving of the body as riven by metaphysical violence’ (Ecstatic Morality, xi). He also claims, remarkably, that ‘it is the failure to adopt Thomas's theory of the body as the foundation of contemporary sexual politics that well justifies the Church in its remarkable claim that Talmon's distinction between liberal democracy and totalitarian democracy is now vitiated’ (Ecstatic Morality, xi-xii). Although McAleer repeats his claim about the essential peacefulness of Thomas's metaphysics of the body throughout the book (arguing that the relationship between the components of the material world is ‘essentially one of desire, order, and peace’ (2), and that ‘there is no fundamental antagonism within human nature, even after the Fall’ (37); and opposing Thomas's metaphysics to those of contemporary thinkers such as Foucault and Merleau-Ponty who, he argues, ‘see the body as metaphysically caught in violence’ (26)), this assertion of Thomistic peaceableness is complicated by McAleer's account of the Thomistic body as essentially wounded in its ecstatic nature: ‘the body must become a wounded body’ (51). As Gerard Loughlin points out in his review of Ecstatic Morality (in Modern Theology 25.1 (2009), 144–147), it is by no means clear that McAleer is as successful as he claims to be in his evasion of metaphysical violence.

⁷ For example, IIa.IIae 179.1, ‘Thus the life of plants is said to consist in nourishment and generation; the life of animals in sensation and movement; and the life of men in their understanding and acting according to reason.’; IIIa 19.2 says that ‘Christ as man communicates with plants by His nutritive soul, with the brutes by His sensitive soul, and with the angels by His intellective soul, even as other men do.’; Ia 92.1 says ‘Consider the scale of living beings – at the bottom are things which have no procreative power themselves like those plants and animals which are generated without seed by the force of some heavenly bodies out of suitable matter. Next are living things which have their active and passive procreative powers joined together e.g. those plants generated from seed. Then the perfect animals, which have the active power of procreation in the male and the passive in the female. In perfect animals the male and female are joined together only at times of mating so that the mating male and female constitute a whole or unity. But at the top of that scale is man, whose life is directed to the nobler function of understanding things’. Ia 96.2 says that there are ‘four things in man: his “reason,” which makes him like to the angels’; his “sensitive powers,” whereby he is like the animals; his “natural forces,” which liken him to the plants; and “the body itself,” wherein he is like to inanimate things.’

⁸ Ia 50.1 describes angels as incorporeal beings; Ia 50.2 says that they are immaterial; Ia 90.3 describes angels as ‘spiritual’ rather than ‘bodily’ substances; Ia 90.4 argues that human soul, whose nature is ‘to be the form of a body’ would resemble the angels if it were ‘in itself a complete sort of thing’; Ia 93.3 describes angels as ‘more perfectly intelligent’ than humans; Ia 94.2 describes angels as ‘separated substances’ i.e. subsistent forms which can exist without being realised in matter, and describes them as being able to understand without the need for sense images. Technically, the fact that angels are immaterial means that they are intellectual rather than rational, rationality being a discursive form of thinking dependent on sense-perception, whereas angels, lacking bodies, do not go through the process of reasoning: as soon as they know anything (and they are created with all of their knowledge present from the beginning) they understand all of the consequences of that thing or idea (Ia 58.3).

⁹ Ia 91.3 describes humanity as ‘the noblest of the animals’; Ia 92.1 charts the hierarchy of creation, placing humankind ‘at the top of the scale.’ Ia2ae 1.3, Thomas states that ‘Acts are called human inasmuch as they proceed from deliberate willing’; in IIaIIae 55.2 that ‘those powers alone which are proper to the soul, namely the rational powers, belong exclusively to man’; and in IaIIae 71.2 that human beings are defined by their possession of rational souls.

¹⁰ In IaIIae 94.2 Thomas defines man as ‘a rational animal’, and in Ia 98.1, he argues that ‘we must consider then that man is established by his nature as a sort of link between perishable creatures and imperishable ones; for his soul is imperishable by nature, his body by nature perishable,’ suggesting that it is the combination of intellect and physicality which defines human nature. IIIa 19.2 says that Christ, as man, shares in vegetative life of plants, sensuous life of animals, and intellectual life of angels.

¹¹ For example, Ia 98.2 says that ‘after the resurrection man will be like an angel, having been rendered spiritual both in soul and in body.’

¹² For example: ‘There can be no complete and final happiness for us save in the vision of God.’ IaIIae 3.8.

¹³ Thomas says that ‘men and other rational creatures [homo et aliae rationales creaturae] lay hold of [the ultimate end] in knowing and loving God, which non-rational creatures are not capable of doing’ IaIIae 1.8. It is not clear what Thomas intends by this reference to ‘other rational creatures’: angels would seem to be excluded by virtue of being intellectual but not rational.

¹⁴ In Ia 91.1, Thomas argues that ‘the rational soul gets its knowledge of the truth in some fashion through the senses,’ and in Ia 94.2 he argues that ‘the fact of the soul's being adapted to controlling and perfecting the body in its animal life means that the proper manner of understanding for our souls is by turning to sensible images.’

¹⁵ ‘A full and lucid consideration of God's intelligible effects is made practically impossible for man in his present state by the sensible ones which distract and engross his attention…the first man used not to be hampered by external things from the clear and steady contemplation of God's intelligible effects’ (Ia 94.1).

¹⁶ Ia 94.1.

¹⁷ Indeed, as Dillard's ‘Keeping the Vision’ and Conn's ‘Aquinas on Human Nature’ point out, Thomas holds that it is possible not only for the individual to exist as a disembodied soul prior to the resurrection but also for that disembodied soul to enjoy (in confident anticipation of its eventual re-embodiment) the beatific vision, a position which requires some rather complicated and not unproblematic work in order to make possible the continued assertion that the human individual consists essentially of an embodied soul.

¹⁸ Ia 98.2.

¹⁹ Ia 100.2.

²⁰ IaIIae 55.4. This is Thomas’ gloss on a definition taken from Augustine via Peter of Poitiers as ‘a good quality of mind by which one lives righteously, of which no one can make bad use’ (IaIIae 55.4). Elsewhere, he describes virtue as ‘an ordered disposition of the soul’ (IIaIIae 55.2).

²¹ Virtue, according to Thomas, ‘cannot be in the irrational part of the soul, except inasmuch as this participates in reason’. (IaIIae 55.4)

²² IaIIae 61.2.

²³ IaIIae 61.5.

²⁴ ‘The divine mind itself may be called prudence; while God's temperance may be seen as his self-containment, somewhat as in us by temperance our reason holds our desires. His courage is his changelessness; his justice the observance of the Eternal Law in his works’ (IaIIae 61.5).

²⁵ ‘Prudence of this kind scorns the things of the world and directs its thoughts only to divine truths: temperance sets aside the needs of the body so far as nature allows: courage prevents the soul from being afraid about losing the body in its approach to heavenly things: and justice consists in the soul's giving a whole-hearted consent to following the course thus resolved’ (IaIIae 61.5).

²⁶ IaIIae 62.1.

²⁷ IaIIae 91.1 describes the eternal law as ‘the ruling idea of things which exists in God as the effective sovereign of them all’.

²⁸ IaIIae describes it as a makeshift affair, lacking ‘the inerrancy that marks conclusions of demonstrative science’.

²⁹ ‘Hence the need of a divine law which misses nothing and leaves no evil unforbidden or unpunished’ (IaIIae 91.4).

³⁰ IaIIae 91.5 says that the Old Law ‘restrains the hand’ and rules by the fear of punishment; whereas the New Law ‘restrains the spirit’ and rules by ‘love shed in our hearts by the grace of Christ’.

³¹ Correspondingly, human sin can subject the individual to the ‘law of lust’, in which circumstance ‘he becomes like the beasts who are born along by their sense appetites’ (IaIIae 91.6).

³² IIaIIae 179.2.

³³ IIaIIae 179.1.

³⁴ IIaIIae 179.1, quoting Aristotle in italics.

³⁵ IIaIIae 180.1.

³⁶ IIaIIae 180.2 says that they create the necessary disposition for contemplation, which is ‘impeded by the vehemence of the passions,’ but they belong properly to the active life.

³⁷ IIaIIae 180.3–4.

³⁸ ‘The sublime contemplation of divine truth wherein contemplation is finally perfected’ IIaIIae 180.4.

³⁹ IIaIIae 180.5.

⁴⁰ IIaIIae 180.7.

⁴¹ The contemplative life is continuous ‘first, because it is proper to us to us as regards the activity of the incorruptible part of the soul, namely, the intellect, and can therefore continue after this life; secondly, because we do not work with the body in the activities of the contemplative life, so that we are better able to persevere in these activities without ceasing’ IIaIIae 180.8.

⁴² IIaIIae 181.2.

⁴³ IIaIIae 181.4.

⁴⁴ In Ia.96.

⁴⁵ IIaIIae 182.1.

⁴⁶ IIaIIae 182.1.

⁴⁷ IIaIIae 182.4.

⁴⁸ ‘How to read the pseudo-Denys today?’, in International Journal of Systematic Theology 7.4 (2005), p. 428CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁹ This is, I think what McAleer does with Levinas in Ecstatic Morality (see especially pp. 28–30), and what Milbank and Pickstock risk in Truth in Aquinas.