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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Taking Aquinas's metaphysics of human nature as my point of departure and taking inspiration from Dante's concept of transhumanization, I sketch a metaphysics of the afterlife according to which a human person in the interim phase between death and resurrection is not a mere disembodied soul. I offer some theological reasons for thinking that our bodily human nature is essential to what we are and for thinking that we can survive the destruction of our bodies at death. I argue that these claims are consistent, provided we hold that our bodily human nature, while essential to what we are, is not necessary to what we are. I argue for this distinction between essence and necessity. I then raise a mereological puzzle about the relation between a disembodied soul and the person whose soul it is, and argue that, if we are to avoid the Cartesian conclusion that this relation is identity, we must hold that a human person, even in the interim phase, is composed of a soul and something else. Drawing on Dante's concept of transhumanization, I argue that this something else is God himself or some specially created divine grace or energy.
1 Descartes, Meditations II. Not all readers of Descartes think that he is a Cartesian about human nature in the sense intended in this paper. I would be happy to be persuaded that the philosophical position I am labeling Cartesianism and contrasting with Aquinas's hylomorphism, is not actually Descartes’.
2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae Ia, qq.75−76.
3 Dorothy Sayers, Strong Poison, ch.10
4 St. Gregory of Nanzianzen, “To Cledonius the Priest Against Apollinarius (Ep. CI),” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, v.7, ed. Schaff, Philip and Wace, Henry (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), p. 440Google Scholar.
5 And it's no clearer even if we grant that a dead man retains ownership of his scattered former parts, as Samwise Gamgee apparently does grant: “I don't see why the likes of thee / Without axin’ leave should go makin’ free / With the shank or the shin o’ my father's kin; So hand the old bone over! […] Though dead he be, it belongs to he; / So hand the old bone over!” J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, ch.12.
6 Fine, Kit, “Essence and Modality: The Second Philosophical Perspectives Lecture,” Philosophical Perspectives 8 (1994), pp. 1−16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Dante, , Purgatorio X.124−129, trans. Sayers, Dorothy L. (London: Penguin, 1955), p. 146Google Scholar.
8 For discussion and evaluation of these mereological claims, see Simons, Peter, Parts: A Study in Ontology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Achille Varzi, “Mereology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/mereology/>.
9 Dante, , Paradiso I.67−72, trans. Sayers, Dorothy L. and Reynolds, Barbara (London: Penguin, 1962), p. 55Google Scholar.
10 Fissi, Rosetta Migliorini, Dante (Firenze: La nuova italia, 1979), p. 133Google Scholar; “La Nozione di deificatio nel Paradiso,” Letture classensi 9/10 (1982), pp. 39−72. Also see discussion in Botterill, Steven, Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia (Cambridge, 2005), p. 194Google Scholar.
11 St. Bernard of Clairvaux, “On the Love of God,” in Late Medieval Mysticism, ed. Petry, Roy C. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1957), pp. 64−5.Google Scholar
12 Jacobs, Jonathan D., “An Eastern Orthodox Conception of theosis and Human Nature,” Faith and Philosophy 26 (2009), pp. 615−627CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 In Purgatorio XXV Dante expounds through the poet Statius the aery body theory according to which souls in the interim phase inform the immediately surrounding air. Dante offers this as a theory of how souls can do things in the interim phase, but it would also work as an account of what supplements a human soul in this phase. However, Dante is a bit unusual among religious thinkers in conceiving of the interim phase as spatially located. Many others, Aquinas included, conceive of this phase as purely immaterial, so I haven't pursued the aery body theory in this paper.