9. Human Identity and Immortality

To be immortal is not to be subject to death. Living corporeal substances are subject to death through the corruption of their substantial unity—not so much the separation of soul from body, but the dissolution of the soul as the substantial form of the body. This dissolution of the soul is brought about by destructive natural causes acting upon the living body. Living things themselves have various capacities to preserve themselves in existence against the ravages of the natural world around them; that is, in part, what it is for them to live—to sustain their existence in and through their own natural activities. And yet nature teaches us that corruptible things inevitably corrupt.

What of Socrates? Socrates is an animal. Thomas is unambiguous about this fact in 75.4 when he argues that Socrates is not identical to his soul because of his animal acts. But, if Socrates is an animal he should be as subject to corruption as is any corporeal substance, and as subject to death as any animal. Here it is important to make an initial distinction. As we’ve seen, living things act to preserve their existence through their vital activities, and succeed in doing so for a time, even if they eventually succumb to the reaper. So we may say they are naturally subject to death because of their composed corporeal natures. And yet, it does not follow that they must corrupt and die; by and large their lives consist in preventing the corruption to which they are subject. This fact alone shows that there are causes with the power to fend off death, even if not to fend it off permanently. However, it is then at least possible that some other cause, a cause with much greater power than the natural causes of living things possess, could fend off death for them without end and preserve them alive without end. The obvious candidate for this cause is God by miraculous intervention; if living things have limited power to fend off their own deaths, presumably God has unlimited power to do so for them. So what is corruptible by nature may not in fact corrupt. While animals are naturally subject to death, they could be supernaturally immortal.

So also even if human beings are naturally subject to death, it may well be within the power of God to keep them from dying by a preternatural gift. This condition of having been given a preternatural gift preserving them from death would be the condition of the first human beings in the biblical account of Eden, the preternatural gift lost by Original Sin through which death entered into the world, however else one understands those data of revelation. But philosophically we can say no more of them than that human beings are naturally subject to death but need not die.

However, the world we live in is not an Edenic paradise into which death has not entered. Living things die. Human beings die. Socrates died. On the other hand, according to Thomas, Socrates’ soul is incorruptible where the souls of other animals are not. It is not even naturally subject to death by corruption. Is there a possibility for immortality, particularly personal immortality, here in the incorruptibility of Socrates’ soul?

One might be tempted to say yes. One might say that in the first place the incorruptible soul of Socrates looks like a person in the current sense of that term. It is a thinking or conscious thing, since it is clearly a thing at least in the sense of a subsistent, and it has the power of intellect, even if it has no other conscious cognitive powers of the animal for which it formally was a soul. What “we” mean by person is a “thinking or conscious thing.” So Socrates’ soul is a person. What person? Well Socrates was a person in that very sense as well, although he had more conscious cognitive capacities than does his soul after death. It seems incongruous to suggest that we have two persons—Socrates and Socrates’ soul. After all that would seem to strike against the unity Thomas was at pains to maintain. While Socrates was alive, were these two persons present? No. There is but one person, and it is Socrates. But then upon the death of Socrates, what happens? Does the person who is Socrates cease to exist, and a new person that is Socrates’ soul come to exist? But, it seems much easier and simpler to say that upon Socrates’ death the person that was Socrates survives as Socrates’s soul. Before death Socrates was composed of a soul and a body. After death he is composed simply of a soul. If we hold that position then, because of the incorruptibility of the soul, while the animal that Socrates was dies, the soul that Socrates becomes survives, and thus Socrates himself is immortal, and not subject to death, not subject to death even by nature as the animal is. Socrates is simply immortal. On this proposed account when Thomas wrote “anima mea non est ego,” he was merely speaking of this life. He should then have added “anima mea ero ego,” “I will be my soul.”

However as an interpretation of Thomas this approach will suffer several severe difficulties. First, on its own terms it is hard to avoid the conclusion that before Socrates’ death, there are two persons present. The argument of 75.2 was not that the intellectual soul becomes a particular thing and subsistent upon the death of the human being. It was that the intellectual soul as such is a particular thing and subsistent, and that includes while it is the soul of a living thing. So if we are going to take the recent minimalist account of person that the term expresses in this proposed interpretation, a thinking or conscious thing, then we have the person that is the particular and subsistent thing that is the soul before the death of Socrates. But Thomas thinks Socrates thinks, and is thus a thinking thing. So we also have the person Socrates. Is the person that is the soul identical to the person that is Socrates? It seems not, given the argument of 75.4 that Socrates is not identical to his soul. So this interpretation suggests that even if after death there is only one person, Socrates, before death there are two persons, Socrates and Socrates’ soul.

In the second place, this interpretation explicitly relies upon an equivocation on the term ‘person’. Thomas accepts from Boethius the definition of a person as an individual substance of a rational nature. (Summa Theologiae IIIa.2.2) But Thomas insists that the soul is incomplete in its nature. It does not have a nature, but is one of the principles of a corporeal nature along with matter. It can only be said to “have” a nature improperly and by analogy. And when we do so speak, what is meant is that its nature is to be the substantial form of an animal. Again, that is why it is not an angel. So strictly speaking, the human soul, even as a subsistent, is not and cannot be a person, unless one equivocates on the term, and in so doing abandons the Philosophy of Nature and Metaphysics within which Thomas thinks.

In the third place, this interpretation would make hay of Thomas’ argument in 75.4 that Socrates is not identical to his soul. There Thomas relied upon the vital activities of Socrates to make that argument–Socrates has vital activities that the soul does not possess as a subject or subsistent. But they are Socrates’ activities as agent just as much as is the operation of intellect. The powers that those activities manifest are powers of Socrates in just the way the power of intellect is. Again this resolves into the “nature” of the soul as substantial form. All of Socrates’ powers “flow from” the soul as their formal principle, even as one of them, intellect, also has the soul as its subject along with Socrates. So if one were to ask which of the powers might be thought to be not quite Socrates’ power in the full sense, one ought to opt for the intellect, not the vital powers of the living body, since it seems that intellect belongs to something other that Socrates and is at best shared with Socrates. But then why would Socrates become identical to the subject in virtue of a power that is not quite his, rather than cease to be with the powers that are properly his? Such questions, and the answers one might give to them, are again senseless if we situate what Thomas thinks back in what he wrote. The reason that intellectual power is no less Socrates’ power than it is the soul’s is because the act of being of Socrates is the act of being of his soul. It is a mistake to think that because Socrates is not identical to his soul, his soul forms some other being with which he would share some power. Again, this has to do with the soul being his substantial form.

In the fourth place, this interpretation would suggest, in Thomas’ terms, that the body with its powers is per accidens related to Socrates’ being. If Socrates is a substance, and the body is per accidens to his being, then the body is per accidens to his substance. In which case he is not a corporeal substance or animal at all, even in this life. The interpretation seems to return to giving the appearance that the intellectual soul is a kind of angel, only now adding that this angel is Socrates for a time associated with bodily powers. But recall Thomas’ rejection of the Plurality of Substantial Forms position. His own account of the soul is that the animal powers of the soul are as much powers of the human soul as is the intellectual power—they are all powers in the second mode of per se predication. In that respect they are all alike, and the human soul is thusper se the substantial form of a living body, not per accidens, and the person Socrates is that living body. When that living body ceases to exist through death, so also does the person who is Socratres. “Anima mea non est ego” simply.

Finally, Thomas clearly understands and accepts the implications of his view that Socrates is the living animal, namely, that the continued existence of the human soul after death is not sufficient for the continued existence of the human person. If the living animal no longer exists after death, then neither does Socrates. If the living animal is not immortal, then neither is Socrates. Consider these objections that Thomas himself considers. There is no resurrection of the body; only the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob live after death. Thomas writes in response that the soul of Abraham is not Abraham, and the life of Abraham’s soul is not sufficient for the life of Abraham. The whole composite of Abraham’s soul and body must live for Abraham to live. Thus if only Abraham’s soul lives after death, Abraham does not. (Summa Theologiae 75.1 ad 2) Similarly when in the Commentary on First Corinthians Thomas writes “anima mea non est ego,” it is precisely to emphasize the importance of the resurrection of the body for human salvation. He writes that “hence allowing that the soul gains salvation in another life, neither I nor any other human being does,” (unde licet anima consequatur salutem in alia vita, non tamen ego vel quilibet homo.) because “anima mea non est ego.” The importance of the theological doctrine of Christ’s Resurrection is that it affirms that it is I who am ultimately saved through my resurrection from the dead, which involves me coming to exist when my body rises from the dead.

So while Socrates was not in this life actually immortal (he did die after all), he may in the resurrection live again and be made immortal by God.

Of course Thomas does not think that the resurrection of the body is demonstrable in philosophy. For him it is a revealed truth, not one of the praeambula fidei. Nonetheless he thinks it is rationally fitting for God to bring it about, since otherwise there would be these very odd beings in existence for all time, incorporeal, immaterial, incorruptible subsistent forms the “nature” of which is to be the substantial forms of living bodies. Earlier we saw how Thomas’ use of philosophical analysis helped to avoid the potentially distorting view of the theologian upon the nature of the soul. Here, we see how a revealed truth helps the philosopher avoid an equally distorting philosophical account of the soul and personal identity that would skew the philosophical books toward a personal human immortality without having to live as a human animal.