One thought on “Aquinas De homine ST prima pars 75-83

  • Peter Marshall

    Hello all – not much of a comment to make here. But I wanted to thank Torrance for forcing (I mean, encouraging!) me to read a key part of the Summa, and for his tremendously helpful overview and analysis of qq. 75-7. This does seem to take us straight into the world of ‘cognitive ecology’ (perhaps eventually we will feel able to do without the scare quotes) with its emphasis on embodiment, and on how sensation is properly the province of the composite soul-body-united hypostatic ‘person’. This is interesting to me as a historian of Reformation controversies about salvation and the afterlife, as it raises significant questions about post-mortem existence prior to the General Resurrection – in what sense do souls ‘feel’ pain in purgatory or hell? Are the joys of heaven or Abraham’s Bosom purely intellective? Are souls sentient at all in the interim between death and final judgement? Some of this has a bearing on my own suggested reading from Thomas More’s Supplication of Souls. I’m pretty sure that, elsewhere in the Summa, Aquinas does turn to tackle questions about the nature of hell-fire and how it impresses itself on the soul. But this whole area (as Philippa’s fascinating discussion of body-soul dialogues also made clear) does seem to be one where the business of translating the metaphysics of the theologians into the discourses of piety was both particularly pressing and particularly perplexing.

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