The Destiny of Humanity

Another doctrine of Aristotelian origin condemned in1270 and in 1277 concerned the very idea of what a human being is. The Augustinian anthropology that viewed man as ‘a soul availing itself of a body’ dominated intellectual culture from the 6th to the 12th c.: the rational soul, or the image of God inside man, was considered the essential part of a human being; its own individual survival, along with its punishment or reward in the afterlife, was never put into discussion, as were not the criteria of the moral life (one of the debates of the Carolingian age used Platonic terms to pose the problem of the relationship between the individual soul and the world soul, but was not further developed). Along with a strictly dualistic reading of the problem, which viewed the body as the prison of the soul and justified detachment from the world (contemptus mundi) as well as monastic ascent, a more complex, three-fold idea of man was formed, in which the two extremes, the soul and the body, were connected and harmonized by an intermediate entity, the spirit. This idea was expressed also in Arabic medicine and, through the translations, in Scholastic medicine. During the 12th c. in the course of studying ethics and law, a new idea of the individual and a new definition of personhood arose, both based on the identification of man with the rational soul. At the end of the century, the De anima of Aristotle began to circulate, a work which presented a totally different notion: the soul is the form of the body (‘the act of an organic body which is potentially alive’), and thus every living creature—man included—is a ‘synol’ (an unique substance), composed of form (soul) and matter (body). What happened then to the survival of the individual soul? Aristotle had never posed such a question in these terms; however, he had stressed that it was impossible to reduce rationality to merely biological terms, when asking whether the intellect (the upper part of the soul, characteristic of man) could ‘have come from the outside’ and been considered somehow ‘divine.’ The philosophers who belonged to one of the monotheistic faiths, when faced with this issue, connected it to the process of acquiring knowledge as described in the De anima itself, and all of them—with the exception only of Averroes and his followers, the so called Latin Averroists, who believed in the unity of the intellect for all mankind—formulated various answers with the intention of saving both the universality of knowledge and individual immortality, through the analysis of the notions of the active and possible intellect found in the De anima and of the interpretations given by the late-antique commentators. The solution proposed by St. Thomas was particularly brilliant, as it succeeded, through an intelligent use of the notion of substance, both in saving the Aristotelian naturalism (with important consequences for ethics and politics) and the idea of the immortal soul, and in using this new anthropology to explain philosophically one of the most difficult dogmas of the faith, namely the resurrection of the body. He argued that the soul-form, having survived the rupture of the unity form-matter at death, would reconstitute, at the end of time, its new glorious body by its own virtue, forming it from pure matter.