18.4 Some Comments on SCG 4,79–97
18.4 Some Comments on SCG 4,79–97
As he says at the outset of the SCG, Aquinas’s concern in this work is to consider how reason, aided by revelation, can reflect on what Christians believe to be true. Aquinas is also intent on taking account of reasons presented to the effect that the Christian religion asks us to believe in a series of falsehoods or impossibilities. In doing so, he covers a great deal of ground and engages with key Christian doctrines and a large range of philosophical questions and topics. In SCG 4,79–97 the doctrines Aquinas touches on include the doctrine of original sin and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In concluding this chapter, therefore, I would like briefly to say something about Aquinas’s treatment of these topics.128
As I have noted, Aquinas views Original Sin as providing a context for the Incarnation.129 He thinks of the Incarnation as dealing with Original Sin. He also thinks of Original Sin as infecting the human race and as leaving people with a problem resolved only by Christ and Christian baptism. And the treatment of Original Sin in the SCG is highly traditional. It reflects what people such as St. Anselm and St. Augustine say on the topic. It also anticipates what the Council of Trent and the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church declare when it comes to Original Sin.
On the other hand, however, the SCG discussion of Original Sin is open to question. I say this because of the way in which it so firmly connects Original Sin with the fall from grace of Adam, considered as a historical individual from whom we have inherited sin and death. This historical emphasis in the SCG’s discussion of Original Sin will pose no problem for Christians who believe in monogenesis and who read the biblical story of Adam and Eve literally. But it will pose a problem for the large number of contemporary scientists who favor an evolutionary over a monogenetic account of human beings. For modern evolutionary thinking about human origins (“paleoanthropology”) denies that there could have been a unique founding pair of humans, “Adam and Eve.” The argument is that the line leading to modern humans (Homo sapiens) broke off from other primates about six million years ago and that our species appeared in Africa about half a million years ago. On this account, humans today reflect the fact that separate groups at different times left Africa and moved to different parts of the world, where, under the influence of natural selection, the different characteristics we see in the human species evolved.130
Someone committed to the position I have just summarized might, of course, well believe that people are sinful creatures. G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) once referred to the doctrine of Original Sin as “the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”131 He meant that it would be mad to deny that we have difficulty distinguishing between right and wrong, and that we seem, as a species, to veer, with remarkable regularity, to bad behavior and to the construction and maintenance of societies full of wrongdoing. However, that people often behave badly only coheres with what Aquinas says about Original Sin. It does not confirm his account of the origin of sin and the connection he makes between sin and death. So when reading the SCG discussion of Original Sin we need to bear in mind the following questions at least: (1) Can we reasonably believe in a historical Adam and Eve? (2) If we cannot, might we still be able to find something believable in what the SCG says about Original Sin?
(1) is actually more difficult to answer than, I presume, most of us take it to be. We live in a culture in which evolutionary accounts of the origin of human beings are generally taken to be broadly correct. Yet, of course, few of us are scientists, and few of us would know where to start when trying to demonstrate that belief in monogenesis has been definitively refuted scientifically. The point I am making here is that if you want rationally to reject the monogenetic picture of human beings that runs through the SCG account of Original Sin, the onus would seem to be on you to be scientifically up to speed on the scientific case against monogenesis. And even if you do the necessary scientific work, you might still find yourself wondering whether science has thoroughly disproved monogenesis since it has been argued that monogenesis is compatible with what contemporary scientists say about our origins. You might find yourself wondering this if, for example, you read something along the lines of Kenneth W. Kemp’s article “Science, Theology, and Monogenesis.”132 Having sympathetically, and in detail, presented accounts of a number of evolutionary theories, Kemp suggests that a respectable scientist need not give up on some version of monogenesis. I, of course, am no respectable scientist, and I am unable to adjudicate when it comes to Adam and Eve and the scientists. But it does seem to me that if you want to pronounce on this matter, you will need to do a fair bit of scientific research, as Kemp has clearly done.
In response to this point, some Christians defending belief in monogenesis will say that their faith requires them to do so. Christians committed to the view that the biblical account of Adam and Eve should be read literally will take this line. Again, some Roman Catholics will hold that they are committed to monogenesis given what the Council of Trent declared concerning Original Sin. For that Council rejected any approach to the topic of Original Sin that denies the historicity of Adam and Eve and the claim that the human race has inherited sin and death from Adam.133
Yet contemporary Old Testament scholars seem fairly agreed that it would be an exegetical error to suppose that the biblical account of Adam and Eve was intended to be read as historical in the sense that we expect biographies to be. And the Roman Catholic Church has, in fact, never officially asserted monogenesis in opposition to evolutionary accounts of the human race.134 Like Aquinas, the Council of Trent speaks of Adam and Eve as if they were historical individuals. But Trent was not attacking any evolutionary theory since theories of evolution did not exist in the sixteenth century. I might add that, in recent years, the teaching office of the Catholic Church seems to have become increasingly open to the idea that people are the result of an evolutionary process. In his encyclical Humani Generis (1950), Pope Pius XII insisted on the truth of the doctrine of Original Sin but also left room for those engaging in research concerning human evolution. Again, in an address on evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences delivered in 1996, Pope John Paul II said (1) that, in Humani Generis, Pius XII affirmed “that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of the faith regarding man and his vocation, provided that we do not lose sight of certain fixed points,” and (2) that “Today, more than a half-century after the appearance of that encyclical, some new findings lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis.”135
So perhaps we might consider reviewing what the SCG says about Original Sin on the supposition that Adam and Eve never existed as historical parents of the human race. I am not claiming that we have to do this since I lack the knowledge that might lead me to support such a claim in a scientifically informed way. And you might think that the Bible always trumps modern science and that it tells us that Adam and Eve were historical individuals. If you say that, however, you are contrasting modern science and the Bible in a way that Aquinas may not have wanted to do were he alive today. There is no knowing what he would have made of what biblical scholars argue now concerning the nature of the Genesis story of Adam and Eve. And he might well have concluded that evolutionary theories concerning the human race have to be taken seriously. He wrote theology while often relying on a number of what are now, I assume, refutable scientific assumptions. He thought, for example, that the sun moves around the earth. He also thought that what he called the “heavenly bodies” are incapable of perishing. And he knew nothing about what we now refer to as the Milky Way. In short, Aquinas, unsurprisingly, was unaware of what we now seem to know about the vastness of the universe, the galaxies in it, and what might have occurred in the universe light-years away. So what would he make of modern science, especially with respect to the notion of Original Sin? I find it hard to believe that he would have dismissed evolutionary theories out of hand since he believes that truth cannot contradict truth and that what we genuinely learn from scientific research should be taken very seriously. Nevertheless, it is impossible to be sure how his theology of Original Sin would read were he alive to develop it now.
However, suppose that we think it reasonable to speculate that he would not be pursuing it with the historical approach to Adam and Eve that he presents in the SCG. In that case, how might he present it? Perhaps along the lines that some theologians have done while knowing the writings of Aquinas very well and while greatly respecting them. Here I think in particular of Timothy McDermott and Herbert McCabe.136 Both of these authors agree that there is no getting away from the idea of human evolution, and both of them agree that we cannot read the account of Adam and Eve in Genesis as historical. On the other hand both of them note that Aquinas thinks of Original Sin as something that infects us just by being born as human beings coming to exist in a world in which there prevails an opposition to what God is all about. And both of them think that we should understand Original Sin in the light of the Incarnation.
The line of thought here is: (1) though people often deny this, it seems evident that we are all drawn into a state of sin just by being born and brought up among creatures who are collectively disposed to sin; (2) it is Christ who presents us with an alternative to this state of alienation from God; (3) Christ did this by showing us that God actually wants us to share in the life of love that constitutes the Trinity, and he did so by willingly accepting and then forgiving what people did to him; (4) the death of Christ shows us what people are capable of as sinners while also declaring God’s love for people.
On this account, we are all infected by sin since all of us come to birth in a world stained by it. Yet, on this account also, we are challenged to accept that God can redeem us by becoming one of us and can, thereby, show us that we can be what Adam, in the Bible, was supposed to be before he sinned. The presiding idea here is that human salvation should not be construed as the wiping out of some particular sin committed in the distant past. It should be thought of as God becoming human and accepting and rescuing people from what they are as prone to sin.
McDermott and McCabe are saying that we are, collectively, in a bad way and that God has offered us the chance of being united with Christ and what he did and said while, in his resurrection, having his life and death endorsed by God the Father. And that is certainly what Aquinas thinks in the SCG as he moves from his treatment of Original Sin to his account of the death of Christ. So perhaps his theology of Original Sin can be separated from his historical assumptions concerning Adam and Eve while leaving his notion of human salvation intact.
18.4.2 The Resurrection of the Body
Aquinas never claims to be able to demonstrate philosophically that we shall be raised from the dead corporeally. He does say that the souls of the dead will be permanently frustrated without being reunited to what is bodily and that this fact coheres with belief in bodily resurrection and gives us some reason to believe in it. But he does not claim that human resurrection in the future can be proved to occur.
Such philosophical modesty is, perhaps, appropriate since it is hard to see what argument can philosophically demonstrate that the dead shall be raised. It has often been said that the resurrection of Jesus is a well-established fact. But even if we agree with this conclusion, as many do not, nothing follows about the resurrection of all human beings—not without a number of theological premises, anyway. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Aquinas derives his confidence that the dead shall be raised from what he takes to be divine revelation. Yet why should he focus so emphatically on bodily resurrection? Why not, instead, think of life after death as nothing more than a matter of ongoing nonmaterial consciousness, the survival of a disembodied mind or soul?
Many people, some of whom self-identify as Christians, seem to think of life after death in nonmaterial terms. This position, however, conflicts with standard Christian teaching, which tells us that, like Christ, we shall be physically raised from the dead (see 1 Corinthians 15: 12–18). It is, of course, not Christian teaching that bodily resurrection amounts to the mere resuscitation of a corpse. The New Testament depicts the resurrected Christ as having abilities that no ordinary human body has. He appears and then vanishes (see Luke 24:36–50 and 1 Corinthians 15:4–9). He can miraculously enter a locked room (see John 20:19). Again, when St. Paul talks about the resurrection of all people he appeals to the notion of transformation. Although clearly not much interested in speculation concerning resurrected bodies (see 1 Corinthians 15:35–36), Paul compares our resurrected bodies with what springs from a seed that is planted in earth (see 1 Corinthians 15:37–38). He goes on to say that, when it comes to the resurrection of the dead, “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.”137 With all of that said, however, the New Testament approach to life after death focuses on it being bodily, not the ongoing existence of a nonmaterial mind. It is not therefore surprising that Christians have never been asked to believe in the “immortality of the soul” in the sense in which philosophers like Plato seem to have done: as the ongoing nonmaterial existence of what constitutes a human person. In any case, the notion that we live after death only immaterially is questionable unless we assume that a human being actually is something nonmaterial.
Here, once again, we return to the notion of substance dualism to which I referred in chapter 11. According to this, we are essentially nonmaterial things, which implies bodily death presents no obstacle to belief in life after death. For if I am something the essence of which is incorporeal, then the corruption of my body does not entail that my life is thereby ended. Yet is it reasonable to suppose that we are essentially noncorporeal? Arguably not. For, as Aquinas notes, we so manifestly seem to be bodily even if we are not merely material (see chapter 11 here). Whatever else we might be, we are surely objects on which biologists can get their hands. That, presumably, is why we can refer to ourselves as, for example, seeing, hearing, and feeling: notions bound up with bodily existence. As Peter Geach observes:
How do we eventually use such words as “see,” “hear,” “feel,” when we have gotten into the way of using them? We do not exercise these concepts only so as to pick out cases of seeing and the rest in our separate world of sense experience; on the contrary, these concepts are used in association with a host of other concepts relating, e.g., to the physical characteristics of what is seen and the behaviour of those who do see. In saying this I am not putting forward a theory, but just reminding you of very familiar features in the everyday use of the verb “to see” and related expressions; our ordinary talk about seeing would cease to be intelligible if there were cut out of it such expressions as “I can’t see, it’s too far off,” “I caught his eye,” “Don’t look round,” etc. … I am not asking you to believe that “to see” is itself a word for a kind of behaviour. But the concept of seeing can be maintained only because it has threads of connection with these other non-psychological concepts; break enough threads and the concept of seeing collapses.138
Being alive as a human being is not to be equated with being essentially immaterial, notwithstanding the arguments of philosophers who have said that all of us are essentially immaterial things. So it is perhaps to Aquinas’s credit that he recognizes this in what he writes about resurrection in SCG 4.
Some people, of course, will argue that the notion of all human beings being raised from the dead is absurd. As I have shown, in SCG 4,80 Aquinas notes seven arguments to this effect. And the arguments have force. But Aquinas has replies to them that are also forceful.
For example, it seems reasonable to suggest that if God is omnipotent, then human resurrection is possible if the notion of human resurrection does not involve any logical impossibility. That we might not be able to understand how God can raise the dead surely does not prove that to raise the dead lies outside God’s power.
Again, we might sympathize with Aquinas’s claim that human resurrection must involve material continuity between people before death and people as raised from the dead if the dead as raised are personally identical with people who have died. The obvious objection to this claim is that resurrected human bodies cannot be materially identical with the bodies of those who have died since the bodies of those who have died corrupt and turn into other things. As Aquinas notes, however, material identity is not required for personal identity even if personal identity over time requires material continuity. Hence his observation: “People are not numerically different at different ages, although not everything which is in them materially in one state is also there in another. In this way, then, this is not a requirement of people’s arising with numerical identity: that they should assume again whatever has been in them during the whole time of their lives.”139 This point is reiterated to some effect by Geach. He writes:
If it is difference of matter that makes two bodies different, it may seem to follow that a body can maintain its identity only if at least some identifiable matter remains in it all the time; otherwise it is no more the same body than the wine in a cask that is continuously emptied and refilled is the same wine. But just this is the fallacy: it does not follow, if difference in a certain respect at a certain time suffices to show non-identity, that sameness in the respect over a period of time is necessary to identity. Thus, Sir John Cutler’s famous pair of stockings were the same pair all the time, although they started as silk and by much mending ended as worsted; people have found it hard to see this, because if at a given time there is a silk pair and also a worsted pair then there are two pairs. Again, it is clear that the same man may be in Birmingham at noon and in Oxford at 7 p.m. even though a man in Birmingham and a man in Oxford at a given time must be two different men. Once formulated, the fallacy is obvious, but it might be deceptive if not formulated.140
You might think that the objection to belief in human resurrection based on cannibalism is pretty decisive. But it really is not. For, as Aquinas says, we do not have to assume that our resurrected bodies will be materially identical with everything that has been part of them prior to our death. What seems to be more important is material continuity. It has been suggested that continuity of memory suffices for personal identity and that if, after my death, someone is around who has my memories, then I live again.141 But that suggestion is not cogent. As Joseph Butler (1692–1752) famously said, memory presupposes personal identity and cannot constitute it. Also, the attempt to secure personal identity only with reference to memory falls foul of an argument presented by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–1796). If I am who I am because of my memory, says Reid, then we might end up ludicrously affirming that someone may be, and at the same time not be, the person who did a particular action. He continues:
Suppose a brave officer to have been flogged when a boy at school for robbing an orchard, to have taken a standard from the enemy in his first campaign, and to have been made a general in advanced life; suppose, also, which must be admitted to be possible, that, when he took the standard, he was conscious of his having been flogged at school, and that, when made a general, he was conscious of his having taken the standard, but had absolutely lost the consciousness of his flogging. These things being supposed, it follows … that he who was flogged at school is the same person who took the standard, and that he who took the standard is the same person who was made a general. Whence it follows, if there be any truth in logic, that the general is the same person with him who was flogged at school. But the general’s consciousness does not reach so far back as his flogging; therefore … he is not the person who was flogged. Therefore the general is, and at the same time is not, the same person with him who was flogged at school.142
So one can see why it might be thought that if we are to live after death, then some bodily continuity is required, meaning that if we look forward to life after death, we should be thinking in terms of resurrection, as Aquinas does.
As I have shown, he believes that the resurrection of people will occur at the end of the world and with the Last Judgment. Some philosophers have argued that we should think of our resurrection as immediately following our death since this would get rid of certain worries concerning personal identity. If we are raised just when we die, then why should we doubt that it is we who are raised? Yet the idea that we are raised exactly when we die seems to smack more of the idea that resurrection is the resuscitation of a corpse rather than the transformation to glory of which St. Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians. It also seems to conflict with the fact that we have a lot of dead and buried people around us. If we can exhume a human body, then what sense can it make to say that the remains of the person we are exhuming has already been resurrected? It has been suggested that, when we die, God might resurrect us somewhere while leaving behind a body that looks as we did when we died.143 This view, though, seems questionably to suppose that God can deceive us on a grand scale. Anyway, Aquinas does not concern himself with the notion of immediate resurrection after death. Why not? Because, I presume, and if he ever thought of it, he takes it to be out of accord with what the New Testament has to say about the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of all people.144
Yet might it not be reasonably claimed that what Aquinas says about human resurrection rests on antiquated views about the universe? It seems to do so given the way it is connected with his views about the heavenly bodies and what he takes to be physically “above” them. You might also think that what Aquinas says about resurrection in SCG 4 should be rejected because of what scientists now tend, though with conflicting voices, to predict about the end of the universe. For their expectations seem to be very different from those of SCG 4,97. Aquinas looks forward to an end of the world marked by a cessation of movement in certain heavenly bodies. Today, scientists talk about entropy, expansion, and cooling down. Or they talk about a “big crunch” and gravity leading to high density and high temperature.
However, we surely do not need to suppose that Aquinas’s antiquated cosmology renders untenable what he is fundamentally striving to say at the end of the SCG. With the best cosmology available to him, he offers a picture of what even he must have thought to be unpicturable and unpredictable on empirical grounds. His eschatology, his account of the end of the world, is not futurology designed to provide us with a travel guide to the hereafter.145 What motivates him when turning to eschatology is biblical talk about human resurrection and God bringing about a new world with graced and incorruptible human beings united to God. And, as Stephen T. Davis observes, such talk is not to be ruled out on scientific speculations concerning what is likely to happen in the universe over time. In Davis’s words:
The concern would be entirely appropriate if atheism or deism were correct, but resurrection points the way for us here. Christians do not hold that the Resurrection of Jesus occurred, or that the general resurrection will occur, as natural consequences of the laws of physics. Rather, the idea is that, at a certain point, God will miraculously intervene and bring about an event that, absent divine intervention, would not have occurred. The universe is not a closed system. So Christians should not envision the end of all things as the nature and predictable result of the operations of the laws of nature. They should see the eschaton as the result of a mighty act of God.146
This is pretty much what Aquinas seems to think.147 But, we might wonder, why he should be as concerned with resurrection as he clearly is in SCG 4. For is resurrection not redundant given what he says about ultimate human happiness in SCG 3? As I have shown, he there maintains that the vision of God is what alone truly fulfills us (see SCG 3,25–37 and chapter 3, sections 2 and following here). According to Aquinas, we are made perfectly happy only by contemplating God. In that case, though, what can be added to our happiness by bodily resurrection? In connection with this question it is important to remember that Aquinas believes that the souls of the dead can enjoy the vision of God and that many of them do. So what of significance can be added to them by the resurrection of their bodies?
That nothing can thereby be added has been argued by John Morreall.148 According to him, if we can be beatified on death, we can be perfectly happy without our bodies being resurrected, which means that the notion of resurrection positively conflicts with that of the beatific vision. “If the blessed in heaven are perfectly happy right now in their condition as souls,” he says, “it is hard to see what purpose the resurrection would serve. … If heaven does consist in our enjoyment of the beatific vision, the resurrection of the body would simply be otiose.”149 If Morreall is right here, there would seem to be something wrong with Aquinas’s emphasis on the importance of resurrection. Indeed, Aquinas himself appears to be aware of an objection to belief in human resurrection resembling that of Morreall. In Summa Theologiae 1a2ae,4,6 he references an argument according to which our final happiness consists in seeing the divine essence (in visione divinae essentiae), an activity to which the body contributes nothing (nihil exhibet corpus).
Considered as an objection to Aquinas on resurrection, however, Morreall’s conclusion is misguided since it rests on the view that people should be identified with their souls, which Aquinas does not accept.150 Morreall asserts that Christian belief in the human soul is dualistic and Platonic.151 Yet Aquinas is not Platonic or dualistic when it comes to what it is to be a human individual. As I have explained, he considers the human soul to be part of a body/soul composite, not a particular human being (see chapter 11 here). Unsurprisingly, therefore, he believes that the souls of the dead are not human beings and are seriously lacking prior to resurrection. Even if they see and delight in God, they exist in a state that is unnatural for them. That is why Aquinas thinks of resurrection as important. He holds that if we are soul/body composites, then we are not there in the fullness of our being without resurrection. What is there is what is but a part of us lacking that which it was created to inform. If I am my soul, then I might have all that I need to be happy come the beatific vision. But Aquinas does not think that I am my soul. And even if he did, he could argue that bodily resurrection might add something to my eternal happiness. For, as Richard Creel suggests, even a soul/body dualist ought to concede that the happiness of our souls can be increased by becoming connected again to our bodies.152 We do not have to think of perfect happiness as equivalent to unsurpassable happiness since one can be perfectly happy without enjoying happiness that could not be possibly be augmented; so God could make something perfectly happy without making it unsurpassably happy.153 Again, just as spices can enrich or enhance good and wholesome food, bodily pleasure might enhance the lives of people considered as essentially incorporeal.154 Even on an austerely dualistic account of people as nonbodily things connected to bodies they have and as surviving the death of these bodies, there would seem to be room for additional happiness should they again become able to enjoy on a bodily basis.
Having presented his account of the final state of the world (SCG 4,97), Aquinas ends the Summa Contra Gentiles on a biblical note. He cites two scriptural texts and piously endorses them. We read:
And hence, the saying of the Apocalypse (21:1): “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.” And Isaiah (65:17–18): “Behold I create new heavens, and a new earth: and the former things shall not be in remembrance and they shall not come upon the heart, but you shall be glad and rejoice forever.” Amen.155
This signing off may seem abrupt. One might look for a lengthier conclusion, one in which Aquinas sums up the Summa Contra Gentiles while brooding on its virtues and those of its author. Yet Aquinas’s writings are conspicuously lacking in self-promotion and a display of his character. They typically present a series of arguments and then fall silent. In this respect, the final brief paragraph of the Summa Contra Gentiles is only what readers familiar with Aquinas would expect from him. As Anthony Kenny has said, the writings of Aquinas are the product of “a teacher invisible, standing out of the light so that others may see.”156