Thomas Aquinas: Soul and Intellect


Supplementary Translations:

Aquinas In 3 Sent. d. 5, q.3, a.2, resp.

 

Supplementary Translations:

Aquinas In 3 Sent. d. 5, q.3, a.2, resp.


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Aquinas, In 3 Sent. d.5, q.3, a.2, resp. in

Scriptum Super Sententiis,v.3, ed. Moos (Paris 1933), pp. 206-7:


109. I respond that it should be said regarding the union of the soul to the body that there was a twofold opinion among the ancients. /    

     There was one which holds that the soul is united to the body as a complete being to a complete being (ens completum enti completo), so that it would be in the body as the sailor is in the ship. Hence, as Gregory of Nyssa says, Plato held that the human being is not something constituted from soul and body, but rather the soul is clothed with the body (corpore induta).  According to this the whole personality of a human being would consist in the soul, to the extent that the separated soul could truly be called the human being, as Hugo of St. Victor says. According to this opinion what the Master [scil. Lombard] says would be true, that the soul is a person when it is separate <from the body>.

110. But this opinion cannot stand, because in this way the body would come to the soul in the way of an accident.  Hence, this name human being — the meaning of which is soul and body — would not signify <something> one per se; and so it would not be in the genus of substance.

111. Aristotle has a different opinion which all the moderns follow, that the soul is united to the body as a form of matter (anima unitur corpori sicut forma materiae). Hence, the soul is part of the human nature, and not some nature in its own right (non natura quaedam per se). And because the notion of <being> a part is contrary to the notion of a person, as was said, for this reason the separated soul cannot be called a person, because, although the separated <soul> is not a part in act, nevertheless it has a nature such that it is a part.