Immortality of the soul, part II. (Apologetics).

The New Testament teaches us clearly that the human soul is immortal, and this teaching is reinforced by the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. But is this gift of immortality a supernatural gift or a gift which is part of our very nature? A first attempt to answer this question is that there is one indication that by our nature we are destined for eternity even if this indication may not prove our immortality definitively.

This indication is that an adult human being has a conscience. It commands and forbids and, we naturally expect, is warning us that there is a guardian of the moral order and that good will be rewarded and evil punished. But this reward is not meted out uniformly in this world, which means that a next world awaits us. What the rewards or punishments are, and whether they are everlasting or perhaps dependent on a second (or third, etc.) chance we aren't sure right away. But we would be contradictory beings were we not immortal.

What St. Thomas Aquinas alleges as a strict proof of our soul's immortality is that we are able to think, to conceive general ideas which abstract from the here and now. The senses present this world to us in its particularity, but we are easily able to transcend this particularity. According to Aristotle and Aquinas, general natures are rendered particular by the matter which individuates them. And our intellect can de-materialize them, strip them of their matter, and consider them in their immaterial generality. Our intellect thus has an activity in which matter does not share. Accordingly the intellectual soul is not dependent on its body for this activity, and therefore for its existence either. Thus it survives death and is immortal.

Another sign of this is that we can think of eternity. We desire happiness; perhaps this is the strongest of all our desires. And we can desire eternal happiness. Indeed, we automatically desire eternal happiness. After we have established the existence of God, we can wonder whether God would have made us with this desire were its fulfillment not possible (Summa Theologiae, I, 75, 6).

The earlier Christian philosophers tended to side somewhat with Plato in saying that the natural knowledge of the soul after death is superior to its knowledge in this life. But this position raises the problem why man has a body if he acts better naturally without it. It was St. Thomas Aquinas who insisted that the natural knowledge of the soul after death is inferior to its natural knowledge during life. At death it loses the means of knowing which it had in life but, since it is immortal, it must have some knowing function. For Aquinas it can know in a new but inferior way. Thus he safeguards both the immortality of the soul and the goodness of the body. Of course the supernatural knowledge of the Beatific Vision is vastly superior to any natural knowledge, but it is a question here of only natural knowledge (Summa Theologica, I, 89, 1).

Aquinas's position helps us to understand better why human bodies are resurrected at the Last Judgment. They are part of our full being, and the resurrection of our bodies completes our nature. In answer to those of a Platonic bent who think that our natural knowledge is better after death than before, and who therefore disvalue the human body, we can point out that original sin has wounded our nature but it has not disvalued our bodies. Indeed, one punishment for original sin is death, which means that death is an evil, and that therefore the body is a good thing. We can also find a corroboration of this in the fact that the Son of God took a human body to himself.

It is a cardinal teaching of Aquinas that the life of grace builds on our natural life. One consequence of this is that our natural powers are perfected by our supernatural powers. Our natural knowledge of God is made richer by our supernatural knowledge of him. The eternal happiness to which we are naturally destined is tremendously increased by the Beatific Vision which is our supernatural destiny. No natural truth is denied by supernatural truth. And, in the case of naturally known religious truths, such as the immortality of the human soul, they are made more certain and are enriched with a more complete explanation.

Father Kennedy is a priest or the Congregation of St. Basil and a long-time student of philosphy.