St. Thomas Aquinas on Death and the Separated Soul

Abstract

Since St. Thomas Aquinas holds that death is a substantial change, a popular current interpretation of his anthropology must be mistaken. According to that interpretation -the 'survivalist' view -St. Thomas holds that we human beings survive our deaths, constituted solely by our souls in the interim between death and resurrection. This paper argues that St. Thomas must have held the 'corruptionist' view: the view that human beings cease to exist at their deaths. Certain objections to the corruptionist view are also met.We humans die. Afterwards, we either exist, or do not exist. In this paper, I discuss St. Thomas Aquinas's view on the matter. I argue that St. Thomas holds unequivocally that after our deaths we do not exist -not until the resurrection, at any rate. I will call this interpretation of Aquinas the 'corruptionist view.' The paper starts with a little bit of scene-setting, but after those preliminaries are taken care of, my argument is embarrassingly simple. I can't help that: it seems to me that when we consider the nature of death in Aquinas, my conclusion follows straightaway.p apq_1379 587.. 599 Despite my convictions about that, other philosophers have recently offered some very clever arguments in favor of an alternative interpretation of St. Thomas. These philosophers -notably, Eleonore Stump, David Oderberg, Christopher Brown and Jason Eberl 1 -claim that St. Thomas held we humans do survive our deaths. After our death, we are constituted (or composed) merely by our souls, rather than by our souls plus our bodies. I cannot treat all of their arguments here. 2 But if my arguments here are correct, then one can conclude either that St. Thomas was hopelessly muddled on the issue -holding both the view that I attribute to him, and the alternative -or, much more likely, that there must be something wrong with arguments in favor of this alternative, which I will call the 'survivalist view.'

How to believe in immortality

“…9.For an influential survivalist interpretation of Aquinas, see Stump (2012). For an influential corruptionist interpretation, see Toner (2009 and 2010). See also the following for the ongoing debate: Oderberg (2012); Nevitt (2014), (2016); Spencer (2014); Brower (2017), 279–310; De Haan and Dahm (2019); Skrzypek (2020); Rooney (2021); .…”

Death as Material Kenosis: A Thomistic Proposal

“… The literature is vast. For corruptionism, see Toner (); for survivalism, see Eberl (). For further bibliography on the debate, see Toner (: 135), footnotes 1 and 2.…”

The problems of life after death

“…12 For those who put forward a survivalist view, see Eberl (2009Eberl ( , 2010, Oderberg (2009), Brown (2005, and Stump (2006). 13 For those who put forward a corruptionist view, see Nevitt (2014), Toner (2010), Pasnau (2002), and Davies (1993). 14 See, for example, Merricks (2001) and Mugg and Turner (2017).…”