THE EARLY CHRISTAINS

The first Christians expected an imminent apocalypse.(31) The Jewish followers of Jesus believed that he was the Messiah of Israel, and that he would soon return to them as Lord of the Judgment, bring an end to this world, and resurrect the dead－ i.e., reconstitute their psycho-physical organisms. Their concept of the human being was still the traditional Hebrew one, essentially un-Hellenised, of a psycho-physical unity.(32) However, as more and more Christian converts were Greeks, and especially after the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the central Church there, Hellenic dualism began to gain ground within the Christian faith. The Jewish eschatology of Last Judgment and resurrection of the dead now had to exist side by side with a more uniquely Christian eschatology of an immaterial soul of each person being judged individually at death and given everlasting reward or punishment, without waiting for the apocalypse and the resurrection of the body. How this development came about, and how the two eschatologies came to be reconciled, is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to note here the process was a gradual one.(33) Even St. Paul, who considered his own mission as towards the Gentiles, never adopted the body and soul dichotomy of the Phaedo entirely. Although his attitude towards the body or flesh (soma and sarx respectively) was ambivalent, and he eventually came to distinguish between a lower, natural body (soma psychikon), and a nobler, spiritual body (soma pneumatikon), and left some hints of a body (soma) ,soul (psyche) , and spirit (pneuma) trichotomy, the soma was the self. He did not elaborate on body versus soul, but rather, on different tendencies within the self, the soma. (34)

THE PATRISTIC PERIOD

It was not until the Patristic period of doctrinal development that there began to emerge a clear distinction between body and soul. Athenagoras (fl. 177), self-styled Christian philosopher of Athens, first made the point of an immortal soul surviving the death of the body, and an eventual reunion of the two at the resurrection. St. Irenaeus attacked the Platonic idea of trans-migration of souls and their divinity, but insisted on an incorporeal, immortal soul, distinct from, but united to, a mortal body. Origen was the first among the Fathers to formulate the idea of the soul as a spiritual, rational substance. He also held that all souls of intelligent beings were created at once, in the beginning, pure, equal, and alike, and were put to the test by God. Except for the soul of Christ, all fell to some extent, and became angels, demons, or human souls. St. Gregory of Nyssa objected to this theory of creation, and held that the body and soul of each human were brought into existence together, but he did not know how. Nemesius (whom the Scholastics wrongly identified with Gregory) wrote the first summa of Christian psychology, the De natura hominis (ca. 400), in which he rejected the definitions of the soul of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, and concluded that the soul was an incorporeal substance, subsistent in itself, not dependent on anything else for its being, yet intended for union with the body. He was unable to answer satisfactorily how the soul and the body were joined together. Tertullian tried to solve this problem by urging that Adam's soul alone was created by God, while all other human souls came into being by the act of biological generation. This 'traducian' theory (Adam as tradux or 'shoot') was never officially adopted by the Church.(35)

All these theories on the soul grew up in the Hellenistic world in the form of Christian polemics against:－

1. the Sceptics, Epicureans, and Stoics, who did not believe in life after death;
2. the Gnostics, who held an extreme dualism of body and soul, perhaps derived from Orphism and Platonism; and
3. the pagan neo-Platonists.

Of these three, the last had the most influence on Christian thought.

The most important, though not the earliest, neo-Platonist was Plotinus, a third-century Egyptian. His philosophical system was built around his psychology. The soul for him was an incorporeal reality which gave form to the body but owed nothing in return. With the soul were all the metaphysical qualities of pure intellect, unity, moving and vitalising power, and even matter. Among these, the greatest was intellect, and intellectual self-knowledge was the highest mode of subjective life. The human intellect bridges the realms of matter and mind, of which the latter was superior and illuminated. In fact, the intellect was one of the higher emanations from the First Mover, the One that is pure Being, or God, and by relying on intellect, the soul can free itself from corporeality and begin the long ascent to the One. Thus, for Plotinus, the soul is a created divinity, a part of the Universal Soul, whose destiny it is to return to merge into the One. This soul cannot sin or suffer, and has no individual mortality. Moreover, the body-soul dichotomy is absolute. It is obviously not a Christian conception.(36)

ST. AUGUSTINE

Unlike Plotinus, St. Augustine's Platonism was a Christian one. For Plotinus, all that matters is the flight of the soul to the One; historical events on earth are of no consequence. For Augustine, on the contrary, history has a goal, namely, the salvation of human kind by the Incarnation of God on earth. Worldly events therefore have eternal meaning. Furthermore, since God is all good, everything made by God must also be good, and that includes this world and human bodies. On the other hand, Augustine is true to the Platonic position that the ultimate good is spiritual, and is to be sought in the intelligible world of the soul, not the material world of the body. Hence, he is anxious to show the superiority of the soul to the body; and he defines the soul as a rational substance equipped to rule the body. By defining the soul as a substance, he asserts its independence from the body. He also borrows, with adaptation, Plato's proofs in the Phaedo of the immortality of the soul. However, he is also careful to say that neither is the human soul a part of the divine substance, nor is there only one soul for all of humanity; the former because the divine substance is indivisible, and the latter because each human has different and distinct lives and actions.

Now, if Augustine's definition of the soul guaranteed its independence from the body and its immortality, it accentuates another problem inherent in any dichotomous formulation: What is a human being Augustine's answer to that question is that a human being is a rational soul using a rational soul using a mortal and earthly body. The soul uses the body to keep in touch with the world of material objects and sensations, and it gives life to the body by mediating between it and the divine Ideas. But if the model is that of someone using an instrument or tool, the unity of the human being is called into doubt. Scripturally, the human being is a unity; further, retribution on the immortal soul after death would not be fair unless body and soul acted as a whole during life. This problem of the unity of the human being was one of the unsettled questions bequeathed by Augustine to the Middle Ages, and which none but St. Thomas Aquinas could resolve.(37)

ST. THOMAS QUINAS

Just as St. Augustine Christianised neo-Platonism, St. Thomas Aquinas has often been said to have "baptised" Aristotle. If in Augustine's thought, the fullness of Christian faith was always in advance of his philosophy, Aquinas was able to assert the independence of philosophy as well as its instrumentality for rationalising that faith.

Aquinas's conception of the human is basically the hylomorphism (from hyle, 'matter', and morphe, 'form') of Aristotle. He defines the soul as "the first actuality of a natural organic body having life in potentiality"; and as "the first principle by which we live, sense, move, and understand". However, these definitions have to be seen in a broader framework to show his solution to the problems bequeathed by Augustine.

Aquinas posits a hierarchical universe of actuality and potentiality. The more something is actualised, the higher it is in the hierarchy; the more it remains potentiality, the lower it is. Matter is potentiality, form is actuality. Undifferentiated matter is pure potentiality; it is the lowest on the scale. God is pure actuality; It is the highest. Only God is fully actualised; only God exists by Its own essence (God is, simply because of What It is.) Everything else exists because its potentiality for existence is actualised to a less complete degree.

Now, the human being stands in the middle of this hierarchy. It is composed of a certain material substance, and a form which actualises the material substance into a living body. This form is the soul. Since the soul can perform certain of its operations in which the body has no part, it must subsist by itself; i.e., it is a substance, an immaterial substance. As a substantial form, the human soul is higher than those forms which are wholly embedded in matter, such as the soul of a dog or the form of a chair, but lower than the angels which are forms completely separated from matter. The human soul possesses the degree of being that its nature, its location on the hierarchy calls for. Unlike an angel, it does not have enough actuality to attain its perfection in a separated state. It is incomplete in itself; it is a simple intellect whose light is so faint that it needs a body to perform most of its operations. At the same time, the body is just potentiality that requires a form to actualise it. So body and soul each need the other for its own completion. The human being that results from such a union of matter and form is a substantial union, not an accidental one. It is not a mixed being, because each component still subsists. It is neither an angel locked in a material prison, nor a spiritual motor driving a material shell, because the soul needs the body to complete itself. Both components are made by the one true God and are therefore both good, and both necessary. The human being is hence not one being made up of two other beings, because it is only the soul, the form, that actualises, that provides the act-of-being (esse), for the body, the potentiality. So there is only one act-of-being for the human unity, one being of two distinct substances (but not two real subjects or distinct existences). It follows that there can be only one substantial form or one soul for this human unity－a single indivisible soul that has all the rational, sentient, and nutritive powers, not three separate souls for various functions. And if the soul is indivisible, it cannot have been derived by division from the souls of one's parents. It can only have been individually created by God from nothing.

In this way, Aquinas guarantees the unity of the human being without endangering the immortality of the soul. The soul is immortal because all substantial forms are by definition immortal or incorruptible. Since the soul's existence does not depend on the body, but is derived from God, it cannot corrupt with the death of the body. Further, since the act-of-being and individuation of a thing are always found together, and both are therefore found in the soul, the human being does not lose its individuation by the death of the body. Finally, since the human being is a unity of soul and body, and neither is complete without the other, a reunion in the apocalyptic resurrection is not only reasonable but also necessary. Thus, Aquinas succeeds in completely harmonising Hellenic concepts with Hebrew eschatology. His is still a dualistic view of the human being, but it manages to avoid any extreme form of dichotomy.(38)

THE MAGISTERIUM

By the early 17th century, doctrines on the soul had received many official definitions by the Christian Church. While many of these definitions were not established as infallible dogma, they were issued by popes and councils in exercise of the magisterium of the universal Church, and constituted positions from which no Catholic might lightly depart. These positions, as summarised in the systematic index of the Enchiridion symbolorum, included the following: the human soul is not a part of the divine substance; it is created by God from nothing; it did not pre-exist, and is not generated by parents; it does not evolve from the sensitive to the rational; it is a substance; it is not one for all humans, but one for each; it is not naturally either good or bad; it is rational and intellectual, but is not by itself an object evident to cognition; it is immortal; it is united with the body, not accidentally, but is the form of the body truly as such and in the act-of-being; it is endowed with freedom, which can be proved from Scripture as well as from reason.(39) Such, in the main, was the doctrine of the soul which the Jesuit missionaries brought to Ming China.(40) Such too, was the basis of the pre-Vatican II teachings handed to us in the form of questions and answers on the nature of humankind. Its indebtedness to, and imprisonment by, Greek philosophy is evident. Where do we go from here?

31. Brandon, Man and his destiny, op. cit., 204-208.

32.Brandon, ibid., 208-211. J.A.T. Robinson, The body, a study in Pauline theology (London, 1966), 11-16.Gelin, op. cit., 23-24.

33.Brandon, ibid., 211-236.

34.Ibid., 211-224. Robinson, op. cit., 17-33.

35.Brandon, ibid., 224-236. New Cath. Ency., XIII. 452-455.

36.A. Hilary Armstrong, St. Augustine and Christian Platonism (Villanova, 1967), 4-9. Baker, op. cit., 94-96. Thomas Whittaker, The Neo-Platonists (4th ed., Cambridge, 1928), 40-53.

37.Etienne Gilson, The Christian philosophy of St. Augustine (NY, 1960), 44-55. F. Coppleston, S.J., A history of medieval philosophy (NY, 1972), 42-43. Armstrong, op. cit., 4-17.

38.Etienne Gilson, The Christian philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (NY. 1956). 174-199. Coppleston, ibid., 186-189. H.D. Gardeil, Introduction to the philosophy of St. Thomas (London, 1956), III: Psychology, 5-7, 14-42. A.C. Pegis, St. Thomas and the problem of the soul in the 13th century (Toronto,1934).

39.H.J.D. Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum: definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, edited by J.B. Umberg, S.J. (Friburg, 1937), 'Index systematicus, VI-d, Anima humana '

40.Ai Ju-lueh (Giulio Aleni), S.J., Hsing-hsueh tsu shu (Hangchow, 1623; Shanghai, 1873), is the earliest and most complete example. Cf. the Jesuit edition of Aristotle's works published at Coimbra, Portugal, in the late 16th century, entitled Commentarii collegii conimbricensis e Societate Jesu (Vatican Library microfilms).