Aquinas and the Soul

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What does Aquinas mean when he says that the soul is the form of the body? I’ve also found this in the Catechism. I’m not sure I understand it.
 
ChristIsTheWay said:
What does Aquinas mean when he says that the soul is the form of the body? I’ve also found this in the Catechism. I’m not sure I understand it.
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Aristotelian science held to a division between form and matter. Everything was made of a combination of form and matter. Matter made it material (excuse the redundancy), form made that object distinct from others. So a chair, like a horse, was made of matter, but they each had different substantial form that made them distinct.

Some people then asked how this applied to man, since man is both body and soul. do the body and soul each have matter and a separate substantial form? But the soul was supposed to be immaterial. So what Aquinas did was call the soul, the substantial form of the body. The body was the matter, but the soul gave form to the body and made us human, and more so, individual humans.

This had some relevance for the resurrection of the body since some people wonder if we have to be raised in our old bodies, or if we are raised in different bodies, will we be the same people. But since the soul is the form of the body, what gives us identity and makes us individuals, it does not matter what matter we are made of, since out soul guards our personality.
 
Is matter being used in a similar sense to the “matter” of physics? Also, what is a “form?” I am not sure I understand what is meant by that term or the term “substantial form.” I know very little about philosophy and its associated concepts, terminology, etc.
 
What does Aquinas mean when he says that the soul is the form of the body?

Are you working from a specific quote? What is it, so that we can see the context in which Aquinas’s remark is made?
 
Charlemagne_II said:
What does Aquinas mean when he says that the soul is the form of the body?

Are you working from a specific quote? What is it, so that we can see the context in which Aquinas’s remark is made?
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I am not working with a specific quote from Aquinas. From the Catechism:

365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.

I’ve read on a couple of websites that Aquinas believed that the soul is the form of the body.

Here: aquinasonline.com/Topics/soul.html

I am told the basic idea originates from Aristotle: faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/psyche.htm
 
Not sure what to make of that.

Here is C.S. Lewis’ take on body and soul.

“You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

The body perishes. The soul lives on. That is very Platonic … but then Plato was supposed to have had a profound influence on the early Fathers, especially Augustine.

If the body and soul are unitive, they are unitive in this world, and will be restored to unity at the Last Judgment. At least that is what I was taught in my youth by the good sisters. 👍
 
I seem to recall having read somewhere that Aquinas also said something along the lines of “I am not my soul.” Again, I am not entirely sure what he means, or if he even did say something along those lines.
 
ChristIsTheWay said:
I seem to recall having read somewhere that Aquinas also said something along the lines of “I am not my soul.” Again, I am not entirely sure what he means, or if he even did say something along those lines.
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Aquinas was concerned with the resurrection of the body. He wanted a way to show that a human being is not just his soul, or just his body. Rather, both together make up a complete person.

For our purposes, yes, matter means the same to a thomist as to the modern physicist. So the “matter” part of this question is simple enough. But everything is made of matter, so the question is what makes some things distinct from others? Aquinas, following Aristotle, believed that everything is made up of form and matter. The form shaped the matter and made it distinct. A rock had the form of a rock that was responsible for shaping its matter into the form of a rock.

Now Aquinas thought that everything was made up of form or matter. But then what of people? Is the human body made of form and matter? Is the human soul made of form or matter? He found the simplest answer to say that the soul itself is the form of the body. This let him avoid the platonic notion that the soul doesn’t really need the body. Rather, since the soul is the form of the body, Aquinas was able to use this to show how the Resurrection of the body was necessary because the human person, as a soul alone, was incomplete.
 
Charlemagne_II said:
Not sure what to make of that.

Here is C.S. Lewis’ take on body and soul.

“You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”

The body perishes. The soul lives on. That is very Platonic … but then Plato was supposed to have had a profound influence on the early Fathers, especially Augustine.

If the body and soul are unitive, they are unitive in this world, and will be restored to unity at the Last Judgment. At least that is what I was taught in my youth by the good sisters. 👍
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This is one of my least favorate Lewis quotes. C.S. Lewis seems to have had some wacky ideas on the soul in general, including a kind of preexistence of it (see The Great Divorce). Don’t get me wrong, I love C.S. Lewis, and I love Plato, but sometimes both were too Platonic for their own good.

You are not a soul and you are not a body; you are a composit being of body (physical matter) and spiritual soul (substantial form).
 
Aelred_Minor said:
This is one of my least favorate Lewis quotes. C.S. Lewis seems to have had some wacky ideas on the soul in general, including a kind of preexistence of it (see The Great Divorce). Don’t get me wrong, I love C.S. Lewis, and I love Plato, but sometimes both were too Platonic for their own good.

You are not a soul and you are not a body; you are a composit being of body (physical matter) and spiritual soul (substantial form).
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I’ve read the great divorce, i would definitely not say that he believed in the pre-existence of the soul in any way at all.

That being said, he does seem to tend toward a platonism about the soul sometimes, but on the other hand, he is a firm believer in the resurrection of the body and new creation (see his book Miracles, especially chapter 16).

I agree though, this isn’t one of my preferred quotes, just because it could be interpreted in an overly dualistic way. I’m not sure about the context how he meant it, though.
 
danserr said:
I’ve read the great divorce, i would definitely not say that he believed in the pre-existence of the soul in any way at all.

That being said, he does seem to tend toward a platonism about the soul sometimes, but on the other hand, he is a firm believer in the resurrection of the body and new creation (see his book Miracles, especially chapter 16).

I agree though, this isn’t one of my preferred quotes, just because it could be interpreted in an overly dualistic way. I’m not sure about the context how he meant it, though.
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Recall, in The Great Divorce, how when the subject of predestination comes up towards the end of the book the man is shown a vision of still, changeless figures with a chessboard in front of them, and pieces moving on the chessboard. The still figures represent the souls of human beings and the chess pieces represent their lives on earth. Each changeless soul, outside of time, makes an eternal free choice about its relationship to God, and the life of that person is lived out on earth and in time as a sort of embodiment of that choice. Thus, in Lewis’ view, the eternal does precede the temporal, but the will ultimately is still free.

The soul, then, is in Lewis’ opinion an eternal (not just immortal) being created outside of time and predetermining a man’s life within time. Hence “a kind of preexistence”, not a temporal preexistence but an eternal, logical preexistence.
 
Aelred_Minor said:
Recall, in The Great Divorce, how when the subject of predestination comes up towards the end of the book the man is shown a vision of still, changeless figures with a chessboard in front of them, and pieces moving on the chessboard. The still figures represent the souls of human beings and the chess pieces represent their lives on earth. Each changeless soul, outside of time, makes an eternal free choice about its relationship to God, and the life of that person is lived out on earth and in time as a sort of embodiment of that choice. Thus, in Lewis’ view, the eternal does precede the temporal, but the will ultimately is still free.

The soul, then, is in Lewis’ opinion an eternal (not just immortal) being created outside of time and predetermining a man’s life within time. Hence “a kind of preexistence”, not a temporal preexistence but an eternal, logical preexistence.
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Ahhh, that’s a fascinating thought, I had not consider that in that way before. I can’t help but think though, that if Lewis were here, he would firmly deny that he really meant there is a pre-existence of the soul.
I mean, he does have himself say to macdonald on seeing this picture “there conversations between the ghosts and the spirits-- were they only the mimicry of choices made long ago?” And Macdonald corrects him and tells him that this is not the case at all (you might as easily say that they are anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things). So on one hand, he does suggest something you can read that way, but on the other, he immediately denies that we should read it that way.
 
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