J
JDaniel
Guest
TS:You really need to reread the summa then. Read all of question 88 and get back to me.
Really? Because I keep reading we’re in the fallen state and were supernaturally upheld in a higher mode of existence prior to the Fall. Sounds like the present state of corporeality hinders us as it presently is in a fallen state. Which really puts into question, how does the human person exist in the state of original justice and even more-so in the Mystical Body of Christ, one in being with Him…
I already know the metaphysics of hylemorphic dualism, so no need to explain it to me as I made it clear in the very first sentence of my first post. I made it clear we exist naturally as this unity of form and matter but the point was to demonstrate that last ends is to know God fully or see Him as He is, face to face. He exists outside of time and space, as Eckhart demonstrated if the soul desires to know God, it must go beyond time and space. Aquinas saw the immense difficulty that it “For since nature is always ordered to what is best, and since it is better to understand by turning to simply intelligible objects than by turning to the phantasms; God should have ordered the soul’s nature so that the nobler way of understanding would have been natural to it, and it would not have needed the body for that purpose.” He resolves the difficulty by stating “Now it is clear that in the natural order human souls hold the lowest place among intellectual substances. But the perfection of the universe required various grades of being. If, therefore, God had willed souls to understand in the same way as separate substances, it would follow that human knowledge, so far from being perfect, would be confused and general. Therefore to make it possible for human souls to possess perfect and proper knowledge, they were so made that their nature required them to be joined to bodies, and thus to receive the proper and adequate knowledge of sensible things from the sensible things themselves.” So, we are lowly inferior creatures, naturally created that way because the Divine Intellect was bound to make the universe according to grades of being, beings closer to actuality and beings less actual, He was also bound by necessity to create corporeality for us because we would be confused in a mode of existence like of angels. Am I the only one who sees the problem with this answer or are people really that comfortable with the fact the only answer is that God was bound to create it like this and we are lowly stupid creatures needing a sandbox to play in because our nature can’t comprehend anything beyond the sandbox? The answer does not suffice and I’m getting tired of being the only one here doing the metaphysical demonstrations.
The answer must suffice! Look: God is Infinite. As “infinite,” even if we try to think of Him as a completely different substance, as “spirit,” He has no choice but to completely permeate us! His property of Infinity includes “magnitude.” He cannot be displaced! That is precisely why matter consists of “dimensionless point particles.” They do not displace Infinity. And, besides, many of the angels apparently did need a “sandbox,” don’t you think?
God bless,
jd