We are not fully human without the Praeternatural Gifts

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This was the subject of lively seminary discussions many years ago.

The Church teaches that Adam and Eve were created with four praeternatural gifts: Immortality, Impassibility, Integrity and Knowledge:

Immortality - they could live forever,

Impassibility - they could suffer no pain, and were subject to no injury or disease,

Integrity - the movements of their lower nature were perfectly subject to their mind and will,

Knowledge - their minds were infused with all knowledge necessary for them to live as adult human beings.

Question was: do we have a natural need of these gifts to be complete in our human nature? In other words, excluding any reference to the supernatural plane, do we need these gifts to be fully human merely on the natural level?

I contended yes, based on the fact that, of the two components of human nature - soul and body - the soul was the more important. The body is designed as a vehicle for the soul and needs to be perfectly adapted to the needs of the soul.

In consequence:

the soul is immortal, so the body must be immortal;

the soul, to function freely, must not be subject to the crippling bonds of bodily pain and injury, hence impassibility;

the soul must have a perfect mastery over the body - no tug-of-war between the two - hence intergrity;

the soul must have a minimum understanding of things in order to know what to do and how to do it, hence knowledge.

Does any Church Father, Pope, theologian or Council have anything to say on the subject? We never did definitively resolve the question all those years ago.
 
I guess it depends what you mean by “fully human”. Without the preternatural gifts, we are not fully how human beings were in one sense “meant” to be.

However, if this is all you ultimately mean, I think “not fully human” is a very poor way to phrase this. It suggests that we fallen human beings are something other than human, something not quite human, since we lack the preternatural gifts. This is obviously false, since we all share a common human nature.

An analogy would be disabled people. Is an amputee or a person with Down Syndrome less human than a (comparatively) healthy and able-bodied person? Of course not. The disability interferes with some things a human being would ideally be able to do, but it is an accidental difference that does not change the person’s substantial identity as human. I would suggest it is, at the most, the same basic thing with the presence or absence of preternatural gifts.

Also notice the name, “preternatural”. It means something outside of or exceeding nature. That suggests to me that the preternatural gifts were something given to Adam and Eve in addition to their complete human nature, supplemental to it so to speak, in order to guard their integrity. If the gifts merely completed human nature rather than supplementing it they would be natural gifts, not preternatural.
 
The belief that our ancestors could suffer no pain and were subject to no injury or disease conflicts with the Church’s acceptance of evolution…
 
tonyrey said:
The belief that our ancestors could suffer no pain and were subject to no injury or disease conflicts with the Church’s acceptance of evolution…
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:eek:

Need… to… respond… Simplistic statement both false and lacking proper nuance about Church teaching and… demands… substantial response… Must…

But I’m too afraid of getting in trouble. No discussing evolution on the Philosophy forum.
 
JM3 said:
sacred-texts.com/chr/aquinas/summa/index.htm

Questions 94-97 🙂
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Thanks for the references ;). Q97 cites Q76 where St Thomas looks at the question more directly in Article 5:

Objection 1: It would seem that the intellectual soul is improperly united to such a body. For matter must be proportionate to the form. But the intellectual soul is incorruptible. Therefore it is not properly united to a corruptible body.

Reply to Objection 1: Perhaps someone might attempt to answer this by saying that before sin the human body was incorruptible. This answer does not seem sufficient; because before sin the human body was immortal not by nature, but by a gift of Divine grace; otherwise its immortality would not be forfeited through sin, as neither was the immortality of the devil.

Therefore we answer otherwise by observing that in matter two conditions are to be found; one which is chosen in order that the matter be suitable to the form; the other which follows by force of the first disposition. The artisan, for instance, for the form of the saw chooses iron adapted for cutting through hard material; but that the teeth of the saw may become blunt and rusted, follows by force of the matter itself. So the intellectual soul requires a body of equable complexion, which, however, is corruptible by force of its matter. If, however, it be said that God could avoid this, we answer that in the formation of natural things we do not consider what God might do; but what is suitable to the nature of things, as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. ii, 1). God, however, provided in this case by applying a remedy against death in the gift of grace.

This does seem to clinch it (for some reason I had never considered this article in the discussion).

Interesting though that for St Thomas material corruptibility is ‘suitable to the nature of things’, which poses the point that mortality and immortality in different ways are a component part of human nature.
 
Aelred_Minor said:
:eek:

Need… to… respond… Simplistic statement both false and lacking proper nuance about Church teaching and… demands… substantial response… Must…

But I’m too afraid of getting in trouble. No discussing evolution on the Philosophy forum.
Click to expand...
Funny how people keep raising evolution in topics that don’t concern it - same thing happened in my thread about evil in Nature.
 
Aelred_Minor said:
:eek:

Need… to… respond… Simplistic statement both false and lacking proper nuance about Church teaching and… demands… substantial response… Must…

But I’m too afraid of getting in trouble. No discussing evolution on the Philosophy forum.
Click to expand...
Discussing evolution is alright; arguing (particularly incessantly) it is probably not acceptable. I would like to hear what you have to say on this, and Tony is quite Catholic. He can take it without getting angry. It will do us all well not to become argumentative.

God bless,
jd
 
forums.catholic-questions.org/forumdisplay.php?f=118

Quote: “For the foreseeable future, there shall be no discussion in the Philosophy Forum of evolution or atheism.”

The focus of the rule seems to be threads specifically devoted to evolution or atheism, but the actual wording forbids any discussion of the topics. This would also be consistent with the apparent purpose of the rule, to avoid ugliness that arose in the past when the topics were discussed. Until I see a definitive word from the moderators interpreting it differently I’ll assume evolution and atheism are not to be discussed even within a thread that was originally about a different topic.
 
Justin_Swanton said:
Funny how people keep raising evolution in topics that don’t concern it - same thing happened in my thread about evil in Nature.
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Nature is part and parcel of what you need to prepare for in argument to understand why it would be brought up in a thread and why evil would not have a thing to do with it,

Gah. Nevermind.
 
Justin_Swanton said:
Funny how people keep raising evolution in topics that don’t concern it - same thing happened in my thread about evil in Nature.
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To state that something conflicts with the Church’s teaching doesn’t entail a discussion about that subject. It is merely **a fact that has to be taken into account **when Catholicism is being discussed.
 
Justin_Swanton said:
This was the subject of lively seminary discussions many years ago.

The Church teaches that Adam and Eve were created with four praeternatural gifts: Immortality, Impassibility, Integrity and Knowledge:

Immortality - they could live forever,

Impassibility - they could suffer no pain, and were subject to no injury or disease,

Integrity - the movements of their lower nature were perfectly subject to their mind and will,

Knowledge - their minds were infused with all knowledge necessary for them to live as adult human beings.

Question was: do we have a natural need of these gifts to be complete in our human nature? In other words, excluding any reference to the supernatural plane, do we need these gifts to be fully human merely on the natural level?

I contended yes, based on the fact that, of the two components of human nature - soul and body - the soul was the more important. The body is designed as a vehicle for the soul and needs to be perfectly adapted to the needs of the soul.

In consequence:

the soul is immortal, so the body must be immortal;

the soul, to function freely, must not be subject to the crippling bonds of bodily pain and injury, hence impassibility;

the soul must have a perfect mastery over the body - no tug-of-war between the two - hence intergrity;

the soul must have a minimum understanding of things in order to know what to do and how to do it, hence knowledge.

Does any Church Father, Pope, theologian or Council have anything to say on the subject? We never did definitively resolve the question all those years ago.
Click to expand...
I can’t help believe that, between Gods justice and His love, He would not create sentient, rational beings who would lack those gifts. We may not possess them by nature (although the Reformers maintained that we did), but we weren’t created to exist in the manner God intended without them, either. Another way of saying this is that man is without his integrity and justice without these gifts, i.e. he exists in a state of disorder.
 
tonyrey said:
The teaching of the Church implies that our ancestors have always been susceptible to pain, injury and disease… 🙂
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This is simply false. Openness to theories on the biological origins of Adam has no bearing on whether God also endowed Adam and Eve with preternatural gifts which they forfeited by sin.
 
Aelred_Minor said:
I guess it depends what you mean by “fully human”. Without the preternatural gifts, we are not fully how human beings were in one sense “meant” to be.

However, if this is all you ultimately mean, I think “not fully human” is a very poor way to phrase this. It suggests that we fallen human beings are something other than human, something not quite human, since we lack the preternatural gifts. This is obviously false, since we all share a common human nature.

An analogy would be disabled people. Is an amputee or a person with Down Syndrome less human than a (comparatively) healthy and able-bodied person? O f course not. The disability interferes with some things a human being would ideally be able to do, but it is an accidental difference that does not change the person’s substantial identity as human. I would suggest it is, at the most, the same basic thing with the presence or absence of preternatural gifts.
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Point taken. By ‘not fully human’ I should have said 'with a human nature that does not possess all the perfection and completeness due to it."
Aelred_Minor said:
Also notice the name, “preternatural”. It means something outside of or exceeding nature. That suggests to me that the preternatural gifts were something given to Adam and Eve in addition to their complete human nature, supplemental to it so to speak, in order to guard their integrity. If the gifts merely completed human nature rather than supplementing it they would be natural gifts, not preternatural.
Click to expand...
Mmm… not quite. Notice how the Church calls them ‘preternatural’ and not ‘supernatural’. They are preternatural inasmuch as they exceed the capacity of nature to produce them, but they are not preternatural in the sense of exceeding what pure nature needs in order to be complete.
 
Justin_Swanton said:
Point taken. By ‘not fully human’ I should have said 'with a human nature that does not possess all the perfection and completeness due to it."

Mmm… not quite. Notice how the Church calls them ‘preternatural’ and not ‘supernatural’. They are preternatural inasmuch as they exceed the capacity of nature to produce them, but they are not preternatural in the sense of exceeding what pure nature needs in order to be complete.
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As I understand it preternatural means exceeding nature while supernatural means transcending nature, above nature. The preternatural gifts exceeded what human beings possess by nature, but were not supernatural in the sense of how sanctifying grace, for example, is supernatural.

To give some examples, Batman is natural (just particularly strong, fast, etc., like an athlete). Spider-Man is preternatural, because he has something besides his human nature which gives him enhanced abilities. A parish priest is supernatural, since the sacrament of Holy Orders gives him abilities that truely transcend the natural order.
 
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