So far as I know, killing a person does not harm their soul except insofar as it deprives them of the opportunity to grow through earthly life, or to repent.A human person consists of two types of matter or substances, material and spiritual.
A living human person requires both. Physical violence harms or kills the body. Spiritual violence (mortal sin) harms or kills the soul. A human person cannot exist without both, and harm to one matter harms the other. Murder is considered such an egregious sin, precisely because it harms another’s body and soul.
The exact boundary between body and soul is unknown. The human body sheds billions of cells over the course of its lifetime, and yet remains the body. At death, the body looses its ability to physically regenerate, but is perhaps not completely destroyed. This leaves, if you will, a “ghost” of a person.
On the last day, Jesus promises to wholly restore each human person, raising them from the dead. Those who have destroyed their souls through mortal sin will not participate in this resurrection.
While a human person has two types of substance, material and spiritual, this is not the only configuration. An angel, for instance, is a person made of purely spiritual matter. An animal though is not a person, and is only material. An animal still processes a soul, which is the force that animates it (“animal” means, at least originally, matter that is animated). God himself is a special matter, of whom only three persons (the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) are consubstantial (share the same substance).
Of course, if you define matter to mean nothing more than something perishable, and spirit to mean nothing more than something imperishable, then you can claim that animal souls are mortal because they are material rather than spiritual, but to do so is to explain nothing.
I am using terminology roughly consistent with the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustus. “Material Matter” includes all physical material and processes, atoms, energy, chemical/physical reactions. “Spirit” is the element that can interact with God on a two way basis (although matter could still be manipulated by God in a one way manner). Soul is the combination of one or both that defines a being; whether the spirit is rational or irrational defines whether the being is a person or an animal.You should define your terms clearly, if you use them in nonstandard ways. What do you mean by matter, and what do you mean by material and spiritual besides perishable and imperishable?
As far as I know, no extra force is required to make alive an animal’s body - physics does that. Which leaves the question, if animals have souls, what do those souls do?
You are correct. I neglected the existence of rational and irrational spirits. A human spirit is rational, capable of knowing and obeying God. Because the spirit is able to understand God, it thus has a duty to obey. Having this ability, and choosing to disobey is the root cause of sin.I think the answer is clear enough - the animal’s soul is what actually experiences and feels the things that happen to the animal’s body.
The difficulty is that spirit and soul have different technical meanings. The soul encompasses the animal’s body and irrational spirit.Which returns us to the original problem - matter doesn’t have feelings or subjective experiences so far as I am aware. If an animal has a soul, that soul can’t be matter at all, which leaves the conclusion that the soul of an animal is spirit.
Jesus warns us with the strictest of warnings that we can harm another person’s soul: “If anyone causes one of these little ones–those who believe in me–to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:6)So far as I know, killing a person does not harm their soul except insofar as it deprives them of the opportunity to grow through earthly life, or to repent.
A human’s body and spirit are integral to the soul. Without both, there is no human soul! This ghostly form, however, is deprived of the material elements of its body. This incompleteness is what is restored at the resurrection.If a person has a “ghost”, it is their soul, not some remnant of their body, though maybe you were also referring to the soul.
There is a hierarchy of vital functions, and thus of different kinds of souls. First of all, there is the vegetative soul which accounts for the functions of nutrition and reproduction. Plants have only this kind of soul. Next, there is the sensitive soul, by which higher animals perceive and respond to their environment. This kind of soul, for some animals, also includes the power of local motion. Finally, there is the rational soul, by which humans are able to use speech and have abstract thoughts. In all of the higher kinds of organisms, the functions that were performed by lower kinds of souls are performed by the higher. Thus, there is only one soul in any particular animal even though it is has the same vegetative capacities as plants.
Aristotle, thus, opposes Platonic or Cartesian dualism. Body and soul together make up one substance. A major problem that Aristotle and Aquinas see with dualism is that it cannot explain why the soul, if it essentially different from and superior to the body, should be united to the body. For Aristotle and Aquinas, however, it is for the good of the soul (or rather, it is for the good of the composite which has its vital activities in virtue of its soul) that the soul is united to the body; a body is necessary for a soul to exercise all vital capacities, since (almost) all vital functions are the functions of body and soul together. The sensitive soul requires a body, since the acts of sensation, of seeing, for example, require bodily organs. Similarly, the act of intellection, which is proper to humans alone, requires sensation, and sensation in turn requires a body. Thus, if human beings are to exercise their proper functions, they necessarily must have a body.
Nevertheless, Aquinas believes too, that the soul of man is a subsistent spiritual reality. He argues that because man is able to know all bodily natures by means of his intellect, his intellect cannot have in itself a bodily nature. Having in itself a bodily nature would prevent the reception, and thus the knowledge, of any other bodily nature, since, for Aquinas, one knows by receiving the forms of what one knows into one’s intellect. Thus, if the intellect had a bodily nature, it would not be able to receive the forms of these things; but since it does receive these forms, it lacks any bodily nature.
It seems that Aquinas was confused on this last point. He seems to have reified the concept of nature, so that he thought in terms of one bodily nature excluding another. Closer to the truth is that one bodily nature can emulate another (e.g. the brain of a human hunter can model the behavior of a deer, without becoming the deer).Therefore, the intellectual principle, which we call the mind or the intellect, has an operation in which the body does not share. Now only that which subsists in itself can have an operation in itself. … We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called intellect or mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent. (S.T. Ia, 75, 2)
This creates a tension for Aquinas. On the one hand he believes that the human soul is the form of the body, the principle by which the body lives, and the principle in virtue of which bodily activities, i.e. sensation, take place. And such activities, being the direct experience of man, implies that man is composed of body and soul. Nevertheless, man also has activities which do NOT involve the body, i.e. intellection. (See Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 56) Thus, he believes that the soul exists of itself, separate from the body. It is difficult to reconcile these two positions (the soul is the form of a body, the soul exists of itself without need of the body), since every other soul that is the form of a body CANNOT exist without that body, e.g. the souls of animals. (S.T. Ia, 75, 3) Some charge that this tension is so great as to render Aquinas’ account of the soul incoherent.
Aquinas’ doubtful conclusion that intellection is immaterial leads to a doubtful ontology of souls, and it is this ontology which yields the conclusion that animal souls are mortal and human souls are immortal.Aquinas’ answer is that the soul has its own act of existence which it communicates to the body, but that, without the body, it is not a complete substance (since it has an essential relation to the body). (S.C.G II, 68) Consequently, without the body it cannot exercise any of its natural activities. Thus, the rational soul can exist without the body, but it cannot do anything in, what is for it, an unnatural state. The separated soul, then, needs God either to reunite it with its body, or infuse it with knowledge, both of which would be supernatural gifts.
That is an open question. The Church only deals only with the relationship between God and Man. Jesus promised man eternal life if we follow him. Nothing is revealed about the fate of animals.If animals do have “irrational spirits”, are those spirits immortal?
Animals are composed of matter and form, the material soul is the form of the body Humans are composed of matter and form, the immaterial soul is the form of the body, that is that the immaterial soul exists as a co-principle with the body, the nature of a human. (sorry for misleading you, and I hope I’m not doing it again, doing it mostly from memory) Man is body and soul. Form is that which makes it this rather than that, the essential nature of a thing.That seems like a pretty good job of answering my question, but let me try to construe what you are saying more closely.
“Animals have material souls, that are composed of matter and form.”
“a human soul is … the form of the body, a union of matter and spirit.”
I’m not quite sure what to make of form being a component of animal souls, and the measure of a human soul.
This seems to confuse different levels of a hierarchy.
I found a gloss on Aquinas’ views on the soul here.
The human immaterial soul (spiritual) has for it’s powers, the intellect-the power to know, and reason, and the will, the power to choose. The brain is not the intellect, but is used by the intellect to abstract ideas that come from objective experience of the material world. In understanding the nature of a deer, a human can use that understanding to his advantage. The brain and intellect work together, the brain supplies the sense impressions, and images, and the intellect abstracts the ideas, or concepts which represent the the things sensed.It seems that Aquinas was confused on this last point. He seems to have reified the concept of nature, so that he thought in terms of one bodily nature excluding another. Closer to the truth is that one bodily nature can emulate another (e.g. the brain of a human hunter can model the behavior of a deer, without becoming the deer).
The fact that man can know and reason puts him in a category different from other living things. The nature of knowledge, intellectual comprehension is not a material thing, even though it is extrinsically dependent on material things. For a person to know that he knows, self-relection is a feat that can not be duplicated by a material thing. To have self-autonomy, self direction is not something ascribed to material things. This kind of activity even though it is extrinsicaly dependent on matter, is not derived from matter. That action that is not derived from matter must have an immaterial source of it’s motion. To move from ignorance to having knowledge is an immaterial (spiritual) motion coming from an immaterial source, the immaterial or spiritual soul which does not depend on matter for it’s existence, but directly on God. The soul is subsistent, like God, once called into existence will always exist as a soul.Aquinas’ doubtful conclusion that intellection is immaterial leads to a doubtful ontology of souls, and it is this ontology which yields the conclusion that animal souls are mortal and human souls are immortal.
It is understood that we were made for God, it is also understood by the power of the immaterial soul, the intellect, to know the truth, it’s logical purpose or end, and the will, to acquire the good, it logical purpose, are logically both found completely in God, who, metaphysically, we find that both the Truth and the Good are one in God, because God is His attributes The human soul is immaterial (spiritual) and God is Pure Spirit, God is subsistent, not dependent on anything for His existence, and the human soul is subsistent, solely dependent on God for it’s existence, and not on matter as the soul of animals are. When they die they cease to exist as animals. When we can not observe immaterial things, we can know of their existence through their effects.I can believe that the soul is the form of the body, given a reality of its own by a sovereign act of God. I can believe that human souls are differently ‘shaped’ than animal souls, in a way that makes them capable of union with God.
But union with God isn’t logically an absolute requirement for immortality. Neither is being made in the image and likeness of God.
I don’t think we have a proof either way about what happens to the souls of animals after they die.
Whatever is a part of the nature of some thing is natural to it. The nature of human beings is to have a immortal spiritual soul and a material body. The spiritual soul and body is what a human being is composed of and what makes it a human being with a human nature and is natural to it. Non-human animals also have natures of a soul and body but not a immortal spiritual soul. For example, the nature of a lion is composed of a soul which animates its body. The specific soul and body of a lion are parts of its nature and is natural to it.I read that human souls are immortal, and animal souls are not, because the former is spiritual, and the latter is natural. But how can a soul be natural at all? There is a divide between what is observer (mind) and what is observed (matter). It seems to me that any soul is on the former side of that divide, whereas nature is on the latter.