Author: David Kustra

Perhaps the first question the first man had asked was, “What is man?” This has been pondered time and again, and various solutions have been profferred. In the following, I would like to briefly outline three ways in which philosophers have approached this question.

Triadic psychology (trichotomism) asserts that the human person consists of flesh (Gk. sarx, Lat. caro), animating soul (psyche, anima), and spirit (pneuma, spiritus). This view seems to be supported by the blessing of 1 Thes 5:23: “may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless.” We also see the distinction of soul and spirit in Heb 4: 12: “the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow.” The purpose of the soul is to animate the flesh; it is the principle of movement which we observe in all living things. The spirit, or mind (nous, mens), as it is often referred to, is man’s rational part. The spirit is sometimes identified with a world spirit or logos in which all men participate. In the triadic system, the element of spirit accounts for the difference between rational and irrational living things.

Dyadic psychology (dichotomism) asserts that the human person consists of a material element (body or flesh) and a spiritual element (soul or spirit). Just as separate substances, according to Aristotelian hylomorphism, consist of matter and form, a human person consists of body and soul. The soul animates the body, as it does in the triadic system. But here the soul also performs the higher rational functions, as does the spirit in the triadic. Therefore, the dyadic view sees no need to posit a separate substance to account for man’s rational faculty. As the soul moves the corporeal, it moves the spiritual as well. Not only does it cause physical motion, but it is also the cause of discursive

reasoning. In the dyadic system, the difference between rational and irrational creatures is not explained merely by the addition of spirit, but by asserting that each species of creature has characteristics in common with other living things and particular characteristics that make it a separate and unique species. We see manifested in the created world a certain order and gradation in the various perfections of creatures. Not all share in the divine image in the same way or to the same degree, nor do all things share the same ultimate destiny.

Monadic psychology (monism, holism) asserts that the human person is an indivisible unit whose material and immaterial parts are merely two facets of the one being. Monism prefers to view the human person as one substance, rather than a composite. Modern neuroscience seems to be monadic inasmuch as it regards all measurable activity as being caused by quantifiable physiological operations of the brain or similar cells and organs of the nervous system. This materialistic outlook certainly safeguards against the tendency toward pantheism that we see in the concept of the world soul. Yet, it fails to adequately differentiate between animate and inanimate creatures, and between rational and irrational animals. Moreover, the materialist cannot explain the origin of matter, but must posit its pre-existence. Belief in eternal matter requires no less of a leap of faith than is required of the theist who believes in an eternal Creator.

In Greek thought, a man has a soul (psyche), but in Hebrew thought, it is more accurate to say that a man is breath (nephesh). Greeks saw man as an incarnate body or as a soul within a corporeal body, whereas Jews regarded man as an animated body, flesh quickened by nephesh. God breathes the breath of life into living things. In the Priestly account of creation, everything that God made has “the breath of life.”¹ Gn 1:30. According to the Jahwist account, when God formed the first man from the dust of the earth, He “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”² Gn 2:7. The Psalmist sees God’s nephesh as that which animates all living things: “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth.”³ Ps 33:6. When He takes away His nephesh, they perish and return to dust,⁴ “Thou takest away their breath, they die and return to their dust” (Ps 104:29). as when the flood waters arose “to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under heaven.”⁵ Gn 6:17. Job said, “my life is a breath,”⁶ Jb 7:7. “my days are a breath,”⁷ Jb 7:16. St. Thomas Aquinas suggests that one reason Job said this was to refute the opinion that a deceased person, after many years, returns to the same kind of earthly life he previously enjoyed; St. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Job, 11. for God is “the breath of all mankind,”⁸ Jb 12:10. and “the spirit of God is in my nostrils.”⁹ Jb 27:3. Not only does the divine breath give life, but it also gives man his rational faculty, as the angel said to Job, “it is the spirit in a man, the breath of the Almighty, that makes him understand.”¹⁰ Jb 32:8. Of the three human psychologies, it seems that monism best represents Hebrew thought, while dichotomism is more characteristic of Greek philosophical thought.

The human body (Gk. soma) is the corporeal aspect of the human person which will be resurrected. The word for body (soma) has been often equated with the word for flesh (Gk. sarx). But St. Paul distinguished the two. To the Romans, he said of the flesh: “I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh [sarx],”¹¹ Rom 7:18. and again, “with my flesh [sarx] I serve the law of sin.”¹² Rom 7:25. In Romans 8, Paul contrasts sinful flesh with life in the Spirit. Flesh, for St. Paul, is not simply a component of the human person; it is the inclination that leads us to commit sin, an inclination that later theologians would define as concupiscence, which is a just punishment for Adam’s original sin. The spirit (Heb. ruah, Gk. pneuma) for Paul is simply himself, not some intellectual or spiritual faculty. In dyadic psychology, spirit is identified with soul.

The soul (Heb. nephesh; Gk. psyche) survives the death of the body. Church Fathers at the end of the second century understood the soul more in the Greek way than in the Hebrew way. Origen (185-254) and other Fathers correctly taught that the created human soul has the gift of immortality. But Origen moved beyond this, asserting that God created all human souls in the beginning, and that each soul lies in wait to be united with its body in the due course of time. This theory of pre-existence, along with his theory of the transmigration of souls, were condemned by the Second Council of Constantinople II in 553.

St. Thomas Aquinas, in his development of Aristotelianism, adopted the dyadic schema. He further distinguished and characterized various types of souls. Plant and animal souls are material souls which depend for their existence upon the bodies that they determine and actualize. The human soul is a noncorporeal substance with an intellect and a intellectual appetite (the will). The human soul is a substance, that is, it is complete in itself. It has extrinsic dependence on the body, but no intrinsic dependence, for it exists apart from its body during the time between bodily death and the resurrection of the dead.¹³ STh I, 75, 1. The material souls of plants and animals are nonsubsistent; they are incomplete in themselves and cannot exist apart from their material bodies.¹⁴ STh I, 75, 3. While the human soul is a complete subsistent soul, it is not a complete human person. It is just the formal element of a composite substance, the substantial form of the human body.¹⁵ STh I, 75, 4. Unlike plant and animal souls, the human soul is a spiritual substance; it has no material elements, it is incorruptible, and it can exist apart from the body.¹⁶ STh I, 75, AA. 5, 6. The human soul is united to its body in substantial union, not in accidental union, as a hand in a glove. The soul is the body’s principle of movement. It performs all the functions that vegetal and sentient souls are capable of performing. Man has only one soul, not three;¹⁷ STh I, 76, 4. the human soul is said to be formally spiritual, and virtually vegetal and sentient.¹⁸ STh I, 76, 3.

The human soul possesses both spiritual and material faculties. These faculties do not constitute its substance, for faculties are what the soul has, not what it is.¹⁹ STh I, 77, 1. Let us first consider the corporeal faculties, using the faculty of sight as an example. Faculties are distinguished from one another substantially by their operations and by their objects. An eye sees a tree. The act of seeing is an operation of the faculty of sight, and the tree is the object of sight. A single faculty may have numerous accidental differences. For example, an eye may see a man sitting, walking or running.²⁰ STh I, 77, 3. In man, the vegetal powers serve the sentient powers, and the sentient powers serve the intellectual powers. The vegetal power of nutrition enables the eyes to function properly, to obtain sense findings from the world. The sentient power of the eye gives sense data to the intellect, enabling it to forms ideas, upon which the will (the intellectual appetite) chooses to act.²¹ STh I, 77, 4. All these faculties are rooted in the soul as their principle, for the soul is the substantial form of the human body.

We should now consider the spiritual faculties. Boethius (d. ca. 526) gives us the commonly accepted definition of person as an individual substance of a rational nature,²² “Persona proprie dicitur rationalis naturae individua substantia”; Boethius, De duabus naturis et una persona Christi, quoted in J. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus: Series latina (Paris, 1844-55), vol. 64, 1337-54 D. A suppositum (in Greek, hypostasis) is an individual substance that has its own way of acting (STh III, 2, 2). A human arm is a substance, but it is not a hypostasis, for it cannot act on its own (STh I, 29, 1). a hypostasis with an intellect and a will. A person is the most perfect of all creatures, for a person has a rational nature like God. The soul is the subject of the intellectual faculties of intellect and will, whereas the human person (the soul-body composite) is the subject of all the other faculties. The body alone is not the subject of any faculty because it can neither exist nor operate apart from its soul.²³ STh I, 77, AA. 5, 6. The intellect can operate without a stream of sense data from the five senses. It can perform discursive reasoning from images previously apprehended and stored in memory. After the death of the body, the human soul lives and remains the formal subject of the intellectual faculties, but only the virtual subject of the vegetal and sentient faculties, since it has no need of these without a body.²⁴ STh I, 77, 8. It maintains this virtually relationship because the soul is destined to be reunited with its body in the resurrection of the dead. Unlike Platonism, which viewed bodily death as the vehicle whereby the immortal soul is set free from its imprisonment within the body, St. Thomas taught that bodily death is a temporary condition in which the immortal soul lives in anticipation of its reunification with its body, resurrected in a glorified state at the end of time.

St. Thomas gives us a synthesis of Greek and Hebrew thought concerning the composition of the human person. His analysis draws upon both Aristotelian hylomorphism, which asserts the dyadic human psychology, and Hebrew theology, which attributes the origin of each human life to the mysterious and wonderful life-giving breath (nephesh) of the Creator. The result is a rational creature with manifold faculties, a composite substance whose soul has separate existence, yet whose natural existence is in union with its body. No other species of creature, spiritual or corporal, has these unique characteristics, which make up the human person.