Thomas Aquinas (I)

This chapter restores the place of the body within Aquinas’s theory of the composition of human nature, explaining his account of the body’s autonomy relative to the soul. The central arguments of the entire study are elaborated: theological problems, particularly the bodily resurrection, led Aquinas to emphasize the body’s goodness; Aquinas thinks that the individuality of the whole person had its origins in matter; the individual body’s autonomy is underpinned by its unique ‘dimensive quantity’—a corporeal form, but an ‘accidental’, not a substantial form, which individualizes the body’s matter. These arguments are established through attending to: essence and its relationship to the individual; the beauty of the human body; embryology, heredity, and the structure of matter; and individuation. A theme running through the chapter is Aquinas’s radical remodelling of Peter Lombard’s concept of the ‘truth of human nature’, i.e. that from which the resurrected body will be constituted.