Would St. Thomas Aquinas Baptize an Extraterrestrial?, Revisited

Abstract

AbstractEdmund Lazzari in “Would St. Thomas Aquinas Baptize an Extraterrestrial,” maintains that Aquinas would disagree with those who would baptize a fallen extraterrestrial on the grounds that they “disregard the necessity of a human nature for incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ,” baptism being the means whereby human beings are so incorporated. Lazzari maintains that, “Because of the crucial role that that assumption of a human nature plays … in Thomistic soteriology, it is not possible to simply transfer the effects of the life of Jesus Christ to other intellectual beings who are not sharers in human nature.” I first intend to show that Aquinas does not hold that a being must have a human nature to belong to the Mystical Body; rather having a rational nature suffices. Secondly, I intend to show that while the effects of Christ's death and resurrection are not such as to be automatically applicable to intelligent extraterrestrials (ETIs), much less to be automatically transferred to them through baptism, Aquinas would maintain that God is capable of ordering things in these ways, as they do not imply contradiction. Thus, if there are fallen extraterrestrials, Aquinas would not assume that it would be inappropriate to baptize them.