Immortality Of Soul Research Articles

Laura Quinney, <i>William Blake on Self and Soul</i>

William Blake on Self and Soul discusses fundamentally interesting topics: Blake’s relation to empiricism and Gnosticism, and his struggle with existential alienation. But the book applies a preconceived framework to his poetry, and this has an unfortunate steamroller effect: it flattens out the texts in its path and moves straight ahead, passing by much that would be helpful, and even necessary, to its purpose. To summarize the framework: “the essential uneasiness of consciousness” (85) is exacerbated by empiricism, a “Science [of] Despair” (Milton 41.15, E 142) that renders the self “intangible” and the world “real” (12). The soul’s intuition of its “transcendental provenance” (xiii), discounted by empiricism, is experientially true, for Blake and all human beings. For remedy, Blake pursues Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, but with a twist, rejecting the individual immortal soul in favor of “the Human Imagination” and the afterlife in favor of “the Eternal Now” (21). He describes the problem in the early illuminated books, then develops his solution, which leads from personal agency in The Four Zoas to individual reformation in Milton and ultimately to self-sacrifice in Jerusalem.

Quo Vadis, Dottore? Religious, Philosophical and Medical Perspectives on the Quest for Immortality

In the daily practice of medicine, health care providers oftentimes confront the dilemma of offering ‘maximum care’ based on available technologies and advances versus ethical concerns about futility. Regardless of cultural backgrounds and differences, most human beings aspire to an illness-free life, or better yet, a life lived with utmost quality and longevity. On account on ongoing advances in science and technology, the possibility of achieving “immortality” (a term used as a metaphor for an extremely long and disease-free life) is increasingly perceived as a realistic goal, which is aggressively pursued by some of the world’s wealthiest individuals and corporations. However, this quest is not taking place in a philosophical or religious vacuum, which is why we attempt to evaluate the current state of knowledge on religious beliefs revolving around immortality and their alignments with today’s medical advancements. The literature searches were performed using relevant databases including JSTOR and PubMed, as well as primary religious sources. Most religions present longevity as a blessing and believe in some sort of immortality, afterlife or reincarnation for the immortal soul. The quest for immortality beyond life in a “body of death” remains consistent with access to medical care and the legitimate possibility of achieving longevity—as long as certain ethical and religious parameters are preserved.

Strategic change at the Hospital Saint-Jacques at Le Roeulx (Belgium), from the account book of Sister Magdelaine Delcourt

Prior to going on Crusade in 1202, Baldwin, bailiff of Le Roeulx, gave his house and associated income to found a hospital in the hope of saving his immortal soul. The original objective of the hospital was to sustain the poor and pilgrims (especially those undertaking the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain (the Camino)). However, few pilgrims availed themselves of its facilities. The mission was then revised to look after the poor and to shelter the sick. By the seventeenth century augustine sisters of Ath administered the hospital. Sister Magdelaine Delcourt, the nun in charge, left us an account and information, covering the period 1625 to 1627. This gives a vivid picture of the financial and other affairs of the organisation for that period. The archaic nature of this record makes it largely inaccessible to the modern reader: this article renders it legible to current researchers.

Moral Status of Animals: Arguments From Having a Soul Revisited

Abstract In this article, I consider a number of arguments that assume that beings who have immortal souls occupy a special position in the sphere of moral concern. First, I place these arguments in their historical and cultural contexts. Next, I formulate several conditions of adequacy that all such arguments must satisfy. Subsequently, I distinguish two different general kinds of such arguments: Inclusionary arguments attempt to use the immortality of soul as a criterion for either including someone into a sphere of morality while excluding others or, at least, for elevating someone's position within this sphere. Modifying arguments attempt to strengthen or weaken moral considerations that already apply to a being included into the sphere of morality. I argue that, although some modifying arguments may fulfill all conditions of adequacy, they have very little practical importance.

The Correlation among Religion and Work in the Philosophy of German Idealism

The philosophy that built by German Idealism is obtained and never neglected religion, this is not about the religious dogmas or the fantasy and legendary nature of religion, but it is about the spirit and the crux of religion. Nevertheless, there is always struggled to deprive it from fantasies and rebuilt by philosophical ideas. These ideal philosophers are asserted to reconstruct the stories and imaginary schemes of religion into philosophical and rational thinking. There is a change in the result of this process which is religion is retreated and the metaphysics is slightly appeared. In other word, this change is directed from revelation to metaphysical views.
 In the light of this, the German Idealism is taking two different ways toward religion: the negative direction; which is involved to the critical studies of the basis and construction of religion, and the positive direction; this direction is returned to religion, but this return is happened after reconstruct religion by the critical and rational process. The relation between religion and ethics is one of the subjects that represent this division toward religion. For instance, if we read Kant, Fichte and Schelling, regardless some details and differences between them, and regardless the stages of developing their philosophies, in the general, their philosophy not tried too much to approve the existence of God in the rational way, and they asserted that it is impossible to approve God’s existence in the rational way. That is why in the basic moral is independent and ties to ration not religion.
 The ethical values are absolute, they legitimate themselves by themselves, and they are not legitimated by the transcendental power out of them. The bad is bad, and the good is good, that is why morality became the first foundation for religion, and the true religion is the one is compatible with rational morality. Even, morality is not complete by itself, because it needs motivations and goals, these motivations and goals are not existing inside the morality itself, just God can provide these motivations and goals to make morality complete. God can make human be a moral creature, in return, God reaches human to the endless happiness. To gain this endless happiness which is not available in this life, it requires soul immortality. Form this point, the God and soul immortality which is not approved by ration, the morality make them a logical and obligation necessity.

A philosophical discussion on death and the meaning of life

A philosophical discussion on death and the meaning of life

<i>EUROPE IN OUR BLOOD</i>... About the Nadezhda Venediktova`s book <i>Caesar and Venediktova. Cultural excavations</i>

Cultural Excavations by Nadezhda Venediktova were published in late autumn 2021, at the time most suitable for philosophical speculations. This way of thinking brings us close to a collapse that might equally turn out productive or catastrophic. Its anaemic academic manner stands out among full-blooded well-crafted literature of saturated and inspiring reality. Pandemic or not, we seek to know whether there is a need to distinguish between various cultures if at the end of the day people are still people. The author does not provide the answer but rather invites us to join a sophisticated mental game in fine textual decorations. And readers will walk away a little confused about simplicity of binary oppositions, and straightforwardness of the logic that a bored visitor so happily lays their hands on, eager and happy to get down to work. The book evolves around the topic of meeting thyself in different cultural surroundings. Sunlit essays bear the imprint of the bitter rationalism of the French enlightenment coupled with a weathered love of personal presence in the world. In her latest work, Nadezhda Venediktova ‘ambitiously comments on life’s creative abilities’. Vivid sketches entitled Passions for Europe may take place by a nameless lake in Zurich but remind readers of Michel Houellebecq’s concrete jungle, of Spengler’s mathematics. But nothing here speaks of The Decline of the West, under the author’s thoughtful gaze Europe comes to life fresh and real — a proverbial sphynx with its intriguing riddles. The author’s underworld meetings with the world literature alternate with colorful Italian landscapes. Vibrant images of friends are so true to life that remind of the immortality of soul. The soul of Europe is truly immortal and found across the continent — Italy, Britain, Austria, Germany, France, Greece, Switzerland, Spain — gave their name to the chapters but cannot be reduced to a dusty catalogue. Nadezhda Venediktova presents European countries through effortless florid metaphors. This what happens when Europe looks into the author’s soul, though it might look otherwise from an outside perspective.

Rethinking Love as Passion: Jeanette Winterson’s The Daylight Gate

Jeanette Winterson’s magical realist love stories, such as The Passion, have been read by some critics in terms of a tendency to idealise romance as a transformative passion that transcends social structures. In this article, I propose that Winterson’s recent gothic novel, The Daylight Gate, critically revises a set of Romantic themes first broached in The Passion, exposing and interrogating the fantasy scenario at the centre of romantic love. This narrative about magic and the devil explores the ambivalence of passion as possession—diabolical and contractual—before using this to critique the desire for transcendence implied by “undying love”. Metaphysics becomes a metaphor for metapsychology, where the Romantic motif of undying love as connected to fatal desire is complicated by a traversal of the fantasy of the union of two immortal souls. These revisions have the effect of reversing the implications of Winterson’s earlier treatment of romantic love, turning it back from the personal towards engagement with the political.

Minds, bodies, spirits, and gods: Does widespread belief in disembodied beings imply that we are inherent dualists?

Belief in beings without physical bodies is prevalent in present and past religions, from all-powerful gods to demonic spirits to guardian angels to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence by a quirk in how we conceptualize persons, intuitively representing their minds as separable from their bodies. Infants have both a folk psychology (for representing the mental states of intentional agents) and a folk physics (for representing the properties of objects) but are said to apply only folk psychology to persons. The two modes of construal become integrated with development, but their functional specialization and initial independence purportedly make it natural for people of all ages to entertain beliefs in disembodied minds. We critically evaluate this thesis. We integrate studies of both children and adults on representations of intentional agents, both natural and supernatural, beliefs about the afterlife and souls, mind transfer, body duplication, and body transplantation. We show that representations of minds and bodies are integrated from the start, that conceptions of religious beings as disembodied are not evident in early ages but develop slowly, and that early-acquired conceptions of religious beings as embodied are not revised by theological conceptions of such beings as disembodied. We argue that belief in disembodied beings requires cultural learning-a learned dualism. We conclude by suggesting that disembodied beings may be prevalent not because we are developmentally predisposed to entertain them but because they are counterintuitive and thus have a social transmission advantage. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Islam and the cognitive study of colonialism: The case of religious and educational reform at Egypt’s al-Azhar

AbstractThis article argues that the emerging Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) provides a valuable new perspective on colonialism. CSR argues that humans are innately inclined towards certain types of religious belief (e.g., belief in spirit beings, belief in immortal souls) and certain types of non-utilitarian morality (e.g., belief in an obligation to care for kin, belief in an obligation to avoid ‘disgusting’ substances or behaviours). These innate inclinations underlie many religious and cultural traditions transformed by colonialism, including Islam. The article suggests that colonial power operates not only by suppressing traditional non-Western institutions but also by suppressing the natural inclinations underlying non-Western traditions. This claim is developed through a study of colonial efforts to transform Egypt’s al-Azhar, the world’s most influential institution of Islamic learning and scholarship. These efforts made al-Azhar into the centre of a global Islamic reform movement, which sought to integrate Islam with a colonial scientific-utilitarian worldview.

From Murphy’s Christian Physicalism to Lowe’s Dualism

Nancey Murphy argues that God created us as physical beings without immortal souls. She supports this Christian physicalism by arguing that neuroscience can better explain minds in terms of physical information processing than dualists can in problematic nonphysical terms. We reply that Murphy overestimates neuroscience and underestimates dualism. She doesn’t show how neuroscience can explain the mind’s characteristic qualia, unity, privacy, or causality. We argue that Lowe’s dualism can better explain minds, often with experimental support and in testable ways. Murphy’s physicalism thus serves to highlight the value of Lowe’s dualism today.

Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literature

Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution, by Ian Duncan

Reviewed by: Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution by Ian Duncan Philipp Erchinger (bio) Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution, by Ian Duncan; pp. xiii + 290. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019, $35.00, £30.00. Anthropology, as Ian Duncan's impressive Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution confirms, has returned to literary scholarship. But it has discarded the guise of the universalist science of man that was one of the unfinished projects of Enlightenment thought. Instead, studies of the human now often work from the premise that their subject is not only infinitely diverse, but also deeply involved with a world of nonhuman life and matter that forms an integral part of its existence, sustaining and surpassing that existence at the same time. As Duncan outlines in his introduction, this modern approach to anthropology took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when a materialist and evolutionist "natural history of man" began to complicate the older notion that human life is divided between a physical body and an "immortal soul." As a result, the figure of man came to inhabit a confusing borderland crisscrossed by multiple fault lines: between "nature and history, individual and species, human life and biological life, or life as such" (2). As various emergent disciplines laid claim to the exploration of that borderland, Duncan argues, the nature of human being became an urgent problem, unsettling the very sciences that increasingly sought to use it as their secular ground. Duncan's key argument is that the realist novel, which evolved alongside the natural history of man, is itself a form of anthropology: rather than simply staging or exhibiting [End Page 290] the questionable figure of the human, it actively participated in its investigation. Duncan pursues this claim through five chapters that range widely across the "classical era of European realism, circa 1750–1880," covering philosophical, scientific, and fictional prose from Germany, Britain, and France (1). The first two chapters establish an analogy between the loose, open, variable form of the novel and the indeterminate nature of human life, which was perceived as equally capable of assuming "all forms and functions" (9). Thus viewed, the very formlessness of novel writing enabled it to compose the "universal discourse" that the philosophy of human nature was unable to supply (2). Indeed, the study of human life, like its subject, was fractured from its inception, as Duncan explains. One broadly empiricist school, represented by a line that stretches from Johann Gottfried Herder to Charles Darwin, described human history as inseparably caught up in the evolution of organic life. By contrast, a rival tradition ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau through Immanuel Kant to Friedrich Nietzsche argued that humans develop through works and arts that separate them from their natural state. In both cases, the underlying question was how natural philosophers were supposed to conceive of the relation between the organic life that humans involuntarily undergo and the historical life that they consciously lead. In the Romantic Bildungsroman, as we learn in chapter 2, this relation between organic and historical development reoccurs in the form of an unresolved conflict between the growth of a human individual and the life of the species of which it partakes. Concentrating mainly on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1795–96) and Germaine de Staël's Corinne, or Italy (1807), Duncan shows how these novels try to mediate the "formation of species being" through narratives of personal progress (57). In doing so, Duncan argues, they repeatedly draw attention to the difference, or even open a rift, between individual and human history. In Corinne, the ruinous disintegration of these two dimensions of human life is specifically meant to expose the "exclusion of women" from the universal category of Enlightenment "man" (57). One of the greatest merits of Duncan's study is that it vividly and thoughtfully illustrates how the nature of the human increasingly was overtaken and transformed by the very life in which nineteenth-century science, from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire to Charles Lyell and Darwin, found it to be embedded. For example, in Walter Scott's Count...

Body–Soul and the Birth and Death of Man: Benedict Hesse’s Opinion in the Mediaeval Discussion

This issue was discussed with regard to chosen commentaries to Aristotle’s treatise De anima, formed in the so-called via moderna mainstream, in particular those of John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and Laurentius of Lindores. In such a context, the Cracovian commentaries referring to Parisian nominalists were presented by those of Benedict Hesse and Anonymus. The analyses carried out above allow one to ascertain that although William of Ockham’s opinion questioning the possibility of knowledge of the soul in the field of philosophy, nominalists of the late Middle Ages did not resign from speculation on the beginning (birth) and the separation (death) from the body of the soul, also the fate of the soul after death. They focused on the nature of the matter – human body (embryo, semen) and his relation with the soul (forma) – in the moment of birth. In the aspect of death 14th century scholars undertook the struggle, which was one with the justification of the psycho-physical unity of the human being existing after death solely as an immortal soul.
 In both thems, they tried to find their solutions, while if they could not solve these aporeticals questions – they had the courage to admit, that is not possible by solely relying on the natural forces of reason. They had to refer to the teaching of christianity, without however falling prey to fideism. This was a methodical endeavour based on the experience that natural reason in searching for the truth is not capable of its own efforts to attain to certain concepts and might on occasion err, it is then that faith becomes its guide and supplies it with more acceptable solutions. This is the courage of one of the greatest philosophers – Plato, who said that you have to have this “great courage” to undertake only probable knowledge, when another is not possible.

Cultural Background of Carved Stone Sculpture of Ancient Chinese Mausoleums

The article explores the ideas, characteristic for religious mindset and philosophy of Confucianism (儒 家思想), about spiritual immortality, filial piety and ethics, which have been firmly established in funerary culture. Harmonic balance of Confucianism, Daoism (道教) and Buddhism brought forth the ideology and concept of immortal soul, according to which the soul does not die after person’s death, and the tomb is its dwelling place. Thus, the construction of tombs gained great significance. The author analyzes Confucian idea of ‘filial piety’, which, merging with ritual funeral concept, developed into a concept of ‘meticulous following of funerary rituals, mourning of parents and worship of ancestors’ (慎终 追远), where the main emphasis is on the organization of parents’ funeral, devotion to ancestors and diligent care of their remains. Furthermore, as Ancient China was an agricultural society which was deliberately devoted to earth, it was believed that the earth is crucial for survival, and one can only rest after death if one’s body is committed to earth. So, to show filial affection, properly make sacrifices, pray for protection, protect the remains and ensure eternal peaceful rest, the internment in the ground became an obligatory condition. And various funeral arrangements, such as marking the grave, its decoration, etc., gradually transformed into funerary plastic art. Consequently, burial in the ground allowed for the possibility and resources to form the funerary plastic art. Ceremonial ideas presented by Mencius (孟子) have become firmly established in the concept of funeral. In a feudal society, for the convenience of government and maintaining the stability of society, etiquette, contributing to the systematization of the hierarchical order of all strata of society, as well as extreme admiration for the imperial power, became a powerful ideological weapon of the rulers. In this ideology, sculptures in the tombs of the supreme rulers – emperors and wangs – are not only guards protecting from evil, but to a greater extent they are also a symbol of imperial power. Therefore, the themes, the number and the size of the sculptures in the tombs of the emperors and wangs were of the highest importance. There is also a strict hierarchical order in the sculptures in front of the tombs of government officials of various levels. Thus, etiquette established standards and order in burial plastic art.

Rethinking Religious Cognition and Myth: A New Perspective on how Religions Balance Intuitiveness and Interest-Provokingness/Memorability

Abstract In his influential work on the cognitive science of religion (CSR), Pascal Boyer argues that the spread of religious ideas involves a tradeoff between their “intuitiveness” and their interest-provokingness/memorability (i.e.,their capacity to provoke interest and be remembered). For Boyer, religious ideas are “intuitive” insofar as they are easy to understand and learn. However, other CSR studies suggest that religious ideas are “intuitive” insofar as they are easy to believe. In analyzing the spread of religious ideas, no study has considered the tradeoff between interest-provokingness/memorability and intuitiveness in the sense of being easy to believe. The present article takes up this task by considering several religious concepts that are intuitively easy to believe (e.g., immortal souls, spirit beings, a Creator God, a just world). It is argued that, in typical religions, such concepts are incorporated into myths. Through incorporation, these concepts lose some of their intuitive believability but gain interest-provokingness/memorability.

Integralność moralności, kultury i godności człowieka w Gaudium et Spes Soboru Watykańskiego II

Celem publikacji jest ukazanie integralności moralności i kultury. Zgodność ta nie jest w pełni możliwa bez uwzględnienia koncepcji godności osoby ludzkiej. Obok koncepcji deontologicznej zostaje ukazane wielkie dobro kultury, jakim są sakramenty. Normą moralności jest godność osoby ludzkiej, która wynika z faktu stworzenia i odkupienia przez Jezusa Chrystusa i staje się dla niego norma normans, ale dotyczy także rozwoju osoby. Godność osoby ludzkiej polega na przekraczaniu świata stworzonego, posiadaniu duszy nieśmiertelnej, korzystaniu z władz rozumu, zdobywaniu prawdy, słuchaniu głosu sumienia. Godność osoby ludzkiej zostaje pogłębiona w świetle objawienia, w którym człowiek odnajduje swoje powołanie. Dobrem kultury są sakramenty i cnoty. Człowiek jako osoba daje odpowiedź na Boże wezwanie, szanując godność swoją, drugiego człowieka, wolne decyzje drugiego, jest odpowiedzialny. Gaudium et spes przytacza na końcu syntezę godności rozumu, prawdy i mądrości człowieka: „Człowiek, z racji swej godności osoby ludzkiej, uczestnicząc w Bożej myśli, góruje swym rozumem nad światem rzeczy”.

Survivalism, Suitably Modified

Survivalism, Suitably Modified James Dominic Rooney O.P. A SIGNIFICANT CHALLENGE to those views according to which human beings have immortal souls or minds that survive their bodily death is that this appears to entail substance dualism. One must hold, it would appear, that humans are essentially their minds or souls; otherwise, a human person would cease to exist at death. Substance dualism, however, is a controversial view in large part due to the difficulty in giving an adequate account of the interaction between body and mind. To some, including myself, dualism also seems patently false because humans are essentially animals of a particular species, not immaterial minds. The view that human beings are essentially animals, nevertheless, does not intuitively sit well with the claim that our souls can survive bodily death. Yet if sense can be made of how these two claims are compatible, the resulting view would be far more friendly, or closer, to typical naturalist views of body-mind relations than is traditional dualism. There has been a revival of interest in hylomorphic theories of material composition, and some have applied these insights to mind-body identity, arguing precisely that a human being is a metaphysical composite whose form, his mind or soul, structures his matter to constitute what is essentially a certain kind of animal.1 Consequently, the hylomorphist identifies as holding a [End Page 349] position resembling "animalism" among contemporary theories of personal identity.2 Nevertheless, there is significant controversy over the status of a soul that would survive the death of the body and whether extant explanations are coherent. I focus in this paper on one prominent debate among Thomists on the question as to whether the soul post mortem comes to constitute the same human person as in life, although persons are not identical to their souls in ordinary circumstances, or whether the human person ceases to exist at death. I do not think the Thomistic debate can be resolved by further interpretation of the texts of Aquinas, as it seems that all parties in the Thomistic controversy are taking stands on a matter that goes beyond those texts. After outlining the dialectic of that debate, and engaging with a famous paper by Elizabeth Anscombe, what I will propose is that my soul comes to constitute my personality after I die, and that this allows a satisfying way to say that I survive my death, without violating any claims made by Aquinas. My view is a Thomistic account of the personhood of the separated soul—constrained by what Thomas Aquinas claims about human beings as matter-form composites and presuming other features of his metaphysics—but it has implications beyond Aquinas. My proposal is intended to give us an adequate theory of the semantics and metaphysics which allow a hylomorphist to say that I survive my death, in virtue of my soul surviving my death, even though that which I am identical to—the animal that is me—ceases to exist when I die. What I will propose is that there is a coherent hylomorphic account that permits me to survive my death, because hylomorphism can accommodate theories of personal identity that otherwise seem to be out of bounds to the substance dualist. [End Page 350] I. The State of the Question For our purposes, it is helpful to lay out the dialectical moves that have been made thus far in the Thomistic scholarship. What follows is merely a series of logical steps, and no temporal claims are being made—the point is to grasp how these positions developed as responses to a certain problem and to each other. At a first stage in the dialectic (representing an initial stream in the discussion), there was Peter van Inwagen. In an essay for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, van Inwagen posed a problem for hylomorphic theories of the human person, including that of Aquinas: If Socrates was a material thing, a living organism, then, if a man who lives at some time after Socrates' death and physical dissolution is to be Socrates, there will have to be some sort of material and causal continuity between the matter that composed Socrates at...

Filozoficzny rodowód Pana Cogito (cz. 2)

The article constitutes the second part of a larger paper concerning the philosophical heritage of Mr. Cogito, the lyrical subject of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems. The self-consciousness of the title character is formed, quite like in P. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of existence, in relation to the sphere of history and culture, as well as to the other. Mr. Cogito, when confronted with the war and annihilation, cannot simply use the Cartesian deductive method of reasoning in order to intelligibly prove the existence of God and an immortal soul. Therefore, he refers in his philosophical thinking not merely to rationalism, but also to symbol, which more profoundly than ratio describes the nature of his existence. When challenged by boundary situations, he unsuccessfully attempts to find consolation in the Upanishads, Stoicism, or the wisdom of Chasidism. His attitude towards the modern philosophy of nature as well as to the relative motion theory is that of a sceptic; he juxtaposes them with Aristotle’s Logic. The propensity of contemporary Western civilization to follow magic or gnosis is perceived by him as a sign of self-delusion, or even self-destruction.

Saint Thomas and Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration

Saint Thomas and Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI on the Body and Adoration Kevin E. O'Reilly O.P. The argument put forward in this brief article is straightforward. In brief, both Saint Thomas and Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI espouse the logic of hylomorphic anthropology, that is to say, the understanding that we are body–soul unities, as well as a participatory metaphysics. With regard to their respective views on the role of the body in adoration, therefore, there is a striking similarity. For both theologians, human worship of God is necessarily embodied worship. This view, moreover, extends to the role of the cosmos in worship, since the cosmos assumes a symbolic significance precisely on account of the fact that embodied existence is spatially and temporally determined by it. The hylomorphic liturgical anthropology of both theologians stands in stark contrast to the dualistic liturgical anthropology that has become dominant in the West in our own time. Ratzinger/Benedict of course offers a critique of these contemporary liturgical trends. If Thomas were alive today, his critique would arguably be substantially the same as that of the Pope Emeritus. Since what is at stake in the case of the celebration of the Mass is the penetration and shaping of the soul by the Word, there is good reason for attempts at renewal to range Thomas and Benedict side by side against those forces that undermine the majesty and mystery of Catholic liturgical worship. In order to make this argument, however, a brief account of hylomorphic anthropology is in order. This account is drawn from the teaching of Saint Thomas, since Ratzinger/Benedict, to my knowledge, offers no systematic treatment of this subject. While hylomorphic anthropology is a philosophical construal of human nature, Aristotelian-Thomistic in its provenance, it has [End Page 613] nevertheless been adopted by the Church's magisterium. Most recently John Paul II, in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor, emphasized this point, referring to "the Church's teachings on the unity of the human person, whose rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of his body."1 "The spiritual and immortal soul," John Paul II continues, "is the principle of unity of the human being, whereby it exists as a whole—corpore et anima unus—as a person."2 Having clarified the concept of hylomorphic anthropology, the article will then turn to an exposition of the thought both of Saint Thomas and of Ratzinger/Benedict on adoration. Both theologians consider bodily gestures to be a physical manifestation of an internal attitude. By the same token, bodily gestures such as prostration and kneeling for their part cultivate a spirit of adoration. Both Thomas and Benedict deal with the issue of orientation in the liturgy. Their agreement in this regard, which is grounded in the Church's ancient Tradition, is the fruit of an understanding that we are psychosomatically constituted. Our worship can therefore never be purely spiritual and thus prescind from space and time. A brief account of the contemporary liturgical situation, however, shows it to be Cartesian in its dynamics. In other words, it cultivates a kind of liturgical practice that is disembodied (inasmuch as this is possible for human beings). The overwhelming creativity that one encounters at times in the liturgy and which constitutes a break with Tradition is the fruit of this philosophy. There is therefore good reason to engage with the reflections of Thomas and Benedict concerning the body and adoration. Saint Thomas's Hylomorphic Anthropology3 [End Page 614] Thomas's understanding of the human body is inseparable from his teaching concerning the intellectual soul as man's sole substantial form.4 "The soul is the very nature of the body,"5 he proclaims provocatively in his commentary on the Sentences, thereby emphasizing the intrinsic and intimate connection that obtains between soul and body. We can well assert that the body's actuality derives from the intellectual soul, an assertion that is in accord with Thomas's metaphysical teaching to the effect that matter "has actual existence by the substantial form, which makes it to exist absolutely."6 Completely ruled out in this view is the possibility of experiencing one's body...