Aquinas’s Troubles with Human Death: A Prospective Solution
Aquinas’s Troubles with Human Death: A Prospective Solution

Summary/Abstract: From a philosophical and theological point of view – but also from the view of common language – death is defined as “the separation of the soul and the body”. In the case of Saint Thomas Aquinas his views regarding death are not fully clear with this being somewhat strange due to Aquinas being a philosopher who makes use of Aristotelian ontological categories and additionally strengthens them with his own modification – the supreme substantial composition of the essence and existence, in relation to death makes use of, in fact, a position elaborated by… Plato (!) And this in spite that he accepted the concept of human being given by Aristotle as more realistic, as better explaining the unity of it. However Aquinas overcame the difficulties of Aristotelian and Platonic solutions, yet it seems that from some reason “he stopped” in analysis of corporeality, accepting the Platonic understanding of the death: the separation of two principles of human being which (along Aristotle’s work) create the unity of it. The distinction between the body and the organism proposed in the article modifies the understanding of human death and sheds a new light on it, that it concerns only the biological organism. If however such proposed change of understanding of death is acceptable and justified, in the consequence one needs to reinterpret traditional solutions of the problems associated with the death, like its process (what is going on during it), a life post mortem, the resurrection. Some suggestions will be made in the article.

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