Abstract

While examining how Aquinas defends his account of the human soul in Article 2 of On Spiritual Creatures, I will point out the difficulties that arise in determining the nature of the human soul when the very starting question is formulated in the manner of Article 2’s question: “Can a spiritual substance be united to a body?” This way of examining the human soul—beginning by considering pure spiritual substantiality and then considering whether it is possible that spiritual substance can relate to a body—reveals an intractable tension which Aquinas would have a difficult time resolving. However, this tension is avoided when the method for discussing the nature of the soul is a bottom-up analysis of the human composite and its operations, which is precisely how Aquinas argues in his Answer. The dialectic between these two different sorts of questioning in Article 2 represents the key opposition between Aquinas’s arguments regarding the soul and those of Averroes and Avicenna.