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Abortion and the embarrassing saint - Catholic Church's changing position on abortion

Humanist, May-June, 1994 by Stephen T. Asma

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In dredging up the uncomfortable past creeds of Augustine, Jerome, and Aquinas, I am not suggesting that changes in dogma automatically manifest church fallibility. Rather, to expose the irony - indeed, the contradiction - in church doctrines is a crucial first premise in a wider and more important argument about the relation between church and state. It is for this reason that we must visit the embarrassing saint.

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Thomas Aquinas has been the official Catholic theologian for the past 600 years. Aquinas was given the thankless job of making the potentially heretical ideas, of Aristotle (then only newly discovered by European intellectuals) consistent with church doctrine. Anyone who doubts his current influence on Christianity need only visit a Catholic college campus, where the mandatory core-curriculum is drenched in Thomistic ideas, or simply ask any priest to recite one of Aquinas' proofs for the existence of God (he will no doubt be able to recite five). The pope himself, in his October 1993 encyclical, cites Aquinas no less than six times.

Aquinas, writing in that encyclopedic manner so beloved by philosophical types, has much to say (and many distinctions to draw) concerning just about everything. In his magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, he tackles (among many other issues) the formation of the human soul.

Generally speaking, Aquinas has three basic strategies. Faced with a vexing question, he either appeals directly to his reasoning skills (which were, make no mistake, quite awesome), or he appeals to scripture, or he appeals to "The Philosopher." By "The Philosopher," Aquinas - and everybody else at that time - meant Aristotle. In the case of the formation or genesis of the human soul, Aquinas quite rightly defers to the wisdom of "The Philosopher." Appealing to Aristotle on this issue is not merely falling back on the authority of antiquity; it is, in fact, a respectful submission to a renowned specialist. While Aquinas spent most of his time cloistered in classrooms and monks' cells, Aristotle spent most of his time elbow deep in the entrails of animal specimens. In fact, much of Aristotle's careful embryological observations are still completely accurate and insightful. So when Aquinas turned to the issues of fetal development, he did so with Aristotle's biological texts close at hand.

In the Thomist-Aristotelian tradition, it is the faculty of "reason" that distinguishes humans from all other animals. Reason, then, is the defining essence of what it means to be a human person. The "soul," according to Aquinas, is not a friendly ghost that enters the body at birth and departs after death; it is a principle of life that all animated creatures possess in varying degrees. For example, plants have souls but they are "nutritive souls" - they have the power of growth. Animals have souls that are not only nutritive but also allow them the powers of sensation and locomotion. Human beings, in Aquinas' view, have the nutritive level of soul (because they are alive), the sensate and locomotive levels of soul (because they are animals), and, finally, the rational level of soul (which makes them human-something "more" than animal).

Abortion and the embarrassing saint - Catholic Church's changing position on abortion

Humanist, May-June, 1994 by Stephen T. Asma

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