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Abortion and the embarrassing saint - Catholic Church's changing position on abortion
Humanist, May-June, 1994 by Stephen T. Asma
This Thomistic view of the soul is not the sort of thing most Christians envision when they consider such matters; it seems that the "ghost in the machine" metaphor has taken stronger root in the common consciousness. But the idea of the soul as inseparable from the body (the animating principle of the body) is still very much the official church doctrine. Pope John Paul II, in last year's October encyclical, reiterated the Thomist position on the relationship between body and soul. The pope states that a person's, "rational soul is per se et essentialiter the form of his body." He then states that "reason and free will are linked with all the bodily and sense faculties." Aquinas draws out this principle to its conclusion when he observes that, if the "bodily and sense faculties" do not develop until the eighth week, then "reason and free will" also do not develop until that time. Consequently, if reason and free will are the defining properties of human persons, then in the first eight weeks of pregnancy no human person per se exists. Obviously, this conclusion remains undrawn for the contemporary Catholic.
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The "levels" of soul, according to the Thomist position, develop from lower to higher through the course of fetal development. This temporal development follows the basic embryological law of epigenesis (which Aristotle argued for and which modern biology currently affirms). Epigenesis means that embryological development occurs in a pathway from the less specific to the more specific. In other words, in the chronological order of gestation, I was alive (a nutritious blob) before I was an animal (capable of sensation and self-movement), and I was both these things before I developed into a human being (having the faculty of reason). The more "specific" (species-defining) traits develop last in the order of time. Now all this may sound quite antique in tone, but it is only a different way of stating what current biology asserts. Human capacities develop at different times in the course of embryological growth; the finished product is not all there at the outset. Regarding the powers of soul, Aquinas states that "the more imperfect powers precede the others in the order of generation, for the animal is generated before the man."
To be blunt, Aquinas as believed that in the course of gestation we are first plants, later become animals, and finally become human persons. If we arrest the development of a human zygote early on, we find, according to Aquinas, a nonspecific animal - or, if the arrest is very early, a nonspecific plant. Human ensoulment occurs, according to the saint, not at conception but at six or eight weeks. This discrepancy - between classical and contemporary Catholic theories of personhood-development - is enough to make the pope cringe.
The Renaissance church even codified the saint's "findings" into laws at the Council of Trent, stating that an individual would not be committing homicide if he or she aborted a fetus prior to its human ensoulment (six to eight weeks). Justice Stevens makes note of the Trent council in his dissenting Webster opinion and uses this embarrassing chapter of Catholic theology to make the crucial point about the separation of church and state.
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