Not really...
OK!! This is a slightly self-indulgent post. My interest was
piqued by a really interesting question on Jess’ blog from Quiavideruntoculi (which I reproduce below). In essence, it is about the difference between the mental life experienced
during sleep and that after death but before the bodily resurrection. It’s
probably of limited interest to anyone other than me and QV, except in that it
underlines the fact that, for a Catholic, life after death is not simply like one
of those Jehovah Witness eternal picnics, but something much stranger and
better.
[Relevant Catholic Encyclopedia articles: Immortality; Resurrection of the Body.]
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Why, given that we
hold de fide that every soul will be conscious after death of the
Particular Judgement, and be capable of enjoying the beatific vision, enduring
purgatory, or suffering the torment of the damned, even before the
Resurrection – that is, before the soul’s reunion with the body – do we all
become utterly insensible during deep sleep every night?
How is it that we can
seem to be the more ‘dead to the world’ while alive and asleep, than we will be
when we are actually dead? What is it about the integration of body and soul
that so limits our consciousness? Is this even a question that we can hope
answer?
Aristotle’s perspective
in these essays is single-mindedly rationalistic. In On Sleep and
Waking he identifies sleep and waking as diametrically opposed phenomena
characterized, respectively, by the absence or presence of perception.
Physiologically, Aristotle posits, sleep and waking result from the disabling
and activation of the body’s
primary sense-organ, which Aristotle took to be the heart. He describes how
sleep is induced by the “exhalations” of ingested
foods which thicken and heat the blood, rising to the brain where they are
cooled before coalescing in the heart. Similar effects are ascribed to
soporific agents, states of fatigue and certain illnesses. Aristotle
distinguishes sleep from temporary incapacities of perception, such as
fainting, and describes sleep as a form of “seizure.” [Joseph Barbera, ‘Sleep
and dreaming in Greek and Roman philosophy’, Sleep Medicine, Volume 9, Issue 8, December 2008, pages 906–910 ]
So
the state of consciousness (whether dreaming or simply unconscious) during
sleep is the result of a suspension of perception due to physical causes. (Our
understanding of the nature of the physical causes has of course changed since
Aristotle, but the principle remains the same.)
In
his commentary on STh Ia
…the thesis…is that phantasms
are needed not only to take the intellect from potentiality to first actuality,
but also from first actuality to second. Without the jargon, the thesis is that
intellectual thought is impossible apart from a sensory context. (Aquinas on Mind, p.94).
To
summarize, in sleep, the ability to think is suspended due to the suspension of
our ability to perceive as a result of the disabling of the physical
functioning of our body. (Dreams are the result of other physical disturbances.
(See Barbera, citing De Insomniis.) As, absent our body, these could not occur,
I put them aside.)
Turning
to thinking post mortem, I think Ed Feser expresses the situation clearly:
HD [ie hylemorphic
dualism –the Thomist understanding of the relationship between soul and body] explicitly denies that the soul
thinks after death in the same way that it does when conjoined to the
body. For our intellectual powers only operate when we are alive because
of the data we get from the senses and the mental imagery this gives rise to;
as Aquinas says, “the soul united to the body can understand only by turning to
the phantasms” [where for the sake of simplicity a “phantasm” can be thought
of, roughly, as a mental image] (Summa Theologiae I.89.1). That
is its natural mode of carrying out intellectual operations.
And for HD, sensation and imagination, unlike intellect, have a material
basis. (This is why for HD neural activity is -- as I have explained in a
previous post -- a necessary condition of everyday cognitive
activity despite the immateriality of the intellect, even if it is not
a sufficient condition.) Hence, while we are alive it is only body
and soul together which think, and not the soul alone.
Now, after death the
soul no longer has available to it its normal input from sensation and
imagination. If it is to think while disembodied, then, it must do so in
a very different manner. What this involves, for Aquinas, is “turning to
simply intelligible objects” rather than to phantasms, as an angel (a wholly
disembodied intelligence) would. (Think of pure concepts divorced from
sensation or imagination.) And this entails a difference as well in
the kinds of things the intellect can know after death. As
George Klubertanz says in a once widely-used manual of Scholastic
philosophy:
Knowledge of singular
material things will be naturally impossible for the separated soul, and likewise
existential judgments about material or sensible things. It will also be
impossible to acquire knowledge of previously unknown material objects…
On the other hand, in this life the soul has no actual direct knowledge of
itself, because it is the form of a body. Once separated in death, it
will be actually intelligible in itself, and so the soul will directly know
itself as an actually existing singular spiritual substance… Communication
between separated souls and between souls and angels should be possible, at
least in so far as states of mind and will are concerned… Whatever other
knowledge is necessary will be given by God, in a fashion similar to the mode
of angelic knowledge. (The Philosophy of Human Nature, pp. 317-18)
To borrow and develop
an analogy from an earlier post, you might think of the postmortem soul like a
hand which has been severed from the body and which is not only kept alive
artificially, but caused to move its fingers (and in this way to carry out
something like its normal operations) via electrical stimulation of the
muscles. The normal state of the hand is to be connected to and
controlled by the body in such a way that it is the entire organism, and not
the hand alone, that moves the fingers. But that does not entail that the
hand might not also move them apart from the body, after being severed, by
non-natural means. Similarly, the normal state of the intellect is to be
connected to the body in such a way that it is the entire organism, and not the
intellect alone, which thinks. But that does not entail that the
intellect might not also think apart from the body, after death, by non-natural
means.
[Feser’s
post here. ]
To summarize, in the absence of the body, the soul thinks in
a different way.
In short, death is not like sleep. In sleep, the mind is
deprived of its normal way of thinking by a disabling of the physical means of
thought. (And being still embodied, it cannot avail itself of non-natural means
of thought.) When it is dead, it is able to think in a non-natural way (but
with the consequence that its mental life is very different from that of an
embodied human being).
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