Hi Ahanu —
In the Catholic worldview, how does the soul interact with the body?
The body is the way the soul manifests itself in the world.
A very poor analogy: oxygen is gas ... release oxygen under water, and you'll get bubbles, and the body's a bit like that, release a soul into the world, and you get a body ... does that make sense?
The 'concrete' body, the actual physical stuff, is called '
sarx' in Greek ('flesh') whereas the body as a being is '
soma'. The soul
psuche (psyche).
From what I understand about Thomas' Catholic beliefs about the soul, there are two things that can happen to the soul after death: (1) the soul is extinguished in hell, or (2) the soul is united with God in heaven
On the extinction thing, there are a number of ways of looking at this:
If you set the path of your life to be a con artist, or a rapist, then as there is no evil in God, there is no place for that kind of being in God, and in effect God says "I do not know you" ... (as in Matthew 23)
The idea of 'suffering' and 'punishment' is just an image to make the idea more accessible to people. Man generally does not invest much in philosophical theories of being and nothingness, and certainly not enough to motivate him to action. But give him an image to work with, and that's something else.
Another way of looking at it is the soul grows or diminishes according to what it feeds on. If its food is 'unreal' then there is nothing that can sustain it in continuance after the death of the physical body.
Soul is life, which is universal and not you, and there is what you make of the life, which is you, the whole discussion is about the 'you' bit of the soul. The life bit is not you nor you it. I think this is what Buddhists are talking about when they say that there is no 'core', no 'soul', but only ephemeral phenomena, they do not mark out that meta-human universal.
Non-existence is impossible; non-existence merely appears as non-existence because of the various degrees of human perception.
In the Christian Tradition, we're talking about a metaphysical principle rather than a state, as 'non-existence' cannot itself be a state (in which case it would be a mode of existence).
In the Thomas' Catholic beliefs about the soul, after death the soul is united with this body, and this unification transforms the body into an imperishable body, a heavenly body, the final form.
Again, we would disagree over the correctness of the term 'united', as if a body was put with a soul.
But the resurrected body will be imperishable, and heavenly, but no less human for all that.
Where we seem to disagree with almost all traditions, I think, is in the view that the physical world is disposable, something of no intrinsic value and no use nor purpose other than a stepping stone to somewhere else. We believe creation to be a theophany, a divine manifestatation, and it is as good as any other mode of manifestation.
Put another way — if the created cosmos has no place in God's plan, then why create one in the first place, and how can God say it is 'good" as He does, six times?
In that way, if 'resurrection' is to be complete, then it must include the physical. That's why man will always be higher than the angels, because angels are pure spirit, man is spirit and matter. If our eschatalogical condition is spirit only, then in that sense we are lesser than human.
For us, man's resurrected body will be spirit and matter — pure spirit and pure matter — although what form that matter will take, in detail, neither I nor anyone else has the slightest idea, although a contemplation of the Resurrected Christ will offer us some indicators.
God bless
Thomas
eek