Merits and Limits of Thomas Aquinas’s Holistic Dualism in Explaining Intermediate State and the Body Resurrection
Merits and Limits of Thomas Aquinas’s Holistic Dualism in Explaining Intermediate State and the Body Resurrection
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초록
This paper examines the merits and limits of Thomas Aquinas’s anthropology-here interpreted as a form of holistic dualism-for explaining both the intermediate state and the resurrection of the body. Against materialism and modern monistic tendencies, Aquinas affirms that the human soul is a subsistent, incorruptible form that survives bodily death. At the same time, against Platonic and Cartesian separationism, he insists that the soul is the form of the body and that the human person is a substantial unity of body and soul. On this basis, Aquinas provides a framework in which the intermediate state is a real, conscious condition of the separated soul, while bodily resurrection remains the necessary and final perfection of human nature. Methodologically, the paper offers a close reading of Summa Theologiae, Summa contra Gentiles, and related texts, and places Aquinas in dialogue with contemporary holistic dualists such as John W. Cooper, as well as with Anthony A. Hoekema and S. T. Davis on issues of personal identity and eschatology. The study argues that Aquinas’s holistic dualism (1) secures a metaphysical basis for post-mortem existence, (2) upholds the centrality of bodily resurrection, and (3) provides a nuanced account of personal identity across death and resurrection. At the same time, the paper criticizes Aquinas’s speculative “geography” of the afterlife—purgatory, limbo of the Fathers, limbo of children—as lacking clear biblical warrant, and questions his strict requirement of material sameness for the resurrected body in light of both Scripture and contemporary philosophy. The conclusion suggests that, for Reformed Life Theology, Aquinas’s holistic dualism should be received as a valuable but not uncritical conversation partner: once purified of its unbiblical accretions and integrated with biblical exegesis, it can significantly clarify the Christian hope in a conscious intermediate state and the future resurrection of the body.