Death is death

Pasnau again, on Thomas.  According to Thomas, human being ceases to exist at death, comes back into existence with the resurrection: “Aquinas believes that when I die, I go out of existence . . . . the soul’s separation causes death, and death puts an end to my existence.  We might think of this as a frankly metaphysical account of death.  Death is not mere biological change, but a substantial change.  I – the person, the human being – go out of existence.”

Of course, he also believes in resurrection, but for Thomas resurrection “involves the resumption of life that had ended,” or as Thomas himself puts it: “resurrection strictly involves only someone who perishes and is destroyed.”  The soul continues to exist in between, and since the soul is the substantial form of the body that soul provides the necessary continuity between the human that died and the human that rises.  But Thomas insists that death really is the passing-out-of-existence of a person.

This, Pasnau notes, has crucial implications for personal identity: “The soul is responsible for all of what makes me be me, in the sense that my defining attributes, physical and mental, ‘flow from’ the soul . . . . But unless those attributes are actually instantiated, I do not (strictly, fully) exist.  The core of who I am is my soul, but it is not all of who I am.”