Folia Theologica et Canonica 3. 25/17 (2014)
IUS CANONICUM - Michael Carragher, O.P., The sacrament of confirmation and personal development
182 MICHAEL CARRAGHER. O.P. the intellect itself is understood, since the intellect’s perfection is the very act of intellective understanding. That is why the Philosopher says that objects are understood prior to their acts, and act prior to their powers. Finnis regards this insight as crucial to understanding human beings. Time and again he repeats this central teaching of both St. Thomas and Aristotle. “And, as Aquinas never tires of reminding us, it is by understanding objects of action that we understand action, and only by understanding a being’s action can we understand its capacities, and only understanding its capacities can we understand its nature. So our practical understanding of the basic goods, the primary objects of all intelligent action, is an indispensable source of our understanding human nature.”24 So human beings are generated to flourish by participating in the basic or genuine human goods. That is why they are endowed with body and (intellectual) soul.25 Both are elements of a particular kind unique to human creatures. As Turner explains26: However, the essential aim of all Thomas’ discussions of the “immaterial” character of the human intellect is to demonstrate that human intellectual activity is not the activity of any bodily organ. Of course Thomas knew that the normal exercise by human intellect of many of its characteristics activities is dependent on the functioning of appropriate bodily organ. And it follows that a soul separated from its body cannot gain any new experiences by means of its normal powers of knowledge acquisition, since, the person being dead, its body rots away and the intellect 24 Finnis supra 9 page 61 in Secularism Practical Meaning. 25 Idem. 67 note 30: “The intellectual (and sensory and vegetative ) soul by the creation of which I came into existence - existence as already a person - is not itself a person but only uniquely the organizing part and the very form act of me”. Standard texts are: Summa Theologiae, I, q. 29, A. 1 ad 5: Ad quintum dicendum quod anima est pars humanae spéciéi, et ideo, licet sit separata, quia tarnen retinet naturam unibilitatis, non potest dici substantia individua quae est hypostasis vel substantia prima; sicut nec manus, nec quaecumque alia partium hominis. Et sic non compe- tit ei neque definitio personae, neque nomen. 1, q. 75, A. 4 ad 2. Ad secundum dicendum quod non quaelibet substantia particularis est hypostasis vel persona, sed quae habet completam naturam spéciéi. Unde manus vel pes non potest dici hypostasis vel persona. Et similiter nec anima, cum sit pars spéciéi humanae. 26 Turner supra 10, pages 79-80 passim. See also Ashley, B. M., The Way toward Wisdom An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics, Notre Dame, IN. 2006. 65: “Modern psychologists by their ‘sense deprivation’ or ‘isolation’ experiments have also confirmed scientifically that someone suspended in the dark in water at body temperature to minimize all sensations of touch soon falls into a dreaming state. This is also illustrated by the famous story of how the blind and deaf Helen Keller behaved like a little animal until her teacher put her hand in running water and spelled out the sign for ‘water’. Suddenly Helen began to think like a human being and became a learned scholar, yet one who had to receive almost all information through touch.” (Note omitted).
