The Resurrection Appearances

St. Thomas Aquinas

    It is easy to see how such a view of St. Thomas in which the soul directly informs prime matter would appeal to someone like Gisbert Greshake, whom we met in Chapter 3, for it would appear to clear away the obstacles to his theory of resurrection at the time of death. If the entire reality, or being of the body, comes from the soul,7 then why worry about the corpse? If matter is pure potency,8 then the soul can make another body by informing new matter. The soul is certainly not meant to stand alone, and we can support this outlook by examining Thomas’ remarks on the deficient knowledge the soul has after death because of the lack of a body.9 It is better to say that “(t)he separate soul demands immediately the resurrection of the body.”10 If Thomas is inconsistent in his application of this theory, Greshake felt it was because of the neo-Platonic elements that remained in his thought. He had in his hands the tools by which to solve the difficult question of the identity between our earthly body and our resurrected body, but failed to follow through. The self-sameness of the resurrection body with our earthly body is guaranteed through the self-sameness of the soul alone and not by matter.11 It is the same matter insofar as it has the same form. Therefore the fact that the corpse remains in the grave is no argument against the immediate resurrection of a glorified body.12 We might also wonder why in such a view it would matter whether the body of Christ remained decaying in the tomb.