Question Eight
Toward what termini the soul, having departed from the body, goes
It is asked toward what termini the soul departing from the body naturally goes: whether from light to darkness, or from darkness to joys.
To this it is answered that after the rational soul has ceased to inform the body, or after the dissolution of its union with the body, it can be understood to be transmuted from light to darkness, or from sadness to joy, in two ways: namely, either according to a transmutation with respect to intellect, or according to a transmutation with respect to affection.
If we speak in the first way, it is said that the Platonists posited the body as though it were a prison of the soul, impeding the perfect cognition which the soul according to itself, in its purity, is naturally fitted to possess. They say that the soul is not saddened by its separation from the body but rather rejoices, just as one who has been imprisoned rejoices when he is freed from a prison grievous and dark to him, toward which, as they say, no appetite or inclination to return is left at all.
And on this one account the philosophers were very strongly turned away from the resurrection of the dead through the reunion of souls with bodies, because they believed that through it souls were impeded from their more perfect cognition.
Cicero appears to have followed these Platonists in the position of his book On Old Age, where he speaks as follows, introducing Cyrus the Elder addressing his sons at his death:
I could never be persuaded, my sons, that souls live while they are in mortal bodies and die when they have departed from them. Nor, indeed, that the mind is then unwise when it has escaped from an unwise body; but that when, freed from every admixture of the body, it has begun to be pure and whole, it is then wise.
Adducing a persuasion for this, he says:
For you see that nothing is so like death as sleep, in which the minds of those sleeping especially declare their divinity. For when they are relaxed and free, they foresee many future things. From this it is understood what they will be like when they have released themselves from the bonds of the body.
Thus he speaks.
The theologians, however, with regard to this transmutation of a soul separated from the body according to intellect, would say with the Platonists that the departure of souls from bodies, when they have been left to their natural powers, is as though a withdrawal from a region of darkness to a region of light, or as though a departure from shadow to a clearer light. This is not because they leave a body which impedes their cognition, but because there enters a mode of knowing belonging to separated intellects: not, indeed, a mode full in all respects, since the soul is the lowest species in the genus of intelligences, but a partial mode by which perhaps they know both themselves and the things surrounding them more clearly than they could know them in the body.
And I have said pointedly that souls stripped of their bodies do not possess the full mode of knowing of separated intellects, because if they possessed it, as soon as they were stripped they would know from their natural powers whether or not they were in charity. For every separated intelligence first reflects upon itself by intuitive vision.
Nor do the theologians concede that a soul stripped of its body lacks a natural inclination and appetite for reunion with its own body because it would again be impeded from perfect cognition, as the Platonists imagine. Rather, they say that in every soul stripped of its body there remains a natural desire for reunion with the body, because the soul is naturally a form and consequently is naturally determined and inclined to inform a subject proportioned to it.
Nor is it conceded that the soul is in the body as though in a prison, because the soul naturally determines it for itself as a habitation or most fitting organ. Nor is it conceded that the soul is impeded through the body, because the soul according to the character of its nature is perpetual, and from this it is naturally separated from the body. Therefore it is fitting that a special mode of naturally knowing itself and other things should correspond to that mode of its being. In this mode it will know many things more clearly per accidens than through the body; nevertheless, it is not said to be impeded by that imagination on account of the body, because naturally, insofar as it is a form, it is determined to a mode of knowing through the body. Therefore, since a thing is not said to be impeded by that state toward which it naturally tends, the proposition follows. Let these things suffice concerning the transmutation of the soul stripped of its body according to intellect.
In the second way, however, we can speak of the transmutation of the soul stripped of its body according to affection: namely, whether immediately upon being stripped from the body it is transmuted to sadness or joy, punishment or delight.
To this it is answered that the souls of deceased wicked faithful persons, or of unbelieving philosophers, are immediately changed to sadness. The reason is that, since the sciences acquired in this life remain in the soul after death, the errors and false opinions by which persons of this kind were deceived in this life also remain in it.
Therefore, as soon as the soul is separated from the body, turning itself by clear vision upon itself, upon the body from which it has been separated, and upon the other things which surround it within a certain distance, it is certainly affected by many sighs and great sadnesses. For it does not find the things which it vainly hoped for; it does not find matters as it thought; it is not placed among its companion stars, happily playing, as it judged it would be; it does not ascend upward to the light of heaven, but sees itself, full of sorrow, dragged downward by dreadful demons to the darkness of hell.
The souls of heretics, Jews, and superstitious faithful persons see clearly that they foolishly and negligently deviated from saving virtue. The souls of those who gave themselves entirely to honors, delights, and joys of this kind, believing that the souls of human beings cease at death like those of beasts, see that they have entered an unknown region where things contrary to the honors of their former life meet them, where in place of temporal dominions they are subjected to the vilest demons, their mockeries and reproaches. Oh, by how great a sorrow and stupor are the souls of such persons disturbed!
But a faithful soul has in addition several special causes of grief. First, because it knows through faith that it is being led to the particular judgment, where it is to be judged either to paradise, to purgatory, or to hell, and it awaits that judgment in great perplexity.
Second, because it sees itself unworthily clothed before the eyes of Christ, lacking the habits of virtues and clothed in the habits of vices.
Third, the faithful soul blushes and is saddened from the recollection and remembrance of the sins and negligences which it committed while it administered the body.
It is saddened because it sees its most natural tabernacle, in which it had many delights or would have had them, and in which it had acquired or would have acquired the perfections of sciences and virtues, now rendered unfit for its habitation and abominably corrupted. It grieves because it is as though compelled to abandon the body and depart from it. It grieves like one who sees a house or garment most fittingly disposed for him being corrupted and defiled, so that he is compelled to depart from it or to cast it aside not without grief and groaning.
Finally, certain souls grieve and are saddened because of the punishments to which they are led in hell or purgatory. These, therefore, are the causes of the soul’s sadness after death. From them it is evident what must be answered to this little question according to the philosophers, the Platonists, and the theologians. These things are from Henry of Hesse, On Genesis.