What follows after my introduction is an interesting article for poets and philosophers linking Duns Scotus and Father Gerard Manley Hopkins. The author, Father Longenecker, does a good job explaining the concept of haecceity as employed by Duns Scotus. In studying philosophy under Brother Francis, who was an ardent Thomist, he taught me to appreciate this contribution of the Franciscan philosopher/theologian Scotus, traditionally called “the Subtle Doctor.” Whereas Saint Thomas considered the individuality of a material thing (including man) to be the particular physical matter as determined (signata) to be this or that thing, his younger Franciscan contemporary (1266-1308), argued that the principle of individuation was the haecceity of a thing, which is to say, the “thisness” of a thing. This may seem a mere scholastic quibble, but when it comes to men, it was, and is, very important. So important in fact, that Brother Francis took issue with Saint Thomas on this question. Why? Because by maintaining with Aristotle that matter was the principle of individuation in all material things including men, the Angelic Doctor committed himself to denying that the separated souls of the dead can be properly called human persons.
How is that, you may ask? The answer to this intriguing question is that, in Saint Thomas’ view, there can be no principle of individuation in an immaterial thing. He maintained that a human person is distinct from another human person through his complete substance, matter and form, body and soul. The souls of the just in heaven and purgatory were incomplete; they had undergone a substantial change in death. Their bodies had decomposed organically into other lesser substances. The just, even in the bliss of beatitude, long for the resurrection of their bodies in glory. But, if they were not human persons, then who was in heaven or purgatory? “Who” was judged in the particular judgment? Was there a “who”? Yes, there was still a “who” in the afterlife of humans. [All persons are “who’s”; angels are persons and each has a name; God is Three Persons, “Three Who’s, one “What”.] The separated souls had to be “who’s (persons), if the Communion of Saints included the Church eternal and not just the temporal Church Militant. (Note: The Council of Trent defined three centuries after Saint Thomas the traditional Catholic doctrine of the Communion of Saints in Session XXV regarding Purgatory, invocation of saints, and indulgences.) The scholastic definition of person is “the complete individual and incommunicable substance possessing a rational or intellectual nature.”
In any event, we know Saint Thomas never denied the consciousness of the separated souls and their self-awareness, even if he questioned their personhood and complete identity. For instance, in his Commentary on First Corinthians, chapter, 15, the Angelic Doctor writes that anima mea non est ego (I am not my soul); well fine, no problem, but when he extends this and says further in that commentary that when we pray to Saint Peter we are not properly praying to Saint Peter (who merited our intercession while laboring in grace on earth) but to Peter’s soul, then there is a problem. The great Tridentine theologian, Francisco Suarez, recognizing incipient danger here, simply put aside such Aristotelian distinctions and offered that “each singular substance is individualized by its own entity and requires no other principle for its individuation.” Suarez, obviously, favored Scotus’ haecceitas.
Moving on to angels, this is not to say that Saint Thomas believed that they were not individuals (i.e., complete individual spiritual substances), each being its own person. What he denied was that they were individuals as in members of a rational species as men are. Peter and John are individuals; these two cows are not individuals, but they are individual cows. This in the sense that they are complete and cannot be divided (individuum) without ceasing to be what they are. In referring to cows in a pasture, no one says, “Look at those individuals,” but they do do so when referring to a group of men. So much were the angels persons for Saint Thomas that he opined that each angel must be its own species, its own whatness. This follows logically because, being immaterial, they have no matter to individuate them as members of a particular species ( as in this man, that man; this cat, that cat, this tree, that tree etc., etc.). Apropos of this, Saint Thomas says, “The good of the species preponderates over the good of the individual. Hence it is much better for the species to be multiplied in the angels than for individuals to be multiplied in one species.” (Summa Theologica, Prima, Reply to Obj 2, Art. 4, Q. 50). Furthermore, Saint Thomas, in treating the question of the guardian angels (ST Prima, Q. 113), affirms that “Individual angels guard individual men.” (my emphasis).
Note well, that there was no disagreement between Scotus and Saint Thomas over the meaning and reality of the term essence (quidditas, or whatness of a thing); for both of them it was (as Aristotle had it in his teaching of hylomorphism in De Anima), the form of a thing, i.e., that which made the thing what it was. For men, as Aristotle said, the form was the soul.
The value of the term haecceity then? It is clearly this: When God creates each unique human soul it has a thisness (haecceity) about it that is incommunicable. In fact, the thisness given by the Creator is what makes the rational soul incommunicable, and, therefore, an immortal human person. The matter, which the soul informs at conception, will be the same matter, informed unto a man’s perfected physical maturity, that will be properly his in an incorruptible state at his immortal bodily resurrection.
In reading Father Longenecker’s tribute to the poetry and prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins, I could not help but note how similar the poet and short-story writer, Father Leonard Feeney, was to his fellow Jesuit Hopkins. Both poets savored creation and the Creator of it all. Both had tender hearts, full of love for truth, goodness, and the beauty of God’s creation. For the former, it is evident in his essays, especially in Fish on Friday’s, “Queen of Hearts” or his poem, “Angela Died Today and Went to Heaven”; for the latter, it was his masterpiece, “The Wreck of the Deutschland.”
The Imaginative Conservative, Father Dwight Longenecker: Believing that Twitter should be a conduit for philosophical riddles instead of cliches, I tweeted last week a thought that came while reading a new book on Gerard Manley Hopkins. The tweet was, “It is through your haecceity that your quiddity will be perfected.” Full article is here.
