Without a doubt, Dr. Edward Feser’s book, Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature (Editiones Scholasticae, 2024), contains one of the best presentations of the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the human being.
Dr. Edward Feser’s name is far too well-known to require a detailed biography. Without exaggeration, he is one of the most important contemporary philosophers of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. Perhaps even more significant is the fact that he is not an intellectual isolated in an ivory tower, but an author who does not hesitate to engage with the “hot” topics of the moment, including political ones. For the readers who are (maybe) hearing his name for the first time, I offer an opportunity for a “close encounter of the third kind” by quoting a tweet of his from October 11, 2024:
“If you’re a Catholic who wets your diaper and cries ‘racism’ or ‘homophobia’ every time someone’s feelings are hurt by ‘insensitive’ language, but can’t work up the mildest outrage at mockery of the Eucharist, I submit that maybe your religion isn’t actually Catholicism.”
It is clear that we are dealing with a critic who does not mince words. His banner reads, as his X profile states, “Professor of Philosophy, Scholastic, Catholic.” Personally, I would have chosen the reverse order of these three descriptors. But this works fine, too.
Everything I have pointed out so far compelled me to read his writings with increasing interest. Among them, I found particularly remarkable his series of articles on the challenging topic of hell (you can find it on his blog under the general title “Damnation Roundup”). When I saw the announcement of his book entitled Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature (2024), I was instantly intrigued. I regard “nature” (φύσις), the most discussed subject in ancient Greece, as the critical point where all philosophical roads and concepts intersect. The question “What is the nature of nature?” is one of the most difficult issues a speculative thinker can confront. This is why, upon seeing the title of Feser’s book, I hoped to finally receive a significant answer to this question.
It was not to be. For now, I remain accompanied (among others) by Saint Maximus the Confessor (with Ambigua and Quaestiones ad Thalassium), Johannes Scotus Eriugena (with De Divisione Naturae), and Pierre Hadot with his surprising 2004 essay Le Voile d’Isis: Essai sur l’histoire de l’idée de nature.
You can already deduce from my tone that the book did not provide the answers I was seeking. Despite this, I managed to read the over 500 pages of this massive volume without losing enthusiasm for Dr. Feser’s qualities. The most important one is half-captured by Sir Anthony Kenny in the Times Literary Supplement:
“Feser has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable.”
I say only half-captured because the most important part is implicit in the beginning of the quote. Feser not only has the ability to formulate a solid argument and express it very well—with true literary talent, I might add—but also possesses the rare quality of appropriating his predecessors’ arguments, making them the content of his own thinking.
Feser is not an exegete or an imitator who replicates the words and arguments of the masters. Though he moves freely through the gallery of significant thinkers in the entire history of Western (and occasionally even Eastern) thought, he judges from his own perspective—with his own philosophical mind, so to speak—what they have said. While Dr. Feser can be considered a Thomist, he is more than that: he is, simply, Edward Feser. The arguments and opinions he expresses are entirely his own.
The monograph I will discuss here addresses and argues what I would call the anthropological instantiations of the universal concept of ‘nature’ (φύσις). The monograph is divided into four major sections, reflecting Dr. Feser’s ongoing interest in the philosophy of mind: Part I: What is Mind?; Part II: What is Body?; Part III: What is a Human Being?; Part IV: What is the Soul? Essentially, as the author himself states in the preface, “the book defends the traditional Aristotelian view that human beings are by nature rational animals.” Clearly, by “Aristotelian,” he implies a refinement of the vision of Alexander the Great’s teacher through the lenses of the speculative genius of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Let us acknowledge it: there is an unbridgeable chasm between the classical and the modern. The latter, quite simply, use the same terms to which ‘someone’ has completely and radically changed the meaning.
In a choice I find highly appropriate, the starting point is not either of the two seminal authors of Western metaphysical thought, Aristotle and St. Thomas, but a third figure who is at least as influential, St. Augustine. The point of departure is a statement from De Trinitate (X, 10): “the mind knows itself, even when it seeks itself.” This illuminating proposition is supplemented by much more substantial passages. From all of these, Dr. Feser constructs a conceptual painting in which the mind and its two fundamental capacities—thinking and willing—are examined with detective-like meticulousness. In the background (or perhaps foreground, if you will) lies the crucial theme of “love.” At the center of this speculative discourse stands one of the most significant passages also extracted from De Trinitate:
“But just as there are two things, the mind and its love, when it loves itself, so there are two things, the mind and its knowledge, when it knows itself. Therefore, the mind itself, its love and its knowledge are a kind of trinity.”
If, in the first instance, Dr. Feser develops, following in the footsteps of first-rate authors, a coherent and comprehensive vision of the human being, his journey does not stop there. Engaged in an intense dialogue with thinkers from all schools of thought, ancient and modern, he responds to, analyzes, critiques, rejects (or occasionally retains) the ideas they propose. For example, he clearly establishes that St. Augustine by no means subscribes to an ungainly Cartesian split between mind and body (as some overly enthusiastic scholars would claim), but neither is Descartes an Augustinian (as some exegetes, misled by Étienne Gilson’s famous Index scolastico-cartésien from 1913, have imagined).
His essential point is that matter is not material. I am convinced that today’s physicists and chemists would shrug if they read such a statement. I am at peace, however—they do not read philosophy. Why would they, after Stephen Hawking declared that “philosophy is dead”?
The clarifications Feser brings along the way are as important as the advocacy he offers for the (often misunderstood) concept of “love:”
“These days the word ‘love’ is commonly taken to connote a kind of emotion, but that is not how ancient writers like Augustine intend it. For these writers, what is essential to loving is to will something as good, and the affective state we associate with love can be absent even when we love something in this sense. Consider, for example, the way you might love an enemy. You would not have warm feelings for him; you might even have very negative feelings when you think of him. But if you willed what is good for him (such as his repentance of the evil he has done to you), you could still be said to love him.”
Introducing Boethius into the dialogue, he deepens his definition of the person as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” Only from this point does Feser’s fascinating journey through the labyrinth of Aristotelian-scholastic terminology truly begin. All the key concepts—substance, form, matter, accident, potentiality, actuality, substantial form, accidental form—are presented, explained, and argued. Everything is done not with the pretense of elucidating the meanings these concepts held for thinker X or philosopher Y, but primarily to incorporate them into his own perspective.
To see concretely how Dr. Feser proceeds, I chose one of the most intriguing topics he discusses: matter. His essential point is that matter is not material. I am convinced that today’s physicists and chemists would shrug if they read such a statement. I am at peace, however—they do not read philosophy. Why would they, after Stephen Hawking declared that “philosophy is dead”? In any case, to understand what Feser means, empirical and positivist science offers no help. Here is only one example:
“Matter, for hylemorphism, essentially just is that which not only limits form to a particular thing, time, and place, but also that which persists when an attribute is gained or lost. It is absolutely crucial to understand that the characteristics of matter identified so far—its correspondence to potentiality (as contrasted with form’s correspondence to actuality), its status as the principle of the limitation of form, and its status as the principle of persistence through change—are definitive of matter as hylemorphism understands it. That is to say, the hylemorphist is using the term ‘matter’ in a technical sense. He is not saying that matter as it has independently come to be understood in modern physics and chemistry is what turns out to be the stuff that plays the roles of persisting through change, limiting form, and corresponding to potentiality. He is, so far, not saying anything about matter in the modern sense at all.”
But neither do modern thinkers (physicists and chemists) say “anything about matter in the metaphysical sense at all.” Let us acknowledge it: there is an unbridgeable chasm between the classical and the modern. The latter, quite simply, use the same terms to which ‘someone’ has completely and radically changed the meaning. To avoid suspense, I will reveal one of the culprits: René Descartes. When I saw during the course of my doctoral studies how he understands a key concept like pneuma (πνεῦμα), along with many other classical concepts, I blushed with indignation. To give you the chance to reflect on Feser’s assertions, I will conclude with just one more quote:
“It is change that involves, not a substance gaining or losing some attribute while still persisting, but rather a substance going out of existence and being replaced by a new one. This is what happens when the banana is eaten, digested, and incorporated into the flesh of the animal that ate it, or when it is burned and reduced to ash. Because change requires some underlying persisting subject that does not change, there must be such a subject in the case of substantial change no less than in the case of the other kinds. But because it is the substance itself that goes out of existence in this case, it is a substantial form that is lost, not a merely accidental form. Hence it is not any kind of secondary matter that is the subject of this sort of change, but rather prime matter.”
In the two quotations above, we have all the necessary concepts at our disposal. Thus, ‘prime matter’ is the universal substratum behind the continuum of everything that exists. This is why we do not see, as Edward Feser imaginatively suggests, things suddenly disappearing and reappearing in our world “out of nothing.” Instead, they transform from one thing into another: for instance, a banana either into the substance resulting from digestion or the ash resulting from its burning. The existence of the banana in our world is determined by the accidental forms that concretize the essential form (or, in Platonic terms, the “idea”) of the banana: if the banana’s color or size changes, we are dealing with an alteration of accidents; but if the banana is completely destroyed (digested, burned), we are dealing with the disappearance of its essential form. More accurately, one could say that the essential form ceases to exist while remaining real in being. That is, what is essentially the banana does not cease to exist—but not in our visible world, accessible to sensory knowledge, but in the unseen yet real world of “ideas.”
When I am writing these lines I notice that I get carried away. But I can’t help but enjoy introducing you directly to the most famous debate of classical philosophy as depicted by Raphael in The School of Athens: the one between Platonists and Aristotelians. I assure you that there is a complete answer to this debate—though it does not lie at the level of speculative-rational explanations proposed over the centuries by the epigones mentioned by Alain de Libera in La Querelle des universaux (1996). What I’ve said so far is not just an invitation to read Feser’s provocative monograph, but also an introduction to the final part of my review.
We learn that a person is “an individual substance of a rational nature,” and so on. Under Feser’s pen (or rather, mouse), everything seems perfect. But is it really so? In my opinion, the whole picture is missing something that is of overwhelming importance to the mystical tradition I represent: original sin and its consequences.
I will thus express the most serious criticism I can make of Edward Feser’s excellent monograph. This criticism is not directed solely at him but at the entire tradition of rational-speculative metaphysical thought that his approach illustrates. The man described by Feser seems (almost) perfect: here is the soul—the “form” of the body; here is the body—the “matter” of the soul; we also have the “mind,” the “will,” and “thought.” We learn that a person is “an individual substance of a rational nature,” and so on. Under Feser’s pen (or rather, mouse), everything seems perfect. But is it really so? In my opinion, the whole picture is missing something that is of overwhelming importance to the mystical tradition I represent: original sin and its consequences.
Following Aristotle, St. Thomas speaks of the presence of what the Stoics called pneuma (πνεῦμα)—the “material” the phantasia (φαντασία = the “organ” of the “phantasms”) is made of. St. Thomas avoids answering the question: was this “knowledge through phantasms” always necessary for man? Practically, he discusses the structure of human existence—following the Aristotelian-scholastic axiom that “nothing is in the intellect without first being in the senses”—as if Adam and Eve in Paradise knew the same way as postlapsarian man. But some of the greatest Christian thinkers in the mystical tradition—led by Saints Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Athanasius the Great, and extending to St. Bonaventure or even St. Francis de Sales—did not share this opinion. On the contrary, for them, the way we know now is profoundly deficient, and restoration is possible only through the transformative work of divine grace.
From this perspective, even reason was viewed, as it manifests now, with profound suspicion. For although we share the same nature as Adam and Eve, its qualities and functionality have been profoundly altered by original sin. Moreover, according to the hints and notes of the three saints mentioned above—Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Athanasius the Great—prelapsarian knowledge involved a form of intellectual intuition that excluded the application of reasoning to phantasms resulting from sensory perception. Why? Because in Paradise the “prime matter” did not possess the same quality (i.e., “mortality”) that “matter” does after the consummation of original sin. That mixture of the metaphysical categories of “being” and “non-being” that the brilliant Athanasius speaks of in Contra Gentes led to a metamorphosis of nature that must be taken seriously when discussing the nature of fallen man and the state of his intellect. Neither concupiscence nor knowledge through phantasms existed before the fall. This is the opinion of the saints mentioned. But if so, how did knowledge occur? And what value does Aristotelian-Thomistic discourse about knowledge through the mediation of “phantasms” hold?
Even if we cannot say that the subject of the fall is absent from the writings of St. Thomas (because it is not!), nevertheless, in his speculative anthropology, it seems not only bracketed but effectively excluded. The hidden premise of this attitude is the thesis that man as an intellectual being was before the fall —more or less—as he is now. This premise is not the one guiding those belonging to the mystical tradition of St. Bonaventure. In this sense, it is extremely significant that reason itself was considered by him the most dangerous harlot imaginable. Actually, the Seraphic Doctor saw in the rise of rational-speculative theology (in short, “metaphysics”) an ascent from the dark abyss of that terrible smoke rising from chapter 9 of the Apocalypse of St. John.
I hope I won’t be misunderstood. By what I’ve said above, I am not advocating for the marginalization of Organon, Summa Theologica, or similar works (such as St. John Damascene’s Fountain of Knowledge). However, I would be pleased to see a serious discussion based on a systematic reading of all sources and major authors (for instance, the Greek Church Fathers I mentioned—with the two Gregories, Athanasius, and the brilliant Maximus—given a place of honor) in which the hidden premises of metaphysical endeavors are seriously interrogated. I hope that even Dr. Feser finds it suspicious that for centuries so many treatises of rational-speculative thought have been written without answering to some essential questions (like the one regarding the post-lapsarian “knowledge through phantasms”). Perhaps the time has come to propose some well-founded answers.
