Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Life by Fabrizio Armerini

Those interested in ethics and public policy have to grapple with the problem of when life begins or ends.  A good deal of the Christian doctrine comes from the thought of Thomas Aquinas.  I am a newbie to reading about all of it because I skipped over a lot of the reading in my western civ class on Aquinas, thinking him a bore.  As a result, I wasn't terribly well prepared to read this book,  from Harvard University Press. This is a translation by Mark Henniger, who is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown.

This is a  technical bit of philosophy, and a person who really wants to understand it should have paid more attention to Aristotle on the soul than I ever did. Thus, I am struggling. The argument goes something like this: the life begins at conception, but what is present is a vegetative soul; the progression from vegitative to sensitive soul would take longer; this sensitive or animal soul consumes the vegetative soul in becoming itself.  Then, of course, the soul becomes rationalized, in shorter order (natch) for men than women.

The key point is just how deeply these ideas influence our understanding of abortion.  On the one hand, even among those who treat abortion as a very grave wrong, it is usually treated as something less than straight homicide (not always).  That appears to be straight out of Thomist philosophy. Amerini's contribution here is to contest the claim that had Aquinas had our contemporary understanding of genetics, Acquinas would have modified his position in favor of seeing the moment of union as the time life begins, not conception.  Amerini is not convinced that the science would have changed Acquinas' mind on much.

  Inevitably the parts of Thomism that most fascinate contemporary readers concern the first question: about when life begins. Nonetheless, I found myself more interested in the second question: Acquinas on when life ends, largely because I knew nothing.  Here you have the three major points: First, that all parts of a person end, in a unified manner. That is, when the body shuts down, the soul itself has no further need of it. Second, that there is a practical unity to life such that there is a singular end to it, and third, that death is the same for all that lives.

I'm in no way convinced I have that right. I am going to have to reread and learn more.