ABSTRACT
Thomas Aquinas presents an account of human immortality and bodily resurrection intended to be both faithful to Christian Scripture and metaphysically sound as following from the Aristotelian view of human nature. Unfortunately, while we have the benefi t of several presentations of Aquinas’s arguments for a human soul’s persistence beyond its body’s death,1 Aquinas died before completing the fi nal part of the Summa theologiae, and so we lack what would have been his most mature thinking on the doctrine of bodily resurrection. Instead, a supplementum-appended by his secretary, Reginald of Piperno-reproduces the latter half of Aquinas’s commentary on Book Four of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, which is one of Aquinas’s earliest works.2 Due to this lack of a defi nitive fi nal statement on the matter, it remains an open question for contemporary Thomistic scholars how Aquinas’s view of the resurrection’s metaphysical mechanics may have developed from his earlier treatment.3
