RATHER THAN HELL: REINCARNATION (CONCLUSION)
PART 3 of 3 parts
Arguments against reincarnation
False Refutations
The materialist is not able to refute reincarnation. As an example, we discuss Paul Edwards, the author of one of our sources, Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Edwards served as professor of philosophy at various Australian and American universities, but unfortunately his heroes are Voltaire and Bertrand Russell, and he shares their biases. He denies the existence of God, denies that humans have a spiritual soul, he denies the possibility of miracles, and he makes no effort to hide his hatred of Christianity. This has an unfortunate effect on his book Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. He tells entertaining stories about the advocates of reincarnation (and we use his book as a source of some of these stories), but when it comes to refuting reincarnation, his main argument is “reincarnation is impossible because humans do not have a soul.” A good part of the book is filled with diatribes against God, against the human soul and its immortality, against the Catholic Church, against Catholic saints and against genuine miracles. The book is as much against Christianity as it is against reincarnation, resulting in a tangle of confusion. Because of his biases, Edwards is not capable of a critical examination of reincarnation.
It should be noted that pantheism is not inseparable from the doctrine of reincarnation: Spinoza, for example rejected it.1 And not all modern pagans believe in reincarnation either. French esotericist René Guénon (1886-1951) argued consistently against reincarnation in many of his books. He maintained the correct conclusion: it is impossible for the same human soul to be born more than once in a human body. This correct conclusion was supported by a faulty reasoning, essentially a faulty understanding of the universe and of human beings.2
“Reincarnation Impossible” Says Thomist Philosophy
Advocates of reincarnation accept the existence of the human soul, so we do not have to argue here that the human soul exists. The spiritual soul of man is immaterial, permanent, self-identical through life, and immortal. If the existence of the human soul is admitted, there are two main attempts to explain the nature of man, and in particular, how the human body and human soul coexist and cooperate.
Dualism (Plato, Descartes)
According to the first one, usually associated with Plato and Descartes, man is a spirit accidentally united to a body. This explanation is called exaggerated spiritualism.3 The soul and body are two substances each complete in itself, therefore this theory is also called dualism.4 Dualism destroys the unity of man and makes the experience of unity an unintelligible illusion. According to this theory, man is a soul using a body, the human soul and the human body are related like captain and ship, driver and car, rider and horse. The captain could guide another ship, the driver could get into another car, the rider could climb on another horse. This explanation is the perfect match for reincarnation, and in fact this is the one reincarnationists always assume. But it brings into focus the greatest weaknesses of the whole theory of reincarnation: if the soul is indeed a complete substance merely using a body, what explains the complete forgetting of everything between reincarnations? A driver of cars should be unaffected by merely changing from one car to another.
Unfortunately for advocates of reincarnations, the accidental union of body and soul they need so badly is not a workable solution because the interaction of body and soul in case of an accidental union cannot be explained. Mortimer Adler clarifies
the philosophical embarrassments consequent upon the Platonic and Cartesian view of the human soul as identical in being with an angel–a purely spiritual substance that does not need a body either for its existence or for its proper operation, which is intuitive intellection. Why, then, is it united with a body to form a boat-and-rower combination of two quite disparate and separable things? That problem is as insoluble as the so-called mind-body problem that goes along with it. Also insoluble is the problem of what differentiates one soul from another, considered to be independent of the bodies with which they are united. That is why Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians reject the transmigration of souls–a doctrine cherished by contrary Far Eastern religions and also proposed as a myth in the dialogues of Plato.5
The Unity of the Human Being (St. Thomas Aquinas)
The alternative and viable theory, that of St. Thomas Aquinas (derived from Aristotle), teaches that man is a composite of two substantial principles, each incomplete in itself, the human body and human soul, which together form a single substance, the human composite.6 This mode of union between soul and body is perhaps one of the most subtle concepts in Catholic philosophy. This union is very different from dualism: it is not an accidental but an essential union. Each soul is united with one and only one body, uniquely its own. In this union, the body (matter) is passive and in itself wholly indeterminate, whereas the soul is active and the principle of determination, the (specifying) form of the body.
Matter, or material cause, is that out of which anything is made. Form, or formal cause, is that into which a thing is made. It is the principle of determination overcoming the indeterminateness of matter.7
This matter-and-form theory is called hylomorphism,8 in which matter (prime matter) and form (substantial form) are related as potency and act, and neither can be understood without the other.
In what follows, we shall give evidence that contemporary philosophy is finally beginning to consider the conclusions of St. Thomas Aquinas.
Since the time of Descartes, Scholastic philosophy was isolated and ignored by all other philosophers. Contemporary Western philosophy divides into three broad traditions: the analytical (primarily in English-speaking countries), the continental (European) and the historical (which includes Thomism). We shall concentrate on the connection between body and soul, or in modern parlance the philosophy of mind.
Contemporary Philosophy of Mind
Modern philosophy stubbornly investigated all the wrong solutions to the mind-body problem, but studiously ignored the explanation of St. Thomas Aquinas. For example, the 597-page book The Self and Its Brain by Popper and Eccles9 does claim to have a detailed history of the mind-body problem starting with the ancient Greeks. Well, between Aristotle and the Renaissance there is nothing at all, as if medieval philosophy and St. Thomas Aquinas in particular have never existed. Popper even asserts the following: “All thinkers of whom we know enough to say anything definite on their position, up to and including Descartes, were dualist interactionists.”10 Since St. Thomas was definitely not a dualist interactionist, is this assertion ignoring St. Thomas, or does it represent ignorance of St. Thomas?
Catholic, and therefore Thomist, textbooks usually concentrate on the correct solution of St. Thomas, and only a few of these devote any space to surveying wrong solutions, such as Bittle,11 Maher,12 and Donceel.13
From among the vast number of secular sources we use three: the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Self and Its Brain by Karl Popper and John Eccles, and Body and Mind by Keith Campbell,14 which has an unusually detailed bibliography. Modern philosophy considers two kinds of solutions. Solutions of the first kind are versions of dualism, i.e., the body and soul are complete substances, and neither can be reduced to the other (also called substance dualism): 1) Interactionism: body and soul are complete substances which act upon each other. 2) Psychophysical parallelism: body and soul are complete substances which do not act on each other. 3) Epiphenomenalism: body and soul are complete substances but causation goes only one way, from body to mind.
Solutions of the second kind (for which they have much more enthusiasm) are versions of materialism (or physicalism). In these theories, only the body is a substance; the soul is always reduced to the body: 1) Behaviorism denies that the mind is a thing. A famous advocate of this position was Gilbert Ryle.15 2) Somewhat less radical is central state materialism: mind is a thing, but it is not spiritual. Also called identity theory: the central nervous system is the mind. Also called property-dualism: the theory represents a dualism of the physical properties and mental properties of the body.
Although hundreds of books and untold numbers of papers were written, the results were very disappointing. According to an honest evaluation from 1967: “The mind-body problem remains a source of acute discomfort to philosophers.”16
A New Beginning for the Contemporary Philosophy of Mind
In 2002, a turning point seems to have been reached: Twelve young philosophers (eight British, two Americans, one Belgian, and one Hungarian), apparently most of them trained in the analytical tradition, published a collection of papers under the title Mind, Metaphysics and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions.17 It can be considered a turning point in the sense that St. Thomas is at last acknowledged as having existed, and more than that, he gets a sympathetic treatment as a source of promising ideas for modern philosophy. According to the editor, John Haldane:
The essays range widely across the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and action, and theory of value, with most linking analytical and Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and some focusing on Aquinas in particular.18
The following quote from David S. Oderberg, author of “Hylomorphism and Individuation” is typical of the whole tone of the collection: “Nothing in philosophy approaches, in precision, refinement, and fecundity, the philosophy of the School (=Scholasticism of the Middle Ages). Philosophy would do well to return to it.”19
We shall only comment on the papers that are relevant to the mind-body problem, avoiding details of philosophy. Haldane wrote Chapter Four, “The Breakdown of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind,” which he starts by saying “Readers of Gilson’s great work The Unity of Philosophical Experience may recognize in my title a partial echo of that of one of his chapters...‘The Breakdown of Modern Philosophy.’20 Haldane states it bluntly:
The current situation in analytical philosophy is untenable, and that space needs to be found for a range of alternative approaches drawn from non-analytical sources, particularly historical ones. The best way of making that point, I think, is by looking at one area in which current orthodoxies seem to be breaking down and to be doing so without prospect of repair or, as yet, of replacement.21
He has specific suggestions: “the insights of the Thomists as to the real locus of immateriality may help the contemporary philosopher of mind relocate his efforts away from neo-Cartesianism.”22
Another paper of great interest is “Aquinas and the Mind-Body Problem” by Richard Cross of Oxford University. Cross lists the favorite “solutions” of contemporary philosophy (substance dualism, physicalism, and property dualism), then states:
Aquinas was well aware that there are problems with these three theories....Aquinas attempted to find a solution to the mind-body problem which is different from any of the positions outlined above, and which as far as I can see clearly avoids the objections which I have just raised against these three positions.23
Avoiding the technical details of these philosophical papers, we merely repeat their overall direction: Young representatives of the analytical tradition in philosophy admit that they have reached a dead-end, and as a result, now, at last, they are willing to begin to look at St. Thomas Aquinas.
This is an unprecedented turning point in philosophy which might lead to promising developments. We draw only one conclusion from it: contemporary analytic philosophers admit (what St. Thomas and Thomists knew all along) that dualism is not a workable explanation. But dualism, postulating an accidental union between body and soul, is the solution absolutely essential for reincarnation.
Some Details of the Thomist Position
Phillips, author of Modern Thomistic Philosophy writes:
The doctrine of transmigration is, therefore, compatible with Platonism (i.e., dualism), where the union of the soul and body is looked on as accidental, but not with Aristotelianism, in which the body derives its nature from the soul, giving to it, in turn, individuality. 24
Angels, purely spiritual beings, differ from each other in the amount of knowledge God infused into them, therefore St. Thomas says every angel is a different species. By contrast, all human souls belong to the same species, and they are, at the beginning, like clean slates, like wax tablets on which nothing has been written (i.e., human beings are not born with innate ideas). For example, every baby has to learn anew, usually from some painful experience, not to touch a hot stove.
What makes human souls different from one another is their union with different bodies. The human soul depends on the body for the acquisition of its particular natural characteristics. Thus the human soul is individuated by matter. Phillips argues that the human soul cannot be united with more than one body:
If it be true that soul and body really form one nature, standing to one another in the relation of potentiality to act, it will be impossible for a soul or act, which is thus essentially related to one body, to become essentially related to another, without parting with something essential to it, and so, at least breaking its actual continuity. In fact, it cannot so change essentially, being a simple nature or form, and must therefore continue to be related to one body, and one only.25
James Royce, author of Man and His Nature: A Philosophical Psychology expresses the same as follows:
With this fuller appreciation of the manner in which the individual human soul actuates matter to form this man’s body, we should find little difficulty in refuting the theory sometimes proposed that souls could lose their personal identity and return to life on earth in a different body. This is called metempsychosis, transmigration of souls, or reincarnation. The very notion of hylomorphism seems to rule out the possibility. For if Napoleon’s soul were to return, any matter with which it would substantially unite would by that very fact be Napoleon’s body....
This individual cannot be somebody else, regardless the change of material conditions. The senile psychotic may not look, speak or act anything like himself at the age of twenty, much less at birth. But he is the same person. Even more preposterous is the theory that the soul could return as the form of a dog or other animal, for if the human soul actuated matter it could only be the formal cause of a human being, not of any other kind. If a lion eats Napoleon, his body becomes lion. If Napoleon eats the lion, the lion becomes Napoleon. But Napoleon’s soul retains its individual identity in either case.26
An explanation of the distinction between incarnate and discarnate (or disembodied) human souls would shed light on this crucial matter. While the human soul is incarnate, it is not conscious of itself: there does not exist for man, here on earth, a direct consciousness of the acts and of the existence of the soul. My soul has never seen itself, has never felt itself; it is the condition of the disembodied soul alone to see and feel itself, to be directly conscious of its own nature and existence:
At death, the soul enters a spirit-state which it did not possess before, knowledge is communicated to the separated soul mediated through the instrumentality of higher spirits. Most importantly, it gains a clear perception of its own self as a spirit, which it did not possess in its earthy life; also a vision of the whole material universe and an approximate knowledge of the angelic nature in general. In a word, St. Thomas constantly teaches that separation means the turning of the human intellect towards higher things, whilst in the state of union with the body it is turned toward lower things.27
The great Benedictine Abbot, Dom Anscar Vonier continues:
I am afraid that people who talk so glibly of a second, third, and for that matter of a hundredth existence, have never thought of the tremendously changed conditions that prevail after death. Death is necessarily the total extinction of all our sensitive life....The soul in the state of separation can only have intellect and will, two powers of extreme immateriality and simplicity. Its survival is anything but a continuation of our present mode of existence. The simplicity and immateriality of power, which are the conditions of the disembodied soul, render useless any speculations about a third or forth existence; a spirit remains a spirit forever.28
St. Thomas Aquinas himself argues that a soul would not willingly enter any human body (which is exactly what advocates of reincarnation imagine):
On the other hand, the hypothesis that souls are united to bodies neither by violence nor by nature but by free choice is likewise impossible. For no one voluntarily enters into a state worse than the previous one, unless he is deceived. But the separate soul enjoys a higher state of existence than when united to the body; especially according to the Platonists, who say that through its union with the body, the soul forgets what it knew before....We are left with the conclusion that if the soul had existed before the body, it would not be united to the body of its own will.29
So in the beginning, God has put the soul into the body, and that union between the soul and body was for the good of the soul. But after their separation, at the death of the human composite, the human soul awakens to its spirit nature, and her life will be a higher and happier life (we do not discuss here sin and grace), so the only body it will be happy to rejoin will be the same body, glorified after the resurrection.30
“Reincarnation Impossible” says Divine Revelation
The Catholic Church teaches that the lifetime of every human being ends with a judgment, which makes reincarnation impossible. Four quotes from St. Paul should completely settle the question for Catholics:
As it is appointed unto men once to die, and after this, the judgment. (Heb. 9:27)
Therefore every one of us shall render account to God for himself. (Rom. 14:12)
For we must all be manifested before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the proper things of the body, according as he hath done, whether it be good or evil. (II Cor. 5:10)
Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord. (Rom. 12:19)
We also quote from the Catholic Catechism of Cardinal Gasparri (Kennedy, 1932), which describes what Catholics call the Particular Judgment (answers to Questions 235 and 236, on p.59):
Immediately after death the soul stands before the tribunal of Christ, to face the particular judgment....At the particular judgment, the soul will be judged about every single thing–its thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions. The sentence then passed on the soul will be ratified at the General Judgment, when it will be made publicly manifest.
Since every lifetime ends with a judgment, the soul that was judged is not available for another incarnation.
There is no divine revelation about the pre-existence of souls, but none is really necessary. By the pre-existence of the soul only this is to be understood: after God creates the soul, it is not immediately united with matter, but lives for a while without any union with matter. But such a pre-existence of the soul would not make reincarnation possible. Every soul being judged right after death makes sure that the soul received by some body, even if it pre-existed, could not have had a previous life in another body.
But even the idea of the pre-existence of souls has been ruled out when the Church condemned the idea of the soul pre-existing. Origen, the eminent writer of the second and third centuries, held that human souls were created long before they were infused into bodies and existed by themselves in a separated state. The Church (in particular, Pope Vigilius in 543) condemned this: “If anyone says or holds that the souls of men pre-existed...and sent down into bodies for the sake of punishment, let him be anathema.”31 This is eminently reasonable, since the soul is naturally made for an existence together with the body, and if it existed before its union with the body it would do so in a state of frustration unable to fulfill its natural function; without the body it would not have acquired any knowledge in the pre-existing state.
This is the unchangeable teaching of the Catholic Church. Paul Siwek gives a long survey of Church Fathers who strongly condemned the doctrine of reincarnation as a “fable” (St. Gregory of Nyssa) or “the dream of stupid people” (St. Gregory Nazianzen).32 After the Fathers, reincarnation disappears from Catholic theology as being irrelevant.
Advocates of reincarnation often deliberately misquote Holy Scripture claiming support for reincarnation. Their favorite is to claim that St. John the Baptist was the reincarnation of the prophet Elias. The short answer is that Elias has not yet died, but he was taken up to heaven (IV Kgs. 2:1-13); he still lives in his original body, so his reincarnation is out of the question. But we shall discuss this in more detail. The passage in which Our Lord is speaking about the role of St. John the Baptist is as follows: “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John: And if you will receive it, he is Elias that is to come” (Mt. 11:13-14). The words of Christ calling St. John the Baptist “Elias” should be understood in the figurative sense of the word: the spirit which animated him and the power which was manifested in his sermons were an exact replica of the spirit and power which Elias had. The comments of the Haydock Bible says the same in more details:
He is Elias, &c. Not in person but in spirit. John is here styled Elias, not in the same manner as those who taught the transmigration of souls; but the meaning is, that the precursor came in the spirit and virtue of Elias and had the same fullness of the Holy Ghost. The Baptist is not undeservedly styled Elias, both for the austerity of his life, and for his sufferings. Elias upbraided Achab and Jezabel for their impieties, and was obliged to flee. John blamed the unlawful marriage of Herod and Herodias, and died for his virtue.
Furthermore, the Angel said, most explicitly, to Zachary about John to be born: “And he [St. John the Baptist] shall go before him [Our Lord Jesus Christ] in the spirit and power of Elias” (Lk. 1:17). And when the priests and Levites asked St. John the Baptist: “Art thou Elias?” and he said I am not (Jn. 1: 21). So the claims and explanations of reincarnationists do not stand up to scrutiny.
And Divine Revelation gives the true answers to questions that the doctrine of reincarnation poses and pretends to answer but in fact is unable to answer. These include: one human life is too short to reach perfection and human lifetimes give very unequal chances to human beings for reaching perfection. Reincarnation pretends to answer these in the order of nature, by endlessly repeating lifetimes, and hoping that by merely repeating life enough times perfection will somehow be reached.
The Christian Revelation is definite about human beings having only a single lifetime in which to fulfill their destinies. But reaching perfection lies with what Christianity calls the supernatural, which has a precise definition, as Fr. Martindale explains:
It does not only mean what outstrips the ordinary powers of human nature. There is no vague association here with the mysterious or even the miraculous; still less with the magical, the visionary, or the ghostly. Our doctrine has to do with the free gift, offered by God to man, and by man freely appropriated, of a way of being–not of acting, or thinking, or feeling–higher than what is co-natural to him.
...there is offered to man the chance of living a super-human (super-natural) life. It is not merely a lofty and moral life, not an unselfish life only, not just a devout, sinless, prayerful life; it is nothing into which, by any process of purification and inspiration, human life can be raised or developed within its natural functioning and out of its natural resources or possibilities....33
This super-human or super-natural life is the result of the above mentioned free gift of God, called the (sanctifying) grace of God which amounts to an intrinsic elevation of human nature, or in the words of St. Peter, being made “partakers of the divine nature” (II Pet. 1:4).
...[T]he super-naturalized man is not two persons, nor a different sort of person, but himself, living his own life, yet in vital union with an essentially higher one.34
The best summary of this doctrine can be found in the Mass:
O God, Who in a wonderful manner created and ennobled human nature and still more wonderfully renewed it; grant that, by the mystery of this water and wine, we may be made partakers of His Divinity who has condescended to become partaker of our humanity.
Once more, then: God intends to give to all men who will accept it the free gift of a super-natural life, with eternal consequences to themselves both if it be accepted and if it be rejected. Man can fail if he rejects the supernatural life offered by God. But if accepted, the grace of God perfects and elevates the human soul, and solves all the problems that reincarnationists like to pose.
Conclusion
No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The medieval saint’s body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive....The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.35
This quote illustrates, using a Buddhist as an example, that Buddhism, Hinduism, and Occultism can be described as “worshipping the god within.” Instead of Occultism, we could have emphasized Theosophy, because according to H. P. Blavatsky, “no one can be a true Occultist without being a true Theosophist; otherwise he is simply a black magician....” The “god within” is always around: The Edgar Cayce Companion: A Comprehensive Treatise of the Edgar Cayce Readings devotes a whole chapter to “Attuning to the God Within.”
The words of Chesterton are very fitting: “Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.”36 And, most importantly, these horrible religions do not have any eschatology; they never consider the Last Things: Death, Judgment, Hell, and Heaven. There is a very good reason for having no eschatology: the demons know that if you begin to think about eschatology, they have lost you. So they want to distract you, which is admirably accomplished with the fiction of reincarnation.
Reincarnation cannot possibly be reconciled with or integrated into Christianity, because true Christianity is based in Divine Revelation and therefore is unchangeable. Both of the explanations of reincarnation–based on Karma (Hinduism) or on spirit evolution (Theosophy)–are constrained to the realm of nature only. Reincarnation is a doctrine about the unredeemed human soul, about the nightmare of his infinite wanderings or about vague hopes for some natural evolution of it.
In the pantheistic world of reincarnation there is no room for God, no room for the supernatural, no room for Redemption, forgiveness and divine grace, which are the only sources of true spirit evolution.
The main purpose of demons is to extinguish divine grace wherever it can be found. They really do not want your spirit to evolve, they only want you to be with them in hell. So reincarnation with its purely natural explanations is most congenial to the demons. And the demons want to keep it that way: that is why Hinduism and occultism are shot through and through with the demonic.
According to the fiction of reincarnation, death is something inconsequential, it merely leads to the next life. So if you do not like your life, just get on with the next one (and thus believers in reincarnation tend to take suicide lightly). After this life comes another, and then another, and yet another, ad infinitum. How is it all going to end? It should end well because in the process you will, somehow, become a god anyway.
This extraordinarily loose thinking, widespread in our age, has the result of sweeping masses of people into the arms of demons. These people waste their lives not recognizing that this life is our one and only chance to prove whether we want to be found friends of God or not. And that is what is going to be determined at the judgment reincarnationists hope to evade.
1 Siwek, The Enigma of the Hereafter, p. 135.
2 Joscelyn Godwin, “The Case Against Reincarnation,” Gnosis Magazine, No. 42, Winter 1997.
3 Jacques Maritain, An Introduction to Philosophy (Sheed and Ward, 1955), p. 176.
4 Ibid., p. 176.
5 Mortimer Adler, The Angels and Us (Macmillan, 1982), pp. 161-62.
6 Maritain, Introduction to Philosophy, p. 176.
7 James Francis Barrett, This Creature, Man (Bruce, 1936), pp. 274-75.
8 Maritain, op. cit., p. 168.
9 Karl Popper and John Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (Springer International, 1977).
10 Ibid., p. 152.
11 Celestine Bitte, The Whole Man: Psychology (Bruce, 1945), Chapter 21: “The Human Person.”
12 Michael Maher, Psychology (Magi Books), Chapter 25: “Soul and Body.”
13 J. F. Donceel, Philosophical Anthropology (Sheed, Andrews and McMeel, 1967), Chapter 12: “Soul and Body.”
14 Anchor Books, 1970.
15 The Concept of Mind (Barnes and Noble, 1949).
16 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “Mind-Body Problem.”
17 John Haldane, Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions (University of Notre Dame, 2002).
18 Ibid., p. x.
19 Ibid., p. 125.
20 Ibid., p. 54.
21 Ibid., p. 59.
22 Ibid., p. 73.
23 Ibid., pp. 36-37.
24 R. P. Phillips, Modern Thomistic Philosophy (The Newman Press, 1962), p. 314.
25 Ibid.
26 James E. Royce, Man and His Nature: A Philosophical Psychology (McGraw Hill, 1961), pp. 334-35.
27 Vonier, The Collected Works of Abbot Vonier, Volume III: The Soul and the Spiritual Life (Newman Press, 1912), p. 53.
28 Ibid., pp. 122-23.
29 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. II: “Creation,” Chapter 83, 17.
30 Vonier, The Soul and the Spiritual Life, p. 54.
31 Denzinger, The Sources of Catholic Dogma (B. Herder, 1957), 203.
32 Siwek, The Enigma of the Hereafter, pp. 9-18.
33 C. C. Martindale, “The Supernatural,” in God and the Supernatural by D’Arcy, Cuthbert, Dawson, Martindale and Watkins (Sheed and Ward, 1954), p. 7.
34 Ibid., p. 20.
35 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Image Book, 1959), pp. 130-31.
36 Ibid., p. 76.
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