Footnote vp57

vp57. A footnote appearing in The Evolution of the Soul by Richard Swinburne (Oxford 1986) reads:

That the human soul (the rational or intellectual soul as the medievals called it) comes into being (connected to the body) sometime between conception and birth is the traditional Catholic doctrine. The human soul is present when there is specifically human functioning. In the last century or two it has become normal for Catholic writers and pronouncements to assume that the soul comes into being at conception. St. Thomas Aquinas on the other hand held that the fertilized egg began to grow first as an animal (or, alternatively, first as a living non-conscious thing and then as an animal), and later as a human; that is, it was animated first by a sensitive soul (or first by a vegetative soul and then by a sensitive soul) and only later by an intellectual soul (see Summa Theologiea, Ia, 76. ad 3 and IIa, IIae, 64. 1). Aquinas owed this view to Aristotle. It was listed as an error by Pope Leo XIII in 1887 (H. Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 1910). Aquinas would not have denied that abortion was wrong, even when (because done soon after conception) it was not the killing of a human being and so murder. He would have said it was still wrong owing to it being the destruction of a potential human being, or the frustration of a natural process. Aquinas's view that the human foetus is animated by a human soul only at some time much later than conception, seems to have been the general view of the Western Church until the nineteenth century -- see G.R. Dunstan, 'The Moral Status of the Human Embryo -- a Tradition Recalled', Journal of Medical Ethics, 1984, I, 38-44.

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