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Life and Death

Key terms
What life is
Health and the span of life
Mortality
Meeting death

Principle of life

What makes a body alive? In the older tradition the soul is the principle of life, the thing that makes a living body more than a lump of matter. These readings ask what that principle is, and whether it is a breath, a form or a power.

2 readings

Chapter 2, verses 7 to 9 of the Book of Genesis (Douay-Rheims) narrate how the Lord God “formed man of the slime of the earth” and “breathed into his face the breath of life”, so that “man became a living soul”. The verses also place “the tree of life” in the midst of paradise. The Fathers and the scholastics commented on them in treating the creation of man. They sit under this term for the origin of life in Scripture.

Book II, chapter 1 of Aristotle’s On the Soul (De Anima) begins its definition of the soul with natural bodies that “have life in them” and says by life “we mean self-nutrition and growth”. It reaches the soul as “the actuality of a body” in the sense of “substance” as form. Aquinas wrote a commentary on the treatise and drew on it throughout the Summa Theologica. The passage sits under this term as the classical definition of life.