Aquinas on Physical Impairment: Human Nature and Original Sin
Medieval accounts of disability by and large (though not universally) defend what is now labeled the religio-moral construction of disability: seeing an individual's disability as a punishment for that individual's sin. Unsurprisingly, such models are not much in favor among contemporary...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
[2017]
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| In: |
Harvard theological review
Year: 2017, Volume: 110, Issue: 3, Pages: 317-338 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Thomas Aquinas 1225-1274
/ Physical disability
/ Original sin
/ Punishment
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| IxTheo Classification: | KAE Church history 900-1300; high Middle Ages KDB Roman Catholic Church NBE Anthropology |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | Medieval accounts of disability by and large (though not universally) defend what is now labeled the religio-moral construction of disability: seeing an individual's disability as a punishment for that individual's sin. Unsurprisingly, such models are not much in favor among contemporary disability theorists for a number of reasons, among which we might include the unacceptable thought that an individual with disabilities somehow deserves those disabilities. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) accepts some version of this theory, but one rather different from the standard one (or at least, from what is now generally understood as the religio-moral model). Aquinas sees physical impairmentsthings that constitute a subclass of what he labels bodily defectsfundamentally as punishments for original sin. He is (generally) very careful to distance his account of defects from notions of individual punishment. (When he is not, it is because of pressure from Scriptural sourcesthough as we shall see below he believes that by and large the Bible, too, explicitly rejects the view that disability could be a punishment for individual sin.) So whatever we think of punishment models more generally, Aquinas's certainly removes one of the least appealing aspects of such models as typically understood. And Aquinas is careful, too, to associate many features of the human conditionnot just those identified as a certain subclass of defects - with corporate punishment for original sin. To this extent, his account of physical impairments tends to normalize such impairments, and to de-emphasize their distance from other features of post-lapsarian human existence. While I doubt that what Aquinas says about bodily defects would satisfy many contemporary disability theorists, it seems to me that parts of his accoutand not least this normalization strategymay appeal to more theologically-inflected accounts of the human condition. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4517 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Harvard theological review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S001781601700013X |