Suárez, body and scholasticism: an anthropology of likeness

Abstract

Firstly, this paper tackles the way in which – within the Christian context – the body qua body, as the sole locus of existence, only arises when the disparity between the mortal creature and the immortal God is highlighted, that is to say, when man is regarded as a sort of vestigium Dei instead of an imago Dei. Throughout early modernity, only theologians and philosophers who, like Servet or Da Costa, posit the mortality of the soul are capable of presenting the body in all its radicality. Contrarily, the body cannot truly appear in an anthropology which, as in Suarez’s case, sticks to the model of likeness or the imago Dei up to its last consequences. In his juridical-political theory, which operates to a certain extent within the regio dissimilitudinis, an authentic body does appear – namely, the social or political one. However, he returns to the realm of likeness, and so the autonomous view of the body is obscured, when he insists on the need of indirectly submitting the political body’s mortal soul to the immortal soul of the Church’s corpus mysticum