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The Faculties of the Soul
All of the powers of the soul are directed toward achieving some good. Ultimately, we are made for the universal good, the vision of God. And we will be satisfied with nothing less than Him. Thus, why do we live and breathe? We are free to choose among the various options on offer, though nothing, save Him, can entirely answer our desire. – St-Thomas Aquinas
The Soul
The soul makes a human person to be what it is. The souls is primary and gives unity to the whole. The soul exists by virtue of itself and the body by virtue of the soul.
Faculties of the Soul
The soul makes the human person to be alive. Its powers include self-nutrition, growth, reproduction, higher animal faculties, such as sense cognition, and human faculties of intellect and will.
Immortality of the Soul
The senses indeed do not know existence, except under the conditions of "here" and "now," whereas the intellect apprehends existence absolutely, and for all time; so that everything that has an intellect naturally desires always to exist. But a natural desire cannot be in vain. Therefore every intellectual substance is incorruptible.
Amongst our various possessions, whether goods of the body or goods of the soul, it is clear that the human will is the most intimately personal and most cherished of all. So it happens that obedience, which makes a man yield up the most dearly prized stronghold of the individual soul in order to do the good pleasure of his Creator, is accounted the greatest of the moral virtues. Among the virtues obedience holds an exalted place but not the highest. The distinction belongs to the virtues of faith, hope and charity which unite us immediately with Almighty God.
By Grace we are elevated far above nature. Grace is more sublime than miracles, then why do we disregard it? Today, the modern worldly culture founded on expressive individualism views a universe ordered to Pathos (subjective feeling, personal view) and random chaos, even though truth, beauty and goodness, even physics, witness a universe objectively ordered to Logos, the Creator.
Worldly and material enticements, lack of love for God, disobedience to the commandments, and focusing on what others did to you instead of what Jesus did for you are common place everywhere.
Jesus came “to destroy the one who has the power of death, that is the devil” (Heb. 2:14). His prayer on the eve of the cross was that His sheep would be kept from the evil one (John 17:15).
According to Romans 8:23, the “redemption of the body” also has a “cosmic” dimension (referred to the whole of creation), but at its center, there is man: man constituted in the personal unity of spirit and body.
We let ourselves to be too deeply impressed by our senses with transitory things and have but a superficial knowledge of the eternal things of God. With miracles, the supernatural suspension of the laws of nature point to spiritual realities, not the works themselves. Jesus wants to communicate a message: believe me. Faith is a Grace that makes us share in the Goods of Christ and of the Saints. Grace makes the Saints participate in the Divine Cognition: they find reality and true freedom in obedience, from the Latin word oboedire, which means to listen, to be alert, to be discerning and attentive to the voice of the Lord.
In his description of the new heavens and new earth – see article – , Isaiah includes animals. “The wolf and the lamb shall pasture together, and the lion shall eat hay like the ox” (Isaiah 65:25)
For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:19-21)
