I wrote before about Hao Wang’s suggestion that Spinoza’s view on immortality — or what Spinoza calls “the eternity of the mind”:

has some affinity with the views of Taoism, especially those of Zhuang Zi, who would have endorsed the thought expressed by Spinoza in the next to the last paragraph of Ethics: “Whereas the wise man is scarcely at all disturbed in spirit, but, being conscious of himself, and of God [Nature], and of things, by a certain eternal necessity, never ceases to be, but always possesses true acquiescence of his spirit”.

A Logical Journey, 109

Since Wang quotes him elsewhere, it is likely that he gets this idea from Feng Youlan. Feng mentions Spinoza several times in the chapter on Zhuangzi in his Short History of Chinese Philosophy.

The view that “emotion can be counteracted with reason and understanding” is said by Feng to be “the view of Spinoza and also of the Taoists”. Feng quotes a story from Ch. 18 of the Zhuangzi (one of the ‘outer’ chapters), in which Huizi visits Zhuangzi after his wife’s death, to pay condolences, and is astonished to find him drumming and singing. Zhuangzi’s explanation for this apparently inappropriate behaviour is that he mourned at first until he came to realise something about death:

At the very beginning, she was not living, having no form, nor even substance. But somehow or other there was then her substance, then her form, and then her life. Now by a further change, she has died. The whole process is like the sequence of the four seasons, spring, summer, autumn, and winter. While she is thus lying in the great mansion of the universe, for me to go about weeping and wailing would be to proclaim myself ignorant of the natural laws. Therefore I stop.

Feng comments that “the Taoists maintained that the sage who has a complete understanding of the nature of things, thereby has no emotions”, but this means not that “he lacks sensibility” but only “that he is not disturbed by the emotions and enjoys what may be called ‘the peace of the soul.’” Following this, he quotes the same passage from Spinoza as Wang above, which in the latest translation reads:

apart from the fact that an ignorant person is agitated in many ways by external causes and never has true contentment of spirit, he also lives, we might say, ignorant of himself and of God and of things, and as soon as he ceases to be acted on, at the same time he also ceases to be. Conversely, a wise person, insofar as he is considered to be such, is scarcely moved in spirit, but being conscious of himself and of God and of things by some eternal necessity, he never ceases to be, but always has possession of true contentment of spirit.

Ethics 5p42s, Silverthorne/Kisner trans.

The wise person achieves a sort of eternity through understanding. It is mysterious what sort of eternity this is. Wang notes that it “is not an afterlife”. Spinoza’s passage seems on the face of it to imply that the wise person achieves some sort of awareness — being “conscious of himself and of God and of things by some eternal necessity” — which somehow causes his soul to be eternal, though why it should cause this is a mystery. But the comparison with Zhuangzi suggests a different and I think more accurate reading.

What Zhuangzi realises with the death of his wife is that she is changed but not gone — sleeping in the “great mansion of the universe”, which is Feng’s translation for “巨室”. Zhuangzi comes to recognise this through noting all the changes through which she passed during her life, “the sequence of the four seasons”. Since change was the only real constant in her life, how can she be gone by yet another change? The point is expressed more clearly in one of the inner chapters (the sixth):

Now the human form in its time undergoes ten thousand transformations, never stopping for an instant — so the joys it brings must be beyond calculation! Hence, the sage uses it to roam in that from which nothing ever escapes, where all things are maintained.

Brook Ziporyn trans., 6:28

Here “that from which nothing ever escapes, where all things are maintained” sounds like the 巨室 again. But this is not some Platonic realm of essences; it is the very principle of the transformation of things. Other passages seem to confirm this, for example:

Life and death are a great matter, but they are unable to alter him [Wang Tai]. Even if Heaven and earth were to topple over, he would not be lost with them. He discerns what alone is unborrowed, so he is not transferred away with the things around him. He looks on the alterations of all things as his own fate, and thus holds fast to their source.

5:3

This resonates somewhat with the passage from Spinoza quoted above: Wang Tai, by looking at things in a certain way, is able to avoid being “transferred away with the things around him”. What is his secret? Elsewhere we have the advice: “Let yourself be jostled and shaken by the boundlessness — for that is how to be lodged securely in the boundlessness” (2:46). The practice is sometimes expressed as “the destruction of the self”. But it is more an unbinding of the self. But what is it that binds the self, from which there is this escape into boundlessness?

An important clue is revealed in the passage I quoted from Chapter Six. After saying that the sage roams in “that from which nothing ever escapes”, the author goes on:

People may try to model themselves on him. But how much better off are those who bind themselves equally to each and all of the ten thousand things, making themselves dependent only on each transformation, on all transformation!

6:28

Here there is an alternative between binding yourself to a distinct model (in this case, the sage) or, what the sage himself does, modelling yourself “equally to each and all of the ten thousand things” — or to transformation itself. In the former case, when you are transformed too much, as in death, you depart from your model and are no longer yourself. You are “transferred away” with the things around you. In the latter case, no transformation can drive you away from yourself, since either you are modelled equally well on everything or your model is transformation itself. As A.C. Graham explains it:

The liberation from selfhood is seen above all as a triumph over death. Chuang-tzu’s position is not that personal consciousness will survive death, rather that in grasping the Way one’s viewpoint shifts from “I shall no longer exist” to something like “in losing selfhood, I shall remain what at bottom I have always been, identical with all the endlessly transforming phenomena of the universe.”

Disputers of the Tao, p.202

We do, after all, choose what we are. We decide which traits we would like to be rid of, in becoming our “true self”, and which we would like to enhance. We do this by having in mind a model to emulate, as Spinoza explains in the Preface to Ethics Part 4:

we desire to form an idea of a human being as an exemplar of human nature to which we may look […] therefore I will mean by good anything that we certainly know to be a means for us to approach ever closer to the exemplar or human nature that set for ourselves; and by bad that which we certainly know hinders us from relating to that same exemplar.

Silverthorne/Kisner trans., p.159

But the price of having a model in mind is that when you transform away from it, as you inevitably will, you lose your being as you have defined it. Of course you don’t lose your being in general — not as a portion of matter, or as the value of a bound variable. But if you see yourself as something in particular, you see yourself as confirming to some model — better or worse, since you can always be more or less your truest self.

Perhaps, however, we can escape defining ourselves in this way. Ziporyn’s The Penumbra Unbound follows how the neo-Daoist, Guo Xiang, built up the Zhuangzi into a technique of avoiding “traces” (跡). 跡 is, Ziporyn points out, literally “footprint”. To follow a trace is, we might say, to follow in the footsteps of a model. But to escape models altogether is to have a boundless and undefined being, to pursue only the myriad transformations that come without cease.

Ursula Renz has shown how flexible the notion of the self is in Spinoza:

the mind can become eternal through a change in its knowledge — knowledge, that is, of the human body, which means one’s own body. This is perfectly plausible, considering all those familiar cases where someone’s implicit understanding of his or her own body changes radically. Examples include those who “unlearn” their phantom limb pain and blind people incorporating their white canes into their proprioception. In both these cases, the implicit knowledge of one’s own body — in terms of its boundaries as well as its composition — has substantially changed.

The Explainability of Experience, p.165–6

What she calls a change in knowledge is really a change in identification. Thus she goes on:

The concept of one’s own body, then — the one we have at our disposal — also depends upon that with which we identify ourselves. Imagine an infant who cannot go for a single minute without his stuffed animal.

p.167

But then is there any limit to what we can identify ourselves with? We can think of another famous passage from Chapter Six of the Zhuangzi:

Perhaps he [the Creator of Things] will transform my left arm into a rooster; thereby I’ll be announcing the dawn. Perhaps he will transform my right arm into a crossbow pellet; thereby I’ll be seeking out an owl to roast. Perhaps he will transform my ass into wheels and my spirit into a horse; thereby I’ll be riding along — will I need any other vehicle?

6:39

What limits us is only the model of ourselves we have in mind. Let go of the model and your self dissolves into the boundless; then there is no death, only transformation.

But does Spinoza take this step? As we saw, he says of the ignorant man that “as he ceases to be acted on, at the same time he also ceases to be”. Throughout Part 5 of the Ethics, Spinoza speaks of a process of becoming liberated from external causes — of acting rather than being acted on. In one sense of course one cannot avoid being acted on by external causes. But in the Passions of the Soul Descartes refers to a special type of external cause that can act on a person: an example (Part 3, Article 172). Perhaps, then, Spinoza is thinking of escape from this sort of external cause. His project then looks very close to the anti-exemplary project of the Zhuangzi and Guo Xiang. One advantage of this reading is that it makes sense of why Spinoza thinks that “being conscious of himself and of God and of things by some eternal necessity” is a path to eternity for the “wise man”.

Resisting models, exemplars, or traces is not valuable simply as a path to eternity, however. It is also a pathway to peace, both inner and outer. When we follow models, it is much too easy to end up at war with those who aspire after different models and in a deadly rivalry with those who aspire after the same models. It is important, therefore, that Parts 3 and 4 of the Ethics are largely devoted to elaborating all the social pathologies that arise from emulation and ambition. It is true that Spinoza seems to recommend having a model in mind at the start of Part 4. But I think that here, like Descartes in his Discourse, he is only proposing a ‘provisional’ morality, based around choosing the right model to minimise these harmful effects. The ultimate peace and beatitude revealed in Part 5 comes only from following the path that we can see Spinoza pointing towards if we read him through the Zhuangzi.

There is much more to say about all this, of course, and I doubt that this blog post will convince anyone on its own. But I am thankful for the coincidence of seeing Spinoza’s name mentioned by Hao Wang, which led me to follow this up through Feng Youlan, the Zhuangzi, and Guo Xiang. It led me to glimpse something I had not noticed before in Spinoza, although through a cloud. Linda Zagzebski argues that the vast majority of moral theories, ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’, can fit into an exemplarist framework, according to which concepts of good, right, and virtue are defined in terms of moral exemplars, identified by admiration. Even thinkers who warn against emulation on principle, such as René Girard, promote an ultimately exemplarist solution — in his case the imitation of Christ (this comes out most profoundly in I See Satan Fall Like Lightning). Anti-exemplarist ethics seem exceedingly rare in history. Beyond Daoism and, if I am right about him, Spinoza I can’t think of any other… um, examples.

Justin Smith wrote a fairly critical blog post on René Girard to which I feel moved to reply. A lot of it attacks Girard’s appeal in Silicon Valley, which I don’t know much about. But the post also criticises Girard’s theory itself. The conclusion states that “René Girard, in sum, is not a particularly great theorist”.

We don’t all have to like the same things, but I think Girard deserves a better reading than Smith is willing to give him.

First, Smith gives a gratuitously unattractive representation of Girard’s method:

a theorist for him is someone who comes up with a simple, elegant account of how everything works, and spends a whole career driving that account home. A theorist spends all of their time on the positive construction of a case, and none of their time on skeptical doubts or objections, and least of all on the nagging call of humility that pipes back up again whenever a philosophically minded person starts to feel as if they’ve got something right — the call that says, “Why should I, of all people, be the one to have got things right? It seems so improbable.”

That’s very unflattering. But I’m not sure what reason Smith has to think it. It should be obvious that Girard never thought that he was the one to ‘get things right’. His entire career consisted of presenting ideas he found in the writings of others. His first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, located the idea of “mimetic desire” in the novels of Cervantes, Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Proust. It’s a work of pure exegesis. The title of his book, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, is also a giveaway. It’s a reference to Jesus’s words in Matthew (13:35), and the book is accordingly about things revealed by Jesus of Nazareth, not René Girard of Avignon. In truth I can’t think of a theorist who made more effort to avoid claiming personal responsibility for the ideas he presented. This is hardly surprising since it was a fundamental belief for Girard that, as he once put it, “individualism is a formidable lie” [1].

Smith’s suggestion that Girard spends “none of his time on skeptical doubts or objections” is belied by the very form in which Girard presented his ideas. Most of his books are records of dialogues. Long sections of books like When These Things Begin and Evolution and Conversion consist of Girard responding to objections formulated by his interviewers or brought by them from other sources. With most authors we can debate about whether “the nagging call of humility” is sufficiently active inside them. But Girard brings in external voices. His preference for this dialogue format is another expression of his strong anti-individualism. Why would somebody who wanted to spend “none of his time on skeptical doubts or objections” write his books by answering people who doubt and object to him?

Smith then turns from method to theory, first attacking Girard’s theory that humans desire mimetically — that is, we copy or borrow our desires from others. Smith writes: “For Girard, there is at least some desire that falls outside of the logic of mimesis, but only because it is a sort of proto-desire, a merely biological drive”. Smith goes on to criticise this point. But where does Girard make it? Smith doesn’t cite any text. Girard is quite explicit that he has no intention of reducing all of human psychology to mimesis [2]:

I’ve gotten into the habit of using the word “desire” to refer to the various appetites, needs, and appropriations that are shot through with and governed by imitation. Mimetic phenomena interest me […]. That’s why I place so much emphasis on them. But I’m not saying that they exclude all other types of explanation. For example, I believe in the love that parents have for their children, and I don’t see how you could interpret that love in a mimetic fashion.

Nor does he say anything to imply that these non-mimetic phenomena are “merely biological drives”. Indeed, he explicitly denies this, as I’ll show below. Smith declares himself to be “wary of human-scientists who seek to contain the biological with modifiers such as ‘merely’”. But Smith cites no passages where Girard writes anything like “merely biological”; the term appears to be Smith’s own. So far Smith has scored a point against himself and none against Girard.

Perhaps more interestingly, one of Smith’s counterexamples to this claim (which Girard doesn’t seem to have made) is the possibility of a “post-mimetic” love:

at least sometimes a man “acquires” a woman by the logic of neighborly competition and status anxiety, but then discovers that she has a soul too, and is worthy of love just like any human being, quite apart from her significance for his social status.

I don’t know what sort of crass theory Smith is trying to wish onto Girard and then refute here — I guess he thinks that Girard believes we only want things or love people for the sake of “social status”? In any case, for a profound example of ‘post-mimetic love’, I would encourage you to look up Girard’s beautiful discussion of the statue scene in The Winter’s Tale. When Hermione is resurrected, Leontes is too; he is freed from mimetic desire and its metaphysical illusions. The resurrection of Hermione is, Girard writes, “Leontes’ reward for purging his bad desire” [3].

Far from being a refutation of Girard’s theory, the existence of this post-mimetic love is an illustration of it. Girard’s theory is that mimetic desire — toxic, dangerous, and hopeless — begins with the (non-mimetic) desire for being. “Mimetic desire”, Girard writes, “makes us believe we are always on the verge of becoming self-sufficient through our own transformation into someone else” [4]. If we overcome this, we give up on the hope of self-sufficiency and the desire to be transformed into someone else. We cease to desire the being of another and simply possess the being we have. We achieve what Spinoza calls acquiescentia animi— acquiescence in our own soul. Being in this state is the result of what Girard calls “conversion” (the sentence just quoted is from an essay entitled “Conversion in Literature and Christianity”). The resurrection of Hermione is a symbol of Leontes’ conversion: from mimetic desire into a state of acquiescence, when he can simply love Hermione free of the bad desire that drove him to envy and then destruction.

Conversion is present in Girard’s theory from the very beginning. It is the subject of the final chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. In his essay on Proust [5], Girard points out that the whole of In Search of Lost Time is a story of conversion: the narrator undergoes a conversion and is resurrected into a new life which was lost the first time around to mimetic desire. He even uses the same term that Smith uses: “post-mimetic desire”. The Annunciation of this new life is the madeleine: “an image of a reality that is past from the viewpoint of the author, a promise of a reality that is yet to come from the viewpoint of the narrator” [6]. The author is the achieved being of the narrator, who lives in the pursuit of being that is the condition of mimetic desire. Conversion is, then, the final message of Girard’s gospel — or rather the gospel Girard finds repeated in the great works of literature. It is the crown of the theory. For Smith to take it as a refutation of the theory is a profound misunderstanding.

Smith also attacks the other main part of Girard’s theory — the “scapegoat mechanism” to which he argues that mimetic desire naturally leads. As Girard explains in one interview [7]:

Inasmuch as they desire the same thing, the members of the group become antagonists, in pairs, in triangles, in polygons, in whatever configurations you can imagine. The contagion signifies that some of them are going to abandon their personal antagonist and “choose” their neighbor’s. We see this all the time, when, for example, we shift the hatred we feel for our private enemies, but that we don’t dare take out against them, onto politicians. In this way partial scapegoats emerge, and by means of the same phenomenon they are gradually reduced in number even as their symbolic charge intensifies.

On this, Smith writes:

Perhaps even more worrisome for Girard’s mimetic theory is that it appears to leave out all those instances in which imitation serves as a force for social cohesion and cannot plausibly be said to involve any process […] leading to a culmination in scapegoating.

I would guess that here Smith is supposing Girard to claim that imitation — mimesis — can only lead to social cohesion through the scapegoat mechanism. But Girard explicitly denied this. Calling the sort of mimesis that leads to scapegoating “bad mimesis”, he explained that while he wanted to emphasise it, he never took it to be exclusive [8]:

in my work, the ‘bad’ mimesis is always dominant, but the ‘good’ one is of course even more important. There would be no human mind, no education, no transmission of culture without mimesis. However, I do believe that the ‘bad’ mimesis needs to be emphasized because its reality remains overlooked, and it has been always neglected or mistaken for non-mimetic behaviour, and even denied by most observers.

Smith also proposes another criticism:

Contrary to Girard’s theory of the scapegoat, a promising alternative account of sacrifice has been defended by such thinkers as the pioneering classicist Walter Burkert, for whom the origins of culture lie in a recognition of the transgressive nature of the killing of animals — even if it is necessary for human life, the spilling of animal blood is a sufficiently powerful action to knock the cosmos out of alignment, and it is only by rituals of atonement that it may be set right again.

In bringing this up, it seems only fair to discuss Girard’s reply to Burkert, which Smith fails to mention. Questioned about Burkert, Girard replied [9]:

In my view his theory has only one flaw: he argues that the hunting of large mammals came before religion. I think his book on Greek religion is remarkable. This is true of all the German anthropological theory on sacrifice. We had a discussion near Santa Cruz. From a theoretical standpoint, I wasn’t quite ready to enter into discussion with Burkert at that time, and he found my thesis too radical. He did not buy into my scapegoat theory because he prefers a theory that ultimately remains close to some kind of functionalism, as the ‘hunting hypothesis’ does.

And Girard discussed this ‘hunting hypothesis’ in Things Hidden [10]:

The hunt has an invariably ritual character in primitive societies. […] Specialists tell us that the human digestive tract has remained that of the mainly vegetarian omnivore, the kind of system that preceded ours in the course of evolution. Man is not naturally a carnivore; human hunting should not be thought of in terms of animal predation.

To understand what might have impelled human beings to set off in pursuit of the largest and most dangerous animals or to devise the strategies necessary for prehistoric hunting, it is necessary and sufficient to recognize that hunting, at first, was actively linked to sacrifice. The object of the hunt is seen as a substitute for the original victim in its monstrous and sacred aspects.

Girard, in other words, gave arguments for his own position in contrast to Burkert’s — for seeing the practice of hunting as deriving from ritual sacrifice rather than the other way around. You can watch a video of him discussing the evidence for this in cave paintings. My point is not that he is necessarily right, but that he has arguments on precisely this point, to which Smith gives no consideration. Smith doesn’t engage with Girard’s reasons for rejecting the “necessary for human life” part of the Burkertian story. Rather, he makes it look as if, in bringing up Burkert, he is raising something Girard never considered.

Smith concludes that “it is easy on even a casual study of [Girard’s] work to spot the weaknesses and lacunae”. But his criticisms of Girard don’t seem based on even a casual study. They attack what he seems to guess that Girard believed, on the basis of something other than Girard’s writings, whether interviews with Peter Thiel or, as with the example of “merely biological desires”, his own hunches about the sort of thing that an inferior social theorist might think. At any rate, he provides not a single quotation to support his interpretation. René Girard may or may not be, as Smith suggests, “the theorist our era deserves”. But surely Girard, along with our era, deserves a fairer standard of critique than this.

[1] Girard, René. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre (Michigan State University Press, 2009), ch.1, §3.

[2] Girard, René. When These Things Begin: Conversations with Michel Treguer (Michigan State University Press, 2009), p.11.

[3] Girard, René. A Theatre of Envy (Gracewing, 2000), p.337.

[4] Girard, René. Mimesis and Theory (Stanford University Press, 2008), p.265.

[5] Girard, René. Mimesis and Theory, pp.56–70.

[6] Girard, René. Mimesis and Theory, p.68.

[7] Girard, René. When These Things Begin, p.19.

[8] Girard, René. Evolution and Conversion (Bloomsbury, 2008), p.56.

[9] Girard, René. Evolution and Conversion, pp.101–2.

[10] Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (Bloomsbury, 2016), pp.68–9.

TORCH Goes Digital! presents a series of weekly live events Big Tent - Live Events! Part of the Humanities Cultural Programme, one of the founding stones for the future Stephen A. Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. Drama Week Biographies:
Fiona Shaw CBE

Fiona Shaw is an actor and theatre and opera director. She is known for her role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter film series (2001–10), as Marnie Stonebrook in season four of the HBO series True Blood (2011), and as Carolyn Martens in the BBC series Killing Eve (2018–present), for which she won the 2019 BAFTA TV Award for Best Supporting Actress. For her performances in the second seasons of Killing Eve and the comedy-drama Fleabag, Shaw received Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series respectively.

Fiona has worked extensively with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. She won the 1990 Olivier Award for Best Actress for various roles, including Electra, the 1994 Olivier Award for Best Actress for Machinal, and the 1997 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance for The Waste Land. Her other stage work includes playing the title role in Medea in the West End and on Broadway (2001–02). She was awarded an Honorary CBE in 2001. In 2020, she was listed at number 29 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.

Professor Oliver Taplin, Emeritus Professor of Classics, Magdalen College, Oxford.
Professor Oliver Taplin is a fellow of Magdalen College and Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford. Professor Taplin's main teaching has been in all aspects of ancient Greek epic, tragedy and comedy: Classics, Classics (and Joint Honours), Classics and English, Classics and Modern Languages, Classics with Oriental Studies at Oxford University.

Oliver's primary focus as a scholar is on Greek drama, especially from the viewpoint of staging and performance. His first book was The Stagecraft of Aeschylus, in which he dealt with the entrances and exits of characters in Aeschylus's plays. Subsequent books, including Comic Angels (1993) and Pots and Plays (2007) examine vase paintings as evidence for the performance of tragedy and comedy. In 1996, together with Edith Hall, he set up the APGRD (Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama). It is devoted to the international production and reception of ancient plays since the Renaissance. He has also worked with productions in the theatre, including The Oresteia at the National Theatre (1980–81), The Thebans at the RSC (1991–92), and The Oresteia at the National Theatre (1999–2000). Apart from Greek drama, his chief area of interest was in Homer.

Oliver retired as Tutor in Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford in 2008. The same year, Oxford University Press published Performance, Iconography, Reception: Studies in Honour of Oliver Taplin, edited by Martin Revermann and Peter Wilson.

Further related subjects include vase-painting and theatre; performance studies; reception of ancient literature in modern poetry; practical translation workshops. Currently he is working on a broad-brush book on Greek Tragedy, including a critique of Aristotle’s Poetics.

Publications include:

The Stagecraft of Aeschylus (Oxford 1977, reissued as a paperback 1989).
Greek Tragedy in Action (London and Berkeley 1978; revised edition 1985); also translated into Greek, Japanese and Polish.
Greek Fire (London 1990); also translated into Dutch, Portuguese, French, German and Greek.
Homeric Soundings. The Shaping of the Iliad (Oxford 1992, reprinted in paperback, 1994).
Comic Angels – and other approaches to Greek drama through vase-painting (Oxford 1993, reprinted in paperback, 1994).
Pots and Plays. Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-painting of the Fourth Century BC (Getty Museum Publications, Los Angeles, 2007)
Sophocles Oedipus the King and other tragedies (Oxford World’s Classics, 2016)
Aeschylus The Oresteia (Norton, New York, 2018)
His new book, Sophocles' Antigone and Other Tragedies was published in September 2020.

Book at Lunchtime, Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity Thomas Aquinas on Bodily Identity is a study of the union of matter and the soul in the human being in the thought of the Dominican Thomas Aquinas. At first glance this issue might appear arcane, but it was at the centre of polemic with heresy in the thirteenth century and at the centre of the development of medieval thought more broadly. The book argues that theological issues, especially the need for an identical body to be resurrected at the end of time, but also considerations about Christ's crucifixion and saints' relics, were central to Aquinas's account of how human beings are constituted. The book explores in particular how theological questions and concerns shaped Aquinas's thought on individuality and personal and bodily identity over time, his embryology and understanding of heredity, his work on nutrition and bodily growth, and his fundamental conception of matter itself. It demonstrates, up-close, how Aquinas used his peripatetic sources, Aristotle and (especially) Averroes, to frame and further his own thinking in these areas. The book also indicates how Aquinas's thought on bodily identity became pivotal to university debates and relations between the rival mendicant orders in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and that quarrels surrounding these issues persisted into the fifteenth century.