Markus Enders: Zum Beitrag des früh- und hochmittelalterlichen Denkens zum christlichen Verständnis der Natur des Menschen
Medieval reflections on man take place on the one hand in confrontation with the anthropological statements of ancient and Jewish-Arab philosophy and on the other hand as an interpretation of biblical anthropology, at the center of which is the understanding of man as an image (imago) of God and a similarity (similitudo) to God (cf. Gen 1:26). Most authors of the Latin Middle Ages see man’s image of God as realized in his intellectual nature, while they see man’s likeness to God predominantly in his ability to love.
The school definition of man as an animal rationale was widespread in the Middle Ages. The determination of the relationship between the intellectual soul and the human body became a central task in the anthropology of the Middle Ages. The anthropological debates reached their climax in the 13th century, when the Aristotelian definition of the essence of the soul as the “first act of a physical, organic body” (De anima II, 1, 412 b, 5 –6) came into competition with the Augustinian-Platonic dualism between these two constituents of the human being. Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas assumed a unitiy of body and soul and wholeness of the human person and determined the individual intellectual soul as the substantial form (Albert) or as the only form cause (Thomas) of the human body. In the Middle Ages, the Aristotelian determinations of the essence of man as a communicative and as a social and political being were also received; furthermore, the following traditional theorems on human nature were accepted and interpreted with approval: the understanding of the human being as a middle and as a boundary between the mortal, physical nature and the immortal, intellectual, divine nature and at the same time as a synthesis of both; and the conception of the human being as a microcosm, which, as it were, contains in miniature all the forms of being of the created world.
Keywords: Image of God/similarity to God – animal rationale – intellectual soul – synderesis, liberum arbitrium