And, although I’m not Catholic, and therefore feel somewhat uneasy answering this, (perhaps those who are Catholic can address this more proficiently) I don’t think that the Catholic Church has officially endorsed the Angelic Doctor’s theory of mind. That is, although Aquinas is considered a brilliant contributor to the Catholic faith, the Church has not endorsed his views on everything (e.g., when the soul enters the body of a fetus). Therefore, although Aquinas has provided much insight into the human mind, he may not be correct in his assessment.

Nothing you have said bears on the question of what it can possibly mean for a soul to exist separately from a body. I have come across this interesting piece of information in Josef Pieper’s Death and Immortality, p. 36:

. . . Thomas Aquinas, for example, explicitly says that the anima separata cannot be called a “person.”

What exactly does it mean, then, to say that St. Peter is in heaven? Was not St. Peter a person? If the soul of St. Peter is in heaven, but a soul is not a person, in what sense does the person who was known as St. Peter exist?

Consider the following:

A few years ago, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made a groundbreaking discovery. He studied people with damage in the part of the brain where emotions are generated. He found that they seemed normal, except that they were not able to feel emotions. But they all had something peculiar in common: they couldn’t make decisions. They could describe what they should be doing in logical terms, yet they found it very difficult to make even simple decisions, such as what to eat. Many decisions have pros and cons on both sides—shall I have the chicken or the turkey? With no rational way to decide, these test subjects were unable to arrive at a decision.

One might ask if disembodied souls—which obviously do not have functioning brains—are in the same situation as living persons with brain injuries. If human beings have emotions because we are physical, and souls have intellect and will, can the soul’s capacity for “willing” function adequately without the body’s emotions?

Yes, he certainly did, and many others as well. One of his points, as a Catholic priest, was that he said hundreds, probably thousands, of masses which had been requested for the sake of people who had died. A theologically and pastorally sound practice, which gets to the real point. In the Communion of Saints, the dead are still our living brothers and sisters in Christ, who benefit from our prayers for them. While we, of course, benefit from praying for them.

Fr Neuhaus knew all this. He certainly did have a point or two.

“You were In the tomb with the body, and in Hades with the soul, in Paradise with the thief and on the throne with the Father and the Spirit, O boundless Christ, filling all things.”

So, when Jesus told the Good Thief, Dismus, that he would be with Him in Paradise that very day it was true as Jesus was only waylayed in the ‘dead world’ for those 3 days but was actually spiritually ‘risen’ to await the 3rd Day.

Men, as distinct from angels, are not by nature immaterial, and are thus not pure forms by nature. While our rationality, our capacity to abstract forms from matter, is immaterial (abstraction, after all, is only possible insofar as the universal is separated from the particular, and matter is fundamentally the particularizing principle) that’s only a part of our human nature, which is partly animal.

Our intellects are not self-sufficient, as that of angels, but work in conjunction with our sensible faculties and our appetites, which are necessarily material, as sense and appetite deal with particulars and not universals. The intellect, together with our senses, thus forms with our other bodily elements a functional unity, the nature of which is our human nature, and which determines the conditions of our perfection.

As human nature is the nature of an embodied thing, it is then truly proper to human nature to be a material thing. Of course, a given instance of human nature may come to lack a body at all, and continue to persist in virtue of the immateriality of its intellect, which is immaterial even when embodied. The immaterial aspect of the human Form continues to ground human existence after death, though such is a necessarily incomplete existence. The presence of such a component as a partially self-subsistent Form doesn’t make humans less truly physical, since all material things are made of matter and form anyway.

While our immaterial capacities properly considered entail some manner of immaterial existence after death is possible, necessarily this state is an imperfect one in which to exist for the kinds of things we are. As rational *animals,* human nature is only perfected in embodiment. Thus it is fitting that a God who loves us, or wills our objective good, should desire to…

Perhaps the “Christian Materialists” believe that the notion of a soul is not biblically based, and is derived from Platonic philosophy. Well, that’s debatable, as one could cite many passages that refer to an afterlife, but why would the fact that something is derived from Platonic philosophy make it less believable? It seems as if there’s this little notion of a Trinity, that most Christians accept, that owes more than a small debt to the broad shouldered Athenian.