DIGRESSION.

Transmigration of souls, regeneration.

...when it has first been released from the body, and it will return, not by Pythagorean metempsychosis transmigration of souls but by Christian palingenesis rebirth; not to be idle, but to contemplate God happily. If it has acted well in life, it will be less afflicted by punishments, which, although we hold by faith, is not, as they suppose, improbable by natural reason. Regarding which matter there is much among our theologians. For there will be neither an infinite departure of souls to return to the body, nor is the world eternal, but founded at the beginning of time, as both others and we ourselves have argued elsewhere. Nor did a certain famous Arab referring to Averroes or his followers think it absurd, which is also reported by Saint Thomas in the Summa Theologica Theological Summary, that things separated from matter, which neither depend on each other nor are subject to place or time, can be infinite. But as far as it pertains to the 'part,' it is manifold. For there is a part that is perfected and perishes, and there is that which perfects and lives as a survivor. This indeed is considered insofar as it is soul—i.e., form and life of the body—and insofar as it is a certain essence or intellectual substance by which the body is vivified. And it is placed in that grade of things, or if you prefer, of beings, that no other created thing, which is not the human soul, can be entirely compared and equated to itself; the existence of which some consider different from its essence or nature, and they weigh its very 'being' both in the body and outside the body, and they want this and that to be natural to the soul, although some might prefer this rather than that to be given the name of nature. Others think the opposite, and believe one should be attributed to the soul, the other to substance, more congruously. And for this reason, in that very dissolution, the whole that is the man will not be abolished but will remain in the surviving soul, and rightfully and deservedly will be held in the number of immaterial forms, apt to draw the body, to which it imparts life, to itself, rather than to be drawn by the body which is by its own nature decaying.