Filozoficzne aspekty rozważań krakowskich scholastyków wokół kwestii nieśmiertelności człowieka

Abstract

As one of the most obvious truths for the medieval people was the fact that they were aware of passing away, that is why eschatological issues constituted one of the most vital motives of the medieval philosophy. In the early Middle Ages deliberations were characterized by a synthesis of the Plato tradition and Christian tradition postulates illustrating a man as a creature whose immortal soul created by God seemed to stand in the opposition to the material body. A breakthrough in the reflection upon the nature of the man came when the Latin world, thanks to St. Thomas Aquinas, got acquainted with the Aristotle conception of the anthropology which tightened the relationship between soul as a form and body as a matter. However, according to the authors of that time, this conception seemed to threaten soul immortality. They claimed that the best way to protect the indestructible character of the human soul is to loose its link with the body. Taking into account these issues, especially in the late Middle Ages, at the time when Krakow Scholastic School was being established, more and more people started to claim that soul immortality can not be justified in terms of philosophical inquiries, on the contrary it should be treated only as the truth of faith. Krakow scholastics also tried to scrutinize eschatological issues at the philosophical level. They were particularly interested in such issues as: the way of the man cognition after the death of the body and the status of the human nature after body resurrection. They left long analyses of these issues among others in Biblical Commentary and Commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences.