Why Angels And Aliens Do Not Receive The Sacraments

My ‘Would St. Thomas Aquinas baptize an Extraterrestrial?’ argued that intelligent extraterrestrial life with sufficiently different matter from human beings would not share a human nature and would therefore not be integrated into the Mystical Body of Christ in the same way as human beings, through...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Lazzari, Edmund Michael (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Wiley-Blackwell 2022
In: New blackfriars
Year: 2022, Volume: 103, Issue: 1107, Pages: 678-685
Further subjects:B Extraterrestrial Life
B Soteriology
B Angels
B St Thomas Aquinas
B Sacramental Theology
B Philosophical Anthropology
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Summary:My ‘Would St. Thomas Aquinas baptize an Extraterrestrial?’ argued that intelligent extraterrestrial life with sufficiently different matter from human beings would not share a human nature and would therefore not be integrated into the Mystical Body of Christ in the same way as human beings, through Christ's sacrifice and the sacraments. Marie George, in ‘Would St. Thomas Aquinas Baptize an Extraterrestrial? Revisited’, demonstrated that the angels are fully incorporated into the Mystical Body of Christ in the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, and therefore posited that St. Thomas would not object to intelligent extraterrestrials of a different nature being baptized. This article revises my contentions about the Mystical Body and then shows that St. Thomas's theology excludes angels from the sacraments on the grounds of lacking a shared nature and argues that, while both extraterrestrials and angels can be saved by Christ, the sacraments have been given only to those who share a human nature with Christ.
ISSN:1741-2005
Contains:Enthalten in: New blackfriars
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/nbfr.12737