“El árbol celeste”: la concepción del hombre de santo Tomás de Aquino

Aquinas' vision of man is worthy of being proposed in the 21st century as an alternative to the anthropological reductionisms triumphant in today's public discourse. For him, the human being is not a mere animal, neither is a pure spirit who can use his body as if it were an independent entity. This metaphysical and unitary view of the human being is also not foreign to an anthropology that starts from a ‘first-person’ experience. Self-awareness leads the human being to realise that he is corporeal, but it also enables him to reach back to his spiritual condition. Moreover, this implies that our soul is immortal and our action is free, as well as having consequences for our corporeality, which is that of a spiritual animal. Man's spiritual nature makes him intrinsically oriented towards God: the human being is a ‘tree turned upside down,’ because his life is not only based on its material facets, but he must ultimately live with the aspiration to be rooted in God as the goal of his biographical journey.