Medieval Christian philosophy inherited both the Platonic view of the soul as naturally immortal by virtue of its spiritual nature and the Christian insistence that immortality is ultimately a gift of God rather than an intrinsic property of the soul. Aquinas navigated this tension carefully: the intellective soul is naturally incorruptible because as a form it has no contrary and does not depend on the body for its being, yet its full beatitude requires resurrection of the body because the soul is naturally the form of a body. This robustly physical account distinguished Christian anthropology from the Platonic tradition even while borrowing its arguments.
On the nature of the soul, its immateriality, and its natural incorruptibility — Aquinas argues that since the intellectual soul operates independently of any bodily organ, it cannot be corrupted by the body's dissolution, but it remains naturally ordered to embodiment.
'The soul itself is the image of God and His likeness, so present to itself and so having God present' — Bonaventure's account of the soul's immortality grounded in its status as the image of God: the soul's orientation toward God is not an accidental property but constitutive of what it is, so its ultimate end is God and nothing less can satisfy it.
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