Sewanee Paper 2024, Does the Rational Soul Think? On the Limits of Personhood

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For the session “Voicing Mysticism & Gender” organized by Mariah Min (Brown University)

(what follows is a draft of a portion of the first chapter for my current book project, The Irrational Animal. It’s the chapter I’m writing this semester off during my sabbatical, and I’ve been working on it since I submitted this paper to the conference a month ago. In its current form, some of it is much more coherent, some perhaps less; and it is much longer. Here’s a snapshot)

In the Middle Ages humans were animals too. Not because we were nasty, brutish, and short – so we still are, mostly, even now – and not even because, like the other animals, we are bodily creatures with bodily appetites; not because of our anatomical similarity, as observed by the common medieval pun on corpus and porcus; and not because we can be healed by similar cures, as hunting manuals observed about humans and dogs. When no less an authority than Albert the Great, in his massive thirteenth-century natural history, speaks of “humans and other animalia,”[1] what he meant is that we were, like the other animals, living things, possessing an anima, a soul.

That is, the main line of medieval professional thought held that every living thing is ensouled.[2] Believing otherwise mistook the key difference between, say, rocks and plants. It was such an error that the thirteenth-century theologian Roger Bacon targeted when he scoffed at the “mob of uneducated people who … mock clergymen who say that dogs and other beasts have souls.” [3] His aim, however, was not to accord other beasts the respect owed the human animal, but only to carve out space for doctrinaire psychology, a word I borrow to mean the science and study of the psyche, the soul. The most influential psychology derives from Aristotle, whose life science divided living things into three groups: plants, nonhuman animals, and humans, each with own kind of life principle, or soul: the nutritive soul of plants grants the capacities to feed, grow, and reproduce; the sensitive soul of nonhuman animals, that of movement and sensation; and the rational soul, unique to the human animal, our special way of apprehending the world, through thinking.[4] But, as I’ll argue, as medieval developments of Aristotle’s psychology moved to subjects other than his interests in movement and perception, what the rational soul grants us is something much more fundamental, and much less volitional, than thought.

To be sure, reason can think. It would be foolish to deny that. Reason allows us to universalize, to exercise free will, to invent novel solutions to worldly problems, to conceive of the existence of God, and so on. No unreasoning animal was supposed to able to do such things. But that’s reason: my concern today is instead with the rational soul, whose chief function, as I’ll argue today, is not thinking, but rather to secure personhood—human difference, human dignity, human responsibility—none of which we can do on our own.

Thinking is just not enough. Consider the absence of appeals to thinking in a key demonstration from Augustine’s On Free Choice of the Will. To prove that humans have moral responsibility, he must prove we have reason, but he does so with no examples from any paradigmatically rational activity. He references no philosophical arguments, no treatise-writing, no law-making, none of that, nothing but our routine domination of other animals, which alone proves our possession of something they lack. What better name for that extra quality, he asks, than “reason”? Augustine’s illogic gives the game away: thinking is not the point when it comes to wondering who has reason. The aim, rather, is to produce human difference.[5]

When the Scholastics arrive in the train of Aristotle’s Latin translations, these arguments elaborate. Their systematic philosophy busied itself with generating, demonstrating, and debating doctrinal truths, testing itself against sometimes quite bizarre limit cases. Many concerned animal cognition.[6] One not uncommon thought experiment involved a cat that gets at fish by removing a cork from their tank, leaving the fish helpless, gasping, and flopping.[7] Another frequently considered problem was the dog that, once beaten with a stick, cringes from all sticks, as if it had developed its own universal concept of “stickiness.” Chaucerians will know about the problem of the rooster who fears a fox without ever having met one before. All these puzzles required solutions that never touched on reason: the clever cat, the conceptual dog, an anxious Chaunticleer, all of them, it had to be said, thought only with their sensitive soul, only with a soul, that is, whose operations never surmounted the body and its sensations. The content of the debates and their evidence varied, but never the conclusions: animals could think – that was indisputable – but no animal could reason.

The foregone conclusion tells us that more was at stake than just different ways of, or origins, of thinking. The fourteenth-century Oxford philosopher Adam de Wodeham tells us just what summoned philosophers to the ramparts when he argues that rational judgments cannot be ascribed to dogs, not because they lack any specific kind of behavior or mode of expression, but because otherwise “I do not see why they should not be called rational animals.”[8] The conclusion, already waiting, unshakeable and necessary, must be met by any loyal philosopher. For any rational animal would necessarily have a rational soul, and if provided with this, they would share our accompanying special dignity: outrageous!

That dignity roots itself most ineradicably not in thinking, but in the rational soul’s immortality. Aristotle wavered on whether the rational soul outlasted the body.[9] It took Christians, among others, to deliver the rational soul securely to an unending afterlife. With the souls thus divided, animal deeds would die with them, and those of plants too, I suppose, while ours might affect us everlastingly. Hence our unique significance among mortal life as legitimate targets of charity, and hence too the reassuring possibility that the wicked but presently comfortable might still get the suffering they deserve. Arguments that pointed to us as moral beings, with our own ways of thinking, were, however, simply too weak to preserve this special dignity. After all, so much of the life of even rational creatures is spent thoughtlessly: for some, in madness or senility, and for everyone, in infancy and sleep. Although in none of these circumstances are we able to reason, we lose in them neither our fundamental dignity nor our inability not to outlast our mortality: I’ll explain that agonized formulation later. For now, in brief, while an animal could never pass the test, we can never fail it, no matter our incapacity.

Let us consider such moments of unwitting human existence. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries experienced a brief fashion for worrying about sleepwalkers, which featured more in Canon Law than they did in medicine. The problem they represented was that class of behaviors committed by rational beings for which they could never be held responsible. Here we hear, for a while, reports of knights “sleepfighting” – arming themselves and whacking about their bedrooms with weapons – or even sleephunting. Among these is a catastrophic story of an English clerk in Paris who, in the night, left the church of Saint Benedict, walked to the Seine, and there, in his sleep, unwittingly killed a child, before returning just as serenely to bed.[10] A terrible thing, but he was as innocent as his victim. Earlier moral commentary, from Gregory the Great for example, held that nighttime activities, chiefly nocturnal emissions, stained nothing but the bedclothes of the ejaculating monk. Later commentary considered more extreme cases, and multiplied exculpatory analogies, of the active sleeper to the drunken Lot, innocent of what his daughters did to him in his inebriation, or to infants, or especially to the insane, or even to quadrupeds, which could also commit violence but never crimes.[11] But however much we lost self-control during sleep or madness, we remained rational animals, even if we were for a time rational unthinking animals.

The same can be said of children. Medieval embryology – unlike the more extreme modern varieties – typically held off on granting us a soul until pregnancy’s forty-fifth day.[12] Beginning then, the nutritive, sensitive, and rational souls might arrive, sequentially; or perhaps we would receive no soul but the rational; or perhaps upon its eventual arrival the rational soul would eliminate the earlier two souls and then take on their tasks, so the fully human subject never had more than the one soul. Once provided with a rational soul, and once finally born, we still had some time to go before we became reasoning beings. Divisions of human ages typically put the end of baptismal innocence at seven years: before this, we were simply irrational; after, we ascended into the Age of Consent, especially important for determining whether a reluctant oblate should be freed from a monastery; in Canon Law, the Age of Reason, also called the Age of Discretion, came later, generally around thirteen for boys, or twelve for girls, when someone could consent to marriage, swear in court, or be held criminally culpable.[13] Dante’s Convivio puts the age of legal responsibility still later, at twenty-five.[14] Full possession of the rational faculties could come later still, according to Gregory the Great, at fifty, and then, having crested the summit, we began, if we are fortunate, our long descent into senescence and senility.[15]

Secular law had its own methods of worrying at the humanity of fetuses and children. Nicole Oresme’s De causis mirabilium registers some uncertainty by allowing that “some people” – aliqui homines are his words here, significantly – are born with “no use of reason, less than a dog,” but even they are generally assumed to have a rational soul, so long as they have a “human shape…notwithstanding any monstrousness in the principal members and in the cognitive powers of the soul.”[16] Though signs of thought would be welcome here, they’re not necessary to establish personhood For, as Eliza Buhrer has demonstrated, later medieval English law divided humans with disabilities, objects of legal concern, from nonhuman “monsters,” mere objects,[17] this on the basis only of bodily shape, inner or outer, for what but a monstrous infant could come thinking into our world?

Sarah Butler has demonstrated that some but not all English law codes held that a fetus felt to be moving – that is, quickened – could itself be the victim of homicide. Notably, only a few of these codes worried whether the quickened fetus might be lacking a rational soul and therefore not be a person. That unphilosophical equivalence between ensoulment and being a person, which would seem to expand the category of the human, even to monsters, was nonetheless stymied by the reluctance of juries to execute anyone charged with causing an abortion, even in cases with unmistakable evidence of assault. To be sure, English juries generally hesitated to consign anyone to capital punishment, but their hesitation here might still be taken as indicating that even the ensouled fetus was not quite recognized as meriting the legal protections owed to other distinct rational beings.[18] We can observe, then, with fetuses, with children, with sleepwalkers and the mad, that rationality is a spectrum, as are the protections and responsibilities of being a human subject; but the rational soul was a binary, something we either possessed or didn’t, and it was that, not any mental activity, that secured our ineradicable personhood as the “rational, mortal animal.”[19]

In sum, we moderns might think of reason primarily as something that enables us to do things, to participate in human society, to engage with each other as equals. But insofar as the primary gift of the rational soul is not thinking but immortality, the rational soul is better understood as something done to us, an endowment we cannot refuse any more than life itself. This is something we have, as Roger Bacon explained, “from without by an act of creation.”[20] that is, by miraculous rather than material processes, transmitted to us with the assistance of our parents, but not made in any sense by any human activity, neither by thinking nor anything else.

We have this condition more indelibly than mortal life itself: for at least in mainstream medieval Christian doctrine, the rational being who ends their life has chosen only to make their last meaningful decision. The life of opportunity must end, the one of consequences never. An extreme version of the implications of this belief in the rational soul’s perpetuity can be found in my last example, that small set of humans to whom responsibility can never apply, namely, dead, unbaptized infants.[21] Being humans, they have a rational soul, which means they are bound, like all of us, for eternity. But which one? No infant could possibly be held morally responsible for any decision.[22] But as unbaptized people, they leave the world still stained with the prerational, predeliberative guilt of original sin. Theologians had long argued that no just God would condemn such souls to the lowest Hell’s unending torment, since all they had done – if they could be said to have done anything – was to miss the ceremony meant to cleanse their sin’s first stain; but neither would a just God reward stained babies with Heaven.[23] Some suitable in-between place had to be found: the Limbo of Infants, likened by one medieval theologian to “a kind of spiritual leper colony.”[24] There they would stay forever. Having inherited this much doctrine, Albert the Great produced an unnerving solution to what would happen next. At the Last Judgment, when God reunited our immortal souls with our now-immortal bodies,[25] Limbo’s unbaptized infants would also get their bodies back, like everyone else, as adults at the peak of their powers, that is, roughly around 30 years of age, but now liberated from the old impediments of the need for food and sleep. It is unclear whether Albert believes these new adults would be suddenly able to reason too, or whether they were already, somehow, prior to the resurrection’s return of their bodies, reasoning even as (spirit) babies.[26] Regardless, their eternity would be virtually without punishment, with no flames at all, limited only to perpetual exile from heaven.[27] Having tied off the problem, Albert left it alone, and perhaps only Sartre or Beckett could have done more with it. For here reason operates without moral responsibility or even hope, among this rump of humanity, forever incapable of doing anything worthy of God’s favor or the Devil’s ire.

* * *

I have long been inspired by Derrida’s interest in the “nonpower at the heart of power.”[28] Here he was talking about our inability not to suffer, an incapacity we share with the other animals, excepting, perhaps, oysters. But I don’t think Derrida would object from the Limbo of Philosophers were I to take this further, by discovering a nonpower at the heart of reason, below or beyond the capacity for thought. If being the rational mortal animal is something we are because of our kind of soul, not because of our kind of thought, recognition is the primary thing when it comes to humanity. For how could you possibly know someone has a rational soul unless you decide in advance they already have it? No amount of argument would ever be enough to admit a nonhuman animal to the court of human dignity, unless they force the question. But for humans recognized as rational, mortal animals, neither sleep, nor infancy, nor anything we do can save us from the burdens of life everlasting. We’re stuck in this, fundamentally thoughtless. Does the rational soul think? Yes, but it’s still there, at its root, even when it’s not, and that’s what really matters.

My goal today has been to begin to describe the uncanny core of the rational subject, the ghost in our machine, and to continue my task of exploring the passivity of reason.

Thank you.

  1. “homines et alia animalia” ↑
  2. Note that Descartes broke with the main line of medieval psychology by arguing that the rational soul was the only real soul: Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, Rationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 149. There was some rare earlier divergence: Alexander Nequam Speculum speculatiorum, claiming the support of Aristotle (actually Nicolaus of Damascus, De plantis), says animals are soulless: Richard C. Dales, The Problem of the Rational Soul in the Thirteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 15. Nicolaus (whose treatise was translated into Latin c. 1250 by Alfred of Sarashel as De vegetalibus) actually doubts only whether plants have souls. See also John Behr, “The Rational Animal: A Rereading of Gregory of Nyssa’s De Hominis Opificio,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 7, no. 2 (1999): 227–28. ↑
  3. “vulgus laicorum … adhuc credit quod soli homines animas habent”: Latin quoted from Anselm Oelze, Animal Rationality: Later Medieval Theories 1250-1350 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 28 n1. ↑
  4. The basic tripartite schema condenses the model influentially laid out in Aristotle, De Anima, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017), II.3, 25–26.; for a representative explanation of the Aristotle, itself channeled through Avicenna, see Aquinas, Summa Theologica I q. 78 a. 1. Plato provides an earlier, different tripartite schema in his Republic 4. It must be said that Aristotle’s theory of the soul is inconsistent. For an introduction to the Aristotle, see Peter G. Sobol, “The Shadow of Reason: Explanations of Intelligent Animal Behavior in the Thirteenth Century,” in The Medieval World of Nature: A Book of Essays, ed. Joyce E. Salisbury (New York: Garland, 1993), 109–10. Sobol observes that Aristotle’s De anima and his Parva Naturalia (a collection of seven short treatises) propose three distinct souls, and attracted frequent medieval commentators, while his monumental works on animals offer instead a continuous rather than discrete schema of varying intelligence, based on qualities of the blood. This model was far less adaptable to Christian doctrine. The Stoics rather than Aristotle may be chiefly to blame for the distinction of rational from irrational animals: but cf. Richard Sorabji, Animal Minds and Human Morals: The Origins of the Western Debate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) to Catherine Osborne, Dumb Beasts and Dead Philosophers: Humanity and the Humane in Ancient Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 64–65 and 72–73. ↑
  5. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 13. See also his Literal Commentary on Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, vol. 1 (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 96. See my discussion in How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011), 33–35. ↑
  6. On the efforts of thirteenth-century Latin philosophy to deny reason to nonhuman animals, Oelze, Animal Rationality; Juhana Toivanen, “Marking the Boundaries: Animals in Medieval Latin Philosophy,” in Animals: A History, ed. Peter Adamson and G. Fay Edwards (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 121–50; Ian P. Wei, Thinking about Animals in Thirteenth-Century Paris: Theologians on the Boundary Between Humans and Animals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). As Toivanen, “Les animaux et le jugement rationnel,” 444, observes, scholastic philosophers denied animals reason while imagining a host of situations that modern ethologists, less bound by doctrinal necessities, might well assess as evidence of animal rationality. A reviewer of an English translation of Jean Darmanson’ s 1684 La Beste transformée en machine correctly observed “All Men believed, without contestation, until the time of Mr. Descartes, That Beasts had Knowledg. Philosophers … only disputed among themselves, whether the Knowledg of Animals extended it self to Reason or no, and to universal Ideas? Or if it was limited by the perception of sensible Objects?” (quoted in Fudge, Brutal Reasoning, 173). ↑
  7. Roger Bacon in Oelze, Animal Rationality, 143. Likewise, although cranes, cows, and sheep were all thought to elect leaders, scholastic philosophy argued that they did this only by their corporeal “estimative power,” as they lacked a disembodied intellect: Juhana Toivanen, “‘Like Ants in a Colony We Do Our Share’: Political Animals in Medieval Philosophy,” in State and Nature: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, ed. Peter Adamson and Christof Rapp (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), 373. ↑
  8. “non video quare debeant animalia rationalia appellari” qtd in Oelze, 124 n9 and 221 n10. ↑
  9. For his incoherence, Dales, Rational Soul, 9–10. For a few key statements from De Anima, II.1, 22 and III.5, 55. ↑
  10. An anecdote from the Apparatus in Clementinas by the early fourteenth-century canonist Guilelmus de Monte Laudano; in Alain Boureau, “Satan et le dormeur, une construction de l’inconscient au Moyen Age,” Chimères : Revue des schizoanalyses 14, no. 1 (1991): 47. ↑
  11. This was the Benedictine canonist Nicolò de’ Tudeschi (aka Panormitanus, so named from his possession of the See of Palermo); Boureau, 48. ↑
  12. Augustine, Liber 83 quaestionum 56. William of Conches offers three options, without deciding on any: at conception, at quickening, or at birth; quoted in J. Allan Mitchell, Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 13, whose work has been particularly inspirational for this paragraph. Robert Grosseteste and the “Anonymous Van Steenberghen” were the only scholastic theologians who held that the fetus was fully ensouled at conception: Dales, Rational Soul, 202. ↑
  13. Jessica Goldberg, “The Legal Persona of the Child in Gratian’s Decretum,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 24 (2000): 18, 47. ↑
  14. Convivio IV.24, “Since up until that time our soul is concerned with the growth and the beauty of the body, when many and great changes occur in one’s person, the rational part cannot discriminate with perfection [non puote perfettamente la razionale parte discernere]” ↑
  15. Isabelle Cochelin, “Pre-Thirteenth-Century Definitions of the Life Cycle,” in Medieval Life Cycles: Continuity and Change, ed. Isabelle Cochelin and Karen Elaine Smyth (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013), 13. ↑
  16. Nicole Oresme, Nicole Oresme and the Marvels of Nature: The De Causis Mirabilium, ed. and trans. Bert Hansen (Turnhout: Brepols, 1985), 235; see also 241. For further complications, which also tend to emphasize the importance of physical appearance in questions of legitimate baptism, Maaike van der Lugt, “L’humanité des monstres et leur accès aux sacrements dans la pensée médiévale,” in Monstre et imaginaire social approches historiques, ed. Anna Caiozzo and Anne-Emmanuelle Demartini (Paris: Créaphis, 2008), 135–62. ↑
  17. Eliza Buhrer, “‘If in Other Respects He Appears to Be Effectively Human’: Defining Monstrosity in Medieval English Law,” in Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World, ed. Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2019), 63–83. ↑
  18. Sara M. Butler, “Abortion by Assault: Violence against Pregnant Women in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century England,” Journal of Women’s History 17, no. 4 (2005): 9–31; Sara M. Butler, “Abortion Medieval Style? Assaults on Pregnant Women in Later Medieval England,” Women’s Studies 40, no. 6 (2011): 778–99. ↑
  19. The phrase is a standard example in, for instance, Porphyry, Isagoge, trans. Edward W. Warren (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1975), a universally read handbook on Aristotle’s system of taxonomic classification. For the phrase’s origins and its diffusion in classical Greek philosophy, Robert Renehan, “The Greek Anthropocentric View of Man,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 85 (1981): 239–59. ↑
  20. “ab extrinseco et a creatione”: Roger Bacon, Perspectiva, ed. and trans. David C. Lindberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 16–17. Bonaventure and Aquinas make the same point; Wei, Thinking about Animals, 115–16; 192. The observation may originate ultimately in Aristotle, whose De generatione animalium 2, 3 says that the intellective soul, unlike the vegetative and sensitive souls, must “come from without, and that it alone be divine”: quoted from Dales, Rational Soul, 10 n23. ↑
  21. The problem long predates scholasticism. Christian doctrinal stances in the Late Antique Mediterranean world that were weighted towards the importance of free will – loosely speaking, “Pelagianism” – would argue that infants were born innocent; the Augustinian position, weighted towards the importance of grace, held instead that babies must have some guilt, since Christ died for them as well (Elizabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 238, discussing his On Marriage II.33, 56). That babies cried at baptism was itself evidence of their innate sinfulness (Clark, Origenist, 240-41; see Augustine’s Sermon 165 and his Against Julian IV.8.42, and for scholasticism, Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 3, q. 68, art 9 (“whether children should be baptized”) reply objection 1). Aquinas’s position – that at birth we are disordered because we inherit God’s withdrawal of “superadded grace” from Adam – strikes me as more thoughtful than Augustine’s: see Christopher Beiting, “The Idea of Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review 62, no. 2 (1998): 220. A clever proof of original sin, and evidence of the importance of natural history for thirteenth-century theologians, is that of William of Auvergne (bishop of Paris, 1228-1249), who observed that the helplessness of human infants was a sign of our disordered, and thus punished reason; irrational animals, by contrast, are often perfectly capable of taking care of themselves from the moment of their earliest physical independence from egg or womb: Roland J. Teske, “William of Auvergne on the Various States of Our Nature,” Traditio 58, no. 1 (2003): 210. ↑
  22. The problem of unbaptized fetuses, a slightly separate matter, depends, in part, on when the embryo was thought to have a rational soul. ↑
  23. This is no longer the position of the Roman Catholic Church: see the 2007 document produced by the International Theological Commission, approved by the Pope, on “The Hope of Salvation for Infants who Die Without Being Baptized.” ↑
  24. This analogy belongs to William of Auvergne, paraphrased by Christopher Beiting, “The Development of the Idea of Limbo in the Middle Ages” (PhD Thesis, Exeter College, Oxford, 1997), 130. Limbo is a Hell, but not the eternal Hell of torment. For the architecture of the afterlife, which, in its most elaborated forms, included not only a Limbo of Infants, but also the Limbo of the Patriarchs (empty since Christ harrowed Hell), and Purgatory (which will empty eventually as the souls of Christians make their way through it), see inter alia Thorlac Turville-Petre, “Saint Erkenwald and the Judge in Limbo,” The Chaucer Review 58, no. 3 (2023): 348–60, citing two widely popular works, the Middle English Prick of Conscience, and Hugh Ripelin’s c. 1268 Compendium theologicae veritatis; Beiting, “Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” 230–31, 233; Christopher Beiting, “The Nature and Structure of Limbo in the Works of Albertus Magnus,” New Blackfriars 85, no. 999 (2004): 503–6; and, at length, Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). ↑
  25. The standard treatment is Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200-1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). ↑
  26. Reasoning baby souls seems to be what William of Auvergne and Aquinas suggest. William does not quite endorse his solution, which omits any proposal of adult bodies, while allowing the infants to reason (eventually?) and thus, as the pagan philosophers could, to be able, potentially, to reason their way into knowledge of God, thus increasing their happiness. Since they have infinite time to do this, their happiness too could be potentially infinite, a hypothesis that strikes me as forgetting the traditional limitations of reason (Virgil in the Comedy eg), which, being propositional and timebound, is unable to conceive eternity fully: Beiting, “Idea of Limbo,” 132–34. Aquinas’s Sentences commentary comes to much the same conclusion: Beiting, “Limbo in Thomas Aquinas,” 242–43. ↑
  27. Beiting, “Limbo in Albertus Magnus,” 498, discussing Albert’s treatise on the resurrection. ↑
  28. “Quel est ce non-pouvoir au coeur du pouvoir?” (L’animal que donc je suis 49) ↑
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