Dist. 50, Part 2, Art. 1, Q. 1
by St. Bonaventure
Source text: Public Domain Mark 1.0. English translation/apparatus/encoding: CC BY-NC 4.0, Wroot Press.
https://bonaventure.wrootpress.com/browse/4/d/50/q/bon-sent-IV-d50-p2-a1-q1
----------------------------------------
### Article I. *On the cognition of the separated soul.*
### Question I. *Whether the separated soul has the use of the sensitive power.*

As to the first, then, the question is whether the separated soul has the use of the sensitive power. And that it does, seems to be so:

1. First, by the authority of the Gospel, Luke sixteen: *Lifting up his eyes he saw Lazarus* etc. All those things which are touched upon there bespeak a sensitive cognition and one after the manner of sense: therefore etc.

2. Likewise, Cassiodorus in his book *On the Soul*, speaking of the separated soul, says: « It sees, it hears, it touches, and with the remaining senses it is more efficaciously strong ».

3. Likewise, it seems so *by reason*: because a substance operates through a power the better and the more easily, the freer it is and the more immune from error; but the substance of the rational soul, once separated, has a cognitive power, because it is impossible that a power be destroyed which is founded in a perpetual substance. And *again*, it is a substance freer and more spiritual: therefore freer for the act of cognition: therefore it can use it better, both the interior and the exterior, than now.

4. Likewise, it is agreed that the separated soul knows things abstracted from material conditions; it knows things under material conditions, the matter being absent;

and again, it knows under individual conditions, the matter or the object being present; this is agreed: therefore it understands and imagines and senses, therefore it has the use of every power.

*If you say* that it does this by one and the same power; *on the contrary:* 5. These acts are of greater and lesser abstraction: if therefore the greater abstraction comes about according to the degrees of spirituality of the powers, and one power does not have degrees of greater and lesser spirituality: therefore it is necessary that it do this by three powers.

6. Likewise, if the intellect of the separated soul can do all these things, then it seems that, since it is in vain that a thing be done by more when it can be done by fewer, God gave the three powers to the soul in vain.

7. Likewise, if the intellect can do the whole with respect to these three: therefore, the senses failing, it will nonetheless be able to know sensible things; which is manifestly false and against experience and against the Philosopher, who says that « when the sense fails, the knowledge which is according to that sense must necessarily fail ». — *If you say* that the separated soul has this; *I ask:* why can the separated soul do the whole through the intellect, but not the conjoined soul? — *If you say* that this is on account of the mass of the flesh; *the objection is raised* concerning the state of Adam, where the soul did not have oppressing flesh, and yet it could not do this by intellect alone, since it would have the senses in vain.

**On the contrary:** 1. « To sense, as the Philosopher holds, is the operation of the *composite* »: therefore, since after the separation is made it is no longer an animal, there will no longer be an operation of sense.

2. Likewise, sense, whether interior or exterior, is a power needing a determinate organ: therefore it is a power bound to an organ: therefore, the organ ceasing, it does not have its operation.

3. Likewise, this is seen by experiment: because a blind man has the power of seeing, and, the eye being lost, he cannot see, nor can a frenzied man remember: therefore, if the sensitive power loses its organ, when it is altogether separated it loses its operation more than when the organ is merely injured: therefore all its operation ceases.

4. Likewise, in every cognitive power it is necessary to find an *agent* and a *patient*, and this *by a difference*. For if they differ in the intellect, which is a simpler and more spiritual power, much more so in the sensitive power; but the sensitive power is not divided into *agent* and *patient* within itself: therefore it is necessary that it have the patient outside itself. But this is nothing other than a bodily organ, which receives unto this, that a man may know: therefore, since after the separation it is active without a passive, and without these two it is impossible that a cognitive power be brought into act; therefore etc.

### Conclusion

> *The separated soul, through the intellective power, knows after the manner of the Angels all the things which the other powers also used to know.*

**I respond:** It must be said that concerning this question there was a threefold opinion of the doctors.

For certain men said that the separated soul, since it draws all its powers with itself, uses *all of them* as a freer substance; nor do they say that the philosophers are to be believed in this matter: because they neither rightly understood cognition after the separation of the soul, nor further the unity on account of which in one soul there are three powers, namely the rational, the sensible and the vegetable, and they are perpetually rooted in the same substance, with which they are necessarily separated; which the philosophers did not know, but the Saints did. And since our faith says that souls are tormented by fire; and Cassiodorus says that « with the other senses it is more efficaciously strong »: therefore they posited that the soul has the use of all its powers.

The second position is that the soul has the *sensitive* powers — that soul, I mean, which is rational. But since all the exterior sensitive powers are united in their origin and in the common sense, and are distinguished in their organs; therefore necessarily, when the soul is separated from the body, all the powers run back to *one origin*, namely to the common sense, and through that sense the soul, once free, can do what it could do through all the other exterior senses by reason of its binding with the body, and

it uses it for the acts of all the senses; and thus it uses an interior sense, not the intellect alone; and this is the sense which draws the phantasms with itself. And they confirm this position through Augustine, who says in *On the Spirit and the Soul*, and in the twelfth book *On Genesis according to the Letter*, that the soul draws with itself the images of bodily things and through them imagines and knows, when it uses the interior sensitive power.

The third position is that the separated rational soul knows nothing except by the mediation of the *intellective* power; and through it it can know not only what it knew in the body, but also everything which the other powers used to know, on account of its freedom, like a single Angel. Through the *sensitive* powers it can operate nothing, just as neither through the *vegetative* ones, since they depend on a bodily organ, as is manifest to one who considers. Therefore, just as, the body being corrupted, it operates nothing through the powers which regard the *vegetable*: so it operates nothing through the powers which regard the sensible. — But through the *intellect* it knows things under material conditions, *the matter being present*, and this belongs to *exterior sense*; and things under material conditions, *the matter being absent*, and this belongs to *imagination*; and it knows those same things also with all material conditions abstracted, and this belongs to *intellect*; and it truly does all these things. And therefore the separated soul is rightly said to *sense, to imagine* and *to understand*, not through diverse powers, but through *one*, which can know in all these modes, as is to be posited in an Angel, as is clear from the second book.

But for a fuller understanding it is to be noted that, just as « in every nature there is something by which it is *to become*, and something by which it is *to make* »; so also in every cognition; and since this is the first division of power, through the *active* and the *passive*, it is necessary that these *differ*; yet according to the degrees of greater and lesser simplicity and spirituality they have a greater and a lesser difference. For the *intellective* power, in that it is more spiritual and more abstract, has both powers, which regard a spiritual substance, so that the *active* is by reason of the *by which it is*, and the *passive* by reason of the *that which it is*, namely of matter and form. — But in the *sensitive* power, which is less spiritual, the *active* power is on the part of the soul, and the *passive* on the part of the organ; and therefore, because sense does not exist without action and passion, therefore *to sense* is said to be the operation of the *composite*. And *again*, since the *active* does nothing without the *passive*; and when the soul loses the body, it loses the *passive* with respect to the act of sensing: therefore it is impossible that it use any sense, whether interior or exterior, as long as it is separated.

Now this opinion is more consonant with reason, nor does it conflict with the faith nor with the authority of the Saints. For it posits that the soul, through the intellective power, understands and knows in these three modes, in which it does now, and the Angel likewise, in these three modes, I say, on the part of *the thing known*; and that is called *to understand, to imagine* and *to sense*, according to what the Saints say. And in this way the authorities of the Saints are to be understood.

*To 1.* To that, then, which is objected first concerning that rich man; it must be said that that tongue was only an *imaginative* tongue. For the soul carries images not only in the lower power; but, when it is separated, it has them in the intelligible memory, which does not need a bodily organ.

*To 2.* To that which is objected concerning Cassiodorus, it must be said that he does not speak of the exterior senses, but of the interior ones, which are nothing other than the intellect itself, insofar as it has the mode of apprehending of those very senses.

*To 3.* To that which is objected, that the separated soul is freer; it must be said that this is true as regards the *active* power; but when it lacks the *passive*, it cannot operate, just as neither can fire without something combustible — not on account of an imperfection of itself in itself, but on account of this, that it necessarily requires something for going forth into work.

*To 4. 5. 6. 7.* To that which is objected, that it knows in three ways; it must be said that the separated soul does this through one and the same power. — As to what is objected concerning abstraction, it must be said that this does not make a diversity, since it is one power according to which the soul orders the whole predicamental line, and *ascends* by abstracting or resolving from the lowest up to the highest, and *descends* by composing from the most general down to the individual. For it belongs to the rational power alone

to compare the individual to the species and to consider the most general genus of that same species; and therefore abstraction in these three acts is not a sufficient ground for diversifying the powers, but rather a most excellent and most fitting conjunction, according to which it has been brought about that the soul, as long as it is in the flesh, should have powers by which it is bound and communicates its operation to the body, both in *governing* or vivifying and in *knowing*. — And thus it is clear why the intellect does not have this *capacity* as long as it is conjoined, on account of the binding and the order and the connexion of the soul's powers to itself and to the body; but not so, when it is separated. — And thus the whole is clear.