II. To the Initial Arguments

197. To the first argument for the opposite [n.181] I say that Augustine so understands ‘must’ that it means ‘is appropriate’ (that is, fitting) for the body to live in the kingdom prepared for the glorious; but it is not required, that is, it is not simply necessary. For the body of Christ can sometimes move from its place even locally, and much more so can it, by divine action absolutely, be elsewhere both sacramentally and locally, putting itself in another ‘where’ without loss of its ‘where’ in heaven, just as we now hold that that body is present non-locally in the Eucharist.

198. To the second [n.182] I say that ‘formal reason’ can be understood in two ways: first properly, for the proximate formal reason, and second for the remote formal reason (taking ‘formal reason’ broadly for remote foundational reason, in the way that heat is said to be the formal reason for something being similar, namely to the extent that heat is the ‘principle by which’ of action and whiteness the principle by which of similarity). When speaking of reason in the first way, one can concede that what the formal reason is the formal reason of is not multiplied without the multiplication of the formal reason. But, when speaking of formal reason in the second way, the claim is false, because the same thing could be the proximate cause of acting as regard many actions, and the same thing could be the proximate foundation as regard many relations. Now quantity is the formal reason of being in place not in the first way but in the second, because it is the proximate foundation of this relation; and from this the proposed conclusion follows, namely that several relations can be founded on the same foundation, especially relations that come to a thing from outside.

199. To the third [n.183] I say that the first proposition is false, unless the unity of the third thing in itself and the unity of the things that are proved to be one from the unity of that third thing are understood in a uniform way, because if there is a lesser unity in itself of the third thing, one cannot infer a greater unity of the others with each other, but a unity through their unity in that third thing. The same holds of ‘together’, that unless the third thing, with which the others are together, is limited to the unity according to which they are together with the third, their togetherness with each other does not follow. Yet neither is what is in Paris together with the same thing in Rome if the third thing, because immense, is unlimited. Hence the following inference does not hold, ‘I am together with eternity and with the soul of Antichrist, therefore that soul and eternity are together with each other’, for eternity is immense as to its actual presence. - To the matter in hand I say that that which is together in two places is unlimited, though not by its own power but by the power of God as agent, I mean unlimited as to ‘where’. And therefore things that are present with it as it is thus unlimited do not have to be together with each other.

200. To the fourth [n.184] I say that, when taking ‘distance’ for distance in place, the major is false. As for the proof about discontinuity, I say that a thing is the same as itself not because it is continuous with itself but because it has a truer unity, for continuity is unity of part in relation to part in the whole, but the unity of the whole with itself is true identity. I say therefore that if a whole as distant is not continuous with itself as distant, yet in each term of the distance it is truly the same, possessing the same continuity of parts in the whole.a

a.a [Interpolation] Hence the soul exists in the head and the foot, and a man has the same being now and at the end of his life, and that being is distant from itself in duration but it is not a different being; hence diversity in what is posterior does not argue diversity in what is prior.

     And when it is said that the unity of a continuous whole is its continuity, this is true of its unity as composed of parts; but its identity with itself is not continuity of the same whole with itself in the way a part is continuous with a part.

201. As to the fifth [n.185], the answer will be plain in the second part of this distinction, question three [nn.307-312].