I. To the Question

A. First Opinion and its Rejection

70. It is said here [Aquinas, Sent. IV d.44 q.3 a3, Giles of Rome, Quodlibet 2 q.9] that spirits are tormented by fire insofar as they apprehend fire under the idea of something disagreeable. And there is a confirmation from Gregory Dialogues 4.29, “A spirit suffers in the way in which it sees; and because it sees itself burning, it is burnt.”

71. And for the possibility of this there is Avicenna Metaphysics 9.7, where he gives the example of a dream, that someone is tormented more in a dream by such imaginative apprehension of something disagreeable than he would sometimes be afflicted by the presence of the same thing when awake.

72. Against this: either a spirit apprehends the fire as disagreeable to him with true apprehension or he apprehends it so with false apprehension.

If with true, one must posit the manner of the disagreeableness, which does not appear possible, because the fire can in no way be disagreeable as it is a corruptive contrary in reality [sc. because, ex hypothesi, the fire is disagreeable to the angel in the angel’s apprehension, not in its material reality], nor can it be so in idea of object because the object of a power as object is agreeable to it.

If with false apprehension, then it follows first that the spirit is tormented not by the fire but by his false judgment; second that if this false judgment is from God, God will be the immediate cause of the deception; and if it is from the angel himself this does not appear probable, because, as Dionysius says Divine Names ch.4, “the natural endowments in them are most splendid,” so spirits can naturally apprehend that fire is not disagreeable to them; again, Gregory ibid. [n.70] says, “The soul suffers from the fire not only in seeing it but also in feeling it.”

B. Second Opinion and its Rejection

73. In another way it is said [Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet 8 q.34] that, because of the demerit of sin, a supernatural habit is given to a spirit, and through this habit the spirit is subject to a bodily agent so it can be made to suffer by it.

74. Against this: the habit is either a bodily form or a spiritual form. If bodily, God can give the habit to inhere in an angel in just the way that an angel can be white or a stone wise, because there is an equal repugnance on both sides between the recipient and the received. If spiritual, then by it the passive subject is no more proportioned to a body as to an agent than it was before.

75. Again, a habit is not that whereby we are able simply but that whereby we are able in a certain way; therefore, that which has in it no potency for acting or being acted on simply has in it no potency for acting or being acted on thus; but in this [angelic] nature there does not sufficiently exist a potency for being acted on, nor can this habit give it the possibility, because the habit is not a potency.

76. Again the punishment would be received immediately in the habit as in what is proximately receptive of it; indeed not mediately either in the angel’s nature, if it is repugnant to that nature. And if the first point be granted, it follows that this habit when separated from the angel could be punished with the same punishment; if the second be granted, it follows that the angel is not punished now either, but that only the habit is.

C. Scotus’ own Response to the Question

77. To the question I say that, according to Augustine City of God 14.15 n.2, “pain of flesh is only a vexing of the soul arising from the flesh, and a certain dissent from its suffering - just as pain of soul, which is called a ‘suffering’, is sadness arising from things that happen to us against our will.”

78. From this it is clear that pain is a passion consequent to sense apprehension and existing in sense appetite, while sadness is properly in the intellective appetite or will, and is consequent to the apprehension by the intellect of some unwanted object.

1. About Pain Properly Speaking

79. The first of these, namely pain properly speaking, must not be looked for in spirits or angels or separated souls, unless it be imagined that there is in a separate spirit sense appetite and (for like reason) senses, and that there can be in a spirit both passion in the sense appetite and passion as to sense, which is trifling, because according to Aristotle On the Soul 1.4.408b11-13, “to say the soul is sad or joyful is nothing other than to say it weaves or builds.” This is indeed true insofar as they are properties of the soul, for they are properties of the composite [of body and soul]; just as sensing too, on which follow such sorts of property, belongs first to the whole composite (On Sense and Sensible 1.436a11-b8, On Dreams 1.453b11-14).

80. Nor yet do I deny that there is in the sensing soul the perfection which is completive in idea of the sensing power, for this is not different from the essence itself of the intellective soul - when one holds what I held in Rep. II.A d.16 n.17, that the principles of operation on the part of the soul are not accidents of the soul. But this perfection, which remains in the soul (rather is really the nature of the soul) is not the visual or auditory power save partially.

81. But the visual power is something that essentially includes this perfection of the soul as well as some perfection of the mixed body (corresponding to it) for their common operation. And in the same way sensation belongs first to the whole that is a conjunct of the two, so that the proximate receiver, and the reason for receiving, is not the soul, nor anything precisely in the soul, nor the form of the mixture in the organ, but the form of the whole that is composed of mixed body and soul; and such perfection is the proximate idea of the receiving of sensation. And therefore the total form is the sensitive power, and not one part of it (namely the form of the mixture) without the other part (namely the form of the intellective soul).

82. Therefore the cause of pain, as it is distinguished from sadness, should not be looked for either in a separate spirit or in a separate soul, because it cannot be in them.

2. About Sadness

83. But let us see about sadness.

I say that, since sadness is in the will arising from the apprehension of the existence of an object disagreeable to reason, either one must look for an object that is immediately shown by reason as disagreeable and yet as posited present or, if it cannot be immediately shown as disagreeable save by an erring reason (because it would not be disagreeable to [the Archangel] Michael, and it does not seem reasonable that this affliction follow erroneous reason), one must find there an object disagreeable to reason because not wanted and yet posited present to it.

84. Now I say that the infernal fire is an object thus disagreeable, and that in two ways: first as definitively detaining a spirit, and second as objectively affecting it.

a. About the Disagreeable Object or About the Infernal Fire Definitively Detaining a Spirit

85. On the first point:

No place, as it is the place of something, is disagreeable to what is placed in it, save because some other body is disagreeable to it. Now since a spirit has no natural agreement with a body (for then that body would be naturally preservative of it), so does it have no natural disagreement with a body such that its being detained at it would be disagreeable to its nature. Hence if the Archangel Michael were, by divine command, joined definitively in place with a body, even perpetually so, and were to apprehend the fact, he would in no way apprehend it as disagreeable or as matter for sadness. Therefore, in order to get sadness from fire as a detention, let first a reason for not wanting it be found.

86. In this way does a bad angel have a ‘not wanting to be detained perpetually by fire’, and specifically under the idea that the fire, by divine sentence or will, effectively detains him there. And to this ‘not wanting’ he is inclined by the love of advantage, in that he wants free use of his power, in order that, as his nature is indifferent to any particular body, so he may be able to make himself present to any particular body. Now pride provokes him, for which reason he desires to use his proper power; envy consumes him, for which reason he wishes not to be determinately anywhere on account of divine sentence or action. Detention and apprehension of it precedes this ‘not wanting’; but, once the ‘not wanting’, albeit disordered, is posited in his will, there follows a definite apprehension of the fact of the unwanted thing; and from this third (or fifth, if the two things that precede the ‘not wanting’ are counted in) there follows sadness.

87. If you ask whether the detaining fire is the effective cause of this sadness, I reply: the fire does not effect the detaining of a spirit, because what is not the effective locator of a thing, or does not prevent it being moved from this place, does not detain it in this place. This house, to be sure, is not effective in detaining me (as to the first point), because it is not effective in fixing my place; yet it does prevent me moving to another place [sc. unless I go out through the door]; and so it can be said in some way to be effective in detaining me as being what prohibits some other formal detention.

88. But in neither way can any bodily place detain an angel; so the bodily fire formally detains him only in this way, that there is no detaining by the fire in the genus of action but only an externally arising relation reducible to the category of ‘where’. What does the effective detaining, whether in the first way (because it actively determines the spirit to that place) or the second way (because it prevents the spirit moving from that place to another), is God directly, because at least detention against the will of an angel that has no angel superior to him could not thus be done save immediately by God.

89. But further, an angel not only hates his detention, active and passive, by God, but he hates his perpetual formal detention by the fire; and not only does he apprehend this active or passive detention as real in fact or as to be continued, but he also hates the formal detention, and consequently the formal detention causes him sadness.

90. Now the saddening object is properly cause of the sadness, because it is not immediately the will since then being sad or not being sad would be immediately in the will’s power - which is not true once the not wanting, and the apprehension of what is not wanted, are posited. Therefore, because the formal detention, or the fire that is formally doing the detaining, is effective cause of sadness, and so further since to be saddened is formally to be tormented (in the way it is possible for a spirit to be tormented), it follows that the fire, as formally detaining the spirit, is effective in tormenting him.

91. And in this way is the assertion [nn.70-71] preserved about how fire is God’s instrument in tormenting, because the evil spirit more principally hates the active detention of God and his own passive detention by God than he hates the formal detention by the fire, because he hates the second only in its order to the first; and thus, what in the second objectively afflicts him, afflicts him in virtue of the first, and does so instrumentally. Nor does this follow: ‘the fire is not the effective but only the formal detainer, therefore it is not effective cause of affliction’ - because the fire, as formal detainer, is an unwanted object and an object apprehended as present, and so it is effective in inflicting sadness.

92. If you say that this is not only because it is not wanted but also because the object is in itself disagreeable (because freedom and indifference to any bodily place belongs to a spirit) - the antecedent is false, as was said above about Michael [n.85], that if he were to apprehend himself as determined perpetually to a definite place by divine sentence he would not be sad, because although he has freedom and indifference as to places, yet he does not have this to them as a sort of natural perfection, because not even one place is thus. So neither does indifference to any number of places naturally perfect an angel; and therefore determination to one place is not against the natural inclination of an angel.

93. An example of this way of being sad is found in men who desire to die, for whom life is sad. In this way do they hate the soul’s being in its body right up to the moment of natural death, because of something hateful that accompanies mortal life; and, second, they apprehend that what they do not want will be; and therefore follows, third, sadness about the detention of the soul in the body, or about the body as detaining the soul - not because the body is the effective detainer of the soul but as it is in some way receiver of the form of soul; and as it detains, so is it, as apprehended, an unwanted object.

94. And this can be got from Gregory Dialogues 4.29, “If the incorporeal spirit of a man when alive is bound in the body, why may not the incorporeal spirit after death be bound by bodily fire?” And Augustine On the Trinity, 21.10 n.11, “If the spirits of men, altogether incorporeal, can now be contained in bodily members, they will then too be able to be indissolubly bound in the chains of their bodies.”

b. About the Disagreeable Object or About the Infernal Fire Objectively Affecting a Spirit

95. About the second way, namely how fire as affecting object causes sadness, the like must, in some respect, be said:

First, the angel’s intellect is determined perpetually to intense consideration of the fire in its idea as object of consideration. Second, the angel apprehends his being determinately fixed to this sort of consideration. Third, the angel hates it and, as before [n.86], this hate arises from affection for advantage, and from this affection the angel wants to consider any object, now this one and now that, insofar as it will have been delightful to him; he is also provoked by pride, whereby he wishes to use his intellective power according to the command of his own will; and he is consumed by envy, because of which he hates to be determined by God to some single consideration. Fourth follows awareness, not only bare awareness of this consideration, as in the second stage, but certain awareness of the factual reality of this intense and perpetual consideration. Fifth, from this follows sadness.

96. But in some respect there is unlikeness between this case and the preceding one [nn.85-94].

As to the first stage [n.95], the unlikeness is because the fire here has the idea of agent as effective detainer of the angel’s intellect, and not by command of the angel’s will, to intense consideration of the fire.

97. And if you ask how these facts can hold of fire, since a body could not move the intelligence of a spirit so effectively that the intelligence be no longer subject to the spirit’s will for determining its act of consideration, namely to considering this or that [n.95] (as Augustine says that the will turns the intelligence away and towards now this and now that [cf. Ord. II d.38 n14]) - one must say that this does not belong to fire by its own virtue, because when the whole active virtue of fire is in place an angel left to himself could, by command of his own will, consider fire or some other body indifferently.

98. Therefore, one must say that this being detained in intense and perpetual considering of fire, and against the angel’s will, is an effect from God principally, and if actively from the fire yet less principally so. And an example can be set down for this: just as the agent intellect and the phantasm are disposed to move the possible intellect in us, so God has, in the matter at hand, a mode similar to the agent intellect and to the phantasm of fire. And the mode would be altogether similar if in us the agent intellect had a will formally and the possible intellect likewise had a will formally, and if the agent intellect were by its own will to determine some definite phantasm for the effective moving of the possible intellect against the possible intellect’s will.

99. Nor is it a difficulty that the principal agent [sc. God] and the instrument [sc. the angel’s intellect] are not in the same supposit here as the agent intellect and phantasm are there, because the order of these agents does not require identity of supposit.

100. At the third stage too [n.95] there is a difference between here and the former case [nn.85-94], because an angel hates much more the perpetual detention of his intellect in intense consideration of fire than his formal detention definitively in place by fire; for his perfection consists much more, and is desired much more, in the opposite of the first, namely in the free use of his intelligence by command of will about any object at all, than it consists in the free use of his power to move definitively as to any ‘where’.

101. Now this detention in the most intense consideration of fire impedes the first liberty [n.100], because by it the angel’s intellect is impeded from considering other things that he could consider. But his definitive detention [in ‘where’] by fire only impedes the second one [n.100].

102. From this follows a difference at the fifth stage [n.95], that there will be much more sadness from this second cause than from the preceding one [nn.85-94, 100], because where there is a greater ‘not-wanting’, and an equally certain apprehension of the fact, a greater sadness follows.

103. There is also a difference between this case and the preceding one [nn.85-94], that in this case fire can in some way be more said to be effective in thus afflicting a spirit than in the preceding case, because in that preceding case the fire is effective in afflicting a spirit only in the way an unwanted apprehended object causes sadness, while in this case here it is effective in causing the primary apprehension that the intellect is determined to, which apprehension is not wanted. And therefore the fire has here as it were a double action on the preceding merely simple apprehension. But just as in the preceding case no disagreeableness in the fire was posited from the nature of the thing but only from the nature of it as not being wanted as detainer, so here the disagreeableness of the fire is not of it as an object considered [sc. the mere consideration of an object is not disagreeable, cf. n.72], but as the final one ever considered, because the object is not wanted as being so considered; yet there is a greater inclination to not wanting in this way than in the preceding way.

c. Objections Against Both Ways

104. There are objections against both ways:

Against the first [n.84], that the fire detains them all equally; therefore all of them will be tormented equally. The consequent is against Augustine City of God 21.16, “It must not at all be denied that the eternal fire will be lighter for some, heavier for others, whether the heat of the fire varies in proportion to the punishment deserved by each or whether it is equally hot but is not felt with equal distress.” From this authority too seems to be got that the heat will torment them and not merely the detention.

105. Against the second [n.95], that if the fire makes such impression only in an intellectual way, delight follows, because the impression befits the intellective power. There is a proof too, because it would delight [the Archangel] Michael.

106. Against both together, that if a spirit does not will against, or hate, being thus detained or affected by the object, he will not be saddened; and thence, since it is in his power not to will against it, it will be in his power not to be tormented.

107. Again, against both together: spirits could be afflicted while in a stone or the sun or the empyreal heaven, if they were definitively detained in them and objectively affected by them. - Look for the answer to this last objection.No response by Scotus is given for this objection, and the Vatican editors provide no explanatory note. Perhaps the answer would be that it does not matter, as to the fact of punishment, where evil spirits are detained or afflicted, provided they are so; but it does matter as to the fittingness of this ‘where’ within the whole universe, namely that it should be a lower and debased place (so not the sun or empyreal heaven) with an active force (so not a stone). ¹⁰

d. Response to the Objections

108. As to the first [n.104], I concede that formal detention (which accords with the formal definition) is equal, but the not-wanting of it is not equal; rather it is more intense in those who sinned more; and so there is greater sadness in them.

109. To the second [n.105]: the first impression on the intellect, which is to understand fire, would be of itself delightful to the intellect; but in the fifth instant [n.102], after the act of not-wanting and the apprehension of the not-wanted event, sadness would be caused by the unwanted and apprehended impression.

110. And if you say that at least the impression as it exists in the first instant will cause delight, I reply that it cannot, because in the same instant the appetite has vehement sadness and that sadness excludes all joy, not only the contrary joy but any chance joy, from Ethics 7.15.1154b11-15.

111. If you say that the cause of delight is naturally prior to the cause of sadness, I reply that, in the case of things that have only a natural order and a real simultaneity, the more efficacious one excludes the less efficacious one though the more efficacious one be posterior in nature. And no wonder, because what impedes and prohibits is sometimes posterior in nature to the agent that is impeded by its restraint. (An example is found in what is generative of one thing and what is alterative of it into the contrary.)

112. To the third [nn.106] I say that not wanting it and not willing against it are not in their power, as will be touched on in discussion of the continuation in them of their evil act [d.46 n.101]. The reason for which is perhaps the continuous action of the superior cause acting to produce something uniform in them because of their preceding demerit; and on this uniform thing there follows a uniform affliction of them. And for this reason, no spirit can have a less strong not-wanting than he has now, because just as his act is not in his power so neither is the mode of his act; and just as the superior cause acts uniformly for the not-wanting (because of which the inferior cause cannot act differently from the superior cause), so does the superior cause act for the intensity of this not-wanting.