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.