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1. The Reasons of Henry of Ghent
81. [First reason] - One doctor [Henry, Quodlibet XIII q.4] argues as follows: When, as far as depends on the power of the agent, something could be done indifferently in various ways to the same thing, if the same thing were susceptible according to one way among them, it would be possible for it to be acted on similarly in any of the other ways. Now, on the part of the agent, since it is of infinite power, there is an equal possibility that a single body may come to be at the same time in several places according to any manner of plurality. But it is impossible that, with God as agent, the same body should be everywhere; therefore, it is impossible simply that the same body come to be at the same time in diverse places. The proof of the minor is that ‘being able to be everywhere at the same time’ is proper to God.
82. [Second reason] - Again, many contradictories would follow, for when a body is put in one place, either it has the same form as in another place or it does not.
If it has the same form, let ice be put in one place and heat in another place; it follows that in one place the body will have cold and in another place heat. Likewise if it not find anything to eat in one place it would be hungry there, in another place finding food it would not be hungry; and in one place it would incur sickness from the inclemency of the air, and in another place health from the air’s clemency, and so it would at the same time be healthy and not healthy but ill; and fourth, in one place it would be killed and in another not, so it would at the same die and not die
But if the second alternative is chosen [the thing has different forms in different places], the same results follow, because the same body will have at least contrary properties, save that according to the second member it will have contraries in each place, and according to the first member it will have one contrary in one place and another in another.
83. [Third reason] - Again, as a thing in place is commensurate with the dimensions of the place, namely as quantum and as continuum, it is thus commensurate to the place as [the place] is one and many; therefore, if the same placed thing is in diverse places, it will be one and many at the same time.8
84. And if you object against the second reason [n.82], that its conclusion seems to apply in the same way to Christ’s body on the cross and in the pyx, because on the cross it was wounded but not in the pyx, Henry responds that when something belongs to something according to what naturally belongs to it, it belongs to it simply (as that if a man is curly as to his head he is curly simply, though he is not curly as to another part); but to be wounded, which includes division of what is continuous, belongs to something as it has being in place only; and therefore if it exists by location in one place and not by location in another place, if it is wounded where it is by location, it is simply wounded; and if it is not wounded in another place where it is not by location, not for this reason is it not wounded, but there is a fallacy according to simply and in a certain respect. But if the same body is by location in two places, and consequently in its dimensions in diverse places, one must say that whatever it naturally does or suffers in one place it does or suffers in the other; therefore in that case it follows that it will have opposites at the same time.