The Powers of the Soul in the Anthropology of Hugh of St.-Cher

Abstract

In the beginning of the thirteenth century, the various doctrines of the powers of the soul reflected the general ontological vision concerning the nature of human being. This chapter concentrates on the problem of the soul’s faculties principally in the commentary on the Sentences and in two quaestiones disputatae of a French Dominican, Hugh of St.-Cher. According to Hugh, the soul has an intrinsic capacity to give perfection to the body. Our soul is united with the body not by its essence, that is to say as a form, but through the mediation of its inferior potencies, which are mere accidents. According to Aristotle, the human soul can survive only if it has a faculty which can exercised independently from the body. Hugh made attempts to overcome the dualist anthropology and to reject a vision in which the relation between the human soul and body was purely accidental. Keywords:anthropology; Hugh of St.-Cher; human body; human soul