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[k_navit]

“Spiritus enim, ut substantia excellentior, substantiam utique inferiorem virtualiter, quod aiunt, et eminenter, in se continet; ut facultas facultatem spiritualis et rationalis corpoream, sentientem nempe et vegetativam.”

WTF with "quod aiunt"? Does it signal that the ut clause here is supposed to be indirect discourse?  Am I to read this as a

Comments

[k_navit]

Ah, thank you, ok (re the "ut"s). Re the subject of aiunt, I guess I was trying to make his grammar demand that we not take it for granted he held an Aristotelian or Augustinian philosophy of the faculties, but rather that we have to take him on his own terms (which isn't done very well, very often, re the faculties) and/or recognize that he sets forward some quite original, even heterodox, thinking. I guess I don't need his grammar to make that argument for me :-) Thanks for the eleventh-hour save of my footnote's clarity!

[ext_79993]

It may be a lot too late, in which case sorry, but I think I read `quod aiunt' as qualifying the twin adverbs, `virtualiter... et eminenter'. The two `ut' clauses look to me, as Kataplexis says, like comparators, so the whole thing is something like:

For the spirit, as the more excellent substance surely contains in itself the lesser one, virtually and eminently as they say, so the spiritual and rational faculty clearly [contains] the corporeal, sensible and vegetative faculty.

For me, actually, the problem here is "Spiritus enim", which seems to be functioning as a kind of rubric, "As for the spirit: ...", whereas with `enim' I would expect it to link more closely into the following syntax than it appears to do. Hmm. But I can't do any better than that.