The Child of Scholasticism, and the Contradictions of the Renaissance

Thomas Aquinas sought to think the relation of childhood to the age of adulthood under the condition of numerical continuity. Such a project needs to reconcile the same and the other, differences of quantity and quality. The problem is that it cannot be a matter of a mere growth, or aug-mentation (obesity, for example, is a disorder and not a result of growth). Consequently, it was necessary to add a second schema that would correct or limit the first, which would fix its terminus, its end. The Aristotelian tradition had imposed the schema of perfection. Difference is thus at once gradual (augmentation) and negative (a lack calls for fulfilment, it is a privation that is not however a mere negation, since becoming implies power or potentiality); and to do this, it is necessary to differentiate the concept of privation, in order to be able to think a privation that does not exclude the presence of form or the soul, without which the body would not exist. Such is imperfection.

The latter is not at all of the same nature when it is a matter of the body as opposed to the mind. Everything happens as if the process were redoubled, quantitative change being attributed to the body and qualitative change to the mind. In the body, in fact, perfection is tied to the possession of the quantity that naturally corresponds to the form. But animated beings, unlike inanimate ones, spring from a seed, and do not immediately receive the quantity that is their due when they receive their form: they are born imperfect, and are led little by little to their optimal size through the labour of nutrition. The gap between the present quantity and the optimal quantity is only a matter of degree, so that the child must simply get bigger: