DiotimosReading Desk

Operations, changes and qualities

Passibility and impassibility

passibilité, passibility; capacity to suffer or undergo affection; passabilité, alternate source form rendered passibility; impassibilité, impassibility; passible, passible; capable of suffering; impassible, impassible

Passibility is the capacity to undergo suffering or affection; impassibility is its absence.

From the book

The Manly Hall Manuscript Collection, Volume I

Attributed to Abraham the Jew · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Browse this book’s lexicon →

Orientation

At a Glance

  • The wordPassibility is the capacity to undergo suffering or affection; impassibility is its absence. They are not interchangeable with corruptibility and incorruptibility. The author makes both blessedness and torment depend on different combinations of these conditions.
  • In this bookA body can remain incorruptible while suffering without end. Conversely, incorruptibility joined to impassibility sustains unending delight. Quicksilver and the prepared quintessence provide the natural examples through which the author argues for these combinations.
  • TranslationThe edition uses passibility for both passibilité and passabilité, preserving the written variation in French. It keeps passible and impassible separately and does not translate incorruptible as though it necessarily meant immune to pain.
  • A place to readRead manuscript 69v–70v, scans 166–168, where the favorable and adverse combinations are stated in explicit parallel.

Meaning

Passibility concerns what a subject can receive or undergo. In the book's theological comparison it includes pain, disease and elemental affliction; in the material analogy it concerns susceptibility to changing conditions. Its range must be read with the subject rather than narrowed to a modern clinical sensation.

Incorruptibility concerns endurance of constitution or life, and so can coexist with passibility. This is the central distinction: if a suffering subject is not destroyed, its endurance may perpetuate the suffering rather than end it. The author regards that combination as intelligible through a material that preserves opposed qualities.

Impassibility supplies the opposite condition, not merely stronger endurance. It is named among the just's glorious gifts and joined to incorruptibility in a lasting absence of evil. The source consequently needs two terms to explain why permanence can have contrary outcomes.

Use in the book

The glorious-body account names subtlety, brightness, agility and impassibility as conditions acquired by the souls and bodies of the just. Their lasting luminosity and freedom from suffering permit eternal delight (66v–67r; scans 160–161). Impassibility is a positive condition of blessed life in this argument, not an inability to act.

The constitution of luminous bodies follows. Stars and planets formed from active subtle elements cannot be altered, suffer or be corrupted in their stated condition until the last judgment; quintessence closely follows with its own specified elemental mixture (67v; scan 162). The author connects constitution and susceptibility rather than treating body as necessarily opaque and painful.

The opposing account starts with quicksilver uniting penetration and thickness, light and opacity, volatility and weight. Through this example, bodies of the damned receive qualities contrary to the just's: opacity, heaviness, thickness and passability (68v–69r; scans 164–165). Their condition is made worse by durable and penetrating capacities rather than corrected by them.

The next side expressly joins passibility and incorruptibility. Darkness and thickness can coexist with penetrability, subtlety and darkening light, letting torments reach all the smallest parts. The author repeats that suffering is compounded in a subject that cannot escape by destruction (69v; scan 166). This is a combination of powers, not a replacement of material agency by a purely metaphorical punishment.

At scan 168 the parallel becomes formal. Impassibility with incorruptibility sustains perfect and unending goods; passibility with incorruptibility makes a successive continual death and inexhaustible torment. Subtlety and penetration intensify the reception of agents. The next side imagines freezing, burning, drowning and illness occurring through the same interval throughout the body (70v–71r; scans 168–169).135

The answer to questions about material fire acting on an immaterial soul returns to quicksilver, explicitly a figure of both Christ and the Demon. Its bodily and spiritual powers supply the author's sensible support for combinations that seem impossible (71v–72r; scans 170–171). This is the manuscript's explanatory strategy, not an independently verified mechanism for a future state.

The Incarnation discussion then describes the impassible exposed to pain and death through a received body (83r; scan 195). The second-operation heading begins with fixed, incorruptible gold taking a passible body, continued as volatile and incorruptible within celestial mercury (90v–91r; scans 212b–213). The apparently contradictory terms are intentionally brought together in the same subject.

The author immediately recalls pure, spiritual quintessence nonetheless subject to the imperfections of corruption and alteration. He uses the combination to illuminate visible/invisible harmony and then distinguishes the specified mercurial spirit from every spirit wrapped in matter (91r–92r; scans 213–215). The lexicon must preserve both the audacious comparison and its restriction, rather than resolving the paradox by changing the technical terms.

Places to read

  1. Manuscript 66v · Scan 160Impassibility among the just's four glorious gifts.
  2. Manuscript 67v · Scan 162Luminous bodily constitution and freedom from affection.
  3. Manuscript 69r · Scan 165Passability among the opposed qualities of the damned.
  4. Manuscript 69v · Scan 166Passibility joined with incorruptibility and penetrating powers.
  5. Manuscript 70v · Scan 168The explicit delight/torment parallel.
  6. Manuscript 71r · Scan 169Simultaneous reception of contrary afflictions.
  7. Manuscript 90v · Scan 212The second-operation heading introduces the passible body.
  8. Manuscript 91r · Scan 213Volatile incorruptible embodiment and the deliberate paradox.

Translation

Passibilité and passabilité are both passibility in English; the French keeps their alternating spellings. Impassibilité is impassibility. The words are not silently replaced with mortal/immortal, since the source repeatedly distinguishes susceptibility from endurance.

The edition also preserves the source's awkward denial that the preceding subject deserves great attention at scan 166. Its inconsistency of tone does not authorize removing the carefully repeated technical contrast. Nor is the Greek gloss of corruption on scan 167 normalized by conjecture.136

passibilité

Attested: H001-S166; H001-S168. Capacity for suffering, explicitly compatible with incorruptibility.

passabilité

Attested: H001-S165; H001-S166; H001-S167. The alternate source spelling rendered by the same English technical noun.

impassibilité

Attested: H001-S160; H001-S168; H001-S213. Freedom from suffering, distinguished from incorruptibility.

passible

Attested: H001-S212b. The body taken in the second-operation analogy.

impassible

Attested: H001-S195; H001-S213. The impassible subject placed in the paradox of suffering.

Source note

H001-S168 explicitly contrasts impassibility-plus-incorruptibility with passibility-plus-incorruptibility. The distinction is the source's, not an editorial repair.

H001-S166 preserves Cela n’est pas digne d’une grande attention. H001-S167's Greek is provisionally διαφτορα, immediately glossed corruption, with the written sequence retained.