 This last point explains some interesting features of Auriol’s attitude towards human knowledge. In particular, despite the fact that Auriol maintains that God could give a person in this life an abstractive cognition of the divine essence, and that this abstractive cognition would be able to serve as the basis for demonstrative knowledge of all articles of the Christian faith (Scriptum, Prologue, q. 2, ed. Buytaert, vol. 1, pp. 211–14; trans. Pasnau 2002, p. 213, n. 130 and p. 214, n. 133), nevertheless Auriol often exhibits a noticeable pessimism when it comes to human cognitive abilities. Thus, Auriol argues at length that in this life we are unable to decide such issues as whether the universe is eternal or created in time. (We know, of course, through Scripture that the world is not eternal, but we could never decisively prove this by means of unaided human reason.) Auriol argues that this is the case because we do not have direct intellectual cognition of, e.g., temporal instants; such cognition would allow us to resolve this problem. (See esp. Nielsen 1996, esp. pp. 223–26, 232–35, 239–41; see also Nielsen 1999.) Here we see that Auriol’s rejection of intuitive intellectual cognition in this life lies at the heart of a somewhat pessimistic view of the reach of human reason: we do not have direct intuitive knowledge of the world (much less of God), only indirect abstractive knowledge, and this places fairly strict limitations on just what our intellect can achieve unaided. The disembodied soul of the blessed, having direct intuitive intellectual cognition, will fare much better.