vocative address to the soul the sonnet invites comparison with Psalm 146. Although Michael West has persuasively argued that this sonnet is indebted to the medieval genre of poetic dialogues between soul and body, the extent to which sonnet actually presents conventional Christian arguments about the relationship between body and soul is a matter of considerable critical debate. John Crowe Ransom counters an older tradition of reading the sonnet in straightforward Christian terms by making the general observation that the "divine terms which the soul buys are not particularly Christian: there are few words in the poem that would directly indicate a conventional religious dogma." B.C. Southam makes an effort to build on Ransom's passing remark in a more developed argument about the sonnet which seeks to show that Shakespeare's speaker is inspired more by a "humanist" philosophy that ironically undermines a rigidly Christian "rigorous asceticism which glorifies the life of the body at the expense of the vitality and richness of sensuous experience." Southam's argument for an ironically humanist poem is countered, in turn, by Charles A. Huttar, who attempts to bring the poem back into alignment with a certain Christian worldview: for example, Huttar claims that "these rebel powers" that "array" the soul in line 2 refer not to "the physical being" or body but rather to the lower powers of the soul itself, the passions or affections. Understood in this way, the sentiment of the poem appears in accord with a certain Christian tradition that rejects "extreme asceticism". However, in a long discussion in his edition of the sonnets, Stephen Booth critiques both Southam and Huttar as engaging in "oversimplification" Booth tries to split the difference between these critical perspectives: "It is as unreasonable and unprofitable to argue that Sonnet 146 does not espouse an orthodox Christian position on the relative value of mortal and immortal considerations as it is to deny that the poem generates the ideational static that Ransom and Southam point out." In Booth's view, conventional Christian ideas and images "coexist" with seemingly contradictory un-Christian ideas and images: "the incompatible elements, points of view, and responses . . . do not undergo synthesis". For Booth, Sonnet 146 contains multiple, sometimes conflicting, elements that cannot and should not be reduced to a singular, univocal argument about body and soul. Missing text The missing text at the beginning of line two is generally attributed to be