Matter, Beatitude and Liberty

Abstract

MATTER, BEATITUDE AND LIBERTY By ANTON c. PEGIS I OF all the frontier issues on the boundaries between Greek and Christian thought, there is one problem which has had an importance and an influence second to none. It is a problem that is to be found somewhere near the very center of the actual development of Greek philosophy, conditioning its vision and producing its outstanding doctrines and problems for over a thousand years of philosophical speculation. I refer to the problem of matter, to its origin and reality, and to its contribution to the intelligible ordering of the world. As everyone knows, in explaining the origin and the order of the world, Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus make matter to enter as an extraneous cause into the intelligible structure of reality. All three of these thinkers are united in being immaterialists in their explanations of the origin of the world; but their immaterialism is based on the tacit assumption that the world of sensible beings is entirely intelligible in the essences which it contains but not entirely intelligible in the beings in which these essences reside.. The question, be it observed, is not merely one of distinguishing between an intelligible essence and a concrete sensible singular. Such a distinction is the great achievement of Plato and Aristotle, as St. Thomas Aquinas regularly points out.1 The present question is much more serious than this recognition that there are substances in the sensible world and that in these substances it is possible to distinguish intelligible natures from the individuating conditions under which these natures are found within the realm of sensible things. The most radical issue, however, which the 1 De Potentia, ill, 5; Summa Theologica, I, 44, 2; De Substantiis Separatis, VII; De Spiritualibus Creaturis, X, ad 8. 265 ~66 ANTON C. PEGIS immaterialism of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus raises is what may be called the dilemma of composite essences. I do not wish to raise this problem in all its generality, since I hope to return to it in another discussion. I merely wish to point to the issue as a background within which to consider the Ethics of Aristotle. The issue can be seen more sharply, for present purposes, if it is put in Christian terms, for then it may be seen as a problem in the relations between the divine ideas and creatures. To say that divine ideas are creative ideas is to say that they are primarily ideas of individuals, including material individuals.2 Because the divine ideas are creative ideas, they are the causes of composite beings in their very compositeness . The world is intelligible even in its imperfections because matter itself is a creature and enters from within, and not extraneously, the ordering of the world by God. To say, therefore , that God creates the total reality of composite substances is not only to reverse the Greek decision on the relations between being and essence, it is also to free composite substances, man himself included, from that tragic and closed immobilism which was the price that the Greeks paid for world order. For if the Platonic Forms, the Aristotelian Species and the Plotinian Thought-Essences are not-and they are not-creative divine ideas, then not only is the order of the world a compromise with the irrational forces of matter, but the very destiny of man is threatened with the tragedy of this compromise. I should like to illustrate this fact by proposing an interpretation of the doctrine of the end of man in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics which may seem to many venturesome in the extreme. The interpretation is not at all new; but that is another story. I propose it in the conviction that, if we made an effort to see the Metaphysics, the Physics, the Ethics and the De Anima as works which were written, however disjointedly, by one and the same Aristotle,. then we could not possibly undertake to ruin the Aristotelian Physics when we are concerned either with the theology of the Metaphysics or with the "Cf. St. Thomas, De Veritate, ill, 5; ill, 8 R and ad 2; VIII, 11; Sum100 Theo-logica , I, 15, 8, ad. 8...