Matter, Form, Potency and Act

I think it is an object of surprise to notice that matter is always formed. The form is intelligible, so certain rocks are where they are because of glaciers, and my car is where it is because I parked it. Many objects have man-made forms; cups, saucers, cookers, and motor cars. The matter has been shaped up according to engineering and contemporary ideas of elegance and perhaps economy. Historians deduce a lot about an age from artefacts which have survived; a flint, a coin or a stamp. Minerals, plants, and animals have natural forms, which speak of design as well as evolution. Each type of creature depends on a supporting environment, so perhaps evolution should be seen as one ecosystem following on another.

St Thomas said that the world around was matter and form, and more form than matter. How though should we think of matter? One could say matter is whatever one abstracts from when considering a question – one is hunting for the intelligible, for the form. On the other hand, wood is the matter you use in making a chair. Yet the wood itself has a form and willow differs from oak and oak from mahogany. With E = MC2 and energy being generated from radioactive matter, some people think of energy as being matter in its irreducible state, but in fact you find that energy always has a form, in heat or momentum, for example.

I suspect that it is out of naïve realism that we imagine we should be able to look at matter as if it were a lump of pure, unformed stuff. If one defines matter as transformability – which is an intelligible definition, then you have a universe in which some things which we call material can be transformed into other things, and some things, like persons, cannot.

The advantage of matter being defined as transformability is that one can see at once that the whole universe, including matter, is intelligible and so can proceed from the wisdom of God by a creative act; whereas if the universe has a non-intelligible component – matter – then it looks as if there is something which did not come about through God’s wisdom and creative decision.

I have quite a strong impression that it is this idea of matter as non-intelligible which lies at the root of much modern atheism. Intelligibility emerges from matter perhaps by random chance. Human consciousness is seen as an epiphenomenon of matter and for Marx that consciousness is caught up in the dialectical materialism of class war. Whereas Galileo had primary qualities which were intelligible, extension and mass but not colour, for Kant such primary qualities are thought up by the mind and what gives rise to the phenomena is not known. The unintelligibility of matter means that the intelligence of man, which is witnessed to by Galileo and Newton, tells us nothing about reality. I think one can see how existentialists reached the conclusion that existence precedes essence. We decide what to do in a universe which is free of moral norms. With such an attitude one can “understand” concentration camps and weapons of mass destruction. I suspect Shakespeare anticipated all this with his remark, “Nothing is but thinking makes it so”. With regard to all this, I find Descartes a little on the side of the angels, for his ‘principle of universal doubt’ did not extend to God, for he argues against indestructible atoms, for “if they had extension, God could divide them”.

Undoubtedly, Descartes has been used to dismiss the Church. Maybe his doubt was something like Occam’s razor: “Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate”. Certainly in Descartes’ day there were ladies who considered that a whole universe might fit into their earring. The First Vatican Council urged theologians to proceed “diligently, piously, and soberly” and maybe a “sober” approach to reality is what Descartes was urging. So it is not sober but fantastical to imagine that by chance unintelligible and unintelligent matter could produce an intelligible world order. It is true that a ‘sober’ approach to reality in Descartes’ day or our own, might pay not too much attention to this, or that theological argumentation or philosophical argumentation. One could spend one’s life getting to grips with Bultman or whomsoever.

The universe proceeding from Wisdom itself and being thoroughly intelligible manifests not just brilliant constructions but the mind of man, a created participation in what God is, wisdom and love, moving from potency – the tabula rasa – to act, in the process of which dramatic, egoistic, group and general bias, effects of the Fall, must be overcome, and recognised anew, and overcome again. “Forgive us our trespasses”, we need to say.

Because of the biases and their power, the good society is rarer than the good man. The one set on integrity finds himself typically swimming against the tide. The association and friendship of those moving to the self transcendence of truth and love is essential if a way forward is to be found for everyone.

One recalls Milton’s phrase: “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed”. The practical life of a business, a lawyer, a plumber and so forth, can be extremely demanding and rewarding, so that higher values get crowded out. “I have bought a farm and cannot come”. A strong established religion, as perhaps in Alsace in its heyday, with clergy and monks, Holy Days and Obligations, can perhaps remind everyone that even if they are building better barns, they have a soul to save. I suspect that today religion is on the fringe.

We are prone to blame secularisation, but actually if one considers Alsace, is not the problem more the decline of religion? The religious house needs to be put in order and grow strong so that everyone recognises the call to holiness and to charity. Not only is man called to be transformed by the love of God, but also to be transformed in his own operations so that he shows forth that love. Operative grace, God’s first gift, leads to co-operative grace where God helps man who has the initiative. There is then a realm of personal values where man responds to God and to himself and to the whole of creation, and so ceases to be simply preoccupied by his work. This is the area where St Peter discovered his weakness for we need God’s help to respond to values worthily even when we recognise them. In the achievement of values we recognise personally we often need to co-operate with others – for example, in getting our children educated, and so the area of personal values easily comes under the influence of group basis. St Peter wanted to be just part of the crowd.

One operates in the world as one knows it, but one lives within a horizon and from a viewpoint. The horizon can be broadened by judgements which are true. So there was a Battle of Hastings, 1066. The viewpoint can be raised by self-appropriation, so it is on the evidence, on the account, and on the generally held belief that I come to knowledge. Intellectual conversion which recognises self-transcendence in attaining knowledge takes one into the wide world of values and beliefs which are held, and so into the culture to which one belongs, from which one learns and to which one contributes. In this cultural world, in achieving a common yardstick for belief, one helps religion to become more generally credible. In this area one might hope to help others move from materialism and from idealism to the critical realism which holds the universe to be intelligible and knowable, which can recognise bunkum and false arguments. J K Chesterton operates in this area.

Culture validates and criticises a way of life with its families and firms, its lawyers and Parliaments, with its workaholics and drop-outs. The way of life knocks people into shape and hopefully allows a person to find a place, a niche, and here, while there is scope for egoism, it can be shamed out as perhaps we are seeing with Parliamentarians at present. Society is a give and take and most people learn to give as well as take.

Being shaped by society are the vital values of the ecology and human spontaneity. Here we find the possibility of psychic conversion but perhaps good social values; finding something to praise in everyone helps people to a more laudable spontaneity. When, at the age of five, Tony McHale our late Deacon, was put on a table to sing and clapped he opened up in a musical way for the rest of his life, even to inventing a tune for a psalm as he sung it at a funeral.

If all intelligibility emerges from matter by chance, then values must be restricted perhaps to health and income levels important as these are. We have found the highest value to be religious facing general bias. Individual values coming from religion or from conscience we found a prey to social bias since many individual concerns must be pursued with others. Cultural values, resting on personal but also generally held knowledge we find resting on (an implicit?) intellectual conversion and opposed by materialism and idealism. To follow the pattern one would identify individual bias as the problem, for an egoist will find it interferes with his life to admit wider values. Following the pattern, social values have to contend with dramatic bias, with the way people are shaped up to think or not to think. So the Cathedral in Constantinople was pulled down by the Reds and the Greens chariot racing fans in about 450AD.

We have a hierarchy of values, religious, personal, cultural, social and vital, and envisage trouble coming from below and healing from above. Fr Doran sees each level of value having to maintain equilibrium between limitation and transcendence. To give two examples, at the level of personal values, a person can be involved in too much. They exhaust the psyche and fall into depression. Or doing nothing, they get depressed. At the level of social values, there is a tension between practicality and inter-subjectivity. A people could get so fond of talking that they neglect work, or so fond of working that they grow dull. The bias from below distorts the balance, so chariot racing takes over from proper work.