The notions of form and matter are treated in very different contexts before and after the Latin translations of the Aristotelian physical and metaphysical texts. Up to the second half of the twelfth century, the Platonic tradition (directly, through the Timaeus, and indirectly) and Augustine of Hippo presented matter as a formless receptacle that precedes the reception of forms. The problem lies in forms coming to be in matter. A parallel tradition begun by Boethius engages in an ontologizing reading of Aristotle’s Categories that leaves matter in the margins of formal ontology. Starting from the thirteenth century, the new context of Aristotelian epistemology reoriented the debate considering the ontology of compound things. Form and matter are then conceived as metaphysical principles that account for change (Thomas Aquinas), or as the constituent parts of things (the Franciscan tradition).
In fourteenth-century England, several theories arose that, while very different among themselves, presented matter and form as absolute things. In Germany, a new metaphysics of forms arises that excludes matter from philosophical discussion.
In medieval ontology, the notions of form and matter most often serve to describe the condition of individual things. According to some authors, only things belonging to the sensible world and subject to change are composed of matter and form. For others, such a composition also extends to beings beyond the sphere of fire (from the moon outwards): although they are not subject to generation and corruption, they are material insofar as they are multiplied and individuated within the same species. Form (morphe/forma) is the principle of determination that makes a thing what it is in actuality. Matter (hyle/ materia) is the receptive principle or the potential “substrate,” which signifies of what a thing is made or in which it is. The notion of matter allows one to account for change, and for the differentiation and multiplication of individual forms.
Nevertheless, this conceptual pair has very different meanings according to era and author. The Middle Ages can be divided into two philosophical periods: before and after the Latin translations of the Aristotelian physical and metaphysical texts.
1. The first period runs from the end of Antiquity and Augustine of Hippo (354-430) to the second half of the twelfth century. During these eight centuries, the Latin Middle Ages did not have access to Aristotelian physical and metaphysical works. The (direct and indirect) Platonic tradition set the terms of discourse on physics. The first part of Plato’s Timaeus (to 53c) is transmitted in the Latin translation made by Calcidius (c. 321). There, Plato distinguishes three primordial genera (48d-52c): (a) immutable and intelligible forms, which are the eternal models of mutable things; (b) sensible and mutable forms, which are the copies of these forms in matter; (c) the matter, in which these copies come to be. Plato describes matter as the universal receptacle or mother. It constitutes the form’s alterity: it is outside all forms so that it may be that in which the forms come to be. As opposed to the form, which is in itself intelligible, matter is not intelligibile - one only perceives it in ‘‘dream.’’ Plotinus (c. 205-270) would add that matter is nonbeing and evil, insofar as it is the opposite of the one (Enneads II, 4).
Following this Platonic line, Augustine of Hippo gives an interpretation of matter that would have much success during the Middle Ages. Commenting on the beginning of Genesis, he compares matter to the shadowy abyss from which God separates things and organizes the world. In the Confessions (Confessiones XII, 6) and in De Genesi ad litteram (I), he describes matter as an absence of form (informitas) and an almost-nothing (prope nihil), but which is something. Created ex nihilo, this formless material is gradually formed thanks to dispositions that are present in it from its creation: seminal reasons (semina, rationes seminales), which Augustine borrows from Stoic physics (De Genesi ad litteram III.12; IV.33; V.7). Such a reading of Genesis allows Augustine to affirm the ontological priority of nothing to the world, and of matter to forms. Terrestrial things, forms engaged in matter, are essentially transitory, mutable, and corruptible.
Medieval commentaries on the Timaeus only appear by the middle of the twelfth century. The most Platonic moment of the Latin Middle Ages occurs at the time of the so-called ‘‘School of Chartres.’’ William of Conches and Bernard of Chartres composed glosses on the Timaeus. With respect to the issue of form and matter, the most important work from this time is perhaps Bernard Silvestre’s Cosmography, a poem mixed with prose commentaries, which, modeled on the beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, tells the origin of the world. As with Augustine, matter (Yle) precedes the formation of the world. Bernard names this shadowy material Silva (forest). Matter is wild, but it is also halfway between good and evil. The intellect (Nous) must organize it, that is, give it form. In this Platonic tradition, the pair matter/form also constitutes the projection into nature of the Fall and the turning away from the Good.
Alongside Augustine, the other great philosophical authority of the High Middle Ages was Boethius (c. 480-524/525), the Latin translator and commentator of Aristotle’s logical treatises. Among other texts, Aristotle’s Categories and Boethius’ Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge played the role of ontological treatises during this period. In this context, the question of substance is not posed in terms of matter and form, but in terms of a Platonized Aristotelian logic: how a genus descends into its species and how the species is individuated. Boethius explains the individuality of substances without recourse to matter, relying on a unique bundle of accidents in each thing. The hylemorphic composition of things does not appear among the problems addressed in the Boethian tradition.
In the ninth century, John Scotus Eriugena retranslated the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius the Are-opagite and adopted Proclus’ system of formal emanation. The ontological reading of the Porphyrian tree, begun by
Boethius, receives a strong Proclian flavor: the genus is the most formal entity, that is, both the most universal and the most essential, and it descends into its species and their individuals by emanation (see, in particular, the Annotationes in Marcianum). Such a formal ontology leaves little room for matter.
2. The second period is that of the reception of the Aristotelian physical and metaphysical corpus. Starting in the second half of the twelfth century, almost the entirety of Aristotle’s texts, as well as numerous Arabic and Byzantine commentaries and treatises, are translated into Latin from Greek and Arabic. In the Physics (II, 1-3) and the Metaphysics (VII, 3, 7-8, 10-11), Aristotle considers matter and form as intrinsic and constituent principles ofmutable things or “composites.” In physics, matter explains the continuity of change: in transformation, what was wood becomes ash. In the material thing, matter expresses potentiality, the possibilities of becoming. It is also the principle that allows one to say in what a thing is and of what it is constituted. The Aristotelian vision is the opposite of Augustine’s: according to Aristotle, act and form are always prior to potency and matter, otherwise it would be necessary to posit an absurd nonbeing - chaos - that existed before being (Metaphysics XII, 7, 1072a7-19).
During this Aristotelian period, three works from the Arabic-speaking world, translated into Latin, played a major role: the “Metaphysics’’ of the Shifa‘ by Avicenna (Ibn Sina), the Fountain of Life (Fons vitae) of Avicebron (Ibn Gabirol), and the commentaries on Aristotle’s works by Averroes (Ibn Rushd).
Avicenna (980-1037) bequeathed to the Latin world a Neoplatonic cosmology and a metaphysics of forms. The cosmos is ordered by a procession of ten intelligences, purely formal substances that cause the world by their essential activity (Metaphysics IX, 4). Material things come about by means of the cosmos’ emanationist dynamics: they are the exterior traces of the activity of intelligences that are always in act. All the bodies of the cosmos, terrestrial and celestial, are composed of a receptive matter and a form or soul infused in it by an intelligence. With respect to Terrestrial matter, it constitutes the stuff that receives the forms emanating from the last of the ten intelligences, the ‘‘agent intelligence,” understood as ‘‘giver of forms’’ (dator formarum).
Written in the middle of the eleventh century, the Fountain of Life of Ibn Gabirol provided the model for ‘‘universal hylemorphism.’’ Ibn Gabirol also adopted a Neoplatonic cosmology, but he gave the matter/form pair a universal, ontological scope: matter is the original material of the whole cosmos. All created substances are composed of matter and form, from the most perfect and universal celestial intelligences down to natural and corporeal beings, characterized by their particularity. In this system, particularity, and not materiality, is the indicator of a degraded state, as in the ontological readings of Porphyry’s tree. On the joint authority of Ibn Gabirol and Augustine, the majority of Latin scholastics associated with the angelic intelligences and with the human intellect a proper matter, independent of any bond to a body.
In his commentaries on the Physics, the Metaphysics, and On the Heavens, Averroes (1126-1198) returns matter and form to their Aristotelian epistemic context: these principles are only discovered in the course of an investigation of physical changes. Against Avicenna, Averroes specifies that only natural things of the sublunary world are composed of matter and form. The celestial bodies are incorruptible; therefore they are not composed of matter (In De caelo I, c. 20). Matter is the potential principle that explains sublunary change: generation, corruption, and accidental changes. According to Averroes, matter is endowed with “indeterminate dimensions” (three-dimensionality), which assure the possibility of being immediately divided into as many individual substances as there are forms in act to determine it.
Aristotle’s philosophical texts were read and commented at the University of Paris and in England from the beginning of the thirteenth century. In the middle of the century, the lectures of Albert the Great provide a first glimpse of the points of scholastic debate. Albert rejects Ibn Gabirol’s universal hylemorphism and adopts Averroes’ approach: only natural (sublunary) beings are composed of matter and form (Summa theologiae II, tr. 1, q. 3-4). Commenting on the Metaphysics (Metaph. II, tr. 3, c. 10), he describes matter and form as correlative principles, intrinsic to the thing. Matter as such is the desire for form. It is therefore necessary that the form be present in it in an inchoative manner, as in an embryonic state. Albert calls this inclination and this desire on the part of matter for a form inchoatio formae (Metaph. I, tr. 5, c. 8; XI, tr. 1, c. 8). He places Aristotelian nature in a Neoplatonic cosmological frame: these embryos of forms, which evoke Augustine’s seminal reasons, are infused in prime matter by the celestial intelligences. The action of natural agents still must realize in act the forms that in an inchoate state preexisted in matter.
From approximately 1260, the interests of university theology carried over into ontology and physics. Three particularly important questions arose concerning matter and form: (a) Can God create some matter without form?
(b) Do a plurality of substantial forms cohabit the same substance, in particular, that of a human? (c) Is there matter in spiritual and separate substances (i. e., in angels, in the pure intelligences of Peripatetic cosmology, or in human intellects considered separately from the body)?
Thomas Aquinas (1224/1225-1274) decides the three questions in a distinctly Aristotelian fashion:
A. God cannot make matter exist without form, since prime matter is pure potentiality. The entire being in act of a substance proceeds from its form, to which the matter is essentially relative. According to this view, matter is deprived of any ontological weight. Considered in itself, matter is a metaphysical principle diametrically opposed to form. It accounts for the potentialities of natural substances. At the level of physical reality, however, it does not enjoy any proper substantiality or actuality. On this basis, Thomas criticizes the theory of seminal reasons (Sentences II, dist. 12, q. 1; De potentia, q. 4; Quodlibet III, q. 1; Sententia libri Metaphysicae VII; De principiis naturae, c. 4; In libros Physicorum II).
B. Consequently, Thomas rejects the coexistence of a plurality of substantial forms in one same individual. If matter is pure potency, then the actuality of the first form provides complete being for the substance. In the case of man, the rational soul realizes the whole man in substance. It is impossible to suppose a partition of prime matter that would be prior to the reception of the substantial form, or that remains under a plurality of substantial forms, because such a division can only come about by an act of information, to which matter, pure potency, is repugnant by definition. In the substantial composite, however, matter remains the principle that allows the explanation of accidental change (man can grow, acquire knowledge, etc.) and then corruption (death) (Quaestio de anima; Summa theologiae I, q. 75-76).
C. Thomas limits the composition of matter and form to the world of generation and corruption. He refuses to explain individuation and the mutability ofangels and intelligences by means of a certain type of matter, a spiritual matter. According to Thomas, angels are pure forms, although imperfect ones; they are not therefore individuated under an angelic species, but there are as many angelic species as angels (De spiritualibus creaturis; De ente et essentia).
These doctrines constitute the points ofcontention during the debates that took place in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. Some authors (such as Giles of Rome, Godfrey of Fontaines, Richard Knapwell, and Giles of
Lessines) defended Thomas’ theses, with adaptations and modifications. But the majority of doctors and almost all Franciscans attacked them. In 1277, Giles of Rome is condemned for having maintained Thomas’ solution to the first problem (a). Thomas’ solutions to the other two questions (b and c) were condemned in 1277 at Oxford, and in 1286 at London.
A. The majority of the Franciscans grant that matter has some ontological weight proper to it and a minimal actuality. John Pecham affirms very clearly that God could make matter exist without form (Quodlibet IV, q. 1). The secular master Henry of Ghent holds the same thesis, invoking divine omnipotence. If matter is essentially something, it is also possible that God could bring it about in isolation, in an order different than the one actually realized (QuodlibetI, q. 10; X, q. 8). To grant matter its own substantiality, and to justify its minimal actuality, Bonaventure reworked the theory of seminal reasons (Sentences II, dist. 7, pars 2, art. 2, q. 1; II, dist. 15, art. 1, q. 1). Only some of the Franciscans would follow him down this path (e. g., Roger Marston, Quodlibet II, q. 22).
B. The plurality of substantial forms is a doctrine shared by almost all Franciscans (with the notable exception of Peter John Olivi’s doctrine: Sentences II, q. 50-51). The Franciscan approach is more empiric and less metaphysical than that of Thomas. Man is a microcosm that contains in act the divisions observed in the larger world. His body, his nutritive soul, his sensitive soul, his intellectual soul, and each of the intermediate degrees are endowed with a proper substantiality. The matter/form pair becomes the means of graduating the scale of being and the parts of a being, from the less perfect (the more material) to the more perfect (the more formal). The same entity can be conceived as matter or form, according to the perspective one takes; for example, the sensitive soul is the matter of the intellective soul, but the form of the nutritive soul (See, e. g., Matthew of Aquasparta, Quaestiones de anima XIII; Richard of Middleton, De gradu formarum; John Pecham, Quodlibet IV, q. 11; and also Roger Bacon, Libri communium naturalium I, pars 2, dist. 1-2, who superimposes the distinction between matter and form on that between genus and species).
C. Consequently, Ibn Gabirol’s universal hylemorphism is largely adopted by Franciscan theologians, following Bonaventure (Sentences II, dist. 3, pars 1, art. 1). Matter is not confined to the physical world, nor is it conceived of as a principle opposed to any actuality.
On the contrary, it is endowed with a minimal actuality and coexists with form in every created substance, including the angels. It accounts for their condition as creatures: limitation, mutability, potentiality, individuality, and receptivity.
In the fourteenth century, two new traditions appear, one English, the other German.
In England, John Duns Scotus (c. 1265-1308) places the problem of matter and form in a global metaphysical context. In this metaphysics, everything that is possible is also real, intelligible, and endowed with a certain formal characteristic, prior to any concrete and created existence. If matter is not nothing - if it is legitimate to speak of matter - it is therefore something in itself possible. Scotus grants to the matter a certain reality and a formal entity at metaphysical level, a more foundational level than that of its physical existence. In a concrete substance, matter and form remain two distinct absolutes, joined by a relation of connection. Composition becomes therefore the distinguishing mark of the world and of created substances (Lectura II, dist. 12, q. unica).
Among Scotus’ numerous critics, William of Ockham (1285-1347) rejects the Scotist metaphysics of the real-possible, and proposes a physics of existence and an ontology of the singular. If discourse is extramentally relevant, its terms must supposit for singulars. This logico-linguistic critique likewise leads to a rejection of Thomas’ solution, where matter is a metaphysical principle. According to Ockham, matter and form are two absolute singulars and are in act in each compound substance. Prime matter is immediately divided into as many substances as actually exist in the world. With an epistemology radically opposed to that of Scotus, Ockham also makes matter absolute; thus he insists on substance being compound (Summula philosophiae naturalis I, c. 9-11; Expositio in librum Physicorum I, c. 16-18; III, c. 14).
The German tradition, with such representatives as Dietrich of Freiberg (c. 1250-1320) and Berthold of Moosburg (d. after 1361), develops a metaphysics of forms that excludes matter, relegating it to the world of the contingent and the corruptible. In his treatise De quiditatibus entium, Dietrich gives a new reading of Aristotelian ontology. Scientific discourse describes only the necessary and per se relations of which Aristotle speaks in the Posterior Analytics I, 4. Only forms and the formal properties of things can be the object of such discourse. Matter is not intelligible, because it is contingent and potential; it is able not to be and to be otherwise than how it is. If one considers the compound substance, matter is posterior to the form and does not enter into the quiddity or the definition of the thing. It no longer has a place in the necessary discourse of metaphysics. In commenting on Proclus, Berthold of Moosburg arrives at the same sort of conclusions by a different path.
See also: > Aristotelianism in the Greek, Latin, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew Traditions > Augustine > Boethius > Divine Power > Essence and Existence > Ibn Sina, Abu 'All (Avicenna) > John Duns Scotus > John Scottus Eriugena > Metaphysics > Natural Philosophy > Platonism > Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite > Thomas Aquinas > William of Ockham
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