Neither Bodily Nor Bodiless

But look at the contradiction he brings forward next — or perhaps it is only another “reason” that has occurred to him — when he declares that Matter is partly bodily and partly bodiless. Must Matter, then, be reckoned to hold both conditions in order that it may hold neither? For it will be bodily and bodiless at once, in defiance of that negative formula of his — a formula plainly too lofty to give any reason for its own opinion, just as that “other reason” of his was. [a]

By the bodily part of Matter he means the part out of which bodies are made; by the bodiless part he means its unordered motion. He says: “If Matter were simply a body, there would be nothing bodiless in it — that is, no motion. If, on the other hand, it were wholly bodiless, no body could be formed out of it.” What an exceptionally straight piece of reasoning we have here! Only, Hermogenes, if you draw your sketches as straight as you reason, no painter alive is clumsier than you.

For who is going to let you count motion as half of Matter, when motion is not a substantial thing at all? It is not bodily. It is an accident — if it is even that — of a substance and a body. It is the sort of thing a driving is, or a shove, or a stumble, or a fall. Even when something moves of its own accord, its motion is simply its being driven; and it is certainly no part of the thing’s substance in the sense you mean, when you make motion the bodiless half of Matter.

Everything, after all, has motion — either from itself, as animals do, or from something else, as lifeless things do. But we would not say that a man or a stone was both bodily and bodiless because it had both a body and motion. We would say rather that all things have one single kind of bodiliness, which is the actual thing that substance is. If bodiless incidents attach to them — acts, or things they undergo, or functions, or desires — we do not count those as parts of the things themselves. How then does he manage to hand over a whole share of Matter to motion, which does not belong to substance at all, but to a certain condition of substance? What else is there to say? Suppose it had taken your fancy to represent Matter as motionless. Would its motionlessness then look to you like half of its form? Certainly not. And no more can its motion. But I shall have room to speak of motion later on.

I see that you are coming back again to that “reason” of yours, which has never yet been in the habit of telling you anything for certain. Just as you introduce Matter to us as neither bodily nor bodiless, so you allege that it is neither good nor evil; and, arguing further in the same strain, you say: “If it were good, then, since it had always been so, it would not need to be arranged by God. If it were evil by nature, it would not have admitted of a change for the better, nor would God ever have attempted to arrange such a nature, for his labor would have been wasted.” Those are your words. It would have been well if you had remembered them in other passages too, and so avoided contradicting them. [f]

Since we have already dealt to some extent with this ambiguity of good and evil in Matter, I will now answer only the proposition and the argument in front of us. I will not stop to repeat my opinion that you were bound to say for certain that Matter was either good or bad or in some third condition. But I must point out that here you have not even kept to the statement you chose to make before. In fact you take back what you declared — that Matter is neither good nor evil. You imply that it is evil when you say, “If it were good, it would not need to be set in order by God”; and again, when you add, “If it were evil by nature, it would not admit of any change for the better,” you hint that it is good. So you give it a close kinship with good and with evil, after declaring it neither good nor evil.

Now, to refute the argument by which you thought you were going to clinch your case, I say this. If Matter had always been good, why should it not still have wanted a change for the better? Does what is good never desire, never wish, never feel able to advance, and to change its good for something better? And in the same way, if Matter had been evil by nature, why could it not have been changed by God, as the more powerful being — by one who is able to turn the nature of stones into children of Abraham? By arguing so you do not merely compare the Lord with Matter; you actually put him underneath it, since you claim that the nature of Matter could not possibly be brought under his control and trained to something better. And although here you are unwilling to allow that Matter is evil by nature, in another passage you will deny ever having admitted it.

My remarks about where Matter is, and about its measure, have one and the same object: to meet and refute your perverse positions. You put Matter below God, and so, of course, you assign it a place below God. Therefore Matter is in a place. Now if it is in a place, it is within a locality; if it is within a locality, it is bounded by the place it is in; and if it is bounded, it has an outline — and you, being a painter by trade, know that an outline is the boundary of every object that can have one. Matter, therefore, cannot be infinite. Being in space, it is bounded by space; and being determined by space, it can be given an outline. [h]

You, however, make it infinite when you say: “It is infinite for this reason, that it always exists.” And if any of your disciples should choose to meet us by saying that you mean Matter is infinite in time and not in bodily bulk, what follows will still show that bodily infinity is what you attribute to Matter — that in bulk it is immense and unbounded. For you say: “And that is why it is not fabricated as a whole, but in its parts.” So it is infinite in bulk, not in time. And you trip over yourself when you make Matter infinite in bulk and at the same time assign it a place, shutting it up within space and a local outline.

All the same, I cannot tell why God should not have formed the whole of it, unless it was that he was either powerless or grudging. So I want to know about the half that was not formed, so that I may understand what sort of thing the whole was. It was only right that God should have made it known, as a specimen of the old state of things, to set off the glory of his own work.

Well then, since it seems to you the more correct thing, let Matter be bounded by changes and displacements; and let it be capable of being grasped as well, since, as you say, it is used as material by God, on the ground that it is convertible, changeable and separable. For its changes, you say, show it to be separable. [k]

And here you have swerved from your own lines — the lines you drew about the person of God, when you laid down the rule that God did not make the world out of himself, because it was not possible for him to be divided into parts, seeing that he is eternal and abides forever, and is therefore unchangeable and indivisible. But since Matter too is reckoned by that same eternity, having neither beginning nor end, it will be incapable of division and of change for the very reason that God is. Since it shares the possession of eternity with him, it must necessarily share with him the powers, the laws and the conditions of eternity as well.

In the same way, when you say, “All things everywhere possess portions of it, so that the whole may be known from its parts,” you mean, of course, the parts that were produced out of Matter and are now visible to us. How then is this possession of Matter by all things throughout the universe brought about — from the very beginning, that is — when the things now visible to us are in a different condition from the one they were in at the beginning?

You say that Matter was reformed for the better — from a worse condition, of course; and in that way you would make the better a copy of the worse. Everything was in confusion, and now it has been reduced to order. Would you also say that disorder is produced out of order? No one thing is the exact mirror of another; that is to say, it is not its equal. Nobody ever found himself in a barber’s mirror looking like a mule instead of a man — unless it is the man who supposes that unformed and shapeless Matter answers to Matter as it now stands, arranged and made beautiful in the fabric of the world. [n]

What is there in the world now that has no form? What was there once in Matter that had been given form, that the world should be the mirror of Matter? The Greeks call the world by a word that means ornament; how then can it present the image of unadorned Matter in such a way that you can say the whole is known from its parts? The whole would certainly take in the portion that has not yet been given form — and you have already declared that not all of Matter was used as material in the creation. It follows that this rough, confused, unarranged portion cannot be recognized in the polished, distinct, well-ordered parts of creation, which can hardly be called parts of Matter at all, since they have withdrawn from its form, being separated from it in the transformation they have undergone.

I come back to the point of motion, so that I may show how you slip at every step. Motion in Matter, you say, was disordered, confused and turbulent, and that is why you apply to it the comparison of a pot of water boiling over. How is it, then, that in another passage you affirm a quite different sort of motion? For when you want to represent Matter as neither good nor evil, you say: “Matter, which is the stuff lying underneath creation, having as it does a motion of even impulse, tends in no great degree either to good or to evil.” [q]

Now if it had that even impulse, it could not be turbulent, nor like the boiling water in the cauldron. It would be even and regular instead, swinging of its own accord between good and evil, but not leaning or tending to either side. It would hang, as the phrase goes, in a just and exact balance. That is not unrest; that is not turbulence or aimless wandering. It is rather the regularity, the evenness and the exactness of a motion that leans to neither side. If it swung this way and that, and leaned rather to one particular side, then it would plainly deserve the reproach of unevenness, inequality and turbulence.

Besides, even though the motion of Matter did not lean either to good or to evil, it would still be swinging between good and evil; so from this too it is plain that Matter is held within limits, because its motion, leaning to neither good nor evil since it had no natural bent either way, swung from either side between the two, and was therefore held within the limits of the two.

But in fact you put good and evil in a place, when you assert that motion in Matter leaned to neither of them. For Matter, being in a place, in leaning neither this way nor that, was not leaning to the places where good and evil were. And when you assign a place to good and evil, you make them bodily by making them local, since things that take up local space must first have bodily substance. Bodiless things, in fact, could have no locality of their own except in a body, when they come to a body. But when Matter did not lean toward good and evil, it was as bodily or local things that it did not lean toward them. You are wrong, therefore, to insist that good and evil are substances. You make substances of the things you assign places to; and you assign them places when you keep motion in Matter poised at an equal distance from both sides.

You have thrown out all your views loosely and at random, so that it should not be obvious, by putting them too close together, how contrary they are to one another. I mean to gather them up and set them side by side. You allege that motion in Matter is unordered; then you go on to say that Matter aims at a shapeless condition; and then, in another passage, that it desires to be set in order by God. Does what aims at being without form want to be given shape? Or does what wants to be given shape aim at being without form? [t]

You are unwilling that God should seem to be equal to Matter; and then you turn around and say that Matter has a condition in common with God. “For it is impossible, if it has nothing in common with God, that it can be set in order by him.” But if it had anything in common with God, it did not need to be set in order — being, of course, a part of the Deity through that shared condition. Or else even God was capable of being set in order by Matter, by having something in common with it. And here you put God under necessity, since there was something in Matter on account of which he gave it form.

You make it a common attribute of both of them, moreover, that they set themselves in motion by themselves, and that they are always in motion. What less do you assign to Matter than to God? All through, there turns out to be a partnership in divinity in this freedom and perpetuity of motion.

Only, in God the motion is ordered, and in Matter unordered. In both, however, the mark of Deity is equally present, since both alike have free and eternal motion. And at the same time you assign more to Matter, since it had the privilege of moving itself in a way not allowed to God.

On the subject of motion I would make one further remark. Following the simile of the boiling cauldron, you say that motion in Matter, before it was regulated, was thickened, restless, and past all grasping because of the excess of its struggling. Then you go on to say: “But it waited for the arranging of God, and kept its irregular motion past grasping, owing to the slowness of that irregular motion.” A moment ago you ascribed struggling to that motion; here, slowness. [v]

Now observe how many slips you make about the nature of Matter. In an earlier passage you said, “If Matter were evil by nature, it would not have admitted of a change for the better; nor would God ever have attempted to arrange it, for his labor would have been wasted.” You therefore concluded your two opinions: that Matter was not evil by nature, and that its nature could not be changed by God. Then, forgetting them, you afterwards drew this inference: “But when it received adjustment from God and was set in order, it gave up its nature.”

Now inasmuch as it was transformed to good, it was of course transformed from evil; and if by God’s setting it in order it gave up the nature of evil, then that nature came to an end. Its nature was evil before the adjustment; but after the transformation it could give that nature up.

It remains for me to show how you make God work. You are plainly enough at odds with the philosophers, and you are not in agreement with the prophets either. The Stoics maintain that God pervaded Matter as honey pervades a honeycomb. You, however, affirm that God makes the world not by pervading Matter, but simply by appearing to it and approaching it — the way beauty acts on a thing by simply appearing, and a lodestone by coming near. [x]

Now what likeness is there between God forming the world and beauty wounding a soul, or a magnet drawing iron? Even if God appeared to Matter, he did not wound it as beauty wounds the soul; and if he approached it, he did not stick fast to it as the magnet does to the iron.

Suppose, though, that your examples are apt. Then, of course, it was by appearing and approaching to Matter that God made the world, and he made it at the moment when he appeared and when he approached. Therefore, since he had not made it before then, he had neither appeared nor approached. Now who could believe that God had not appeared to Matter — Matter which, given its eternity, was of the very same nature as himself? Or that he had been at a distance from it — he whom we believe to exist everywhere and to be visible everywhere, whose praises all things sing, even lifeless things and bodiless things, as Daniel says? How immense the place must be, where God kept himself so far away from Matter that he had neither appeared to it nor approached it before the creation of the world! I suppose he journeyed to it from a long way off, as soon as he wished to appear and to approach.