The very stones will cry out
On the dignity of matter
In the encyclical Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II calls on philosophy to recover its “sapiential dimension.” Faith must seek out a metaphysics “able to propose anew the problem of being – and this in harmony with the demands and insights of the entire philosophical tradition, including philosophy of more recent times, without lapsing into sterile repetition of antiquated formulas” – in effect, a wholesale renovation of the discipline, in keeping with the wisdom of antiquity, inherently expansible as regards the contributions of modern and contemporary philosophy… that is to say, anything but a dead letter, a museum artifact encased in complacent self-assuredness.
The pope does not so much as sketch the contours of such a metaphysics – nor could he; following on Gaudium et Spes, he is forcefully insistent that the human sciences remain autonomous. He does, however, provide a valuable direction: “Set within the Christian metaphysical tradition, the philosophy of being is a dynamic philosophy which views reality in its ontological, causal and communicative structures.” In his specifying this category of knowing as dynamic, its inner orientation to self-transcendence and to progress is verified and empowered. The shape that this “new metaphysics” may eventually take is an open question, particularly as I see precious few – or rather, essentially no one – venturing so much as a first stab.
So why not then hazard a jaunt where angels fear to tread? I'd like to (modestly, tentatively) offer a new and radical ennobling of matter, as a point of departure towards metaphysics writ now. It should perhaps tip us off that there is more to the story here that our current Holy Father includes this quote fairly early in Laudato si', “It is our humble conviction that the divine and the human meet in the slightest detail in the seamless garment of God’s creation, in the last speck of dust of our planet.” The same text summons Christians to see the world as a “sacrament of communion.”
Suffice it to say, matter is not the inert “stuff” of particulate theories. Yet almost limitless opportunities for a deepening understanding can be found in the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical system, to say nothing of theology.
Religion is ever liable to the generating of dualisms (matter/spirit and body/soul, in this case). “Over-spiritualizing” is a danger, now more than ever as materialist physicalism comes everywhere to the fore. But I think there is a particular pitfall for philosophers of the tradition, as deeply thought-out and carefully crafted formulae become time-worn and stagnant over centuries of recitation. Prime matter “exists” absolutely nowhere but at the veritable Kármán line of abstraction. It is not imaginable. It is not even creatable; prime matter is, properly speaking, only con-creatable. St. Thomas goes so far as to say, in QQ. Disp., III, Q. iv., a. 2 ad 4: “[M]atter is its passivity as God is His activity.” And this, I suggest, is its glory.
Matter is unalloyed determinability, “a potentiality cognized apart from all species and form, and even from privation; yet susceptive of forms and privations” (De spiritual. creat., Q. i, a. 1). Matter holds therefore, at the very heart of its being, a dynamic of pure receptivity to form, and therefore to spirituality, to the other, to the Divine Will. It is, of its very nature, existentially incapable of offering resistance. And so we find moments of soaring poetry, as again in Laudato si': “The Lord, in the culmination of the mystery of the Incarnation, chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. He comes not from above, but from within, he comes that we might find him in this world of ours.”
How, and by what underlying ontic principle, does this come about? With regard to matter qua matter, its potentiality ensures that it can bear the inflow of the divine without ripping apart at the seams, as it were. With regard to soul, Etienne Gilson captures it beautifully in saying that the soul "receives the body in the communion of its own act of being." German theologian Theodor Schneider clarifies this idea further, explaining that the informing of the body is not a power superadded to the substance of the soul, rather, the soul "is the form of the body as substance." It is not only that soul and body are inseparably integrated. Even more, the soul is by its nature driven to seek out matter, to express itself through matter, as its proper manner of existence. Again, from Schneider: "Being in the body is not an activity, but the self-realization of the soul. The body is the visibility of the soul, because the soul is the actuality of the body." As it is spiritualized and perfected, the soul is not disengaged from the body, but rather enters into an ever-greater self-possession through the matter it animates. It is precisely here, at these existential depths, that the incarnate God comes.
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Counter-intuitively (or perhaps predictably), “this world,” the world for which our Lord would not pray, is excelling deficient religion in its own angelistic dualism, and thereby obscuring the traces of God in our midst. Moderns live in what I have called an externally curated stream of consciousness, moving among avatars and hyperlinks (and, strangely, goods) in a manner more suited to purely intellective substances. Image and sound are manipulated with exceeding precision instantly, as anyone fancies; we relate unproblematically to mere fictions, not troubling ourselves too much about it. Generative AI applications concretize the surreal with a mouse click. As we stake our claim in the metaverse, the cosmos – and with it, matter, the body – falls by the wayside.
Pope Saint John Paul II therefore was perspicacious in writing, also in Fides et Ratio: “This sapiential dimension [of philosophy] is all the more necessary today, because the immense expansion of humanity's technical capability demands a renewed and sharpened sense of ultimate values. If this technology is not ordered to something greater than a merely utilitarian end, then it could soon prove inhuman and even become potential destroyer (sic) of the human race.”
It may, however, have eluded the pope's foresight that our technology would advance explosively, not to the service of utilitarian ends – even the devil proposed turning stones into bread – but to ego, imagination, and a fully surrogate perception, judgement and intellection. This may take humanity out more effectively than brute violence for the stealth and subtlety of its anesthetizing dope.
From this, religion has misguidedly taken cues, whether in anti-intellectualism, fideism, or poor human formation, pure and simple; I have been “invited” to one too many pious nuptial Masses among the hyper-devout, only to be turned away from the lavish (and tightly curated) reception, because “it's the church service that's the important part.” It's difficult to follow the counsel to rejoice with those who rejoice, on finding oneself, like the atheist in the coffin, all dressed up with no place to go. It's heartbreaking. Some among these same very, very spiritual bridegrooms, in a different context, boasted of a novel 96-day fast, spanning several liturgical seasons. (I doubt they were aware of the origins of the practice in Buddhism.)
We find in the encyclical Lumen Fidei: “Today more than ever, we need to be reminded of this bond between faith and truth, given the crisis of truth in our age. In contemporary culture, we often tend to consider the only real truth to be that of technology: truth is what we succeed in building and measuring by our scientific know-how, truth is what works and what makes life easier and more comfortable. Nowadays this appears as the only truth that is certain, the only truth that can be shared, the only truth that can serve as a basis for discussion or for common undertakings.”
It is a crisis of truth where the technocratic paradigm is exalted as ultimate (especially as what it succeeds in building and measuring becomes ever more outre and abstract), but also where the pious devise “religious technologies” by warping sacramentality or appropriating whatever the internet may dream up, all in the service of image and prosperity, while eschewing hospitality and festivity, earth, water, bread and wine.
On this very note, let's go back to Laudato si': “God comes to us in a fragment of matter, not from above, but from within.” Salvation history runs exactly counter to the move toward a technology-enabled disembodiment; salvation history is incarnational. For St. Augustine, the natural world itself was, from the beginning, invested with great dignity. In adopting the neo-Platonic teaching of the rationes seminales, Augustine was able to cut through several knots which vexed philosophy: not as process – for God is not subject to time – but instantaneously, the elements were taken to have been enlivened, from within, with a divine presence directing them to their respective ends (τέλη.) The humblest of being bears within this power, virtutem. To the cosmic elements have been entrusted a unique autonomy, fecundity, and life; they are holy. This idea was articulated by Augustine in De Genesi ad litteram; it had been held in previous generations by Justin Martyr, among others, and in his own time by Gregory of Nyssa. Later it was propounded by, notably, St. Bonaventure.
But now let's look even more deeply at Thomas. If we were really pressed, the Angelic Doctor says, we could say that prime matter “would have for its specific difference its relation to form...” (Quod., IX, a. 6. 3.). Prime matter, while completely inexistent, is pure relationality. The import of this is perhaps, as yet, underexploited, especially as Ratzinger has suggested that it is relationality, rather than substance, that affords the deepest cut into being – a stunning concept, though beyond the scope of this current post.
It is also worth considering that for Thomas, where prime matter is a virtual distinction in a realized existent, its potentialities are then highly specified. Here, we have no blank slate supple with unending shape-shifting, but rather an arc of directionality. Capacities inherent to matter from the dawn of creation are awakened and heightened through the Incarnation. In this regard, we turn again to Pope John Paul:
“In the liturgical experience, Christ the Lord... reveals the transparency of the cosmos, precisely as in Scripture... This is why the liturgy is heaven on earth, and in it the Word who became flesh imbues matter with a saving potential which is fully manifest in the sacraments: there, creation communicates to each individual the power conferred on it by Christ. Thus the Lord, immersed in the Jordan, transmits to the waters a power which enables them to become the bath of baptismal rebirth.”
Likewise, for Pope Francis, “[t]he Sacraments are a privileged way in which nature is taken up by God to become a means of mediating supernatural life... Water poured over the body of a child in Baptism is a sign of new life.”
And again, John Paul II invited us to respect “the Eucharistic potential of the created world.” In this brilliant theology, we find an apex uniting Augustinian ideas with a Thomist framework, to extremely lofty effect.
In some ways, Benedict XVI may have gone furthest of all:
“It is therefore very important that matter be part of our faith, that the body be part of our faith; faith is not purely spiritual, but this is how God inserts us into the whole reality of the cosmos and transforms the cosmos, draws it to himself…. Moreover with this material element — water — not only does a basic element of the cosmos enter, a fundamental matter created by God, but also the entire symbolism of religions, because in all religions water has something to say.”
For Benedict XVI, the material element of water mediates relatedness to Christ, even where ritual is not intentionally directed to him. Water, so taken, is no mere sign to be read by the faithful alone, but an element with an efficacy unto itself drawing no such distinction. As usual, the theology of Francis is less daring, but his pastoral practice is far more progressive (and that gains all the attention) — although the continuity is clear, taking theology and practice together. Yet already John Paul II had set us up for this development, in proclaiming post-Incarnational matter to be “fully theophoric.”
The “world is destined to be assumed in the Eucharist of the Lord, in his Passover, present in the sacrifice of the altar,” as John Paul II declared. A mentor of mine, Roger Duncan, wrote that in Adoration, we gaze upon realized eschatology: “In the conversion of the species we see an eschatological promise, but we also see a culmination which has been unfolding since the beginning of the universe – an evolutionary process.”
Owing to the innate potentialities of matter, its eschatological resonance, and its capacity to be reached “from within,” we encounter in Ratzinger a statement of an awesome transposition, predicated of the Eucharist: “Body has become word, and word has become body in the act of love that is the specifically divine mode of being” – an analogous perichoresis of Word and body, of the Word which abides and the corporeality which otherwise necessarily connotes change.
But this is, for Benedict, the divine fulfillment of a potentiality deeply woven into cosmos, implicit in creation’s very ontological structure, subject to the same evolutionary process cited above by Duncan. Speaking of the violence of the crucifixion, Benedict states: “Since this act transmuted death into love, death as such is already conquered from within (emphasis mine), the Resurrection is already present in it. Death is, so to speak, mortally wounded, so that it can no longer have the last word. To use an image well known to us today, this is like inducing nuclear fission in the very heart of being – the victory of love over hatred, the victory of love over death. Only this intimate explosion of good conquering evil can then trigger off the series of transformations that little by little will change the world.” Women and men everywhere have always known this, he says; all carry within a primordial intuition that the world can, and must, be changed.
For Ratzinger's Augustinian bent, we have a powerfully new and accommodated conception of the rationes seminales; “seeded in” to the works of darkness is not only their own demise, but the releasing of propulsive energy unto transformation as their own atomic structure, as it were, is rent apart. The renewal of creation is virtually contained, from within.
One wonders at the turn of phrase of Pope St. Paul VI in the encyclical Mysterium Fidei, that the Eucharist involves a “transelementalization.” It almost seems to hint, in advance, of this model. Paul VI’s departure from the expected language of substance situates us at the edge of an entire abyss of mystery, regarding matter and its destiny.
In Laudato si', our Holy Father Pope Francis has seen fit to to quote a homily of Benedict XVI, preached at the Mass of Corpus Domini: “[I]n the bread of the Eucharist, 'creation is projected towards divinization, towards the holy wedding feast, towards unification with the Creator himself.’”
In a homily delivered at Aosta, Benedict himself foretells that “the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy.” Cosmos becomes liturgy, just as body becomes word.
When death, the last enemy, is conquered, its veil and shadows lifted, then will be made fully visible the “transparency of the cosmos.” Earth and heaven will ring with the praises of the just, the music of the spheres; the very stones will cry out with their elemental canticle of glorification – a blessed task indeed, should metaphysics be called upon to prophesy to this end.