SUBSTANCE IS NOT MATTER
Some discussions on Facebook have made me realise that people bring a lot of physics into metaphysics, and this muddles up our understanding of what ancient and medieval metaphysicians were trying to say. Of course I am no expert in many (or any) particular metaphysical systems, but I have learned a few things on my ongoing unorthodox journey through metaphysics. My (also ongoing) formal education in physics has given me a (probably rare) insight into the similarities and differences between the two spheres of inquiry. I say rare because so far it has been hard for me to find physics students or teachers who find metaphysical systems like Thomism or Neoplatonism interesting or useful beyond the way we can fit it to our physicalist prejudices. But of course, I can be wrong on that.
I want to show here the metaphysical difference between “matter” and “substance/essence”, how that distinction is collapsed in physics, and how it confuses a lot of people, especially Christians who profess the “inherent goodness of embodiment and materiality”. This will explain why metaphysical “matter” is considered “evil”, and why this is not incompatible with the doctrine of resurrection.
I
ESSENCE AND SUBSTANCE
Norris Clarke defines the essence of a thing as that “by which it exists in this or that particular mode or manner of existing, as this or that particular being and not some other.” [1]. Essence, basically, is what a thing is, that makes it different from all other things. There is something that differentiates humans from rocks beyond mere difference in particle characteristics, and that is what a human is is not what a rock is. The human intelligence can differentiate essences and not just physical objects.
As for Substance, Norris Clarke’s definition is also useful:
“…the principle of self-identity has been called substance (from the Latin sub-stare: to stand under), that which stands under all its changing phases as their principle of continuity and self-identity. The changing phases that affect the substance have been called accidents (from the Latin accidere: to happen to) , because they happen to the substance but do not constitute or change its essential self-identity. The substance is thus immanent in, involved in, and expressed in its changing accidents, but though united with, never simply identical with , totally immersed in, or exhausted by any one of them. [1]
You might wonder, if you get what Clarke is saying here, what the difference is between essence and substance. I don’t think I’ve found a more satisfying answer than Guenon’s:
“…there is in each being something corresponding both to the one and to the other of these two principles, in such a way that the being is as it were a resultant of their union, or to speak more exactly, a resultant of the action exercised by the active principle, Essence, on the passive principle, Substance”[2]
In other words, essence is a being as it is what it is. If to be is to act – that is, if to be is to be “effective”, in that all existent things leave a “trace” of their existence, or to “make a difference” (e.g. the Sun’s existence is tied to the fact that if it did not exist, the universe, at least locally, would be a different place) – then essence, what something is, is the active principle of a being. It is this being and not some other. That is its essence.
On the other hand, if essence is unchanging – that is, if essence, despite whatever modalities it manifests, does not change. E.g. A human is a human even if their skin is black, white, brown, etc. – then in that fact of “unchangeness”, which can be considered “passive”, it is a “substance”, while the modalities of that substance is called “accident”.
Another way to describe this, somewhat platonically rather than “aristotelianly” as we have been doing before now, is the language of “possibility”, which both Schuon and Guenon were very good at [3,4]. Equating “Possibility” to “Reality” – as all that is possible is actual in God’s undifferentiated unity, without which nothing would be possible or real – another name for God, following Guenon, would be “All Possibility” (and I really like this name). God is the possibility of existence, and from him flows all “secondary possibilities”, which Platonists call “forms”. There is the possibility of existence as such, which is God, then there are the possibilities of the possibilities of existence; that is, given existence as a fact, there are things that can exist. This hierarchy continues on seemingly indefinitely. For example, there is the possibility of existence (God) that has nothing prior to it. From that we get the possibility of the existence of man. So far so good. But we can also have the possibilities for the existence of man, and this includes the possibility of races, community structures, etc., which can have sub-possibilities of their own, and so on.
In this “chain of being”, one can see that substance is something that gets “lesser” as we go “smaller” and “lower”. The possibility of man as such has “more” of all that is essential to man than one individual manifesting sub-possibilities of humanity. But at the same time, an individual man is a man, and not a half man. An individual man possesses all that is essential to man in virtuality, that is, that individual is still “connected” to that which makes them “human”, the essence of “humanity”, which contains all its possibilities.
The implications of this is simple. God has the most substance, infinite substance in fact, as He is the source of all substance, and by extension, reality. “Reality” can then be equated to “substance/essence”, and the lower you go on the hierarchy, the less “real” the things you find there are. What you will also notice is that “substance” here has nothing to do with chemistry, except maybe the name. We are not talking about chemical compounds, but the metaphysical reality of what a being is.
I submit that it is this “substance” that Paul means when he talks of “celestial flesh” and “terrestrial flesh”. As Dale Martin has brilliantly explained [5], the ancient concept of “material” looked nothing like modern physicalism. The gods had “bodies”, but not like our “bodies”. Their “bodies” were of a “higher substance” than human flesh [6]. The human body itself was not considered a discrete entity, or even the manifest presence of an “individual” as we understand it. In Martin’s words:
“For most modern thinkers the individual human body is a different sort of thing from the things that surround it. In the modern world we may talk about the "social body," but for most of us the phrase is a metaphor; the social body is simply the aggregate of many individual bodies. And it is the individual aspect that, in the end, counts. We may also speak of the earth as a body or, more rarely in the modern era, imagine the human body as a microcosm that reproduces the macrocosm of the universe. But again, these modes of speech usually function as metaphors. We do not really think that the human body is simply the cosmos writ small or that each individual body is merely a reproduction of the same elements and dynamics that surround us. But in the ancient world, the human body was not like a microcosm; it was a microcosm, a small version of the universe at large… Rather than trying to force ancient language into our conceptual schemes, we would do better to try to imagine how ancient Greeks and Romans could see as "natural" what seems to us bizarre: the nonexistence of the "individual," the fluidity of the elements that make up the "self," and the essential continuity of the human body with its surroundings… In the absence of such an ontological dualism, for most people of Greco-Roman culture the human body was of a piece with its environment. The self was a precarious, temporary state of affairs, constituted by forces surrounding and pervading the body, like the radio waves that bounce around and through the bodies of modern urbanites. In such a maelstrom of cosmological forces, the individualism of modern conceptions disappears, and the body is perceived as a location in a continuum of cosmic movement. The body or the "self" is an unstable point of transition, not a discrete, permanent, solid entity.” [5]
It is in this light Christians affirm the “inherent goodness” of the body. We affirm the inherent goodness of substances, that is, the “whatness” of creation, because such “whatness”, the essence that makes creation what it is, only exists because of its participation in God’s goodness. To exist is good, because the God whose essence is existence is good, and is goodness itself, named “the Good” by Platonists. As Christ says, “only God is good”. To the extent we exist, or have “essence”, we are good. To the extent we don’t, we are not good, that is, we don’t exist. This brings us to the crux of the matter (pun intended): What is metaphysical “matter”?
II
MATTER/EVIL
Norris Clarke defines matter as the “principle of distinction”:
“…the principle of distinction must be a non-formal or non-qualitative one which is able to distinguish two natures without introducing formal qualitative differentiation between them. Since such a principle is the correlative opposite of form-a qualitative notion-Aristotle first called it matter, or primary matter. How can this do the job of distinguishing without formal differentiation? Precisely because it is the very essence of matter, as quantitatively extended, to be spread out in space, parts outside of parts-one part of a material body can never be in the identical same place as another. [1]
The genius of this formulation, which I admit, is why some form of Aristotelian language is indispensable, is how is can be applied to all the levels of the chain of being. Of course Aristotelians do not subscribe to the platonic realm of forms, but as Plotinus shows, the lessons from Aristotle can benefit Platonists greatly, even if what Aristotle says is simply implicit in Platonism.
In physical reality, things are separated by space and time. In non-physical reality, things are separated by the fact of their different essences (and don’t forget that physical =/= essence/substance. The realm of forms is more substantial than physical reality and in fact spawns it).
If “matter” is the principle of distinction, then all “things”, in as much as they are not the infinite simplicity of God, are “made of matter”, as even the forms are distinct (the form of man is not the form of rocks). Forms are the “fullness of created essence”, but even then they are distinct. This is where the concept of “substance” as “reality” meets the concept of “matter” as “unreality”. The caveat is, that some are more “material” in this sense, than others. The forms for example are distinct, yet are “united” in a way that is simply impossible for physical objects. They “mix” without confusion, because they don’t exist in space, yet they are distinct, which means they are “made of less matter”, or to make it clearer, they are “made of less distinctions”, than physical things. This shows another side of St. Paul’s distinction between “terrestrial body” and the “Celestial body”. The forms have more “substance”, are “more real”, yet with “less matter”. If I were to put it in the form of mathematical variation, I’d say that substance is inversely proportional to matter. This leads us to an important implication of metaphysical matter as distinction.
The more distinctions something has in relation to other things, the more limitations that thing has, and the more “places” (literal or figurative) it is excluded from. The form of fire is not limited in “fieriness”, unlike individual fires which eventually burn out, as they are limited in time and space. They are excluded from places. The form of man is not limited by location, while individual men, who have more “distinctions” (for example, this man is not that man), and are more limited. It is safe to say that matter = quantity = distinction = exclusion = limitation.
This formulation also means something else. It means that matter = non-existence/nothingness. "How?", you may ask, but the answer is simple. What does exclusion mean other than a part of reality where that thing being excluded does not exist? As long as I am excluded from a location, I do not exist in that location. Even in the spaceless and timeless world of forms, each essence is an essence to the exclusion of other essences, even if this “exclusion” is not spatial or temporal. In other words, if matter is distinction, exclusion, and limitation, matter is also privation, which is another name for evil.
What you have to take note of is that “evil”, considered in this manner, that is, metaphysically, is morally neutral. We are not talking exclusively about things that we often consider to be moral. Moral and “natural” evil (e.g. hurricanes killing people, the brutality of natural selection) are a special modality of evil considered as privation. Ordinarily, or in the metaphysical sense, evil is simply “privation”, and the moral neutrality of the term is seen in how there is no “natural” or “moral” evil in Heaven, the world of forms, even if they have “privation” in their distinctions between essences.
Let me say here as a small detour that the forms contain all the possibilities of that form’s manifestation in the physical, so all humans are united in the form of man, even if this unity is hard to grasp for us down here. So it is not true that this metaphysical system erases individuality completely. It simply fulfils it to the highest possibility, which is unity with all souls, the precursor to apokatastasis.
This understanding of “matter as evil” is the reason why the Platonist requires “escape from the body” to be united to the forms. It is not opposed to Christian resurrection, it is simply another way of viewing the same phenomenon. As Christ kills the terrestrial body to gain his Celestial body, so does the Platonist implore us to lose our terrestrial bodies to gain the world of forms, the home of the celestial bodies, the forms being the celestial bodies themselves. What Christ does is to show, in a different form, and in front of witnesses, what this transformation looks like. Christ’s body disappears because it is no longer physical. It doesn’t need doors or food, yet because the celestial contains everything essential to the physical in a more “substantial” form, Christ can still appear in the physical and be touched, even if the reality behind such an appearance is totally beyond what touch and sight can comprehend.
The difference between “evil” as such, in its neutrality, and “natural” or “moral” evil – which David Bentley Hart notes with respect to the latter, is ultimately a worthless distinction, as morality is natural [7] – is that the latter occurs when a being has a privation in essential attributes that it is not supposed to, that is, when violence is done against its essence, when it is not itself, or made to be not itself. Death, for example, is a phenomenon which “unmakes” living creatures. Men cease to be men, and become a mass or organic particles, a “body”, and not a “man”. But natural evil only occurs in the subtle and physical, in the realm of change, because change is itself a manifestation of limitation, where things are not solely themselves and must transform to "become themselves". The end of all change is death, because change itself is death, for something ceases for another to begin. Death, from the perspective of anyone in a changing world, is the loss of self. The being ceases. But from the perspective of the changeless forms, no change has occurred at all, everything is what it is. Everything is fully itself. In comparison with the forms, the physical is an illusion. This is the logic of resurrection, it is the unmasking of death as a phantom. This is why “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom”, while eating Jesus heavenly “flesh” saves. The earthly bread is made into (or realised as) bread from heaven, even if masked by physicality.
It is here I will say that what Physicists call “matter” is already for the Aristotelian, “matter with form”, or for the Platonist, “matter participating in form”. They (and I’m including myself as a physicist in training) do not deal with metaphysical “pure matter”, because that doesn’t exist, it is literally “no-thing-ness” and not a substance named “nothing”. They also do not deal in metaphysical "substance" since it is qualitative and not reducible to subatomic particles or the formulas of classical physics. Physics itself is quantitative. It attempts to reduce everything to quantity. It attempts to reduce everything to "pure matter", but as "pure matter" is simply privation, all it can access are smaller modalities of matter-form composites, as they are the only things that exist that are "close" to the nothingness of pure matter. As such, physics can never find "substance", which is irreducibly qualitative, that which makes a thing itself. An atom is matter participating in the form of the atom, and not the purest form of matter. Similarly, an electron is matter participating in the form of the electron. The physical body, because of its limitations and privations, needs to be subsumed into the fullness of its substance, or from another perspective needs to be realised as “not very real”, and already “contained” in all that essentially pertains to it in the form of man. Same for all physicality. They are all to be subsumed (or realised as already subsumed) into their full essence in the forms. This is resurrection, the “new heaven and earth”, which is everything the old heaven and earth is, but better in a presently incomprehensible way. Christus Resurrexit!
[1] Clarke, W. N. (2001). The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (1st Edition). University of Notre Dame Press.
[2] Guenon, R. (2004). The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times (4th ed.). Sophia Perennis.
[3] Schuon, F. (2013). From the Divine to the Human: A New Translation with Selected Letters (Writings of Frithjof Schuon). World Wisdom.
[4] Guenon, R. (2004). The Multiple States of the Being. Sophia Perennis.
[5] Martin, D. B. (1999). The Corinthian Body. Yale University Press.
[6] Hart, D. B. (2018). The Spiritual Was More Substantial Than the Material for the Ancients. Church Life Journal. https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/the-spiritual-was-more-substantial-than-the-material-for-the-ancients/
[7] Hart, D. B. (2015). God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo. Radical Orthodoxy, 3(September), 1–17.