114 RICHARD MCKEON 



translations of Salerno. Alfanus, Archbishop of Salerno, dis- 

 tinguished materia from matenatum in his translation of 

 Nemesius. After pointing out that some philosophers held that 

 the soul is corporeal, while others held it was incorporeal, he 

 gives a Neoplatonic refutation of the corporeity of the soul: 

 the body needs a principle to hold it together; the principle is 

 either incorporeal or corporeal; if it is corporeal, it in turn 

 needs a principle to bind its constituents together. If the Stoics 

 say that the principle is a motion, one asks what is the power 

 or virtue (virtus) which causes this motion. If it is matter, 

 the previous arguments are repeated; if it is not matter, it is 

 " mattered " (materiatiim) , and the mattered will be different 

 from matter, for " what participates in matter is called 

 mattered." But if it is not matter, it is " immattered " and 

 all body is " mattered." "^ The Stoic distinction of an operative 

 and a material cause may, however, be joined to the distinction 

 between " matter " and " mattered " without becoming involved 

 in the Stoic materialism: " matter " is potentiality and the 

 " mattered " is potentiality restricted by a form which confers 

 a specific function or potentiality and from which a specific act 

 follows, but the distinction does not entail the consequence that 

 all things are corporeal. 



William of St. Thierry (1085-1148) made elaborate use of 

 the doctrine of elements, but was critical of the use of physical 

 arguments to specify properties of God or the Trinity inferred 

 from creation. He was the adversary of Peter Abailard and 

 William of Conches and called their errors to the attention of 

 St. Bernard. In his Disputation against Peter Abailard, his 

 criticism of Abailard is that " he loves to think about all things 



'■^ Nemesii, Premnon Physicon, pp. 25-26. The distinction of materia and materia- 

 tum used by Abailard, of elementum and dementatum used by William of Conches, 

 and of natura naturans and natura naturata, which came into use about the same 

 time or a little later, have common origins in translations from Greek or from 

 languages which preserve verbal forms of materia, elementum, or natura from which 

 passive (and sometimes also active) particles can be formed and recognized. In the 

 other languages the relation between matter, mattering, and mattered is lost in 

 the circumlocutions of translation of a work which examines that relation and is 

 inconspicuous in original inquiries into like problems employing the same data. 



