Cause Principle Unity

Third dialogue
have scandalized certain theologians because they have placed matter too
highly. This has occurred either because these works were lacking in
expression, or because the theologians, having been bred on Aristotle’s
opinions to consider matter solely in the sense of the substratum of natural
things, have not understood them well. They do not see that, according to
others, matter is understood as being common to the intelligible and sensible
worlds (to use their terms, which give an equivocal meaning to matter
based on an analogy). This is why opinions should be examined with
great care before being condemned, and why it is necessary to distinguish
terms as much as thoughts, for even if thinkers sometimes agree on a
generic idea of matter, they go on to differ in their specific concepts. As for
our argument, it is impossible that any theologian should be found (if we
suppress the term ‘matter’, and however captious and malevolent his way
of thinking) who would accuse me of impiety for what I say and think of
the coincidence between potency and act, taking both terms in an absolute
sense. Whence I would like to infer (in the measure allowed) that, in the
simulacrum of that act and that potency, insofar as it is in specific act all
that it can be in specific potency, the universe being all that it can be (let it
be as it will in terms of the particular act and potency), there is a potency
that is not separated from the act, a soul which is not separated from that
which is animated – I mean, the simple, not the composite, so that the
universe has a first principle taken as a unity, and no longer considered doubled
into material principle and formal principle. This principle may be
inferred by comparison with the aforesaid, which is absolute potency and
act, so that it is neither difficult nor harmful to admit definitively that as
a substance, the whole is one, as Parmenides, treated ignobly by Aristotle,
perhaps conceived it.
DICSONO. You, therefore, hold that although, in descending along the
ladder of nature, there are two substances, one spiritual and one material,
both are eventually reduced to one being and one root.
TEOFILO. Yes, if you think that it can be tolerated by those who do not
penetrate into the matter.
DICSONO. Very easily, provided that you do not raise yourself beyond
the limits of nature.
TEOFILO. This has already been done. Since our conception or definition
of the divinity differs from the common one, we have our personal
definition, which is yet not so contrary or unfavorable to the other, and
perhaps clearer and more explicit from the point of view of reason, which
69