Cause Principle Unity

Fourth dialogue
vocula), a melius rem ipsam perpendentibus faemina dicitur [it has finished, I
repeat, by being called woman (to gather everything into a single term) by
those who have most effectively evaluated its very reality]. Et mehercle [And
by Hercules], it is not without good reason that the senators of Pallas’
realm 3 have judged it well to set matter and woman side by side, for they
have been pushed to extremes of rage and frenzy by their dealings with the
rigours of women – but just now an apt rhetorical flourish comes to mind.
Women are a chaos of irrationality, a hyle [wood] of wickedness, a forest of
ribaldry, a mass of uncleanliness, an inclination to every perdition (another
rhetorical flourish here, called by some complessio [complexion])! 4 Whence
existed, in potency, non solum remota [not only remote], but etiam propinqua
[also proximate], the destruction of Troy? In a woman. Who was the
instrument of the destruction of Samson’s strength? Of that hero, I mean,
who became unvanquished conqueror of the Philistines with the famous
ass’s jawbone that he had found? A woman. 5 Who tamed, at Capua, the
might and violence of that great captain and perpetual enemy of the Roman
republic, Hannibal? A woman! (Exclamatio!) Tell me, O cytharist prophet,
the reason for your weakness. ‘Quia in peccatis concepit me mater mea’ [‘in
sin did my mother conceive me’]. 6 O ancient forefather, first-made man,
gardener of Paradise and cultivator of the Tree of Life, of what malice were
you victim, to have been propelled with the entire human race into the bottomless
gulf of perdition? ‘Mulier quam dedisti mihi: ipsa, ipsa me decepit’
[‘The woman that you gave me, it is she, she who deceived me’]. 7 Procul
dubio [Without doubt], form does not sin, and no form is a source of error
unless it is joined to matter. That is why form, symbolized by the man,
entering into intimate contact with matter, being composed or coupling
with it, responds to the natura naturans 8 with these words, or rather this
sentence: ‘Mulier, quam dedisti mihi’, idest, matter, which was given me as
consort, ipse me decepit; hoc est, she is the cause of all my sins. Behold,
behold, divine spirit, how the great practitioners of philosophy and the
acute anatomists of nature’s entrails, in order to show us nature plainly,
have found no more appropriate way than to confront us with this analogy,
which shows that matter is to the order of natural things what the female
sex is to economical, political and civil order. Open, open your eyes and …
3 Philosophers.
4 A complexion is a rhetorical figure in which the members of a period begin and end with the same
term.
5 Delilah, as told in Judges 16. 6 Psalms 51, 5. 7 See Genesis 3, 12–14.
8 Scholastic formula designating nature as active power and producer.
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