Cause Principle Unity

Cause, principle and unity
in her, just as the blood of her parents has mingled to produce her
beautiful body, the virtues of their heroic spirits have fused to forge her
extraordinary spirit.
POLIINNIO. Rara avis [Rare bird], that Marie de Bochetel. Rara avis,
that Marie de Castelnau. 14
GERVASIO. That rare you use for women can just as well be applied to
men.
POLIINNIO. To get back to the point, a woman is but matter. If you do
not know what a woman is because you do not know what matter is, study
the Peripatetics a little; they will teach you what a woman is by teaching
you about matter.
GERVASIO. I see that, with that Peripatetic brain of yours, you have
learnt little or nothing from what Teofilo said yesterday about the essence
and potency of matter.
POLIINNIO. Be that as it may. I hold to the point that one must condemn
the appetite of both woman and matter, which is the cause of all evil,
all affliction, defect, ruin and corruption. Do you not think that, if matter
were satisfied with its present form, no alteration or affliction would hold
sway over us, we would not die, we would be incorruptible and eternal?
GERVASIO. And what would you say if it were satisfied with the form it
had fifty years ago? Would you be Poliinnio? If it had remained what it was
forty years ago, would you be so adulterous (I mean, adult), so perfect and
so learned? Thus, just as you are pleased that your other forms have given
way to the current one, so it is nature’s will, which orders the universe, that
all forms yield to all others. Not to mention that it is much more dignified
for that substance, which is our substance, to become everything by receiving
all forms, than to remain fragmentary by holding onto only one. In that
way, it shares a likeness with that which is all, in all.
POLIINNIO. It seems to be you are shedding your natural habits and
beginning to be learned. Apply yourself, if you can, a simili [by similitude],
to showing the dignity to be found in woman.
GERVASIO. That I will do easily. But here is Teofilo.
POLIINNIO. And Dicsono. Another time, then. De iis hactenus [Let us
stop there].
TEOFILO. Have we not seen that the Peripatetics, like the Platonists,
divide substance by the specific difference of corporeal and incorporeal?
Just as these specific differences are reduced to the potency of a single
14 Refers to the same woman, Marie de Castelnau, née Bochetel.
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