Form and content
01
Aug
Modern philosophy has separated the form from
the content, just as a label is separated from an ingredient that exists in a bottle, but this comes from the reduced understanding of what matter is, the hylé of the Greeks, whose thought in Aristotelian terminology interconnects them in hylemorphism (ὕλη, hýle = “matter”; μορφή, morphé = “form”).
For this to have an anthropological scope, necessary for the discourse on cultural diversity, it is necessary to link act and power, as Thomas Aquinas did, where matter is not what we today designate (like substance, for example), but rather what is as a possibility or in potential, written like this by Thomas: “matter est id quod est in potentia” (matter is that which is in potential) (THOMAS, ST I q.3 a.2 c), in current terms, while It’s not an act, it’s just a given.
Thus the act is the existence of fact, or the action itself, that is, “forma est actus (form is act) (ST I q.50, a.2, obi.3), so we let ourselves be shaped by ideas, actions and thoughts that can be deeper or shallower, based on just a few words.
Thus the articulation of the binomials power x act and matter x form is in this way, “matter is nothing but power, form is that through which something is, as it is the act” (THOMAS, ScG II, c.43), these Categories give a distinction from fundamental metaphysics, and anthropologically mean that one thing is the possibility of existing or acting: power or matter, another thing is actually existing or acting: act or form.
Some modern theologies want to separate body and soul, this is without eschatological and biblical foundation, otherwise the human figure of Jesus would be divided into two: the divine and the human, which would be in opposition and would fight against each other, and this is why the Christian anthropology must be rigorously unitary, as it is in Thomas Aquinas.
M matter and form (seen in this new aspect linked to content and essence), without its actual existence (form) the body would not even exist, but only the possibility of existing (potentially) makes it exist in act, this unity is radical, since the necessary condition for its existence is the body, so spirituality is not just “body” there is an essence in it.
It is fundamental to understanding Christian anthropology, written clearly by Thomas: “The human being is not just a soul, but something composed of soul and body” (THOMAS, ST I q. 75 a 4c), if on the one hand not all materialism (which is not hylemorphism) denies the existence of the soul, much bad theology seeks to deny the existence of the body, it is the modern dualistic relationship, crystallized in objectivity and subjectivity, in which both are mutilated, so they were not “shaped” with a spirit new.
According to Thomas Aquinas, human living bodies and their actual existence (form, also called by him the intellective soul) is immortal, unlike other non-human living bodies, whose existence has a beginning and an end, not the eschatological end, but the finalist end of an interruption, as all humans die, and for him death is explained as a provisional disability through which we pass into an immortal existence and overcome the radical disability of the living body through death.
The metaphor of the potter that transcends the simplistic analysis of simple adherence (Jer 18, 3-4): “I went to the potter’s house, and behold, he was working at the wheel; When the vase he was molding with clay broke down in his hands, he was once again making another vase out of that material, as seemed best to his eyes.”
AQUINAS, T. (2001-2006) Suma Teológica. Brazil São Paulo: Loyolla, 8 v.
