Ambrose

English

Have men taken up so much opinion that some of them set up three principles of all things — God, and the exemplar, and matter — and asserted that these are incorruptible and uncreated and without beginning, as Plato and his disciples do; and that God made the world not as the creator of matter but as a craftsman looking to an exemplar, that is, to an idea, out of the matter which they call hyle, which is said to have given the causes of generation to all things; and thought the world itself too incorruptible, neither created nor made? Others also, as Aristotle with his followers thought fit to argue, laid down two principles, matter and form, and a third along with them, which is called operative, to which it should belong to bring about fitly what it had judged should be undertaken.

Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by

Latin

PL 14, col. 123A · pd

Notes

The opening sentence of the Hexaemeron, and the whole Latin bench's account of the opposition is settled in it. Plato: three principles, God and the exemplar and matter, all three incorruptible, uncreated and without beginning, with God a craftsman looking to an idea rather than the maker of the stuff — and the stuff is named, hyle. Aristotle: two principles, matter and form, with a third operative one. Every later Latin witness on this crux repeats one or both lists, usually without naming Ambrose: Remigius has the three at PL 131:53D (K1 sliced it), Hugh of St Victor has them as opifex, materia and forma, Comestor has all three philosophers with Epicurus added and hyle spelt ile. What none of them repeats is the reason Ambrose gives immediately afterwards for Moses' having written as he did — that passage is at PL 14:124B and was built for K1 as ambrose-hex-1-2, so this crux takes the doxography and leaves the answer where it stands.

Threads

• ← echoes · Ambrose
  Phase 4. Two halves of Ambrose's first chapter, split between two cruxes. The earlier passage sets out what the philosophers held — Plato's three principles, uncreated and coeternal with God, and the atomists' concourse; this one clears them away in a sentence by making Moses a witness rather than a disputant. The refutation is unintelligible without the doxography that precedes it.
• ← contests · Chalcidius
  Both name hyle and take opposite views of it. Ambrose at Milan reports the philosophers' matter in order to refuse it, as a rival to the God who makes out of nothing. Chalcidius uses sylua as the plain sense of the verse — 'the earth was invisible and formless', that is, corporeal hyle, the old substance of the world before it took on forms — and has already said on the previous leaf that the Hebrews confess hyle was generated, which is what removes Ambrose's objection. The concession Ambrose needed was on a Latin page he never saw.
• ← echoes · Hugh of St Victor
  Ambrose: 'tria principia constituerent omnium, Deum, et exemplar, et materiam … de materia, quam vocant hylen'. Hugh: 'Philosophi gentilium tria quaedam rerum principia sine principio posuerunt: opificem, materiam et formam.' The same three-item list with the same qualification (without a principle / uncreated and without beginning), abbreviated to single words and unattributed.
• ← echoes · Peter Comestor
  'Plato dixit tria fuisse ab aeterno, scilicet Deum ideas, ile' is Ambrose's 'Deum, et exemplar, et materiam … quam vocant hylen' with exemplar resolved into ideae, and Aristotle's two principles, materia et forma, follow in the same order. Epicurus is Comestor's addition.
• ← parallel · Basil of Caesarea
  The same position described from the two sides of the Latin/Greek divide within about fifteen years: Ambrose names it (Plato's three principles, hyle uncreated) and Basil argues against it without naming anyone ('if we call this matter unbegotten it is made equal to God'). Ambrose knew Basil's Greek Hexaemeron; this Latin Basil is Eustathius' later version, so the Latin words are not a source for Ambrose's.
• ← contests · Chalcidius
  Ambrose sets up the hyle of the philosophers as the position a Christian must refuse, and Chalcidius had already reported the concession that dissolves it. For Ambrose, matter that the craftsman merely finds is a rival to God; for Chalcidius, the Hebrews grant that hyle itself was generated, so the Platonist account of the world's substance and the scriptural account of its origin are not in competition. Ambrose is refuting a Platonism that this Latin Platonist does not hold, forty years earlier and in the same language.
• ← contests · Philo of Alexandria
  Ambrose refutes this position by name and does not know he is refuting Philo, whom he is elsewhere copying. Ambrose: they say the world was made out of the matter they call hyle, and this is to make God a craftsman rather than a creator. Philo: the substance was of itself without order, without quality, without life, and God being good did not grudge it his own best nature. Every term Ambrose objects to is in the Greek, in that order, in the book his own Hexaemeron follows most closely.
• ← parallel · Paul of Burgos
  Ambrose and Burgos both want the philosophers' matter kept out of Genesis, and they want it for opposite reasons. Ambrose argues against the doctrine: they say the world was made out of the matter they call hyle, and that makes God a craftsman rather than a creator. Burgos argues against the genre: the philosophers proceed only by opinion, as their disagreeing shows, so nothing in Scripture may be made to depend on which of them is right. The first is a refutation and the second is a ruling about jurisdiction, and only the second could have been written after the schools had spent three centuries on Aristotle.