THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART

The inclination to take the matter-form structure to be the constitution of every being receives, however, particular encouragement from the fact that, on the basis of religious — biblical — faith, the totality of beings is represented, in advance, as something created. And here, that means "made." The philosophy of this faith can, of course, assure us that God's creative work is to he thought of as different from the action of a craftsman. But when, at the same time or even beforehand, in accordance with a predetermination, taken on faith, of Thomistic philosophy for biblical interpretation, the ens creatum is thought out of the unity of materia and forma, then faith is interpreted by a philosophy whose truth is based on an unconcealment of beings that is of another kind than the world believed in by faith.^a

Now it is indeed possible that the idea of creation which is grounded in faith can lose its power to guide our knowledge of beings as a whole. Yet, once in place, the theological interpretation of everything that is, the viewing of the world in terms of matter and form that was borrowed from an alien philosophy, can remain in force. This is what happened in the transition from the Middle Ages to the modem period. The metaphysics of modernity is based, too, on the matter-form structure, a structure devised in the Middle Ages but which itself, in its own words, merely recalls the buried essence of εἶδος and ὕλη]. Thus the interpretation of the thing in terms of matter and form, whether it remains medieval or has become Kantian-transcendental, has become commonplace and self-evident. But for that reason, no less than the other interpretations of the thingness of the thing we have discussed, it represents an assault on the thing-being of the thing.

The situation reveals itself as soon as we call actual things "mere things." The "mere," after all, means the removal of the character of serviceability and of being made. The mere thing is a kind of equipment that has been denuded of its equipmental being. Its thing-being consists in what is then left over. But the kind of being possessed by this remainder is not actually determined. It remains questionable whether the process of stripping away everything equipmental will ever disclose the thingness of the thing. Thus the third interpretation of the thing, that which bases itself on the matter-form structure, also turns out to be an assault on the thing.

The three modes of defining the thing we have here discussed conceive it as, respectively, the hearer of traits, the unity of a sensory manifold, and as

^a Reclam edition, 1950. (1) The biblical faith in creation; (2) the causal-ontic explanation of Thomism; (3) the original, Aristotelian interpretation of the ὄν.

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