Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought: 1) The Greek ‘form-matter’ motive

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'The religious ground-motives in the development of Western civilization are basically the following:

1. The "form-matter" ground-motive of Greek antiquity in alliance with the Roman power motive (imperium).

2. The Scriptural ground-motive of the Christian religion: creation, fall, and redemption through Jesus Christ in communion with the Holy Spirit.

3. The Roman Catholic [Thomistic] ground-motive of "nature-grace", which seeks to combine the two mentioned above.

4. The modern humanistic ground motive of "nature-freedom", in which an attempt is made to bring the three previous motives to a religious synthesis concentrated upon the value of human personality.' 

(Herman Dooyeweerd, Roots of Western Culture: Pagan, Secular, and Christian Options, Paideia Press, 2012, p15) 

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Dooyeweerd – The Four Formative Undercurrents of Western Thought: 

1. The Greek ‘form-matter’ motive.

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 39-32)

The central motive of Greek philosophy, which we have designated as the ‘form-matter’ motive in line with the Aristotelian terminology, originated from the meeting of the pre-Homeric religion of life and death, with the younger, cultural religion of the Olympian gods. The older religion deified the ever-flowing stream of organic life, which issues from mother earth and cannot be bound to any individual form. In consequence, the deities of this religion are amorphous. It is from this shapeless stream of ever-flowing organic life that the generations of perishable beings originate periodically, whose existence, limited by a corporeal form, is subjected to the horrible fate of death, designated by the Greek terms anangkē or heimarmenē tuchē. This existence in a limiting form was considered an injustice since it is obliged to sustain itself at the cost of other beings so that the life of one is the death of another. Therefore all fixation of life in an individual figure is avenged by the merciless fate of death in the order of time. This is the meaning of the mysterious utterance of the ancient Greek philosopher, Anaximander, which reads “the (divine) Origin of all things is the apeiron” (that is to say, that which lacks a limiting form). “The things return to that from which they originate according to destiny. For they pay to each other penalty and retribution of their injustice in the order of time.”

The central motive of this religion, consequently, is that of the shapeless stream of life eternally flowing throughout the process of birth and decline of all that exists in a corporeal form. This is the original religious sense of the matter-principle in Greek philosophy. It issued from a deification of the biotic aspect of our temporal horizon of experience and has found its most suggestive expression in the ecstatic cult of Dionysus, imported from Thrace.

The form-motive, on the other hand, was the central motive of the younger Olympian religion, the religion of form, measure and harmony. It was rooted in the deification of the cultural aspect of classical Greek society. This motive found its most profound expression in the cult of the Delphian god, Apollo, the legislator. The Olympian gods have left mother earth with its ever-flowing stream of organic life and its inescapable anangkē. They have acquired the Olympus as their residence and have a personal and immortal form, imperceptible to the eye of sense, an ideal form of a perfect and splendid beauty, the genuine prototype of the Platonic idea as the imperishable metaphysical form of true being. But these immortal gods have no power over the anangkē, the inexorable fate of death. Remember the utterance of Homer in his Odyssey: “The immortals too cannot help lamentable man when the cruel anangkē strikes him down.” This is why the younger Olympian religion was only accepted as the public religion of the Greek polis, the city-state. But in their private life the Greeks continued to hold to the old earthly gods of life and death.

The form-matter motive, originating in the religious consciousness of the Greeks from the meeting of these two antagonistic religions, was not in itself dependent upon the mythological and ritual form of the latter. As its central basic motive it ruled Greek thought from the very beginning. The autonomy claimed by Greek philosophical theories over against the popular belief implied merely an abandonment of those mythological forms of the latter which were bound to sensuous representation. It did not mean a break with the form-matter motive, as such. To the contrary it was much rather the common religious starting-point of all Greek thinkers. It was this very basic motive, which alone guaranteed a real community of thought between Greek philosophical tendencies, polarly opposed to one another. It determined the Greek view of nature, or physis, which excluded in principle the biblical idea of creation; it also ruled the classical Greek meaning of the terms eidos and eide, which are only understandable from the religious significance of the Greek form-motive. It lay at the foundation both of the Greek metaphysical view of being in its opposition to the visible world of becoming and decline, and of the Greek views of human nature and human society. Because of its dialectical character, it has involved Greek thought in a dialectical process that displays all the traits which we have briefly indicated.

MOTIVES: ONE  TWO  THREE  FOUR

Excerpt from ‘In the Twilight of Western Thought’ by Herman Dooyeweerd, Paideia Press, 2012, pp 29-32)

For similar analyses of religious ground motives, see New Critique Volume I, Part II; and Dooyeweerd, The Roots of Western Culture, Collected Works, Series B, Volume 3.

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SEE ALSO -

DOOYEWEERD: Form-Matter ground-motive | Superheroes and Zombies
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