Matter as an Image of the Good
Ferdinand Ulrich’s Metaphysics of Creation
- Philosophy
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
The question of matter has been a quiet but enduring question in our desire to know being—and therefore to know ourselves—since we began to ask questions about the nature of being at all. Indeed, in the Timaeus, Plato writes that matter is only graspable “by some bastard reasoning.” The use of this evocative adjective is not meant simply to indicate that matter is bad or the source of all evil, but rather indicates matter’s “middleness”: not exactly being itself, but also not nonbeing simpliciter. Thus, thinking about matter cannot happen in the usual way. Ferdinand Ulrich is not a usual thinker and this book seeks to illuminate Ulrich’s radical way of thinking being and thinking being as gift, which is to say, it seeks to explain Ulrich’s metaphysics of creation. It does so in light of Ulrich’s understanding of matter, which has a central place in his work, and indeed is for Ulrich the test-case for whether any metaphysics is sufficiently radical.
Endorsements (3)
Foreword
“Doctor Coleman’s thematic focus—the role that Ferdinand Ulrich sees matter playing in the manifestation of divine goodness ad extra—provides her with a lens through which to exhibit the architecture of Ulrich’s entire metaphysics without sacrificing precision, economy, or grace. In so doing, she has produced one of the first, as well as one of the finest, accounts of Ulrich’s metaphysical vision in any language.”
“Ferdinand Ulrich is a challenging metaphysical and theological thinker whose work is not as well known in the English-speaking world as it should be. Rachel Coleman helps to remedy this situation. This book will significantly advance the reception of his work. She offers us a remarkable exploration of his thought in connection with the metaphysics of creation of both Aquinas and Ulrich. This is a lucid, judicious and illuminating work which is highly recommended.”
“What the scholastics called materia prima, designates the fundamental changeability of all corporal beings. Materia gives us the chance to become over time ‘essential’ (wesenhaft: Meister Eckhart) by living in the ‘unity of life and death’ (Ferdinand Ulrich). In her remarkable book Rachel Coleman unfolds in detail the principles in Ulrich’s work, with which he describes materia as an essential part of God’s giving of being (creation), that establishes our freedom.”
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