ABSTRACT
The concept of materia accorded well with the fundamental medieval doctrine of the transcendence of God and the complete dependence of the world. The word materia was certainly suitable for rendering the Aristotelian concept of 'that out of which', the enduring substrate. The Neoplatonic interpretation of the concept of matter continued largely unchallenged in medieval thought until the Scholastic period. But the rediscovery of Aristotle by Western thinkers did not result in a full recovery of the Aristotelian conception of matter. Augustine's conception of matter, which derived from Neoplatonism, strongly influenced subsequent thought. Plotinus had accepted Aristotle's conception of hyl as in itself without definiteness; it is thus apeiron, the indefinite. Thus while Neoplatonism continued the Aristotelian conception of matter as the correlative of form, the Neoplatonist polarization of form and matter as being and not-being constituted a great divergence from the Aristotelian doctrine.
