Subsidence of the coarse

Meaning

Ravalement and affaissement describe lowering and settling of the coarser portion of first matter. Weight and lesser subtlety explain the direction within the author's creation account.

II.3.17 assigns the original separation to God. The heavier, coarser matter subsides while substance remains distinguished from excrement. The relevant later claim concerns passible sublunary things: they contain impurities capable of being removed. It is not an unrestricted statement that every divine or celestial reality is excrementitious. The essential/accidental pair must also be assigned correctly: substance is essential; the removable excrement is accidental. Subsidence thus helps explain the lower world's condition without making gross matter the creator of its own order.

The English keeps “when God separated” as the agent clause and translates passibles as things capable of suffering action. The falling motion belongs to the historical cosmology, not a silently substituted modern formation theory.