Marxist essayist Ernst Bloch like his friends Lukacs and Benjamin, was impelled by the horrors of the first world war towards Marxism, seeing in it a defence against the Armageddon which might otherwise engulf humanity. Bloch re-reads the Aristotelian dichotomy of potency (matter) and act (intellect) in terms of the progressive realization of potency in a world fully illuminated by reason. The Scholastics doctrine that primordial matter is first cause of the universe is thus interpreted horizontally, in our history, rather than vertically, in terms of an inaccessible heaven. Marxism itself is part of the historical "figuration" of this process.