Aristotelianism

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ARISTOTELIANISM

ARISTOTELIANISM is a school and style of philosophy that flourished throughout the Middle Ages in four languages and over three continents and that persists even now. Aristotle's school, the Lyceum, continued after his death under the leadership of his students, most notably Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 286 bce). The vigor and brilliance of the Aristotelian legacy diminished after Theophrastus and were revived only after several centuries, but the editing of Aristotle's writings under the supervision of Andronicus of Rhodes was accomplished around 30 bce in Rome. The work of Andronicus laid the literary foundations of the philosophical tradition of Aristotelianism. The philosophical, as distinct from the philological, study and development of Aristotelian philosophy owes much to Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 200 ce). His commentaries on Aristotle's Metaphysics and On the Soul became classics and were studied carefully by later Muslim and Jewish philosophers. Another important ancient commentator was Themistius (fl. fourth century ce) in Constantinople, whose paraphrase of book 12 of Aristotle's Metaphysics became a classic treatise in natural theology and was translated into Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin. Beginning in the fifth century, extremely valuable and influential commentaries on Aristotle's works were written by a group of scholar-philosophers who were more influenced by Plato and Plotinus than by Aristotle himself. Although most of these commentators were non-Christian, for instance, Simplicius (fl. sixth century), some were Christian, notably John Philoponus (fl. sixth century).

The transmission of the Aristotelian legacy to the Semitic world was begun by Syriac-speaking Christian thinkers who, living in or near the Byzantine empire, knew Greek and translated Aristotle's works either into Syriac first and then into Arabic or into Arabic directly. To some extent Aristotelian ideas had already filtered into the work of the Greek Church Fathers before becoming "semiticized" later on. In several Greek Christian theological texts we find some use of such Aristotelian terms as ousia (substance)—which in turn entered into Latin theological literature as substantia. Yet the Aristotelian philosophical influence on patristic literature was not so great as the Platonic and was generally confined to some of his logical writings, which were incorporated into the early medieval Greek and Latin educational program. Most of Aristotle's writings, especially the scientific, were either unknown or ignored in the West until they were translated from Arabic several centuries later.

By the ninth century a distinctive intellectual tradition had emerged in the Muslim world. Its practitioners, the falāsifah ("philosophers"), were set off from and opposed to the mutakallimūn ("theologians"). These Muslim philosophers, the first of whom was probably al-Kindī (803–873), attempted to assimilate the Greek philosophical tradition as they knew it and to formulate a conception of Islam as a religion in philosophical terms. The most notable of these philosophers were al-Fārābī (870–950), Ibn Sīnā (980–1037; known in the Latin-speaking world as Avicenna), and Ibn Rushd (1126–1198; Averroës). Each represented a further development and refinement of Aristotle's philosophy, with increasing liberation from the Plotinian supplements and interpretations that had accumulated along the way. This incorporation of Aristotle into the "house of Islam" did not pass unchallenged, and at times the Islamic opposition to Aristotelian philosophy was quite strong.

Once Arabicized, Aristotle's writings began to spread into other languages. Since the majority of medieval Jewry was living in the Muslim world and speaking and writing Arabic, the Arabic translations of Aristotle eventually became part of the Jewish philosophical tradition, which, although small, comprised a continuous series of notable thinkers throughout the Middle Ages. By the middle of the twelfth century, Aristotle had so thoroughly captivated the Jewish philosophical world that the earlier Neoplatonic writers were not only eclipsed but almost obliterated. From Maimonides (1135/8–1204) on, Jewish philosophical and theological literature was dominated by Aristotle. As in Islam, Jewish thinkers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such as Yitsḥaq Albalag and Mosheh Narboni, absorbed Aristotle's ideas. Critical response was sometimes moderate and sometimes severe and thoroughgoing. Nevertheless, Aristotle's influence was still prominent in Jewish thought throughout the Renaissance, diminishing only in the seventeenth century.

The Latinizing of Aristotle occurred both early and late. In the sixth century the Roman writer and civil servant Boethius translated some of Aristotle's logical treatises into Latin; but these first fruits were to be the only works of Aristotle available in the Latin world until the late twelfth century. Because of this lack the Latin philosophical world of the Middle Ages was for several centuries relatively "dark," while the Arabic-Hebrew world was "enlightened." This cultural gap was, however, to vanish. Initially Aristotle's works were rendered into Latin from Arabic or Hebrew along with the commentaries of Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd; later Latin translations were made directly from the Greek, although these were less common until the fifteenth century. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) had virtually the entire Aristotelian corpus at his disposal and was thus able to do for the Christian world what Maimonides and Ibn Rushd had tried to do for their coreligionists: establish a philosophical interpretation of the religious beliefs of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam within the general conceptual framework of Aristotle's philosophy.

Subsequent Christian theologians and philosophers continued Thomas's work by writing commentaries upon Aristotle's treatises and composing philosophical books in which Aristotle's ideas were either expanded or criticized. By the thirteenth century Aristotle was referred to in Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin as "the Philosopher." His writings constituted almost the entire philosophical library and curriculum of the medieval world until the fifteenth century, when signs of a Platonic revival begin to surface in Renaissance Italy. But even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such thinkers as Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) and Galileo (1564–1642) suffered because of the power of the Aristotelian professors and theologians at Italian universities.

Influence of Aristotelianism

Perhaps the most attractive feature of Aristotle's philosophy is its comprehensiveness. It is not just that Aristotle wrote on every topic from astronomy to zoology but more that what he did write added up to an integrated system of thought that made good sense out of ordinary human experience. Aristotle's philosophy begins with logic, and the first translations of Aristotle were the Latin versions of several of his logical treatises. Logic was to be a steady interest of medieval philosophers, who, in Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew, continued to develop, refine, and supplement Aristotelian logic as a topic-neutral discipline.

In most medieval curricula the subject studied after logic was natural science, an area of pervasive interest to Aristotle, who wrote treatises in both the physical and the biological sciences. In addition to his separate studies in the special sciences, Aristotle developed his scientific views into a general theory of nature, a "philosophy of nature." The medievals took Aristotle's general cosmological scheme for granted and usually adopted its main principles. The Aristotelian cosmos is a well-ordered physical system in which natural processes follow regular patterns and determinate goals. Aristotle's doctrine of natural teleology was a medieval commonplace. The same is true with respect to his doctrine of finitism. The medievals shared his general prejudice against the infinite and believed with him that the world is a "closed" system: finite in size and in the number of individuals contained within it.

Aristotle's philosophy of nature was also attractive to the medieval mind because it allowed for theology. His theory of celestial motion provides the premises for a proof for the existence of a deity; indeed, Aristotle himself gives such a proof, one that was developed by medieval philosophers and theologians through the thirteenth century. Eventually, Aristotle's own natural theology, sketched out in Metaphysics 12, became the philosophical paradigm according to which many medieval thinkers developed their own theories of divine attributes. Further, Aristotle's theory of celestial motion allowed for a plurality of "unmoved movers" of the heavenly spheres, although one of them—God—was regarded as primary. Medieval philosophers took this doctrine even further and, under the influence of Plotinian themes, developed a cosmology within which various levels and kinds of cosmic intellects, or powers, devoid of matter, function within the universe. Aristotle's cosmos became to the medieval mind a richly diversified scale of being, some of whose rungs were occupied by intellectual forces that were inferior to the supreme mind, God, but superior to all embodied souls or animate beings, such as humans, dogs, and roses. At this point a marriage between Aristotle and Plotinus had been arranged, one that the biblical doctrine of angels either motivated or could easily be fitted into. The biblical angels were indeed identified by al-Fārābī and Maimonides as Aristotle's separate, unmoved movers. In this context we have really a marriage among three partners: Aristotle, Plotinus, and scripture.

One Aristotelian idea that proved to be troublesome, however, was the thesis of the eternity of the world. After all, what could be more clear or explicit than Genesis 1:1: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"? Throughout the Middle Ages, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian thinkers wrestled with what appeared to be an irreconcilable conflict between Aristotle and scripture on this fundamental cosmological doctrine. Various solutions were proposed, some veering toward Aristotle, others toward scripture. Of the former variety was the view of the Muslim philosophers who developed a doctrine of eternal creation, whereby the universe eternally emanates from God, its first and ultimate cause. Others, like Levi ben Gershom, or Gersonides (1288–1344), a French-Jewish philosopher and astronomer, criticized and rejected the Aristotelian eternity thesis altogether and defended the biblical doctrine of creation. But at this point the creationist camp split: some advocated the idea, an "absurdity" to the Greeks, that God created the world ex nihilo; others, a small minority including Gersonides, adopted the Platonic suggestion of a divine sculptor crafting the world out of formless, uncreated matter (see Gersonides' The Wars of the Lord 6.1.17). Some thinkers, however, believed that this question was not philosophically decidable and that one had to appeal to revelation for the correct answer. This cosmological agnosticism was advocated by Thomas Aquinas and was accepted by many Christian theologians thereafter (Summa theologiae 1.46.2).

The question of creation proved to have more than just cosmological implications. Inseparably bound up with it was the issue of miracles and divine omnipotence. Maimonides welded the link between these questions quite tightly: the affirmation of the world's eternity implied strict determinism, which rules out, he claimed, the possibility of miracles (see his The Guide of the Perplexed 2.25). In turn, the denial of miracles implies a serious restriction on God's omnipotence. By the end of the thirteenth century some of the more "irreconcilable" philosophical and scientific theses of Aristotle and the Muslim philosophers were condemned as heretical and false by Stephen Tempier, bishop of Paris. Aristotle's doctrine of the eternity of the universe was equated with a curtailment of God's infinite power.

A number of modern scholars have maintained that although the 1277 condemnation by Stephen Tempier superficially looks like theological interference with philosophical inquiry, it really was not. Instead, these scholars claim, thinkers were thus liberated from their Aristotelian fetters and were free to pursue lines of thought, particularly scientific hypotheses, that previously had not been open to them and that were ultimately to replace Aristotelian physics. Whether or not the condemnation itself led to a more critical approach to Aristotelian natural philosophy is difficult to determine. What is undoubtedly true is that from the fourteenth century on there was a growing dissatisfaction with some of the more important ideas in Aristotle's cosmology and physics. That this critique took place in the Jewish philosophical orbit too suggests that it was not so much Stephen Tempier who stimulated the critical spirit as the continuous close study of Aristotle's ideas by independent-minded philosophers and theologians. Gersonides, living far from Paris, criticized Aristotle's major principle of mechanics, the theorem that every moving body is moved by an external mover. With the rejection of this physical principle, the argument for the existence of God as the first unmoved mover fails.

Perhaps the most thoroughgoing and profound premodern critique of Aristotelian natural philosophy was developed by the Spanish-Jewish theologian Ḥasdai Crescas (1340–1420). Wanting to undermine the whole medieval Aristotelian tradition in Jewish theology, Crescas correctly focused his efforts upon the basic physical theorems of Aristotle. One by one these cornerstones crumble under Crescas's acute criticisms. Why can't there be an actual infinite? Why can't there be a vacuum? Do the heavenly bodies need to be continuously moved by external, incorporeal unmoved movers? Why can't there be a successive series or even a simultaneous plurality of worlds? These and other questions eventually led Crescas to reject the whole Aristotelian physical system. In its place he suggested an actually infinite universe in which the heavenly bodies move according to their own inherent motion, without unmoved movers. Such a universe, Crescas insisted, manifests God's infinite power.

Another persisting perplexity that the medievals inherited from Aristotle had to do with his psychology. Aristotle's obscure, indeed mysterious remarks about "the intellect that makes all things" and "the intellect that becomes all things" (On the Soul 3.5) turned out to be one of the most commented-upon passages in his entire corpus. His somewhat parenthetical comment that the former intellect might be immortal and eternal aggravated the matter and opened up a can of philosophical and theological worms. What did Aristotle mean by an active mind and a passive mind? Where are these intellects? Are they immanent within the human mind or transcendent? How do these different intellectual functions work? Wherein lies the immortality of the intellect? These were only a few of the questions that were to vex Aristotle's commentators and medieval disciples.

Alexander of Aphrodisias made several important terminological and conceptual clarifications of this passage. Dubbing the active intellectual part the "agent intellect" (nous poiētikos ) and the passive part the "material intellect" (nous hulikos ), he went on to claim that the former is a unique, transcendent incorporeal power identical with God, whereas the latter is a corporeal disposition of the human body. The agent intellect is the active cause in human cognition; the material intellect is the receptive, or passive, capacity to acquire knowledge. Finally, the mature human intellect perfected by its accumulated cognitions is the "acquired intellect" (nous epiktētos ). It is this last member of this cognitive trio that Alexander suggests might be immortal. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers agreed that the agent intellect was not only the primary active cause in human intellection but also a major factor in prophecy. The prophet is a person whose intellect is so perfect that he is eligible to receive a special "overflow" from the agent intellect that makes him the recipient of divine information, which he conveys to other people. The ordinary religious believer refers to the agent intellect as an angel, since scripture, written in the language of ordinary people, depicts the agent intellect figuratively so as to give the reader some idea of how prophecy is given.

A number of Parisian philosophers, following Ibn Rushd's conclusion that agent intellect and material intellect are virtually and actually one, could not quite reconcile that view with their religious belief in individual immortality. Thus emerged the notorious doctrine of the double truth, according to which what is taught by divine revelation may not be compatible with what is taught by sound philosophy. Throughout the late thirteenth century the Latin philosophical-theological scene was obsessed with this issue, until the "Latin Averroists" were finally suppressed. In this battle to "protect the faith" Thomas Aquinas wrote a polemical essay against the Averroists. According to him, the agent intellect is not a unique transcendent power but is immanent in each human mind, which is as a whole a substance capable of independent existence. Individual immortality is thereby ensured (Summa theologiae 1.75, 76, 79, and On the Unicity of the Intellect: Against the Averroists ).

Despite the various criticisms made of these different aspects of Aristotle's doctrines, his influence remained strong throughout the Middle Ages and even in the Renaissance. Galileo's frequent sarcastic and mordant criticisms of the "simple-minded" Aristotelian professors, who prefer to look at the heavens in their books rather than through the telescope, testify to the still-living tradition of Aristotelian thought in the seventeenth century.

Aristotelianism was influential in the twentieth century in Roman Catholic theological circles and in university faculties. Recently, however, the Aristotelian imprint upon Christian theology has begun to seem either foreign or obsolete to theologians who look to modern philosophers for inspiration. Nevertheless, Aristotle's metaphysical ideas and vocabulary persist and are defended or at least employed by some contemporary Anglo-American philosophers, such as P. F. Strawson, who consider him to be one of the more suggestive thinkers in the classical tradition of Western philosophy.

Bibliography

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Sorabji, Richard. Times, Creation, and the Continuum. Ithaca, N.Y., 1983. A fine philosophical and historical study of basic topics in Aristotle's philosophy.

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