Protestant Hostility to Aristotle and the Great Chain of Being

                                                              Martin Luther

"Aristotle is the godless bulwark of the papists. He is to theology what darkness is to light. His ethics is the worst enemy of grace." - Martin Luther

 

        I get it. When Gaita says that Aristotle would have been utterly contemptuous of Christianity, I agree. I see that as flowing into the rejection of Aristotle by theologians like Ockham and Luther. I personally have a hard time reading or liking Aristotle, perhaps partly because of the translation (I recently reread parts of the Nichomachean Ethics in the Penguin edition, and the translator made Aristotle come alive to some extent). But to attack Aquinas for his use of Aristotle is way off.

        St. Thomas of Aquinas takes over some aspects of Aristotle to make sense of some deep aspects of Christianity than Plato cannot help with and that otherwise are threatened by the very interpretations promoted by Ockham and Luther – the inscrutable, arbitrary, all-powerful God who loves us worthless wretches for no reason. Aristotle gave Aquinas the resources to affirm the material Creation and the body – which are the deep aspects of Christianity I mentioned.

       Aristotle starts with Plato’s distinction between the particular and what of the particular that makes it possible for our intellect to apprehend as a kind of being. There is in my children features that are particular to them, that allow me to distinguish Paul from Kili, and both from Kelly. But there are features in all three that allow me (and you) to recognize them as human beings: essential features that distinguish all human beings from other kinds of beings, especially our closest neighbors in the animal kingdom. To this schema, Aristotle contributes two elaborations that St. Thomas of Aquinas then adapts.

       First, that which allows us to recognize the humanity in all three of my children (in all of us) expresses itself in and through the body. For Plato, the body has nothing to do with it. Plato portrays the body as a prison of the soul, as a mere shadow of an ideal reality. Perhaps as the numeral 3 is a “shadow” of the ideal number three – the connection between the material mark ‘3’ and the real number is arbitrary and conventional. We could also use the sign ‘III’ or ‘三,’ or anything you want.  Just as Paul would still be Paul in Kili’s body, and Kili would still be Kili in Paul’s. For Aristotle, however, that which allows me to recognize my children not only as the particular souls they are but also as human beings expresses itself in and through their bodies. Their souls and bodies are one reality with two aspects. Paul could not be Paul in a different body. Paul’s intelligible form – his soul – without his body would be a mere idea, not fully real. This idea of embodied form, bodies infused with soul, in stark contrast to Plato’s soul-body split, fits well with Christian teaching about the goodness of Creation, the miracle of the Incarnation, and the resurrection of the body. Our human destiny in Christianity is not to be pure spirits that have escaped from the evil of the body and the fallen material world, but life in a recreated, spiritualized body, in a recreated spiritualized world – a New Jerusalem. Thus, Aquinas used Aristotle’s changes of Plato to lay the groundwork for a truly Christian “theology of the body,” of which perhaps John Paul II’s (the Holy Spirit’s) work of the same name is the full flowering.

        Second, that which allows me to recognize both the particularity and the humanity of my children is not outside of time and space. Like all living beings, they develop, they grow, they reach (with luck and/or grace) their mature form. Aristotle understood you could only apprehend what and who they are from the perspective of their most mature form. Everything that goes into their lives ought to be for the sake for this mature form they will, God willing, reach.  This ‘for the sake of’ permeates reality, though it is most clear in organic beings. Eyes are for the sake of seeing, ears for the sake of hearing, etc.

        Moreover, we can see the ‘analogical’ connection between different ways of being ‘for the sake of’ (the technical term, teleology, comes from the Greek telos, meaning ‘end’, ‘goal’, or ‘purpose.’).  Sexuality in the cat, for instance, is for the sake of reproduction, and human sexuality shares this with cat sexuality. Sex is fertility. Yet as different kind of being – namely, as self-aware creatures – human sexuality is interwoven with respect, recognition of selves as unique limits on our wills. I’ve heard it said that male cats “rape” female cats. That is pure anthropomorphism. It makes no sense to apply to concept ‘rape’ to creatures that have no fully active will and no full self-awareness. Of course, things are different with us. Through sexuality, we simply cannot use another human being to ‘release pressure.’ Rape is not just a violation of ‘autonomy’ either. ‘Oh my God, I violated that woman’s autonomy’ – that as an express of remorse would be silly. Rape is an offence against the whole person, her body, her sexuality, her soul, her goodness. Such judgments presuppose the kind of difference between human women and female cats I have been talking about. It also presupposes the goodness of the body, including sexuality. If something is not good, then it cannot be violated.

      Further, as given through revelation and through the reasons of the human heart, the final purpose of being human is strongly connecting to becoming loving: maturing the capacity to love others, the community’s good, the Creation, God – and as loving, one self. Thus in light of our final purpose, sexuality becomes just one more way to love each other, the body (Creation), nature, and God. From the perspective of our inherent, natural flowering, we can also, for example, recognize pornography as the utter perversion of sexuality. We can see any form of education that blinds the young to this reality as corrupt all the way down to the roots. In light of what Thomas does with Aristotle’s embedding material being with purposes and final purposes, the universe can be seen as meaningful and imbued with value: can be seen as Creation. We should see this as a deepening of Genesis: “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” These various ways of being ‘for the sake of’ are similar and different: analogical. The meaning of ‘for the sake of’ depends on the reality of that to which it applies. The purpose of the stomach is both similar and yet different from the purpose of education, which is to say, of humanity. This is a drastic extension of Aristotle. Indeed, Aristotle relates to Thomas as animal sexuality relates to Christian sexuality.

       The point: Aquinas did not water down Christianity to adapt it to the best Aristotelian science of his day; Aquinas found some tools used by Aristotle in his Greek thought-world, and found that, adapted, deepened, they yielded insights into some difficult theological problems of his day. In so doing, Christians can deepen their understanding of their faith. For some people, faith must be nourished by understanding. Luther – and still more of those who went down the road he constructed – would deny nourishment to the intellect, making faith a blind act of obedience. To me, that seems to make us all a bunch of Uncle Toms and God our slave master. The other extreme: making our poor intellect the judge and jury of all reality and faith. Thomas navigates around both extremes.