Aristotle and Early Christian Thought

Mark Edwards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315520193
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Histoire du Christianisme

In studies of early Christian thought, 'philosophy' is often a synonym for 'Platonism', or at most for 'Platonism and Stoicism'. Nevertheless, it was Aristotle who, from the sixth century AD to the Italian Renaissance, was the dominant Greek voice in Christian, Muslim and Jewish philosophy.

Aristotle and Early Christian Thought is the first book in English to give a synoptic account of the slow appropriation of Aristotelian thought in the Christian world from the second to the sixth century. Concentrating on the great theological topics – creation, the soul, the Trinity, and Christology – it makes full use of modern scholarship on the Peripatetic tradition after Aristotle, explaining the significance of Neoplatonism as a mediator of Aristotelian logic. While stressing the fidelity of Christian thinkers to biblical presuppositions which were not shared by the Greek schools, it also describes their attempts to overcome the pagan objections to biblical teachings by a consistent use of Aristotelian principles, and it follows their application of these principles to matters which lay outside the purview of Aristotle himself.

This volume offers a valuable study not only for students of Christian theology in its formative years, but also for anyone seeking an introduction to the thought of Aristotle and its developments in Late Antiquity.

1 The philosophy of Aristotle

Aristotle was born around 384 BC in Stagira, a Greek colony on the peninsula of Chalcidice, which at that time was under the rule of Macedonia.¹ On the death of his father Nicomachus, who was physician to King Amyntas, he lived as the ward of a family friend named Proxenus in the city of Atarneus in Asia Minor. At the age of 18, he made his home in Athens, and remained there for some 20 years as a member of Plato’s circle.² He returned for a time to Atarneus, perhaps to enjoy the company of Hermias (his friend and father-in-law, who governed the city on behalf of the Persians), or perhaps because he had failed to achieve recognition as the true successor of Plato. After the revolt and subsequent execution of Hermias, he was invited to the court of Philip of Macedon to act as tutor to his son Alexander. In 335, however (when Alexander was 21), he returned to Athens to found a school of his own in a gymnasium which, because of the proximity of the temple of Apollo Lyceius, was known as the Lyceum. The portico, or peripatos, in which he taught his students while walking gave rise to the custom of styling his followers Peripatetics. His own epithet, ‘the Stagirite’, is derived of course from the place of his birth, which was also the place of his death in 322, a year after he had found that Athens was no place for a Macedonian sympathizer in the wake of Alexander’s death. His lectures to his pupils were preserved, though only as notes, and it is only on their account that any interest attaches to the supposed discovery of his tomb.

The corpus

In the Hellenistic era, it would seem that Aristotle was not as well known by the ‘esoteric’ works which he had delivered at his school in the form of lectures as he was by the ‘exoteric’ writings which were sufficiently polished in style and sufficiently unexacting in argument to be read as literature. If we can believe the Greek polymath Strabo,³ who wrote in the late years of the first century BC, the esoteric works remained concealed for two centuries, together with those of Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus, in the town of Scepsis on the Aegean seaboard of Asia Minor. Early in the first century, they were purchased by the bibliophile Apellicon of Teos, who had them transcribed and made infelicitous efforts to emend them. While the appearance of these new copies checked the decline of the Peripatetic school, students were led astray by the imperfections of the text, and it was fortunate that this library fell into the hands of the roman general Sulla. When he brought them to Rome, a grammarian named Tyrannio arranged for their distribution, but the booksellers exercised no discernment in their choice of scribes. When the historian Plutarch takes up the story around 100 AD,⁴ he relates that through the offices of Tyrannio a Rhodian named Andronicus came into possession of various copies, which he made public and catalogued under the title Pinakes. He implies that this redaction was still current, and two centuries later it furnished a model for Porphyry’s edition of the works of his master, Plotinus. Eschewing the chronological arrangement, Porphyry says that he followed the precedents set by Apollodorus of Athens, who gathered the comic plays of Epicharmus into ten volumes, and the Peripatetic Andronicus, who divided the compositions of both Theophrastus and Aristotle into treatises.⁵ The meaning of this statement is unclear, as that of the next clause, which is often taken to mean that Andronicus juxtaposed texts which were related in subject matter. An Arabic book professing to reproduce a certain Ptolemy’s appraisal of his labours reports that the alphabetical sequence of titles was followed in certain parts of the corpus, and that Andronicus added treatises of his own in defence of his editorial policy and the ascription of the texts to Aristotle.⁶

Scholars would now hesitate to endorse the ancient judgements on the decline of the Peripatetics, savouring as they do of a post-apostolic age when in most Greek schools the spirit of free enquiry had been deadened by the continual repetition of the same thoughts that had stirred it into life. It is also widely agreed that until the last 20 years our debt to Andronicus was exaggerated. He is not credited in antiquity with any textual criticism of Aristotle’s writings, and he was evidently not the first to name or enumerate them. Diogenes Laertius appends a list of about 100 works to his life of Aristotle, of which perhaps one tenth (allowing for the vagaries of nomenclature) can be identified with items in our present corpus.⁷ Cicero is acquainted, by hearsay at least, with the Nicomachean Ethics, but suspects that it is so called because Nicomachus was the author rather than the dedicatee. His Topics is based, he tells us, on an Aristotelian treatise of the same name, although it is plainly not ours.⁸ If he had witnessed the republication of Aristotle’s esoteric writings, it is remarkable that he mentions Tyrannio yet says nothing of them.⁹ Before him, the Stoics had raised objections to Aristotelian logic which appear to bespeak some knowledge of texts that now compose the Organon. The Metaphysics, as we now style it, is a collection of short texts which were thought to be fit to come after the Physics: the collator is not likely to have been Andronicus, as was once assumed, for a proposed correction of this work was attributed to Eudorus of Alexandria, a Pythagorean or Platonist who was scarcely, if at all, his junior.¹⁰

Nevertheless, it is in this compilation that the works of Aristotle have come down to us. The commentaries, from the second century AD to the sixth, expound a selection of texts from the canon, which for the most part are also those most often laid under contribution in Christian writing. The following review of his philosophy will consequently have nothing to say of Aristotle’s rhetoric, his poetics, his political philosophy, his zoology or his minor works on ethics, some of which at least receive as much consideration in modern textbooks as his logic, his cosmology, his physics, his metaphysics and his psychology. I shall also lay most emphasis on those portions of each treatise which were to play a role in the shaping and refinement of ecclesiastical teaching on creation, incarnation, the Trinity and the immortality of the soul.

Logic: The categories

Aristotle’s logical writings constitute the Organon. The title of the first text, the Categories, is the Latinization of a Greek word which signifies not categories in the common English sense, but acts or modes of predication. While we are apt to speak as though the work posits ten orders of being or possible subjects of discourse, it might be more apt just to say that it begins with ousia, or substance, as the subject of predication, and that it then goes on to divide the possible predicates into nine classes.¹¹ To be more accurate still, it begins by distinguishing the ‘synonymous’ or univocal use of terms, as when we speak of each of two persons as a man, from the ‘homonymous’ or equivocal use of terms, which permits us to apply this term not only to a man of flesh and blood, but to the statue which differs from him in its formula of being (1a1–6). Next, we learn to differentiate predication ‘according to the subject’ (kath’ hypokeimenon) from predication ‘in the subject’ (en hypokeimenôi): an instance of the first type would be to say that X is a man, while an instance of the second would be to say that something is true of X which might be cease to be true without destroying his identity (1a20–1b9).

Any coupling of a subject with a predicate is a composite expression. The expressions which are not composite are substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action and affection (1b). Of these ten, substance is the one that cannot be predicated of another if it is taken in its primary sense denoting an individual. Such terms as ‘man’ and ‘animal’ are substances in a secondary sense (2a13), and predicable of the individual (as we have already seen) kath’ hypokeimenon. It is possible to predicate not only ‘man’ of a certain man like Socrates, but ‘animal’ of ‘man’ (as when we say ‘man is an animal’): we arrive at the species by the successive addition of differentiae to the genus, so that ‘man’ is that species of animal which is differentiated by two-footedness and a capacity for knowledge (1b.15–19). The species is more properly a substance than the genus, and no substance can be predicated ‘en hypokeimenôi’ (2a29).

The other nine terms, however, are predicated in this manner (2b–3a). An example of quantity is ‘two cubits long’; an example of quality is ‘white’ or ‘grammatical’; and an example of relation is ‘double’ or ‘greater’. In contrast to qualities, substances have no contrary, while on the other hand they admit of contrary predicates (3b–4b); in contrast to ‘white’ or ‘grammatical’, ‘man’ and ‘animal’ carry with them some reference to a primary substance. A quantity may be either discrete or continuous (4b20), but in neither case will it either have a contrary or admit of contradictory predicates (3b29–30; 5b11–12). A relative term is one that is predicated of one subject but understood only with reference to another (6a36–38). Thus, one mountain is ‘greater’ by comparison with another mountain, ‘virtue’ is always the virtue of some agent, and a slave belongs to the person whose slave he or she is. Some relations have contraries, as vice is contrary to virtue, and contrariety sometimes admits of gradation, as there are degrees of equality and inequality: in the case of ‘double’ or ‘triple’, there is no contrary, but a correlative relation is implied, for if X is the double of Y, Y must be the half of X. Similarly, the master’s existence entails that of the slave (6b15–32).

At the end of the treatise, Aristotle classifies what we have here called correlatives as mutually implicative contraries, distinguishing them both from simple contraries and from instances of privation, which is merely the absence of a certain property rather than the presence of some real property which is opposed to it (12b15–14a25). He proceeds to note five senses of priority: in time, as when one man is older than another; in necessary sequence, as one comes before two in the sequence of numbers; in learning or demonstration, as we master the alphabet before we are able to recognize syllables; in honour or affection, as when we say that those whom we love ‘come first’; and in causation, since we take it as an axiom that the cause precedes the effect (14a25–14b23). He also enumerates six kinds of motion: generation, destruction, increase, diminution, alteration, and change of place (15a13–15b17); in other texts, these are reduced to four by allowing generation and increase to subsume the obverse processes of destruction and diminution.

The six predicables which follow relation in Aristotle’s catalogue are treated more summarily, and continue to puzzle experts in ancient philosophy. The difficulties which they raise, however, are of less consequence for our study of Christian thought than those which concern the purpose and scope of the work and its place in the Aristotelian corpus. Commentators have differed from ancient times as to whether the Categories is an essay in ontology or in the proper use of language.¹² To many, it has seemed obvious that his discussion of ousia pertains to the nature of substance itself and not only to the proper employment of words; yet if this is so, his implication that only the individual, the concrete instantiation of form in matter, is a true substance cannot easily be reconciled with passages in the Metaphysics equating substance in its primary sense with eidos or form.¹³ The latter position is also that of the Platonists, if this form is understood to be that of the species rather than the individual, and the Platonist may repudiate the Categories or elect to harmonize the two philosophies by surmising that the priority of the concrete in this work is epistemic while the priority of the form in the other is ontological. Aristotle’s anatomy of the concept of priority lends some colour to this opinion; his failure to announce the scope and purpose of his treatise at the outset and his decision to commence instead by illustrating the difference between a homonym and a synonym have puzzled both his admirers and his detractors from his own time to the present.

Logic: Other treatises

The sequel to the Categories, which bears the title On Interpretation, is an essay in logic, prefaced by definitions of the noun, the verb and the sentence. Once these have been established, the principal object of the first half of the work is to distinguish the cases in which two propositions are contradictory from those in which they are contrary. The contradictory proposition to ‘all human beings are white’ is ‘some human beings are not white’, and it is evident that (granting the existence of human beings) one of these must be true and the other false. The contrary to ‘all human beings are white’ is ‘no human beings are white’, and while it is clear that both cannot be true at once, it is possible for both to be simultaneously false (17a25–18a11). Since they appear to be inescapable, these conclusions have given rise to little theological controversy; Aristotle, however, goes on to canvass the possibility that a different logic governs those statements which we should now call modal.¹⁴ If I say of some event that it happened in the past or is happening now, this statement of mine is either true or false at the time of its utterance – that is, either ‘p took place’ or its contradictory ‘p did not take place’ must be true. On the other hand, if I say of some future event ‘it may happen’ and another retorts ‘it may not happen’, it appears that both assertions can be true because both are entailed by the statement ‘p is possible’ (18b5–9). At the same time, it is not possible for the statements ‘p will happen’ and ‘p will not happen’ to be true concurrently. Since, therefore, time will show that either ‘p will happen’ or ‘p will not happen’ is true, should we not infer that if ‘p will happen’ is true it is impossible for p not to happen? And does it not follow from this that whatever will happen is predetermined and that hence there is no such thing as freedom (18b1–17)?

If the assertion ‘p may happen or p may not happen’ simply expresses my ignorance of the future, it involves no contradiction. If it means ‘whether p occurs or not, there is no natural or logical law...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. The philosophy of Aristotle
• 2. Aristotle in the second century
• 3. Aristotle and ante-Nicene Christianity
• 4. The Neoplatonic reaction to Aristotle
• 5. Aristotle and the Trinity in the fourth century
• 6. Gregory of Nyssa and Aristotle
• 7. Aristotle and the Christological controversy
• 8. John Philoponus: Theologian and apologist
• 9. Boethius and Aristotle
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index