CHAPTER X.
ARISTOTLE SINCE THE CHRISTIAN ERA.
We have seen above (p. 38) that in the time of Cicero—that is to say, shortly before the Christian era—the works of Aristotle were very little known even to philosophers. The edition of those works by Andronicus was made and published in the last half-century before the birth of Christ. And then—three hundred years after the death of Aristotle—there began silently and imperceptibly the first dawn of that wider reputation of him, which was destined to shine through the whole of Europe for a thousand years with ever-growing and increasing splendour.
During the period of the Roman Empire, the day for original philosophies was gone by. The works of Aristotle, in the form in which they were now presented to the world—being a culmination of ancient thought, and containing a dogmatic exposition of the outlines of every science; being rich in ideas and facts, precise in terms, and yet condensed, and often obscure—offered to the minds of intellectual men, and especially the subtle Greeks of those times, exactly the kind of food and employment which suited them. To study one of these treatises, and comment upon it, became now regarded as sufficient achievement for the life of one man. Aristotle thus shared the honours awarded to the sacred books of different nations; he became placed so high as an authority, that merely to expound or explain his meaning was a path to fame. The race of Greek commentators, or “Scholiasts,” was spread over three or four centuries, the most distinguished names among them being those of Boethus, Nicolas of Damascus, Alexander of Ægæ, Aspasius, Adrastus, Galenus, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Porphyry, lamblichus, Dexippus, Themistius, Proclus, Ammonius, David the Armenian, Asclepius, Olympiodorus, Simplicius, and Johannes Philoponus. The writings of many of these worthies have been lost, and their memory only survives through their having been quoted in the more enduring commentaries of others. What remains of the whole body of these Scholia is various in worth, ranging from emptiest platitudes up to remarks of subtlety and ability. Occasionally, but too rarely, the Greek scholiasts preserve for us some precious sentence or tradition of antiquity. The late Professor Brandis has condensed into one closely-printed quarto volume all that he considered worth notice of the “Scholia upon Aristotle,” and even with some of these we might have dispensed.
Gradually Christianity took possession of the Roman Empire, and then came the inundation of barbarians, whose uncultivated natures had no sympathy with literature, science, or philosophy. Libraries were destroyed, or, unused, underwent the course of natural decay. The arts fell into abeyance, and Western Europe, as if in order to be born again, seemed to pass through the waters of Lethe. From the sixth to the thirteenth century all knowledge of the Greek writers was lost. But long before the close of this period intellectual life had begun to stir again among the friars and ecclesiastics of the Continent; and the chief nourishment for that life consisted of a fragment from antiquity, being none other than Latin translations[1] of the so-called ‘Categories’ and ‘Interpretation’ of Aristotle (see above, pp. 50-57), and of the ‘Introduction’ of Porphyry to the first-named of the two treatises. In earlier and better-informed ages Aristotle had been repudiated by some of the Fathers of the Church as being, at all events in comparison with Plato, “atheistical.” But no harm to theology could arise from a study of the dry formulæ of logic and metaphysics. Nay, these formulæ, while totally devoid of all dangerous colouring or character—being merely some of the fundamental and ordinary principles of reasoning —were likely to do good service to the Church, by training her adherents to argue skilfully in her behalf. Thus, the ‘Categories’ and ‘Interpretation’ won their place as text-books for youth; and thus the “Scholastic Philosophy,” which consisted in lectures and disputations chiefly on matters mooted by Aristotle, took its rise out of the Latin translations of these Peripatetic treatises.
Afterwards a richer knowledge of Aristotle came to the schools of the West from what might have been considered an unlikely source—namely, the Arabs in Spain. Departing from the example of him who burned the Alexandrian library, and from the traditionary tendencies of Mahometans in all ages, the Arabs of Bagdad, Cairo, and Cordova indulged in a period of enlightenment and of intellectual activity. This period was chiefly inaugurated by Almamun, the son of Harun-al-Raschid, and seventh of the Abbasside Caliphs at Bagdad (a.d. 810), who “invited the Muses from their ancient seats. His ambassadors at Constantinople, his agents in Armenia, Syria, and Egypt, collected the volumes of Grecian science; at his command they were translated by the most skilful interpreters into the Arabic language; his subjects were exhorted assiduously to peruse these instructive writings; and the successor of Mahomet assisted with pleasure and modesty at the assemblies and disputations of the learned.” “The age of Arabian learning continued about five hundred years till the great irruption of the Moguls, and was coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals.”[2] It was during the twelfth century that the Arabs of Cordova became the schoolmasters of the “schoolmen,” and poured a flood of learning into Europe. The chief of them was the great Ibn-Raschid (A.D. 1120-1198), whose name was Latinised into Averroes. Besides other philosophical works, he wrote 'Commentaries' on all the principal works of Aristotle, and these were translated into Latin and published abroad. Averroes knew no Greek, and his commentaries were made upon the existing Arabic versions of Aristotle; but he quoted the translation of the text of each passage entire before elucidating the meaning, and thus he brought a great deal of the thought of Aristotle, though passed through a double translation, to the notice of Europe. In commenting upon Aristotle, his attention seems to have been drawn to that passage, above referred to (p. 172), on the difference between the Constructive and the Passive Reason. Following out this idea, he made it the basis of a doctrine of “Monopsychism,” to the effect that the Constructive Reason is one individual substance, being one and the same in Socrates and Plato, and all other individuals; whence it follows that individuality consists only in bodily sensations, which are perishable, so that nothing which is individual can be immortal, and nothing which is immortal can be individual. These doctrines spread from the Arabs to the Jews of Spain, and from them to the Christian schools, and Averroism became a leaven in the scholastic philosophies, causing, as might be expected, the most virulent strife between the opponents and supporters of the theory of “Monopsychism.”
In the latter part of the thirteenth century Aristotle reached the height of his glory. At this time, partly from Arabian copies in Spain and partly from Greek MSS which the Crusaders brought with them from Constantinople, Western Christendom had obtained the whole of his works. He was now commented on by eminent ecclesiastics; indeed he occupied and almost monopolised the most powerful minds of Europe. Chief among these may be mentioned Albert “the Great,” the most fertile and learned of the schoolmen, who has left commentaries on Aristotle which fill six folio volumes; and his pupil, St Thomas Aquinas, who prepared (1260-70), through the instrumentality of the monk Wilhelm of Moerbecke, a new translation of the entire works after Greek originals; and who himself wrote laborious commentaries on the ‘Meta-physics,’ the ‘Ethics,’ and other books. It may be observed that by these great churchmen Aristotle is treated with the most implicit confidence; they seem blind to all that is Greek and pagan in his point of view; they defend him from charges of Averroism; and treat him, in short, as one of themselves. All this, of course, argues a great want of the critical and historical faculty, and much mixing up of things—“syncretism,” as it is called by the learned; but historical criticism was hardly to be looked for in the Middle Ages.
The Stagirite was now almost incorporated with Christianity. The Summa Theologiæ of St Thomas Aquinas was a compound of the logic, physics, and ethics of Aristotle with Christian divinity. But the highest honour of all came to him in the year 1300 A.D., when he was hailed in the ‘Divina Commedia’ of Dante as “the master of those that know,” sitting as head of “the philosophic family,” to whom Socrates and Plato and all the rest must look up.[3] Him Dante figured thus sitting in the “limbo,” or fringe, of hell, with all the great spirits of antiquity, who had lived before Christianity and without baptism; they were free from torment, but were sad, because they felt the desire, but had no hope, of seeing God.
Dante had been a diligent and reverential student of Aristotle, especially in the commentaries of St Thomas Aquinas. In his ‘Convito,’ he says that “Aristotle is most worthy of trust and obedience, as being the master-artist who considers of and teaches us the end[4] of human life, to which, as men, we are ordained.” In the 11th canto of the ‘Inferno,’ he follows up Aristotle’s views of the “unnatural” character of usury (see above, p. 122), and places usurers in hell among those who do violence to God and Nature, the reasons for which he sets forth in a learned discourse. But the most striking thing of all is to find that Dante, in the 24th canto of the ‘Paradiso,’ commences the statement of his own theological creed in words taken directly from Aristotle’s definition of the Deity—
One sole eternal Godhead, of whose love
All heaven is moved, himself unmoved the while.”[5]
And in the 27th canto, Beatrice, standing on the ninth heaven, points to the circumference, or primum mobile, of Aristotle (see above, p. 136), and discourses to Dante in the following thoroughly Aristotelian terms:—
Starts: motionless the centre, and the rest
All moved around. Except the soul divine,
Place in this heaven is none; the soul divine,
Wherein the love, which ruleth o'er its orb,
Is kindled, and the virtue, that it sheds:
One circle, light and love, enclasping it.
As this doth clasp the others; and to Him,
Who draws the bound, its limit only known.
Measured itself by none, it doth divide
Motion to all, counted unto them forth,
As by the fifth or half ye count forth ten.
The vase, wherein time's roots are plunged, thou seest:
Look elsewhere for the leaves.”
It was not till 240 years after these verses had been written that Copernicus propounded his system of the motion of the earth and the other planets round the sun; and that system only gradually won its way to acceptance, even in scientific minds, and with the aid of the demonstrations of Galileo. Till the end of the seventeenth century the Aristotelian system—further elaborated by the Alexandrian Ptolemy and by King Alphonso X. of Castile (1252-1284 A.D.)—maintained its influence, and filled the literature of all Europe with a particular train of associations.[6] Shakespeare lived and died in the faith of the older system. Milton had been bred in it as a boy, and the plan of his universe in the 'Paradise Lost' was drawn according to it. Yet still, as a learned man, he was well acquainted with all that could be said in favour of the Copernican system. And he puts these arguments into the mouth of Adam in the 8th book of ‘Paradise Lost.’ An angel, in reply, reminds Adam—what is, in fact, the case—that neither the motion of the sun nor of the earth can be absolutely proved; and adds that these are matters too high and abstruse for human inquiry. Milton’s mind was “apparently uncertain to the last which of the two systems, the Ptolemaic or the Copernican, was the true one.”[7] Surely, however, if but slowly, the Copernican theory established itself in the mind of Europe; and when once it had been established, then a great gulf was set between Aristotle and the modern world.
We have seen Aristotle an object of reverence to the great scholastic philosophers and the great poet the Middle Ages. But we must not forget that the universities were, so to speak, founded in Aristotle—that for a long time the chief end of their being was to teach Aristotle. Chaucer describes the zeal of the poor Oxford student for this kind of learning in the following terms:—
That unto logik hadde long y go:
As lene was his hors as is a rake,
And he was not right fast, I undertake;
But looked holwe and thereto soberlye.
Ful threadbare was his overest courtepye.
For he had gotten him no benefice,
He was not worldly to have an office.
For, him was lever have at his beddes hed
Twenty bookes clothed in blake or red
Of Aristotle and his philosophie,
Than robes rich or fidel or sautrie.”
This almost living picture from the fourteenth century doubtless represented correctly the loyal and undoubting faith in the Stagirite, to be found among many generations of students, not only at Oxford, but at Paris and Padua, and the other seats of universities.
But a spirit of revolt against authority in general, and especially against the authority of Aristotle, was destined to show itself, being fostered by the progress of time, the revival of learning, and the Reformation. In the year 1536 we find Peter Ramus, then a youth of twenty years of age, choosing as the subject of his thesis for the M.A. degree, in the University of Paris, the proposition, that “Whatever has been said by Aristotle is false!” It may be imagined with what consternation the announcement of this thesis, which seemed scarcely less than blasphemous, was received by the academical authorities. However, the young Ramus acquitted himself with such ability, as well as boldness, that he obtained his degree and the licence to teach. This licence he employed in lecturing and writing against the Peripatetic logic. He propounded a method of his own in which more attention was to be paid to the discovery of truth. He formed a sect of Ramists, and rallied round himself the malcontent spirits of France, Germany, and Switzerland. In some of the universities Ramism obtained a firm hold. But he had to fight a hard battle with the Aristotelians, who were armed with official power, and not slow to use it in the way of persecution; his books were often condemned to be suppressed, and finally he was a martyr to the cause which he had chosen. Being a Huguenot, he was assassinated by his Aristotelian enemies during the massacre of St Bartholomew (1572 A.D.) The arguments of Ramus seem nowadays to have no weight against the ‘Organon’ of Aristotle, but they are valid against that perverted use of the ‘Organon’ which constituted the Scholastic method. It was quite necessary that the spell which Aristotle had so long exercised over the world should be broken and Ramus did good service in somewhat rudely assailing it.
If the first great attack upon Aristotle proceeded from a spirit of revolt within the logic-schools, the second was a direct manifestation of the results of the Renaissance, and consisted in bringing learning and criticism to bear upon the works of Aristotle. This was done by Patrizzi, or Patricius, who brought out his ‘Discussiones Peripateticæ’ at Bâle in 1571. Patricius possessed a combination of character which is fortunately not often seen,—being extremely learned and very able, but, at the same time, ill-conditioned, egotistical, and wrong-headed. Preferring in his own mind a sort of Neo-Platonic philosophy to the Peripatetic system, he set himself to work in the book just mentioned to pull Aristotle to pieces. The first section of the ‘Discussiones’ treated of the life and morals of the Stagirite, and raked together against him all the personal charges to be found scattered through the remains of antiquity (see above, p. 28); the second section critically assailed with great learning the genuineness of the works of Aristotle, and proved them all to be spurious (!) The remaining sections undertook to refute the system of philosophy which they contained. The attack of Patricius was overdone in malignity, yet still it had a powerful effect in inducing men to think for themselves when they saw the claims of their oracle thus stringently called in question.
Another impulse to reaction against authority was given by science itself, in the shape of discoveries which were irreconcilable with the dicta of authority. In the year 1592, Galileo, wishing to test the truth of Aristotle’s principle that “the velocity of falling bodies is proportionate to their weight,” ascended the leaning tower of Pisa, and launching bodies of different weight, demonstrated that they reached the ground simultaneously, and thus that the principle which had been so long held with undoubting faith was erroneous. The Aristotelians of Pisa, however, were so much annoyed by this demonstration, that they compelled Galileo to leave the city.
Aristotle’s philosophy had, since the days of St Thomas Aquinas, been bound up with the Catholic Church. Therefore it is not to be wondered at that Luther, in the commencement of the Reformation, should have “inveighed against the Aristotelian logic and metaphysics, or rather against the sciences themselves; nor was Melanchthon at that time much behind him. But time ripened in this, as it did in theology, the disciple’s excellent understanding; and he even obtained influence enough over the master to make him retract some of that invective against philosophy which at first threatened to bear down all human reason. Melanchthon became a strenuous advocate of Aristotle, in opposition to all other ancient philosophy. He introduced into the University of Wittenberg, to which all Protestant Germany looked up, a scheme of dialectics and physics, founded upon the Peripatetic school, but improved by his own acuteness and knowledge. Thus in his books the physical science of antiquity is enlarged by all that had been added in astronomy and physiology. It need hardly be said that the authority of Scripture was always resorted to as controlling a philosophy which had been considered unfavourable to natural religion.”[8] This system of Melanchthon’s got the nickname of the “Philippic Method,” and it was received with so much favour in the Protestant Universities of Germany as to cause these Universities to oppose the spread of Ramism.”
Scholasticism and the love of authority died hard, and not without many a struggle. It is recorded that so late as the year 1629 an Act of the French Parliament was passed forbidding attacks upon Aristotle! The Jesuits employed the Peripatetic tenets in arguing against free-thinkers like Descartes. Even to the present day the manuals of philosophy in Roman Catholic ecclesiastical establishments are a résumé of Aristotle.
Until the seventeenth century, when the authority. of Aristotle was questioned, “his disciples could always point with scorn at the endeavours which had as yet been made to supplant it, they could ask whether the wisdom so long reverenced was to be set aside for the fanatical reveries of Paracelsus, the unintelligible ideas of Bruno, or the arbitrary hypotheses of Telesio.”[9] But in the seventeenth century modern philosophy took a new and splendid start in Bacon and Descartes, while modern science commenced its glorious career with Galileo, Kepler, and Newton. Bacon, with his rich scientific imagination and his stately language, was a fitting herald of the new era. He sometimes reflects the spirit of Ramus or Patricius, and applies to Aristotle harsh terms which were rather merited by the scholastic pedants who had been Aristotelians only in the letter. Could the Stagirite himself have returned to the earth at this moment, he would doubtless have declared for Galileo and Bacon against the Peripatetics. Aristotelianism was not refuted in Europe, but its long day was now past; it was superseded and quietly put aside when other and fresher subjects of interest came to fill men’s minds. Bacon contributed to this result, not by railing at the “categories” and the “syllogism,” but by exciting people’s fancy with suggestions of the extension of human power to be gained by researches into nature—suggestions which subsequent results have verified a hundred-fold.
From henceforth it became impossible for an educated man to be an Aristotelian, because however much he might in his youth have learned from Aristotle, there was so much more to be learned which was not to be found in Aristotle, that Aristotelianism could only constitute a portion of his culture. In the Middle Ages it had constituted the whole of culture; but that time had gone by, and in the modern world it became possible to gain elsewhere even most of that which the study of Aristotle had to offer. The best of Aristotle’s thought had now come to be the common property of the world, and men could become good logicians without reading the ‘Organon,’ and without being conscious of the obligations which, after all, they owed to its author.
Perhaps the period of the greatest neglect which the memory of Aristotle underwent since the Christian era was the eighteenth century. This was a period of antithesis to mediævalism, and, at the same time, a period of mechanical philosophy and shallow learning. At the English universities all studies, except perhaps mathematics and verbal scholarship, were at a low ebb. Only small portions of Aristotle were taught, and these were ill taught without reference to their context and real significance. But with the nineteenth century there came a restitution of the honours of the Stagirite, who was now regarded in his proper light—that is to say, historically, and not as if he were an authority for modern times. This came about with the rise of the great German philosophies. There have been two great periods of philosophy in the world: the period of Greek philosophy in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C., and that of German philosophy during the first part of the present century. And there is a certain affinity between the two. Kant and Hegel have more in common with Plato and Aristotle than they have either with the scholastic philosophy or with the psychological systems of the last century. An age which produced Kant and Hegel was likely to appreciate their ancient forerunners; and Hegel advocated the study of the works of Aristotle as “the noblest problem of classical philology.” The Germans have applied themselves to this problem with splendid success, especially Immanuel Bekker, Brandis, Zeller, Bonitz, Spengel, Stahr, Bernays, Rose, and many others who might be mentioned. The great Berlin edition of the works of Aristotle, brought out under the auspices of the Prussian Royal Academy, is a monument of their labours. We have seen the vicissitudes of reputation through which Aristotle has passed—how at different times he was partially known, misconceived, over-rated, under-rated, and both praised and blamed on wrong grounds. Perhaps at no previous time has he been more correctly known and estimated than he is at present.
The various services of Aristotle to mankind have been to some extent indicated in the foregoing pages. To attempt to summarise them all would be vain; but perhaps it may be said, in a word, that Aristotle has contributed more than any one man to the scientific education of the world. The amount of the influence which he has exercised may partly be inferred from the traces which his system has left in all the languages of modern Europe. Our everyday conversation is full of Aristotelian “fossils,” that is, remnants of his peculiar phraseology. These mostly come through Latin renderings of his terms, though sometimes the original Greek form is preserved. The following are a few specimens of these fossils: “Maxim” is the major premiss of the Aristotelian syllogism. “Principle” has the same meaning—it comes from principium, the Latin for “beginning” or “starting-point,” which was one of Aristotle’s terms for a major premiss. “Matter” comes from materies, the Latin for “timber” (see above, p. 167); when we say “it does not matter,” or it makes a “material” difference, we are indebted to Aristotle for our words. “Form,” “end,” “final cause,” “motive,” “energy,” “actually,” “category,” “predicament” (the latter of these two being Latin for the former), the “mean” and the “extremes,” “habit” (both in the sense of “moral habit” and of “dress”), “faculty,” and “quintessence,” are all purely Peripatetic; while the terms “Metaphysics” and “Natural History,” are derived from two of the titles of Aristotle’s works.
Aristotle, the strongest of the ancients and the oracle of the Middle Ages, must always hold a place of honour in the history of European thought. Writings which have interested and influenced mankind so deeply and through so many centuries can never fall into contempt, even though they may be devoid of the graces of style and though the matter in them may be either superseded or else absorbed into the treatises of other authors. Nor is it from mere curiosity—from a merely antiquarian or historical point of view—that the works of the Stagirite continue to be studied. As long as the process of higher education in modern Europe consists so largely in imbuing the mind with the literature of classical antiquity, so long will a study of certain works of Aristotle remain as one of the last stages of that process. Those works—especially the 'Rhetoric,' 'Art of Poetry,' 'Ethics,' and 'Politics'— have a remarkable educational value. They form an introduction to philosophy; they invite comparison of ancient and modern ways of thinking; they offer rich stores of information as to human nature—so much the same in all ages; and they train the mind to follow the Aristotelian method of analytic insight. This method consists in concentration of the mind upon the subject in hand, marshalling together all the facts and opinions attainable upon it, and dwelling on these and scrutinising and comparing them till a light flashes on the whole subject. Such is the procedure to be learnt, by imitation, from Aristotle.
- ↑ These translations were attributed to Boethius, the “last of the philosophers,” at the end of the fifth and beginning of the sixth century.
- ↑ Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ chap. lii.
- ↑ Dante, ‘Inferno,’ canto iv. 131—
- “Vidi il Maestro di color che sanno
- Seder tra filosofica famiglia;
- Tutti lo miran, tutti onor gli fanno.
- Quivi vid’ io Socrate e Platone,
- Che innanzi agli altri piu presso gli stanno.”
- ↑ This, of course, refers to the ‘Ethics.’—See above, p. 101.
- ↑ Cary's Translation.—See above, p. 176.
- ↑ When Shakespeare wrote—he was referring to the Ptolemaic or Alphonsine spheres. The common metaphor of a person's "sphere" is a survival of the same notion.
- ↑ See Professor Masson’s edition of ‘Milton’s Poetical Works’ (Macmillan, 1874), vol. i. p. 92.
- ↑ Hallam’s ‘Introduction to the Literature of Europe.’ Part I, chap. iii.
- ↑ Hallam’s Introduction. Part III., chap. iii.