Aristotle
by Patrick Atherton
In Armstrong, ed., Classical Mediterranean Spirituality: Egyptian, Greek, Roman
Crossroad Publishing Company, 1988

"It is scarcely possible to estimate more highly than does Aristotle the scope, power, and dignity of the human being's intellectual nature and its essentially religous character. This 'god,' in whom all knowing is grounded and to whom all knowing aspires (for he is that which is in itself the most knowable of all things), is nous or intellect - more properly, he is hte self-distinguishing, self-integrating activity of pure visionary knowing (noesis noeseos) (Metaphysics 12.1074b34). This divine intellect 'encloses the whole of nature,' and it was apprehended by the ancients in the form of myth handed down by tradition (Metaphysics 12.1074b1-3). Besides what was graspable of the divine nous through the consideration of nature, it was its presence in humans - in their theoretical and practical activities - that elevated them above the merely natural.... The spirituality, then, of Aristotle is nothing less than a celebration of the power of nous, displayed in all nature, life, and intellectual activity - an exaltation of reason as what is divine and, in particular, as what is divine in human beings." (p. 121)

"Philosophical wisdom in its primary form was a kind of divine knowledge; religion, so far as it was enlightenment about the gods, coincided with philosophy." (p. 123)

"The Aristotelian conception of the gods and the divine life is distinguished from that of later times by one very conspicuous feature: the ascent to god is from nature to its divine source or arche - from a contemplative consideration of the moving and changing things of our immediate experience to a grasping of these objects in their universal forms or determinations, and then to a grounding of these forms in the primary unity of the Form of Forms.... The Aristotelian wisdom ... brings us within sight of the divine principle as that which is required to explain nature." (p. 123)

"[I]n the divine intellection, god's knowledge of the Forms was only a knowledge of himself - a self-knowledge (Metaphysics 12.1074b33-34)" (p. 125)

"[T]his entire derivative dimension of changing Being - the heavens and the world of nature - depends upon an unchanging substance or arche. This substance is 'eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things' (Metaphysics 12.1074a4-5); it has no magnitude and is without parts and is indivisible. It is a pure Intellect which grasps its object as one with itself." (p. 129)

"Aristotle takes great care to elucidate the nature of the self-relation involved in the divine thinking. It is not that there is for him on the one side a divine Nous, complete in itself out of relation to a world of objects, and on the other a complex of Forms, to which self-consciousness has to be yoked. It is rather that the Mind in pure intellection (noesis) is only aware of itself *as it grasps objects*. Its relation to objects *is* its relation to itself: 'to be an act of thinking and to be an object of thought are not the same thing.... [But] in some cases knowledge is the object.... Since thought and the object of thought are not different in the case of things that have not matter, the divine thought and its object will be the same, i.e., the thinking will be one with the object of its thought.' It only remains to add that the object of the divine thought is not composite or 'put together'; it knows all aspects as parts of one perfectly unified whole 'so that through eternity it is the thought of that which has itself for its object' (Metaphysics 12.1074b33-1075a4)" (p. 130)

"The End exists as a free, unconstrained energy - free not with the caprice of arbitrary choice but as not dependent on anything apart from itself." (p. 131)

"The capacity of human beings for philosophical wisdom is both the completion of human nature and the highest approximation humans can enjoy to the divine Being. Theoretical knowledge, that knowledge of the truth for its own sake (without attention to any utilitarian end), approaches the divine felicity: it is the activity in which human nature, though enslaved by need and want in so many ways, shows its dignity and freedom. The rational soul, in apprehending the Forms of things, does not discover an alien world, but comes into possession of *itself*: 'the soul is potentially all things' and, through scientific knowledge (episteme) that culminates in intellectual intuition (noesis), it possesses actually what lay implicit within it. In this condition it has achieved its proper perfection (arete) and completion: the philosophically wise person is happy (eudaimon) with that joy and happiness that god possesses eternally." (p. 132)

END