Aristotle VS the Church
Drama In The University
The Catholic Church frequently gets held up as the anti-intellectuals of the Middle Ages, and their beef with Aristotle is symbolic of this. But…there is nuance here.
Aristotle and His Legacy
I don’t know how much I have to say about the guy: he’s one of philosophy’s big names and heavy hitters.
He was born in Stagira, Greece and joined Plato’s Academy in Athens as a young man. In his 30’s, he tutored Alexander the Great. He founded his own school, the Lyceum, later fleeing when his link to Alexander became a liability. He died in 322 BC. (So, 2347 years ago.)
His legacy is much bigger. He wrote many books and treatises while he was in Athens, about everything from biology to philosophy. His most influential works were his treatises on logic, physics, and metaphysics.
His work on logic, ‘Prior Analytics’ was the first written, formal study of the subject and was only improved upon with the introduction of 19th century math. His use of induction and deduction from observations, unlike Plato’s inductions from a priori assumptions, still stands.
He added ‘aether’ to the four humors system that Empedocles invented. It never quite caught on in the mainstream, but it does still crop up sometimes.
Of course, many of his contributions were his worst ones. His writings on physics and biology, often wrong to the point of silliness, was the starting point for natural sciences until the Enlightenment. People improved on what he wrote; they modified it to fit reality or themselves, but always they started with Aristotle.
Aristotelians And Their Apologetics
Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike were in awe of this guy.
Muslims referred to him as ‘The First Teacher;’ Christians called him ‘The Philosopher.’
Thomas Aquinas and Moses Ben Maimonides were fans and used his works to write things like ‘Summa Theologica’ and ‘The Guide to the Perplexed.’
Peter Abelard, (of Heloise and Abelard fame) followed the guy.
There were, however, a couple of things these moderate fans had a problem with. No, not that he is frequently wrong about everything in physics and biology. Their problem was that Aristotle claimed that the earth had no beginning.
Also, Aristotle lived 300 years before a guy named Josh of Nazareth ever breathed. He worshipped the same deities that his fellow Greeks did, which made him a pantheist. He had his own take on the matter, but everyone does and there isn’t any way of making him into a monotheist.
The (Kind of ) Bannings
Paris of 1210
Aristotle’s pantheism first caught up with him in 1210. A provincial synod held in Sens and including the Bishop of Paris banned the Arts department of the University of Paris from reading Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy or the commentaries. Theologians were allowed to continue reading Aristotle, but public or private readings in Paris were banned on pain of excommunication.
Aristotle was merely the most famous name on that ban. Other writers who the synod considered pantheists were listed as well. It should be remembered that a lot of Aristotle’s writing had been lost after the Roman Empire faded into oblivion, and what was preserved was copied and translated by Arabs during its Golden Age. Christians hadn’t seen a whole lot of Aristotle or any other Greek writer until the Crusades, and what they had wasn’t well understood. The 1100’s and 1200’s would be the first time many of the great thinkers in Paris would have gotten the uncut and uncensored Greek philosophers.
The University of Toulouse tried to make hay out of this by advertising that students could read Aristotle there. It didn’t seem to make much of an impression.
Actually, the ban itself didn’t seem to have made much of an impression either.
Paris 1270
Again, Aristotle was lumped in with another great thinker, Averroes, by a Bishop of Paris. This was the bishop’s, Etienne Tempier, show. He called conservative theologians together to denounce and ban the teaching of 13 propositions of the two big thinkers.
They did not care for Aristotle’s belief that the world had no beginning and that there was no first man. They also didn’t care for Aristotle’s take on an ‘unmoved mover.’
Averroes was in trouble for saying that a soul can’t bodily burn, nor can God make someone immortal who is mortal.
This was when the full strength of Aristotle had reached Paris, and there were people in the arts department of the university who were radical, diehard Aristotelians, ready to wreck Church shop on behalf of their new hero.
Siger of Brabant was one of these radicals, and this ban might have had an influence on his fleeing Paris to bigger things. Thomas Aquinas and other thinkers took a more moderate approach and tried to compromise with the ancient thinkers.
Paris 1277
In January of 1277, the Pope asked the bishop of Paris to investigate claims of heresy in Paris.
This was the same Tempier who had it out for Averroes, so we have some questions. While the pope sent a second letter in April asking about teachings from masters of the Arts in Paris, there is debate as to how much his letters had to do with Tempier’s behavior.
In March, Tempier drew up a list of 219 propositions and some books that, if you taught or listened to them, you had seven days to report yourself to the authorities for correction or suffer excommunication. This list effectively banned certain treatises on geomancy, witchcraft, fortunetelling, and a famous work called De Amore.
It also put the works of Thomas Aquinas into question.
That last part caused people to scale back the ruling, as condemning ‘Summa Theologica’ seemed a bit…rash.
The Church’s Current Stance on Aristotle
Newadvent.org calls him the ‘greatest of heathen philosophers.’ Most commentors seem very pro-Aristotle, sometimes to the point of hagiography.
They still, however, must reconcile that Aristotle is not in total agreement with them. Aquinas is often cited as having bridged the philosophical gap, but it’s a gap that has to be regularly filled in. He’s still dead and open to interpretation, after all.
The Nuance
It’s fashionable in certain circles to paint the Catholic Church as anti-intellectual at every level. The banning of Aristotle can be trotted out as evidence of this.
Aristotle did not start out as universally beloved. He had to be translated and then interpreted to fit a new world view. When that reconciliation was made, he could be held up as verging on sainthood. Triumphalist historians can gloss over that to claim that we are always getting better in a steady climb toward perfection, with the implication that our ancestors were the worst and unredeemable.
Herein lies a couple of problems for both the triumphalist historian and Catholic apologists:
- The Catholic Church might have rescinded the Aristotle hate, but they banned a whole bunch of authors, starting in 1600, and the bans didn’t get pulled until 1966. Authors include Immanual Kant, Erasmus Darwin, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume. So, it wasn’t like accepting Aristotle taught them a lesson.
- The limited nature of the bannings belie the sense of the church as an all-powerful monolith. Tempiers was the nutball here. Which is not to say that the church as a hierarchy did not set the stage for Tempiers little play. This is a nutter who should have never had influence over a school, and similar lists of banned teachings sprang up in Oxford. But he also can’t stand in for all Catholicism for all time.
- There is a long-standing practice of lay people ignoring stupid edicts from on high in a church. Famously, about 90% of Catholics ignore the Pope’s rulings on birth control now, and no matter how many times local priests and bishops chastised nobles for participating in jousts and dressing fancy, the objects of their scorn went on their merry way without even acknowledging it. It’s as though people trapped in their towers with their pretty philosophers can issue rules untethered from reality that you can freely ignore when it starts to mess with your personal life.
- Probably the most important point here is that ‘anti-intelletual’ has a lot of nuance. What the Church had on its hands was a problematic fav: he had an unfortunate set of assumptions, but his logic was invaluable. As Ross Blocher’s speech covers, we can cherry-pick beliefs; take a little piece from here and a little piece from there. We mostly do, in the end. Certainly, religions have a history of doing this pretty liberally. The question is how much did they synthesize and take on new ideas, as opposed to borrowing a big name for their ideas? At what point have we forced old philosophers to dance to our new tune? Aquinas’s compromise at least tries to assimilate the new ideas with his and engages with them.
Sources:
List of authors and works on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum — Wikipedia
Condemnations of 1210–1277 — Wikipedia