ARISTOTLE FOR BELIEVERS

For sometime I have wanted to write a book on philosophy for Christians, and one day I may get to it. For many years now I have been teaching philosophy in various high schools and colleges, my forte being to introduce philosophy to those in different walks of life: bright high school kids, all the college levels, and in more recent years the adults and adulterers of the night schools in Dallas. The first and last groups have been the most fun. I glory in introducing Socrates or Spinoza or Locke to an eager beaver high schooler or to some working girl who rushes over from her job at Texas Instruments to take a course in a subject that she has always heard about but of which she knows nothing, not even beans. Or to a business man who was too busy succeeding to go to college, and now that there is a super-duper community college just off the freeway and not out in the boondocks somewhere, he decides to “do” college, and he starts with philosophy. Woman, is he fun to teach! But sometimes he checks out, swearing he has made a mistake and just plain swearing, especially if it is logic he has chosen. When it is logic, I urge them to hang in and give it and me a fair chance (I even promise to drop them before I fail them), but the fatality list is always embarrassingly high.

This fall I had a dashing salesman in my logic class who challenged me to show what all the P’s and Q’s and the syllogisms would do for him as a business man. It will help you to think more critically, to become more aware of your faulty thinking, I assured him, explaining that he uses syllogisms everyday and often invalid ones, even sometimes when he says no more than “What, me?” But when we started doing truth tables, I lost him. Tough education sometimes has a hard time of it out there in the marketplace. I started with 29 and I have now dropped them down to eight, and two of those are critical cases. Six will do just great, all women, young executives and housewives. They have begun to fall in love with thinking, more than with me. Women are not necessarily smarter in such situations, but they can take it bet ter. They have more guts and will hang in when the going gets rough, like having babies. They have too much pride to be quitters.

But I had rather teach general philosophy where we deal with the history of ideas, ethics, religion, and with the philosophers themselves. Here we meet the likes of father Socrates and his famous child in the faith, Plato, and grandson, Aristotle. We don’t have to bother with the rules of inference and the laws of thought and so the casualty list is not so bad.

The other day I came upon a book that is something like what I have in mind, except that it deals with but one philosopher, entitled Aristotle for Everybody by Mortimer J. Adler, with the sub-title, Difficult Thought Made Easy. It confirmed me in my conviction that philosophy is for everybody, including kids —and elders in the church! Using this book as a point of departure, I want to pass along to you, who has probably never had a course in logic (Aristotle fathered logic!), some of the goodies in Aristotle, who is considered one of the more difficult philosophers to understand.

First you should know that Aristotle died in 322 B. C., within a year of the death of his most famous pupil, Alexander the Great —who was one of his dropouts! He sat at Plato’s feet in Athens for almost two decades, and, being his brightest student ever, should have succeeded him, but he was too much his own man. “Dear is Plato,” he would say, “but dearer still is truth,” which is one of my favorite quotes. He started his own school at age 52, called the Lyceum, one of the four great schools of antiquity. He amassed one of the great libraries of the ancient world and was himself the author of over 400 works in a score of subjects, including psychology, ethics, botany, zoology, and logic. Due to political uprisings he at last left Athens, his teaching criticized as dangerous. He said he chose exile “lest Athens should sin a second time against philosophy,” referring to the unjust execution of Socrates 76 years earlier.

His school was called the peripatetics in that he and his students would walk, think, and talk together, endeavoring to understand the nature of man and his world. Aristotle concluded that the “nature of things” imply some ultimate cause and that the universe cannot be explained as a mere happenstance. He came up with the “Unmoved Mover” as responsible for it all and referred to this final cause as if it were God, which led St. Thomas Aquinas and medieval Roman Catholic theology to canonize Aristotle as the forerunner of their theological system, known as Thomism. But it was ill-advised, for the old sage’s ultimate Mover is in no sense a personal God or even a creator. Aristotle saw purpose in the universe, but the purposer remains unexplained. Only movement can explain change, and there was the Mover that was not itself moved, but the philosopher did not seek to make it a spiritual being. He had no theology. To him matter and energy are eternal, and the universe has always been here in one form or another.

Plato before him spoke of a creator God and Socrates was convinced that he had been sent by “God,” whom he distinguished from the gods of the Greeks, to be a gadfly among the materialistic Athenians. It is not amiss to say that Socrates walked with God in a pagan land. I do not teach my students that Socrates knew what he did of God through natural religion, which is that men discover God through reason and nature, but that God has revealed Himself in history, a revelation that is confirmed in nature and reason. While Socrates probably had no contact with Judaism, a certain knowledge of God had passed along from generation to generation since the time of Abraham and the patriarchs. Socrates was able, in his quest for reality, to tap enough of that tradition even in a pagan world to cultivate a faith that was confirmed by “His eternal power and divine nature, which have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made,” as the apostle puts it in Rom. 1:20.

Aristotle may have implied some of the same things, but he did not personalize them. He chose to remain a scientist and let you decide for yourself what you would do with the Unmoved Mover who has to be in the picture if things make sense. But he was intensely interested in man and the principles by which he should live. The end of man is to be happy or to enjoy well-being (not just being), which he defined as harmony, inner as well as outer harmony. To have well-being, he insisted, one must learn to think, which is the most natural thing he can do, man being the only rational animal. So it is only through self-realization that man gets with it. Everything in the universe is seeking its potential, even rocks, which explains why they work their way toward the center of the earth, which is where they belong. The person who is not fulfilling her potential cannot be truly good or moral, the sage says.

But we will now speak more particularly of some of the things that impresses Adler about Aristotle.

One’s life is determined by the choices she makes and the choices set up habit patterns, so that a badly lived life is due to wrong choices that one freely makes. We are all morally obligated to improve ourselves, and this we do by breaking bad habits and building good ones. If we sleep more than we should, overeat, waste time, lose our temper, or use bad grammar it is because we have habituated ourselves in these directions. A rigorous, studious, well-disciplined life comes through conscious effort, by applying oneself to it until it becomes a habit. So one is not consciously courteous and well-mannered after awhile, but habitually so. He doesn’t have to say “I’m not going to overeat today or lose my temper with the children,” for his way of life is now above all that.

This speaks to the Christian. When we are but babes in Christ, we are more aware of our efforts to be transformed into his image, and so we are building new habits. But after awhile we should habitually follow Christ. We think of him and love him as if it were second nature. A growing Christian never says “I must be sure to pray today,” for he has now made Christ the blessed habit of his life, the sun of his life with everything else revolving around him. On the other hand, a lot of believers have a lot of bad habits. Aristotle notes that these can be changed only by changing the choices one makes.

Aristotle dreamed of that situation in which people were truly friends, which meant they would really be concerned for each one’s good. If people were friends, justice would not be necessary. So justice is appealed to only when love fails. Law thus forces upon all members of society a consideration for others that is only second best. Man tends to love more as he understands himself and others better. Ignorance, particularly wilful ignorance, is man’s chiefest vice and is at the heart of all his misery. The one whose life has to be monitored by justice rather than by love is ignorant of what life is all about.

Does this not speak to our own divided church? I often meet people who had much rather rely upon the goodness of this world or the courts of justice than to trust the “love” of their fellows in the church. At least they can get justice in the unredeemed world, though it is sisterly and brotherly love that we all want and need. If we could but be friends, people who would lay down their lives for each other, then we would not have to be ruled by law, including the “law book” that some folk make out of the Scriptures.

The most elegant notion in Aristotle’s ethics is that of the golden mean, and I know of no principle so badly needed in American life than it. Excessive desires destroys nations as well as individuals. Buddhism has identified this — people wanting too much — as the source of most human misery. The Greeks understood this and thus made moderation man’s crowning virtue. The Stoics insisted that if you want to be happy do not increase your possessions but decrease your desires. The golden mean is the midway point between the excesses — and if there is a doubt err on the conservative side! That is, it is better to under eat than to slightly overeat, though one should avoid all excessives.

One big difference between Aristotle and the Christian teachers who came along three centuries later was that Aristotle was an aristocrat, believing that only a few could practice his teaching. Christianity is the only teaching in all history that presumed to reach out to all men, the poor as well as the rich, the common folk as well as the elite. The biggest difference of all, of course, is that we have not only ideal principles to which to look but the ideal Person as well. —the Editor