Aristotle's Children

"Exactly. He’s sitting there in charge of all of the other great thinkers in Dante; he’s the “ maestro di color che sanno ” [the master of those who know]. I’ve chosen this book because I really enjoyed it, I learnt a huge amount from it, and I found it fun to read, but also because its author has an agenda which goes beyond telling the story of Aristotle in the 12th century CE. The agenda is that he wants the book to help us resolve conflicts between religions, and to prevent people being persuaded by our contemporary theocrats that God has any role in the state. Rubenstein was originally a lawyer. Three of the authors I’ve chosen here are not orthodox specialist academic writers on Aristotle. As a young man, Rubenstein was involved in the most radical of causes: the Black Panther movement, campaigns for racial equality, and protests against the Vietnam War. He now writes an important blog on conflict resolution, and he’s actually professor of Conflict Resolution and Public Affairs at George Mason University. “Rubenstein sees this as a model for interfaith dialogue that puts philosophy at the centre” In the 12th century, the way Aristotle was received radically affected how not only Christians but also Jews and Muslims saw the relationship between faith and reason—i.e. bringing Aristotle into discussions of that relationship ramped up the role of reason hugely. Rubenstein sees this as a model for interfaith dialogue. It puts philosophy at the centre, and allows people to get away from petty inter-doctrinal conflicts and into mutual discussion and cooperation. So, I see this as a truly important book in terms of providing ways forward in the 21st century. And that’s how he intended it. He says that the relation between Aristotelian thought and Christianity in the Middle Ages was a stage of creative tension in which the great scholastics didn’t see faith and reason as an either/or choice. He says that the Aristotelian project which seemed irrelevant in the age of political and religious fragmentation (Aristotle went out of fashion in the Enlightenment) could however serve in the next phase of human history as an inspirer of creative integrative thought. He writes: “one does not have to be nostalgic for the Middle Ages to recognise that obliterating this part of our past makes the present seem eternal, and obliterates alternative futures.” He thinks we should look at the extraordinary meeting in Spain of Arabic philosophy and Christian, Boethian thoughts about the role of philosophy in education. This book offers a study of another time and another place where Aristotle proved extraordinarily positive. His secular thinking, and interest in reason and logic , were the reasons why the scholastics originally loved him so much. It’s only later that people like Aquinas took Aristotle for their own, and tried to turn him into a Christian. Absolutely. This is something which would have absolutely appalled him. And I’m not alone in thinking this. There are many who see Aristotle as providing a promise of balance in the sorts of debates we conduct in the secular age of the 21st century. Among the first to start doing trying to making him conform to dogmatic Christianity was Tertullian, one of the early Christian Fathers. They said that Aristotle had, in fact, accepted faith and that he committed suicide—which he never would have done: he disapproved strongly of suicide. They said he committed suicide because he could not understand the tides of the Euripus. This is a strait between mainland Greece and the island called Euboea. Aristotle did die there. He fled Athens because he was accused, just like Socrates, of impiety. But unlike Socrates (who wanted to be a martyr and could have left but didn’t), Aristotle sensibly removed himself back to safe exile in his maternal ancestral home. He died, probably of stomach cancer, not long after getting there, a disappointed man, at the age of sixty-two. But the early Christians had said that he had in fact thrown himself into the Euripus, which has these tides that no scientist has fully explained even today. They’re violent—I’ve been to see them. The Church Fathers said he had accepted as he died that there must be a deity and that the human mind could not explain everything, as he had previously maintained. They claimed his last words were, “If Aristotle cannot intellectually grasp the Euripus then let the Euripus take Aristotle”. But this was a Christian fiction. They desperately needed him to renounce his attitude to God. People realised that it posed a problem to religion that this great brain had lived and died, but had been absolutely clear all along that: a) there was no interventionist deity; and b) there was no afterlife. It was just too much."