A Conversation With Aristotle

Christianity is nominally and principally founded on Christ but, in fact, incorporates wisdom and traditions from a variety of sources. Chief among these are the pre-Christian Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans. The pagan Greek and Roman influences have proven controversial, especially to Protestants, but the simple fact is that reading and understanding Holy Scripture requires, at a minimum, a basic understanding of the human condition and such an understanding was certainly available to the ancients long before the time of Christ. Revealed truth builds on natural truth.

Among these, the Hebrew influence is obvious. Jesus, the apostles, and the earliest Christians were Jews and they all referenced the Hebrew scriptures which we know today as the Old Testament.

The Roman influence is relatively straightforward. Israel was, in Jesus' time, a province of Rome. Roman law and traditions held for centuries after throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. When Israel waged two ill-fated rebellions against Rome it was utterly destroyed. Rome became the seat of Christianity and some have even go so far as to say that the Roman Catholic Church is the surviving vestige of the Roman Empire

The Greek influence, though, is far more subtle and complex. By the time of Christ Israel had been in the Greek sphere of influence for centuries. Alexander the Great had conquered the near east in 330 BC and upon his death his successors carved up his empire between them and held it until they were, in turn, conquered by the Romans. Israel fell between Egypt, ruled by Ptolemy, and Syria, ruled by Seleucid, and changed hands between them a few times. The Macabee rebellion was a war against Greek influence on Israeli society. The wealthy Sadducees were especially infatuated with Greek culture but historians argue that the Pharisees, too, were influenced as, for example, in their formal methods of analysis and argument. The diaspora Jews were even further immersed in Greek culture.

But perhaps the most important Greek influence on Christianity came from Aristotle through Saint Thomas in the middle ages. Like Saint Augustine in 5C AD, Thomas drew upon pagan sources to weld faith and reason. Faith, from Holy Scriptures, and reason primarily from Aristotle. When today you inquire as to why Christians believe something or why the Church teaches something, if the answer is not Holy Scripture or Tradition, it is very likely to be Aristotle. In particular, the Christian concept of the nature of things comes straight from him.

But we have learned a great deal about the nature of the cosmos since Aristotle. Now, to be fair, Thomas didn't just copy Aristotle, he built upon him. Yet Thomas, himself, was a product of the middle ages and much has transpired since then as well. Thomas' magnum opus, Summa Theologica, is generally regarded as the greatest work of Scholasticism, now an arcane field of philosophy.

So let's imagine a short conversation with Aristotle who was, by all accounts, a brilliant man. Our goal is to update him on what mankind has learned in the last couple millennia. What would be the most important ideas we would wish to convey? Would any of these ideas be news to Thomas as well?

We would begin with science. Although Aristotle deserves great credit for laying the foundation, and although his ideas held sway until relatively recently, in fact we know a lot more about how the world works and how to learn about how the world works. Science is, essentially, a marriage of reason and empiricism but the most important ingredient of science is its tentativeness. Every scientific theory is, and always will be, subject to revision upon new evidence.

Aristotle recognized that the perfect is the enemy of the good and so it is with the pursuit of certainty. Only logical deduction can achieve certainty; the Scholastic obsession with achieving certainty exaggerated the value of logic to the exclusion of empiricism.

Taking a more empirical and tentative approach, science delivered the goods principally in physics and chemistry but also in areas such as medicine and technology. But the traditional deterministic, mechanistic model of science is bounded by two relatively recent discoveries: quantum physics and chaos theory. The universe, it turns out, is fundamentally indeterministic and, even if it were deterministic, it's complexity defies prediction except in certain, simple situations.

Perhaps the single most important and relevant discovery is in the field of biology: evolution.

Aristotle proposed that all things have a nature. But what gives things their nature? In biology, the most basic answer is: natural selection and the survival of the fittest. Why do birds sing? Why do fish lay eggs? Why do lions chase gazelles? Why do humans think? Natural selection and the survival of the fittest species. The most fundamental nature of biological beings is their struggle to survive in competition for finite resources.

While the evidence for evolution is pretty strong, the concept has found broader application in more speculative fields including, especially, sociobiology. Sociobiology is based on the idea that social behavior is a product of evolution and that cultures evolve in their practices. Why are men more promiscuous than women? Why do people get married? Why do nations go to war? Natural selection of the fittest culture. The most fundamental nature of social groups is their struggle to survive in competition for finite resources.

All of this may seem a tad dark but there is another idea that would have been totally foreign to Aristotle though Thomas would have been less surprised by it: human progress. Starting around 1400 AD, a couple hundred years after Thomas, Europe experienced a social explosion unparalleled in human history.

Which brings us to the last major element of note: capitalism. Human progress was not merely academic and philosophical, it was also material. Greater wealth and longer lifespans.

The nature of capitalism is, essentially, a domesticated competition and natural selection. Both its advocates and critics recognize in it the familiar survival of the fittest. Capitalism is often denigrated as social Darwinism by the very same people who champion Darwin's theory of evolution.

Humanity prospered under capitalism and this prosperity fed the growth of science and culture in a virtuous cycle. Much as Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire, so Europe set sail to conquer the world; its wealth and technological superiority enabled it to do so.

Today we see the Chinese and Indians, among others, embracing capitalism and prospering similarly from it. China, which had once been prostrate before individual European powers, is on the verge of becoming the largest economy in the world with a growing military to match.

Seeing the bounty of capitalism we can reflect back on life itself. The struggle to survive may seem harsh, even brutal, but it drives evolution and produced human beings, the most complex and reflective creatures in the cosmos.

So, to summarize, what we would tell Aristotle is that the nature of life is the struggle for survival and the nature of that which we observe is that it has found a way to flourish in that struggle to survive. This is true from the lowest organic cells to the most complex human societies. That would not be an alien idea to the ancients who were witness to frequent war and civil strife but I think Aristotle might be surprised at how much it explains and how it influences the foundations of philosophy.

Surely Aristotle would be the first to concede that his philosophy of natural law needed to be updated. We need a new Thomas to weld two millennia of human progress with Christian theology.