The Aristotelean school

The Aristotelean school

The identity of the Aristotelean School was preserved from the time of Aristotle's death down to the third century of the Christian era by the succession ofScholarchs, or official heads of the school. The first of these — Theophrastus — as well as his immediate successor Strato, devoted special attention to developing Aristotle's physical doctrines. Under their guidance also, the school interested itself in the history of philosophical and scientific problems. In the first century B.C. Andronicus of Rhodes edited Aristotle's works, and thereafter the school produced the most famous of its commentators, Aristocles of Messene and Alexander of Aphrodisias (about A.D. 200). In the third century the work of commentating was continued by the Neo-Platonic and Eclectic philosophers, the most famous of whom was Porphyry. In the fifth and sixth centuries the chief commentators were JohnPhiloponus and Simplicius, the latter of whom was teaching at Athens when, in the year 529, the Athenian School was closed by order of the Emperor Justinian. After the close of the Athenian School the exiled philosophers found temporary refuge inPersia. There, as well as in Armenia and Syria, the works of Aristotle were translated and explained. Uranius, David the Armenian, the Christians of the Schools of Nisibisand Edessa, and finally Honain ben Isaac, of the School of Bagdad, were especially active as translators and commentators. It was from the last-named school that, about the middle of the ninth century, the Arabians, who under the reign of theAbassides, experienced a literary revival similar to that of Western Europe underCharlemagne, and obtained their knowledge of Aristotle's writings. Meantime there had been preserved at Byzantium a more or less intermittent tradition of Aristotelean learning, which, having been represented in successive centuries by Michael Psellus,Photius, Arethas, Nicetas, Johannes Italus, and Anna Comnena, obtained its highest development in the twelfth century, through the influence of Michael Ephesius. In that century the two currents the one coming down through Persia, Syria, Arabia, and Moorish Spain, and the other from Athens through Constantinople, met in theChristian schools of Western Europe, especially in the University of Paris. TheChristian writers of the patristic age were, with few exceptions, Platonists, who regarded Aristotle with suspicion, and generally underrated him as a philosopher. The exceptions to be found were John of Damascus, who in his "Source of Science" epitomizes Aristotle's "Categories" and "Metaphysics", and Porphyry's" Introduction";Nemesius, Bishop of Emesa, who in his "Nature of Man" follows in the footsteps ofJohn of Damascus; and Boethius, who translated several of Aristotle's logicaltreatises into Latin. These translations and Porphyry's "Introduction" were the only Aristotelean works known to the first of the Schoolmen, that is to say, to theChristian philosophers of Western Europe from the ninth to the twelfth century. In the twelfth century the Arabian tradition and the Byzantine tradition met in Paris, the metaphysical, physical, and ethical works of Aristotle were translated partly from the Arabian and partly from the Greek text, and, after a brief period of suspicion and hesitancy on the part of the Church, Aristotle's philosophy was adopted as the basis of a rational exposition of Christian dogma. The suspicion and hesitation were due to the fact that, in the Arabian text and its commentaries, the teaching of Aristotle had become perverted in the direction of materialism and pantheism. After more than two centuries of almost universally unquestioned triumph, Aristotle once more was made the subject of dispute in the Christian schools of the Renaissance Period, thereason being that the Humanists, like the Arabians, emphasized those elements in Aristotle's teaching that were irreconcilable with Christian doctrine. With the adventof Descartes, and the shifting of the centre of philosophical inquiry from the external world to the internal, from nature to mind, Aristoteleanism, as an actual system, began to be more and more identified with traditional scholasticism, and was not studied apart from scholasticism except for its historic interest.