Aristotle's God and the Authenticity of De mundo : An Early Modern Controversy

Aristotle's God and the Authenticity of De mundo: An Early Modern Controversy JILL KRAYE In memory of Charles B. Schmitt IF HORSES HAD gods, said the Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes, they would imagine them as horses, and similarly for cows? And likewise, one might add, without the hypothetical qualification, for philosophers. Certainly Aristotle's God, the first unmoved mover of Metaphysics 12, is made very much in the philosopher's own image and likeness, for he is pure thought. Aristotle's philosopher-God not only outranks Plato's philosopher-king, he outphilosophizes "the Philosopher," since the sole object of his thought is thought, in other words, himself. His thinking, in Aristotle's memorable if mysterious phrase, is a thinking of thinking." While Plato's gods have as their specific function the care for all things (Laws 9ood), Aristotle's God, totally absorbed in self-contemplation and remote from the world he did not create and may not even know) is clearly i Xenophanes, fr. 15 in H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmenteder Vorsokratiher,5th ed., 3 vols. (Berlin, 1934-37) = ft. 169 in G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven, and M. Schofield, The PresocraticPhilosophers , 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1983). Metaphysics 12.9. 1o74b34-35: ~o~,v• v6~oL; vofio~og v&lotg. For Aristotle's arguments that the world is eternal and uncreated, see De caelo 1.1o and 3.2.30 lb31-3o2a9. Commentators have long debated whether Aristotle's God, by knowing himself , knows the world, as Thomas Aquinas argued: see In MetaphysigamAristoteliscommentaria, ed. M.-R. Cathala (Turin, 1926), 736 (lib. xii, lect. xi): "intelligendo se intelligitomnia alia." Modern scholars, beginning with E. Zeller, Die Philosophicder Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichenEntwicklung, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1876-82), vol. 3, pt. 2:382-83, have tended to reject this interpretation: see, e.g., W. D. Ross's introduction to his edition of Aristotle,Metaphyo'irs,2 vols. (Oxford, 1924), l : cxlix, and his Aristotle, 5th ed. (London, 1949), 183; P. Aubenque, Le Problkmede l' gtrechezAristote (Paris, 1962), 66 n. 1;J. L. Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher(Oxford, 1981), 133; A. C. Lloyd, Form and Universal in Aristotle (Liverpool, 1981), 19; W. K. C. Guthrie, A Histo~ of GreekPhilosophy, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 1962-81), 6: 261-62; cf., however, L. Elders, Aristotle'sTheology:A Commentary [339] 34~ JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:3 JULY ~99 o unconcerned about the fall of a sparrow. But if there is no room in the Aristotelian universe for a special providence, controlling the fate of individuals , there might nonetheless be a general one which governs the eternal and regular motion of the heavenly spheres but does not influence the ephemeral and erratic movements of humans and sparrows in the sublunary realm. Or so it was generally believed around the second century A.D.4 This account, which clearly developed from the Aristotelian distinction between the perfect regularity of the heavens and the haphazard, unpredictable nature of sublunary events, was the version of Aristode's atdtude towards divine providence which the Church Fathers knew and reacted against) That most Aristotelian of Aristotelian commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias, presented a somewhat different view of divine providence, which he considered to be more in line with his master's philosophy. Attempting to find an acceptable middle ground between the Epicurean belief that the gods were totally unconcerned with the world and the Stoic assertion that God took care of every humble detail in the universe, Alexander assigned the operation of providence to the sublunary realm. He maintained, however, that it was strictly limited to the influence of the regular motion of the heavenly bodies, which ensured the preservation and welfare of species, but played no role whatever in the good or bad fortune of individuals. 8The patristic and, to a lesser extent, the Alexandrist interpretation remained the standard versions of Aristotelian divine providence until the nineteenth century. Fleet x6ottov, usually known by its Latin title De mundo, is a brief cosmologion Book A of the Metaphyrics (Assen, 1979), 957: "SinceGod knows himself, he knows all things, since he is their principle"; and K. Oehler, Dec Unbeweg~eBe'wegerdes Aristoteles (Frankfurt a. M., 1984), 7, who maintains that the...