Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early Modern Science by Craig Martin (review)

In Subverting Aristotle, Craig Martin takes us on a brisk trot through the history of anti-Aristotelianism from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century. Singling out one particular strand of hostility to Aristotle, he first traces the problems that arose from the continuous attempts on the part of both philosophers and theologians to adapt a pagan Greek philosophy to the needs of European Christendom and then shows how these eventually contributed to the downfall of Aristotelianism. Covering such a large amount of intellectual territory in just 180 pages of text and 58 pages of endnotes is something of a tour de force, for which Martin deserves not only plaudits but also warm gratitude from the many readers who will find a mine of useful information in his survey. By taking account of so many authors—some well known, but others scarcely familiar even to specialists—over such a long period of time, he leaves himself very little space to discuss any of them in detail or, more regrettably, to place them in their historical context. In compensation, however, Martin has a sharp eye for apt quotations, which he provides in abundance, usually giving just an accurately (if at times a bit clumsily) translated snippet, with the original cited in the endnotes.

The Ariadne’s thread by which Martin leads the reader through this labyrinth of accusations and counter-accusations is his conviction that “the religious motivations of promoters of new natural philosophies who attacked Aristotelianism were sincere” and that “subverting Aristotle’s authority was necessary for and concomitant to the ascent of modern science” (p. 10). His aim is to counter the Whiggish, and now rather outdated, view that the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was a reflection, if not a direct result, of the progressive secularization of European thought. He argues that these new developments were instead closely allied to religion and marked the culmination of a centuries-long battle against both the impiety of Aristotle and the misguided efforts of generations of Aristotelians to reconcile his intractably pagan beliefs—the eternity of the world, the mortality of the soul, the absence of divine providence in the sublunary world—with Christian theology. As Martin points out, the opponents of Aristotle were paradoxically assisted in their campaign by Renaissance Aristotelians such as Pietro Pomponazzi, who maintained that combining philosophy with theology was like “mixing different soups” (p. 67) and who defiantly defended the right of philosophers to investigate natural phenomena according to the principles of nature and of Aristotle, free from interference by the Church—although conceding that their own merely probable reasoning was trumped by the certainty of the Bible, revelation, and Catholic dogma. It was far from their intention to loosen Aristotelianism’s stranglehold on the European mind; yet these professional Aristotelians helped to do just that, since, by explaining Aristotle’s doctrines without recourse to theological adjustment, they laid bare their unacceptable pagan underpinnings. In similar fashion, humanist scholars like Gabriel Naudé, by “historicizing” Aristotle, made it clear that he and his philosophy were inextricably part of the pagan world.

Reading the wildly varying portrayals of Aristotle’s relationship to religion, from virtual Christian to benighted atheist, which Martin has collected together in this rich study, one cannot but agree with the French Jesuit René Rapin that “it is difficult to understand how in the succession of time it has been possible to make such different judgments on the same person” (p. 167).