Aristotle Discourages Modern Art
The world owes a great debt of gratitude to Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher. Born in Stageira, a town in northern Greece, he did what so many other up-and-coming young hopefuls did - he migrated to Athens, the intellectual capital of the world. There he was quickly recognised and set up his own school, which means little more than that he had a group of regular students who followed him around and hung on his every word.
His reputation was such that Phillip II of Macedonia offered him a job as tutor to his son, Alexander - later to be known as Alexander the Great. Aristotle took the job: not only was it a bad career move to refuse any request from the most powerful (and short-tempered) man in Greece, but Aristotle was intrigued by the notion of influencing the mind of the youth who would become ruler of Greece. (He would probably have been even more eager had he realised that Alexander would become ruler of the world!)
After eight years in the wilds of Macedonia - as sophisticated Athenians regarded it - Aristotle returned to Athens. However despite his wealth and his influence, the strict Athenian laws forbade a non-citizen to own property in the city, so he set up his school in the Lyceum, a sort of gymnasium, and lectured to his students as he strolled around the colonnades surrounding the gym's exercise yard. The Greek word for these was peripatoi and in consequence his students became known as "Peripatetics".
Needless to say, his success - and some of the ideas he promulgated - roused the ire of native Athenian philosophers, who saw their students leave to listen to Aristotle and eventually they managed to bring a case against their rival. Rather than face an Athenian court, a by-no-means unbiased assembly of the citizens, Aristotle fled the city, famously remarking that he didn't want the Athenians to be guilty of impiety twice - a reference to their judicial murder of Socrates a few years before.
Nevertheless, Aristotle's followers continued his tradition and Aristotelianism became one of the two great schools of thought in the ancient world (the other was Platonism, based on the teachings of Socrates as transmitted by his disciple Plato). Platonism became the favoured school of thought of the Christian church and shaped many of the mediaeval doctrines that seem so strange and even baffling to modern minds, such as the doctrine of Transubstantiation and even some of the beliefs about the Atonement.
Muslims who encountered Aristotle's teachings when they conquered Egypt and other parts of the civilised world were more receptive to his ideas and translated many of his writings into Arabic. It was through contact with the Muslims that Aristotle was reintroduced into Europe and brought about a revolution in Western thinking. Although much of what Aristotle taught would now be regarded as nonsense - his claim that mares were impregnated by turning their tails to the west wind, for example, or his teaching that sight happens when a ray from the eye shoots out and "feels" the "sight object" - the new way of thinking and the realisation that the church did not have a monopoly on truth may be said to have led eventually to modern science.
However we have another reason for being grateful to the old philosopher. In 1996 a Greek construction company, building yet another museum of modern art near the Evangelismos Hospital just east of the centre of Athens, came across some ruins, an almost inevitable happening in Athens. With an exasperated sigh they suspended operations and called in the archaeologists.
Althogh little remains beyond some foundation trenches and the bases of walls, there is no doubt that what they uncovered was Aristotle's Lyceum and the archaeological authorities stepped in to acquire the site and preserve it - the latest plan is to build a six million dollar roof over it and turn it into an outdoor museum.
Work on the gallery of modern art stopped and has never been resumed - and that's why I say that we must be grateful to the old philosopher. Anything that will put a halt to the exhibition of piles of bricks, bisected animals in formaldehyde and tents embroidered with the names of discarded lovers, can only be a Good Thing.
doctrine of Transsubstantiation This is the belief that during the Mass the bread and the wine become transformed into the actual body and blood of Christ. It is based on the Platonic teaching of "substance" and "accidents".
To try and explain this let me use an illustration: we are all familiar with plastic, which we will call a "substance". However plastic can take many shapes and forms; it can be made into chairs or bowls, window frames or raincoats, and so on. What is worse, it can even be made to look like other substances - I have seen some quite realistic-looking wood finishes to objects made of plastic! None of those shapes or finishes is intrinsic to "plastic" - they are "accidents". (In fact, you might even say that there is no such thing as "plastic", there is merely an ideal mental image of "plastic" and all the things which which we think of as "plastic" are simply manifestations displaying various accidents of that ideal plastic.)
Those who believe in Transubstantiation hold that at a certain point in the Mass the substance of the bread is changed although the accidents remain the same. Thus - to continue our illustration - if I could somehow magically change the wood-appearance plastic into actual wood, it probably wouldn't look all that different, but the substance would be radically different!
Needless to say, however satisfactory the idea was to the mediaeval mind, modern minds find it less so and the majority of Christian denominations prefer to see the bread and wine as simple memorials of the final meal of Christ and His disciples - though many accept that God is present in some especial way during the celebration. Return
© Kendall K. Down 2009
