Gauthier on Aristotelian contemplation

“the contemplation of God interests Aristotle in the Ethics, if at all, only because it is the perfection of man, and it is hardly at all that he envisages it, except as perfection of man. What he seeks, is this not, as he says repeatedly (Nicomachean ethics I, 2, 1095 a 16; 4, 1096 b 34-35; 5, 1097 a 15; X, 2, 1172 b 35), a good that man can achieve by action [(un bien que l’homme puisse faire)]? This good, he showed that it consists for man in accomplishing his task as man, [a] task that is nothing other than the highest activity of man, and it is as this highest activity of man that contemplation appears (X, 7, 1177 a 12-13). Contemplation is the perfection of man because it is the activity of the intellect, which is what there is in man of the highest (1177 a 12-17), and which is man himself (1178 a 2-3). If, therefore, gazing upon [(regarder)] God makes for human happiness, this does not appear to be because what one gazes upon is God, but rather because what gazes is man, who, in this gaze [(regard)], is fulfilled [(s’achève)]. God comes into the picture [(intervient)], so to say, only indirectly, because it is necessary to the gaze that there be an object, and an object proportioned to his nature, which is divine (1177 a 15-16; b 28, 30). In this sense, Aristotelian contemplation can be only, strictly speaking, intellectual; its ambition is to realize [(achiever)] the subject that is [human] intellect, not to go beyond it in order to arrive at, beyond it, a transcendent object.
“However, even in the Nicomachean ethics itself, there appears, however incidentally, the idea that what makes contemplation the highest of [human] activities is not only the perfection of its subject, the intellect, but also the perfection of its object, God (X, 7, 1177 a 20-21). The Ethics does not insist on this aspect, which remains outside of its perspectives. But Aristotle did insist on it in the introduction to his third course on biology, a little posterior to the Nicomachean ethics. According to this celebrated text (On the parts of animals I, 5, 644 b 22-645 a 4), it is no longer from the perfection of its subject that contemplation draws its superiority. No, envisaged subjectively, the contemplation of divine realities is, qua knowledge, inferior to the knowledge that we have of the realities of our world, just as a glance that grasps by chance one whole little part of its object is inferior to a view that takes all of its aspects in at leisure. The superiority of the contemplation of divine realities it gets entirely from its object, from that object which, however, it knows so little [(mal)]. But [simply] making contact with this object is of more value than knowing exhaustively the things of this world [(d’ici-bas)]. Must we not recognize in this the affirmation of a contemplation which is no longer purely intellectual, of a kind of mystical contact (éphaptométha, 644 b 32) infinitely impoverished in the order of knowledge, but infinitely rich thanks to the object to which it unites us? It isn’t even as though there is lacking here the evocation of what, more than the flourishing of the intellect left unsatisfied, makes, in such a contemplation, for our joy: [desire,] the lancinating and amorous desire that it satisfies.
“And yet, missing from Aristotle is what is essential to what makes of Platonic contemplation a mystical contemplation: the affirmation of something beyond essence (Republic VI, 509 b 9) which, not being an intelligible, cannot be grasped by an intellectual knowledge, but only by a mystical touch (éphaptesthai, Symposium 212 a). God, for Aristotle, is not something beyond essence; he is the supreme Intelligible., and it is as supreme intelligible that contemplation makes contact with [(attaint)] him (Protreptic, fr. 14, p. 50, 20-21; Nicomachean ethics X, 7, 1177 a 20-21; cf. Metaphysics Λ, 7, 1072 a 26-27), and if even Aristotle speaks at this point of a ‘touch’, this touch remains completely intellectual: it is simply, by opposition to the judgment in which the knowledge of complex realities is handed down, the intuition of a simple reality: by calling it [a] ‘touch’, as by calling it [a] ‘gaze’, one gives expression to the simplicity of this knowledge, but does not deny that it is strictly intellectual in character (cf. Metaphysics Θ, 10, 1051 b 23-25; Λ, 7, 1072 b 21). If our intelligence knows God only this little [(mal)], this is not because it is intelligence, but on the contrary because it is not an adequate intelligence [(assez intelligence)]: the supreme Intelligible is too exalted for for lesser intelligences [(trop haut pour la moindre des intelligences)]. One could not in the final analysis, therefore, speak in Aristotle of a ‘mystical’ contemplation. Perhaps, however, one can still speak in his case of a sort of religion, [a] religion entirely intellectualistic, but yet full of fervor. For it is impossible to deny that Aristotle, when he speaks of the contemplation of God, speaks of it with a fervor that isn’t just the fervor of a savant burning for [(épris de)] knowledge, but the fervor of a religious mind burning for God.”

René-A. Gauthier, OP, La morale d’Aristote, Initiation philosophique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 102-104.

You were SERIOUS about that?

"The seductively suggestive title of Kołakowski’s talk was 'The Devil in History.' For a while there was silence as students, faculty, and visitors listened intently. Kołakowski’s writings were well known to many of those present and his penchant for irony and close reasoning was familiar. But even so, the audience was clearly having trouble following his argument. Try as they would, they could not decode the metaphor. An air of bewildered mystification started to fall across the [Harvard] auditorium. And then, about a third of the way through, my neighbor—Timothy Garton Ash—leaned across. 'I’ve got it,' he whispered. 'He really is talking about the Devil.' And so he was."

     Tony Judt on a Harvard lecture of 1987, in "Leszek Kołakowski (1927-2009)," The New York review of books 56, no. 14 (September 24, 2009): 6 (6-7). More of value follows: "It was a defining feature of Leszek Kołakowski’s intellectual trajectory that he took evil extremely seriously. Among Marx's false premises, in his view, was the idea that all human shortcomings are rooted in social circumstances. Marx had 'entirely overlooked the possibility that some sources of conflict and aggression may be inherent in the permanent characteristics of the species.' Or, as he expressed it in his Harvard lecture: 'Evil . . . is not contingent . . . but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.' For Leszek Kołakowski, who lived through the Nazi Occupation of Poland and the Soviet takeover that followed, 'the Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously' [("The devil in history," My correct views on everything (St. Augustine's Press, 2005), 133)].
     "Most of the obituaries that followed Kołakowski's recent death at the age of eighty-one altogether missed this side of the man. That is hardly surprising. Despite the fact that much of the world still believes in a God and practices religion, Western intellectuals and public commentators today are ill at ease with the idea of revealed faith. Public discussion of the subject lurches uncomfortably between overconfident denial ('God' certainly does not exist, and anyway it's all His fault) and blind allegiance. That an intellectual and scholar of Kołakowski's caliber should have taken seriously not just religion and religious ideas but the very Devil himself is a mystery to many of his otherwise admiring readers and something they have preferred to ignore."

Brague on the role of "digestion" in the disappearance of philosophy from the Islamic world

"I attach the greatest importance to a fact that Jean Jolivet has stressed: the 'philosopher' (philosophus) who debates with a Jew and a Christian in Abelard's [Dialogue between a philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian] is a Muslim. That personage, who is circumcised and claims descent from Ishmael, attempts to set up an ethics independent of revelation. . . . What is important is that this human type--one that some find a temptation and others, a type to be exorcised--continued to haunt Latin Christianity. As it happens, that model was by then exclusive to Andalusia, which stood out as different from the Islamic East; in its land of origin, it was already petering out.
"This means that it was precisely at the time when the Latin philosophus--when it did not designate Aristotle--came to signify faylasuf that, in the Islamic world, the use of the Arabic word faylasuf began to give way to other terms. Call that development what you will. The fact remains that, in the East, the word for 'philosophy' declined in favor of other words. In parallel fashion, in the same period the relationship with the Philosopher par excellence--Aristotle--ceased to have a textual dimension in that world. The twelfth century is the age in which Islamic thought fully digested Greek philosophy, the same Greek philosophy that Europe, somewhat later and perhaps to our own times, was to find hard to digest."

Rémi Brague, "The meaning and value of philosophy in the three medieval cultures," chap. 2 of The legend of the Middle Ages: philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 55 (41-55). "'inclusion' is an appropriation in which the foreign body is maintained in its full alterity but is enveloped by procedures of appropriation, the presence of which highlights that alterity; . . . 'digestion' is an appropriation in which the foreign body is assimilated to the point of losing its independence" (51). Christianity "included" Aristotle, whereas Islam "digested" him, thereby abandoning philosophy--though not thought (47)--in the process.

Brague sins less than he lets on

"If you don't know a number of things, compare them."

Rémi Brague's riff on "if you don't know something, . . . teach it". In "The meaning and value of philosophy in the three medieval cultures," which is chap. 2 of The legend of the Middle Ages: philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 42 (1-22).

"I mean, theologians' theology, not the variety knocked together by the profs de philo"

"is it not also true that, in the final analysis, believing in God is, in a sense, refusing the world as it is and as it appears to an unprejudiced eye, with the result that according to a logic of 'communicating vases' (found, for example, in Nietzsche), all that we take from God would be that much gained for the world?
"It is true that I have had occasion to note in Nietzsche a fairly unsophisticated representation of the relationship between the divine and the human according to which the one gains what the other loses. To be sure, Nietzsche said many powerful things. But his writings contain a fully worked-out version of the hydraulic image: 'There is a lake which one day refused to flow off and erected a dam where it had hitherto flowed off: ever since, this lake has been rising higher and higher. Perhaps that very renunciation will also lend us the strength to bear the renunciation itself; perhaps man will rise ever higher when he once ceases to flow out into a god.' This image already appears, discreetly, in the young Hegel, and emphatically in Feuerbach. Today even more mediocre minds wallow in the idea: man must demand his good, supposedly projected in God, and so on. . . .
"If the relationship between the world and God were of this sort, Prometheus (in the Romantic interpretation of that figure) would be right. But how much naïveté does that imply! To begin with, man and God exchange homogeneous goods, in finite quantities, within the same system. One of the first rules of theology, however, is that it is not in the same sense that we attribute properties (justice, power, knowledge, etc.) to God and to man. A bit of Neoplatonic therapy is called for: ideas do not possess the qualities that they confer. As well as a small dose of theology--I mean, theologians' theology, not the variety knocked together by the profs de philo. Let me offer you two phrases of Thomas Aquinas for your meditation: 'To detract from the creature's perfection is to detract from the perfection of divine power'; 'We do not wrong God unless we wrong our own good.'"

Rémi Brague, "Interview with Christophe Cervellon and Kristell Trego," The legend of the Middle Ages: philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009): 10-11 (1-22).

Brague on the damage done by fast-talking media stars and intellectuals

"legends abound about the Middle Ages. I have done my utmost to destroy that teeming vermin. . . . I have no illusions about the sucess of my venture: any fast-talking media star can do a thousand times more in one minute to perpetuate falsity than we library rats can do in ten lifetimes to unmask it. That said, you do not have to have hope to take on a challenge. And if what the 'intellectual' has to sell is a 'fine-talk' version of the dominant opinion, the duty of the university professor is above all to reestablish what he or she believes to be the truth, whether it is agreeable or not."

Rémi Brague, The legend of the Middle Ages: philosophical explorations of medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009): viii-ix.

Christum aufer, mutus fiet mundus

Remove Christ, [and] the universe will fall silent.

I.e., become incapable of articulate speech; be rendered mute or inarticulate; be struck dumb (cf. Ps. 19:1-4). Peter M. Candler after Antonio Cittandini (Thomae aufer, mutus fiet Aristoteles): "apart from Christ, the world cannot speak to us." In "The logic of Christian humanism," Communio: international Catholic review 36, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 79. Candler got Cittandini from Ralph McInerny, Praeambula fidei: Thomism and the God of the philosophers (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006): 306.