Response to Germain Grisez's

GRISEZ ON ARISTOTLE AND HUMAN GOODS Response to “Natural Law, God, Religion, and Human Fulfilment” In his essay ‘Natural Law, God, Religion, and Human Fulfillment’ Professor Grisez has given us, in his usual stimulating and provocative way, a good many ideas to chew on and react to. Reading him is always a challenge. In this particular piece he has covered a lot of ground in moral philosophy, theology, and the history of thought. Happily it is not my task to comment on everything. My focus is to be Grisez’s discussion and criticism of Aristotle. However, this focus, while narrow enough for the purposes of this paper, will also give me the opportunity to discuss some of the other things he says. As regards Aristotle, Grisez finds in the Stagirite certain ideas that, as he says, are “disastrous for religion and moral life” (p.13). Well, perhaps they are, but I think we ought to register a certain initial surprise that they could be. After all Aristotle’s philosophy has had such an effect on the theological and moral thinking of the past two millennia, whether Christian or not, that if we are to judge his philosophy disastrous we will probably find ourselves having to judge the thinking it affected disastrous too. Grisez does seem to think that, at least if his remarks on St. Thomas Aquinas later in his paper are anything to go by. But that would suggest that Grisez’s “renewal of Christian ethics” (p. 27) is less like a renewal and more like a revolution. Still it might be a needed revolution. I will return to this point at the end. Grisez gives the following catalog or syllabus of Aristotelian errors. 2 1) God is only one, albeit the supreme one, of many self-subsistent substances. 2) God is self-thinking thought, fully actual and changeless, that cannot and need not do or make anything. 3) Some other substances, especially men, can relate themselves to this god by trying to be like it. 4) These substances become like the god through an ordered set of functions that culminate in the exercise of speculative reason. 5) None of the human substances is individually self-existent. 6) There is no place for a creator-creature relationship or for co-operation between man and Aristotle’s highest god; there is no place for living in harmony with this god or for following its guidance. 7) Human goods are commensurable and ordered hierarchically. 8) Man’s priorities are determined by nature, nurture, or fortune, not by one’s free commitments—there is no freedom of choice and no possibility of making an overarching religious commitment. 9) Other goods, besides the goods at the top of the hierarchy, do not have intrinsic but only instrumental goodness. 10) There are no genuine moral virtues, or aspects of a person whose various parts are integrated with a set of freely chosen and faithfully fulfilled upright commitments organizing one’s life. 11) Not every person possesses dignity—only the fortunate can realize human potential fully; many people are pretty poor specimens and some are natural slaves. (pp.13-14) 3 This is an impressive catalog and a heavy indictment. But it also represents, interestingly enough, a very common view. In fact it reflects in large part the prevailing scholarly consensus about Aristotle. To be sure few scholars would find the catalog as objectionable as Grisez does. They either have no special view on the matter or they even look upon it, or parts of it, with a certain satisfaction. It accords rather nicely with a sort of contemporary non-Christian secularism. However, one ought to add straightaway that, contemporary though it be, there is nothing especially new about it. The basic view about God and man that it attributes to Aristotle, and satisfaction with this view, go back to the Middle Ages and beyond (as Grisez in part notes, p.13 n.29). One of the chief representatives at any rate was the great Muslim thinker, Averroes.1 In fact one might not unfairly describe the contemporary scholarly consensus and state of mind as a sort of revival of Averroism. The revival is not, I should add, a conscious one, since the scholars are generally not aware of, or at least not much interested in, the Averroist character of their views. St. Thomas Aquinas, we know, labored long and manfully against Averroism, especially as it presented itself in the Latin Averroism of his day. Moreover he labored to show not only that Averroism was wrong as a philosophical doctrine but also that it was wrong as an interpretation of Aristotle.2 In both respects he achieved considerable success. Averroism pretty much perished after his time both as a believable philosophy and as a believable interpretation of Aristotle. The revival of the Averroist interpretation 1 For a brief overview of the matter see Frederick Copleston’s, A History of Philosophy (Doubleday, 1948), vol. 2, ch. 42. For Averroes himself a basic text is The Decisive Treatise, in Philosophy in the Middle Ages, ed. Hyman and Walsh (Hackett, 1973), pp. 293-316. 2 See in particular his De Unitate Intellectus contra Averroistas. 4 among contemporary scholars is thus a distinctively modern phenomenon, which, as I have already remarked, owes little to its Averroist pre-history. One might well be inclined to conclude, therefore, that such Averroism, if it was dominant once and has, quite independently, returned to dominance again, is well founded in the Aristotelian texts and naturally imposes itself on the reader’s mind. To this conclusion one cannot, I think, entirely object. But one should not allow it altogether. Not only was it possible for Aquinas to argue many centuries ago that Averroism was false to Aristotle’s texts, it is possible to argue the same now, as in fact some contemporary scholars have been doing.3 In other words, there is a certain split in the world of scholarship about what Aristotelianism is, and if one side of this split dominates now, the other dominated earlier and may well come to dominate again. Let us say, then, that Grisez’s criticism of Aristotle is a criticism of one of the possible Aristotles that scholars find in the texts. To that extent, therefore, I can agree with him and can even endorse his indictment. “Yes,” I am inclined to say, “if that is what Aristotle said, then he was wrong and needs to be corrected.” But maybe that is not what Aristotle said. In which case the indictment does not stand and we should forebear to condemn, or at least to condemn on these grounds. I do not intend here to engage this scholarly debate (that would take me too far from the burden of Grisez’s paper). But I do wish to put on the table a third approach—an approach that can perhaps mediate the controversy and help, in some degree, to explain it. My own sense about Aristotle and his philosophy is something like the following. His texts are indeed ambiguous and unclear, and they are ambiguous in precisely the 3 See, for example, Gianluca di Muzio, ‘Aristotle on Improving one’s Character,’ Phronesis 45 (2000): 203-219. 5 ways that have been noticed by the scholars, whether medieval or modern, and that have split them into rival camps. But the reason for this is not that Aristotle really went one or the other way chosen by the scholars and just failed to make that sufficiently clear to the non-scholars. On the contrary, Aristotle left things unclear because he really thought they were unclear. So, unlike the scholars, he quite deliberately refrained from deciding which way to go. He exercised over himself, in other words, a certain degree of ascetical restraint. He was ready to decide questions where he thought he had evidence to go on— determinative if he thought the evidence determinative, probable if he thought it probable. Where he thought he had no evidence, or where no solution rationally presented itself, he held back and kept a judicious silence. Perhaps he would have preferred to go one way rather than the other. But if so we cannot tell that from the texts he left us. One immediate illustration of this relates to numbers 1), 2), 3), 6), and possibly 8) and 10) in Grisez’s syllabus above, namely the apparent lack of a providential and personal god in Aristotle. One should say straight off that there was no lack of a providential and personal god or gods in the Greek thought of Aristotle’s day, as the evidence of the great tragedians and the mystery religions makes very clear. So why does this not get reflected in Aristotle? An answer is already present in Xenophanes. The personal gods of pagan Greek religion are too irrational and too immoral to be worthy of belief or worship. If the philosopher is going to believe in a god, therefore, this god must be one that he can give some philosophical and not mythical ground for. Now the world itself provides such philosophical ground for the existence of such a god. For the world is not sufficient to explain itself; something else beyond it must be posited to explain it. 6 This fact is the basis of the several cosmological arguments for the existence of a god (Grisez states one of them in his paper, p.7). But do these arguments establish indisputably that this god is a personal god, or that, if he is, he is also a providential god? I think not.

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