That is nonsense. You make aristotle out to be a cult leader. We might as we forbid all children to speak as well if this is the case. Aristotle wasn't joking when he said that "the educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead." Let us contrast that with the sacred scriptures.
"Jesus answered, and said to him: If any one love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and will make our abode with him."
"For the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what you must say."
"Hold the form of sound words, which thou hast heard of me in faith, and in the love which is in Christ Jesus."
"But Jesus said to them: Suffer the little children, and forbid them not to come to me: for the kingdom of heaven is for such."
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If you want to talk about him, let's talk about him.
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When you said you were "studying Aristotle today" I assumed you meant that you had gotten a book by someone (a professional philosopher in the Aristotelian tradition, hopefully) that discusses Aristotle's thoughts. Now it sounds like you're just googling "Aristotle quotes" because the uneducated/educated quote isn't in any of his work so far as I'm aware, it's something Diogenes attributed to him, and it's something that you're only going to discover if you're researching Aristotle by just googling "things Aristotle said." But that's no way to learn about what someone taught and believed, is it?
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One of Aristotle's many contributions to western thought, and indeed to Christendom later, was the crystallization and incorporation of the principle of non-contradiction. Mainly, that a thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect. This is an axiom that supports other truths, it's something that you need to "get out of the way" (i.e., establish) before you can talk intelligibly about most things, including religion. For, if we're uncertain whether or not a thing can be and not be in the same respect, then how can we ever be certain (or even make sense) of the idea that there is a God who is
immutable? Or that there is a God
at all? Since, without such a principle, there very well might
be and
not be a God. Or, there might be a God who's immutable
some of the time, but not the rest of the time. And so on.
.That the educated and uneducated are as different as the living and the dead is, in light of the principle of non-contradiction,
true. Notice that he doesn't say the
poorly educated, but the uneducated. Certain things mutually exclude each other: like education and uneducation. Like being alive and being dead. The quote isn't saying that those who aren't highly intelligent are better off dead, it's saying that the
difference in education between a man who has it and a man who
doesn't is the difference between a man who has life and doesn't. But this quote of his isn't something from any of his works anyways, but something Diogenes just said he said when he was asked about education, so it's hardly even something that one should be mounting any strong case for anything about or against anyways.
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Such is the case with Aristotle's metaphysics writ large. The whole of them deal with the nature of being and change
as such. These are the sorts of things that need to be understood before we even talk about religion because they establish the very nature and existence of such a thing as truth, of there being substances (rather than just ever-fluctuating accidents), of things being ordered toward an end, and so on. It is of course possible to believe the Catholic faith without ever knowing that Aristotle existed, but it's hardly possible to go beyond that-- to defend it, to understand it on a deeper level, or to crystallize or tease out any of the implications of Catholic teaching. It's not surprise that Aristotle's metaphysics have been used in solemn councils. That's how seriously she takes this system of thought.
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When Aristotle began to be resuscitated and known in the west, he was quickly incorporated into the Church's teaching, probably first with the development of the word "transubstantiation," a distinguishable and now standard word to describe what happens at the consecration, a word that didn't exist until the eleventh century or so. Once St. Thomas "baptized" Aristotle's thought, it became adopted about as officially as possible by the Church as her own philosophy. The Aristotelian Thomist system (or just Thomist system, since the two are indistinguishable in most of the ways that count) is an intellectual bulwark supporting the entire corpus of theological argumentation and demonstration. Since St. Thomas, the Church's most solemn teachings have incorporated Aristotelian metaphysics, probably most notably in the Council of Trent's teachings on justification and its causes. Anytime we speak of substance, of teleology, of matter and form, of holymorphic unions, or most of the rest, we're
using the distinctions and system Aristotle most notably developed and applying them in the Tradition of St. Thomas. It is not a small thing to glibly reject Aristotelian metaphysics, in fact, Pope St. Pius X prescribed this thought system as
the principal antidote and protection against
modernism.
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Much more could be said, but I'll stop before I get too digressive.
Topic: Aristotle (Read 4334 times)