Aristotle (384-322bc)
The Senses Are the Portal to Knowledge, the Arts can Show Us the Way to Truth
The Renaissance owes much to Aristotle, as does the Baroque era and beyond. When Aristotle's manuscripts were brought back from the Crusades they were given to the universities to study and the professors found it interesting, taught it to their students and by the time of Thomas Aquinas in the 1200s, his ideas had overtaken those of Plato and was replacing the ideas of Plotinus through the Pseudo-Dioinysius in many ways. By the time we get to Giotto's Arena Chapel, painting by observation of nature was beginning to replace the stylized Neoplatonic approach of the Middle Ages.
As opposed to Plato (his mentor), Aristotle found all that changes in the material world to be glorious. He saw it to be signs of how the Prime Mover (Aristotle's version of the Creator) and if studied, they could give hints about how the Prime Mover worked. Since the Prime Mover started the movements, the motions of seed to seedling to sapling to gloriously full-grown tree to dying tree to a return to dust was a motion that repeated over and over and had to be part of the original design of the Prime Mover. He saw the Forms as stamping their imprint on maleable matter, which was eternal and uncreated—something the Prime Mover used to produce the original motions.
The Church was unduly affected by the ideas of Aristotle, much like they had been by Plato and Plotinus. Thomas Aquinas said much the same about Aristotle that Augustine had said about Plato—he felt Aristotle had discovered the precepts of God by just studying nature, and it led Aquinas to believe the Intellect was not fallen, quite contrary to the clear teaching of Scripture. Pope Urban VIII famously denounced Galileo for thinking the sun was at the center of the galaxy because Aristotle had mistakenly thought the earth was the center of the universe, since all nature appeared to be for the benefit of man. The Pope's argument wasn't an argument between science and the Bible as many think today, but rather old science vs. new science. It was passages like Isaiah 40:22 that speak of the "circle of the earth" that led Columbus and others before him to conclude the earth was round and the East could be reached by traveling West. Very few actually thought the world to be flat, contrary to how many paint those believing in creation to be "flat earthers."
The philosophies of men are quite dangerous if they are used to aid in the interpretation of Scripture, and we will see that this has happened over and over throughout the history of the Church.
