then, at some time, the jaws of the earth opened, and they were able to escape and make their way from those hidden realms into those regions that we inhabit. When they suddenly saw earth and seas and skies, when they learned the grandeur of clouds and the power of winds, when they saw the sun and realized not only its grandeur and beauty but also its power, by which it fills the sky with light and makes the day; when, again, night darkened the lands and they saw the whole sky picked out and adorned with stars, and the varying light of the moon as it waxes and wanes, and the risings and settings of all these bodies, and their courses settled and immutable to all eternity; when they saw those things, most certainly would they have judged both that there are gods, and that these great works are the works of gods.
This is a beguiling vision of divine order—it is easy to understand why Cicero quoted these words—and passages like this facilitated the rediscovery of Aristotle’s work and the rehabilitation of his reputation in later centuries.
A key turning point came when the pagan philosopher Porphyry (c. A.D. 232–c. 304) produced a philosophical system that reconciled and synthesized what he took to be the core moral and metaphysical teachings of Plato and Aristotle. By the Middle Ages, the sovereign authority of Plato and Aristotle over the thinking of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians, scientists, and poets was rivaled only by the final authority of God’s word in the Torah, Bible, and Koran. Treated as an indispensable and encyclopedic supplement to sacred scripture and Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s corpus was for many centuries carefully examined by those seeking authoritative information about natural and social phenomena, and also authoritative answers to classical philosophical questions.
One result was scholasticism, in which the quest for wisdom was replaced by a close reading of Aristotle’s consecrated texts and the composition of detailed, often lifeless commentaries on them.
But another, and even more consequential, result was the creation of a lasting link between philosophy and science (episteme). When Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics says that one knows (epistatai) a thing unconditionally when one knows the appropriate explanation of it, and knows that the thing cannot be otherwise, he represents scientific knowledge as the fruit of an analytic inquiry into a natural world composed of empirical facts, and he implies—pace Plato—that the acquisition of such knowledge requires neither a conversion of the soul in practice, nor a crowning moment of divine revelation.
“All men by nature desire to know,” declares the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. “In everything natural there is something marvelous,” we read in his treatise on Parts of Animals.
In Aristotle’s voracious desire to comprehend the particulars of the visible world, especially as expressed in the most beautiful of his surviving texts, there is, indeed, something marvelous. But in his overmastering passion for scientific knowledge, as in his expedient alliances with tyrants, there also seems something Faustian.
Aristotle himself insisted that it is sometimes “difficult to know whether one knows or not.” But in the matter of his life and character, it is not that hard.
“As with most ancient personalities,” observes one scholar, “we know just enough about Aristotle’s to realize that we cannot really know anything about it.” Given the conflicting scraps of evidence that survive, we will never be sure if Aristotle in fact embodied “an ideal of human excellence”—or, instead, as his earliest detractors insinuated through the anecdotes they chose to preserve, something else entirely.
SENECA
The Death of Seneca, 1633, oil on canvas, by Claude Vignon (1593–1670), a French painter influenced by Caravaggio. Condemned to death by Nero in 65, the philosopher has voluntarily sliced open his veins—his retinue includes a scribe who is poised to record his every dying thought. (Louvre, Paris, France/Peter Willi/The Bridgeman Art Library International)
What is personal integrity? How can one cultivate and maintain a consistently good will? These were pressing questions for Lucius Annaeus Seneca, the most important of the pagan philosophers to write, and to think, in Latin. Yet Seneca’s personal inconsistencies are so well documented that his foremost modern biographer simply takes his hypocrisy for granted, in order to analyze the extent of the gulf between his words—as a moralist, a dramatist, and a philosopher—and his deeds, especially in his years as the principal adviser to the Roman emperor Nero (A.D. 37–68).
Some contradictions seem obvious. In many passages in his writing, Seneca praises poverty, but he amassed great wealth. He