The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
Finally, for Aristotle all Movement, as comprehensive of every kind of
change, being defined as the transition from Potentiality to Reality,
as the determination of Matter by Form, can be called forth, in the
last resort, only by a pure Form which, though the cause of all Motion,
is itself unmoved, is pure Thought and Speculation, a thinking of
thinking,--God eternally thinking God and Himself alone. Yet this
God is, if thus safely distinguished from the world, yet hardly more
Personal than Spirit was in Anaxagoras, or the Idea of Good was in
Plato. For not only does Aristotle refuse Him a body and all psychic
life, but with them he eliminates all Doing and all Producing, all
Emotion and all Willing, indeed all Thinking except that of His own
lonely Self-Contemplation. And yet the activity of the will is as
essential to Personality as that of thinking; and thinking again we can
conceive as personal only if conditioned by a diversity of objects and
a variety of mental states. And this God’s relations with the world are
strangely few and still curiously materialistic. For He but sets the
world in motion, and has no special care for it or detailed rule over
it; and since, of the three or four kinds of motion, spacial motion is
declared to be the primary one, and its most perfect form to be the
circular, and since a circle moves quickest at its circumference, He is
conceived as imparting to the world a spacial and a circular movement,
and this, apparently, from a point in space, since He does so from
outside. His transcendence is, so far, but a spacial one.
In Physics, Aristotle still constantly describes Nature as an
harmonious, reasonable Being, an all-effecting force. There is here a
mythical strain at work, and yet nowhere is a subject clearly defined
to which these various qualities could be attributed.
In Anthropology again, the active soul, the rational and free-willing,
the immortal principle, is that which specially distinguishes and
constitutes Humanity, and which indeed is the Form of the lower
soul-powers and of the body as well. Yet it is these lower soul-powers,
it is the passive, the vegetative and sensitive, the mortal soul-powers
which, in and with the body, constitute this particular man, and only
particular men are really existent. Where and how then is this living
man’s Personality, his indelible consciousness of the unity of his
nature, to arise and to be found in all this medley?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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