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
And finally, in Ethics, Aristotle maintains and develops, it is true,
the great Socratic tradition of conceiving all virtue as active,
and demands with Plato that the whole man should, as much as may
be, put himself into all his moral acts. Indeed Aristotle makes
here the great advance of definitely denying the Socratic doctrine
that virtue consists in knowledge, and of abolishing the Platonic
distinction between ordinary and philosophic virtue. All moral
qualities are, according to him, matters of the will; and arise, in
the first instance, not through instruction, but through exercise and
education. But in place of Plato’s grandly organic, though still too
abstract scheme of the Cardinal Virtues, each of the three partial
ones pressing upwards and requiring and completing the others, and all
three bound together by the general fourth, we get a more detailed and
experimental, but only loosely co-ordinated enumeration and description
of the virtuous habits, all of them so many means between two vicious
extremes. The purificatory, recollective, self-fleeing, grandly
organic, deeply religious tone and drift of Plato’s philosophy, that
priceless conviction that we must give all if we would gain all, has
disappeared.
Everywhere then we get in Aristotle that noble Greek insistence, upon
Action and Energy, upon Reason and Clearness, upon the General and
Unification. But at all the chief turning-points we get a conflict
between the General, which is alone supposed to be fully true, and the
Particular, which is alone supposed to be fully real. And hence we are
left with an insufficient apprehension of the inexhaustibleness of
all Reality, of its indefinite apprehensibleness but ever inadequate
apprehendedness. And above all, as both cause and effect of all this,
we find here only a slight and intermittent hold upon the great
fact and force of Personality in both God and man. In a word, if in
Plato the abstracting process went in general still further than
in Aristotle: in Aristotle the supply of experimental material of
a spiritual kind which in Plato was ever enriching, supplementing
and correcting the abstract reasoning and its results in matters of
spirituality, is almost entirely in abeyance.
5. _In Plotinus and Proclus._
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