Philosophy & Christ

Aristotle and Christianity

Aristotle taught that everything in nature has a purpose, that the good life is flourishing reached through virtue and good habits, and that all motion traces back to a first Unmoved Mover who draws the world as an object of love. Christianity shares his sense that creation is purposeful and that character must be formed. It differs in confessing that the First Cause is not a self-absorbed thought but a personal God who knows, loves, and gives the grace to become good.

What Aristotle taught

Aristotle (384 to 322 BC), Plato's student, brought philosophy down to earth. Where Plato looked up to the Forms, Aristotle looked closely at the world and found purpose built into it. Everything has a telos, an end it is for: an acorn is for the oak, an eye is for seeing. In the Nicomachean Ethics he asks what a human being is for, and answers eudaimonia, usually translated flourishing or happiness, a whole life lived well. We reach it not by feeling but by becoming a certain kind of person: virtue is a settled disposition, learned by practice, that finds the mean between two extremes. Courage stands between cowardice and recklessness; generosity between stinginess and waste. We become just by doing just acts until justice becomes second nature.

In the Metaphysics he reasons that the chain of causes cannot run back forever, so there must be a first cause of all motion, an Unmoved Mover: pure actuality, perfect, eternal. It moves everything not by pushing but by being desired, the way a beloved draws a lover. It is, in his phrase, thought thinking itself.

Where Christianity agrees

Christianity has drawn on Aristotle more deeply than on almost any other pagan thinker. Thomas Aquinas built much of medieval theology on him, and his ‘five ways’ to God begin from Aristotle's argument from motion to a first cause. Christianity agrees that the world is purposeful, not an accident, that it points beyond itself to a First Cause. It agrees that character is formed by habit, that virtue is real and worth the long apprenticeship. It agrees that human beings are made for a genuine flourishing, a life that is good all the way through, and not merely for passing pleasure.

Where it differs

Aristotle's God is magnificent and cold. The Unmoved Mover contemplates only itself; it does not know the world, did not create it, and does not love it or act within it. There is no providence, no mercy, no relationship. Christianity confesses a First Cause who is not self-absorbed thought but self-giving love, who made the world freely and sustains it, and who came into it. Second, for Aristotle virtue is finally your own achievement, the fruit of your own discipline. Christianity honours the discipline but insists we cannot make ourselves fully good by effort alone; goodness is completed by grace. Third, Aristotle's flourishing is a this-worldly ideal for the fortunate few. Christianity offers the humblest person an eternal flourishing in communion with God.

What Christ offers the seeker of the good life

Aristotle reasoned his way to a First Cause that moves the world as the beloved moves the lover. Christianity says he was closer than he knew, and that this Mover has a name and a heart:

The God whom Aristotle glimpsed as pure being turns out to know you by name and to have entered your world in Christ. And the flourishing Aristotle sought through a lifetime of habit is offered as a gift and a friendship: Jesus said, ‘I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly’ (John 10:10). The virtues still must be practised, but no longer alone and no longer only by willpower. The One you were made for helps you become who you were made to be.

Frequently asked questions

Did Aristotle influence Christian theology?

Profoundly. Thomas Aquinas synthesized Aristotle's philosophy with Christian faith in the thirteenth century, using Aristotle's argument from motion to a first cause as the basis of his 'five ways' to God, and his account of virtue to describe the moral life.

Is Aristotle's Unmoved Mover the same as the Christian God?

They overlap and differ. Both are a first, eternal cause of all things. But Aristotle's Mover contemplates only itself and neither creates, knows, nor loves the world. The Christian God freely creates, knows every creature, loves the world, and entered it in Jesus Christ.

What does Christianity add to Aristotle's ethics?

Aristotle rightly says virtue is formed by habit and aims at flourishing. Christianity affirms this but adds that our best effort cannot fully heal us, that goodness is completed by God's grace, and that human flourishing finds its true end in eternal communion with God.