When I had lifted up my brows a little,
The Master I beheld of those who know,
Sit with his philosophic family.
All gaze upon him, and all do him honour.
There I beheld both Socrates and Plato,
Who nearer him before the others stand;
Democritus, who puts the world on chance,
Diogenes, Anaxagoras, and Thales,
Zeno, Empedocles, and Heraclitus;
Of qualities I saw the good collector,
Hight Dioscorides; and Orpheus saw I,
Tully and Livy, and moral Seneca,
Euclid, geometrician, and Ptolemy,
Galen, Hippocrates, and Avicenna,
Averroes, who the great Comment made.
I cannot all of them portray in full,
Because so drives me onward the long theme,
That many times the word comes short of fact.
"The teacher of those who know." The first book of the Metaphysics famously opens with the words All men by nature desire to know. In Aristotle we can find such a natural yearning for knowledge in an eminent degree, and we cannot count the number of those who have been taught at his feet and been the better for it.
Born in Stagirus on the Chalcidic peninsula of Greece, Aristotle was the son of a Stagirite doctor who became the personal physician of the Macedonian king, Amyntas III. His father died when he was only ten years old. In those days, medical lore was an esoteric tradition; it passed from father to son in secret. Aristotle was probably taught something of the trade. But since Aristotle was so young when his father died, this intelligent young boy was diverted from the path of medicine to a higher calling: the teacher of those who know. He was brought up by his uncle, or perhaps a family friend, who taught him not medicine but literature and rhetoric. The horizons of the boy were being forced to expand.
At the age of seventeen, Aristotle began to study in the Academy, although when he joined Plato was not currently teaching but away in Sicily. Since Plato was gone, he probably studied under the likes of Eudoxus, the great Greek mathematician, and a few others of Plato's students and friends. After studying in the Academy, Aristotle began to teach there. We know almost nothing about what he taught this period, but rhetoric was probably one of the subjects. So it was for twenty years. Then, suddenly, he left the Academy, and we do not know why. Perhaps he disagreed with the views of Speusippus, Plato's nephew, who had succeeded Plato as the head of the Academy; perhaps he left because he himself was not named head of the Academy; perhaps he left for political reasons. We do not know. He traveled to Assos, near the Isle of Lesbos, where, welcomed by the king, he gathered a following around him and, likely as not, began to develop his researches into animal anatomy and his views on politics. It was not to last; political turmoil forced Aristotle to leave. He returned to Macedonia. It is said he was tutor to the young Alexander the Great; perhaps instead Philip of Macedonia simply saw him as a potential replacement for the anti-Macedonian Speusippus as head of the Academy. In any case, it did not immediately pan out, and after seven years he returned to Stagirus; however, Alexander seems to have had ideas similar to those of Philip, and when he became king of Macedonia, he sent Aristotle to Athens to form a rival to the Academy. This was the famed Lyceum. There he taught for thirteen years on a broad range of subjects, until the death of Alexandria forced him to leave again.
I do not know whether all the details of the above story are true; whoever knows when sources are so sketchy as those we have in Aristotle's case. But what strikes me about the life-itinerary of the teacher of those who know is that it really was an itinerary: it was a long, wandering journey. It was nothing other than a voyage of discovery. His native intelligence served as the material, but the form that made that intelligence to be the intelligence of the one later ages would call the Philosopher and Master of those who know - this was the pattern of his life. And all this contingency brought that native ability to an extremely high pitch of genius.
It has sometimes been said, following Whitehead, that the whole history of philosophy consists of footnotes on Plato. But there is another sense in which one can say that historically even Plato was simply a set of footnotes on the Philosopher. For Plato's great value through the course of ages has often been that he intimates ways in which Aristotle is incomplete, as footnotes intimate that there is more to the world than the text itself. And as such Aristotle, footnoted by Plato and those who came after, has in a sense been the great organon, the instrument, of all the rolling centuries of Christian philosophical thought, with its strong affirmation of the reality and importance of the world into which the Word was born, the Word who is, as Augustine saw, the Master or Teacher of those who know in the truest and deepest sense. Aristotle could have made no sense of the Incarnation; but he was part of a great preparatio evangelii. And of all the compliments that might be applied to a pagan philosopher by us Christians, there is none greater than that.
So let us take a moment to recall the excellence of the teacher of those who know; perhaps imitating his interest in logic and the natural world. And we who believe in the Logos made flesh may perhaps say a prayer for the Philosopher, he who has most taught us the importance of that natural desire to know.
