cized Plato’s doctrine of self-subsistent Forms, his own work is a critical
synthesis incorporating Form as one of four causes, along with material,
efficient, and final. In order to see the world as emanating downward from
Forms, one would have to ignore Aristotle’s stress that Forms never exist apart
from matter. Similarly, although Aristotle did not regard the world as created
by or flowing down from God—nor did he see God as something transcending
the universe—his cosmology is hierarchic in a more concrete way. His astron-
omy depicts the earth surrounded by concentric crystalline spheres which carry
the moon, sun, and planets around in shells inside the sphere of the fixed stars.
There is an idealist element in this, insofar as Aristotle needed something to
move each sphere; and just as the human body is moved by its soul, regarded
as the Form of the body, each astronomical sphere is moved by its own
soul/Form. God has a place in this physical system as the unmoved mover of
the outermost heaven. Aristotle’s God does not move anything by efficient or
formal causes, but exists only as the final cause toward which other things are
attracted. The Neoplatonists, especially under religious impulses in Islam and
in Christianity, could reinterpret this physical world-picture as if it were a series
of metaphysical emanations. God was transformed from final cause into a
source of Being and of Forms; each astronomical sphere could be identified
with a level of abstraction; angels could be inserted to move the spheres, or to
represent various levels of metaphysical reality above the spheres.
For this reason, an interest in empirical science could reinforce rather than
undermine this Plotinian view of the world and its identification as Aristotle’s.
The Baghdad translators also imported Ptolemy, Euclid, and Galen, and the
surrounding network of philosophers showed considerable interest in the em-
pirical sciences. The sciences were treated as filling in details of the overarching
hierarchic worldview. The same happened when Aristotle’s corpus first became
known in Europe. Albert the Great, who even used Averroës’s commentaries,
still saw the whole thing through Neoplatonic eyes. For Albert, the symmetry
of the whole system provided a convenient framework into which new infor-
mation on gems, minerals, and plants could find its place as a grand compen-
dium of the sciences, and he saw no reason to break out of the Neoplatonic
metaphysical hierarchy to stress the materialist elements in Aristotle’s ontology.
One can even say that there is a scientific core to the aspects of Aristotle that
are closest to Neoplatonist hierarchy. Aristotle’s logical classification of genus,
species, and individuals was suggested by his biological researches; it was
Aristotle’s attempt at a classificatory theory of his data that seemed to show
the existence of “higher” and “lower” levels. Scientific empiricism was no
challenge to hierarchical idealism, so long as it stuck to description and
classification of natural phenomena.
Let us attempt to departicularize the historical context of the acceptance
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^431