Posted on: August 4th, 2016 “Integralist Thomism” … in Aristotle
In opposition to “two-tier Thomists” (or neoThomists) who, in an effort resist the onslaught of modernity, maintain a strict separation between nature and grace, “integralist Thomists” such as John Milbank & David Bentley Hart think, following thinkers such as Henri de Lubac, that the separation between nature and grace, the natural and the supernatural, is permeable and always-already deconstructed.
In this same spirit I appeal to Aristotle, who in Nicomachean Ethics X.7 (line 1177b 25ff), writes:
[The life of contemplation] would be greater than what accords with a human being, for it is not insofar as one is a human being that he will live in this way, but insofar as something divine is present in him, and to the extent that this surpasses the compound being, to that extent also the being-at-work of it surpasses that which results from the rest of virtue [i.e., that which is characteristically human]. So if the intellect is something divine as compared with a human being, the life that is in accord with the intellect is divine as compared with a human life.
The Stagirite continues in this vein for several more lines, arguing that there is something divine in human beings, and so we should strive for the divine life, strive for what is “beyond us.”
So it is that, several hundred years before the advent of the Gospel, Aristotle was already striving toward the thought that grace is packed into nature, or that nature, in and through the human being, inevitably leads beyond itself to the divine.
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