“Yeah, that's why I don't mess around with doing anything good, Dan. You do one good deed for somebody...I imagine it's habit-forming. Something decent. See that grateful look in their eyes, imagine it makes you feel like Christ Hisself.” – Ben Wade

“Virtue is not an act, but a disposition (a habit).” –Aristotle
 

Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft famously describes the “Bach argument for the existence of God,” wherein God’s existence is clearly posited by a) the beauty and b) the coherence of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music. God couldn’t fail to have created a universe with such order. Among Kreeft’s students polled about their inchoate path to Christian faith, this simple argument popularly outranks the more technical Aristotelian-Thomist proofs of God. No surprise: in order to convince, such proofs require a good deal more training than most under-equipped, under-educated college students possess today. As such, the “Bach argument for the existence of God” is a nice appetif for the more technical arguments.

I propose an innovation in this vein of aesthetically inclined God proofs: the 3:10 to Yuma argument. In a word, God’s existence is more or less required by a) the beauty and b) the coherence of this film’s commanding moral realism. Both elements countervail upon the powerful forces of Modernist moral mediocrity burnished in most every other film I’ve ever seen. 3:10 to Yuma is moral realism at its very finest. In this Christian morality tale, even the term (“moral realism”) has its definition polished up and reinvigorated, after three or four centuries of ill—even opposite—popular usage.

Conceptually distinct from Kreeft's aesthetic Bach argument and the standard moral argument for God, is a combination of the two: the argument expressing the natural beauty of morality.

3:10 to Yuma restores moral realism from its perverse, longstanding Modernist misinterpretation (i.e. “all men eventually sell out, which is okay in survival situations”) to meaning its sheer opposite, the truer construction that “fiat justitia ruat coelum.” The latter corresponds with what Dan Evans, the film’s protagonist, means when he says, “I’m seeing the world the way it is.” He counteracts the usual appropriation of these words, most often employed by cowards who justify selling out by recourse to a silly dichotomy: moral theory versus the “real world.” When the hammer meets the anvil and moral principles confront life-or-death situations, “pretty much everyone wants to live,” to use the film’s villain’s diabolically commonsense leverage. And up until this film, it has been filmically acceptable to sell out for survival. But Dan Evans is a true moral realist.

The previous misconception of so-called moral realism actually incorporates not one but two toxic worldviews. They are pragmatism—a weak, pseudo-moral argument in favor of comfort, convenience, or survival over principle, (“I just like to do things easy,” as per the film’s villain Wade)—and consequentialism—a weak, pseudo-moral justification of immoral means toward a winsome end (“Every way of man is right in his own eyes,” as per Wade, again). In 3:10 to Yuma both are laid to abject waste.

Upon the epic conclusion of 3:10 to Yuma, the world over, self-justifying cowards and lovers of guiltless creature comforts afforded by pragmatism and consequentialism, will groan in discomfort. (The discomfort of conscience.) Moral mediocrity will no longer avail them, not in this film anyway. 3:10 to Yuma simply leaves in its wake no compelling excuse not to be a man of virtue, a real man.

Misinterpreting 3:10 to Yuma

Sadly, one of the most famous online critiques of this film by Michael Karounos misinterprets—in fact, oppositely interprets—it as “anti-Christian.” Literally, nothing could be farther from the truth. The critique it puts forward runs that in 3:10 to Yuma “honor and truth are shown to be hollow principles,” and that Dan Evans’s “only concern is getting money to buy back his water rights.” Karounos thinks that the film mocks Christianity. Baffling. I’m not sure whether we were even watching the same film! In 3:10 to Yuma, honor and truth are shown to be the only principles worth living (or dying) for—which repudiates pragmatism—and Evans goes well beyond the satisfying of a contracted-for goal—which repudiates consequentialism.

Indeed, the main point of 3:10 to Yuma lies in repudiating what I call the “Gandhi protocol,” a lame critique of Christianity which runs that, “I would convert to Christianity if I ever met a true Christian.” (And thus, the film does the opposite of what Karounos’s critique alleges it does.) The film’s Scripture-quoting villain, the infamous outlaw Ben Wade, essentially embraces just such a worldview until he runs into Dan Evans. In short, Evans is the first non-hypocritical Christian that Wade has ever met. And the arc of the story gives the viewer occasion to scrutinize Wade’s gradual acknowledgement thereof. Just waiting for Evans’s resolve to crack, Wade watches Evans with vigilant interest during their dangerous trek to Contention, where Wade is to be put onto a prison train going to Yuma Prison.

But what will Wade do if and after he finds in Evans a man who will not abandon righteousness—a man who does not at all conform to Wade’s moral categories? Will he reevaluate his own moral calculus?

Up until his confrontation with Evans, Wade associates the Bible either a) with devilishly stone-cold excerpts to say to someone you’re offing (a la Pulp Fiction’s Jules Winfield), or b) with the high standards overwhelming the deeds of lukewarm social hypocrites of the petit bourgeois (as according to the tired, less-than-insightful “Gandhi protocol”). One example of the latter kind would be Byron McElroy, the “Pinkerton” in Wade’s transport posse helping Evans get to Contention, with whom Wade bandies familiarly throughout the journey, as only well-acquainted “frenemies” would do (until Wades offs him, that is). In other words, Wade insinuates that he has memorized many passages from the Bible simply in order to taunt Christian hypocrites like McElroy.

But when Wade comes to know Evans more and more, the viewer finds Wade unprepared to accept the possibility of a man like Evans, a veritably good man, willing to do: a) what is right, b) because it is right, c) no matter the cost. Wade’s eventual moral conversion at the behest of the taciturn Evans occurs in precisely these three progressive phases. When correctly understood, these three stages of conversion are distinctly Christian, which disproves Karounos‘s above criticism altogether.

Moral Conversion in Three (Not So) Easy Steps

Step 1 - Doing what is right: The first step in Ben Wade’s moral conversion occurs when he sees Evans’s plain commitment to doing what is right. This occurs gradually between the beginning of the transport posse’s trek and the (penultimate) hotel room scene in Contention. There Dan Evans arouses profound moral sentiment among all listeners, including Ben Wade, with a speech reflecting his conviction not to abandon the task. Evans will be the only member of the transport posse still willing to see the task completed, in view of the lengthening odds against it. In short, Evans bids farewell to his son William forever, telling him to return home with a parting message for his mother: “your old man was the only one left standing or willing to walk Ben Wade to that train [the payment for which will follow].”

Counterintuitively, during Evans’ simple yet florid farewell, the viewer watches the bystanding Wade much more closely than either conversant, Evans or his son. Wade is clearly moved. Only minutes before, Wade had in exchange for his freedom, privately offered to quintuple the sum guaranteed Evans (for the accomplishment of the task). Evans had turned Wade down. So well before the speech is made, Wade already acknowledges that Evans cannot be bought off.

Yet while Wade is clearly touched by Evans’s rejection of the buyout sum and then by his farewell speech, a keen observer notices that as Wade looks on, he seems at one distinct moment to replace the former notion that Evans must be motivated (not by true goodness but) by money with the new notion that Evans must be more truly motivated by desire for his son’s and wife’s respect. The latter is as false as the former.

Honor is a more noble desideratum than money. Thus, Wade by imputing this higher false motivation to Evans, has taken one step—even if on a mistaken basis—toward conversion. But if Evans were actually motivated only by the prospect of deceiving his son and wife into respecting him, as Wade thinks, this would not constitute true Aristotelian virtue, or doing the right thing for its own sake.

Step 2 - Doing what is right because it is right: Everyone then leaves except Wade and Evans, who are left alone to complete the task and to get to the train station. Half an hour later, the two men flee the hotel amid the gunfire of over forty hired guns (hired by Wade’s gang) aimed at Evans. Wade and Evans make it most of the way to the station—the final destination—by stumbling into a little shack. There, Wade announces loudly and suddenly to Evans that he “ain’t doing this no more,” because “your son’s already gone home, hero.” Translation: I helped you to deceive your boy into believing you went the whole nine yards (because, inexplicably, I like you), now get out of my way as I return to my gang. Return to your family.

Evans seems almost oblivious, and responds by insisting that they must keep moving to the train station. To this, Wade reacts violently. He knocks Evans down and begins to choke him. What insane idea, what daemon, has possessed this strange man Evans?! No one does what is right simply because it is right!

As Wade chokes the breath out of Evans, Wade’s eyes soften. His spirit is converted from violence. We see (as much as we hear) him say, “alright.” He has met his match: one true Christian (even on the tendentiously high standard set on the Gandhi scale). Ben Wade now accepts that there is at least one follower of Christ who will do what is right simply because it is right. But Wade remains unsure how far Evans will go in the name of this right action.

Step 3 - Doing what is right because it is right no matter the cost: As Wade and Evans run together on the final leg of their journey, they are have clearly become friends, at long last. Evans trips at one point; Wade helps him up. Wade’s pursuing gang cannot believe their eyes. The viewer forgets that the two willing men run eagerly toward the train which will transport Wade to be hung at Yuma Prison.

They arrive at the small train station, where pinned down by Wade’s gang’s sniper fire, the two men exchange parting stories in a sort of confessional, as they await the train. Eventually, it arrives late and, through fortune and through the actions of Evans’s son, who did not actually go home, Evans manages to get Wade onto the train. “Well, you did it, Dan—“ Wade begins to congratulate Evans, who still stands on the platform, when interrupted by gunfire.

Charlie Prince, Wade’s evil yet faithful lieutenant, kills Evans on the platform with multiple shots. Prince smiles faintly as he fires shots, just as Wade had earlier promised Evans’s son would happen. Prince then restores to Wade his legendary gun, “the hand of God,” which bears a crucifix on the handle. The viewer sees Wade carefully looking down at the gun’s crucifix—at the One Truly Good Man who ever lived—and finally recognizing that Evans fully followed the example of this One Truly Good Man, willfully dying for the sake of others. Wade is in that moment fully converted; his concluding actions accord entirely with such a conversion.

Conclusion

Aside from jamming its thumb defiantly into the eye of the devotee of American pragmatism and consequentialism, this film will also moisten the eye. And to say the least, this features as an unexpected (if not unrelated) quality in a virtually unsung Western remake with non-American leads—an obscure, Wild West adventure film turning out to be more like a crypto-theodicy. In other words, this film has got more Moby Dick to it than McQueen or Duvall.

3:10 to Yuma is about the big issue, the only one which ever interested mankind: as stated in my introduction, the proofs of beauty and moral coherence defeat the two Modernist neurotoxins pragmatism and consequentialism, the flotsam and jetsam of our age. But mankind has forgotten it.

Viewers do not come before a film of the Western genre expecting to take in a real drama; thus, no one is prepared for this film’s arousal of the spirits or its tear-jerking. And that is precisely why 3:10 to Yuma’s plain meaning—an undeniable affirmation of a personal God and His clear, immutable moral law—rests on the mantle, in so many viewers’ memories, like Poe’s “purloined letter,” obvious yet invisible. Tears constitute an unexpected devotional, after all, even in homage before the usual genres like tragedy or melodrama—recall the mighty Hector slain and defiled in front of his grieved father King Priam. Nor are most viewers of the Western prepared to consume a morality tale…or much less a crypto-theodicy. And even less are they ready to spend part of their weekend viewing a Christian morality tale about conversion and martyrdom! Heavens, no: the genre is too “gritty” and “realistic” for that!

Perhaps true realism and (dare I say it) true grit are more about the Cross of Christ than we formerly presumed. 3:10 to Yuma proves as it inspires. The film’s uncanny crypto-Christianity together with its hidden, tear-jerking poignancy, combine with the film’s unrepentant moralizing (pun intended) to suggest something of an almost mystagogical character, revealing the “way the world really is,” which is to say, the best path for men: the way of martyrdom. This film is sui generis insofar as it spits moral realism back in the face of the consequentialist Western genre. The Western leitmotif of having your cake and eating it too, be damned.

No more saving the world and saving your own skin. That is the stuff of children’s tales. 3:10 to Yuma puts the better to his money: “If you want to do right, fantastic. But don’t forget to pay the toll, which is precisely one death, and keep the change.”
 
 
(Image credit: New York Times)

Last week, I wrote about the longstanding Catholic drive to reinterpret the philosophy of Plato as realist. In actuality, Aristotle’s philosophy perfected Plato’s by connecting the material to the formal world—two separated domains which, in Plato, remain wholly alien to one another. Accordingly, it is quite a “stretcher,” I suggested, when Catholics talk about Plato as a realist. Any philosophy which divorces the material and the formal qualifies as anti-realism, because matter’s interaction with form is the very thing that constitutes intelligibility. (More on that below…)

As predicted, the article’s “combox” bore out my very thesis: Catholics and other Westerners (including some atheists) remain so strongly accustomed to just such an unduly charitable characterization of Plato that they startle to hear otherwise.

But here’s the real rub: such a distinction between the two ancient philosophers matters only because we live in a more violently anti-realist Modern era, which put to death (in popular thought) the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Church’s Scholastic philosophy. Plato’s errors would not matter nearly so much if we were pre-Moderns.

As mentioned in last week’s article, living in the “Modern era” means inhabiting the centuries after the Sixteenth. Two moments of that most unfortunate century are directly insinuated here: the Protestant Reformation and the secularist Enlightenment. They are equal but opposite rejections of the Natural Law.

Today, in English-speaking countries, the faithful grandchildren of the Reformation are usually thought of as “the religious right,” while the intellectual progeny of the Enlightenment comprise “the secular left.” It so happens, as one of history’s bitterest ironies, that in countries like America and England, a giant, sustained food fight erupted between the two sets of grandchildren...who were once fellow travelers! We are all familiar with these skirmishes, of course, comprising the so-called “culture war” between two shouting, red-faced fundamentalisms: Protestant Biblicism versus Enlightenment Scientism in all its many vestiges.

The narrative not falsely goes that these two camps despise one another.

They do…today. But as aforementioned, it was not always so. One is surprised to find that together, each half of Prot-Enlight originally teamed up with the other against the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Catholic Church. Together, each camp strove cooperatively to make the sixteenth century Catholic view of nature, the Natural Law, seem outdated. Together, both parties asserted an aggressive new anti-realist dichotomy for the supposedly new times: form versus matter, faith versus science, even faith versus reason.

Ironically, the two sides cooperated steadily against the Church during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in order to create these false dichotomies, only to spend the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries arguing ceaselessly about them!

Whether or not the reader accepts Plato’s role in this Modernist overturn of the Natural Law, it is far more important—and leagues more undeniable—to a clear conception of our world that we come to terms with the primary role played by Prot-Enlight. Plato’s role was mere prefigurement to that of the Prot-Enlight philosophies. The Prot-Enlight philosophies set the goal as the complete eradication of the Natural Law.

Prot-Enlight and the Three Prongs of the Natural Law

The two halves of Prot-Enlight Modernism altered the prevailing Western notion not so much of God, counterintuitively, as of nature. That is, any pop-theological changes wrought by the Reformation or the Enlightenment were actually secondary, in pervasiveness, to the harmful amendments Prot-Enlight made to the popular Western view of the world, or reality, itself.

I wrote in last week’s article: “In the main, Aristotelianism stands for reality’s incipient freedom and morality, its intelligibility, and its teleology.” Whether we’re talking about the authors of the Enlightenment like Francis Bacon and David Hume or the authors of the Reformation like Martin Luther and John Calvin, Prot-Enlight sought to “take down” the “big game” of the Catholic Natural Law, of which these three prongs were (and are) constitutive.

Natural Law Prong #1: Firstly, Catholic Aristotelianism (i.e. Thomism) puts forward physical nature as the forum of man’s freedom and morality. In other words, humanity’s freedom and morality are altogether natural. Catholicism does not naively suppose that either human or physical nature guarantee man’s automatic morality through any and all uses of his freedom; rather, physical nature is the forum where the proper use of human intellect and will may through deliberate action dispose each of the natural appetites, through habit, toward morality. And nature is the locus in quo where this happens. The secular and the Protestant worlds together decry this Catholic position: morality, for each worldview, counteracts nature. Again, for Catholicism, morality is perfectly natural, which is why Thomas Aquinas asserted that all of the appetites are natural…if implemented with the proper disposition, of course.

Protestantism, as mentioned above, rejects the possibility of freedom and morality altogether. Man is enslaved to sin. Whether we talk of Luther’s assertion that human will is “in bondage,” or Calvin’s infamous doctrine of predestination, Protestantism writ large rejects the first prong of the Natural Law hailed by the Catholic Church. The Protestant view of sin, mankind’s “total depravity,” swallows up any possible proper usage of intellect or will.

The Enlightenment, on the other hand, posited naturalism—the perfect opposite of the Natural Law’s first prong. Naturalism describes a deterministic nature which we find “red in tooth and claw.” The animals are no more than complex mechanisms, meat machines, which operate as the vector sum of their competing appetites. Moreover, naturalism places man squarely in the middle of, not above, nature. He too is bestial. He too is determined by his appetites alone. He too is just a meat machine. As such, human free will is rejected and determinism (equal but opposite to Protestant pre-determinism) prevails, although Enlightenment thinkers certainly wouldn’t designate this “sin,” as the Protestants do.

Natural Law Prong #2: Secondly, Catholic Aristotelianism puts forward nature as intelligible. “Being is intelligible,” Aristotle famously explained. As articulated in last week’s article, Aristotle described that form was in matter, as it were, rather than above matter, as Plato had taught. Because matter is in-formed, then, nature is intelligible. If form were instead compartmentalized somewhere above matter, as in Plato’s “noetic heaven,” then the material objects would be neither knowable nor differentiable. But the opposite is true. On this Aristotelian basis, the Thomism of the Catholic Church affirms that faith and reason work together, rather than against one another. Faith is strengthened, not weakened, by the two ways of knowing about human reality: the a priori way, philosophy, and the a posteriori way, science. Both philosophy and science affirm theology because, as Thomas Aquinas famously held, “truth cannot contradict truth.”

Protestantism, beginning with Luther, repudiated the scientific worldview—and not only the false scientific worldview of Scientism, but even science properly done. Protestantism also rejected the philosophical approach to the world: Luther held that “the whole of Aristotle is to theology as shadow is to light.” The rallying cry of Luther’s Reformation was sola scriptura, meaning that the Bible alone—not science or philosophy or anything less than supernatural revelation—is intelligible to the mind of man.

The teachings of the Enlightenment, in a coordinate if opposite manner, reject the intelligibility of the universe. And this is strange because Enlightenment secularists have always claimed to be “for science,” a claim which requires the principle of intelligibility. It’s quite simple: the new Scientism posits materialism. For the materialist, nothing but matters exists. Even though this precludes both ratio and intellectus, materialists never seem to understand how their point of view vitiates science’s ability to be done at all (cogitation requires ratio and intellectus: one recalls John Lennox’s debate with Richard Dawkins, where clearly Dawkins failed to understand Lennox that “the principle of consciousness, intelligibility itself, proved [his] point”).

Natural Law Prong #3: Thirdly, the Aristotelian view of nature poses nature’s goal-orientedness (i.e. teleology). Nature discloses its own purpose. Just as in prong #2, wherein the Catholic worldview affirms via the principle of intelligibility the formal cause of nature, this third prong of the Natural Law affirms nature's final cause as Jesus Christ. Nature's purposive, christological aspect is the culmination of Natural Law prongs one and two: because nature has a goal, its morality and intelligibility are thereby validly connected to the supernatural. If, in fact, nature were devoid of a supernatural telos, as the Prot-Enlights believe, then its ostensible morality and intelligibility would be rendered arbitrary and even conceptually null.

So, with regard to the convoluted Protestant stance on prong #3, the Reformation rejection was not of Christ, but of his sustained connection to the physical world. Reformation theology rejects the idea that nature's purpose is knowable through human examinations of the world. In short, Protestants express ambivalence insofar as they think the natural world does not really have a knowable supernatural end, even though of course they affirm Christ as the Logos (and in that sense, the goal). As Louis Bouyer said, “in Protestantism, everything goes on, or seems to go on, as if the Incarnation had ended with the Ascension of the Savior.” As if Jesus' connection to the world lasted only thirty-three years!

Clearly, through the Enlightenment’s rejections of God, of formal causation, and even of consciousness itself, the secularists removed any conception of a purpose in the universe. Such a crystal clear issue need not be belabored here. The secularists tell us every day, after all, that everything is pointless.

Conclusion

From here, the story only gets stranger and stranger. After all, the Modern English-speaking republics—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, among ours and the motherland—all claim to be founded upon the Natural Law, even as their professed basis lies in the twin sixteenth century movements (their opposite motives notwithstanding) whose raison d’etre was the elimination thereof!

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us confused, schizophrenic. Think of American history: who was it but men steeped in the Reformation and the Enlightenment—the “Prots” and the “Enlights”—who drafted the several state constitutions, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights? And what are these papers but documented ways of life, memorialized articles of culture, predicated squarely upon the Natural Law. As such, we Moderns are confounded citizens of the most schizophrenic republics of all-time. America, crown gem of all the paradoxical republics, was even founded as against Rome, by folks who thought Canterbury had grown to be too close a likeness.

Americans in 2016 have the temerity to be surprised when recounting our cultural failures in Natural Law living. Many Americans even have the gall to wonder why our republic is failing. In short, when Modernism is based upon dual rivaling rejections of the Natural Law, untangling the web equates to no trifling academic affair: it becomes an existential exercise required for our very survival. Until the republics founded in the Modern era return to the Natural Law, we will continue to be unable to justify such republican desiderata and sine qua nons as: natural rights, subsidiarity, popular morality, anthropology, a liberty-based political economy, and a humane employment of science and technology (materialist science yields materialistic technology, as we recognize). We shall no longer receive these benefits without shouldering the burdens, or at the very least without acknowledging the mutual exclusivity of the Natural Law and Prot-Enlight Modernism.

Until we return to Aristotle, to Thomas, and to the Natural Law, we should expect to find our Modern world more than just cold and hostile to us—we should expect to find it unfree, unintelligible, and pointless.

In today's Catholic Church, Platonism and Aristotelianism are often considered equal. It is a dangerous error that hails all the way back to the first neo-Platonists in the third century. Simply put, the true description of reality, rightly recognized by the Catholic Church, is that account given by Aristotle (not Plato!) and confirmed by Thomas Aquinas.

But too many Catholics speak of Plato and Aristotle together, as if their metaphysics are identical. They are in fact nowhere near this. And when this error of conflation was combined with the the Enlightenment and the Reformation, the byproduct was a surge in atheism.

These two sixteenth century forces staged a joint revolt against the metaphysics of Aristotle. And the overly close association of Plato and Aristotle was and continues to be a major piece of the puzzle: in our day, Plato is either falsely held to be Aristotle’s equal, or even his philosophical better.

Even among Catholics, it hasn't been articulated commonly, plainly, or clearly enough: to abandon Aristotelian metaphysics and ethics is to veer toward atheism. Aristotelianism alone accounts for the close causal interaction of formal reality—"being qua being" or existence as it really is—and our day-to-day material lives. Platonism flatly rejects such an interaction.

Often, well-intentioned Catholic theologians have been all too ready to consider Plato a practical Aristotelian simply because St. Augustine was a sort of Platonist. (In fact, he was the precise sort—a neo-Platonist—who popularized the conflation. But more on that later.)

At present, suffice to affirm that Plato was not any sort of Aristotelian, proto- or otherwise, except in the very most mechanical sense: Plato first posited “form” and “matter,” and from there said perfectly opposite things (compared against Aristotle) about them. In fact, Plato divorced form from matter. The divorce of form and matter comprises the position of anti-realism to which the Modern world has predictably returned—following the anti-Aristotelian metaphysics of the two forces of Modernism, what I call “Prot-Enlight,” and also the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (the perfect vindication of both the Reformation and the Enlightenment).

And this is in turn due largely to the unhappy fact that neither ancient thinker, Plato nor Aristotle, has been studied with any consistent degree of seriousness, anytime following the Late Middle Ages.

Neo-Platonists and Straussians

As mentioned above, the first historical which equated Platonism with Aristotelianism were the neo-Platonists, who were the contemporaries (and in some cases, collaborators) of the Church Fathers, like Saint Augustine. Rather than emphasizing all of the plain errors in Plato's metaphysics, corrected by Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, especially those at Alexandria, highly exaggerated the few likenesses between Plato's and Aristotle's ontologies.

In other words, neo-Platonism generally regards Plato as an Aristotelian and vice versa. This falsity influenced many students in the early Roman empire, and continues to do so.

One factor that partly excuses neo-Platonism's false equivocation between Plato and Aristotle was the widespread disappearance and general unavailability of Aristotelian texts during this period (the third through the sixth century A.D.). The neo-Platonists wrongly but honestly assumed that Plato's student, Aristotle, had incorporated more of his teacher's system into his own metaphysics than he actually had. Where there existed a hole in Aristotelian scholarship, the neo-Platonists assumed (wrongly, most of the time) that Aristotle probably agreed with his teacher Plato.

And this is understandable enough.

But in today's academy, there is no longer any excuse for this equivocation. In any of today's colleges and universities willing to give Plato or Aristotle a read at all, which is far too few, the influence of cultish twentieth century thinker Leo Strauss prevails. What Strauss and the Straussians did to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle was to re-bundle them, as neo-Platonism had, into a “package deal.” The Plato and Aristotle package.

And since none of the Straussians gave a sufficiently close or accurate read to either Plato or Aristotle, they tend(ed) to buy the neo-Platonist myth of the close lineage between the two metaphysics. (For whatever reason, Straussians studying the Medieval period in philosophy tend to focus on neo-Platonic-inclined Arab scholars like al-Farabi or Avicena instead of Aristotelian-leaning Averroes or Thomas Aquinas. And this tends to re-solidify the wrong impression inaugurated by the neo-Platonists.) The Straussians have not helped matters.

Prot-Enlight and Immanuel Kant

Naturally, it would require a much longer, drier article to enumerate fully all of the parties involved in the phenomenon of falsely aligning Plato and Aristotle—and what motivated each of these parties. Instead, what merits our attention is the Modern world, where the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant “undid” most of the corrections Aristotle made to Plato's thinking.

Long after the neo-Platonists, but long before the Straussians, two distinct sixteenth century groups wanted not necessarily to characterize Aristotle as a Platonist (or vice versa) but rather to kill Aristotelianism outright. In the main, Aristotelianism stands for reality’s incipient freedom and morality, its intelligibility, and its teleology. These three prongs not coincidentally characterize the Catholic view of reality. The Protestant reformers and the Enlightenment secularists wanted to depart from Aristotelianism for quite differing, even opposite, reasons.

But they shared at least one common goal: to unyoke the Modern world from the “thralldom” of Rome. Doing so involved the development of a Prot-Enlight ontology which viewed man’s nature as unfree (determinism), nature as unintelligible, and reality as purposeless (random or “non-teleological”). Perhaps a follow-up article, explaining how each they achieved this, and how a German philosopher would vindicate both 150 years later, is warranted.

That German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, vindicated both the Enlightenment and the Reformation by returning (in non-Platonic language) to Plato’s divorce of matter and form. In other words, what is knowable about this world constitutes practical knowledge, but is unimportant; what is knowable about reality constitutes pure knowledge, is important, but unknowable from this world. Such Kantianism falsely claimed to justify the overturn of Aristotle. Even into our age, this claim has fooled most of the world.

Jacques Maritain and the Way Forward

To date, the clearest and most definite argument put forth against the equation of Platonism with Aristotelianism was that of twentieth century Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain appraised Plato’s metaphysics as both vastly important for its undeniable contributions to the truth, and yet vastly wrong where it became too specific. (Plato was certainly the “big picture thinker” par excellence!) Such specific calculations about reality required Aristotle’s corrective hand, Maritain reasons.¹

The only metaphysics sufficient to explain this intuitive truth of existence would have to be capable of positing a much closer causal connection between ideal reality—what Plato called the “really real”—and our material existence. Aristotle’s did this, and Thomas Aquinas’ perfected upon it by use of the concept of analogia.

The practical aspect of Maritain’s philosophy, aside from its bright distinction between Plato and Aristotle, was its popularity among non-philosopher Catholics.  Readers of Maritain among the Catholic laity are able, en masse, to understand, from a truly Aristotelian perspective, just

how are we to explain the relationship between [material] things and their forms? Plato replied by calling them likenesses or participations of the forms. But these terms, which later will receive in Scholasticism a profound significance, are in Plato’s system nothing more than metaphors devoid of any strictly intelligible content…[which is] a pregnant conception which, in Aristotle’s hands, was to be purged of all internal contradiction, but which, as presented by Plato, seems self-contradictory…

By rightly pointing out the self-contradiction in Plato’s metaphysics of divorce—divorce between the world and meaning, between material objects and their forms, between reality and semblance—Maritain points us away from Kant, and back to the truth—that is, back to Aristotle and St. Thomas.

Conclusion

When the world embraces anti-realism, a divorce between form and matter, Aristotelian realism is abandoned and atheism naturally follows. The view of a rational, causal, meaningful universe requiring a God drops away…and you wind up with irrational, anti-philosophical worldviews, like the self-contradictory scientism of Laurence Krauss.

Now, this is truly a "strange notion," that the apparent winning philosophy has lost. In the hearts and minds of the West, the philosophia perennis has been passed over in favor of dozens of differing strains of Modernist alternatives over the last five centuries. In truth, only part of this blame can be attributed to the usual suspect one finds beneath popular falsities and behind the executioners of priests and philosophers: old-fashioned, prophet-slaying mobbishness.

In this particular case, the killers and deniers of the truth have been aided—and in that sense exculpated—by confused Modern philosophers themselves, who ought to know better, and who long ago popularized the supposed "closeness" of Plato and Aristotle.