Aristotle on God

Abstract

Aristotle’s theology as expounded in his Metaphysics is seen as radically distinct from his predecessors’ and farther still from traditional religion. Contributing to this view are three apparently peculiar conceptual features of Aristotle’s God: (i) that God is solely a final cause who moves all other things as being loved or desired; (ii) that God is a self-thinking thinking; (iii) and that God is ontologically separate from the visible cosmos. No pre-Aristotelian philosopher has adduced (i)-(iii) in an argument to the existence and nature of God; and this prompts the question of how Aristotle’s theology stands to preceding thought. This article argues that, despite appearances, the fundamental assumptions and basic elements of Aristotle’s theology and religion are an adaptation of his philosophical predecessors’, and that Aristotle differs from his predecessors only by being closer to and logically more consistent with traditional religion. This conclusion is without prejudice to the acute analytical distinctions and philosophical refinements by which Aristotle transposed preceding thought into his own.