From the TMC newsletter: What We are Reading: Aristotle's Metaphysics by Christopher O. Blum, Fellow and Dean
Metaphysics has never been as widely understood or as greatly loved as philosophers think it ought to be, but today, it seems, there are some particularly stiff cultural winds blowing in the face of its pursuit. In the first place, metaphysics is a kind of knowledge, and reasoned-out knowledge at that. In that regard, it is a subject more like chemistry or Euclidean geometry than it is like the study of literature or the sifting of political platforms. When we seek to answer questions such as “what is God?,” we are not looking for a moral or an aesthetic judgment, we are seeking understanding. Second, although metaphysics seeks the knowledge of the highest causes, it does so from common experience and human reasoning alone, and so it is different than the kind of knowledge of God that we have thanks to our faith and on the basis of what God has revealed about himself in Sacred Scripture. Metaphysics provides the tools to make our theological reflections more accurate and more fruitful, but, by itself—that is, without the assistance of revelation—it speaks only in the most general terms about the Divine. For these two reasons, then, it can be hard to muster up the patience that metaphysics demands of those who pursue it. After all, our political and cultural woes are so very pressing, and our faith certainly does offer more ready and more powerful answers to our most pressing questions. Why, then, do we labor through the difficulty of Aristotle’s Metaphysics? The reason is simple: in imitation of St. Thomas Aquinas, we thereby propose to measure our own intellectual grasp of reality against the one Dante called the master of those who know.
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