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[ 78 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
it
is compatible with divine order and foreknowledge. Virtue never goes
unrewarded. Boethius found consolation in the expectation of reparation and reward
after his death. His book, along with Augustine’s Confessions and other meditative
works, cultivated piety and introspective analysis during the hard times in the West
of the Early Middle Ages.
During this period, the Eastern church, and Greek philosophy in general,
developed independently of the Latin West. East and West would reconnect later,
at least
to some extent, first through the mediation of the Arabs, who brought,
along with their own works, most of Aristotle and commentaries on him.
4
In
the East, and later also in the Arab world, Aristotle’s chapters in De anima on
the intellectual soul—in particular book 3, chapter 5—were widely discussed.
Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 200 c.e.) provided the most authoritative interpre-
tation of Aristotle available. His most important contribution was to suggest that
the active or productive power of the intellect, what he called the “active (or
agent) intellect,” is a transcendent singular being, which enters the soul “from
without” and is equivalent to Aristotle’s transcendent prime mover, or God. He
also named the receiver of these ideas, what others would call the potential or
possible intellect, the “material intellect” because it served as matter for the active
intellect to inform with ideas. In his view, this material intellect was an active
power in humans, with the disposition to think the forms, or ideas, brought to it
from without, by the active intellect. In thinking these ideas, the material intel-
lect becomes “actual” and acquires these ideas, which accumulate as a habitus,
a dispositional readiness to use the ideas on subsequent occasions. By suggesting
that the material intellect was an active power, he also, in effect, distinguished it
from the passible (
pathêtikos) intellect, which included the irrational powers of
the soul, such as imagination and emotion.
Although Alexander saw the active intellect as immortal, he left little room
for human personal immortality. He viewed the material intellect, which was
the highest part of the human soul, as a power that could become “immortal”
while thinking immortal ideas but did not thereby acquire immortality for itself.
Rather, it is a power or faculty produced out of a particular organization or mix-
ture of the material constituents of the body, and it dies with the body. In taking
this position, he followed a trend that developed
in Aristotle’s immediate succes-
sors, Theophrastus and Strato.
Among those who relied heavily on Alexander but who also moved away
from him in the direction of an account of personal immortality was Themistius
(c. 317-c. 388). He was studied closely by the Arabs and after his work was trans-
lated, in the thirteenth century, had a great influence on European philosophers.
He is the probable source of the notion of a hierarchy of matter-form relations in
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