The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

aristotle
noblest virtue. It is theoria kai eudaimonia, which means knowledge of the
world and knowledge of oneself. It is the goal for a whole life. Wisdom (sophia)
as the highest virtue is the aim or telos of the entelechy of man. Thus Aristotle
wrote at the end of his Ethics the sentence: “Sophia estin nous kai episteme,”
which means: Wisdom is pure reason and spirit united with knowledge. Sophia
reveals itself as purest love.
These thoughts of the Aristotelian ethics reach the loftiness of Plato’s idea
of love as highest wisdom, as expressed in the Symposium, and they lead us
to the top of the pyramid of Aristotle’s concept of God. “If God is always in
that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder, and if
in a better state this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And
life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that
actuality; and God’s self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We
say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and
duration, continuous and eternal, belong to God; for this is God.” 197
At this point Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics became a way to wisdom
(sophia) of God (theos), a theosophy. How this Aristotelian theosophy prepared
the way to the Logos-doctrine of the gospel of John will be seen in the following
chapter (XII).
This preparation was the impulse which stood behind the Lyceum at
Athens, the first university of the world. In the very place where previously
stood the temple of Apollo Lyceus, the good shepherd protecting the flock
against the wolf, the Sophists came together in their arguing, doubting and
mocking. As Aristotle walked with his disciples in the peripatos, he was in fact
driving back the wolf of skepticism and sophistry. He and his pupils formed a
society of friends of wisdom or sophia, a union of philosophers who dedicated
their lives to fulfill the mission of Apollo, the good shepherd, protecting the
flock against materialism.
The word of the Delphic Apollo, “Know Thyself,” found its echo in the
Lyceum at Athens. At the beginning of Hellas, the forefather of the Hellenes,
Deucalion, landed with his ark on Mount Parnassus where Apollo dwelt with
his nine muses. Now, at the end of Hellas’ development, Aristotle appeared as
a second Deucalion and rescued the remnants of the wisdom of man from the
flood of darkness in the midst of the Iron Age.