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Aristotle on divine movement and human nature 245own explanation in 1248 a 25ff. Aristotle speaks of ‘God’ ( ) as ‘principleof movement in the soul’ ( ) who ‘seesboth the future and the present’ ( , 38) and who‘moves more powerfully’ ( ) (40–1). For the rest, this ‘God’is in the main passive: he is the object of ‘having’ (, 32) and of ‘using’(, 38), 26 and it is worth noting that verbs like ‘give’ () or‘be concerned’ (, cf. in On Divination in Sleep and in Magna moralia) are absent here. 27 The idea of a divine movementwhich Aristotle here expounds does not, as has often been claimed,amount to an incidental and momentaneous inspiration or possession bya god comparable, for instance, with Plato’s description of divine frenzy inthe Ion and the Phaedrus (as the word might suggest). 28 It26 X is mostly translated here as ‘use’, probably because it is supposed that the god () ofwhom Aristotle here speaks is an immanent principle, some sort of psychic faculty. Apart from thequestion of whether this is correct (see below), in the context of divination has the meaning‘consult’; it is thus often connected with (‘god’, Herodotus 1.47; Aeschines 3.124), with (‘sooth-sayers’, Aristophanes, Birds 724; Plato, Laws 686 a) and with (‘divination’, Plato,Timaeus 71 d). This use of is, according to Redard (1953) 44, derived from the principalmeaning ‘seek the use of something’, which is an ‘essentially human’ activity (‘rechercher l’utilisationde quelque chose. C’est un verbe essentiellement humain. Le procès exprimé est restreint àlasphèredu sujet qui fait un recours occasionel à l’objet’), in which the object remains passive (‘Le rapportsujet–objet se définit comme un rapport d’appropriation occasionelle’).27 The question of divine activity in this chapter is connected, of course, with the question of how this‘god’ () should be conceived. The analogy in 1248 a 26, ‘as it is a god (or, God) that moves theuniverse, so it is in the soul’ ( ) seems to exclude the possibilitythat it is an immanent principle. In any case this ‘god’ is not identical with ‘the divine element inus’ ( , line 27), for this is the ‘intellect’ (), whereas ‘God’ is ‘superior to intellect’( ). This is why I prefer the MSS reading over Spengel’s conjecture inline 38. If the Unmoved Mover is referred to, then the wording ‘principle of movement’ ( ), which is usually set aside for efficient causality, is awkward, since the Unmoved Movermoves as a final cause (but see Pötscher (1970) 57). But it is questionable whether the theology ofMetaphysics should serve as a guiding principle here: passages such as Pol. 1362 a 32, On Comingto Be and Passing Away (Gen. corr.) 336 b 27, On the Heavens (Cael.) 271 a 33 and Metaph. 1074 b 3show a greater resemblance to the theology of Eth. Eud. 8.2. The same applies to 1248 a 38: ‘he seeswell both the future and the present’ ( ), which seemsinconsistent with God’s activity of ‘thinking of thinking’ ( )inMetaph. 1074 b 34–5and also with Eth. Eud. 1245 b 17 (‘he is too good to think of anything other than himself’, ), but which might be connected with Metaph. 983 a 5–10,where it is stated that God knows the ‘principles and causes’ ( and ) of all things (seeOwens (1979) 227). On these matters see Huby (1979) 57.28 The idea expressed by ‘using God’ ( , see n. 26 above) is in contrast with the concept ofenthusiastic divination in Plato’s Ion: ‘this is why God takes out the mind of these people and usesthem as his servants, as well as the sooth-sayers and godly diviners’ ( ,534 c 7–d 1), where ‘God’ ( ) is the subject of ‘use’ () and man the object. Thiscontrast supports the view that Aristotle here does not, as Effe (1970) argues (cf. my note 29), havein mind Plato’s notion of divine madness (). The presence of the word (‘divineinspiration’) here in Aristotle’s text does not alter this view, for this is used by Aristotle elsewhere todenote an affection (a ) of the human soul (cf. Pol. 1342 a 6; Eth. Eud. 1225 a 25) and here seemsto be used in a somewhat metaphorical way. See also Croissant (1932) 30 n. 2: ‘Le mot