#On the Dead Tutor
Aristotle of Stagira was born about 384 before the common reckoning and died about 322. The Bureau of Records cannot leave any corpse undated, so it renders those years as A.S. −2093 to −2031. His file carries a zero in its dateline because the schema refuses negative numbers, as most clerks do. The zero is a floor and nothing more. He never saw 1710, the Church, the Synod, or the Sacred Ledger. All four would have baffled him, and that bafflement is the only humility I have ever managed to credit to his account.
His life is short and public. He studied under Plato in Athens for twenty years and left when the school passed to someone else. He tutored the boy who became Alexander of Macedon. Then he came back to Athens and founded his own school at the Lyceum, where he is said to have lectured while walking, and so his pupils were called Peripatetics. He wrote on logic, categories, the soul, physics, the heavens, animals, ethics, politics, rhetoric and poetry, or else others wrote those things down under his name. He held opinions on every creature in the Aegean down to the cuttlefish. When Alexander died, Athens remembered who had taught him and grew unfriendly. Aristotle left, reportedly so that the city would not sin twice against philosophy, and he died the next year at Chalcis.
Doctrine files him under pre-epoch intellectual inheritance, beside Euclid, the Roman aqueduct tables and the better Greek physicians. The category means dead, pagan, useful and supervised. No Bureau claims him, and none could, since the oldest organ of the Synod is younger than his grave by some two thousand years. Doctrine claims custody of what survives of him instead: the school texts, the teaching extracts, and the right to say what they mean.
#On Logic Under Custody
His great gift was a machine for arguing. Men argued before him, of course, as they have argued since the first quarrel over a goat. Aristotle took the practice apart and laid the pieces on the bench. Then he showed which arrangements hold and which fall over under their own weight. All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Socrates is mortal. Two premises and one conclusion, with a guarantee attached: when the premises are true and the form is valid, the conclusion cannot be false. He sorted the valid forms and named the terms. He also catalogued the fallacies a clever man uses to get a stupid audience to agree to its own robbery.
He added the Categories, a list of what may be said of a thing: its substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time and the rest. Catechists have drilled novices on that list for longer than there have been Bureaus to employ them.
The guarantee is the dangerous part. A valid syllogism carries truth the way a drain carries water, and it will carry sewage just as faithfully.
At the Academy of Strasbourg, Doctrine teaches the second-year novices a rule short enough to carve, and it has been carved: valid form sanctifies nothing; the premises decide. Whoever writes the premises owns the argument, and the Bureau of Doctrine writes the premises. A novice who builds a flawless syllogism on an unlicensed first term has proven nothing. He has made an excellent cart and hitched it to a stolen horse.
For this reason the Index Claritatis matters more to logic than any Greek. A term has to be licensed before it may stand in a premise. Miracle, anomaly, evidence, nature: each has an approved sense. An argument that slides from one sense to another between the first premise and the second commits what Aristotle called equivocation and what the Bureau of Purity calls a Tuesday.
A Rhenish parish catechism described Aristotle as "the first doctor of the Church's reasoning."
Corrected. Aristotle held no doctorate of anything ecclesiastical. He died a pagan, centuries before the Church had a single parish to catechise. The catechism mistook the pupil's grammar for the tutor's baptism. The printer has been instructed, and the schoolmaster has been instructed more firmly.
#On the Rationalist Theft
The Rationalists claimed him, as they claimed anything old and well bound. Their mistake is instructive. Aristotle believed the world had purposes. Things move toward their proper ends, the heavens are ordered, and a mind can grasp that order because the order is there to be grasped. The Amsterdam authors of De Vera Luce wanted an instrument with nothing set above it. They took his method, threw out his cosmos, and called what remained freedom.
After A.S. 0 the Academies turned demonstration into sovereignty. Whatever could not be measured on their bench was fraud. Once a question had been asked, whoever held the calipers was entitled to answer it. The Treaty of Regensburg made that entitlement law in A.S. 30, and the Rationalist Republic governed by it until the Sundering of A.S. 45 showed what an argument without a custodian will admit. Their error was less a matter of logic than of jurisdiction. They believed the syllogism answered to no one.
The Greek would have made a poor Republican. He wrote a whole treatise on politics without once proposing that the lecture hall should govern the city. The Academies quoted him most often where he was least theirs, which is the usual fate of a dead man with a large library.
#On Strasbourg's Use
The Synod did not burn him. It inherited the Rationalist lecture rooms of Strasbourg, scrubbed them, reconsecrated them and kept the chalk. The logic course survived because a Church that must argue heresy to death needs men who can tell a valid form from a counterfeit one. Tribunal advocates learn the figures of the syllogism. Records clerks learn the fallacies so they can find them in petitions. Purity learns them to find them in confessions and, to its great distress, now and then in its own charge sheets.
The text used in Strasbourg is a plain teaching digest: the figures, the terms, a table of fallacies, and the Categories cut down to a single page. A Doctrine preface opens it. The preface tells the reader that the Philosopher supplies the form and the Creator supplies the truth. Anyone who confuses the two will be assigned remedial arithmetic under supervision. The fuller Greek texts stay in the restricted stacks. The enemy's commentaries on them go lower, into the Forbidden Stacks, where Doctrine keeps whatever is useful chiefly to people it does not trust.
A clever student eventually asks whether the Doctrine preface is itself a premise, and whether it is licensed. He is praised for the question, and then he is reassigned.
#On War's Aristotle
Then there is the Bureau of War, which has never read him and uses him every day.
In A.S. 172, on the Danubian forward corridor between Budapest and Bastion-Irongate, the Vexillators of Strasbourg under Warden-Submarshal Calev Rohn forced three crossings in a single charge: Saint Hadrien's Ford, the Chain-Pier Ruin, and the drowned pontoon at Mark Seven. Tribune-Clerk Othmar Vey wrote his report under a wagon, in the rain. In it he said the men were "borne forward in a manner exceeding ordinary locomotor explanation." War did the rest, and the Night of the Three Bridges became a miracle of locomotion.
Put War's reasoning on the bench and it is a syllogism of perfect figure. Bodies under load cannot cross a flooded Danube under fire at the recorded speed without aid. The men crossed at the recorded speed. So the men were aided. War then declared the aid divine because the result favoured the Synod. Aristotle would have recognised that fourth step at once and fined it.
Every weakness is in the premises. The "recorded speed" was recorded by men who needed the miracle. "Cannot cross" rests on no trial the Bureau has ever run, since such a trial would mean drowning a control group. The Philosopher would have asked what kind of aid it was and from what cause. He would also have asked why the current's sideways pull appears in the surgeons' notes and nowhere in the homily. War answers such questions with a stamp: MARTIAL OBEDIENCE, RATIFIED. The veterans answer that they swam. Under a pastoral tolerance clause, Doctrine lets the veterans keep their answer, and it keeps the premises for itself.
He gave us the forms, and he supplies none of the premises. A pagan dead two thousand years handed the Church a very good knife. He was not asked, he is not thanked, and he has no say in whose throat it opens.