Please see my review of Mary Nichols’ Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human: Piety and Politics in the “Nicomachean Ethics” in Public Discourse! https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2024/02/92638/
Very interesting! I would tend to agree that there is value in exploring the philosophic case for piety, which is not in itself dependent on revelation. At the same time, the questions you raise at the end of your review point to the fact that revelation is a permanent presence in political society. In Aristotle's day, revelation was in conflict with reason (Zeus, the head of the gods, was a philanderer). Christianity, by positing a God who is Reason, does not conflate the human and divine, but provides a framework in which the two can be understood as harmonious. Given the general failure of recent generations to transmit this understanding, I think it behooves those who embrace Christian revelation today to seek a better understanding of philosophic piety, and vice versa. Although Christianity does require orthodoxy, orthodoxy rightly understood is not synonymous with theocracy, and by no means denies the limits of human reason (aided or unaided). "We see now through a glass in a dark manner" (1 Cor. 13:12).
Very interesting! I would tend to agree that there is value in exploring the philosophic case for piety, which is not in itself dependent on revelation. At the same time, the questions you raise at the end of your review point to the fact that revelation is a permanent presence in political society. In Aristotle's day, revelation was in conflict with reason (Zeus, the head of the gods, was a philanderer). Christianity, by positing a God who is Reason, does not conflate the human and divine, but provides a framework in which the two can be understood as harmonious. Given the general failure of recent generations to transmit this understanding, I think it behooves those who embrace Christian revelation today to seek a better understanding of philosophic piety, and vice versa. Although Christianity does require orthodoxy, orthodoxy rightly understood is not synonymous with theocracy, and by no means denies the limits of human reason (aided or unaided). "We see now through a glass in a dark manner" (1 Cor. 13:12).