The Rise of Neo-Aristotelianism?

My mom recently wrote an entry about "Spiritual Formation", and it got me thinking. It was Aristotle who thought that everything has a form which leads it to behave in certain ways in certain circumstances. The natural bent of that form could be thwarted or modified by certain accidences attendant upon it, such as its combination with some object of a different form (e.g. air might be mixed with water, keeping it from going upward to where all air is supposed to be; when the water is heated, the air escapes - of course we now know that this is just a difference between the liquid and gaseous states of the same water). By undergoing Spiritual Formation we are attempting to mold ourselves into a new form that we did not have before. This is why I put the "Neo-" in front of "Aristotelianism". I don't think Aristotle believed that an object's form could change. If it could, that would be a sort of transmutation (and now we're getting alchemical). And indeed, even Donne, who as far as I can tell was a good Aristotelian, seemed to think that our form was fixed - at least according to the poem that I love to put on my blogs:

Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward

LET mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,
The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or business, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules forme bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse, did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,
And turne all spheares at once, peirc'd with those holes?
Could I behold that endlesse height which is
Zenith to us, and our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They'are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree;
I turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know mee, and I'll turne my face.

Regarding the question whether our form is fixed or not, I think both sides have something to offer - but how to bring them together, I don't quite know. On the one hand, we would like to say that we are all made in the image of God and that is something fixed and will never change. On the other hand, we would like to say that we are re-formed and made into a new creation in Christ. But I don't want to talk more about this at this time. Moving on...

It's interesting that the idea of a worldview, which as far as I can see is an idea that is on the rise - partly as a result of post-modernism, and partly as a reaction against it - also suggests the notion of an Aristotelian form. Our worldview is like the essense of our form, the thing that determines how we will behave, or how we will respond to certain situations, the thing that determines the way we think about things, the conclusions we draw, etc. Of course, in the post-modern world the nice thing about worldview is that it acts as a touchstone for our belief that who we are is a function of who we (or our parents, or the broader culture) have been. [Side note: I just realized that this is similar developments in Linguistics - namely, that what a language is is a function not only of natural laws of phonetics, etc., but also of what the language has been.] But again, we are Neo-Aristotelians in that we think that worldview can be changed, re-formed.

This might also be related to the debates over stem cell research. In an earlier entry (on Xanga) I think I raised the question whether it would be a helpful thing to consider an Aristotelian perspective - namely that an embryo has a certain form which it will naturally move toward becoming, i.e. a full-fledged human being. This way of thinking could potentially shed some light on the questions, especially since most the debate seems to be revolving around more Platonic questions - What is an embryo? Is it a life? Is it a ball of chemicals? When does one suddenly transform into the other? The Aristotelian concept of becoming as opposed to being is, I think, rather intriguing. And again, both have some Biblical merit - Jesus became better than the angels, but on the other hand Jesus is the second person of the Trinity. But there might be a problem here. Perhaps Aristotelianism is already breaking into the stem cell debates. One of the arguments in favor of doing stem cell research (on stem cells derived from embryos) is that the harvested embryo (harvested for whatever reason) is already no longer capable of becoming a person since it is not in an environment conducive to that development. The increasing awareness that an object is not defined solely without regard to its environment (perhaps this is remotely similar to Donne's assertion that "no man is an island") raises the question whether an embryo's form is constant between one environment and another, or if it changes.

And that raises another interesting question - whether the same emphasis on the dependency of an object on its environment might apply to the question about Spiritual Formation. In the absence of God, do we automatically have a different form than we have in the presence of God? For now I'll say that this sounds rather appealing to me, but I'll have to spend some more time thinking about it.

In the meantime... Is Neo-Aristotelianism on the rise? What does it mean?