Acts of the Apostles 8 · A Record of the Great Scattering
8.1The Acts were already finished. This chapter was added afterward.
8.2At first no one wrote him down, because he was the one who refuted us. That omission is itself the evidence against our own rule. (cf. The Rule 2.11)
8.3We add him now, and we write down the reason he was missing along with him.
8.4In the Academy there was a man who studied for twenty years, named Aristotle.
8.5He was the best student Plato ever had. He was also the first to take Plato apart in public.
8.6Plato said the forms of beauty and justice hang in the vault of heaven. (cf. Gospel of Plato 2.9)
8.7Aristotle said: not in heaven. In this horse, and in this leaf. What you must look at is not the vault. It is the horse.
8.8Some expected Plato to expel him from the Academy.
8.9Plato did not. Plato said: this is exactly what I made that rule for.
8.10Aristotle later said a sentence that has been quoted for two thousand years:
8.11"Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth."
8.12It is usually read as a breach. It is in fact the highest respect.
8.13A man who cannot refute his teacher has not inherited learning. He has inherited worship.
8.14He left the Academy and founded the Lyceum east of the city. He taught while walking, and so his students were called the walkers.
8.15Where he parted from Plato was, in the end, a small thing: he went and counted.
8.16He counted the gills of fish and the feet of bees, and cut open sea urchins to see what was inside. He recorded more than five hundred kinds.
8.17He was wrong about a great deal. Those who came after corrected a great deal. That is exactly what he wanted.
8.18He also taught a boy. The boy was named Alexander.
8.19When that boy grew up, he marched to the end of the world as it was then known.
8.20The Order records this not to boast of it, but as a warning:
8.21Alcibiades betrayed a city. Alexander rewrote the world. (cf. Gospel of Xenophon 4.16)
8.22The one who teaches cannot govern what the one who learns does with it. And that law grows larger the further down it runs.
8.23In his old age the Athenians moved to try him too. He did not wait. As he left he said:
8.24"I will not let Athens sin twice against philosophy."
8.25That was not cowardice. That is the difference between what is inside the fence and what is outside it. (cf. The Covenant 4.3)
8.26Socrates chose to stay, because what he taught all his life was the law of the citizen. (cf. Gospel of Xenophon 5.9)
8.27Aristotle chose to leave, because what he taught all his life was to go and look. The dead cannot look at anything.
8.28Both were right. This too is a place where we do not agree, and we do not rule on it either.