Theology of Aristotle

...to beware of [this]. But that these were the genuine books of Aristotle, the divine Thomas first testifies in his Apologetic against the Unity of the Intellect, professing that he had seen them written out in Greek in an equal number, and not yet translated. He adds also that they were necessary, as appendices to his Metaphysics. They were promised by Aristotle in the second book of his Physics and in the twelfth book of his First Philosophy. To this is added that it is by no means likely that one philosopher would have written a work of such mystery with so much consumption of oil and (as they say) casting of dust, and then attributed it to another. For it is not read that such a thing was ever done before and preserved for so long. Nor, moreover, should anyone bring up that this is not enumerated among the works of Aristotle, for that is an open lie. For Diogenes Laertius reports in his Life of Aristotle that he composed one book concerning the Pythagorean tenets, and this is it, containing the mystical philosophy of the Egyptians, drawn by Pythagoras from them, and carried into Greece. Indeed, it is no obstacle that the book is called one by Laertius, while these are fourteen, for it was dissected by later scholars for the sake of doctrine and easier memory, just as the book On the Soul, called one by the same, was divided into three, and the book of Physics, also called one, was divided into eight. Neither does it prevent [it from being his] because the opinion that the soul is a harmony is condemned here, since (as Themistius says in his first book On the Soul) that was not the opinion of Pythagoras, but of certain Pythagoreans. But let it not be objected that this contradicts many of his assertions made elsewhere in his works. For Aristotle openly prefaces here (which he does nowhere else) that he is not collecting his own wisdom, but that of others, the Egyptians. And why not undeservedly? Since in the fourth book he confesses that such things are not discovered by human means, but revealed divinely. This he joins to Pythagoras, as historians have recorded of him among other things. Nor does it so often truly contradict his other opinions elsewhere... [catchword: opinions]