Download PDF | Constantinople and the West: Essays on the Late Byzantine (Palaeologan) and Italian Renaissances and the Byzantine and Roman Churches, By Deno John Geanakoplos, University of Wisconsin Press 1989.
326 Pages
Introduction
This volume owes its existence to the suggestion of several colleagues and students that, to mark my retirement after thirty-four years of almost uninterrupted teaching, a number of my essays of wider appeal be gathered together and published in a single accessible volume. I have chosen for inclusion in this book essays that reflect the primary research interest of my career, the broad theme of the cultural and ecclesiastical relations between the Byzantine East and Latin West during the Middle Ages and Italian Renaissance.
It is this consideration-together with the relative unavailability of most of the essays-that constitutes the basis for this collection. Part 1 deals with the influences on Italian Renaissance humanism of the so-called Byzantine Palacologan "Renaissance," a fascinating but generally little-understood revival of Greek learning (and art) that took place in the Byzantine East somewhat before and during the Italian Renaissance. It has long been known of course that Greek manuscripts of the Palacologan Renaissance, including those of authors until then un- known to the West, were brought to Italy by Byzantine scholars fleeing the Turkish conquest of their homeland.
But what these essays demon- strate, for the first time systematically, I believe, is that through their knowledge of the Alexandrian and Byzantine traditions, the Byzantine émigrés alone were able to unlock and authentically interpret the more advanced treatises of Aristotle, Plato, and other Greek literary, philo- sophic, and scientific works. Through their teaching in Italy of the mean- ing, style, and nuances of the Greek texts (as well as their editing of texts for the press), the Byzantine refugees were thus able, if sometimes unwit- tingly, to promote a fusion of the Palacologan Renaissance of Greek learning with the developing Latin, and later, Italian humanism. Accord- ingly, thus the essays in Part ! attempt to restore a balance between the old, now entirely untenable, view that the coming of the Greek émigrés served to begin the Italian Renaissance, and the more recent but still exaggerated view of not a few modern Renaissance historians that they were merely transmitters of Greek learning to the West.
Through juxtaposition, so to speak, in these essays of both the Palae- ologan and the Italian renaissances, it is hoped that the reader may comprehend more clearly the process of the broadening horizon and corichment of Itahan Renaissance thought and learning fostered by the Emigre scholars from Byzantium Part 2 deals with the relations between the Byzantine and Roman churches, largely irenic in the earlier centuries of the undivided Christian church but turbulent in the period after 1054 and especially 1204, the date of the Latin conquest of Constantinople and beginning of the forced Byzantine conversion to "Roman Catholicism." Any modern attempts to bring about a genuine reconciliation of the churches must be based on the mutual experience of the two ecclesiastical bodies in the medieval and Renaissance periods, some of the main encounters and phases of which are discussed in this volume. Most important for such a recon- ciliation is probably an understanding of the churches last great encoun ter at the Council of Florence.
There, after centuries of mutually recrimi nating schism and unsuccessful attempts at reunion, every religious dif ference of any significance was, finally and for the first time in a general council, publicly debated by theologians of East and West. A few words about the nature of each essay: The first is an attempt at a broad synthesis reevaluating the vital question of the various aspects of the Byzantine émigrés contribution to the Italian Renaissance. The second essay, on the same general theme, covers roughly the same period but with its argument organized according to the various intellectual fields or themes treated rather than by phases of the Italian Renaissance. Essays 3 and 4 concern two major Byzantine personalities who I think substantively influenced Italian Renaissance intellectual thought.
The first is the polymath Theodore Gaza, a first-class Greek and Latin philol ogist and probably the leading secular Aristotelian of the earlier Italian Renaissance. His collaboration in Rome with Andrea Giovanni di Bussi and several others, editing for the first printers in Italy a corpus of classi cal Latin works, and his responsibility for what appears to be the first printed passage from a classical Greek author (Plato), have gone almost unnoticed by most modern historians. The second is the philosopher John Argyropoulos, a Byzantine humanist who, several at genties now believe, was primarils responsible for bringing about the redientation of Italian (especially Florentine) humanism from emphasis on rhetoric and
philology to Platonic philosophic thought. Probably one of the most original contributions to the volume is the fifth essay, an attempt at a biography (the first in English) of the little known but widely influential Greek scholar Nicolaus Leonicus Tomaeus. His official appointment by the Venetian Senate in 1497 to teach Aris totelian philosophy in the original Greek text marked the ascendancy, if not the triumph, of the Greco-Byzantine Aristotle at the Renaissance's
leading university, Padua, over the hitherto prevailing Averroist (Arab) interpretation. As will be seen, essays 3, 4, and 5 focus on the cities of Rome, Florence, and Venice, each of which in turn became the major center of Greek learning in the Italian Renaissance (Florence being historically first). Essay 6 examines the great eighteenth century historian Edward Gib- bon's in many respects surprisingly accurate and vivid, if acerbic, treat- ment of the ill-fated schism between the Greek and Latin churches. The next essay is an analysis of the proceedings and intricate theology of the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381, which in effect marked the emergence to leadership in the Greek East of the patriarchate of Constantinople that subsequently of course became the great rival to Rome. Essay 8 examines the interaction at the unionist Council of Lyons in 1274 of the Franciscan minister-general and theologian Bonaventura and other representatives of the mendicant orders with the legates of the Byzantine church and Emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus.
The essay demonstrates, among other things, that the role of Bonaventura has been exaggerated by historians, the principal intellectual architects of the union being two little-known Franciscan friars, the sympathetie Greek Franciscan John Parastron and the Latin Franciscan Jerome of Ascoli. The next essay, 9, deals with a neglected chrysobull of the same emperor. The document expresses the exultant Byzantine mood at the restoration of Constantinople to the Greeks in 1261 and the treatment accorded the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia by its Byzantine restorer Michael VIII. Essay 10, a shorter essay read to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the Sicilian Vespers (1282), delineates the attitudes of the Greek-speaking, in ritual still Orthodox, population of Sicily toward possibly the two most astute diplomats and implacable enemies of the medieval world, Charles I King of Sicily and the Byzantine ruler Michael Palacologus.
Study 11, though published two decades ago, remains, I believe, essen- tially still valid in its interpretation of the Council of Florence. One of the first Western analyses to utilize, critically, the behind-the-scenes mem- oirs of the Byzantine cleric Sylvester Syropoulos, the essay is possibly the only article in English analyzing the preliminaries, proceedings, and problems of the famous council. The final essay, written for the 550th anniversary of the beginning of the councils of Basel (1431-49) and Florence (1438-39), will interest, I hope, not only church historians and theologians, but also ecumenists who look back to these last two medieval confrontations between Eastern and Western Christendom as the point of departure for any modern negotiations to reunite the two churches.
The Appendix, closely related to material in Part 1, is concerned with the vital but still rather neglected problem of the first editions of the Greek Church Fathers printed in the Renaissance. I have endeavored to revise all the essays in the aim of correcting errors enriching the text, and bringing the studies entirely up to date. Thus essay 11, in particular (on the Council of Florence) contains many changes and considerable additional material. Also, essay 4, on Argyropoulos, has in parts been rewritten in the light of the most recent scholarship, and the texts of the other essays (especially 3 on Gaza, 5 on Tomaeus, and the Appendix) have been reworked, along with their notes For the convenience of interested scholars and the general reader, more detailed recent bibliographical material is provided at the end of each essay.
These bibliographical additions include not only works spe cifically relevant to each essay but also related material of a more general nature. It should be noted that I have incorporated into the text and notes any pertinent new information provided by the titles listed in the addi tional bibliographies. Full bibliographical material for works of my own that are cited in the text can be found in the list of Selected Works at the end of the volume.
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