Download PDF | George Gemistos Plethon The Last Of The Hellenes ( Oxford University Press Academic Monograph Reprints) ( 1986)
414 Pages
INTRODUCTION
THERE is something of a legend among historians of the late Byzantine Empire and the early Italian Renaissance about George Gemistos, who called himself Plethon. The legend has still to be completely explored. There have been many monographs about different aspects of his life and works, and most of what he wrote has been published, though in scattered and often inaccessible editions. There has been no previous account in any language of his life and writings as a whole. He remains an interesting and mysterious figure in the last century of Byzantium. Whether he was an important figure, and if so in what way, has still to be explained.
Exploring the legend is a difficult task, simply because it is a legend. It rests chiefly, but not exclusively, on the impact he made by his presence in Florence in 1439, the lectures he gave there ‘On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato’ (or, more precisely, ‘with regard to Plato’), and the long essay in which he summarized them, usually known as De Differentiis. It is a commonplace among scholars that the Italians who formed his audience were greatly impressed by his personality and his arguments. Sir Steven Runciman has written that ‘in Italy, where the learned world had come to realize what a store of knowledge was to be found in Byzantium, the intellectuals longed to see this illustrious philosopher’.' Francois Masai wrote that ‘Pléthon est entré en relation, non pas seulement avec des personnages secondaires, . . . mais avec les coryphées de ’humanisme italien . . .’.? Many other scholars have written to similar effect. They echo statements contained in the two surviving funeral orations on Gemistos.?
No doubt they are right, but the evidence of his influence is surprisingly slight. The number of Gemistos’ identifiable acquaintances in Italy is small. Only one-Ciriaco Pizzicolli (in Greek Kyriakos, and in English Cyriac of Ancona), who was a keen antiquarian but not a philosopher—can be said with certainty to have known Gemistos before his visit to Italy. Only two—Cosimo de’ Medici and Grigorio Tifernate—are known with certainty to have heard Gemistos’ lectures at Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici was of course the pre-eminent name:
if he went to hear Gemistos, then many of his circle would have gone also.
Further than this it is hard to go. Five other Italians are known by name who encountered Gemistos: Ugo Benzi at Ferrara; Francesco Filelfo at Bologna; Lionardo Bruni, Paolo Toscanelli, and Pietro Vitali (called ‘Peter of Calabria’) at Florence; but only the last three could have heard his lectures, and it is no more than a strong presumption that they did so. As for the text of De Differentiis, only one manuscript (the autograph) is known to have been available in Italy during his lifetime, and that was in the hands not of any of his Italian friends (though it was for them that he wrote it) but of his former pupil, Cardinal Bessarion. So far as the names of individuals go, the rest is all conjecture, though much of the conjecture is no doubt well based.
Gemistos’ place in the intersecting worlds of Greek and Latin humanism, and thus in the western Renaissance, remains to be assessed. I started work on his life and writings with the presumption that he was, as he has often been called, the one significant and original philosopher of the late Byzantine Empire. Of this I have become increasingly sceptical. Certainly he can be, and perhaps has been, overrated as a philosopher. But I have come to the conclusion that he was indeed an influential figure in the cultural history of Europe for reasons other than those usually supposed.
It is probably true that he was the first competent interpreter of both Platonism and Aristotelianism to address Latin audiences in Greek for a thousand years. That fact alone should have assured him of an interested audience. When he did so, the process of translating Plato into Latin was still in its early stages, though the translation of Aristotle was almost complete. It was not until 1423 that the complete corpus of Plato’s surviving works was available in the West even in the original Greek. The philosophical study of Plato, as distinct from the literary task of translation, had scarcely begun. In effect, it began with Gemistos’ arrival.
But the outcome was not what he intended. He intended to establish Plato in the place of Aristotle-as the foundation of metaphysical speculation, and hence of physical science as well. Instead he succeeded unintentionally in fascinating the West with Platonic imagery and poetry, which affected writers and artists more than philosophers and scientists. Philosophers continued for generations to adhere to Aristotelianism as interpreted in the scholastic tradition.
Even when they discarded Aristotle, it was not to put Plato in his place. But poets, painters, sculptors, and creators of works of imagination in general took Plato to their hearts. This would have disappointed Gemistos, who had little interest in the arts. But it was, willy-nilly, his real legacy to the West, which justifies Masai’s assertion that ‘action de Pléthon sur la Renaissance est certaine’.*
To make it intelligible how this came about, I have tried to summarize his life and writings with the minimum of intrusive commentary. Within the framework of a biography, I have included complete translations or summaries of all his published works: speeches, lectures, essays, letters, addresses, and commentaries. Since there are no English translations of his three major works—De Differentiis, the Reply to George Scholarios’ Defence of Aristotle, and the Book of Laws-1 have translated the first of these in full (Ch. x1), and given extensive summaries of the other two (Chs. xv and xvi). All his other writings are summarized in chronological order, so far as this can be established, at the appropriate periods of his life. The one important work not by Gemistos which I have also summarized is Scholarios’ Defence of Aristotle (Ch. xu), since without it the controversy between the two men could not be understood.
Ihave divided the work into two parts, entitled Gemistos and Plethon because he adopted the latter name as his pseudonym at the crucial turning-point in his life, the year 1439, during his visit to Italy. I use the former name in the first part and the latter name in the second, although some of his contemporaries continued to call him Gemistos, or to use both names indiscriminately, after he made the change. Although he was about eighty years of age when he adopted the new name, all his important works were written subsequently, at least in their final form. The result is that the two parts of the book are roughly equal in length, although the second part covers little more than a dozen years of his life.
My intention has been to include everything necessary for the study of his life and works. But I must acknowledge the imperfect and interim character of the result. Much work remains to be done on Gemistos’ manuscripts. A number of them (though not the most important) have never been published. Of those that have been published, new editions are required of a least two: On the Events among the Greeks after the Battle of Mantinea, published by H. G. Reichard in 1770; and the Reply to Scholarios, published by W. Gass in 1844. Botheditions were based on inferior manuscripts; and in each case Gemistos’ autograph is now available in Venice.
Nevertheless I am grateful to several scholars for helping to ensure that this work is not more imperfect: to Professor Donald Nicol for reading and commenting on the typescript; to Mr Ian Crombie for similarly scrutinizing my translation of De Differentiis; to Mme Bernardette Lagarde for providing me with a copy of her doctoral thesis on De Differentiis; and to Mr Leofranc Holford-Strevens of the Oxford University Press for his editorial improvements of the text. I am also indebted to several Greek scholars, whose names will be found in the Bibliography; and especially to Mr Panayiotis Kanellopoulos, who first stimulated my interest in Gemistos Plethon.
THE LOST SOUL
‘ON the 26th of June of the 15th Indiction, a Monday, the teacher Gomostos died at the first hour of the day.’ So wrote an anonymous hand in the margin of a manuscript now preserved at Munich.! On the reasonable assumption that by ‘Gomostos’ he meant George Gemistos, who called himself Plethon, the philosopher’s death occurred in the early morning of Monday 26 June 1452, less than a year before the Turks captured Constantinople. Gemistos had been born in the capital of the dying Byzantine Empire, but he died at Mistra in the southern Peloponnese.
Historians of the day liked to call it Sparta, but Mistra stood a few miles west of the ancient site, not in the plain of the River Eurotas but on a spur of Mount Taygetos. It was founded as a fortress in 1249 by French colonists, the successors of the Crusaders who had captured Constantinople in 1204. The site was personally chosen by Guillaume de Villehardouin, the fourth Prince of Achaia under the Latin Empire. But much had changed in the two centuries between the foundation of Mistra and Gemistos’ death there.
The French held the fortress for only twelve years. In 1259 Guillaume de Villehardouin was defeated and captured by a Byzantine army in the battle of Pelagonia. The high point of the Greeks’ conquest of the Latin Empire came in 1261 with the recovery of Constantinople by the forces of Michael VIII Palaiologos, the founder of the last Byzantine dynasty. Guillaume was obliged to cede four forts in the southern Peloponnese-Mistra, Geraki, Maina, and Monemvasia— as the price of his freedom. A small part of the Peloponnese thus became again a Byzantine province. But the Franks tried to recover the lost territory by force of arms. The Greeks living in the neighbourhood then took refuge on the hill under the protection of Mistra, which grew from a fortress into a walled town. During the following century it became a small but important provincial capital.
The rise of Mistra was almost the only bright spot in the history of the Peloponnese during the fourteenth century. The surrounding country was poor and desolate, constantly overrun by the warring armies of the Greeks and Franks, or ravaged by Norman, Catalan, and Turkish raiders. The Frankish Principality of Achaia, which had once included the whole Peloponnese, was so impoverished that it had to import food and animals from Italy. The Greek Despotate of Morea was ruined by the violence and greed of rebellious land-owners. Serfdom still survived there, an indication of technical backwardness; natural resources such as the minerals and timber of Mount Taygetos were undeveloped.
In the middle of the fourteenth century the prospect slightly improved with the establishment of members of the imperial familyfirst the Cantacuzenes from 1349 to 1382, and then the Palaiologoi from 1383 to the end-as semi-autonomous Despots. Under the Palaiologoi most of the Peloponnese was eventually reconquered from the Franks. But Mistra was never more than a small oasis in a desert of anarchy and confusion. The lamentable state of the Peloponnese is documented by many contemporary writers, including the Emperor Manuel II (1391-1425), Demetrios Kydones, Demetrios Chrysoloras, Isidore of Monemvasia, the satirist Mazaris, and Gemistos himself.’
Compared with the rest of the Empire, however, its importance and prosperity grew. It became a cosmopolitan city, attracting Franks, Spaniards, Jews, Venetians, Genoese, and Florentines. In the fifteenth century it ranked next to the capital and Thessalonica; then, after Thessalonica was ceded to Venice in 1423 and finally captured by the Turks in 1430, it stood second to Constantinople alone. The only other Greek city of importance still free was Trebizond on the Black Sea, which had been ruled by an independent Greek Emperor of the Komnenos family since the time of the Latin conquest. Argos, Corinth, Patras, and Nauplia were held by the Venetians, together with Methoni and Koroni; Athens and Thebes formed part of a Florentine Duchy; Arta was held by the Italian Count of Cephallonia. They had passed through many vicissitudes, but none was in Greek hands at the opening of the fifteenth century. Nothing remained to the Byzantine Empire outside Constantinople and its near environs except one or two islands and a few towns in the Peloponnese, of which Mistra was virtually an independent capital. It was there that Gemistos spent almost the whole of the second half of his life.
Gemistos was a very old man when he died in June 1452; no one knew exactly how old. After his death, George Trapezuntius wrote that he had completed ‘almost a hundred years of this miserable life’» George Scholarios, writing in 1450 when Gemistos was still alive, compared him with Tithonos, the equivalent in Greek mythology of Methuselah.4 Both Trapezuntius and Scholarios were bitter critics of Gemistos, and both were very much younger men; but there was no reason why they should be mistaken about his approximate age. Their estimates were corroborated by a funeral oration delivered in his honour, which compared him with both Tithonos and Methuselah.’ An Italian friend, Francesco Filelfo, wrote to the same effect, calling him ‘pretty aged’ (admodum senex) in 1441.6
On the basis of these estimates it is only possible to guess his date of birth. Guesses have ranged from 1350 to 1389, but both extremes can be ruled out. Ifhe had passed 100 when he died in 1452, the fact would have been remarked in the funeral orations; if he had been only in his sixties, he could hardly have been compared with Tithonos or Methuselah; and in neither case could he have been described by Trapezuntius as ‘a/most a hundred’. The most reasonable guess is that he was born between 1355 and 1360.
The chronological context of his life is interesting. It coincided with the last century of the Byzantine Empire and the first century of the Italian Renaissance, in both of which Gemistos played a part. It also coincided with the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. That war played a part in the emergence of nation-states in the west, which was a development that Gemistos hoped also to promote in Greece. But it also helped to frustrate efforts to raise forces in the west to save Constantinople from the Turks.
About the time of Gemistos’ birth, the Italian Renaissance was just beginning. Cola di Rienzi had recently failed in his enterprise of restoring the Roman Republic (1354). Boccaccio was completing the Decameron (1358) and Petrarch was sighing over his manuscript of Homer, which he cherished but could not read. With their joint encouragement, the first professorship of Greek was established at Florence in 1360, but its holder, Leontius Pilatus, was a mediocrity and it did not flourish. In the same year was born Giovanni de’Medici, the father of Cosimo and founder of the family’s fortunes, a near contemporary of Gemistos.
During the presumed decade of Gemistos’ birth a kind of humanism was also emerging in the Byzantine world. It was reflected at Constantinople in the scholarly disputes between Platonists and Aristotelians; at Thessalonica in the controversy between Hesychasts and their opponents; at Mistra in the copying of classical manuscripts and the painting of frescoes in a style reminiscent of the Italian Trecento. A significant event about the time when Gemistos was born was the completion by the great scholar Demetrios Kydones, in 1354, of his translation of St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra Gentiles, the first major work of Latin theology to be presented to the Greeks in their own language.
In the middle 1350s the dying Empire itself saw a faint gleam of hope. The religious controversy, which tore the Orthodox Church apart, had ended in 1351 with the victory of the Hesychasts, whose mystical doctrines then became part of Orthodoxy. The struggle between John V Palaiologos and his usurping father-in-law, John VI Cantacuzene, had ended with the enforced abdication of the latter in 1354. The threat to the Empire by the powerful Serb ruler, Stephen DuSan, who had actually claimed the title of Emperor, ended with his death in 1355. In the same year the restored Emperor John V (1354-91) sought reunion with the Catholic Church and offered his personal submission to the Pope, in return for military aid against the Turks.
But the Pope had no troops to send. Meanwhile in 1354 the Turks had taken Gallipoli (Kallipolis), their first foothold on the European mainland. Hitherto they had served as mercenaries in the Greek civil war; now they were established in Europe for good. Gemistos’ lifespan therefore also coincided with the century in which the Ottoman Empire came into being, not in Anatolia but in Europe.
When he died, the world was greatly changed, and even greater changes were about to come. In western Europe the first nation-states had emerged; in eastern Europe the nation-state which Gemistos had conceived was about to be destroyed. The Renaissance was in flower, though its greatest glories were still to come. Gemistos died as one of the most revolutionary generations in European history was about to be born. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer of Greek texts, was born in 1450, two years before Gemistos’ death; the explorers Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci in 1451; Savonarola, the scourge of Italian humanism, and Leonardo da Vinci in 1452; Erasmus in 1466, Copernicus in 1473, Luther in 1483. Within half a century of Gemistos’ death the intellectual as well as the geographical and historical map of the world had dramatically changed.
Gemistos never heard of America and never saw a printed book. He never saw a play acted on the stage. He perhaps saw and even heard a cannon; he must have seen a mechanical clock, in Florence if not in Constantinople, but never at Mistra. He did not live to see his native city fall to the Turks, though he foresaw the enslavement of his people. Other Greeks also foresaw it, but few shared his belief that a new age was beginning as the old one died, for pious Greeks believed that the world was coming to an end in 1492 (AM 7000, the year in which, instead, the new world was discovered). Although his philosophical outlook was ostensibly conservative and even reactionary, it was in reality prophetic and even revolutionary. There is good reason for calling him both the last of the Hellenes, in the sense of pagans of the classical age, and the first of the Greeks, in the sense of modern nationalists.
Gemistos was buried at Mistra, though his remains are no longer there. He received an Orthodox Christian burial, for few knew or wished to know that he was a heretic. All that is known of his funeral is that two panegyrics were delivered, both of which survive. One was by an otherwise unknown monk called Gregorios, the other by a slightly better-known but still shadowy figure called Hieronymos Charitonymos, whose name is also given as Christonymos and Hermonymos in the manuscripts.’
To judge from their orations, the monk Gregorios was the more interesting of the two men at that date, because he had been accepted by Gemistos as a pupil, whereas Charitonymos had not. At first sight this is surprising, for Gemistos was contemptuous of monasticism. But several of his pupils were monks, whom perhaps he hoped to guide to more useful lives. Nothing more is known of Gregorios, but Charitonymos is better documented. He seems to have been a tiresome and querulous man, capable of expressing himself with extreme silliness. ‘I who used to be more silent than a fish have been made, by this unbearable loss, more loquacious than a cicada’, was a typical exclamation.’ Probably he was identical with Charitonymos Hermonymos, who delivered a funeral oration over the wife of the Despot Thomas Palaiologos in 1462.° He was also once thought to be identical with George Hermonymus of Sparta, who later escaped to Rome and subsequently taught Greek in Paris from 1476; but this is mistaken, for manuscripts by both men survive, and their handwriting is clearly different."
Funeral orations are not always revealing, but those in honour of Gemistos tell something of his character. The two panegyrists had much the same things to say about his merits, and their profuse lamentations were mostly indistinguishable. The one significant difference was that Gregorios had been initiated into Gemistos’ esoteric teaching. Both men spoke of him as a ‘leader of initiates’ (uvotaywy6s), implying that he had formed some kind of private circle, but only Gregorios knew exactly what it meant.''
Gregorios referred enthusiastically to his generosity and kindness in imparting ‘abundantly every day the sweet and divine spring to those who wished’, and added that ‘he was never seen to be jealous of the enjoyment of everything by anyone, as we see happening daily with others’."? But Charitonymos’ experience was different. Apostrophizing the dead philosopher in a sardonic phrase, he said: ‘You never could be hard on anyone whatever, except on a few, perhaps from the same harshness and arrogance which you showed towards me’. Every approach that Charitonymos made to Gemistos was repulsed, he said, though everyone else was made welcome. Still, he would not blame Gemistos himself, but attribute it to old age and ‘perhaps the insinuation of certain slanderers’.'! These enigmatic words suggest the reason why he was less explicit in his praises than Gregorios, who used language derived directly from Gemistos’ own philosophy.
Both men praised him for the four traditional virtues of prudence, courage, justice, and wisdom, which had been the subject of an essay by Gemistos himself. Only Gregorios was able to interpret his wisdom in Gemistos’ own language. Charitonymos spoke of his knowledge of ‘things human and divine, in counsel and in action, in military and civil affairs, in scientific and practical matters’, and of his mastery of ‘things known in speech, both theoretically and in practice, and things known by the mind alone, and things known in harmony and diagrams and numbers and the revolution of heavenly bodies’."’ But all this was exceedingly vague.
‘There were only two points in Charitonymos’ speech which were not to be found in that of Gregorios. One was that Gemistos ‘criticized Aristotle’s philosophy, which some had previously praised as divine, calling it mere childishness’."° The other was that he displayed a capacity for divination equal to that of Calchas.'’ For the rest, one must turn to Gregorios, who knew what Gemistos actually taught.
His speech began in conventional style, lamenting the death of Gemistos as more calamitous than a barbarian invasion or an earthquake.'® After a number of extravagant expressions of grief, Gregorios went on to define Gemistos’ greatness in words which were intended to emphasize the reconciliation of secular and theological learning:
Gone is the man of much experience in secret and divine matters, the leader of initiates in high and heavenly doctrines, the amplest and godliest intellect, the divine leader in high philosophy, the man who enquired scientifically into the whole of divine wisdom and the whole of human wisdom, who through natural skill and memory and greatness of mind gathered more than a natural share of wisdom. .. ."”
Here and throughout his speech, Gregorios was at pains to show that Gemistos’ devotion to secular philosophy was in no way inconsistent with theological orthodoxy.
He made the same point more unmistakeably soon afterwards, when he invoked the names of St Paul and David immediately before a passage of almost blatant Neoplatonism. He described how Gemistos
not only led all men towards the glory of the supracelestial God, on whom the great Plato also says that the eyes in man’s head are fixed, by means of the inherent beauty and order of virtue; but also through the affinity of our mind with the intelligible he guided those who chose more easily and surely than by the eyes towards intelligible beauty.””
In other words he sought exact knowledge through reason rather than sensation. He subordinated the bodily senses to the intellect, which is ‘the greatest of all struggles, without which it is almost impossible to be united with the intelligible God’ 2" Here was introduced one of the favourite doctrines of the Neoplatonists: that of assimilation to or union with God. There immediately followed another Neoplatonic doctrine, that of intermediary beings between the transcendent God and man, for Gemistos ‘was not far from rivalling the angels in the self-sufficiency of his way of life, just as he appeared their equal in intellectual activity’.”” Neoplatonic dafuovec (daemons) could safely be identified with Christian angels, but Gregorios’ real thought was revealed in the next sentence: ‘For this man ate the bread of angels, which bread is thought to be, I judge, the contemplation of the intelligible and the comprehension of God’s creations’.
As if aware that he had been treading on dangerous ground for an Orthodox monk, Gregorios then digressed into an encomium of Gemistos’ exercise of the four virtues. Again he showed more awareness of Gemistos’ originality than Charitonymos in his illustrations. As to prudence, Gemistos was ‘like an image of the intelligible and sensible order’. Plato said that God presented himself as an example of all that was good, but ‘this man entirely on his own, so far as is humanly possible, was revealed as an image of God’.”’ As to courage, he showed it in putting up with difficulties caused by others (‘which actually very rarely occurred’) and also with ‘the misfortunes which are sometimes sent for our benefit by the divinity which decrees everything in this world’.”* Here was a glimpse of Gemistos’ determinism.
As to justice, Gemistos followed Plato in being willing to forgo private advantage for the public benefit.”” Finally, his wisdom was shown not only in the study of eternal and divine matters but also in that of natural science. Here Gregorios referred again to ‘secret matters’, to metaphysics, to physics, and to political science.” Eminent philosophers used to visit him from all over the world, because his wisdom exceeded that of Solomon and Palamedes (‘who first invented hours and the measurement of months, as well as dice’).””
Gemistos, on the other hand, made a much more important discovery: he found philosophy in a deficient state, and he restored it. Thus:
He laid down the easiest route to knowledge for those who chose; he exposed with complete accuracy and wisdom the false route which misled some men; and he liberated the human race from its supreme deception. Proof of what I have said lies in the wise and brilliant writings of that blessed and divine soul; and whoever faithfully follows them in every respect could not miss the sacred truth?
These sentences hint at an esoteric philosophy of a novel, unorthodox, and even revolutionary kind. It was only revealed to ‘those who chose’-a word which is sometimes mistranslated as ‘the chosen’;*! though it is true that they had also to be chosen for acceptance. It was hidden from those who took the ‘false route’~perhaps a discreet allusion to Gemistos’ habit of denouncing Christian theologians as ‘sophists’. It was embodied in certain texts (ovyyodyuata )-perhaps an allusion to Gemistos’ last work, the Book of Laws (Néuwv Zvyyoagy ). Gregorios clearly knew what he was talking about.
After a further lament on his personal loss, Gregorios comforted himself with the thought that death meant ‘not a complete destitution but a departure of our better part to some divine, intelligible place, much more divine and better than here’. He explained that the soul was indestructible, unlike the body, which disintegrates ‘because it is composite, and composition is the origin of destruction’.* There followed a long exposition of the relationship between body and soul in terms which Gregorios had evidently learned from Gemistos, leading to the conclusion that God must have made the soul immortal because he is himself immortal and good and incapable of jealousy.
A further argument followed, which was characteristic of Gemistos and borrowed from Plato: that no one willingly renounces life, and therefore the soul, which is the essential part of man, must continue to live even when the body is dead. If this were not so, then God would be responsible for something evil. But in fact God is ‘not in reality the cause of all things but only of good things’.“ Gemistos had often used this argument. It is found only in Gregorios’ speech, not in that of Charitonymos.
The two panegyrists came together again on one single point, which was almost the only historical fact in Gemistos’ life that either of them mentioned. For once Charitonymos was the more precise. ‘Greeks and barbarians alike admired him,’ he said; ‘especially those living in the west who had sufficient experience of his wisdom.’* Gregorios said that not only Greeks but the ‘best of the Romans’ admired him, and the latter admitted that they were ignorant in comparison with him.** Charitonymos elaborated these remarks in detail:
When there was a wonderful gathering in the West of wise and eminent men, and a great debate on the matter of the Church’s doctrines, how can one describe the admiration they felt for this man’s wisdom and virtue and his powers of argument? He shone among them more brightly than the sun. They regarded him as their common teacher, the common benefactor of mankind, the common pride of nature. They called him Plato and Socrates, for he was not inferior to those two in wisdom, as everybody would agree.””
Thus spoke Charitonymos on the impression made by Gemistos at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438-9. He did not claim firsthand knowledge, and his enthusiasm carried him away. The true extent of Gemistos’ immediate success in Italy, particularly with his lectures on Plato and Aristotle, remains to be assessed. It is clear at least that he made comparatively little impact on the proceedings of the Council. On the other hand, the visit to Italy was a turning-point in his own life, since virtually all his major works were written, or at least completed, in or after 1439. As a turning-point, it came remarkably late in his life, when he was already nearing or even past the age of eighty. It was only after his return from Italy that he exposed himself, almost without camouflage, to the charge of paganism. Yet he still did not forfeit the admiration of his contemporaries, including devout Christians.
Both panegyrists insisted on Gemistos’ piety, but in subtly different language. Gregorios drew parallels to him from both biblical and ecclesiastical history and also from classical antiquity and mythology. He compared Gemistos with Solomon and Minos, and with Joseph and Bellerophon. He traced his intellectual ancestry to Plato, Thucydides, and Xenophon on the one hand, and to St Basil, StJohn Chrysostom, and St Gregory of Nazianzus on the other. He applied the same description of a ‘divine leader of initiates’ to St Paul as to Gemistos.** When he spoke of Hellenes, in contrast to Romans, he followed Gemistos’ practice of meaning all Greeks of all periods, not distinguishing ancient pagans from modern Christians. As a monk himself, he seems to have been aware that Gemistos was under suspicion of apostasy, and therefore needed to be defended in terms of Christian orthodoxy as well as pagan philosophy. These points seem to have been lost on Charitonymos, whose parallels were drawn solely from classical antiquity, apart from one reference to Methuselah.
Gregorios and Charitonymos were not the only eulogists of Gemistos after his death. A circle of admirers survived, most of whom escaped to Italy after the fall of Constantinople. None was more eloquent than an anonymous scribe who wrote an impassioned lament on the destruction of Gemistos’ Book of Laws by his severest critic, George Scholarios. The latter he described as ‘a jealous and uneducated person’, who would be for ever blamed and detested by ‘the best of the Hellenes’. But to Gemistos he said: ‘Your fame is immutable and need fear no envy’. He made an exhaustive list of Gemistos’ qualities: first, love of truth, and then ‘wisdom, virtue, learning, prudence, rhetoric, morality, literary style, self-restraint, legislative skill, humanity, political judgment, liberality, emulation of the deeds and morals of antiquity, nobility, piety, justice, poverty, simplicity of life’. Scholarios himself would not have denied Gemistos most of these qualities, apart from piety (@eo0¢Bera ), which meant different things to each of them.
An even more striking testimony is to be found in two letters written by Cardinal Bessarion, who had once been Gemistos’ pupil. This eminent Greek Catholic, who had lived in Italy since 1441, was so highly regarded at Rome that he was twice a serious candidate for the papacy, in 1455 and 1471. Like Gregorios and Charitonymos, he too had once described Gemistos as a ‘leader of initiates’. On his death he wrote a letter of condolence to Gemistos’ two sons, Demetrios and Andronikos, in terms which implied that his old teacher’s paganism was well known to him:
I have learned that our common father and master has shed every earthly element and departed to heaven, to the place of purity, joining the mystical chorus of lacchus with the Olympian gods. I too rejoice to have studied with such a man, the wisest that Greece has produced since Plato (leaving Aristotle out of account). So if one were to accept the doctrines of the Pythagoreans and Plato about the infinite ascent and descent of souls, I should not hesitate even to add that the soul of Plato, having to obey the irrefragable decrees of Adrasteia and to discharge the obligatory cycle, had come down to earth and assumed the frame and life of Gemistos.”"
He added some phrases about Gemistos’ imperishable fame, and an epitaph in three elegiac couplets of warm admiration but poor prosody.
The phraseology of this letter follows closely that of Plato’s Phaedrus, which describes the cycle through which the soul passes between this world and the other world every ten thousand years. Certain phrases, such as ‘the decrees of Adrasteia (Fate)’ and ‘the blessed chorus’, are explicitly Platonic.” The same phraseology had been taken over by the Neoplatonists. Bessarion must have been conscious that he was using Neoplatonic vocabulary, though the term did not yet exist to distinguish Plato’s original doctrines from the elaborations of his successors. He was using the language of allegory, which would already be familiar to educated Greeks and not taken literally. Gemistos himself had commended ‘the language of myth’, and Bessarion was his pupil. Within a generation the practice became familiar in Italy, even among dignitaries of the Church. But the Greek Church was stricter in distinguishing between classical learning and theology. To apply Platonic vocabulary to religious matters would be shocking in the eyes of a rigidly Orthodox Greek, such as Scholarios.
Evidently Bessarion did not intend that his unorthodox eulogy of his old teacher should be treated as confidential, for he sent a copy of it with a covering letter to Nicholas Secundinus, a mutual friend who had accompanied the Greek delegation to the Council of Union in 1438 as an interpreter, and had later entered the service of the papacy. In the covering letter he repeated his praises of Gemistos still more emphatically.“ ‘He was veritably the paragon of philosophy and every kind of wisdom.’ His skill was not confined to literary expression, but embraced music, geometry, arithmetic, metaphysics, theology, and physics. He also showed himself a model of moral philosophy in his practical conduct, so that Diogenes and the Stoics were not to be compared with him. ‘For he adopted their gravity and seemliness and self-sufficiency, but rejected their pretentiousness, self-satisfaction, and ostentation.’
Bessarion added that he had admired Gemistos more than anyone else he had ever met. As a philosopher, he never knew anyone so indifferent to the worldly present, nor one who so completely abstained from sophistical triviality and was so indefatigable in the search for truth. He concluded:
That is why we have said much to honour him greatly in these few words. Even with many more words we could not say all that ought to be said. But it suffices to honour a man who surpasses both ourselves and the heroes of the past with silent admiration rather than words.
There was nothing in Bessarion’s letter to Secundinus which alluded so directly to Gemistos’ peculiar beliefs as in his letter to Gemistos’ sons. Only the word ‘sophistical’ echoed a favourite epithet used by Gemistos, but anyone might use the word without necessarily applying it, as Gemistos regularly did, to the bigoted theologians of Orthodoxy. Secundinus had not been a pupil of Gemistos, nor was he by training a philosopher. As a civil servant who specialized in translation, he had no mind for the eccentric subtleties of Gemistos.
With Bessarion it was another matter. He was one of the great scholars of his age, and not a man to use words lightly. He was one of the few Greeks, together with Scholarios, who could read both the ancient Greek philosophers and the modern Latin theologians in their original language. He was also a loyal servant of the ostensibly reunited Church. When he used seemingly heretical language in his letter of condolence to Gemistos’ sons, he cannot be supposed to have intended to endorse their father’s paganism. Yet undeniably he was exposing himself to misunderstanding and criticism.
When the critics set to work on Gemistos’ reputation in the following generation, some of them did not spare Bessarion as well. The earliest was Scholarios himself, who entered monastic life as the ‘humble monk’ Gennadios in 1450 and became the first Patriarch of Constantinople under the Ottoman Empire. He was followed by George Trapezuntius (called ‘of Trebizond’ because his parents came from that city, though he himself was born in Crete), and by Theodore Gazis (in Latin, Gaza). Both men had settled in Italy, Trapezuntius in 1417 and Gazis between 1430 and 1440; and both entered the Roman Catholic Church. In the Orthodox Church, Scholarios’ attacks on Gemistos were echoed by Matthew Kamariotes (Camariota) and Manuel of Corinth (Peloponnesius), each of whom held the post of Grand Rhetor under Ottoman rule.
The attacks which these men launched on the reputation of Gemistos were bound also to touch Bessarion, directly or indirectly. In some cases they criticized him for defending Plato and his old tutor, in others for defecting to the Roman Catholic Church. Gemistos could be blamed both for teaching him Platonism and for weakening his faith in Orthodoxy. Bessarion had stopped short of paganism, but in many other respects he exemplified the freedom of thought which was Gemistos’ most characteristic gift to his pupils. It was also, in the eyes of his enemies, Gemistos’ most unforgiveable crime.
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