Download PDF | The Philosophy Of Gemistos Plethon Platonism In Late Byzantium, Between Hellenism And Orthodoxy Routledge (2014)
404 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book is a revised and extended version of my PhD thesis defended in September 2007 at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague (under the original title: Platos Second Coming: An Outline of the Philosophy of George Gemistos Plethon). Here 1 would like to thank those without whose help and support it would have been impossible to complete this work: Filip Karfik who together with Vladimir Svaton ~ was for me the initial impulse for choosing this rather peculiar topic and was so kind to supervise my thesis, helping me in solving various problems connected with working on it; George Zografidis and George Karamanolis for our extremely fruitful discussions about Gemistos in Rethymno, Crete; Stéphane Toussaint and Claudio Moreschini for a cordial reception in Pisa; the Greek and Italian authorities for supporting my study stays in both these places without which I could have neither started nor finished writing my thesis; the Centre for Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Texts, Olomouc
for an opportunity to pursue my studies in the long term; Katerina Ierodiakonou for a vivid interest in my work since its very beginning; the late Alain-Philippe Segonds and Anthony Kaldellis for their critical remarks, Niketas Siniossoglou for an opportunity to study his own Plethon book just before it was published; Jozef Matula for his support and for help with obtaining numerous texts, which would have otherwise remained inaccessible to me; Diana Gilliland Wright for a consultation about history of Mistra; Charalambos Dendrinos for substantially improving the transcription of the manuscript Additional 5424 presented below; Franco Bacchelli for making accessible to me his forthcoming edition of Plethon's treatise On Homer; Franco Bacchelli for making accessible to me his fortchcoming edition of Plethon’s treatise On Homer; Radek Chlup for many consultations about Proclus as well as for the incessant correcting of my English; John Monfasani for his overwhelming magnanimitas, his remarks and innumerable corrections of my hopeless style and for an opportunity to study some of his unpublished texts; John Smedley and Celia Barlow for their help with preparation of this demanding manuscript for publication. Finally, I cannot say for how much I am grateful to Karezina who is also the creator of the beautiful picture of Poseidon drawn during my rather boring lecture on Plethon. This book is dedicated to our daughter Helena whom we brought back home from wonderful holidays spent in Mistra.
The work on this book was supported by the Centre for Patristic, Medieval and Renaissance Texts, Olomouc (research programme MSM6198959202); Global Perspectives in Science and Spirituality, programme ‘Approach to the phenomenon of life’; and Charles University in Prague (project UNCE 204004).
Introduction
George Gemistos Plethon is certainly one of the most important, but at the same time also one of the more mysterious figures of Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy. The lectures on Plato he gave to the Florentine humanists during his stay in Italy - directly or indirectly —- helped to promote the renewal of Platonic philosophy in the West. However his own version of Platonism has arguably not yet been sufficiently explored and his religious beliefs and their relation to his philosophical thought have not received a satisfactory treatment either. Both topics, his Platonism and his religious beliefs, will be the focus of the present study.
The Man and his Work
George Gemistos, later also surnamed Plethon, was born in Constantinople presumably to a pronotarios of St Sophia, Demetrios Gemistos,' some time before 1360.? He might have studied under the famous philosopher Demetrios Kydones, who played an important role in introducing Latin scholasticism into Byzantine thought,’ and a mysterious Jew Elissaeus,* but we cannot beentirely sure in either of these two cases. Gemistos appeared in Constantinople around 1405, but shortly afterwards moved to Mistra, the capital of the Despotate of Morea (the present Peloponnese) where he was active at the court of the Despot as one of his officials* and at the same time as a distinguished humanist and teacher of ancient Greek thought and culture.‘ He must have soon become well known as a statesman, philosopher and an authority on the ancient Greek world.
In spite of being a layman, he travelled as a counsellor with the Byzantine delegation to Italy to participate in the Council at Ferrara and Florence in 1438-1439 where the Church union was to be concluded. There he met Italian humanists and gave his famous lectures on Plato’s philosophy. After the Council whose resulc, namely, the union of the Eastern and Western Churches, he rejected, Gemistos returned to the Peloponnese and spent the rest of his life in Mistra.* He died most probably in 1454, although the year 1452 is usually accepted as the date of his death.’ A few years afterwards, he was accused of paganism and ancient Greek polytheism by his main personal as well as philosophical opponent, Scholarios, who finally managed to seize and burn Gemistos’ most important work, the Laws, discovered after his death.'*
His alleged polytheism, inspired by Plato, subsequently began to provoke condemnation and censure but also fascination among Byzantine and Renaissance thinkers, and his remains were even transferred to Italy in 1464 by his admirer Sigismondo Malatesta, who buried Gemistos in his neo-pagan Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini."' Writing around 1490, Ficino famously claims that Gemistos’ lectures on Plato during the time of the Council were an impulse which 20 years later inspired Cosimo de’ Medici to found the Platonic Academy in Florence and to charge him with making a Latin translation of Plato.'? His (posthumous) portraits have been identified in a painting by Cristofano dell'Altissimo kept in Uffizi and in a famous fresco, the Procession of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, both in Florence." In the later tradition he was regarded either as a scholar and Platonic philosopher — although not always as a reviver of ancient paganism — or as a prominent anti-Unionist."
Gemistos left behind numerous texts covering such diverse disciplines as grammar, rhetoric, literature, music, geography, astronomy, ancient history, politics, religion, philosophy and theology.'> Although some of them are only excerpts and summaries from ancient authors, most probably made in his school for teaching purposes, the wide range of his interests definitely shows that he was not only an excellent scholar, but, in fact, a kind of polymath." For practical reasons, the present study will have to concentrate only on the texts that are in some way relevant for his philosophy, although those political, religious and theological treatises that contribute to the understanding of his philosophical thought will be discussed here too.
Gemistos and Scholarship
The secondary literature on Gemistos is surprisingly rich.’ Modern Plethonic scholarship begins with the works of Wilhelm Gass,'* and especially Charles Alexandre,'? who around the middle of the nineteenth century published some of Gemistos’ key texts, along with studies on them. Alexandre’s edition of Plethon’s Laws, accompanied by other shorter texts related to it, has not been superseded, although in the meantime some more of the text of the Laws has been discovered by Renée and Francois Masai. Alexandre’s book is also a turning point in the overall interpretation of Gemistos’ religious beliefs, because while Gass was not still sure about his paganism,” Alexandre’s extensive edition of the Laws is widely accepted by modern scholars as the decisive proof of it. In the second half of the same century, Fritz Schultze made the first important attempt to reconstruct Gemistos’ metaphysical system as a whole.*!
He was followed by a Greek scholar Ioannes P. Mamalakis who published important works on Gemistos in the late 1930s,” as well as Milton V. Anastos who wrote detailed and very interesting studies on diverse aspects of his thought and learning shortly after World War II.** Nevertheless, arguably the most important works on Gemistos’ philosophy still remain those by Francois Masai from the 1950s, who has also re-examined the tradition of the transmission of his texts and discovered some important manuscripts.” On the basis of Gemistos’ autographs discovered by Masai, Bernadette Lagarde wrote an excellent PhD thesis, unfortunately so far unpublished, in which she edited, translated and commented on his On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato.’ Furthermore, she later also published the Reply to Scholarios’ Defence of Aristotle.
Of the many Greek scholars who contributed significantly to Plethonic scholarship we should mention especially Theodoros S. Nikolaou,” Leonidas Bargeliotes* and Christos P. Baloglou,” the last one being especially interested in political and economic aspects of Gemistos’ writings. John Monfasani® and James Hankins," both writing about topics related to Gemistos, made very important contributions to understanding his work in the context of contemporary Renaissance thought. Brigitte Tambrun-Krasker, specializing on Gemistos, prepared several important editions of his texts and, as well as many articles, wrote an PhD thesis and monograph on him.” In Italian Moreno Neri published several translations of Gemistos’ works and studies on him, recently followed by a general overview of his life and thought published jointly with an extensive commentary on his treatise On virtues.
Fabio Pagani made an important discovery of Gemistos’ radical alterations of Plato's text in manuscripts.” In English Niketas Siniossoglou recently published a significant monograph on Gemistos whom he considers to be an outcome of the previous tradition of Byzantine humanistic and pagan thought and influential in the rise of modern secularism.” Last, in 1986 Christopher M. Woodhouse published a complex and detailed study of Gemistos'’ life, the events in which he took part, and his writings, whose most important parts he translated or summarized in English. Even if Gemistos’ philosophy and religious beliefs will be treated from a significantly different perspective here, the present work is much indebted to this exceptional book, which provides an ideal starting point for anybody interested in the remarkable thinker of Mistra. Thus, although the present study can hopefully be understood on its own as far as Gemistos’ philosophy is concerned, for his life as well as historical context the reader is referred to Woodhouse’s book.
What is now, as it seems, most needed for the proper understanding and appreciation of Gemistos’ thought, is a kind of global schizzo, a systematic overview of his philosophy, concentrating especially on his Platonism. Such an overall reconstruction must be primarily based on his own texts, and it should be collated with the testimonies of other writers and supplemented by them only as second level sources. Plethonic scholarship often relies too much on external information about his personality, certainly extraordinary and fascinating, and thus tends to interpret his works from the perspective of the contemporaries who might have misunderstood or were even overtly hostile to him. Unfortunately, this leads many interpreters to regard some of his texts as hypocritical, purely tactical and not representative of Gemistos real thought.
The best example of this approach is perhaps Siniossoglou’s book where, furthermore, Plethon’s thought is interpreted against the background of broader intellectual discussions of his day. Unfortunately, there are only few cases when Gemistos explicitly names or reacts to some of his alleged opponents (as, for instance, Palamism which he nowhere seems to discuss). Using indirect philosophical and textual evidence to interpret his works thus remains speculative. Furthermore, Siniossoglou supposes that Plethon is the most important representative of an alleged secret tradition of Byzantine intellectual paganism lasting for centuries. However, as it seems to the present author, for such a tradition we have no straightforward and unambiguous evidence.
The approach of the present study is thus the reverse — it will attempt to concentrate firstly on Gemistos’ texts, provide a detailed interpretation of them while accepting all as serious, however they may vary in the expression of his philosophical and religious beliefs, and interpret them in their proper context. Subsequently external testimonies may be introduced, which must be, nonetheless, always submitted to a careful examination, which is especially necessary in the case of Gemistos’ real religious views. Only then conclusions can be drawn. Since the present study intentionally keeps as close as possible to Plethon’s original text, some of its parts are indeed very descriptive, the fact of which its author is well aware, being a kind of ‘happy positivist. One may also object that the present study to some extent suffers from insensitivity to the context and that it does not pay sufficient attention to the different genres and occasions in which Gemistos’ texts were written, using them just as a quarry for his doctrine. As we hope to be able to show, such an approach may be justified by the exceptional inner coherence of Plethon’s Platonism, whose different aspects are scattered throughout his various writings. This study should be thus an attempt to collect all these bits together and to place them into the proper place in general picture of Gemistos’ philosophy.
To discuss Gemistos’ thought properly, it is convenient to divide his writings into three groups that correspond to the most important aspects of his philosophy. The first one is the so-called public philosophy, that means the philosophy Gemistos presented publicly as his own and more or less clearly reflects what he himself held. The second group is the Platonism contained in his commentaries and interpretations of the thought of others, especially of Plato and the Chaldaean Oracles. The enigmatic Laws, discovered after Gemistos’ death, belong with the latter group of texts, for the reasons that will become apparent later on, subsumed here under a common designation as philosophia perennis. Finally, the third part of the present work will treat the problem of Gemistos’ religious beliefs, including his sole treatise dealing with Christian theology, often considered as hypocritical and not representing his real opinions.
This part will also discuss at length external testimonies as well as the content and the intentions of the Laws, on which the usual conclusion about his paganism is based. For reasons that will be discussed only in the third part of this study, the name ‘Gemistos’ will be used — to some extent in a similar manner as it is in Woodhouse’s book — when his personality or public philosophy is meant, whereas his surname ‘Plethon’ will be restricted solely to the context of the philosophia perennis.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق