Search Results

Ideas have lives of their own. Their genealogies, careers, mutations, and legacies form historical patterns and ontologies different from those of individual human beings and societies, though they are linked to them in manifold ways. Ideally, the history of ideas should be studied diachronically and across the boundaries of states, cultures, and periods, these being the most important categories that artificially break up intellectual history. Yet the questions of how the Byzantines interacted with ideas which they received from earlier periods, and how they developed ideas of their own, are occluded in existing scholarship. It is typical for diachronic studies to jump from antiquity to the Renaissance, reinforcing a particular concept of the genealogy of the “west.” Intellectual histories of the medieval west rarely include the Byzantine world, even though the western tradition draws from the same Greek, Roman, and Christian sources that were also part of the Byzantine patrimony. Moreover, within Byzantine Studies intellectual history is probably the least developed subfield, lacking titles to its name and definition in relation to other inflections of historical inquiry. We have therefore chosen the format of an Intellectual History of Byzantium as a preliminary step toward rectifying this imbalance: first, to provide the resources with which more integrated cross-cultural, diachronic, and analytical narratives may one day be written, and, second, to spur the growing interest in Byzantine intellectual history as a more or less distinct discipline.

WHY BYZANTINE INTELLECTUAL HISTORY IS IMPORTANT

Not only did the Byzantines develop a vibrant and complex intellectual culture for themselves, they can justly claim an important place in the intellectual history of the world. In an ideal world driven by genuine intellectual curiosity, cultures would be regarded as fascinating and worthy of study for their own sake. But as we live in more utilitarian times, it is necessary to list some of the contributions that Byzantium made to cultures other than itself, and also why it is important for historians of ideas to study it. This will also reveal some of the ways in which it is interesting in its own right.

“BYZANTINE PHILOSOPHY”?

Most people instinctively assume that philosophy is a lofty and valuable thing, which partly explains the favorable reception accorded to the relatively novel scholarly term “Byzantine philosophy.” It is a plausible assumption that if ancients and moderns philosophized, then the people we call Byzantines also philosophized in their own Byzantine way, and the output of that intellectual activity should, unsurprisingly, be called Byzantine philosophy. In an age that allows for various metonymical, loose, and metaphorical usages of the term “philosophy” and asks for all Enlightenment prejudices against Byzantium to be dropped, the coinage “Byzantine philosophy” appears legitimate and defensible.

The claim for a distinctly Byzantine branch in the history of philosophy appears reasonable, but its history is new. In post-Enlightenment Eurocentric modernity, philosophy as such was “naturally” associated with that of the Hellenes, the medieval schoolmen, and the moderns, e.g. Descartes and Hobbes. By the mid-nineteenth century, and especially with the work of Ernest Renan, it became difficult not to acknowledge, however grudgingly, that the Arabs also had philosophy, be it only as transmitters, and in light of the overwhelming influence of Averroes on the schoolmen. At the same time (also by the end of the nineteenth century), the same had to be done for the Jews, both those living within the Islamic world who wrote in Arabic and those in southern France and northern Italy who worked with Hebrew translations of the Arabic sources and equally submitted to the influence of Averroes. And now, claiming a place among other ethnic/religious/linguistic communities, the Byzantines have also been discovered to have had philosophy. But it is possible that this has come about through the legerdemain of subjecting historical fact to a Procrustean bed of politically correct specifications.

Beyond mere scholarly political correctness, there is a fundamental question that recent scholarship tends to avoid: would the term “Byzantine philosophy” be meaningful to the Byzantines themselves, and would it be at all acceptable to them?

PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN DOPPELGÄNGERS

The strife between George Gennadios “Scholarios” (c. 1400–1472) and George Gemistos “Plethon” (c. 1355–1452) presents itself in dramatic narrative form. As the Byzantine world was rapidly disintegrating, an influential religious leader (Scholarios) preaching at the heart of the Orthodox world, in illustrious Constantinople, publicly accused a lay philosopher (Plethon) operating at the fringes of the empire of surreptitious paganism. For years Scholarios had been collecting information on the “Hellenic” – that is, pagan – underground of Mistra, a Byzantine outpost in the Peloponnese that attained notoriety as a refuge for eccentric minds. Eavesdroppers reported to Scholarios about the existence of the Book on the Laws (henceforth Nomoi), a pagan holy book circulating among a chosen few, and Plethon's aim to subvert Christianity and restore philosophical and religious Hellenism. For his part, Scholarios was more than just a devoted soldier of Christ: he was also an expert on Aristotle and was esteemed among the finest Orthodox theologians. Still, he failed to get to Plethon during the latter's lifetime: the philosopher enjoyed some sort of immunity, possibly owing to his service as a valuable advisor of the despots of Mistra, and because he was a celebrated teacher of philosophy (as Scholarios was forced to admit), astronomer, geographer, historian, and jurist.

Plethon bridged the gap between Byzantium and the Renaissance. He had participated in the Council of Florence (1438–1439) as a delegate serving the Greek cause along with Scholarios, and Mark Eugenikos of Ephesos, the champion of the anti-Latin position and a man greatly admired by Scholarios, was among Plethon's former students. Plethon's intellectual stature allowed him to meet and converse with the crème de la crème of Renaissance minds, including Nicholas of Cusa, Leonardo Bruni, and Cyriac of Ancona, who considered Plethon a friend. At the margins of the Council, Plethon compiled a treatise in Greek on the Differences between Aristotle and Plato that stirred up considerable controversy. It provoked Scholarios to protest against the veiled words of that cunning – as another Orthodox theologian of note, Manuel of Corinth, put it a little later – crypto-pagan philosopher.