Byzantine Platonism

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Byzantine Platonism is the name modern historians give to the study of Plato that persisted in the Greek-speaking Christian East, from the survival of the late antique schools through to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It was never a movement with a creed, and for most of that span it was not even a school. It was a habit of reading kept alive in a culture that had inherited the Greek philosophical texts intact while regarding their pagan content with deep suspicion.

That suspicion is the central tension. The Byzantines possessed Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus in the original — manuscripts the Latin West had lost and would later recover only through them — yet Platonism carried the charge of the paganism Christianity had defeated, and an interest in it could end a career or worse. In the eleventh century Michael Psellos, a court scholar of formidable range, revived Platonic and Neoplatonic learning at Constantinople and wrote on the Chaldean Oracles; his pupil John Italos was tried for heresy and his teachings anathematized, the condemnation written into the Orthodox liturgy. The lesson held for centuries: Plato could be read, mined, and admired, but not believed.

The figure who broke that restraint stands at the end of the tradition. George Gemistos Plethon, working in the 1430s and 1440s at Mistra in the Peloponnese, came to hold — guardedly in public, openly in private — that the Platonic philosophy was not merely a tool for Christian theology but a truer account of the divine than Christianity offered. His treatise contrasting Plato with Aristotle, written during the church council at Ferrara and Florence in 1438–39, reached an Italian audience hungry for the Greek texts; the encounter is traditionally credited with prompting Cosimo de’ Medici to found the project that became Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Academy. Plethon’s own great work, the Book of Laws, sketched a reformed pagan religion with the old gods restored as philosophical principles. After his death it was burned by Gennadios Scholarios, the first patriarch under Ottoman rule, and survives only in fragments.

How far Plethon actually intended a revived paganism, and how far the label was fixed on him by hostile readers, remains contested among scholars — some read him as a genuine apostate, others as a bold but still recognizably philosophical reformer. What is not in doubt is the transmission. His pupil Bessarion became a cardinal of the Roman church and carried Greek Platonism and its manuscripts permanently into the West. The current that the Byzantine world had guarded for a thousand years, half forbidden, passed out of it at the moment that world ended — and became one of the engines of the Italian Renaissance.

→ In the library: The Dialogues of Plato (Jowett, 1892) · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Marsilio Ficino · The One · Middle Ages