Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 301 - The Empire Strikes Back - Introduction to Byzantine Philosophy.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Empire Strikes Back – Introduction to Byzantine Philosophy. There almost was no Byzantine philosophy. In fact, there was almost no Byzantine Empire, at least not in the sense we usually think of it. If the capital city of Constantinople had fallen to a year-long siege laid by Arab forces from 717 to 718, then we would not bother to speak of Byzantium at all, but just say that the Eastern Roman Empire collapsed somewhat later than the Western Empire. And we might well be saying it in Arabic. If it hadn't been for the Byzantines holding the line against the armies of Islam, those armies would have made their way into Europe. Probably they would have brought their religion and language into central Europe and perhaps as far as the English Channel in the North Sea, just as they brought it to all of northern Africa, Spain, and Central Asia. That this alternate history did not occur was thanks above all to the fortifications of Constantinople, built generations earlier at the behest of Emperor Theodosius. They surely rank as one of history's most successful building projects and would be finalists in a most important ever walls competition, alongside the Great Wall of China, Hadrian's Wall, the Berlin Wall, and an album by Pink Floyd. The Theodosian walls would be needed many times, because the Byzantines were surrounded by enemies and not infrequently riven by internal conflict. For all the details, I recommend checking out the History of Byzantium podcast presented by Robin Pearson, whom you might remember me interviewing back in episode 215. But just to give you some context, here's a quick overview of historical developments starting in the 7th century or so. It was at this time that the Byzantines were confronted with the rise of Islam, a challenge that caught them unprepared. It didn't help that in the 6th century, they'd been softened up by wars of attrition with the Persians and outbreaks of the plague. During a catastrophic loss at the Battle of the River Yarmouk in 636, the Christians lost the symbolically crucial city of Jerusalem, and then vast swathes of territory in Anatolia and the agricultural heartland of Egypt. To make matters worse, there was pressure from the other direction in the form of the Bulgar tribes in Thrace. This sort of thing would continue to be a problem, as Byzantine emperors had to cope with threats on two fronts, the armies of Islam to the south and east, and various so-called barbarian tribes like the Bulgars, Magyars, Pechenegs, and Rus to the north and west, not to mention forces from western Christianity such as the Franks and Normans. The losses of the 7th century ushered in a period often called the Dark Ages of Byzantium. It's not a time that we'll be featuring much in the podcast to come because of the lack of surviving texts. Much as with the 7th and 8th centuries in the Latinate West, philosophical activity was evidently sparse in the Greek-speaking East. The empire had lost Alexandria, home of so much intellectual endeavor in late antiquity, and other cities where philosophy was pursued, like Gaza. By seizing these urban centers, the Arabs had unwittingly administered a kind of lobotomy to Greek Christendom. Though Constantinople did not fall, political upheaval did not provide an ideal context for scholarship. Some of the upheaval was occasioned by that most famous response to military defeat, iconoclasm. For a full century, the Byzantine elites were consumed by the question of whether it was acceptable to venerate icons of Christ and the saints. The iconoclast said no. They believed that this was an idolatrous practice for which the empire was being punished. Leo III, the same emperor who had successfully faced down the siege in 718, began the removal of icons in 730, and his policy was carried on with enthusiasm by Constantine V. After decades of iconoclasm, the Empress Irene reintroduced the icons only for them to be banned again from 815 to 843. We'll cover all this in more detail in an episode devoted to the philosophical justifications used by iconoclasts and their opponents, the Iconophiles. For now, we can simply note that one outcome of the dispute was the destruction of many iconoclasts, because when the iconophiles prevailed, they destroyed the works of the iconoclasts. So this is another reason for the relative silence of the historical record leading up to the 9th century. That century is a more important one for us, in part because it was at this time that we see changes in book production, making it a landmark era for the dissemination of philosophy and other sciences. Again, we'll be getting into this in a future episode, but to make a long story short, scribes at this time began using a more efficient script and very gradually the new technology of paper which had come from China via the Islamic world. At about the same time, the Byzantines were able to recover significantly in political and military terms. Thanks in part to the breathing space afforded by Islamic infighting, especially the disintegration of the Abbasid Empire in the 10th century, the Greek Christians went from strength to strength between the years 800 and 1000. They took control of Bulgaria, re-extended their territory towards the west as far as the river Danube, and recovered some of what had been lost to the Muslim armies. By the middle of the 11th century, the empire included southern Italy, the islands of Crete and Cyprus, mainland Greece, Macedonia, and the region around the Black Sea including all of Anatolia, plus a foothold in what we would call the Middle East with the city of Antioch. This isn't to say that the rulers had a firm grip on all those territories. There was always the danger of raids, if not outright warfare across the borders. In many regions within direct Byzantine control, that control was actually rather nominal, and some of the areas you'll see marked on maps as part of the Byzantine Empire were really buffer states ruled by independent Christian allies like the Serbs and the Armenians. Still, if we generalize and ignore the many individual losses and victories experienced from the 9th to the mid-12th centuries, we can say that this was the most politically successful period for Byzantium, and hence the time that we'll get the lion's share of our attention in the coming series. In the late 12th century, though, things started to go wrong. Political infighting at Constantinople was compounded by territorial losses, for instance of Thessaloniki at the hands of the Normans. Then disaster truly struck. The farcical Fourth Crusade brought a Latin Christian army to the gates of Constantinople in 1204. After a dispute over money, they managed to get into the great city and ruthlessly sack it, a shocking tragedy in which a Christian army destroyed the greatest of Christian cities. As the historian Judith Heron has pointed out, some of the negative connotations still evoked by the word Byzantine, absurd bureaucracy, and a soft luxurious lifestyle go back to Western attempts to justify the sack of Constantinople after the fact. As with some of the wars we've seen in the Middle East in our own times, in the background of more obvious violence there was a more quiet cultural destruction. There was massive loss of artworks, some spirited back to Latin Christendom like four bronze statues of horses that were brought to Venice and used to decorate the church of San Marco. The sack of 1204 was also a tremendous blow to the history of philosophy. It was here, and not in the eventual fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans, that we lost the many texts that were known to earlier Byzantine scholars but are no longer preserved today. On the political front, the fall of the city ushered in a long period of relative weakness for Byzantium. After retrenching to Nicaea, the Eastern Greek Christians managed to retake Constantinople from the Latin Christians in 1261. A new dynasty, the Paia Alogoi, would rule there for the better part of two centuries. Then came May 29th, 1453, when the Ottomans did what their Muslim predecessors had failed to do in 718, get past those walls, and finally put an end to the Roman Empire. That it was still a Roman Empire is something worth bearing in mind as we approach this third tradition of medieval philosophy alongside those in the Islamic world and in Latin Christendom. We tend to think of the Western Medievals as the heirs of the Romans precisely because they used Latin. But Greek had always been the dominant language in the Eastern realms under Roman domination, so the inhabitants of those places would have seen no break with antiquity on that score. Nor was there any break in religious terms. Christianity had already become the religion of the empire in late antiquity. As for the idea of a Roman Empire not centered in Rome, that too was a development that came well before the fall of the West, never mind the rise of Islam. And the Muslims called the Eastern Greek Christians the Romans, in a rare point of agreement between the two sides since the Greek Christians too thought of themselves as Romans. So with this new series of episodes, we are really just circling back to where we left things in late antiquity with the Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor and carrying on the story of Roman philosophy written in Greek. Suppose though that there had been no Byzantine Empire, and thus no Byzantine philosophy. What would we be missing? For starters, pretty much all of ancient philosophy. As we'll be seeing, the historian of philosophy should be interested in Byzantium in its own right and not only because its scholars preserved older texts for posterity, but it's hard to deny that our greatest debt to them lies here. Without the scribes of Constantinople, nearly all ancient Greek literature would be lost, with the sole exception of a few papyrus texts like those found in Egypt or amongst the volcanic ash at Herculaneum. We know the original works of Plato and Aristotle, for instance, only thanks to Greek manuscripts of their works that were dispersed across Europe after the Fourth Crusade. Without such manuscripts, our access to Aristotle would be almost only through medieval Arabic translations, which would actually be convenient for those of us who are of European descent, given that as already noted, if it wasn't for the Byzantines, we'd probably be speaking Arabic anyway. Of course, if all the Byzantines had done was to make copies of older Greek philosophical works, we wouldn't need to devote a whole series to them, but they did more. They engaged with the ideas of both pagan and Christian antiquity, carrying on the late ancient practice of writing commentaries, especially on Aristotle. This is something that unifies the three medieval traditions. In 10th century Baghdad and 12th century Spain, in 13th and 14th century Paris and Oxford, and throughout Byzantine history, philosophers busied themselves with the careful exegesis of Aristotle's works. The difference being that unlike such commentators as Al-Farabi, Varroes, Aquinas, or Buridan, the Byzantine commentators could read him in the original Greek instead of having to use Arabic or Latin translations. We'll see, especially with the group of scholars supported by the princess Anna Komnena in the first half of the 12th century, that there was even a completest ambition to comment on all the Aristotelian works that had not yet received this treatment in late antiquity. Nor was Aristotle the only non-Christian thinker who was admired by the Byzantines. Also in the 12th century, a heated dispute broke out between proponents and critics of Proclus, one of the most enthusiastically pagan philosophers of antiquity. Later on, in the 15th century, there was another debate about the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle with George Gemistos Platon asserting the superiority of Platonic philosophy and Bessarion coming to Aristotle's defense. It may seem surprising that the Eastern Christians were so concerned with the preservation, exposition, and evaluation of these pagan thinkers. But it fits into a wider tendency of the Byzantines to cherish classical culture. They recognized the value of writings that predated Christianity, in part on aesthetic grounds. As in late antiquity and Latin Christendom, education had at its center the three linguistic arts of the Trivium, grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, or logic, which were supplemented with the four mathematical arts of the Quadrivium. Youngsters, at least those elite enough to receive such an education, were schooled in Homer and other classical authors, just like students learning Greek today. Late ancient authors like Galen, the great doctor of the 2nd century AD, had already venerated Attic Greek as a particularly exalted form of the language and the Byzantines followed suit. Thus, we see extensive philological annotations to the plays of the Athenian poet Aristophanes. These would have been intended to help readers understand and appreciate the archaic language, much like the footnotes that guide the modern-day reader through an edition of Shakespeare. The Byzantines also preserved the work of classical historians and imitated their example by producing a number of histories about their own times. The just-mentioned Anna Komnena was one such historian, as was Michael Psellos, one of the thinkers who raised eyebrows with his embrace of pagan Neoplatonism. In a later episode, we'll be considering the philosophical interest of Byzantine history writing, one of several places we can look to find ideas about politics. But of course, the leading preoccupation of Byzantine intellectuals was not pagan philosophy or history, it was the Christian faith. As with our coverage of the Islamic world and Latin Christendom, we'll be seeing that philosophically intriguing ideas were often put forward in the context of theological movements and writings. A notable example is the Hezekast movement associated with the 14th century theologian Gregory Palamas, comparable to some of the mystical traditions we've looked at in other cultures. According to Hezekasm, humans cannot grasp God directly, but only through his Energeae or activities. You'll often see the English translation energies, which to my mind is overly literal. You might recognize the term Energeae from Aristotelian philosophy, and indeed, Palamas's teaching reaches back to Aristotle by way of the late ancient Cappadocian Fathers, who took up the tools of classical philosophy to explain our epistemic access to God, or lack of it, as well as the divine trinity. Of course, it's a contentious question whether theological doctrines like this should be counted as philosophy. For a good example of resistance against this idea, one can turn to a chapter in the recently published Cambridge Intellectual History of Byzantium. Its authors, Dimitri Gutas and Niketas Siniosoglou, would have objected earlier when I said that there almost was no Byzantine philosophy because they would strike the almost. To quote their exact words, the Byzantines had no philosophy or very little of it in the margins. For them, the attempts of recent scholars to integrate Byzantium into our histories of philosophy is a case of political correctness. I quite enjoy that, conjuring as it does the spectre of left-wing protesters calling for new additions, funding to support the intensive study of monastic life at Mount Athos and perhaps the invention of novel pronouns to describe a Trinitarian god who is neither singular nor plural. Their point, though, is that we should not just grant every culture the complement of having managed to produce philosophy, and that the Byzantines in particular do not pass the test. These Christian intellectuals were, with a handful of exceptions, so committed to the superiority of revelation over human reason that they could see pagan learning only as a dangerous antagonist. As a result, though some attention was paid to classical philosophy, this was an ancillary scholarly pursuit, alongside the exposition of religious orthodoxy. They complained that classroom philosophy was not allowed to freely compete with doctrinal, clerical, and ascetic tradition, and that the scholars of Byzantium show no signs of entertaining the possibility that the Hellenic metaphysical, cosmological, moral outlook might be more true than orthodox doctrine. Here they seem to catch themselves realizing that this is implausibly demanding and concede in parentheses that it would be enough if philosophy was at least conceived as offering different solutions, so as a kind of independent alternative to Christianity. Of course, even that is raising a pretty high bar for the Byzantines to clear. For Gutas and Sino-Soglu, a given thinker only counts as a philosopher if he or she pursues rational argument wherever it leads without being constrained to adhere to religious dogmas. While that might strike you as eminently reasonable, a moment's reflection shows that it would have some very surprising consequences for our study of the history of philosophy. It would imply that there was also no philosophy at all in Latin medieval Europe, or to borrow their phrase, only philosophy in the margins. Philosophy would be found, if at all, then only in the works of confirmed members of the university arts faculties, like John Buridan. Just consider Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, or Ockham. They may have been among the greatest philosophical minds in history, yet none were philosophers, according to this exclusivist definition. Nor, by the way, was the aforementioned Proclus just as devoted to paganism as Aquinas or your average Byzantine thinker was to Christianity. What about the Islamic world, where intellectuals were in explicit competition with the Byzantines and often presented themselves as the true heirs of Atlantic wisdom? As you might remember from his appearance on this series as an interview guest, Dimitri Gutas is a leading expert in this area. He could rightly point us to a small number of outright rationalists like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes and identify them as the true, and perhaps sole, philosophers of the medieval age. For they were prepared to see human reason as independent from, and even in some ways superior to, religion. But the fact is that, in Islamic culture and even within the intellectual elite, they were the ones who were marginal. Philosophy and rational argumentation in the Islamic world, as in Latin Christendom and Byzantium, was mostly used to buttress and expound the teachings of one or another Abrahamic religion. This is what we find in such diverse thinkers as the Muslim Al-Kindi, the Christian Ibn Adi, and the Jewish Maimonides, all of them expert readers of Aristotle and deeply committed to the idea that Aristotelian philosophy could be interwoven with sensitive exposition of revealed texts and religious doctrine. Gutas and Signor Zoglou make an important and valid point in noting that pagan thought was greeted with more unease than enthusiasm among Byzantine churchmen. Yet some theologians would have rejected, or just been puzzled, by the idea that philosophy means using reason independently of faith. Gutas and Signor Zoglou themselves quote the early medieval thinker John of Damascus, defining philosophy in the following way, It is love of wisdom, and true wisdom is God, therefore the love of God, this is the true philosophy. So, in approaching this tradition, we do need to recognize that the Hellenic philosophical heritage was much debated and occasionally outright condemned by Byzantine theologians, but we don't want to miss out on the philosophically fruitful ideas that were put forward even by the harshest critics of that heritage. If that is our goal, it seems to me unhelpful to focus on the question of which thinkers should and should not be classified as philosophers. After all, the job of the historian of philosophy is not to police the textual traditions of earlier times, discarding any thinkers who might be tainted by theological, mystical, or other ideological concerns. Rather, we should look for and study texts that address perennial philosophical questions, for instance about knowledge, being, human nature, and ethics. The Byzantines did this when commenting on Aristotle, but they also did it in explicitly religious contexts, when arguing about the nature of God, the sense in which God is accessible to the human mind, the virtues of the monastic life, and so on. Thus, I'll be deliberately taking what Gutas and Seniosoglu would call a relativist approach. That is, I will discuss whatever strikes me as philosophically interesting, or rather anything I will strike you, the listener, as philosophically interesting, rather than restricting my attention to works that would have been seen at the time as falling under the literary genre of philosophy. To the contrary, as already mentioned, we'll be looking at historical writing and at other aspects of Byzantine culture such as iconoclasm, the debate over hesychasm, and attitudes towards women. Then too, as I'm sure Gutas and Seniosoglu would agree, the historian of philosophy should try to understand the way that uncontroversial examples of philosophical writing, like Aristotle, have been appropriated and transmitted. Here, Byzantine culture is not merely relevant, but for reasons I've already sketched, arguably the most important of the three medieval cultures. The historian needs to know where various traditions of thought came from, and will have no hope of understanding Renaissance philosophy without grasping at sources in Greek as well as Latin and Arabic medieval thought. Indeed, one reason I've chosen to tackle Byzantium as the third of the three medieval traditions is that it leads so naturally into the Renaissance, a time when Greek philosophical learning and classical philosophy were revived thanks to texts coming into Latin Christendom from well, you know where. There's another, more distinctive sense in which the forthcoming episodes will cast a broad net. Usually, the phrase Byzantine philosophy is applied only to the intellectual output of the Greek intellectuals of the empire, who were mostly in Constantinople. But in fact, quite a lot of philosophy was going on elsewhere and in languages other than Greek. I just mentioned John of Damascus, who did write in Greek but lived in the Islamic world, as his name indicates. There was philosophy written in Syriac and Armenian, some of it in that familiar genre of commentary on Aristotle, and there was philosophy in Georgian, notably with the 12th century philosopher John Petrizi. In fact, it would be strictly speaking more accurate, albeit not very good marketing, to call this series of episodes something like Philosophy in Eastern Medieval Christianity. Aristotle kicked things off in that spirit by discussing the reception of Aristotelianism in Syriac and Armenian, which will be a chance to see how scholars working in those languages carried on, and also innovated within, the concerns of late ancient philosophical culture. So join me next time for some proper orientation on philosophy in the East, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.