Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 324 - United We Fall - Latin Philosophy in Byzantium.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, United We Fall – Latin Philosophy in Byzantium. When I was covering Latin medieval philosophy on this podcast series, perhaps I was a little bit unkind to Thomas Aquinas. Though he received extensive coverage, one of the main points of that coverage was to shift him away from center stage, to emphasize that he was only one of several important thinkers of high scholasticism, and one who was in some ways out of step with his contemporaries. And I pointed out that other philosophers of the 13th century, such as Albert the Great, Henry of Kent, and Duns Scotus had a greater impact in the following century than Aquinas did. If you're an admirer of Aquinas, who is still nursing a grudge about this, then you'll be glad to know that in today's episode I won't be doubting Thomas or his influence. To the contrary, I will be pointing to a largely unknown aspect of his legacy, the Greek translation and Byzantine reception of his works. Usually, we think of philosophy as moving from Greek to Latin, not the other way around. That process began with Cicero and Boethius in antiquity, was pushed forward by medieval translators like Ariugina and William of Murabeche, and then famously brought to final fruition by the scholars of the Renaissance we'll be covering before long, men like Marsilio Ficino with his translation of Platonic works into Latin. To think of Aquinas and other philosophers being translated from Latin into Greek, just as the Renaissance was about to begin in the West, and in the final years of the Eastern Empire seems like history getting things backwards. But the Latin-Greek translations can also be seen as the culmination of a long series of encounters between West and East, encounters that had been going on throughout the whole Byzantine period. For the most part, this is a story of political and religious interaction and rivalry. The two realms begin to drift apart in about the 5th century, if not earlier, as the sole languages of church and state become Latin in the West and Greek in the East. There were frequent diplomatic contacts between the Carolingian West and the court at Byzantium though, and in the 10th century a strong connection was made when the Byzantine princess Theophano married the Western emperor Otto II. This was among the high points of influence from the East making itself felt in the West, for instance in artworks and the design of coinage. But there were many other examples of cultural exchange. Michael Bselos mentions having Westerners among his students, calling them Celts, while monastic life in the West was influenced by Eastern models, and Western romance literature was known and imitated in Greek. There are even Byzantine retellings of the story of King Arthur and his court. Yet theological concerns constantly prevented true unity between Latin and Greek Christendom. A famous turning point was the so-called Phottian schism, named after the scholar and patriarch Phodias. This concerned the addition of the phrase, and the Son, in Latin filioque, to the Creed, with Phodias and the Greeks rejecting this formula and insisting that the Holy Spirit does not proceed from both Father and Son, but only from the Father. While this would remain a key point of contention, there were to be other disagreements. The Latins were not comfortable with the Eastern devotion to icons that emerged out of the defeat of iconoclasm. Conversely, the Byzantines rejected the Latins' use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist because it was too reminiscent of Jewish practice at Passover, and because for them, the presence of air in leavened bread symbolized the second divine nature of Christ. They also objected to the idea of purgatory as an unacceptable innovation, meaning that if Dante had been from Constantinople, his divine comedy would have been one-third shorter. Of course, the only thing that Byzantine scholars enjoyed more than putting forth their own theological ideas was showing that the ideas of others are absurd. We've seen this in debates that pitted Greek theologians against one another and in texts written against Islam. And they also wrote critically of the Latin Church. One example, which because of my own allegiances as a sports fan has my favorite title from all of Byzantine literature, is The Sacred Arsenal. It was not a prescient appreciation of London's greatest soccer team, but a lengthy theological treatise written in the 1170s by a scholar connected to the court of the Komnenei named Andronikos Komateros. The Sacred Arsenal is divided into two parts. The first argues that the Latin Christians are, like fans of Tottenham Hotspur, deeply wrongheaded. This is followed by the second part, a collection of more than 1,000 proof texts and more than 200 arguments or syllogisms intended to establish the Greek position. Similar works were written on the other side too. To take one notable case, Anselm of Canterbury composed a treatise against the errors of the Greeks in the context of a council held at Badi in 1098 attempting to resolve the disputes dividing the churches. Religious harmony was a goal worth striving for. The political elite were keen to close the rift so as to present a united front against the threat of Islam. A repeated dynamic was that the members of this elite would reach agreement with the other side, only for the wider church membership to reject the deal. Thus a council at Lyon, held in 1274 and celebrating the union of the two churches, was met with horror back in Constantinople with the people shouting at the delegates, you have become Franks. Almost two centuries later, a series of meetings was held in Florence, which in 1452 issued in a compromise on the Filioque problem, but it would be rejected by an Eastern synod a few decades later. The alert listeners ears will have pricked up at those dates because 1452 is one year before the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. What, you may wonder, were the Byzantines playing at? At this point, the Eastern Empire's chances of survival were about the same as those of a snowball receiving vigorous back rubs in a Finnish sauna. And here were the brightest minds of Constantinople devoting their energies to disputing the niceties of Trinitarian doctrine. But actually, this makes perfect sense. It was just the latest example of the Byzantines offering concessions to the West in hope of military assistance. But that hope was triumphing over experience. Emperor John V Palaiologos had gone so far as to accept the Catholic faith and debased himself at St. Peter's in Rome, only to be forced to accept vassalage from the Ottomans. Nonetheless, the desperate military situation of the Empire gives us a context for understanding the way the intellectuals, especially those who favored a union between the churches, became interested in the works of Western scholars. Which finally brings us to our promised topic of the impact of Latin philosophy in the East. As I commented in a recent episode, we've already been getting the impression that philosophy was passing from every language used around the Mediterranean into every other language. The Latin-Greek translations complete that picture. These were not on the scale of the translation movements that rendered Greek philosophy into Arabic or Arabic and Greek philosophy into Latin, but they did have a significant impact on the final generations of thinkers who lived in the Byzantine Empire. One of the translators was Maximus Plonides, whom I mentioned in episode 322. He produced Greek versions of works by Augustine, Boethius, and Anselm of Canterbury. Of these, his translation of Augustine's On the Trinity was particularly significant and a surprising choice given that Augustine had helped to inspire the adoption of the filioque clause by theologians in the Latin West. Despite this, no less a Byzantine theologian than Gregory Palamas drew on this work by Augustine taking over his idea that there are Trinitarian structures within the life of the human soul that mirror the inner dynamic of the three divine persons. It has also been suggested that Augustine may lie behind a passage in a work of uncertain origins that refutes absolute skepticism on the grounds that no one can doubt that he himself is living, thinking, remembering, willing, and considering. This argument, also found in Augustine's On the Trinity, is famous for anticipating Descartes' anti-skeptical argument, I think therefore I am, which makes it especially intriguing to see that an anonymous Byzantine author was struck by Augustine's idea. As I say though, the Latin Christian philosopher who made the biggest splash in Byzantium was Thomas Aquinas. An astonishing number of his works were rendered into Greek, including both the Summa Con Turgentiles and Summa Theologiae, as well as commentaries on Aristotle and a variety of other treatises. This was mostly the work of three men, two brothers named Dimitrios and Prochoros Cudenes, and then George Gennadios Scholarios. Let's leave Gennadios Scholarios aside for now, since he was already introduced at the end of our interview with Judith Heron, and since we'll be returning to him in the next couple of episodes. Instead, we'll focus for now on the Cudenes brothers. With them, we take up the strand of another story we were telling last time, the Hesychast controversy. As we saw, the spark for that intellectual battle was lit by an encounter with Latin scholasticism. The opening salvo was Barlaam of Calabria's complaint that the schoolmen of the West ought not to be applying the tools of syllogistic reasoning to God. This provoked Palamas into asserting that we can indeed have certain demonstration of God through a direct encounter with God's energy or actuality, while his essence or nature remains inevitably beyond our grasp. When this Hesychast position was approved by the Byzantine church in the mid-14th century, it opened another divide with the West. Like Palamas, Prochoros Cudenes was a monk at Mount Athos, but he was a committed enemy of Hesychasm. He was expelled from the monastery there and condemned as a heretic for his opposition to Palomite theology. This drew his more moderate brother Demetrios into the fray as he began to write on behalf of Prochoros. As Marcus Plusted has remarked in a monograph on the eastern reception of Aquinas, Prochoros was the better theologian of the two but much the worst diplomat. In refuting the Hesychast's views, the two brothers were able to draw on extensive knowledge of Aquinas. Demetrios Cudenes had acquired this knowledge by quite literally doing his homework. Some years previously, Demetrios had been a court official and found that the interpreters tasked with translating for visitors from the Latin West were not up to the task. By this period, the Dominican order had been sending representatives to Byzantium for some time. They had already sent missionaries to convert Orthodox Christians to the Catholic point of view in the early 13th century, and it was a Dominican who wrote the first critique of the Greek theology that could be read in the Greek language. So it was to a Dominican friar that Demetrios turned to acquire facility with Latin, and his instructor set him the task of working on texts by Thomas Aquinas. It's advice that remains valid, by the way. Aquinas's Latin is admirably straightforward, and I would recommend him to anyone who is starting to read medieval Latin philosophy in the original. In any case, Demetrios Cudenes was very much taken with Aquinas and moved on to translating his works into Greek. In doing so, he displayed the philological care that distinguished so many Byzantine forerunners of Renaissance humanism. He dug out the original texts of Aristotle that Aquinas referred to, using these in his Greek translations from Aquinas's Latin, and he sought to collate multiple manuscripts to avoid errors, though he complained that these were difficult to track down. Demetrios and his brother Prochoros used Aquinas against their theological opponents. The central teaching of Palamas and the Hezekas, as we know, is that God shows Himself to us through His actualities or activities or energies, His energeae, which are divine yet nonetheless to be distinguished from God's essence itself. By contrast, Aquinas had drawn on Aristotle to show that God is, in His essence, already being itself. In other words, pure actuality. The Cudenes brothers accepted this equation between activity and essence, thus eliminating the key contrast of Palamas's philosophical theology. They also put to use Aquinas's famous theory of analogy by arguing that the light shown to Christ's apostles and in mystical visions is not divine, as Palamas insisted, but only symbolizes him analogically. It would have been easy for the Palamas to respond by disdaining the Cudenes's dependence on a Western thinker. By being so open to the Latin Christian sphere, which according to Demetrios formed a single people with the Eastern Christians, the brothers departed from the longstanding Byzantine habit of sneering at the Catholics and the very language that they wrote in. It was usually reckoned that the lamentable introduction of the Filioque clause was probably occasioned by the inflexibility of Latin. And of course, such events as the 1204 Sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders did not improve the reputation of the West. Indeed, Barlaam of Calabria once pointed out to representatives of the Pope that poor treatment of the East by the West did more to undermine Church unity than genuine disagreements in doctrine. But by the time of the Hezekiah's controversy, the Orthodox were starting to appreciate the subtlety and rigor of Latin scholasticism. Demetrios openly stated that the intellectual standard among the Greeks was well below that of the Latin West and even suggested that Latin is more precise than Greek, not less. More surprisingly, the Hezekahst too found much to admire in Aquinas. Take for instance the Emperor John VI Kantakouzeni, who was a supporter of Palomite thought both before and after he stepped down from his office to become a monk. He could have made the obvious move of criticizing the Cudanese brothers for indulging in the logical games of Latin scholasticism. But while remarking that Aquinas breathes syllogisms rather than air, he did not make this the hallmark of his refutation and instead made free use of Aquinas' ideas himself. The problem was not to use syllogisms in theology, but to use them badly, as did Prochoros in setting forth his heretical views. Another Palomite, Theophanes of Nicaea, even used typical phrases from Aquinas in his own writings, for instance by introducing counter-arguments with the phrase, To which I answer that, Aquinas' Latin respondeo di kendum transformed into the Greek pros d'etat toyota reteon. It's worth emphasizing this point because it warns us away from assuming that mystically inclined thinkers like the Palomites, or devout Byzantine theologians more generally, would be uniformly opposed to the use of rational argumentation in matters of religion, and would see this as both a hallmark and weakness of Latin scholasticism. Some Eastern thinkers did feel that way. Remember again that Barlaam initiated the Hezekast controversy precisely by making this sort of complaint. And we find other thinkers of the late Byzantine period saying things like, Aristotle and his philosophy have nothing in common with the truths revealed by Christ. But remember too that the Sacred Arsenal produced hundreds of syllogisms in support of the Greek theological position. The Palomites followed suit by using Aquinas and other Western thinkers against themselves as they defended hesychasm and charged the Western position on the philioque with being irrational and inconsistent. Even those who were more firmly opposed to Latin scholasticism were willing to meet it on its own argumentative ground. An author named Callistos Angelikudes wrote a massive refutation of Aquinas' summa consergentiles, showing its flaws point by point in something like the way Nicholas of Metone had attacked Proclus. An appropriate comparison, since Callistos' main problem with Aquinas is that he was too dependent on pagan philosophy. The use of Aquinas in the Hezekast controversy is the most eye-catching and well-researched case of influence from the Latin West on philosophy in the Greek East. But such influence can be found elsewhere even when it comes to topics that had been under discussion for a very long time. A nice example is the problem of the so-called Term of Life. Back in the 7th century, several authors had raised the question whether God predetermines how long a person will live. This is of course just a specific version of a question asked in all the medieval traditions as to whether God foreknows, and thus decides in advance, everything that happens down here on earth. Actually, the specific idea that each of us has a pre-defined Term of Life is also found in Islamic texts. One author, Anastasios of Sinai, even makes a point that was famously made a few centuries later by the Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali, that if God decides how long a person will live, sinners could complain that he did not arrange for them to die before they committed their more grievous misdeeds. Among early Greek Christian authors, it was generally agreed that God at least knows beforehand how long each human will live. In keeping with a remark made by the Cappadocian father Basil of Caesarea, death comes to those whose Term of Life is completed. Anastasios admits this while cautioning that human free will is not impeded by God's foreknowledge. More than half a millennium later, this conclusion was known to a 13th century thinker we met in episode 322, Nikephoros Blemides. Yet Blemides went against Anastasios, and a number of intervening figures, including the just-mentioned Nicholas of Metzone, by arguing that, "...there is no limit set for each person's life, nor has death been predetermined for each person by God." One study has suggested that Blemides was moved to this new contact with Dominican friars who visited Constantinople and who held a similar view to the one accepted by Anastasios. God foreknows, but does not cause or predetermine the length of life. Blemides therefore describes the view as an unacceptable novelty rather than an age-old solution and rejects it as a bit of Latin sophistry. Empires tend to die with more fanfare than individual humans. The more observant residents of Constantinople could tell, in the years leading up to 1453, that whether divided from the Latin West or united to it, the Greek East was about to see its own term of life come to an end. One scholar presciently remarked that even if the world was not about to end, as he deemed likely, at least the Byzantine nation was enjoying its final days. This was Gennadios Scholarios, the third Latin Greek I mentioned earlier, and as it happens, the author of no fewer than five treatises on the question of the term of life that showed the influence of Thomas Aquinas. But Scholarios is known best not for his translations or his consideration of this question of divine foreknowledge, but for a dispute over the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle. His opponent in this dispute can be described as the last great philosopher of Byzantium, and simultaneously as one of the first philosophers of the Italian Renaissance. Assuming we all live long enough, we'll meet him next time as we devote an episode to the Platonism of George Gemistos Platon, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.