 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? Collector's Items, Fotius and Byzantine Compilations Like Rodney Dangerfield, obsessive collectors get no respect. The word trainspotter, which refers to a railway enthusiast, is in British English synonymous with loser, and there is indeed something slightly tragic about someone who spends all their free time looking for things the rest of us find pointless. We've all shaped our faces into a frozen smile and uttered a forced, wow, when being shown, say, a neighbour's collection of Star Wars figurines, or a cousin's treasure trove of memorabilia from the career of Donny and Marie Osmond. At such moments, I remind myself that I too am prone to the collector's impulse. I refer not to my complete edition of Buster Keaton's silent films, for which I make no apologies, but to my embarrassingly large collection of books about ancient and medieval philosophy. The roots of addiction were planted early in my own career, when a young man who was considering studying philosophy looked around my office and said, so I guess you're new here. When I asked how he knew this, he said, because you hardly have any books. That was about twenty years ago. Nowadays, a visitor might reasonably conclude that I am preparing for a cataclysm in which all of Western civilization is destroyed with the lucky exception of my office, so that future historians will be able to reconstruct the early history of philosophy using nothing but my private library. What they will make of my plastic, dancing James Brown doll, I hesitate to guess. In my defence, I would point out that collectors of the distant past achieved more or less exactly what I just described. We owe much of our knowledge about antiquity to obsessive collectors whose efforts defied civilizational collapse, preserving precious texts and information like Noah saving the animals aboard his ark. Right of place, at least as concerns the history of classical philosophy, must go to Simplicius. A Platonist living in the 6th century, he feared that the rise of Christianity would make it even more difficult to get access to ancient pagan literature that was already hard to find. This is why he packed his commentaries on Aristotle with extensive reports about and quotations from pre-Socratic philosophers and other thinkers. We should also be grateful to the Byzantine scribes who copied out those massive commentaries and to other scholars of Byzantium who usually get no respect, those whose literary output consisted of compilations and summaries of earlier texts. While not the most innovative of thinkers, they produced works that survived through the collapse of their own society and that transmit otherwise lost parts of the history of philosophy. We saw with John of Damascus that in Byzantine culture philosophical writing often meant compilation rather than original composition. These philosophical chapters gathered together all the logical materials one needed to master in order to do Christian theology. Though unprecedented in ambition and influence, the approach of John's book was, like its contents, nothing new. From the so-called Dark Age of the early Byzantine period, around the 7th century or so, we have several logical compilations that likewise answered the need to educate students in logic. John himself drew on such summaries, and the authors of the earlier textbooks in turn looked back to the late antique school of Alexandria where the aforementioned Simplicius had studied. Though these compilations occasionally show some originality in their arrangement of the materials, their purpose is simply to present the basics of Aristotelian logic, much as was being done in Syriac and Armenian at about the same time. Thus, Mosman Roushé, who studied and edited several of these treatises, has remarked, "...perhaps philosophical activity is too generous a term to bestow upon works of so little effort and originality." But their mere existence shows the importance of logic to Byzantine intellectuals. They found it unproblematic to take over at least this part of the Hellenic intellectual inheritance because it seemed to them neutral with respect to the divide between pagans and Christians. As Roushé puts it in his study of another logical compilation from the 9th century, insofar as logic was a tool of philosophy and not a doctrine, its use by the Christian apologist was encouraged. As its application was inexorable and its utility common to all, often only the meaning of its terminology was open to dispute. Of course, thanks to the scribes of Constantinople, we have the original treatises of Aristotle devoted to logic, and for that matter a wealth of late ancient commentary on those treatises. So if these early compendia were lost, it would deprive us of little more than the insight that an interest in logic did persist through the Dark Ages. The same cannot be said for the numerous texts known as scolia, a technical term that refers to comments written in the margins of manuscripts. We don't usually put much value in marginalia, yet these scolia were seen as important in Byzantine culture, enough so that scribes would routinely copy out scolia found in a manuscript along with the main text. Scolia seemed first to have come into fashion because readers had difficulty understanding works of antique literature such as the plays by Aristophanes and other classical authors whom they took to be the ultimate representatives of good Greek style. Notes in the margins would explain the meaning of words that were no longer in use, or make observations about grammar, much as students of English literature nowadays need footnotes to help them navigate their way through a text of Chaucer or Shakespeare. In due course, scolia were used for other purposes too. Sometimes they preserved parts of otherwise lost philosophical commentaries, or make pertinent observations about the life of the author of the work being copied. Such information could also be set down in an independent work rather than in the form of scolia. The most impressive and important example is the so-called Suda, a staggeringly huge work of the 10th century with entries on individual Greek terms and personages, explaining each entry by pulling together information from earlier sources. Many of those sources were themselves compilations, so that this Byzantine encyclopedia has been called a compilation of compilations. The Suda wouldn't make for good bedtime reading, it's really a reference work whose modern edition runs to five volumes, but it is an invaluable resource for scholars of classical antiquity. The entries can also provide a revealing window into the minds of Byzantine intellectuals of the period. Consider its definition of the word philosophy. It first draws in a historian named George the Monk to tell us that philosophy is correctness in ethics along with belief in true knowledge about being. The Suda then abbreviates George the Monk's complaint about the philosophical failures of Jews and Greeks before adding a division of philosophy into ethics, physics, and theology, which is drawn from John Philoponus. So this little passage, despite being entirely unoriginal in its contents, reflects a moderate view according to which Christian truth is the full culmination of philosophical reflection. Moderate reflection, however, does involve philosophical disciplines apart from theology, including natural philosophy which is understood as an inquiry into bodily things and their forms. Probably no Byzantine expected to become famous for writing Scalia, but the man who came closest was Arethas, who lived from the 9th into the 10th century. We still have volumes that belong to his library, the full version of which would presumably have put mine to shame. The surviving eight books include Euclid, Plato and Aristotle, and feature notes written in Arethas's own handwriting. We even know how much he paid for these books. The Euclid cost him 14 pieces of gold and Plato 21. For comparison, a job in the famously vast Byzantine civil service paid a starting salary of about 72 gold pieces annually, so you can see that even a modest library back then would have cost a small fortune. Arethas's expensive taste was also a controversial one. In a letter written in 903, he confesses to having been an ardent lover of Aristotle and a warm inquirer of his works. In the end, though, he has decided that the call of Aristotelian philosophy is like that of the sirens luring ships to their doom in Homer's Odyssey. Note the characteristic use of an allusion to classical Greek literature, even as Arethas disowns Hellenic philosophy. It's been speculated that his enthusiasm cooled after he was accused of impiety in the year 900, with the charge sheet perhaps, including an undue attachment to pagan ideas. Arethas came by his fondness for philosophy in the same way Aristotle did, he got it from his teacher. This was Photius, the prize exhibit in our assembly of Byzantine collectors. He can take a good deal of credit for inspiring a revival of interest in Greek literature, science and philosophy that has been termed the 9th century Renaissance. And in case you're keeping track, they make three medieval Renaissance that came along well before the 1 and 15th century Europe. Along with 9th century Byzantium, the term has been applied to Islamic culture in the 10th century and Latin Christendom in the 12th. And as long as we're handing out titles, we can mention that Photius has been called the inventor of the book review. This in honour of his writing of a work called the Bibliotheca or Library, which collects reports on no fewer than 280 works, a number of which are known only or primarily thanks to the summaries offered here by Photius. Unlike most of the figures we'll be covering in the history of Byzantine philosophy, Photius played a significant part in actual Byzantine history. Thanks to his reputation as a man of learning, he was tapped for the role of patriarch despite being a layman. A breakneck round of ordinations saw him being made subdeacon, deacon, priest, and then patriarch in time for Christmas of the year 858. Not everyone saw him as the ideal stocking stuffer. The previous patriarch, Ignatius, had supporters who still saw him as the rightful holder of the post, and the confrontation between the two sides ran on for years. This already heated debate got even hotter when the Roman pope, Nicholas I, asserted the right to adjudicate in the affair, which was not welcomed in Constantinople. Lamenting the whole time that he would much rather be spending time with all those books, Photius found himself deposed and exiled, then made patriarch again in 877, only to be removed yet again in 886. He died while in exile in 893. For our purposes, it isn't necessary to get into the details of his checkered career as a churchman, whose complexity I feel almost obligated to describe as Byzantine. I do, however, want to mention his role in the famous rift between the Western and Eastern churches known as the filioque controversy. This Latin phrase means, and the Son. The debate concerned the acceptability of saying that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, not only the Father. When it came to Photius's attention that some Western Christians were making this part of their recitation of the Creed, he was unsparing in his critique. His diatribe against the filioque clause nicely illustrates the point we've been making that logical and other philosophical ideas could be pressed into the service of theological dogmatics. For Photius, the capacity to generate other persons of the Trinity is the characteristic property that distinguishes the Father, so it cannot belong to the Son as well. He speaks of this in quasi-political terms as the monarchy of the Father and complains the filioque would instead introduce a duarchy, that is rule by two rather than one. Then too, if the Spirit has two causes, it would have to be a composite thing made up of parts introduced by its different sources. Yet we know that the divine persons are utterly simple. Photius certainly knew what he was talking about here, because his bibliotheca is nothing if not a composite drawn from many sources. As he explains in a brief preface, the work was written for his brother in anticipation of a diplomatic mission to the Islamic world, which must have been in either 845 or 855. Here's what Photius says. The point of this, then, is that Photius and his brother have been taking part in a kind of literary salon in which texts were apparently read aloud to the group, which makes sense if you think again about the expense and scarcity of handwritten books. But now Photius is going away on a lengthy trip, so he is going to give his brother consolation and edification with a wealth of information about the books he, Photius, has read. It is not only the fact that Photius has read the hundreds of works discussed in the bibliotheca, but also that he is recounting their contents from memory, or so he claims. He will not arrange the works thematically, but jumble together disparate genres and topics for the sake of a more entertaining overall product. In this, and in some of his wording here in the preface, Photius looks back to a female scholar of the Roman Empire, Pamphila of Epidaurus. She likewise mixed together heterogeneous materials in her writing on history. By the way, she is a good example of an author for whom we are dependent on the reports of Byzantine scholars like Photius, who discusses her work in his bibliotheca. As this already indicates, Photius's collection is not devoted only to philosophy. Indeed, our favorite discipline plays a pretty minor role in the work, which covers a wide range of genres including history, literature, and of course Christian theology, though it should be noted that a good half of the works covered are secular. Probably the assortment of topics is not so much a reflection of Photius's tastes as what he has been able to get his hands on and commit to memory. Yet, this election does seem to betray certain of his intellectual interests. These would include medicine, as well as the relevance of philosophy for doctors. Photius discusses Galen's work on the sects, and rightly notes that it is really a treatise on scientific methodology, one that to his mind is required reading before embarking on medical studies. Another philosophical issue that clearly caught Photius's imagination was free will. Probably his most valuable contribution to our knowledge of ancient philosophy is his summary of an otherwise lost work on the subject of providence by Hierocles of Alexandria, a Platonist of the early 5th century AD. Photius devotes two sections of the bibliotheca to this treatise. He explains that in it, Hierocles wanted to treat providence while bringing the thought of Plato and Aristotle into sympathy, a project he was taking over from Ammonius, head of the school of philosophers in late ancient Alexandria. Following this perceptive remark, Photius goes on to explain that Hierocles attacked rival conceptions about providence, the skeptical view of the Epicureans, and the determinism of Stoics and astrologers. Hierocles' champions were, of course, Plato, but also such pagan authorities as Orpheus and the Chaldean Oracles. According to the true Platonic theory, providence flows forth from the highest god through the heavenly world and then manifests itself in the earthly realm as fate. Within this system, humans retain their freedom, for it is in response to free actions that we receive just reward or punishment at the hands of fate. As Photius emphasizes, Hierocles was able to establish this only by taking recourse to a belief in reincarnation. Our fate in this life was chosen by us in our actions in a past life. This teaching is evidently problematic from a Christian point of view. Photius has clearly noticed this fact as he writes that Hierocles, starting from strange notions puts forward incoherent reasonings without it entering his mind on what grounds the doctrine of providence could truly be defended. But that hasn't stopped him from offering a detailed report of the work which is otherwise largely free of editorial remarks on Photius's part. He even goes so far as to wrap up the first of the reports on Hierocles by praising his clear and unflashy writing style as appropriate to the task of a philosopher. Photius's approach is similar in recounting the ideas of that hero of Hellenic philosophy, Pythagoras. Here, one could easily have the impression that one is reading a pagan Neoplatonist explaining his own intellectual lineage, perhaps because it's exactly that sort of text that Photius is drawing on. We are told that Plato and Aristotle were the ninth and tenth successors in a line of teachers stretching back to Pythagoras himself, and then treated to an exposition of supposedly Pythagorean doctrine that touches on topics ranging from the creation of all things out of the cosmic mathematical principles of monad and dyad, to theories of color, the soul, and wind. Autius also takes time in this section to defend Aristotle from the charge that he denied the immortality of the soul. As these examples suggest, the Bibliotheca is the work of a scholar of Hellenism who was a devout Christian but who didn't let his religious convictions stop him from telling us whatever he knew about ancient culture. Usually he simply ignores the question of why all this material would be useful for a Byzantine intellectual to know, but there is at least one interesting exception. In a section devoted to the Pyrronian skeptic Anesidemus, which again is invaluable since his works are lost, Photius clearly explains the distinctive nature of this form of skepticism. Whereas the so-called academic skeptics asserted the impossibility of achieving knowledge, the Pyrrhenists make no definite assertions at all about knowledge or anything else. Having explained all this, Photius adds, It is clear that Anesidemus makes no contribution to philosophical doctrine, but for students of dialectic the book is not without its uses, provided that its arguments do not impose upon unstable intellects and its subtlety does not affect the judgment. Perhaps we could extrapolate from this to an attitude about philosophy as a whole, or even Hellenic culture more generally. Enjoy it and make use of it, but do so carefully. Speaking of enjoying yourself and being careful, I'll take this opportunity to urge you to do both over the summer, which will be podcast-free for about a month while I take my annual break. And it will be well worth the wait, because we'll be discussing one of the greatest names of Byzantium. I know it's almost too exciting to bear, but at least you'll have a month to collect yourself before hearing about Michael Psellos, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.