 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, Consul of the Philosophers, Michael Psalos. When Socrates proposes in Plato's Republic that philosophers would be the best rulers for the ideal city, he recognizes that the suggestion may well seem ridiculous, as well he might. If you've spent as much time around philosophers as I have, you'll know that often their organizational talent barely extends to wearing matching socks. No wonder, then, that even if Plato's authoritative status meant that philosophers in antiquity and the Middle Ages continued to envision perfect rulers as philosopher kings, real-life philosophers often found themselves outside the halls of power. In Latin medieval Christian culture, they were far more often monks or university masters than courtiers. Monasticism was also an important context for philosophical thought in Byzantium, as we'll be seeing. Yet there were major intellectual figures who had significant access to the imperial court. We already met one of them, Photius, another was Michael Psalos, arguably the outstanding author of the whole tradition of Byzantine philosophy. He earned this status in part by writing about non-philosophical topics. His most frequently consulted work is surely the Chronographia, a portrait of numerous emperors that has made him a key source for the study of Byzantine history in the 11th century. As Psalos emphasizes, he is providing first-hand testimony, having known personally many of the protagonists of his story. He came into court circles having achieved a reputation for learning, thanks to the encouragement he received from his mother, Theodota, who made sure he was closely acquainted with such classics as Homer's Iliad. He served emperors as a scribe and as a judge and was then honored as Consul of the Philosophers by Emperor Constantine IX Monomachus in the year 1047, a title that aptly combines the political with Psalos' main intellectual interest. But in Byzantium, no one stayed in favour forever, and Psalos would duly find himself packed off to a monastery, which is when he took the name Michael. He endured the ascetic life there for only a year. A contemporary poem satirizes his inability to commit himself to chastity by comparing him to the famously lustful god Zeus in what has been seen as a dig at his fascination for pagan learning. That commitment to pagan thought is evident from his multifaceted literary output, which has been preserved for us in astounding abundance. Almost 1800 manuscripts of his works survive today. Along with the Chronographia, they include many letters, rhetorical showpieces like funeral orations, theological treatises, and philosophical writings. Among the latter, we have a commentary on a logical text by Aristotle and a work that gathers together philosophical wisdom from many sources, often known by the Latin title De Omnifaria Doctrina. From this we can see that Psalos was to some extent continuing trends in the previous intellectual life of Byzantium. The collection of philosophical nuggets in De Omnifaria Doctrina has an obvious forerunner in the work of Photeus and other compilers. One can easily imagine the bibliophile Photeus saying, as Psalos did to his patron Constantine Manomachus, I came into the world for books, and am in constant conversation with them. Likewise, his choice to comment on Aristotle's logic fits with widespread interest in that field of philosophical endeavor going right back to late antiquity. Indeed, much of Psalos's effort was directed towards what the Latin Christians called the trivium, that is, the arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic. This was not in a university setting. Nothing quite like the universities of Latin Christendom existed in Constantinople, though palace schools were established there. This was done already in the 9th century by the Caesar Bardas, with Leo the mathematician being given a chair for philosophy. Psalos, though, seems to have taught grammar and rhetoric on an informal and independent basis and compared the resulting group to a chorus with its leader. This was not atypical. Psalos boasted that he was a lone philosopher in an age without philosophy, but we know from his own letters that he did have teachers, as well as students, and we know too of other intellectuals in his day with an interest in such disciplines as logic and rhetoric. The surviving letters of Psalos reveal that the relations between teachers and students were politically significant. We find him offering them patronage, recommending them to other aristocrats, and in general warming to the role of the oldest boy in an old boy's network. All of this, including the reluctant entrance into the monastic life, might make Psalos sound like a Byzantine version of Peter Abelard, who worked in France only a few generations later. But unlike Abelard, Psalos reserved his greatest admiration for pagan Neoplatonists rather than Aristotle and the logical tradition. In an often cited passage from his Chronographia, he gives us a brief intellectual autobiography, writing, I came to Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, after which I progressed to the most admirable Proclus, as if arriving in a great haven, where I sought all science and accuracy of thoughts. After this, intending to ascend to first philosophy, and to be initiated into pure science, I took up first the knowledge of incorporeals in what is called mathematics, which have an intermediate rank between the nature that concerns bodies and the thought that is free of relation to bodies. Actually, that threefold classification of sciences into physics, mathematics, and metaphysics, or first philosophy, with the three disciplines corresponding to three types of being, goes back ultimately to Aristotle. But it's still pretty clear from the passage that Psalos is enthusiastic about Platonism. Strikingly, it is Proclus who receives particular praise, even though Proclus was notable for his flagrant paganism, something not nearly so prominent in some other late ancient Platonists like Plotinus. Here we come to a crucial question, or even the crucial question, about Psalos' philosophy. What was his attitude towards non-Christian Hellenic culture generally, and towards the pagan elements of ancient philosophy in particular? It is not easy to give an answer, in part because it is hard to know which parts of Psalos' vast corpus of writings record his considered personal views. Sometimes, as when he responds to a request for a philosophical treatment of the soul, he quite openly says that he is simply going to collect the views of other authors. Even in this sort of case, though, his choice of material may seem to imply approval. Indeed, it has been said that Psalos quotes what he agrees with and tends to leave under silence statements with which he disagrees. Others think that a philosophical compilation like De Omnifaria Doctrina is unreliable as a guide to his true convictions and thus point us towards his theological writings. The most radical view has been put forth by Anthony Caldellis, who wrote a study of the Chronographia arguing that Psalos cloaked his true and essentially anti-Christian sentiments in all his writings, betraying them only with hints and indirect illusions. But this interpretation is difficult to square with Psalos' writings on theology, and Caldellis is often forced to resort to the expedient of insisting that Psalos means the exact opposite of what he says. In fact, it seems clear that Psalos was both a sincere Christian theologian and a devotee of classical learning who was fascinated by pagan philosophy. His solution to this tension was to present Hellenic materials in a positive light, while also distancing himself from them. We see this in a letter he wrote to his colleague John Tsiphelinos, who was given a chair of rhetoric the same year that Psalos was honored as Consul of the Philosophers. Psalos would later write a funeral oration for him. In the letter, Psalos takes umbrage at being called a follower of Plato. On the one hand, Psalos is glad to style himself as a Platonic philosopher, but he rejects the implication that he is thereby departing from orthodox religious belief. Allegory can be a useful tool for finding the truth in Hellenic sources, and Psalos takes this approach to the Iliad and the Odyssey, just as the Neoplatonists had done before him. When Homer speaks of Zeus and the other gods, we should take this to refer to the one God of Christianity surrounded by the angels, while Troy's seizing of the beautiful Helen symbolizes foolish attachment to the things of this world. Psalos says that it would obviously be madness to expect anyone to abandon Christianity in favor of pagan wisdom, yet the Christian should nonetheless take cognizance of Hellenic thinkers, and if they somehow stand a chance of helping you towards the truth, then make use of them. Confirmation of this can be found in Psalos' commentary on the Chaldean Oracles. Of unknown authorship, this late ancient body of writings was seen by Neoplatonists as a work of divine inspiration. Its ostentatious paganism could hardly be denied, and Psalos makes no effort to do so in his commentary, which draws on a lost commentary to the work by Proclus. Instead, Psalos presents the pagan teachings one by one and remarks on the compatibility of each with the Christian truth. He is not afraid to label certain ideas in the oracles and in Proclus himself as ridiculous, as for example the originally Platonic notion that the whole universe has a single soul. He is also forthright in his rejection of astrology and beliefs in the efficacy of magical items like amulets, though he is clearly interested in the occult aspects of pagan culture and writes a work about demons that will be read avidly by the Renaissance Latin philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Conversely, Psalos is not afraid to trumpet agreement between Christianity and paganism when he can find it. Elsewhere, he remarks that Plato was not far off the truth and, in an alien guise, mystically discourses on our theology. In a discussion of the possibility of receiving a revelation from God, he points out that pagans had similar ideas, writing, That last phrase, intellect from the outside, is a favorite philosophical borrowing of Psalos. He takes it from Aristotle's zoological works, where it is remarked that the intellect comes into the animal from the outside and that it alone is divine, because intellectual reasoning involves no physical process. For Psalos, this is an anticipation of the Christian idea that God, and in particular the Holy Spirit, can bestow knowledge on humans. This sort of help is needed because God is in himself inaccessible to the human mind. He appears to us only through his workings in the world and most perfectly in the so-called gifts of the Spirit. Around the time Psalos was writing, monastic writers like Simeon the New Theologian and his student Nikita Stetatos were urging that extreme asceticism was the best way to receive such gifts. The path to God lay through wailing, gnashing of teeth, mortification of the flesh, and other things that don't sound like much fun. As for Psalos, he actually owned some monasteries, yet he was little impressed by many of the supposedly holy men of his day, seeing them as hypocrites. He was also unsparing in his criticism of emperors who lavished money on the Church, seeing this too as hypocritical. True piety lies within and is not demonstrated by spending projects. And as events at court would later force him to discover, the monastic life was not for Psalos. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, I am a human being, a soul bound to a body. Therefore I take pleasure in both ideas and sensations. If someone places his soul above the body, he is both happy and blessed, but I would be content, even if I lived half for the body. And in another letter to a judge, I am partly divine while living in a body. So I do not like to be completely earthbound, nor am I convinced by those who compel us to soar beyond nature. He then adds that his favorite proverb is, Avoid extremes. His attitude towards Christian asceticism, then, is not unlike his attitude towards pagan philosophy, admiring but also taking critical distance. To put the point in the terms of ancient ethics, Psalos's more rigorous contemporaries urged their fellow Christians to achieve the state of apateia, that is, freedom from all bodily passion and desire. Psalos was content with the more modest goal of metriopateia, meaning the moderation of the passions. This brings us full circle to the question of what it means for a philosopher to be involved in political life. For Psalos, political virtue lies in the middle between a bodily life devoted to pleasure and a divine life that separates the soul from the body as much as possible and consists in pure contemplation. Such contemplation can never reach true fulfillment in this life, since, as just mentioned, God is ungraspable. This teaching is one that Psalos could find in both the Greek Fathers and in Neoplatonists like Proclus, who put the first principle beyond the world of intellect. Psalos thus imagines a supra-rational state in which the mind drinks from the river in silence as he puts it, inspired by the tale of Christ's suffering. Despite such enthusiastic, even mystical remarks, in his own life Psalos was content with mere political virtue. His approach to ethics was a realistic one, committed to virtue and aspiring to divinity, yet in the end not demanding too much. This is well illustrated by his attitude towards the monk Elias, who features in a number of Psalos' letters. Psalos expected this man to be a paragon of self-restraint, and was taken aback when Elias turned out to be a fun-loving chap with a good line in amusing anecdotes about brothels. Psalos cannot help enjoying his company, and after Elias' death, he expresses the hope that this entertainingly naughty monk may find a place in the afterlife between heaven and hell. Psalos applies a similarly forgiving standard to the rulers of his day. Thus, Basil II, the earliest emperor covered in the Chronographia, is revealed as an admirable character even though he was corrupted by exposure to the pressures of political life, and Constantine Monomachus is praised for his personality even though he wasn't a very successful emperor. In general, Psalos seems to think it is unreasonable to expect an emperor to be both exemplary in virtue and effective in political rule. So far, we have only scratched the surface of Psalos' varied and fascinating output, but that's okay, because he's going to be with us for several more episodes to come. We'll be moving beyond narrowly philosophical literature – all those commentaries on Aristotle and allusions to Proclus – but Psalos will continue to play a significant role. In this episode, the status of pagan philosophy has been an important theme, and that will certainly be the case when we look at Psalos' student John Italos and his condemnation for excessive attachment to Hellenic thought. Furthermore, I'll be looking at Psalos alongside some other Byzantine historians, who are of some interest to the historian of philosophy because of their methodology and often implicit political ideas. As I've mentioned, Psalos was also a rhetorician, so he will figure in an upcoming episode where we discuss rhetoric and Byzantine aesthetics. And he will also be important in an installment devoted to women in Byzantium because of the encomium he wrote for his mother. But before getting any further into this miniseries of episodes – a season of Psalos, if you will – we'll be talking to one of the world's leading experts on his thought. Join me next time for a man who might fairly be honored with the title Consul of Consul of the Philosophers, Dominic O'Mara, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.