 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 University of London. In the popular imagination, the Middle Ages were a time of unremitting repression. The threat of persecution and book burnings ensured that intellectuals would stay well within the bounds of accepted orthodoxy, which is why medieval philosophers were rather uncreative and tradition-bound in comparison to the innovative thinkers of the Enlightenment. Like most cliches, this one is basically wrong, though it contains a grain of truth. It is least applicable to the Islamic world, where political persecution of philosophy was almost unheard of, in part because there was no obvious institutional framework for enforcing religious orthodoxy. Things were rather different in the Latin West, where we do see reprimand or imprisonment of philosophers including Peter Avelard and Roger Bacon. Worse was the fate of Marguerite Porret, who not only saw her writings destroyed, but was ultimately executed for heresy. But, for the most part, philosophers were not punished for heresy for the excellent reason that they were not heretics. Another popular conception has it that any philosopher worthy of the name should challenge the beliefs of their society, but in fact, the vast majority of philosophers in the Middle Ages, and still today, argue in support of widely held beliefs, seeking to clarify and explore the consequences of commonly accepted doctrines rather than trying to undermine them. All this applies to Byzantium too. As we've seen, there was plenty of creative and sophisticated philosophical reflection that stayed well within the bounds of religious acceptability, which is exactly what we should expect. Devout Christian cultures produce philosophers who are devout Christians. This is so true that the most notorious exception to the rule, the anathematized John Italos, probably wasn't a true exception after all. As he himself protested, his devotion to pagan philosophy did not really lead him to adopt genuinely unorthodox teachings, which is why his accusers had to defame him by ascribing to him a variety of mutually incompatible doctrines that he didn't in fact hold. But now, as we reach the end of our examination of Byzantine philosophy, we have finally arrived at a figure who can plausibly be ascribed as unorthodox in every sense of that word. His name was George Gemistos, and he called himself Platon. The name is probably a pun, Gemistos and Platon mean roughly the same thing, abundant or full, but it was also a tribute to the similarly named philosopher whom Platon most admired, Plato, in Greek platon. Platon loved Plato so much that he wrote an attack on Aristotle for his departures from Platonic and then went even further by embracing full-blown paganism. Maybe. Still today, a dominant interpretation of Platon sees him as a convinced pagan. This goes back to the immediate reception of his writings and especially to his great rival Gennadios Scholarios. These two men lived at the twilight of Byzantium. Platon died either 1452, just before the fall of Constantinople or more likely in 1454, one year afterwards. Scholarios lived for some time thereafter and even served as patriarch under Ottoman rule, an office whose authority he used to have one of Platon's books banned and burnt in 1460, well after Platon's death. The work in question, the Book of Laws, nonetheless partially survives. By one calculation we still have almost half of it, in part thanks to excerpts preserved by Scholarios himself when he was explaining why he was forced to take this draconian measure. On the basis of this material, we can see that Platon presented a lengthy and complex metaphysical doctrine along broadly neoplatonic lines and full of references to pagan gods, the highest god he called Zeus, with lower divinities named Poseidon, Hera, and so on. That sound you hear is Nicholas of Metone turning over in his grave. He would have seen Platon as the predictable and lamentable outcome of the revival of interest in pagan Neoplatonism back in the 11th and 12th centuries, and especially the pernicious influence of Proclus. Indeed, Scholarios charged that Platon took many of his ideas from Proclus. But Platon himself claimed to find inspiration in a long line of sages going back to Zoroaster, the Indian Brahmins, the Magi, and Greek thinkers ranging from Parmenides and Plato to late ancient philosophers like Plutarch, Plotinus, Porphyry, and just for the sake of variety one whose name didn't begin with a P, Iamblichus. So, in his laws, which by the way is tellingly named after Plato's work of the same name, Platon presented himself as resurrecting a set of ancient doctrines. Were these ideas really intended to replace Christianity? The most explicit evidence for that notion actually doesn't come from Scholarios, but from another Greek scholar, George of Trebizond. He met Platon at the Council of Ferrara in Florence, which as we saw last time, attempted to forge a union between the churches of West and East. As you'll know if you've ever attended a philosophy conference, all the interesting stuff happens during the coffee breaks. Similarly here, Platon and George fell to talking during a lull in the proceedings. Supposedly, Platon predicted that before long, a single religion would unite Latin Europe, the Greek East, and indeed the whole world. It would be neither Christianity nor Islam, but a faith that does not differ from paganism. Pretty shocking stuff, especially given the setting. It would be like attending a Star Wars convention and mentioning your love of Star Trek. But there is some room for skepticism here, since George of Trebizond was perhaps the only man even more polemically opposed to Platon than Scholarius was. In addition we must ask, what was Platon doing at a top-level summit of Christian theologians if he was actually a convinced pagan? The answer is, in part, that Platon was getting to know local scholars, and in so doing, single-handedly inspiring the Italian Renaissance. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but Platon can in fact be credited with helping to inspire a resurgence of interest in Greek philosophy. Among others, he met and taught Leonardo Bruni and Cosimo de' Medici. No less a witness than Marsilio Ficino names the latter encounter as a key moment in the history of Renaissance Platonism. According to Ficino, it was Platon who inspired de' Medici to sponsor a so-called Platonic Academy in Florence. More on that in a later episode. But Platon was not just using this summit as an opportunity for intellectual tourism. Though some modern-day scholars assume that he couldn't have cared less about the differences between Latin and Greek theology, he is said to have remarked that the theological debate was a matter of life and death, and he wrote on the subject as well. More generally, the writings that he made public in his lifetime give no explicit signs of sympathy for paganism. Despite its prodigious length, the Laws was apparently intended only for a more intimate readership, or even private use. We might be tempted to compare this to the way that in early modern Europe, especially daring treatises like David Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion were published only posthumously. If Platon did have an intimate circle of readers in mind, who would they have been? A long-standing hypothesis is that he was at the centre of a group of similarly-minded thinkers in the Peloponnesian city of Mistra, located near ancient Sparta. Platon moved there in 1409. In his time, Mistra was an almost independent city ruled by so-called despots, I say almost independent, because the rulers were relatives of the imperial family, the Pelaeologoi. Platon had cordial relations with them. Setting himself as Mistra know-it-all, he wrote missives to the rulers of the city, offering advice on political affairs, and even declared himself willing to help implement the measures he was proposing. Platon would no doubt appreciate it if you noticed the parallel to Plato arriving in Syracuse and attempting to advise the rulers there. His specific proposals also echo those made by Plato in The Republic and The Laws. Platon envisions an ideal society with three classes, so-called helots, who labour in agriculture and animal husbandry, the middle merchant class, and at the top, the rulers. Like so many other Byzantine political theorists, he praised monarchy as the most perfect political system. Just as a boat needs a captain and an army a general, the state needs a single figure at its head. At the back of Platon's mind here may have been the notorious rebellion that had occurred in Thessalonica in the previous century, when the so-called zealots overthrew the local imperial representative and achieved autonomous popular rule. In Platon's ideal scenario, Mistra would represent a different kind of city-state, run from the top down by a wise despot who listens to a philosopher-advisor, a role Platon was graciously willing to play. The military posture of the state was to be strengthened by abolishing the use of mercenaries, and instead having a dedicated soldier-citizenry who should be supported by taxes raised from the labouring class. Again, one may think of Plato here and the class of warrior-guardians from his Republic, though Platon probably also took inspiration from reports about ancient Sparta. Some readers have also detected in Platon's proposals a remarkable endorsement of Greek nationalism, something that had played no real role in the ideology of the multi-ethnic Byzantine Empire. Emphasizing that the Peloponnese had been governed by Hellenes since antiquity, Platon believed that the people of Mistra could find solidarity by seeing themselves as representative of a Greek genos, or race. Equally remarkable, are Platon's recommendations concerning land redistribution. In a slap at the way aristocratic magnates had gathered property to themselves across the empire, he insisted that land should be held in accordance with use. If you farm it, you own it. Thanks to such proposals, Platon has been hailed as anticipating modern utopian ideals, and it would fit well with this that his political theory is relatively secular. Christian ideology is strikingly absent, and his religious prescriptions go more along the lines of recommending a rather generic and rational theism. The ruler is to ensure that people believe in one all-ruling God who exercises providence over all things. Here we do see a link to the teachings of Platon's openly pagan Book of Laws. In the one section of this work that did circulate publicly, Platon again discussed the providence exercised by this god. We've seen many times how belief in God's oversight of the world could threaten to tip over into determinism, the view that all things that occur do so necessarily. Platon doesn't just tip over into determinism, he leaps enthusiastically. He assumes that nothing can occur without a cause, and that true causes guarantee their effects. After all, a cause that didn't guarantee its effect would still leave something to be explained, namely why the effect arises from the cause when it might not have done so, with the result that we would need to seek a further cause. Ultimately, all causes go back to the highest god Zeus, who stands at the top of every explanatory chain. For Platon, as for the ancient Stoics, who were clearly an influence on him here, human freedom does not consist in uncaused or indeterministic action, but in aligning one's will with the indomitable will of God. This argument in favor of inevitable fate resonates with a discussion found in Platon's other best known work entitled On Aristotle's Departures from Plato. It frequently charges Aristotle with self-contradiction, and this issue of fate is one such example. Aristotle understood that causes should necessarily give rise to their effects, but he was unwilling to accept the deterministic consequences of this fact. Still, as the title of the work suggests, the main goal of this treatise is to itemize points where Aristotle failed to adhere to his master's doctrines. Platon is particularly vexed by Aristotle's rejection of Plato's theory of forms, which are unconvincing and make it impossible to explain God's production of the world. As we know from his book of laws, Platon believes that the highest god gives rise to other gods that transcend the physical universe. These are pure intellects and can be identified with the world of Platonic forms. They in turn produce the heavenly realm, with the stars and planets also being understood as divine. All of these things, the gods and the heavens, are eternal. It's only in the world down here below the heavens that we find things that are subject to generation and destruction. The references to multiple gods and the pervasive necessity of Platon's system hardly sound compatible with Christianity as any medieval Byzantine would have understood it. Yet Platon complains that it is Aristotle, not Plato, who is unacceptable from a Christian point of view. Plato shows how God is genuinely a creator of the universe, whereas Aristotle is content to make his divine principle a cause of nothing more than heavenly motion. Aristotle's admirers were not about to concede this point though. In a much lengthier response to Platon's treatise, Scolarius rose to Aristotle's defense, devoting particular attention to the question of whether Aristotle's god can be understood as a creator, like the god of the Abrahamic religions. Scolarius affirmed that this is indeed the right way to understand Aristotle because in causing motion, the Aristotelian god becomes a genuine maker of the cosmos. By contrast, Plato depicted God as a mere craftsman who fashions the universe from pre-existing matter. To my mind, this reading of Aristotle is about as convincing as a French Elvis impersonator, yet it's an interpretation with a surprisingly good pedigree. One of the last important pagan readers of Aristotle, Ammonius, who was the head of the Neoplatonist school at Alexandria, also thought the Aristotelian god must cause the existence of the heavens if it causes them to move. But Platon is having none of it. He thinks that if there is truly a source of being for things, then we have to accept an account like Plato's theory of forms, which postulates a paradigm of being participated by all other things. Platon therefore criticizes Aristotle for his famous claim that being is said in many ways. No, argues Platon, being is a unified, unifical concept because all created being is rooted in the divine, which is nothing other than being itself. With this move, Platon moves decisively away from the negative theology that has characterized so much of Byzantine thought. The contrast is especially strong with contemporary followers of Gregory Palamas, who taught that God is in himself unknowable, never grasped in his essence, but only in his activities or energies. Platon is having none of this either. Like other opponents of hesychasm, he thinks it is absurd to distinguish God into two aspects, essence and activity. This, by the way, is one thing all interpreters of Platon can agree about. He really didn't like the hesychasts. In his political writings he makes this clear with withering remarks about the pointless wastefulness of monastic institutions. As a result, Platon occupies a rather anomalous place in late Byzantine philosophy. This period is often framed as a clash between men like Scolarios and the Cudones brothers, Aristotelians who were enamored of Latin scholasticism, and the hesychast Palomite faction whose views would ultimately prevail in the East. Actually, we already know that this is an oversimplification. We saw in the last episode that some of the Palomites also drew on the Latin scholastics, especially Thomas Aquinas. But Platon's position should give us further pause, since he was deeply unimpressed by both the scholastics in the West and the hesychasts in the East. In fact, it was the reception of Latin scholasticism in Greek that seems to have triggered Platon's attack on Aristotle. He explains the Westerners' excessive admiration for Aristotle by saying that they are following the lead of Iverroes, the Muslim commentator who was so avidly used by scholastics as a guide to understanding Aristotle's works. Scolarios, by contrast, was a translator and avid reader of Aquinas, so in leaping to the defense of Aristotle, he was also speaking up on behalf of the Latins, and also of authors who wrote in Arabic like Avicenna and Iverroes, whom Scolarios seems to have known primarily through Aquinas. He was much less impressed by the Italian humanists, with whom Platon consorted, remarking in his defense of Aristotle that they know as much about philosophy as Platon knows about dancing. Above all, Scolarios was convinced that Aristotle is, for the most part, compatible with Christianity, with his occasional lapses to be forgiven in light of his lack of access to revelation. For this reason, he took Platon's criticism of Aristotle to be further evidence of pagan leanings. Since Aristotle was in fact easy to harmonize with Christian teaching, Platon's denunciation of Aristotle could only be taken as an implicit rejection of the faith. Scolarios' accusations came back with an explanation of how Platon was led astray. It was supposedly through an encounter with a Jewish philosopher named Eliseos, and for good measure the malign influence of demons, that Platon was exposed to the teachings of Zoroaster and inducted into secret pagan doctrines. Scolarios adds that Platon tried to conceal his heretical beliefs, though you have to say that if this is true, Platon wasn't very good at keeping secrets. Not only did he write the Book of Laws with its references to the Hellenic pantheon of gods, but he also wrote a commentary on that classic text of pagan religion, the Chaldean Oracles, drawing on the earlier commentary by Michael Psellos. As with Psellos, this commentatorial activity could be taken more innocently. It may have been the mere expression of a fascination with ancient Platonist literature, which would also explain why Platon did extensive editorial work on Plato's dialogues. It is still debated whether Platon should be understood in this second way as a particularly adventurous exponent of Byzantine humanism who nonetheless retained his Christian belief, or instead as a secret pagan in line with the accusations made by Scolarios and George of Trebizond. Two recent books on Platon make a case for these two very different options. For Nikitas Signor Soglou, he was a radical Platonist who merely posed as a Christian and who anticipated modern European philosophy with his secularist utopianism. Wojciech Hladki instead assumes that the Book of Laws was simply a kind of literary experiment, an exercise book in which the names of pagan gods were assigned to the principles of a Neoplatonic metaphysics just for the sake of practical convenience. For Hladki, Platon did not abandon Christianity, as we can see from his engagement with debates over the correct understanding of the Trinity. My own hunch lies somewhere between these two approaches, though it is perhaps closer to that of Hladki. As both he and Signor Soglou stress, Platon was a firm believer in the power of human reason. He believed that we are able to grasp all of reality, including God himself. This suggests that we do not really need a revelation, whether pagan or Christian, to give us access to truths that would otherwise have remained hidden. For many of his contemporaries, this would already be tantamount to heresy, but it need not imply a total abandonment of Christian belief. Like other medieval rationalists, such as Averroes, a comparison Platon would not have appreciated, Platon may have supposed that religions convey the same truths discovered by philosophy but in a different register. Perhaps he assumed that ancient pagan religion and Christianity were both more or less adequate representations of one and the same metaphysical system, the very system discovered in Platonist philosophy. This would explain why he blamed Aristotle for failing to envision God as a creator, as does Christianity, and also why he thought it was worth defending the Orthodox position on the Trinity. For him, to speak of Zeus fathering Poseidon and Hera, or of the Father generating the Son and the Holy Spirit, would have been alternate descriptions of the same thing. It's worth noting that Platon does not seem to have engaged in actual pagan ritual practice, and this too suggests that he embraced paganism only as a symbolic discourse, just an alternative way to express a fundamentally rational theology. It may seem that Scolarios prevailed in his clash with Platon. He outlived his opponent, occupied the powerful position of patriarch several times, and had the satisfaction of seeing Platon's book consumed in flames. But you could argue that it was Platon who, like a clown with insomnia, had the last laugh. His impact on Ficino and other Platonists of the Italian Renaissance makes him a key figure in European thought. Platon was among the first who truly grasped an important insight made possible by the humanist project that spanned from Constantinople to Florence by way of mistra. Improving knowledge of ancient literature revealed the diversity of classical philosophy. This opened the possibility of saying that pagan literature is valuable, but that some pagans are better than others. For Platon and his Renaissance heirs, it was Plato and his followers, not Aristotle and his commentators, who produced the best that philosophy has to offer. With this, we are now finally ready to go west again, and to resume our investigation of philosophy in Latin and the European vernacular languages as we tackle the Italian Renaissance. And we're going to do that very soon, but I don't want to leave the story of the Greek East here. That would be making the same kind of mistake I tried so hard to avoid when covering philosophy in the Islamic world, which is so often portrayed as having ended in the 12th century, having survived just long enough to transmit Greek philosophy to the Latin West. Just as philosophy in fact persisted in Islam for many centuries after that, there is a story to tell about philosophy in Greek that does not simply culminate and transfer of wisdom to Western Europe. To a limited extent, Byzantine thought lived on after the fall of Constantinople, and to an even greater extent, it lives on in the Greek intellectual culture of the present day. That's the story we'll be telling next time, as we wrap up our look at the thought of the Byzantine Empire by considering its immediate aftermath and modern reception. Here on, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.