Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 329 - Greeks Bearing Gifts - Byzantine Scholars in Italy.txt

 Tì è lì tàlè, óm tì è làlè, óm tì è làlè, óm tì è làlè. 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, Greeks Bearing Gifts. It speaks well of philosophy that we've managed to get so far into this history of the subject without mentioning a single fistfight. Philosophers get into arguments, but usually without coming to blows. I will confess to wondering what might happen if they did. The biographical compilation written in Antiquity by Diogenes Laertius provides rich material for the imagination here. He informs us that Plato studied wrestling, and that the very name Plato, meaning broad, may have referred to his muscular build. By contrast, Aristotle is described as having slim legs and the affected dress of a courtier. Diogenes leaves little doubt that if these two got into a fight, there would be only one outcome. To paraphrase the jock character played by Emilio Estevez in the classic 1985 teen comedy The Breakfast Club, there would be two hits, Plato hitting Aristotle, and Aristotle hitting the floor. Sadly, but if we're honest, also rather entertainingly, the peaceable record of philosophers is now going to come to an end. Two of the greatest humanists of the 15th century, Pojo Bracciolini and George Trapezuntius, had a quarrel which escalated to the point that Pojo attacked George and tried to gouge out his eyes. George retaliated with a punch and went for a knife, chasing Pojo into a hasty retreat. Later, George would complain to the pope that Pojo hired a hitman to take revenge. Not an edifying spectacle, especially from two men who devoted their lives to the edification of their contemporaries. Yet the event was entirely characteristic of the backbiting and rivalry that raged between humanist scholars. In fact, the hostility with Pojo is not even the most famous clash between George and another humanist. Better known, and more interesting, in philosophical terms, was the conflict between George Trapezuntius and Bessarion. This despite the fact that George and Bessarion had a good deal in common. Both of them hailed from the Greek East. Ironically, Bessarion was actually from Trebizond, whereas George was from Crete. He's often called George of Trebizond, but the surname Trapezuntius just indicates that his grandfather was from there. Both moved to Italy and converted to Catholicism, in Bessarion's case after he was persuaded of the Latin's theological views at the Council of Ferrara and Florence. He was elevated to the rank of cardinal and would only narrowly miss out on being elected pope later in his career. Native Greek speakers who mastered Latin, George and Bessarion became ambassadors of Hellenic literature to the Italian scholarly world. Both supported the cause of unity between the Western and Eastern churches, with Bessarion arguing that the hopes of Christianity must lie especially with the Western Church once the East fell to the Turks. The two men even died at about the same time, Bessarion in 1472 and George in that same year, or possibly the following year. It's worth emphasizing that these two scholars came to Italy well before the fall of Constantinople, with George already arriving in 1416 and Bessarion attending the aforementioned council along with George in 1437. This was hardly atypical. Though there was indeed an influx of Greeks to the Latin West after the Ottomans took the capital, scholars had already been leaving for generations during the long decline of the Byzantine Empire. So there were a significant number of Greeks in Italy throughout the 15th century to the point that Bessarion called Venice almost another Byzantium. This helps to explain how so many Italian humanists learned Greek. George Trapezuntius taught Greek to his later sparring partner, Poggio, and had stints teaching in Venice and Florence before moving to Rome. Another important teacher of Greek was Manuel Cresoloras, who led an Eastern embassy to Venice already in 1390 and returned to Italy six years later. He wrote a grammatical textbook for Greek, modeled on medieval books of Latin grammar, and taught a generation of early Renaissance humanists. Some were inspired to travel East themselves, as did Garino Veronese. He accompanied Cresoloras on a return trip to Constantinople, then later became a teacher in his own right, working in various cities including Florence. In addition to such personal connections, the transplanted Eastern scholars had a major role to play in the translation and interpretation of Greek philosophy, science, and patristic literature. Such was their influence that one humanist remarked, after the fall of Constantinople, that in Italy many people had gone Greek as if they'd been educated in Athens. The Greek scholars imported the values of Byzantine humanism with its exaltation of good style and commitment to philological exactitude, and they transposed these values to the Latin language. Bessarion is famous as the most Greek of the Latins and most Latin of the Greeks, praise supposedly bestowed upon him by Lorenzo Valla. But in fact, George Trapezuntius was the superior Latinist. It would seem that Bessarion had to get the help of his secretary, Niccolò Perotti, to pursue his rivalry with George without being embarrassed by his inferior grasp of the language. George was proud of his accomplishments in this area. He boasted that he learned Latin so well that he could dictate to two scribes on different topics at the same time, and that he might be mistaken for a native speaker from the time of Cicero. We've seen how Byzantine scholars, as far back as Psalos, esteemed the Attic Greek of authors like Aristophanes and Plato. Similarly, George and other humanists in Italy held up Cicero's language as the standard against which Latin should be judged. In an influential work on rhetoric, George referred constantly to Cicero, whom he called the best of rhetoricians, for examples to illustrate the general rules of the art. He was disdainful of the medieval tradition of writing on rhetoric, seeing it as unsystematic and inadequate. He took his cue instead from Greek works on the subject, especially by Hermogenes, a rhetorical theorist from the 2nd century AD who wrote in Greek. George also translated the rhetoric of Aristotle, but rejected Aristotle's approach to the subject, which encouraged the orator to focus on the emotional and psychological states of the audience. Following Hermogenes, George instead laid out general rules of style for achieving certain effects. John Monfassani, the foremost modern-day scholar of the Greek humanists in Italy, has hypothesized that it was George's love of rhetoric that turned him into a critic of Plato. At first, George was apparently an admirer of Plato. He translated the dialogue Parmenides, at the best of Nicholas of Cusa, no less, and also Plato's laws. Upon translating this dialogue in 1451, he said how pleased he was to discover that the constitution of Venice seemed to echo the proposals made by Plato. But perhaps taking umbrage at the attacks on rhetoric in Platonic dialogues like the Gorgias, George turned against Plato and wrote a work called Comparison of the Philosophers Plato and Aristotle. It was round two of the fight between adherents of Plato and of Aristotle. As you'll remember, the first round pitted Plethon against Scholarius, the former chastising Aristotle for rejecting his teacher's doctrines and the latter coming to Aristotle's defense. Where Plethon struck out at Aristotle's rejection of Platonic forms and divine creation of the universe, George prefers to hit below the belt by accusing Plato of sexual depravity. He points to the erotic elements of the dialogues themselves and also to Diogenes Laertius's report that Plato took male lovers. The polemic against Plato provides George with a welcome opportunity to take a swipe at Plethon. You may recall that George was one of the more hostile witnesses called for the prosecution when we considered the question of Plethon's paganism. It was George who, rather implausibly, accused Plethon of openly revealing his pagan sympathies at the Council of Florence and Ferrara. From his point of view, this was only to be expected given Plethon's philosophical tastes. Trading on a standard bit of anti-Muslim polemic, George comments that the prophet Muhammad had been a second Plato seeking to corrupt the sexual morality of the people with Plethon coming along as a third. Alongside such accusations, George does mention more substantive philosophical failings in Plato. Having translated Plato's laws, he is well placed to criticize the Platonic political theory. In a remarkable section of his diatribe, he attacks the classist and xenophobic elements of that theory. He is appalled by provisions in the laws that prevent aliens from settling permanently in the ideal city. George reflects explicitly on his own life story here, remarking that it would be unjust to exile him from his new Italian homeland just because he hails from Crete. He praises the ancient Romans, and more surprisingly the Ottomans of his own day, for their cosmopolitanism, their willingness to integrate citizens of different ethnic groups and backgrounds into a single state. Furthermore, George rails against the way Plato calls for a strict division of the classes, something we also know from the Republic. How will the citizens ever be united in bonds of friendship if one class is permanently and significantly disadvantaged? And why would the upper class ever look on their inferiors with anything but disdain? Not a bad question even today. But most extraordinary is George's point that Plato, or his philosopher-rulers, have no business prescribing to all citizens how they should spend their lives. Who is Plato to say that a humble laborer may not aspire to gain wealth and standing in his community? George's argument may reflect the greater social mobility of Renaissance Italy, but he sometimes sounds remarkably like the modern-day philosophy student who, having grown up in a Western liberal democracy, is confronted with a totalitarian paternalism of the Republic. Consider the following lines, for example, where George writes, The gauntlet had been thrown down, and Plato was in need of a champion. Stepping into the Platonic corner to fight this rematch of the Byzantine debate, we have Cardinal Bassarion. Against the accusation that Plato and his works were sexually depraved, Bassarion retorted that if this were true, the Greek Fathers of the Church would hardly have admired Plato as they did. The fault is rather with George, who is evidently unable to get his mind out of the gutter. He fails to realize that the erotic themes in the dialogues have nothing to do with physical lust, which Bassarion calls earthly love, but concern a more exalted divine love. So if you've ever wondered why the phrase Platonic relationship refers to chaste affection despite Plato's frequent discussion of sexual relationships in the dialogues, now you know. Just as George had devoted himself to studying and translating Plato before attacking him, so Bassarion was an accomplished Aristotelian by the time he came to defend Plato. He produced a Latin version of the metaphysics, perhaps the most difficult treatise in the Aristotelian corpus if not the entirety of ancient philosophy. And as an admirer of Latin scholasticism, he was one of those Byzantine scholars who avidly read texts by Western Aristotelians like Aquinas, right from the earliest stages of his career. In another direct link to the Byzantine controversy over Plato and Aristotle, Bassarion had been educated at Mystra under none other than Plasian, to whom he referred as his father and guide. Yet he distanced himself from Plasian's anti-Aristotelianism while also rejecting George's anti-Platonism. Bassarion wasn't really spoiling for a fight, but trying to make peace. His aim was to demonstrate the agreement between the two authors and their suitability for use by Christian thinkers. A good example is his handling of a point raised by Plithon in his attack on Aristotle. Plithon had complained about a passage in the physics where Aristotle said that whereas a craftsman may deliberate in using his art, the art itself does not do so. For example, a carpenter needs to make careful plans to build a ship, but if the art of carpentry were in the wood instead of in the carpenter's mind, the wood would just turn itself into a ship, the way that natural things like trees grow to maturity on their own. Against this, Plithon asserted that nature involves a guiding intelligence no less than carpentry does, because it is an expression of higher intellectual causes. Rather than rebutting this bit of obvious Platonism, Bassarion tries to make Aristotle agree with it. He reminds his reader that Aristotle did believe in God, a prime mover ultimately responsible for all change in the universe. So Aristotle too acknowledged that there is a divine intellect providentially guiding nature. Yet he was still right to say that nature does not deliberate, because the kind of intelligence involved in providence and its natural results is different from the kind of hesitant, uncertain deliberation we humans perform when we are, say, building a ship. Another man who sought to defend Aristotle by establishing his harmony with Plato was Theodore Gaza. He too was a Greek scholar who made his way to Italy after being called to Rome from Constantinople to work for the pope as a translator. Like George Trafazuntius and Bassarion, who became his patron and close associate, Theodore Gaza distinguished himself as a translator from Greek into Latin. He produced a widely used version of Aristotle's zoological writings, which would go on to be reproduced in early modern printings. Actually, he did more than just translate. Convinced that the Greek texts at his disposal were faulty, he re-edited and even reordered them before translating them, making some organizational changes that have still been followed in modern editions of Aristotle. Alongside this bold and influential philological work, Theodore wrote on philosophical questions, though not always very convincingly. The aforementioned expert on the field, John Monfosani, has called him learned and serious, but startlingly trivial. A good test case for this judgment is a brief work on the topic of fate. Like his ally, Bassarion, Theodore wants to avoid any sense that Aristotle and Plato were in serious disagreement. Again prompted by a supposed divergence of Aristotle from Plato, mentioned by Phelan, Theodore takes up the question of free human action. In a famous section of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between the voluntary and the involuntary. He proposes that a voluntary action is one that is neither compelled nor done in ignorance. It is a sign of voluntariness that the person who performs the action does not later regret the action or its consequences. This theory makes it possible to do bad things voluntarily. Indeed, part of Aristotle's purpose is to explain when it makes sense to blame someone for their bad deeds. If they did it without compulsion and not in ignorance, and they don't regret it later, then they did it voluntarily and are thus blameworthy. But famously, Plato, or rather the character of Socrates in various Platonic dialogues, held that no one ever does bad things voluntarily. After all, isn't the fact that someone willingly does something evidence enough that they take it to be a good thing to do? By way of resolution, Theodore points out that Aristotle too says that all actions aim at some good outcome or other. So he would agree with Plato that when we act badly, we are ignorant in some sense, namely ignorant of what would really be good to do. Yet we are not ignorant in a more basic sense because we know the facts concerning what we are doing. If you get into a boxing match with your mother and break her nose, you've done something bad. But it makes a difference whether you did this because you are ignorant of the fact that it is wrong to break your own mother's nose or because you don't realize that this person you're hitting is your mother because she's wearing one of those padded helmets. Moral ignorance is no excuse, whereas ignorance of the facts might be. The clash between Bessarion and George Trapezuntius was the mother of all battles involving Greek emigre scholars in Italy, but it certainly wasn't the only one. Never mind dog-eat-dog, this was humanist-eat-humanist. In addition to the aforementioned fisticuffs between George and Poggio, there was also a spat between George and Guarino Veronese, that student of Chryso-Lores who travelled to Constantinople. Guarino was considered a fine Latin stylist by most, but not by George. In his work on rhetoric, he provocatively rewrote a speech by Guarino, showing how it could be improved by making it sound more like Cicero. As if this weren't bad enough, he added some insulting comments on Guarino's style. No one with any taste could bear to hear it. The two patched it up, at least in theory, at that same church council in Ferrara. With all the scandals erupting and being calmed down, it's amazing the participants had any time to get in the debates over the Trinity. And there were other quarrels, like a critique of George's commentatorial work on Cicero by Giorgio Merula, a student of yet another Greek scholar named George Agaropoulos. To be fair, a lot of these events seem to be traceable to George's character. An arrogant man who was well aware of his own talent, he provoked his colleagues so routinely that you have to think any ignorance involved was moral and not only concerning the facts of the case. But it was all too possible for humanists to savage one another without George's involvement. In another case, a mistake made by Bessarion was noticed by that same Agaropoulos, provoking Theodor Gazza to write a rather unconvincing treatise in Bessarion's defense. When they weren't going so far as to sharpen their swords, the humanists were sharpening their pens. The better to take jabs at one another in the status-conscious and competitive atmosphere of Renaissance Italy, when a scholar's present reputation was as precious as facility with the languages of the past. So I'm sure that Bessarion and George Trappismtius would be immensely pleased to find a podcast being devoted to them about 550 years after they died. But they might take umbrage upon learning that they are not the most famous 15th century humanists. That honor would instead go to several Italian scholars who were, you know, Italians. We'll meet them next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.