Radical Platonism in Byzantium

by Siniossoglou, Niketas

• ISBN13: 9781107013032
• ISBN10: 1107013038
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-30
• Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr

Summary

Byzantium has recently attracted much attention, but principally among cultural, social and economic historians. This book shifts the focus to intellectual history, exploring the thoughts of visionary reformer Gemistos Plethon (c.1355-1452). It argues that Plethon brought to their fulfilment latent tendencies among Byzantine humanists towards a distinctive anti-Christian and pagan outlook. His magnum opus, the pagan Nomoi, was meant to provide an alternative to and escape-route from the polarity of the Orthodoxy of Gregory Palamas and Thomism. It was also a groundbreaking reaction to the bankruptcy of a pre-existing humanist agenda and to aborted attempts at the secularisation of the State, whose cause Plethon had himself championed in his two utopian Memoranda. Inspired by Plato, Plethon's secular utopianism and paganism emerge as the two sides of a single coin. On another level, the book challenges anti-essentialist scholarship that views paganism and Christianity as social and cultural constructions.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. ix
List of abbreviations	p. xiii
Introduction: Plethon and the notion of paganism	p. 1
Plato's escape from Athos	p. 1
The argument	p. 11
Structure and outline of the book	p. 38
Lost rings of the Platonist golden chain
Underground Platonism in Byzantium	p. 49
Towards a reformulation of K. N. Sathas' thesis	p. 49
Divine Plato: pagan Platonic dissonance in late antiquity	p. 54
Occult Plato: Hellenism and the first Byzantine humanism	p. 62
Secular Plato: Psellos and the art of dissimulation	p. 71
The twelfth-century Proklosrenaissance and Theodore Metochites	p. 85
The rise of the Byzantine Illuminati	p. 93
How to see god: the quest for the Thabor light	p. 93
The 'Enlightened-ones': anti-Hesychast discourse according to Palamite sources	p. 100
Plethon and the twilight of Palamism	p. 114
The last ring of the Platonist golden chain: the Platonic fraternity of Mistra	p. 119
The Plethon affair	p. 125
George of Trebizond and Scholarios against Plethon	p. 125
Juvenalios	p. 134
The Nomoi in flames	p. 138
The accusation of dissimulation	p. 141
The puzzle of the Nomoi	p. 148
The elements of pagan Platonism
Epistemic optimism	p. 163
Intellectual versus spiritual illumination	p. 163
The intellection of 'Zeus'	p. 169
Plethon's Plato	p. 190
The Byzantine civil war on illumination	p. 199
The Chaldean Oracles reloaded	p. 212
Pagan ontology	p. 223
Towards a new ontology	p. 223
The threat of 'one genus of everything, Being'	p. 226
Against the equivocity of Being	p. 230
A return to Parmenides	p. 240
That 'Zeus' is not beyond Being	p. 243
Re-sacralising the physical world	p. 250
Unearthing the pagan hereditas damnosa	p. 263
Symbolic theology: the mythologisation of Platonic ontology	p. 278
Palamite 'energies' and Plethonean 'gods'	p. 278
Paganism in the Differences: Forms as intellects, creators and originators	p. 293
The strange case of Monodia in Helenam	p. 300
Polytheism, necessity and freedom	p. 306
Fate	p. 313
Mistra versus Athos
Intellectual and spiritual Utopias	p. 327
The birth of social engineering: the Memoranda	p. 327
Three paths to salvation: Kydones, Scholarios, Plethon	p. 347
The secular turn	p. 359
Paganism and totalitarianism: the Memoranda in their relation to the Nomoi	p. 384
The path of Ulysses and the path of Abraham
Conclusion	p. 395
The origins of Plethon's pagan Platonism: the developmentalist thesis	p. 395
The essence of pagan Platonism	p. 403
Philosophical implications of the Plato-Aristotle controversy	p. 408
Political implications of the Plato-Aristotle controversy	p. 414
Epilogue: 'Spinozism before Spinoza', or the pagan roots of modernity	p. 418
Bibliography	p. 427
Index	p. 447
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