Georgios Gemistos Plethon (; /1360 – 1452/1454), commonly known as Gemistos Plethon, was a Greek scholar and one of the most renowned philosophers of the Late Byzantine era. He was a chief pioneer of the revival of Greek scholarship in Western Europe. As revealed in his last literary work, the Nomoi or Book of Laws, which he circulated only among close friends, he rejected Christianity in favour of a return to the worship of the classical Hellenic gods, mixed with ancient wisdom based on Zoroaster and the Magi.

In 1438–1439, he reintroduced Plato's ideas to Western Europe during the Council of Florence in a failed attempt to reconcile the East–West Schism. Plethon also formulated his political vision in several speeches throughout his life. The boast in one of the speeches that "We are Hellenes by race and culture" and his proposal of a reborn Byzantine Empire following a utopian Hellenic system of government centered in Mystras, have generated discussion about Byzantine and modern Greek identity. In this regard, Plethon has been labelled both "the last Hellene" and "the first modern Greek".

Biography

Early life and career

Georgios Gemistos Plethon was born in Constantinople circa 1355/1360. Raised in a family of well-educated Orthodox Christians, he studied in Constantinople and Adrianople, before returning to Constantinople and establishing himself as a teacher of philosophy. Adrianople, the Ottoman capital following its capture by the Ottoman Sultan Murad I in 1365, was a centre of learning modelled by Murad on the caliphates of Cairo and Baghdad. Some time before 1410, Emperor Manuel II Paleologos sent him to Mystra in the Despotate of Morea in the southern Peloponnese, which remained his home for the rest of his life. In Constantinople, he had been a senator, and he continued to fulfil various public functions, such as being a judge, and was regularly consulted by rulers of Morea. Despite suspicions of heresy from the Church, he was held in high Imperial favour.

Council of Florence

In 1428 Plethon was consulted by Emperor John VIII on the issue of unifying the Greek and Latin churches, and advised that both delegations should have equal voting power.

Plethon and the Renaissance

At the invitation of some Florentine humanists he set up a temporary school to lecture on the difference between Plato and Aristotle. Few of Plato's writings were studied in the Latin West at that time, and he essentially reintroduced much of Plato to the Western world, shaking the domination which Aristotle had come to exercise over Western European thought in the high and later Middle Ages.

Marsilio Ficino's introduction to the translation of Plotinus has traditionally been interpreted to the effect that Cosimo de' Medici attended Pletho's lectures and was inspired to found the Accademia Platonica in Florence, where Italian students of Plethon continued to teach after the conclusion of the council. Nevertheless, Plethon came to be considered one of the most important influences on the Italian Renaissance. Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine humanist and the first director of the Accademia Platonica, paid Plethon the ultimate honour, calling him 'the second Plato', while Cardinal Bessarion speculated as to whether Plato's soul occupied his body. Plethon may also have been the source for Ficino's Orphic system of natural magic. In his 1415 and 1418 pamphlets he urged Manuel II and his son Theodore Palaiologos to turn the peninsula into a cultural island with a new constitution of strongly centralised monarchy advised by a small body of middle-class educated men. The army must be composed only of professional native Greek soldiers, who would be supported by the taxpayers, or "Helots" who would be exempt from military service. Land was to be publicly owned, and a third of all produce given to the state fund; incentives would be given for cultivating virgin land. Trade would be regulated and the use of coinage limited, barter instead being encouraged; locally available products would be supported over imports. Mutilation as a punishment would be abolished, and chain gangs introduced. Homosexuals and sexual deviants would be burnt at the stake. The social and political ideas in these pamphlets were largely derived from Plato's Republic. Plethon touched little on religion, although he expressed disdain for monks, who "render no service to the common good". He vaguely prescribed three religious principles: belief in a supreme being; that this being has concern for mankind; and that it is uninfluenced by gifts or flattery. Manuel and Theodore did not act on any of these reforms.

After his death, Plethon's Nómōn syngraphḗ (Νόμων συγγραφή) or Nómoi (Νόμοι, "Book of Laws") was discovered. It came into the possession of Princess Theodora, wife of Demetrios Palaiologos, despot of Morea. Theodora sent the manuscript to Scholarius, now Gennadius II, Patriarch of Constantinople, asking for his advice on what to do with it; he returned it, advising her to destroy it. Morea was under invasion from Sultan Mehmet II, and Theodora escaped with Demetrios to Constantinople where she gave the manuscript back to Gennadius, reluctant to destroy the only copy of such a distinguished scholar's work herself. Gennadius burned it in 1460; however, in a letter to the Exarch Joseph (which still survives) he details the book, providing chapter headings and brief summaries of the contents. He also proposed more practical, immediate measures, such as rebuilding the Hexamilion, the ancient defensive wall across the Isthmus of Corinth, which had been breached by the Ottomans in 1423.

The political and social elements of his theories covered the creation of communities, government (he promoted benevolent monarchy as the most stable form), land ownership (land should be shared, rather than individually owned), social organisation, families, and divisions of sex and class. He believed that labourers should keep a third of their produce, and that soldiers should be professional. He held that love should be private not because it is shameful, but because it is sacred. Forster had also written an essay about Plethon, to be found in his book Abinger Harvest.

Ezra Pound included Plethon in his poem The Cantos. References to Plethon and Sigismondo Malatesta can be found in Canto 8. Plethon is also mentioned in Cantos 23 and 26. Pound was fascinated by the effect that Plethon's conversation may have had on Cosimo de Medici and his decision to acquire Greek manuscripts of Plato and Neoplatonic philosophers. By having manuscripts brought from Greece and becoming the patron of "the young boy, Ficino," Cosimo facilitated the preservation and transmission of the Greek cultural patrimony into the modern world after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Plethon thus played a key but hidden role in the Italian Renaissance.

Plethon and his school are depicted in the 2008 novel The Perfect Remembrance of Death () by Serbian writer Radoslav Petković, whose main character survives the fall of Constantinople and remembers his early days in Mystra as Plethon's pupil.

See also

  • Greek scholars in the Renaissance
  • Christian heresy
  • Hellenistic religion
  • Polytheistic reconstructionism
  • Renaissance humanism
  • Renaissance magic

References

Sources

  • Benakis, A. G. and Baloglou, Ch. P., Proceedings of the International Congress of Plethon and His Time, Mystras, 26–29 June 2002, Athens-Mystras, 2003
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  • Harris, Jonathan, 'The influence of Plethon's idea of fate on the historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles', in: Proceedings of the International Congress on Plethon and his Time, Mystras, 26–29 June 2002, ed. L.G. Benakis and Ch.P. Baloglou (Athens: Society for Peloponnesian and Byzantine Studies, 2004), pp. 211–17
  • Keller, A., 'Two Byzantine scholars and their reception in Italy', in: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (1957), 363–70
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  • Michalopoulos, Dimitris, "George Gemistos Pletho and his Legacy" in Intelectualii Politicii si Politica Intelectuallilor, Editura Cetatea de Scaun, 2016, p. 448-459 ()
  • Masai, François, Pléthon et le platonisme de Mistra (Paris, 1956)
  • Monfasani, John, 'Platonic paganism in the fifteenth century', in: John Monfasani, Byzantine Scholars in Renaissance Italy: Cardinal Bessarion and Other Émigrés, (Aldershot, 1995).
  • Runciman, Steven, The Last Byzantine Renaissance (Cambridge, 1970)
  • Setton, Kenneth M. 'The Byzantine background to the Italian Renaissance', in: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 100 (1956), 1–76.
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  • Tambrun-Krasker, Brigitte, Georges Gémiste Pléthon, Traité des vertus. Édition critique avec introduction, traduction et commentaire, Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi, Philosophi Byzantini 3, Athens-The Academy of Athens, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1987.
  • Tambrun-Krasker, Brigitte, Magika logia tôn apo Zoroastrou magôn, Georgiou Gemistou Plêthônos Exêgêsis eis ta auta logia. Oracles chaldaïques. Recension de Georges Gémiste Pléthon. Edition critique avec introduction, traduction et commentaire par Brigitte Tambrun-Krasker. La recension arabe des Magika logia par Michel Tardieu, Corpus Philosophorum Medii Aevi, Philosophi Byzantini 7, Athens-The Academy of Athens, Paris, Librairie J. Vrin, Bruxelles, éditions Ousia, 1995, LXXX+187 p.
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  • Vassileiou, Fotis & Saribalidou, Barbara, Short Biographical Lexicon of Byzantine Academics Immigrants in Western Europe, 2007.
  • Viglas, Katelis, 'Alexandre Joseph Hidulphe Vincent on George Gemistos Plethon', Anistoriton Journal, Vol. 13, No 1, 2012–2013, 1–12
  • Vojtech Hladky, The Philosophy of Gemistos Plethon. Platonism in Late Byzantium, between Hellenism and Orthodoxy, Ashgate, Farnham-Burlington, 2014
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  • Pléthon (1858), Traité des lois (Book of Laws) at archive.org
  • Plethon at the New Acropolis library
  • "George Gemistos Plethon on God: Heterodoxy in Defense of Orthodoxy"
  • Pléthon et Cosme de Médicis
  • Pléthon : le retour de Platon, Pythagore et Zoroastre
  • "Secret Texts of Hellenic Polytheism" by John Opsopaus, PhD