Gemistus Plethon Simulacrum

The Life

Plethon was born, probably in Constantinople, around 1355 or 1360. He spent most of his life in Mistra, in the Peloponnese, where he advised the Byzantine despots and wrote on philosophy, theology, history, and political reform. In 1438 he travelled, at the age of at least seventy-eight, to the Council of Ferrara–Florence, the ecumenical gathering that sought, unsuccessfully, to heal the schism between the Orthodox and Latin churches. During his months in Florence he lectured privately to Cosimo de' Medici and his circle on the differences between Plato and Aristotle. Cosimo, captivated, resolved to found a Platonic Academy in Florence, though the plan took another twenty years to realise. Plethon returned to Mistra and died there in 1452 or 1454, nearly a century old.

The Thought

Plethon's extant work includes *On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato* (written during his Italian visit), a number of treatises on political reform in the Peloponnese, and the remarkable *Book of Laws*, parts of which were burned after his death by the Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios on grounds of pagan heresy. The *Laws* — of which what survives indicates something genuinely startling — envisaged a restored Hellenic religion, with Zeus at its head, organised ritually and doctrinally as a systematic alternative to Christianity.

More publicly defensible was his comparative assessment of Plato and Aristotle. Against the dominant Byzantine Aristotelianism, Plethon argued that Plato was the superior philosopher on questions of theology, the soul, and the nature of reality, and that the Aristotelian orientation of recent Byzantine philosophy had obscured Plato's true depth. This was not simply a scholarly position but an agenda: Plethon wanted Hellenic philosophy revived at the heart of a reforming polity.

The Legacy

The direct effect of Plethon's neo-paganism was limited — his *Laws* were burned, and nothing resembling a Hellenic religious revival occurred. The indirect effect, through the Florentine Platonic Academy, was enormous. Cosimo de' Medici's enthusiasm for Plato, fed by Plethon's lectures, led to the establishment of the Academy at Careggi, to Ficino's commissioning as its chief philosopher and translator, and to the systematic recovery of the Platonic and Hermetic corpus in Latin Europe. The Italian Renaissance's Platonic turn, in which the whole subsequent history of Western philosophy is enmeshed, had as one of its proximate causes the visit of a very old Byzantine philosopher to Florence in 1438.