Everything about Plethon

Gemistos Plethon was a 15th century philosopher in the Platonic tradition. He lived in the Byzantine-controlled town of Mistra in southern Greece, but his most important activities took place in Italy, where he inspired the budding Renaissance humanists to study Plato rather than Aristotle. Both Cosimo de Medici and (indirectly) Marsilio Ficino felt indebted to Plethon. Yet, this éminence grise of the Renaissance is surprisingly unknown. I presume C.H. Woodhouse wanted to fill the gap with his monograph "Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes".

I'm not sure if he succeeds. Woodhouse does provide the reader with a full-length translation of "De Diferentiis", the most important of Plethon's works, and summarizes his other philosophical works. However, he says next to nothing about the social and intellectual background. I understand that this wasn't the author's intention, but it does make the book a hard read for the uninitiated. Page up and page down, Woodhouse discusses which obscure Italian scribe met Plethon in what God-forsaken Italian town, and when. His sources are impeccable manuscript collections from the 15th century. I was especially impressed by Woodhouse's references to "Laonici Chalcocandylae Historiarum Demonstrationes", published in two volumes in Budapest 1922-27.

Not!

OK, seriously. "Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes" is a super-scholarly work, and much as I admire the author's learning (I really do!), it did get tedious to read after a while.

But yes, Gemistos Plethon must have been a fascinating (and bizarre) character. He was around 80 years old when visiting Italy in conjunction with the church council at Ferrara-Florence, and yet it was this visit which became the turning point in his life. Outwardly, Plethon was an Orthodox Christian, but several of his pupils converted to Catholicism, including Bessarion, who became a cardinal. Isidore of Kiev may have been another student of Plethon, but this is unclear. In reality, Plethon was a secret apostate. His esoteric message was unabashedly pagan, but known only to a narrow circle during his lifetime. To Plethon, the real religion was the Neo-Platonism of Julian the Apostate and Proclus. Christianity and Islam were both irrelevant and doomed to disappear. Plethon considered the polytheist pantheon of the Olympus as completely symbolic, but he nevertheless decided to construct a new version of Greek polytheism to serve as the public religion of a future ideal society. Since heresy and apostasy were capital crimes in the Byzantine Empire, Plethon choose to divulge his paganism only to a select few. Indeed, even his more practical proposals for turning Byzantium into a kind of modernized Sparta were turned down by the Emperors (who nevertheless considered him a trusted friend and advisor).

Not everyone was fooled by Plethon's pretenses. The future Patriarch of Constantinople, Gennadios, suspected Plethon of rank heresy already before the old man's death at the age of 90+, and got his worse fears confirmed when a copy of the secret "Book of Laws" fell into his hands shortly afterwards.

"The Book of Laws" was Plethon's magnum opus, loosely modelled on Plato's "Laws". The work was explicitly polytheist, using the old Greek names Zeus, Poseidon and Hera for its main deities. The shocked Patriarch burnt it, and only a few of the treatises have survived. The work is bizarre and misogynistic: adulterous women should be forced into prostitution (which should therefore be legal), homosexuals and their "victims" should be executed by burning, and so apparently should Christians. In fact, Plethon seems to have been obsessed with burning people to death. His mysterious and elusive Jewish teacher, Elissaeus, may have been burned at Constantinople for unknown offences (Elissaeus might also have been a covert pagan). Payback time? The rest of the surviving work contains everything from philosophical musings to pagan hymns.

To Woodhouse, Plethon was not just "the last of the Hellenes" but also "the first of the modern Greeks", since he was a kind of Greek nationalist, pointing forward to a more secular, national identity for the people of Byzantium. But here, the context once again eludes the reader, and we are quickly thrown back to all those Italians who may or may not have attented Plethon's lectures in Venice or what not...

Since "Gemistos Plethon" is a well-researched scholarly monograph, I'll give it four stars out of five, but don't tell me I didn't warn you...