Plato, Byzantium and the Italian Renaissance

Artkarel.com, 2021

It is sometimes said that the introduction of Plato in the context of the Councils of Ferrara and Florence (1439) "triggered the explosion of the Italian Renaissance". And of the great humanist, the German Cardinal-philosopher Cusanus, it is said that he "brought to Florence Bessarion and Plethon, who were both Greek scholars of Plato and brought the entire works of Plato which had been lost in Europe for centuries". At the same time, goes the narrative, "the Medicis financed a crash program to translate the works of Plato. This excitement made the Italian Renaissance what it became". While Plato's ideas and the renewal of greek studies did play a major role in triggering the European Renaissance, the preceding affirmations, as we shall document here, require some refinement.

Soldato as well as the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

2004

The early medieval period is viewed as a linkage to the ancient Greek philosophical ideas with the western world. As this essay affirms the rise of early medieval philosophy was influenced greatly by the ancient Greek texts. Thus the works of Plato, Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists are highly mentioned in this epoch. Because of the confusion of dates that demarcates the beginning and the end of the early medieval period, this essay considers this period to have begun with Boethius and ended with John Scotus Eriugena (810-877) A.D. However, reference is made of St. Augustine not because he is an early medieval thinker but by the fact that his contributions prior to the rise of early medieval period were enormous and his influence continues to flourish even at present. Therefore, the goal of this essay is to spell out the contribution of the ancient

Oxford Handbook of Jewish Philosophy, 2022

famously characterized the history of European philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." 1 This would not be a good characterization of the history of medieval Jewish philosophy. Indeed, from Philo of Alexandria (1 st c. C. E.) until the 15 th century, we have no direct evidence of Jews reading Plato. 2 One could, perhaps, characterize medieval Jewish philosophy as a series of footnotes to Aristotle, but with the caveat that most Jewish philosophers read very little Aristotle. Indeed, at the height of Jewish Aristotelianism, from the 13 th c. through the first half of the 15 th century, only six texts of Aristotle had been translated from Arabic to Hebrew, three of which appeared only as lemmata to translations of Averroes' Long commentaries, 3 and another two had been translated from Latin into Hebrew. 4 Even if one were to read all of these works together-and it is even possible that no one actually did-one would have only a piecemeal and incomplete sense of Aristotle's philosophy. Still, many medieval Jewish philosophers had a commitment to an Aristotelian program of study. In its earliest versions, this program appears as a loosely construed order of study (logic, physics, metaphysics, ethics, and politics) and a set of central concepts (substance, accident, form, matter, actuality, telos, nature, etc.) which made their way to Jewish thinkers via Arabic translations and commentaries. Later, it consisted of detailed study of Hebrew translations of some of those commentaries, especially those of Averroes, most often without the texts of Aristotle. These ways of studying the Aristotelian works defined how medieval Jews understood philosophy and science and what subjects they saw as beyond the reach of human understanding. In what follows, we shall trace the outline of this program of study, starting from its appearance among Arabic speaking Jews, then turning to Maimonides' treatment of it, and finally to the formation of various scientific curricula in 1 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 39. For a recent explanation of how Whitehead saw his own work as a footnote to Plato, see Nathan Ogelsby, "Footnotes to Footnotes: Whitehead's Plato" (Ph.D. Dissertation, CUNY, 2018). 2 It is not likely that more than ten of Plato's works were ever translated into Arabic before the 20 th century and even these ten may have been summaries rather than translations; see, e.g., Cristina D'Ancona, "Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/arabic-islamic-greek/>. There are no direct citations from any of these works and all references to Plato are general or sufficiently distinct from Plato's text as to deny making any direct connections. European Jews could, perhaps, have read some selections of the Timaeus in Calcidius' 4 th century Latin translation, but if they did they left no record of it. Plato's works, indeed, were not translated into Hebrew until the 20 th century. It is possible, however, that medieval Jews of Byzantium could have read and studied Plato in Greek; there is as yet no evidence of this, but there is still much left to be uncovered. Note, though, that Marsilio Ficino's Latin translations of Plato were extremely influential on Jewish philosophers of renaissance Italy, marking a distinct point of departure from the Middle Ages. 3 These were, in chronological order, Samuel Ibn Tibbon's translation of the Meteorology and Zeraḥyah Ḥen's translations of the De Generatione and Corruptione and De Anima. The Posterior Analytics and Physics were translated by Qalonimos ben Qalonimos along with Averroes' Long Commentaries on those works. The Metaphysics was similarly translated by an otherwise unknown Moses and then revised by Moses of Salon. 4 These were the 13 th century translation of the De Animalibus, probably by Samuel HaLevi, and Meir Alguadez's translation of the Nicomachean Ethics made around 1400. The latter appeared as Sefer ha-middot, ed. J. M. Satanow (Berlin: 1791) in an oft reprinted edition. Another anonymous translation of part of De Anima, produced between 1160 and 1270, is also extant.

Italian Studies, 2016

Please refer to published version for the most recent bibliographic citation information. If a published version is known of, the repository item page linked to above, will contain details on accessing it.

Chapter XI. The Twelfth Century Chapter XII. The Thirteenth Century Chapter XIII. Saint Thomas Aquinas Chapter XIV. Franciscan Schoolmen Chapter XV. The Eclipse of the Papacy BOOK THREE. MODERN PHILOSOPHY Part I. From the Renaissance to Hume Chapter I. General Characteristics Chapter II. The Italian Renaissance Chapter III. Machiavelli Chapter IV. Erasmus and More Chapter V. The Reformation and CounterReformation Chapter VI. The Rise of Science Chapter VII. Francis Bacon Chapter VIII. Hobbes's Leviathan Chapter IX. Descartes Chapter X. Spinoza Chapter XI. Leibniz Chapter XII. Philosophical Liberalism Chapter XIII. Locke's Theory of Knowledge Chapter XIV. Locke's Political Philosophy Chapter XXIV. Schopenhauer Chapter XXV. Nietzsche Chapter XXVI. The Utilitarians Chapter XXVII. Karl Marx Chapter XXVIII. Bergson Chapter XXIX. William James Chapter XXX. John Dewey Chapter XXXI. The Philosophy of Logical Analysis this or that portion of my subject less adequate than it would have been if there bad been no need to remember "time 's winged chariot." This book owes its existence to Dr. Albert C. Barnes, having been originally designed and partly delivered as lectures at the Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania. As in most of my work during the last thirteen years, I have been greatly assisted, in research and in many other ways, by my wife, Patricia Russell. great period, from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, was dominated by the Catholic Church, except for a few great rebels, such as the Emperor Frederick II . This period was brought to an end by the confusions that culminated in the Reformation. The third period, from the seventeenth century to the present day, is dominated, more than either of its predecessors, by science; traditional religious beliefs remain important, but are felt to need justification, and are modified wherever science seems to make this imperative. Few of the philosophers of this period are orthodox from a Catholic standpoint, and the secular State is more important in their speculations than the Church. Social cohesion and individual liberty, like religion and science, are in a state of conflict or uneasy compromise throughout the whole period. In Greece, social cohesion was secured by loyalty to the City State; even Aristotle, though in his time Alexander was making the City State obsolete, could see no merit in any other kind of polity. The degree to which the individual's liberty was curtailed by his duty to the City varied widely. In Sparta he had as little liberty as in modern Germany or Russia; in Athens, in spite of occasional persecutions, citizens had, in the best period, a very extraordinary freedom from restrictions imposed by the State. Greek thought down to Aristotle is dominated by religious and patriotic devotion to the City; its ethical systems are adapted to the lives of citizens and have a large political element. When the Greeks became subject, first to the Macedonians, and then to the Romans, the conceptions appropriate to their days of independence were no longer applicable. This produced, on the one hand, a loss of vigour through the breach with tradition, and, on the other hand, a more individual and less social ethic. The Stoics thought of the virtuous life as a relation of the soul to God, rather than as a relation of the citizen to the State. They thus prepared the way for Christianity, which, like Stoicism, was originally unpolitical, since, during its first three centuries, its adherents were devoid of influence on government. Social cohesion, during the six and a half centuries from Alexander to Constantine, was secured, not by philosophy and not by ancient loyalties, but by force, first that of armies and then that of civil administration. Roman armies, Roman roads, Roman law, and Roman officials first created and then preserved a powerful centralized State. Nothing was attributable to Roman philosophy, since there was none. During this long period, the Greek ideas inherited from the age of freedom underwent a gradual process of transformation. Some of the old ideas, notably those which we should regard as specifically religious, gained in relative importance; others, more rationalistic, were discarded because they no longer suited the spirit of the age. In this way the later pagans trimmed the Greek tradition until it became suitable for incorporation in Christian doctrine. Christianity popularized an important opinion, already implicit in the teaching of the Stoics, but foreign to the general spirit of antiquity --I mean, the opinion that a man's duty to God is more imperative than his duty to the State. This opinion--that "we ought to obey God rather than Man," as Socrates and the Apostles said--survived the conversion of Constantine, because the early Christian emperors were Arians or inclined to Arianism. When the emperors became orthodox, it fell into abeyance. In the Byzantine Empire it remained latent, as also in the subsequent Russian Empire, which derived its Christianity from Constantinople. * But in the West, where the Catholic emperors were almost immediately replaced (except, in parts of Gaul) by heretical barbarian conquerors, the superiority of religious to political allegiance survived, and to some extent still survives. The barbarian invasion put an end, for six centuries, to the civilization of western Europe. It lingered in Ireland until the Danes destroyed it in the ninth century; before its extinction there it produced one notable figure, Scotus Erigena. In the Eastern Empire, Greek civilization, in a desiccated form, survived, as in a museum, till the fall of Constantinople in 1453, but nothing of importance to the world came out of Constantinople except an artistic tradition and Justinian's Codes of Roman law. During the period of darkness, from the end of the fifth century to the middle of the eleventh, the western Roman world underwent some very interesting changes. The conflict between duty to God and duty to the State, which Christianity had introduced, took the form of a conflict between Church and king. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Pope extended over Italy, France, and Spain, Great ____________________ * That is why the modern Russian does not think that we ought to obey dialectical materialism rather than Stalin. of pleasure in reasoning, analysing, and systematizing. Although in art the Renaissance is still orderly, in thought it prefers a large and fruitful disorder. In this respect, Montaigne is the most typical exponent of the age. In the theory of politics, as in everything except art, there was a collapse of order. The Middle Ages, though turbulent in practice, were dominated in thought by a passion for legality and by a very precise theory of political power. All power is ultimately from God; He has delegated power to the Pope in sacred things and to the Emperor in secular matters. But Pope and Emperor alike lost their importance during the fifteenth century. The Pope became merely one of the Italian princes, engaged in the incredibly complicated and unscrupulous game of Italian power politics. The new national monarchies in France, Spain, and England had, in their own territories, a power with which neither Pope nor Emperor could interfere. The national State, largely owing to gunpowder, acquired an influence over men's thoughts and feelings which it had not had before, and which progressively destroyed what remained of the Roman belief in the unity of civilization. This political disorder found expression in Machiavelli Prince. In the absence of any guiding principle, politics becomes a naked struggle for power; The Prince gives shrewd advice as to how to play this game successfully. What had happened in the great age of Greece happened again in Renaissance Italy: traditional moral restraints disappeared, because they were seen to be associated with superstition; the liberation from fetters made individuals energetic and creative, producing a rare florescence of genius; but the anarchy and treachery which inevitably resulted from the decay of morals made Italians collectively impotent, and they fell, like the Greeks, under the domination of nations less civilized than themselves but not so destitute of social cohesion. The result, however, was less disastrous than in the case of Greece, because the newly powerful nations, with the exception of Spain, showed themselves as capable of great achievement as the Italians had been. From the sixteenth century onward, the history of European thought is dominated by the Reformation. The Reformation was a complex many-sided movement, and owed its success to a variety of causes. In the main, it was a revolt of the northern nations against the renewed dominion of Rome. Religion was the force that had subdued the North, but religion in Italy had decayed: the papacy remained as an institution, and extracted a huge tribute from Germany and England, but these nations, which were still pious, could feel no reverence for the Borgias and Medicis, who professed to save souls from purgatory in return for cash which they squandered on luxury and immorality. National motives, economic motives, and moral motives all combined to strengthen the revolt against Rome. Moreover the Princes soon perceived that, if the Church in their territories became merely national, they would be able to dominate it, and would thus become much more powerful at home than they had been while sharing dominion with the Pope. For all these reasons, Luther's theological innovations were welcomed by rulers and peoples alike throughout the greater part of northern Europe. The Catholic Church was derived from three sources. Its sacred history was Jewish, its theology was Greek, its government and canon law were, at least indirectly, Roman. The Reformation rejected the Roman elements, softened the Greek elements, and greatly strengthened the Judaic elements. It thus co-operated with the nationalist forces...