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See Wind, BESSARION'S LETTER ON PALINGENESIS

Seznec- Index

 Garin, p.58 

     It was in that atmosphere that the most serious participant at the Council, George Gemistus Pletho, the restorer of the cult of the pagan gods at Mistra, announced, whilst discussing with his Florentine friends, the imminent end of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the advent of the conversion of men to the religion of truth.  

In one of the fragments of the Peri nomon saved from destruction and from the persecution of Scholarios, one can read, amongst other things, some very significant prayers: 4 

King Apollo, you who rule and govern all things in their identity, you who unify all beings, you who harmonise this vast universe which is so varied and manifold ... O Sun, lord of our heaven, look favourably upon us; and you too, O Moon, venerable goddess, look favourably upon us; and you, the bringer of light (Venus), and you Stilbon (Mercury), both faithful companions of the resplendent Sun, and you, Phaenon, Phaethon, Pyrois (Saturn, Jupiter and Mars), who all obey the Sun your king, who help him as is fit in the government of human matters, we celebrate you as our radiant protectors, along with the other stars which a divine providence has thrown into space. Garin, Astro, pp. 58-59 

There is only one God for Pletho, the supreme god whose law is absolute and unchangeable: it is the destiny, the heimarmene, which nothing escapes. 'Everything is subject to a law . . . All events are established by eternity, placed in the best order possible under the authority of Zeus, the unique and supreme master of all. Zeus alone among all other beings knows no limits, because nothing can limit him . . .' Nothing can escape his decrees or his foresight, nor that of the superior beings which are his ministers; and knowledge of the future cannot affect necessity. Even those who know, know ‘the decrees of a necessary and inevitable Destiny . . . Nor is there any way of escaping, of evading that which Zeus has decided for eternity, and which Destiny has fixed' for ever. 5 

Pletho was at the same time both a great thinker and a great reformer. His interpretation of Platonism and Hellenism found its conclusion in a rationalism which exploited the scientific possibilities implicit in astrology to the full. His Zeus, his One-All, his heavens, his destiny (heimarmene), carried the consequences of a natural law, which necessitates and links everything together, to their logical conclusions, where everything can be foreseen and is predictable because everything is preordained: where religions, revelations, prophets, apostles and saints are brought back to the absolute plane of reality. There is no doubt that such a conception was irreconcilable with every positive religion; it is not surprising that it should be attacked and persecuted in the East and the West. What is most important in all this is that Pletho himself opened the way to a series of recoveries, however reductive, of great significance: from the praise of the Greek gods to the solar cult, from the 'Chaldean Oracles' to Emperor Julian, from Zoroaster to the 'Mysteries of the Egyptians' of Iamblichus. pp.60-61 

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Wind, Chapter 3:

15. Leibniz was anticipated by Gemistus Pletho, Laws III, xv (ed. C. Alexandre, 1858, p. 92), who compared the Neoplatonic unfolding of the One into Many to the effect of multiple mirror images, […]. The figure derives from Plotinus, Enneads IV, ill, II ; Brehier sees it also in Enneads VI, vi, 4: 'image d'origine platonicienne et que Leibniz a reprise' ( , 1954, VI², p. 8); cf. also Dodds's commentary on Proclus, Elements of Theology, p. 254; J. Trouillard, 'La monadologie de Proclus', Revue philosophique de Louvain LVII (1959), pp. 309-20. 

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YATES: 

mainly from Gemistus

Frances Yates writes that Pletho, “ . . does not mention Trismegistus, …” and that  Zoroaster “ . . .was Pletho's favourite as the first priscus theologus.”

Yates, Giordano Bruno, p.15 

“This equating of Zoroaster with Hermes brings Ficino's genealogy into some conformity with that of Gemistus Pletho, for whom the most ancient source of wisdom is Zoroaster, after whom he puts a different string of intermediaries to those given by Ficino, but arrives eventually, like Ficino, at Pythagoras and Plato.”

See the passages quoted from Pletho's commentary on the Laws and from his reply to Scholarios in

Yates, Giordano Bruno, p.15 

“Pletho firmly believed in the extreme antiquity of these Oracles (see Masai, op. cit., pp. 136, 137, 375, etc.) which are for him the early fount of Zoroastrian wisdom the streams from which eventually reached Plato. This exactly corresponds to Ficino's attitude to the Hermetica. It was not difficult for Ficino to mingle the waters of these two pristine founts, since they were roughly contemporaneous and similar in their atmosphere.” [1] 

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Pletho "...extolled the Chaldean Mysteries at the expense of the Egyptian..."

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1. Georgios Gemistos Plethon

Plethon’s attitude towards Islam was rather open : he considered Islam as equivalent to Christianism, since it is a revealed religion. According to him, both faiths could be substituted with Neo-Platonic religion, thanks to a syncretic convergency very similar to that proposed by Sufi mystics of the epoch.

Plethon’s Neo-Platonism continued an old and uninterrupted Byzantine tradition which periodically created doctrinal problems due to the adequacy of Platonism and Christianism. Byzantine Neo-Platonists always aimed to be firstly Christian. Michael Psellos (11th c. A.D.) before him defended the thesis of a harmonious continuity from Academy to Christianism, and argued that Fathers of the Church like Clemens of Alexandria and Origenes used Platon’s doctrine to support Christian dogmas. Philosophical doctrines like that of justice or that of the immortality of soul were substantially precursors of Christianism.

Byzantine Neo-Platonism was sharply criticized, however, by other groups within Orthodoxy : Ioannes Italos, for example, a disciple of Psellos, was accused of heterodoxy because he tried to re-activate Greek pagan doctrines; he was judged and condemned. Such a sentence constituted a strong barrier for Byzantine Platonism considered almost as a religion with its own philosophy (that of Proclos) and rituals.

Although Proclos’ philosophy, which created Neo-Platonism, never ceased to be studied by a large number of Byzantine philosophers in spite of the obstacles, the greatest defender of the Neo-Platonic restauration was probably Plethon. Indeed, he considered Neo-Platonism almost as a religion, just because he thought that Philosophy could overcome revealed and opposed Faiths (Christianism and Islam), in the context of the re-activation of Hellenism which might substitute the dying theocracy like it was that of Byzantium at the end of 15th c. A.D.

Plethon spent a long time in Ottoman cities where Sufi developed a strong activity, either in Edirne (Adrianopolis) or in Bursa (Prusa). The fact influenced definitely his thought, although our informations on this point are not clear (they come from his enemy the Patriarch Genadios Scholarios). It is certain, however, that, during his stay in Ottoman territory, Plethon was initiated to the activity of commenting Ancient Philosophy by Hebrew, Arabic or Persian philosophers, and he was in direct contact with the reality of Islamic thought [6]. Some philosophical thesis of Plethon, like that of land division or that of polygamy, could be rooted in Muslim customs rather than in pagan Antiquity [7]. Generally, the enemies of Plethon considered his doctrines and those of Muhammad as two types of Platonism, both aimed to destroy Christianism.

     Plethon’s work was translated into Arabic very early (ca. 1462) [8] at the Court of Mehmet II. It indicates that there has been previously an exhange of ideas between Plethon and the Muslim circle he frequented. Plethon’s attitude towards Turco-Muslim World was open. The proof is given by the fact that, although a Byzantine, he studied Hellenic, i.e. pagan, Antique Philosophy in Ottoman territory and wrote works which evidence an intellectual ecclecticism, charcateristic of a cosmopolitan man who tried to deepen Mediaeval Platonism by means of the traces left by Ancient Greek Philosophy in opposed philosophical traditions as Hebraism, Islam and Christianism.

Plethon’s relativism led to a new concept of religion which was adapted to mans’ measure and which aimed to overcome the dogmatical imperfections of opposed religions.

Pedro Bádenas, The Byzantine Intellectual Elites at the Court of Mehmet Fatih. Adaptation  and Identity

http://www.filol.csic.es/departamentos/bizantinos/ESE.html

 

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 Gemisto Pletho recurs as an important but shadowy figure in the handing down of this tradition. He does not in his surviving works mention either Orpheus or the Orphic writings. But we know that hymn-singing played a large part in his reconstructed paganism, and that he devoted a chapter of his Nomoi to ‘Hymns to the Gods’ and another to ‘The Arrangement of the Hymns.’ We have evidence also that he copied out fourteen of the Orphic Hymns. It may be that it was Pletho's appearance at the Council of Florence in 1438 that awakened in the West an interest in this ritual practice. There are, however, significant differences in the motives underly-ing the hymn-singing of Pletho and that of Ficino. As Walker tells us (71) Pletho saw the effect of the hymn-singing as subjective rather than objective. It did not actually reach the gods, but prepared or ‘moulded’ our imaginations. Ficino's motives are more direct and straightforward, and closer to the theurgic tradition of Iamblichus and Proclus. The singing of hymns can prepare man's spiritus to receive the influx of spiritus from a particular astral body. Music recovers its powers of magic, its ability to exploit and turn to advantage the forces of the phenomenal world. ‘Nothing is more effective in natural magic,’ says Pico, ‘than the hymns of Orpheus, if the proper music, mental concentration and other circumstances which the wise are aware of be applied.’ (‘Nihil efficacius hymnis Orphei in natural magia, si debita musica, animi intentio et caeterae circumstantiae, quas norunt sapientes, fuerint adhibitae.’ (72))

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o’Neill:

The reason that eastern Neoplatonism is of interest to us is that Harris (1972) shows that Psellus (1018-1079) relied heavily on Proclus and, in turn strongly influenced Pletho (c. 1360- c. 1450). Pletho was one of the Greeks that traveled to Italy in the 15^th century for the councils that attempted to reunite the eastern and roman churches. Pletho provided access to Greek philosophy that Italy had only known through the Latin writers and stimulated a new interest that stimulated the 15^th century Italian Neoplatonists.

Though Pletho and other Byzantines at the council are often credited with introducing the Italians to Neoplatonism, we will show below that they simply stimulated a tradition that was already deeply engrained in Roman Christianity. Pletho later formed a Neoplatonic community in Greece (Webb 1974) that espoused an individualistic religion uniting Neoplatonism, Christian mysticism, Sufism, and the Chaldean Oracles (Godwin 2002).

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Malatesta exhumed the bones of Plethon, the Greek Neoplatonist, and placed them in the temple/church.

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Labowsky, Lotte, The Library of Cardinal Bessarion, Sussidi Eruditi, 31, Rome, 1979.

Bessarion studied Platonic philosophy under Plethon at MISTRA . . .  

“Bessarion had his connections in Greece, Crete and Tebizond to hunt for manuscripts.” Introduction, p. 9.

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Available free online - note Chapter on Psellos - important to trace the Plethon line to Renaissance Hermetica ...

  Byzantine Magic    -   edited by Henry Maguire    http://www.doaks.org/MABM.html

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see Pausanias, Vol. 2, pp. 3, 86n, 165n, 280n.

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The growing knowledge of Greek in the Latin West was not only a boon to the study of ancient Greek authors, but also led to a new interest in the literary scholarship of Byzantium. The works of Theophylact of Euboea, an eleventh-century Byzantine exegete who had studied with the Platonist Michael Psellus, were especially welcome in the West  owing to his conciliatory position on the Schism--Theophylact defended the Roman  Catholic position against Greek intransigence on a number of key theological issues. In  the fifteenth century his works were translated into Latin by Christoforo Persona, a  native of Rome who had studied in Greece, probably under Gemistus Pletho, and had accompanied the Greek Orthodox delegation as an interpreter to the Council of Union in 1437/38. Persona later became the head of the Williamite order in Rome and papal librarian under Sixtus IV. The illumination by Matteo Felice shows Persona presenting his translation to Sixtus IV.

Vat. lat. 263 fol. 1 recto

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First, there was the visit of the initiate Georgios Gemistos, known as Plethon, to Italy for the last ecumenical council of Florence/Ferrara in 1438-1439. It was Plethon who so fired Cosimo de Medici with the idea of a lineage of ancient theologians reaching back into primordial times that Cosimo “conceived in his noble mind a kind of Academy” to study this perennial wisdom and, about 1450, asked the son of his favorite doctor to organize this and start translating the texts of these ancient masters that Plethon had provided. Thus the Platonic Academy of Florence came into being, and Marsilio Ficino began his epoch-making translations, including those of Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, Proclus, the Corpus Hermeticum and the Chaldean Oracles. But Plethon’s influence outran even this. Besides Cosimo, Plethon met and equally inspired Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas of Cusa whose association in the “other” Academy, that of Palestrina, was also to have far-reaching effects in that magic work The Dream of Poliphilo.

It was Plethon, who at the time that Christian Rosenkreutz was laying down the foundations of the Fraternity of the Rose Cross, publicly introduced the project of the Christianization of ancient wisdom. To what extent Plethon himself believed in this project, or whether he would rather have preferred to see a return of the most ancient solar cosmic religion, must remain a moot point. Certainly, some like Jean Robin, have attributed to his offspring a sinister stream of counter- or at least counter-Christian initiation. Nevertheless, Plethon’s influence was enormous. He did much more than merely inspire Ficino’s translations and Cusanus’s philosophy. Above all, it was he who brought the symbol of “fire” to the center of the tradition we have been following and pushed the idea of ecumenicism to the bounds of heresy upholding the universality of all forms—which is the same as being attached to none. His position was, to adapt a current slogan, “to think religion globally and embody it locally”—as good an explanation as one can find of our Fraternity’s second rule. As for fire, drawing on the Chaldean Oracles and what he knew of Zoroastrianism and the Persian Ishraki or theosophers of Light (of whom, Corbin proposes, he was a student), Plethon considered fire to be the all-luminous substance, the pure luminescence or Spirit, which is the nature and source of all created things. All things then, were filled with tongues of Sophianic flame, descended from a single fire. Fire was, in other words, the quintessence and as such was the medium at once of magic and of alchemy.

Christopher Bamford, The Meaning of the Rose Cross @ ROSE CROSS

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1433 - In Florence, Cosimo de Medici conceived a passion for Hermetic and Neo-Platonic literature after meeting a mysterious Greek scholar - Georgios Gemistos, or Pletho, (Greek - Plethon = Full) who brought Neo-Platonism from Byzantine, via Psellus and gave a series of lectures in 1433 tinged with Gnostic ideas. Cosimo was inspired and founded his Platonic Academy.  

"...A Greek manuscript in seventeen books brought from Macedonia to Cosimo de' Medici...was said to contain the secret wisdom of Thoth, the Egyptian sage whom the Greeks called Hermes Trismegistus, or the Thrice Great Hermes."

- Peter Tompkins, The Magic of Obelisks

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As to the great George Gemistos Plethon, he is related to a whole School of Platonists at Mistra, and his famous work Peri on Aristoteles pros Platona diaferetai ("On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato") which he wrote in Florence in 1439, was the spark which ignited the most serious conflict between Aristotelians and Platonists in Byzantium and Italy. He taught philosophy at Mistra and believed that the ideal state would be built on the Neoplatonic philosophical system and not on Christianity. He was thus the ideologic opponent of the last philosopher of this period, Patriarch Gennadios Scholarios, who, although he wrote an extensive commentary on Aristotle and a lesser one on Plotinus, did not hesitate to throw Plethon's book Nomon Syngraphe ("Book of Laws") into the fire with his own hands, after the latter's death.

http://www.fhw.gr/chronos/10/en/pl/pn/pnd2.html

See also: George Gemistos Plethon, George Pachymeres, Nikephoros Gregoras, Theodore Metochites, George Gennadios Scholarios, Hesychasm

174 

However, during the last years of the  Byzantine Empire metempsychosis returns in the work of George Gemistos Plethon  and in his discussions with a circle of friends that included, among other famous  people, Cardinal Bessarion. Plethon was a Neoplatonist  whose contribution to the Italian Renaissance remains to be assessed. The transmigration of souls  is part of a wider philosophical-political system, which he tried to establish by  emulating the Republic of Plato. Unfortunately, George Scholarios, the first  patriarch of Constantinople under Ottoman rule, destroyed Plethon’s magnum opus The Laws after he had compiled an anthology of extracts from it. Plethon’s  ideas on the transmigration of souls are found in the concluding paragraph of  The Laws, the Epinomis that is preserved, and in a brief note entitled “Recapitulation of Zoroastrian and Pythagorean-Platonic Dogmas.” In the  Epinomis Plethon also gives a brief history of the dissemination of these  “dogmas”  similar to that presented at the beginning of this study. Interestingly enough, Plethon and Apollonios of Tyana entertain the same  contempt for Egyptian philosophy.The death of Plethon, less than a year before  the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, marks the end of the philosophical  eschatological tradition in Byzantium. The church allowed Plethon a funeral in accordance with the Orthodox rite and turned a blind eye to his heretical views. Nevertheless, Plethon’s friends continued the Neoplatonic tradition in the West. Bessarion, who became a Roman cardinal and was considered twice for the papacy,  wrote the following words to Plethon’s sons: “I have learned that our  common father and master has shed every earthly element and departed to heaven, to the place of  purity, joining the mystical chorus of Iacchus with the Olympian Gods. . . . if one were to accept the doctrines of the Pythagoreans and Plato about the infinite ascent and descent of souls, I should not hesitate even to add that the soul of Plato, having to obey the irrefragable decrees of Adrasteia and to discharge the obligatory cycle, had come down to earth and assumed the frame and life of Plethon.”

 Bessarion’s wording is careful, but the idea of reincarnation was employed for eulogistic purposes, and one may assume that Plethon’s soul, whether in the Christian afterworld or in his Neoplatonic intelligible world, would have enjoyed this  reference. 

ALEXANDER ALEXAKIS, Was There Life beyond the Life Beyond? Byzantine Ideas on Reincarnation and Final Restoration, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, No. 55, online at: http://www.doaks.org/DOP55/DP55ch08.pdf

 

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