Gemistos Plethon and the Neo-Platonists

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best to become a religion, and had tried out of its school to make a Church. Hence, the new mind in the first flush of its awaking turned from its ancient master, Aristotle, and threw itself into the arms of the NeoPlatonists. Gemistos Plethon, who took part in the Council of Florence, 1439, was intellectually the most potent of the Greeks who helped in the Renaissance. He regarded Aristotle as a westernised Mohammedan rather than as a Greek, a man who had indeed once lived on the Hellenic soil, but who had become an alien in race and an enemy in religion, speaking in the Latin schools ideas which he owed to a Moorish interpreter. So Plethon expounded to the awakening West Plato as the Neo-Platonists understood him, "the Attic Moses," the transmitter of a golden tradition which the secular Aristotle had tried to break and which ran back through Pythagoras to Zoroaster on the one hand and Abraham on the other. His philosophy was at once monotheistic and polytheistic; God was one and infinite, but He acted by means of ideas or spirits, or minor deities who filled the space between us and Him. As first and final cause He ordered all things for the best, and left no room for chance or accident. Providence was necessity and fate providence, the world in all its parts and life in all its elements were vehicles of a divine purpose. The soul of man was immortal; the doctrine of reminiscence proved that it had lived before birth and so could live after death.

Plethon emphasised in every possible way the differences between Plato and Aristotle, refusing to allow them to be reduced to a mere question of terminology. This teaching lifted men above the arid. syllogisms of the schools, enriched their view of themselves and nature, of God and history, and gave reality to the ancient saying “ex oriente lux." For it came more as a religion than as a philosophy; even the apparatus of worship was mimicked; ceremonies were instituted, holy or feast days were observed; celebrities became saints, before the bust of Plato a taper was ceremoniously burned. The neophytes underwent a species of conversion; Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) was said to have been called in his youth to be a physician of souls, and designated as the translator of the two great masters, Plato and Plotinus. Man was conceived as like unto God, and was named divine; his destiny was to seek eternal union with the God from whom he came. That God was the archetype of the universe, its unmoved mover and orderer, the ground of all our reasoning, the light of all our seeing. He knew the world from within when He knew Himself, for creation was only the expression of the divine thought, God as it were speaking with Himself, and man overhearing His speech.

The circle of those devoted to the study of this philosophy contained the most distinguished scholars of the day. Besides Ficino there stood his friends or converts, Angelo Poliziano, though his fame is mainly philological; Cristoforo Landino, the exponent of Horace, of Virgil,

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The new Aristotelians

and of Dante, who has given us a picture of Florentine society which recalls Plato's Symposium; Girolamo Benivieni, the poet who sang in praise of Platonic love; the architect, painter and man of letters, Leo Battista Alberti; Pico della Mirandola, of whose faith and fame and achievements we have already spoken; and above all the men of the Medicean House who founded the so-called Platonic Academy of Florence. This was rather a Society than a School, not an equipped and organised college, but an association of like-minded men who cultivated philosophy and professed to live according to the philosophy they cultivated. It added lustre to the reign of the Medici, helped to define its character, to fix upon it name and distinction. Under Cosmo and his son Piero, and especially under his grandson Lorenzo, it became the centre and sum and even source of Florentine culture. But the patronage of the House proved fatal to the thought for which the Academy stood; with the House it rose, lived in its smile, fell in its fall. Yet it did not fall before it had accomplished things that could not die. It revealed the world which the Church had extinguished and the Schoolmen superseded; it raised the reason that could speculate concerning truth above the authority that would legislate in its behalf; it taught men to believe that the truth lived in the soul rather than in books, that nature was beautiful and man was good, and that truth existed before Church or Councils and stood outside them both, and that man attains to the larger humanity by the study of that literature in which the truth adapted to his nature is best expressed. These were indeed notable contributions to the thought of the century.

But though Plato lived in the New Academy, Aristotle still reigned in the older Schools. He had been too efficient an instrument in education to be easily pushed aside; but the thought which is to shape living mind must not itself be dead. Hence the men, who were by birth as well as by discipline Aristotelians, set themselves to rejuvenate the ancient Master and change his obsolete speech into the language of the day. Three tendencies at once showed themselves, one which interpreted Aristotle in the sense and manner of Averroes; a second which construed him by the help of the Greek commentators, especially Alexander of Aphrodisia; and a third which laboured to reconcile him with Plato, some of the last-named going to Aristotle for their physics, but to Plato for their metaphysics. It soon became evident that the philosophical questions involved theology and raised issues affecting certain dogmas of the Church. These issues were more sharply defined in the Aristotelian than in the Neo-Platonic Schools and seriously alarmed the Church. How this was and with what reason, Pomponazzi (1462-1524) - Peretto, or little Peter, as he was affectionately named — will help us to understand. Reverence for Aristotle had become in him a second nature; and though he writes poor Latin and knows no Greek, and is, as he said, in

comparison with his master but an insect beside an elephant, yet he desires to serve truth by interpreting his philosophy. He frankly emphasised its opposition to faith; and narrowly escaped being burned for his pains, though his books were not so fortunate. He said: "The thinker, who inquires into the divine mysteries, is like Proteus. In face of consequences he neither hungers nor thirsts, eats or sleeps; the Inquisition persecutes him as a heretic; the multitude mocks him as a fool." Doubt is native to him, and like Descartes he doubts that he may know; but, unlike Descartes, his doubt is more critical than speculative, more literary than philosophical. And if he has a doubt to express he dearly loves to express it in another name than his own, or shield himself behind some noted authority. Religions he conceives as laws instituted by lawgivers, like Christ or Mohammed, for the regulation of life. They are governed in their coming and going, in their bloom and decay, by time and space; and their horoscope can be cast just as if they were mortal beings. Christianity is proved true by its miracles, which are not impossible, though they have now ceased to happen and fictitious marvels have taken their place. Since religions are laws, they must promise to reward the righteous and threaten to punish the wicked; and as conduct rather than knowledge is their end they may use parables and myths, which, of course, need not be true. Man is like the ass which must be beaten that it may carry its burden; to teach him deep mysteries would be but to waste our breath. Nor are we to esteem him too highly or exhort him to become godlike, for how can man resemble a God whom he cannot know? As it is impossible to have natural grounds for a supernatural faith we must be content to hold it without reason, though it may be a gift of grace. If religion be moral then man must be free. And though his freedom may be incapable of rational proof yet it is a matter of conscious experience. This, indeed, may seem incompatible with Providence, which Aristotle conceived as general rather than particular, though we conceive it as a general made up of all particulars; but where philosophy is blind revelation may see, and it is better to trust it than to walk in darkness. The God who governs has created, and creation was willed in eternity, but happens in time, for Aristotle's idea of an eternal creation is sophistical. As the workman loves his handiwork so God loves all His creatures and wills their good. He has given to every being, not perhaps the absolutely best, but the best for it and for the universe, viewed in their complementary and reciprocal relations. For men supplement each other; what seems in and by itself a defect may become an excellency when seen from the standpoint of the collective whole. Man lives in humanity, humanity within nature, nature in God; and we ought to know all together before we judge any separately.

This is what would be called to-day a system of philosophical agnosticism, where man's ignorance becomes a plea, if not a reason for

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The new scholasticism

faith; but what it signified to Pomponazzi we shall best understand by turning to his famous treatise on the Immortality of the Soul. The treatise is at once an attempt at the historical interpretation of Aristotle and a serious independent discussion. It is practically concerned with the question: How did Aristotle conceive immortality, as personal or as collective? It is as little soluble by the natural reason as the cognate question whether the world is eternal or created; in each case the problem as to the beginning holds the key of the problem as to the end. The Aristotelian Schoolmen had argued that the capacity of the soul to think the eternal and will the universal implied its immortality. But what is the soul? We cannot define it as thought percipient of the universal reason, for there can be no thought without ideas and no ideas without sense. The soul which lives within nature must develop according to natural law and in obedience to it. Now, we never find soul without body; and hence we must ask: how are these related? Not as mover and moved, else their proper analogies would be the ox and the waggon it draws, but as matter and form, i.e. without the body the soul could not be, for only through the body does man take his place in nature and realise his rational activity. Hence the human soul cannot exist without the human body, and must therefore be liable to the same mortality. And this conclusion is worked out in connexion with the moral doctrine that man is bound to act from love of virtue and horror of vice, and not from any hope of reward or fear of punishment, and so to act as to make all nature the better for his action. Reason, then, must conclude that the soul is mortal; but religion comes to our aid, and by teaching us to believe in the resurrection of the body resolves our doubts. Of this doctrine philosophy knows nothing, and so we can hold it only as an article of faith. This is in effect all Pomponazzi can teach us; religion and reason occupy opposite camps; neither can hold intercourse with the other. The truths of religion are the contradictions of the reason; the processes of the reason cannot serve the cause of religion. The new scholasticism was a philosophy of reasoned ignorance where the cardinal verities of religion were the inconceivabilities of thought.

But here certain new forces which seriously affected the course and the development of Latin thought must be referred to and analysed. The ecclesiastical situation began to change, and the temper of the Renaissance changed with it. Thought had revived without conscious antagonism to the Church, though with the clear sense of opposition to the Schools and their methods. Churchmen had been forward in cultivating the new spirit, had encouraged and studied its literature, appreciated and promoted its art. But the Reformation, with its attendant incidents, made the Church suspicious of movements which might contain the seeds of revolt, while the Renaissance, always sensitive to

New attitude of the defenders of the Church

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outer conditions, lost its spontaneity, becoming self-conscious and critical. Italy after 1525 became what the Moorish wars had made Spain, sullen in temper and jealous in disposition; she imitated Spanish methods and developed the Inquisition; in Rome, once careless and happy, the Holy Office was founded.

One of the earliest fruits of this change of feeling was the revival of Scholasticism and the increased influence of the Spanish mind upon the Italian. This revived Scholasticism, which was bred mainly in two Orders, both of Spanish origin, the Dominican and the Jesuit, and introduced by them into schools and universities, pulpits and Courts, learning and literature, was used to prove the necessity of the Church to religion, of the Pope to the Church, and of all three to society and the State. It had the learning which the Renaissance created, but was without its knowledge of antiquity, its sympathy with it, or its belief in finding there virtue and truth. Its purpose was indeed quite specific : to prove not that the Church was the mother of culture or mistress of art, but that she was the sole possessor of truth, the one authority by which it could be defined, authenticated, and guaranteed. The line of defence was bold: the Church was the creation of God, its government His express design, its rulers instituted by His immediate act. Secular rulers were but mediate creatures of God, appointed through the people and responsible to them; but spiritual rulers were His immediate creation and responsible to Him alone. And since the Church was the sole custodian of truth, it was not permissible to seek it without her or outside her; to profess to have found it independently was to be heretical; to obey what had been so found was to fall into the deadliest schism. The argument may have been narrow, but it was clear and strenuous; it may not have converted opponents, but it convinced friends. The Church became conscious of her mission; she was the guardian of thought, the guide of mind. She alone could judge what was truth and what error, what men ought to do or ought not to know. And as she believed so she acted, with results that are broadly written upon the face of history. The new Scholastics converted their own Church from the Catholicity which encouraged the Renaissance to the Romanism which suppressed its thought.

This, then, is what we have now to see; and so we resume our discussion of the thought which, as it faced the second quarter of the sixteenth century, began to feel the creeping shadow of the future. The change came slowly-for mind loves a violent catastrophe as little as nature

still it came and was marked by the rise of physical in succession to metaphysical speculation. The Neo-Platonic school had tended to a mystical and allegorical conception of the world, which implied a doctrine of the divine immanence and looked towards Pantheism. The Aristotelians, on the other hand, emphasised the ideas of cause and Creator,

C. M. H. II.

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