George Gemistos Plethon: The Last of the Hellenes

by C.M. Woodhouse

This study of the Byzantine philosopher George Gemistos Plethon includes the first complete translation of his treatise, On the Differences of Aristotle from Plato , and summarizes all his other works. Woodhouse emphasizes Plethon's controversy with George Scholarios on the respective merits
of Plato and Aristotle and his important impact on the Italian humanists during the Council of Union at Ferrara and Florence in 1438-9. Though Plethon's ambition to create a new religion based on Neoplatonism was never realized, his ideas had a significant influence on the western
Renaissance.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography, Religion, History

410 pages, Hardcover

First published June 26, 1986

About the author

Christopher Montague "Monty" Woodhouse, 5th Baron Terrington, DSO, OBE (11 May 1917 – 13 February 2001) was a British Conservative politician who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Oxford from 1959 to 1966 and again from 1970 to 1974. He was also a visiting Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1956 to 1964.

Terrington was an expert on Greek affairs after he first got involved with the resistance forces in Greece against the Germans during World War II, and then having served in the British Embassy.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woodhouse's biography of George Gemistos, based as it can only be upon documents written by, to, or about him, reveals an ambiguous character, and one only perceptible in glimpses at that. Moreover, nothing concrete survives from almost the first half of his nearly century-long life: the earliest manuscript attributable to him was composed when he was already in at least his forties, and his period of most prolific output, during which his significant philosophical and theological works appear, was the last decade and a half of his career.

The character who does appear, largely through an epistolary controversy between Gemistos, his chief rival George Scholarios, and their respective circles over the relative merits of Plato and Aristotle, is one who was quick to escalate abstract metaphysical debate to the level of ad hominem vituperation, yet evidently inspired real personal devotion in those students who sympathized with his doctrines, and at least moral respect amongst those who didn't. His only real enemies seem to have been a handful of individuals like Scholarios who suspected - and after Gemistos's death found incontrovertible evidence - that Gemstos's neoplatonism was in fact masking a genuine Hellenic paganism.

While Gemistos's nostalgia for a classical paganism was only made explicit in one work, the Nomoi, posthumously destroyed by Scholarios, it was but one aspect of a comprehensive Greek patriotism, inflamed in the face of Ottoman and Frankish aggressions, which found expression in epistles of political advice - reminiscent of Plato's Republic - to the Byzantine Emperor and his son.

Woodhouse's most valuable contribution is perhaps his translation of Gemistos' De Differentiis and an insightful summary of the heated exchange it prompted. Summaries of the surviving fragments of the Nomoi and Gemistos's commentary on the Chaldean Oracles hint at the intellectual world of a man born two thousand years too late.

[The Hellene · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books (if not the best) written about Plethon, the man who attempted the full restoration of the Hellenic culture, religion and philosophy in the years shortly before the fall of Constantinople.