Life

Scholarios (c. 1400–1472), born in a rich family, studied the traditional philosophical curriculum. His teachers implanted into him a love for Orthodoxy but also for the Latin theological tradition and especially Thomas Aquinas, the greatest – according to Scholarios – Latin theologian and one of the greatest Christian thinkers of all times. In the context of the pro-union politics of emperor John VIII Palaiologos (1425–1448) and of patriarch Metrophanes II (1440–1443), he participated in the council of Florence (1438–1439) by promoting an “economical union” with the Roman see “for the nation’s sake.” From 1443 onward, he adopted an extremely antiunionist attitude. In 1450, removed from court by the new emperor (1448–1453) Constantine XI Palaiologos, he became a monk, taking the name “Gennadios.” After the fall of Constantinople, Mehmed II the Conqueror, who knew of his strong anti-Latin stand, made him a patriarch (Gennadios II; early 1454). Soon he resigned and retired on Mount Athos and in a monastery near Serrhai (northern Greece), where he devoted himself to writing and discussions with Muslims on the true religion up to his death.

Thought

Scholarios was primarily interested in theology. Yet, he had a wide knowledge of the ancient Greek philosophical literature and had studied the Greek translations of some major Latin Christian works (such as Augustine’s De Trinitate and Aquinas’ two Summae) produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In combination with his own knowledge of Latin, this made him interested in philosophy, especially Aristotle, and in the question of the relationship of this philosophy to Christian thought.

He mainly developed his views on it in the context of his polemics (1443 onward) against the religious philosophy of George Gemistos (Plethon). Scholarios wrote a refutation of Plethon’s short but bitter anti-Aristotelian lecture in Florence (1439) On the Issues on Which Aristotle Contentiously Disagrees with Plato, labeled Against the Impasses Ignorantly Imputed by Plethon to Aristotle (1443/1445). The topics treated there are God and his relation with the world; Aristotle’s doctrine of the homonymy of “being”; his doctrine of “primary substance”; his conception of the “universal” as “matter” and the “particular” as “form”; his view on the simultaneity of the “relatives”; his principle of contradiction and its implications on determinism; various matters of human psychology; the Aristotelian conception of virtue as “meanness”; the ultimate end of human being; the famous cosmological ether problem; whether the source of sun’s heat is its nature or, as Aristotle said, its rapid motion; the question of the cause of the motion of stars; teleology in nature and its relation with Providence; Aristotle’s rupture of the universal law of causality by construing human deliberation as ultimate principle of many things; his conception of “movement” or “change” in general; and Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s Forms.

The central discrepancy between Scholarios and Plethon stems from Plethon’s rejection of Aristotle’s doctrine of “entelechy” as immanent in everything and cause of the transition from “potentiality” to “actuality”; Plethon’s Neoplatonic metaphysics postulated a hierarchy of beings, each of them responsible for the existence and the qualities of its inferior. Scholarios objected in a clearly Thomist spirit that God is the causa remota of whatever goes on in the world and governs the world by having implanted to each sort of creature a power to directly produce some concrete effects, this power being Aristotle’s self-“actualization.”

Scholarios was so filled with indignation at reading Plethon’s major work, the Laws, where a highly elaborated pagan, anti-Christian utopia was described, that he threatened the author to burn him alive (in fact, he finally burnt Plethon’s writing). He regarded Aquinas’ Christian Aristotelianism as a perfect tool to combat Plethon. Radicalizing some arguments of Aquinas and based on Simplicius’ Commentary on the De Caelo, he claimed that Aristotle did not believe in the eternity of the world and that God, to Aristotle, is the cause not only of the movement in the world but also of the very existence of the universe. Scholarios also compiled a Florilegium Thomisticum, both from the Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa theologiae, which he intended to use as a source of arguments for producing a refutation of Plethon’s Laws, as well as another Florilegium Thomisticum, from the Summa contra Gentiles (III, 84–106), in order to refute especially Ch. II, 6 of Plethon’s masterpiece, which circulated as an independent treatise On Fate. Scholarios, taken up with his anti-Catholic struggle, did not find time to write these refutations; still, the Thomistic arsenal of the intended refutation and his systematic treatises On the Divine Providence and Predestination stand as a mark of what he had in mind when saying that Plethon’s philosophy is insane. Instead of Plethon’s Platonic doctrine of the incorruptibility of the human intellect, which postulates the eternal preexistence of the human soul, Scholarios deemed the Thomistic doctrine of the simultaneity of coming into existence of body and soul as more consistent. Instead of Plethon’s Neoplatonic-Averroist doctrine of the faculty of “phantastikon” as the “medium” between intellect and body, Scholarios adopted the Aristotle-based Thomistic doctrine of how a created soul forms a “direct” union with body. Against Plethon’s doctrine of fate, Scholarios adopted Thomas’ doctrine of the way and the degree the superlunar world affects humans in the context of God’s providence as well as of Predestination and free will.

Scholarios also produced a Thomistico-Scotistic interpretation (Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Francis of Meyronnes et al.) of Gregory Palamas’ distinction between God’s ‘essence’ and ‘energies,’ based also on Radulphus Brito’s doctrine of logical and metaphysical ‘distinctions’. God’s energeiai are intentiones/epinoiai, whose mode of existence is partly objective and partly subjective; God’s simplicity is grasped multifariously through the results of His creative and gratifying activity. Scholarios also suggests that Palamas’ solution to the problem of God’s simplicity and multiplicity is close to John Duns Scotus’ application of the distinctio formalis to God.

Scholarios also produced an Ars vetus, which was almost fully and verbatim based on Radulphus Brito (regarding Porphyry’s Isagoge and Aristotle’s Categories), Thomas Aquinas (regarding Aristotle’s De interpretatione), and some other scholastic sources, many of which included a lot of material from the Late Antique Greek commentators on Aristotle’s logic. His paraphrases of Aristotle’s natural works (Physica, De caelo et mundo, De anima, Parva naturalia, Meteorologica) seem to be an abridgment of Theodore Metochites’ paraphrases, enriched with certain sporadic notes by means of which he repelled some anti-Aristotelian arguments by the Platonist George Pachymeres. Of Aquinas’ œuvre, besides his selective translation/abridgment of Aquinas’ Commentary on the De interpretatione, he translated the De ente et essentia along with Armandus de Bellovisu’s Commentary on it (into which he inserted an interesting discussion of the problem of the divine simplicity in Thomistic, Scotist, and Palamite terms), the Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima and a part of the Commentary on Physics, and the pseudo-Thomistic De fallaciis. Besides, he elaborated an abridgment of Demetrios Kydones’ translations of Thomas’ Summa contra Gentiles and of the I a, I a II ae, and the II a II ae of the Summa theologiae. His versions of Aquinas’ Commentary on the Posterior Analytics and on Metaphysics are not extant. He also translated the greater part of Petrus Hispanus’ Summulae logicales and Gilbertus Porretanus’ De sex principiis and a part of Radulphus Brito’s Ars vetus (on intention/epinoia). He also wrote a short treatise On the Compatibility of Aristotle’s and Plotinus’ Definitions of Human Happiness as well as an Encomium of Aristotle.

Cross-References