Georgios Gemistos Plethon

Restorer of True Religion

Georgios Gemistos Plethon (1355–1452) was a Greek philosopher and Platonist who sought to revive the ancient Greek ways of the Gods. It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that it is thanks to Plethon’s works that the Temple of Zeus exists in the format it does today and that major thinkers centuries later, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, could elaborate their ideas.

A renowned scholar, he was eventually brought into in the service of the Byzantine emperors. In his seventies, he audaciously reintroduced Platonic thought to the Renaissance West at the Council of Florence designed to unify the Orthodox and Catholic Churches (1438–39), where contemporaries dubbed him “the second Plato”.

Plethon was the first open follower of the Gods in many years and was the direct trigger for the revival of pagan thought. His presence, writing and cell of ‘apostates’ caused extreme alarm among Christians, both in the Byzantine Empire which came to an end a year after his passing and in the Renaissance Italy under the Catholic Church that he migrated to.

In essence, his writings were the foundation stone for the Neoplatonic circle of dissidents in Florence commonly called the Platonic Academy. One of his former students, Gennadius Scholarius, became the Orthodox Patriarch and a severe enemy.

YOUNG LIFE

Plethon was born in 1355 in Constantinople, then part of the late Roman Empire (the Byzantine Empire). He was born into a family of fervent Orthodox Christians who were well-educated and had a reputation for scholarly excellence.

As well as studying in Constantinople itself, he went to study at Adrianople (Edirne) which recently had been conquered by the Ottoman Turks. Revelling in educative pursuits and having a very curious mind, Plethon gained significant first-hand knowledge about Islam as well as Christianity through his contacts among the Turks. Much like the observations of his compatriot Argyropoulos later, Plethon surmised that the fall of Byzantine Empire was due to innate corruption .

Plethon was not a normal boy. His desire to study Antiquity and deep-seated desire for the nature of the Gods led him to study at many libraries in the collapsing Empire, which only sated his desire to go further. One benefit of the Turkish occupation is that his movement in doing so was virtually unhindered; many of the guards of repositories of information installed by the Orthodox Church had fled.

He spent many decades of learning and collecting information with utmost patience. The majority of what he became famous for occurred after he reached age sixty.

THE TEACHER

In 1403, Emperor Manuel II Paleologos sent him to Mystra in the Despotate of Morea in the southern Peloponnese, an outpost of Byzantine rule after the Turkish invasion, where he became the Lord for all intents and purposes.

He taught the sciences philosophy, astronomy, history and geography, and compiled readers of classical figures. His pupils included Bessarion and George Scholarius (later to become Patriarch of Constantinople and Plethon's enemy). He was made chief magistrate by Theodore II.

Unable to do so in the heavily censored empire, he produced his major writings during his time in Italy.

THE COUNCIL OF FLORENCE

In 1428, Plethon was sent as part of a delegation to the flowering city of Florence to negotiate a union between the Orthodox and Catholic Church, the so-called Council of Florence. He perceived that the union of the churches would actually weaken them both.

Through the agitations of Florentine humanists he set up a temporary school to lecture on the difference between Plato and Aristotle. Few of Plato's writings were studied in the Latin West. Plethon reintroduced much of Plato to Western Europe, shaking the domination of scholasticism. Marsilio Ficino hailed him as the one who introduced Plato to the eyes of Italy.

Most notably, Cosimo de Medici who was the most influential lay person at the Council due to being the ruler of Florence met Plethon and attended certain lectures out of curiosity. Cosimo was sufficiently impressed by the Greek delegation’s learning, particularly Plethon’s, to invest heavily in the study of Plato thereafter. George of Trebizond, while possibly exaggerating, seems to indicate Plethon’s lectures in Florence had an aggressively pagan orientation.

THE REVIVAL OF ANTIQUITY

Plethon envisioned a reformed society with a new state religion built around a hierarchical pantheon of Greek Gods. The leader would be a philosopher-king charged with executing the will of the divine on Earth.

Following on from the Republic, the political and social elements of his theories covered the creation of communities, government of benevolent rulership, shared land ownership and social organisation, families, and divisions of sex and class. He believed that labourers should keep a third of produce. Many of the more extreme measures of his program were intended to get the Empire out of its catastrophic situation.

Despite his hatred of Christianity, Plethon attempted to save the remnant of the Roman Empire from total ruin through this program. In a letter written around 1414 to Emperor Manuel II on the situation in the Peloponnese (De Isthmo), argued that the peninsula's inability to organize a defense against the “barbarians” (Ottomans, Italians, and Latins) stems from its poor political structure (kakopoliteía).

He examined the current state of affairs, observing that successes and failures both hinge upon the perfection of state administration. In a speech addressed to the despot Theodore, Plethon asserted that the only way for a city or state to improve its affairs is by reforming its structure (politeía). If circumstances merely happen to be favorable, he warned that such good fortune is fleeting and can easily give way to something far worse.

He provides historical examples to reinforce his point, noting that the Greeks languished under foreign rulers until Hercules gave them laws and inspired in them a desire for virtue. Similarly, the Spartans only flourished once Lycurgus established laws for them. Moreover, the Arabs carried out their conquests by adapting Roman laws to their needs. By this reasoning, Plethon maintained that reform is urgently required so the weaknesses of the Despotate can be mitigated.

Plethon prefigured many of the severe measures against extremist Christianity that individuals such as Tokugawa Ieyasu would put into force on the other side of the world and which started to emerge in the state in Germany in the 1930s. He recommended severe reprisals for ruining religious pluralism and an eventual reintegration of Christianity into a solar God system.

NOMOI

In private, Plethon harbored radically heterodox religious ideas. His final work – the Nomoi or Book of Laws – circulated only among close disciples and was discovered after his death. Plethon openly and utterly repudiated and rejected Christian and Islamic doctrine in favor of a Neoplatonic pagan religion centered on the Hellenic Gods, which he regarded as repositories of ancient wisdom, drawing on the teachings of Zoroaster, Plato and the Persian Magi.

The Book of Laws was deemed heretical by church authorities; Gennadius Scholarios, the Orthodox Patriarch, burned most of it in 1460. Only fragments survive of the Book of Laws. Fortunately, Scholarios’ letter to a colleague preserved the chapter headings and a summary of its contents, allowing later scholars to reconstruct Plethon’s esoteric system. The Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato, a concise summary of the Nomoi found among the papers of his student Bessarion, also was preserved.

In contrast to Christian cosmology, Plethon taught that the universe is eternal and inherently perfect. He rejected the Christian notion of an apocalyptic triumph over evil followed by eternal paradise, and he denied the existence of absolute evil. Plethon asserted a universal divine order in which everything proceeds from the Good and all apparent evils are relative imperfections.

Central to his belief system was the assertion of reincarnation. Human souls, being immortal and akin to the Gods in basis, are repeatedly incarnated in successive bodies under the direction of the Gods, to fulfil the harmony of the cosmos. This assertion of Plethon was extremely dangerous. He blended late Byzantine theology with ancient Greek theology.

THEURGY

Plethon reintroduced the concept of theurgy or union with the Gods. His pagan system was a syncretic fusion of Platonic philosophy, Hellenic polytheism, and “Chaldean” (Zoroastrian) mysticism. His demand focused on the practice of ritual and prayer to unite the soul with the Gods. Plethon held that intellectual study alone was insufficient for salvation and that the soul’s ascent requires practical rites and devotional exercises to actualize the wisdom of the philosophers.

In Plethon’s view, the Gods are spiritual intelligences governing the cosmos. By honoring them through sacred rites, humans align themselves with the cosmic order. Man, the “[fallen] relative of the Gods”, should strive toward the Good by worshiping the divine powers properly.

Thus, in the Nomoi he prescribed a full regimen of religious ritual, hymns, and invocations modeled on ancient Greek pagan worship but reinterpreted in Platonic terms. Gennadius Scholarios’s report confirms that Plethon “recommended religious rites and hymns to petition the classical Gods, such as Zeus, whom he saw as universal principles and planetary powers.”

Plethon outlined an elaborate liturgical calendar and daily schedule of worship. A surviving fragment on “the worship of the Gods” (Peri theōn therapeias) shows that Plethon designed a lunisolar calendar of festivals closely tied to celestial cycles.

For each month, certain days were consecrated to particular Gods. For example, the eighth day of every month was devoted to Poseidon in some ancient calendars, a practice Plethon noted.

Noting how this concept had been stolen in Islam, Plethon also established daily prayer times. Five prayers per day were recommended, spread from dawn to night, to continually orient the soul toward the divine. His model was explicitly based on pagan precedent and philosophical reasoning: he also knew that ‘loose’ and superstitious styles of paganism did not work.

Plethon composed twenty-eight hymns and poetic invocations, presumably one for each major deity or for each day of a 28-day cycle. These hymns drew inspiration from the Orphic Hymns and fragments of the Emperor Julian.

GODS

Plethon calls Zeus One-itself and Good-itself, equating him with Plato’s Form of the Good or the Neoplatonic One. Zeus in this system is absolutely transcendent in rank yet immanent as the source of all being. Unlike the Christian God, however, Zeus is not a solitary deity ruling a void. He creates a family of Gods who personify the Platonic Forms and cosmic principles.

The second God in the hierarchy is Poseidon, whom Plethon describes as the eldest “child” of Zeus, born without a mother (i.e. directly from the One). Poseidon represents the Divine Intellect or Demiurgic Nous. Zeus entrusts to Poseidon “secondary matters,” namely the creation and ordering of the comprehensible cosmos.

While all these higher Gods are direct emanations of Zeus, Plethon introduces a female principle in the figure of Hera. In his mytho-philosophy, Hera is “third in command after Poseidon” and rules over the substrate of what Zeus creates, uniting eternally with him.

The other Gods, Kronos, Apollo, Apollo, Athena, Hades and others are given distinct roles over elements of the universe.

He elaborates more on the other Gods, categorizing them as heavenly and chthtonic. All of these first-generation Gods exist eternally and beyond the material world – they correspond to Platonic Forms or noetic entities, each a perfect archetype of some aspect of being.

According to Plethon, since all things ultimately proceed from the Good (Zeus), nothing truly divine can be evil. What people call evil spirits are either illusions or simply the more distant emanations of the Good which appear imperfect relative to higher things but are not evil in themselves.

While this is a simplification of what is true, this doctrine directly opposes the Catholic and Orthodox view of devils. Daimons are represented for the first time since Antiquity as helpful intermediary spirits, guiding and correcting humanity. In ritual, Plethon claimed one need not fear conjuring Daimons, in contrast to the medieval Christian magician’s anxiety and stupidity.

Plethon’s cosmology and theology is explicitly Neoplatonic.

THE HERETIC

Orthodox Christianity in the 15th century officially condemned the kind of pagan magic Plethon was reviving under pain of death. The Orthodox Patriachate viewed the ancient Gods as either nonexistent or as demons in disguise, and any ritual invocation of them as dangerous idolatry. In Christian practice, the only sanctioned “theurgy” was the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church such as the worthless Eucharist or prayer to the saints directed to the one God through Christ. Many of Plethon’s contemporaries were scandalized by what he openly said:

I myself heard him at Florence ... asserting that in a few more years the whole world would accept one and the same religion with one mind, one intelligence, one teaching. And when I asked him "Christ’s or Muhammad’s?," he said, "Neither; but it will not differ much from paganism." I was so shocked by these words that I hated him ever after and feared him like a poisonous viper, and I could no longer bear to see or hear him. I heard, too, from a number of Greeks who escaped here from the Peloponnese that he openly said before he died ... that not many years after his death Muhammad and Christ would collapse and the true truth would shine through every region of the globe.¹

His enemy Scholarius later claimed that Plethon was filled with "Hellenic" ideas and cared little about the study of traditional Christianity, studying instead the works of poets and philosophers. Scholarius also fabricated a lie that Plethon fell under the spell of a Jewish doctor serving the Sultan named Elisha while in Ottoman territory, which is unfortunately taken seriously by historians and is just drivel designed as reverse psychology. More truthfully, he claimed Plethon fixated on Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Iamblichus and Proclus, as well as Avicenna and some Islamic philosophers who attempted to use Platonism to justify Islam.

Plethon died in Mistra in 1452. In 1466, some of his Italian disciples, headed by Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, stole his remains from Mistra and interred them in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini, "so that the great Teacher may be among free men."

FATHER OF RENAISSANCE

Plethon’s system is fundamentally Neoplatonic magic and theology, much like the currents that informed Renaissance Hermeticism. In this, his ideas of Plato’s importance that he elaborated through his lectures in Florence were the most crucial contributions he made. Plethon did not hesitate to critique Aristotle or the scholastic tradition. This caused a reevaluation of the importance of Plato in the Italian world, with many documents of Plato being snapped up for translation and analysis.

Hence Plethon’s presence in Florence in 1439 directly influenced figures like Marsilio Ficino and the Platonic Academy discussion circle. Furthermore, in the occult sense, Ficino’s own brand of natural magic, especially his use of Orphic hymns and planetary talismans, were inspired by Plethon’s ideas.

Marsilio Ficino later obtained and translated the Corpus Hermeticum (in the 1460s), which taught the ascent through planetary spheres and communion with the One. These were concepts Plethon would have agreed with. Both Hermetic and Plethonian magic share a focus on cosmic sympathy: the idea that the material and celestial worlds are intertwined, and through the proper rites, one can draw down influences from the stars or Gods.

We could say that Plethon helped legitimize magic and pagan wisdom in a Renaissance context in presenting it as a serious philosophy. His Book of Laws was not available in the West then, but the ideas he disseminated such eternal cosmos, divinity of the stars, theurgy as divine communion as seeped into Renaissance thought.

Plethon’s open advocacy of pagan theurgy was too heretical for his time in Byzantium – it died with him in the East, only to bear fruit later in the West. In Greece, his former pupil Scholarios strongly denounced him; the burning of the Nomoi symbolized the Church’s rejection. Nonetheless, Plethon’s daring ideas earned him posthumous admirers. He has been called “the last of the Hellenes” for being perhaps the final thinker of the Byzantine world to champion the Olympian Gods.

After the fall of Constantinople, Italian humanists remembered Plethon as a luminary. In 1466, the ruler Sigismondo Malatesta, who revered Plethon, re-interred Plethon’s remains in Italy (at the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini), enshrining him as a pagan sage. The symbolic act underlines Plethon’s impact on the Renaissance imagination: he was seen as a conduit of ancient wisdom into the modern world. Marsilio Ficino and others carried forward many of Plethon’s themes, blending them with newly translated Hermetic and Platonic texts to create the Renaissance “occult philosophy.”

Ficino’s development of natural magic with Orphic hymns can be traced to Plethon’s influence. Through Ficino and his successors, Plethon’s spirit lived on in the Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and even Rosicrucian traditions of early modern Europe. Academically, Plethon’s Nomoi remained lost for centuries, but fragments and references survived in libraries. Modern scholarship (especially in the 20th and 21st centuries) has pieced together his doctrines and given him recognition as a key figure in late Byzantine thought.

The Book of Laws presents a genuine revival of Greek polytheism, unprecedented in Byzantium. Its detailed liturgy of daily prayers, hymns, sacrifices, festivals demonstrates that Plethon did not just intend his ideas as merely philosophical allegory, but as a working religion.

In a real sense, Plethon attempted to bridge a millennium and reconnect with the pre-Christian past but filtered through the advancements of Neoplatonic philosophy, integrating the lofty metaphysics of late antiquity with the ritual heart of the ancient cult. Plethon gathered a small secret circle (thiasos) of followers who may have practiced aspects of his pagan worship in Mystra during his last years.

Although Plethon escaped the perseuctions of the Church, one such follower, mentioned in sources, was executed for impiety, a martyr to his cause, which indicates the real risks they took.