A Genealogy of Perennial Wisdom — Part Three

The third instalment of the series A Genealogy of Perennial Wisdom, attached here as an audio file accompanied by slides containing relevant images and references, tells a remarkable story from the fifteenth century.

In 1439, as the Ottoman army advanced into Europe and shortly before the fall of the Byzantine Empire and the conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmed II, which eventually occurred in 1453, a great council was convened in Florence to bring the Western and Eastern Churches closer together. Florence itself would soon become one of the centres of the Renaissance.

At that time, Greek-speaking Byzantine civilisation was the heir to and custodian of manuscripts by the Greek philosophers. Although Aristotle and Plato were known by name in the West, the absence of Latin translations meant that Western knowledge of many of these works remained limited. In the first part I noted that after the Academy of Plato was closed by Emperor Justinian I, Damascius, head of the Platonic Academy, together with six other philosophers, took refuge at the court of the Persian king Khosrow I in 529 CE. During this period, a number of Plato's works—including the dialogues Gorgias, Phaedo and Timaeus—were translated into Pahlavi at the Academy of Gondishapur.

Later, one of the conditions of peace between Iran and Rome was the return of these philosophers and a Roman undertaking not to persecute or harass them. Yet after their return the Platonic Academy never regained its former vitality or standing in the Christian world. Neoplatonic philosophy, the last powerful survivor of Greek philosophy, effectively lost its influence, and philosophy entered several centuries of deadly silence in the West until a philosopher named Gemistus Pletho in the Eastern Roman Empire undertook the revival of philosophy and the reintroduction of Plato to the Western world.

Pletho arrived in Florence in 1439 with great honour, alongside a delegation of scholars and Christian theologians from Byzantine civilisation, and according to his contemporaries he shone like a star. Pletho not only accelerated the transfer of Greek works from Byzantium to the West—partly because Christian civilisation feared that these works would fall into Ottoman hands—but also helped initiate the process of translating the complete works of Plato from Greek into Latin. For this reason he has been described as a founder of the revival of Greek learning in the West.

Like Suhrawardi, Pletho was deeply convinced that philosophy in its primordial form began with Zoroaster and that Plato inherited Zoroaster's philosophy. Pletho himself wrote a summary of his final work, the Book of Laws (Nomon Syngraphē), under the title Summary of the Doctrines of Zoroaster and Plato. Although after his death the Book of Laws was burned on the order of Gennadius II, Patriarch of Constantinople, the summary was preserved by one of Pletho's students, Bessarion.

After Pletho's death, Cosimo de' Medici—one of the politically influential participants in the Council of the Western and Eastern Churches and an admirer of Pletho—came to power in Florence. Influenced by Pletho's teaching and ideas, he decided to revive the Neoplatonic Academy in Florence. He also commissioned one of the greatest philosophers and scholars of Florence and Italy in that era, Marsilio Ficino, to render Plato's works from Greek into Latin. Ficino, like his predecessor Pletho, maintained throughout his life that there was an eternal wisdom that began with Zoroaster and continued historically through the Neoplatonists.

Shortly before Martin Luther's Reformation, Ficino called for reform of the Church through a return to this perennial wisdom and developed his views and his understanding of that wisdom in his six-volume work associated with the idea of prisca theologia, or ancient theology. The foundational idea of this wisdom is the existence of a form of philosophical insight capable of uniting science, religion and knowledge of the self—what we would today call psychology—and whose genealogy and principal lines can be traced from Plato back to Zoroaster.