Philosophy in the Byzantine World

The elements that define the evolving philosophy of Byzantium were: the centralization of cultural life inside the imperial court; the exclusive use of the classical Greek language (demotic or ‘popular’ Greek, the language spoken by all the populations of the Eastern empire, was used only for marginal portions of the written culture); the conservative and erudite attitude towards classical culture; the division between the ‘practice’ of philosophy, considered a ‘foreign’ science, and the development of religious thought—spiritual theology and contemplative practice—in the central centuries of the Byzantine Middle Ages. A real and proper dialogue between philosophy and religion will take place, following the age of the Church Fathers (4th c.) only during the dispute on Esicasm in the 14th c. The teaching of philosophy was not institutionalized in a codified manner (the imperial School of Magnaura, founded in the 9th c., had short duration), but was normally cultivated in private circles, such as the one around the empress Anna Comnena in the 11th c. The basic philosophic tendencies were mainly Platonism and Neoplatonism: Proclus had a particular influence not only on the first Christian philosopher of the Midle Ages to write in Greek, Pseudo-Dyonisius the Areopagite, but also on later thinkers such as Michael Psellos (11th c.); even the Byzantine commentators of Aristotle were generally grounded in Neoplatonic positions. Neoplatonism was influenced by oriental doctrines, in particular by the presence of magical doctrines of Harranian origin. The cultural dialogue with the near East, and above all with Syria, was especially intense during the 7th c., when religious events (in particular the diaspora of intellectuals who adhered to the Nestorian heresy) created among other consequences the conditions for the translation of Greek texts and the redaction of Syrian commentaries on Aristotle. The exchanges with the West were only episodic during the Carolingian age, but later intensified starting with the 12th c., and became particularly important at the time of the council of Ferrara and Florence (1438-1439), convened to reunify the Eastern and Western Churches, that had been divided since the schism of 1054. Contacts between Byzantine intellectuals and representatives of Florentine humanism brought to the Latin world the works of Plato, Plotinus, the Hermetic corpus, and the Chaldaic Oracles, which constitute the sources for Renaissance Platonism.