Michael Psellos (1018-1078).

After the age of Photius, Byzantine intellectuals found a freer and fuller access to the sources of ancient Greek philosophy. With Michael Psellos, we discover a personality who is, to a large extent, the product of this early-Medieval Byzantine renaissance. Psellos’ contribution to theology is actually very limited and only indirect. Since in the accepted Byzantine world-view, religion and philosophy are in fact inseparable, he can and must be mentioned as a major phenomenon in the history of Byzantine Christianity.

“I want you to know,” he writes, “that Hellenic wisdom, while it fails to render glory to the divine and is not unfailing in theology, knows nature as the Creator made it.”¹⁹ This acknowledgment of the ancients’ competence in understanding nature implies a basis for natural theology, a knowledge of the Creator through the creatures. Elements of this approach existed of course among the Apologists of the second and third centuries and were developed by Origen and by the Cappadocian Fathers. But, first and foremost, responsible churchmen, they emphasized the religious gap between Christianity and ancient Hellenism. For them, Hellenic wisdom was a tool for apologetics, not an end in itself. Occasionally, Psellos himself recognizes this incompatibility; for example, he refutes Plato’s concept of a world of ideas subsistent in themselves and not only in the divine intellect.²⁰ But these reservations come to his mind from explicit and formal definitions of the Church, rather than from any deep conviction. He certainly expresses the true state of his mind more accurately when he writes, “To be born to knowledge I am satisfied with the throes of Plato and Aristotle: they give me birth and form me.”²¹

In fact, the rather formal theological conservatism, which prevailed in official circles of the Church, made possible in men like Psellos the resurgence of a Neo-Platonism approximately identical to what it had been in the sixth century. In him and his contemporaries, there was, in fact, very little true encounter between theology and philosophy. Psellos certainly remained a Christian; but if there is any emotional thrust to his thought, it consists in finding agreement between, not opposition to, Platonism and Christianity; and it is of little concern to him if the agreement is artificial. Psellos is quite happy, for example, to discover the Trinity as well as the Biblical world of angels and saints in Homer.²²

This example of formal and artificial adaptation of Hellenism by the Gospel shows the limitations of what has been called Byzantine humanism. It obviously lacked the living stamina, which made Western Scholasticism possible after the rediscovery of Aristotle or the Italian Renaissance after the decline of Medieval civilization. Even if he knew Plato and Aristotle better than anyone in the West ever did, Psellos remained a Medieval Byzantine — i.e., a man was committed to tradition and loyal, at least formally, to the rigid norms of official theology. He was not a great theologian, and his loyalty to official theology prevented him from becoming a really great philosopher. Fundamentally, his thought remains eclectic. The principles of Neo-Platonism — fidelity to Aristotle in logic and natural philosophy coupled with Platonic metaphysics — were precisely appropriate to his frame of mind. “As far as I am concerned,” he confesses, “I collect the virtue and the potential of everyone; my reasoning is varied and is a melding of every single idea into one. And I myself am one out of many. If one reads my books, he discovers that they are many out of one.”²³

No brilliancy of expression, no exquisite sophistication of style was sufficient to transform this eclecticism into an original and creative system of philosophy. Real creativity and living thought continued in the circles which Psellos considered infested with unhealthy and irrational mysticism. It is doubtful however whether Psellos at any time even met or read the most authentic representatives of monastic spirituality, his contemporaries, such as Symeon the New Theologian. If he had, they would have been unlikely to understand each other at all.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 490