The Circle of Cantacuzenos.

Father-in-law of the legitimate emperor John V Paleologos and emperor himself between 1347 and 1354, John Cantacuzenos, exercised a decisive influence in assuring the triumph of Palamism in Byzantium, and after his abdication remained for almost forty years a powerful political and intellectual force in Byzantine society. Having accepted monastic tonsure in 1354, he nonetheless kept at his personal disposal enough funds and influence to act as a generous Maecenas for Byzantine intellectuals. Travelling between Constantinople and Mistra in the Peloponnesus, he sponsored, in both his main residences, the copying of manuscripts and the development of scholarly projects.

As a theologian himself, he is the author of learned apologies of Palamism and of a lengthy refutation of Islam. During his entire life however, he never lost sight of Western Christianity and several times participated in debates with papal envoys. Ecclesiastical union with Rome was consistently on the diplomatic agenda of the time as a condition for a Western crusade against the menacing Turks. Many Byzantines, including Emperor John V Paleologus, who succeeded Cantacuzenos, were ready to accept hastily all papal conditions in order to achieve immediate military relief. Supported by a majority in Church circles — especially by the disciples of Palamas who were occupying major positions in the hierarchy — Cantacuzenos defended the idea that union could be achieved only through a solution, at a joint council, of the theological issues dividing East and West. He was probably (and justifiably) sceptical that Western help could be decisive in any case, and, together with a majority of the Byzantine population, envisaged Turkish conquest as a possibility preferable to a betrayal of Orthodoxy.

He was never opposed to contacts with the West however repeatedly proposed a serious theological dialogue and actively supported careful preparation on the Byzantine side for this eventual encounter. Knowledge of Latin the theological thought was a necessary precondition, of course, and it is in the circle of Cantacuzenos that Latin theological sources were systematically translated into Greek. The emperor himself used some of them in his polemics against Islam, but his secretary and friend Djemetrios Cydones devoted his entire life, with Cantacuzenos’ approval and support to the translation and study of Thomism. Meanwhile, another friend, Nicholas Cabasilas, was reviving sacramental mysticism in the best tradition of the Greek Fathers. Speaking to the legate Paul in 1367, Cantacuzenos developed his conviction that union never was achieved by imperial decree: “This is impossible in our Church,” he said, “since faith can never be forced.”¹ His view of the situation was all the more realistic since the greater part of the Orthodox world was then out of the reach of the Byzantine emperor. The greater mass of the Greeks was already under Turkish occupation, the Balkan Slavs were politically and ecclesiastically independent, and the Russians were unlikely to accept lightly any union scheme drafted without their participation. Byzantium could not hope to legislate in Church matters as it happened in the time of Photius but could hope only to provide intellectual leadership in the forthcoming dialogue. Cantacuzenos did what he could to give Byzantium the necessary intellectual tools to produce as a condition for Church union what he and his contemporaries considered a real possibility: a theological victory of the East over the West at a union council.

Out of the groundwork laid by the circle of Cantacuzenos, grew two or three generations of intellectuals who often adopted radically divergent attitudes toward the main theological options of the day. Investigation of their writings and thought has only recendy begun; but at the present stage of our knowledge, it was already clear that, in spite of several individual casualties and major mistakes, an “in depth” encounter with Western theology was in the making.

Humanists.

The encyclopaedic interests of Cantacuzenos led him to grant support to all forms of knowledge, including the study of secular philosophy — a tradition at all times alive in a small group of Byzantine aristocrats and intellectuals. Synodal decrees of the eleventh and twelfth centuries had warned the humanists against the dangers of considering Greek philosophy as a criterion of the theological thought, but Barlaam of Calabria — originally a protege of Cantacuzenos’ — went beyond the permissible by reducing theology to the level of intellectual wisdom and discursive knowledge. The Council of 1341 signalled his defeat and condemnation. The capture of imperial power by Cantacuzenos in 1347 coincided with the total victory of Palamas and the Hesychasts and was seen as a disaster by the humanists among whom the Antipalamite party recruited most of its members. Clearly, the Byzantine Church was rejecting Platonizing humanism and refusing to accept the very patterns of humanistic civilization by which the West was in the process of adopting.² It was precisely at this time that several prominent humanists, whose intellectual forefathers — Photius, Michael Psellos, Theodore Metochites — had despised the Latins as “barbarians,” discovered in the Latin West and particularly in Italy the last refuge of true Hellenism.

Demetrios Cydones (ca. 1324-ca. 1398), a close political associate of Cantacuzenos’, certainly belongs to this category. Staunch to Orthodox in his youth, he sometimes worried that the protocol requirements for an imperial ambassador to the pope, which would force him to address the Roman pontiff as “beatitude,” “holiness,” “common pastor,” “Father,” and “Vicar of Christ,” might have been harmful to his faith.³ But then suddenly, he discovered Thomism. When his diplomatic functions led him to learning Latin from a Dominican of Pera, he used the Summa contra Gentiles as an exercise book, and the effect on this friend of Barlaam, disappointed by the recent victory (in 1347) of the Hesychasts, was astounding. The Latins, whom the Byzantines considered incapable of rising above the military or merchant professions,⁴ knew Greek philosophy! “Because the Byzantines did not care for their own [Greek] wisdom, they considered Latin reasonings to be Latin inventions.” In fact, if only one took the time to unveil the meaning of Latin books hidden by a foreign tongue, one would have found that “they show great thirst for walking in those labyrinths of Aristotle and Plato for which our people never showed interest.”⁵

With the approval and support of Cantacuzenos, Demetrios continued his work of translation. The entire Summa contra Gentiles, most of Summa theologica, as well as important texts of Augustine and Anselm were made accessible, in Greek versions, to Demetrios’ contemporaries and to the following generations of Byzantine theologians. Cantacuzenos himself used Demetrios’ translation of the Refutation of the Koran by the Dominican Ricoldo da Montecroce as a source book for his writings against Islam.

Date: 2016-01-14; view: 551