Gemistus Pletho, George

GEMISTUS PLETHO, GEORGE. - Philosopher, b. around 1355 in Constantinople, d. ca. 1452 in Sparta. The name Pletho, derived from an analogy of meaning with his original surname (γεμίζω = πλήθω), was chosen by the philosopher in homage to Plato. He was with the Greek representatives at the Council of Florence for the union of the Greek Church, thus having the opportunity to exercise a certain influence on the culture of the Medicean circle. And Ficino attests to the impression that the venerable old man made on Cosimo. At the school of a learned Jew, Elisseus, he seems to have come into contact with the doctrines attributed to Zoroaster. Very early he began to dream of and preach to his disciples at Mistra, near the ruins of ancient Sparta, a politico-religious reform, in which a kind of Plato's republic was to be founded upon a restoration of the classical religion similar to that of the emperor Julian. According to a testimony of George of Trebizond, he was convinced that soon Islam and Christianity would disappear from the world, and all men would be united in a universal religion. Of this he traced the outlines and specified the dogmas and rites in a work, The Laws (Νεμοθεσία, ἡ τῶν νόμων συγγραφή), which his implacable adversary George Scholarius, Gennadius, had destroyed, and of which only a few fragments remain.

In this work, polemicizing against all poetic deformations, he establishes a theology in which Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean themes are connected to the doctrines of the Chaldean oracles, which G. held most dear and commented upon. He accepts a multiplicity of gods, "of whom Zeus is the king, the greatest, the best possible, whose divinity transcends all"; from him are generated, and arrange themselves in ordered hierarchies, the inferior gods, who directly, or through subordinate divinities, govern the entire universe "according to an immutable destiny that derives from Zeus."

In Florence, in 1439, during an illness, "to please on the one hand those who comforted us, on the other the followers of Plato," he composed the essay On the Difference between Plato and Aristotle, where he exalts Plato for having posited a supreme God, unique, of spiritual and separate nature, while Aristotle is mistreated in every way. Hence the venomous polemic of George of Trebizond and the response of Bessarion, who had been a disciple of G. in Greece.

Eugenio Garin