GEMISTO PLETONE, GIORGIO

GEMISTO PLETONE, GIORGIO. – Philosopher, born around 1355 in Constantinople, died ca. 1452 in Sparta. The name Pletone, 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 exert a certain influence on the culture of the Medici circle. Ficino attests to the im-

pression that the venerable old man made on Cosimo. At the school of a learned Jew, Elisseo, he seems to have come into contact with doctrines attributed to Zoroaster. Very early on, he began to envisage and preach to his disciples at Misitra, near the ruins of ancient Sparta, a political-religious reform, in which a kind of republic of Plato was to be founded upon a restoration of the classical religion similar to that of the emperor Julian. According to a testimony by Giorgio di Trebisonda, he was convinced that Islam and Christianity would soon disappear from the world, and that all men would be united in a universal religion. He began outlining this religion and defining its dogmas and rites in a work, The Laws (Νεμοθεσία, ἡ τῶν νόμων συγγραφή), which his implacable adversary Giorgio Scolario, Gennadius, had destroyed, and of which only a few fragments remain.

In this work, polemicizing against all poetic distortions, he establishes a theology in which Neoplatonic and Neopythagorean themes are connected with the doctrines of the Chaldaean 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 everything”; from him the lesser gods are generated and arranged in ordered hierarchies, and they govern the entire universe directly or through subordinate divinities, “according to an immutable destiny that proceeds from Zeus.”

In Florence, in 1439, during an illness, “in order to please, on the one hand, those who comforted us, and, on the other, the followers of Plato,” he composed the essay On the Difference between Plato and Aristotle, in which he extols Plato for having posited a supreme, unique God, spiritual and separate in nature, while Aristotle is mistreated in every possible way. Hence the venomous polemic of Giorgio di Trebisonda and the response of Bessarione, who had been G.’s disciple in Greece.