Draft:The Aristotle-Plato Debate in the Middle Ages

The Aristotle and Plato debate in the Middle Ages involved attempts to identify differences in the views of the two ancient Greek philosophers and to justify the greater correctness of one of them.

The views of Aristotle and Plato differed in many ways: in his Metaphysics Aristotle questioned the theory of forms, his Politics polemicized with the Laws and the Republic, his treatise On the Heavens refuted Plato's theories regarding soul, time and infinity, and his First Analytics contradicted Plato's views on methods of classification. From the opposite camp, the first response was a treatise by Taurus Calvenus of Beirut (mid-2nd century BCE), which has not survived, criticizing Aristotle's "Categories". A more extensive criticism of Atticus is partially preserved in the excerpts of Eusebius of Caesarea and was known to scholars of the late Renaissance. The conflict between the teachings of Aristotle and Plato was not decisive for ancient philosophy, and the main struggle was between the schools of skeptics (from 270 BC, beginning with Arcesilaus, they headed the Academy), Stoics and Epicureans. In the 1st century BC, Antiochus of Ascalon abandoned Stoicism in favor of orthodox Platonism, which for him included Aristotle. The founder of Neoplatonism Plotinus criticized some of Aristotle's positions, but was well acquainted with his works and the commentaries on them of Alexander of Aphrodisias. Plotinus's student, Porphyry wrote a preface and commentary to the Categories. As a result, when Neoplatonism became the dominant philosophical school of late antiquity, Aristotelianism was an integral part of it. Moreover, of the commentators on Aristotle who did not belong to this school, only the aforementioned Alexander of Aphrodisias can be named. Within the framework of Neoplatonism, Aristotle's criticism of Plato was understood as an insignificant difference in usage, concerning only the material world. Aristotle was relied upon as the main source of information on logic and physics, while Plato was recognized as the highest authority on metaphysics and theology.

Neoplatonism retained its popularity in the Middle Ages, although its links with pagan philosophy were quite obvious. The teachings of the last major Neoplatonist philosopher, Proclus (412-485), were declared a source of heresies by John Philoponus in the 6th century, but the next refutation appeared only 500 years later. The closure of the Academy in Athens by Emperor Justinian in 529 did not lead to an interruption of the tradition. The last Platonists went to the court of the Persian Shah, hoping to find in Khosrow I a Platonic sovereign. The result was the appearance of a Persian translation of the dialogues. For the next several centuries, Plato's followers did not develop new theories, limiting themselves to literary criticism and teaching at the University of Constantinople. Some Christian authors (Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, John of Damascus) attempted to adapt Neoplatonism to the needs of Christian theology. In the 9th century, the chronicler George Amartolos presented Plato as a herald of Christianity, a similar point of view was held in the 11th century by John Mauros. The real revival of Platonism in Byzantium occurred in the 11th century. Thanks to Michael Psellus, inspired by the works of Proclus and Porphyry, Plato's works began to be studied in the East and the Latin West. This aspect of the intellectual connection between Byzantium and the West has not yet been well studied, but the connection was apparently carried out through the Greeks of Sicily and Southern Italy. In the 12th century, new refutations of Proclus were published by Theodore Prodromos and George Tornik, but they were of a general nature. In the same century, Nicholas of Methone published a systematic refutation of Proclus's Principles of Theology, analyzing it chapter by chapter in the light of Orthodox doctrine. During the same period, new translations of Aristotle's texts appeared, and by the 13th century, Aristotelianism had become one of the foundations of medieval university education.

According to I. Medvedev, in the last centuries of the empire's existence, "Platonism clearly became the dominant trend within the humanistic community of Byzantine intellectuals, whose motto could be the words of Michael Apostolius that love for the divine Plato pierced his heart".

Late Byzantine Platonism was not homogeneous and often resulted in formal imitation of Plato. Nikephoros Gregoras called his works "dialogues" and used the intonations and speech patterns of the heroes of Plato's dialogues, which caused mocking criticism from the hesychast Nikolai Cabasilas. However, researchers have found that Gregoras and his teacher Theodore Metochites were deeply familiar with Platonic thought and the Neoplatonic tradition. The attitude of Christian theology to Plato's philosophy was also complex. On the one hand, one can assert the Neoplatonic basis of the teachings of the Church Fathers. If Aristotle gave theologians a scientific apparatus, then Platonism as a teaching turned out to be so comprehensive that it allowed satisfying various spiritual needs and became the basis for various, sometimes mutually exclusive, philosophical and religious doctrines. On the other hand, the church condemned that part of Plato's teaching, from which followed the concept of metempsychosis, the existence of ideas and matter in themselves, thereby denying the free will of the Creator. Platonic terminology was used by many Byzantine theologians, including the head of the hesychasts Gregory Palamas .

According to one approach to explaining the causes of the Platonic-Aristotelian dispute of the 15th century, it became a continuation of the hesychastic dispute on Italian soil. In this case, the hesychasts are understood as exponents of the "naive" Platonizing tradition of the Orthodox Church, while their opponents, above all Barlaam of Calabria, represent the admirers of the Aristotelian West, who desire unity with the Catholic Church. The depiction of the ideological struggle in Byzantium in the 14th-15th centuries through the opposition of "Aristotelians" and "Platonists" goes back to a contemporary of the events, George of Trebizond, and in the 19th century it was shared by the German theologian F.-W. Gass and the Russian Byzantinist Fyodor Uspensky ("The Theological and Philosophical Movement in Byzantium in the 11th and 12th Centuries," 1891). The modern historian James Hankins notes that such an approach leads to simplifications: although hesychastic spirituality has features in common with Neoplatonic metaphysics, its immediate predecessors were Pseudo-Dionysius and other Greek Church Fathers, just as one cannot say of the early anti-Palamites that their views were only pro-Western and Aristotelian. According to Hankins, the hesychastic controversy influenced philosophical debate in a more complex way: on the one hand, the final victory of the Palamites in 1347 caused disappointment and a sense of intellectual decline among Byzantine intellectuals, on the other hand, the Palamites rejected the possibility of ecumenical reconciliation with the West and pinned their long-term hopes on the tolerance of the Ottomans. In response to the renewal of orthodoxy, conservative intellectuals tended to pursue one of three main strategies: a decisive embrace of Western ideology, that is, religiously, conversion to Catholicism, and philosophically, adherence to Aristotelian scholasticism (Manuel Kalekas, the brothers Maximus and Theodore Chrysoverges, Demetrius Scaranos, the emperor John V Palaiologos, Demetrius Cydones, George of Trebizond, John Argyropoulos), a search for a compromise based on Proclus's Platonism (Bessarion of Nicaea), and the presentation of Platonism as a remedy for the distorted orthodoxy and "dialectical terrorism" of Western scholasticism (Plethon).

The culmination of the dispute was the controversy between the Byzantine philosophers Plethon and Gennadius Scholarius in the mid-15th century.