From Dictionary of the Middle Ages, ed. J. Strayer, vol. IX, New York 1987, pp. 694-704.

To be
reprinted in J. Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, Rome: Edizioni di
Storia e letteratura. All rights reserved.

PLATO IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The philosophy of Plato (429-347 BC), the Athenian philosopher, transmitted both

directly and indirectly, had a powerful effect upon the intellectual and cultural life of the

Middle Ages, as upon all other periods of Western civilization. Much of this effect may

be traced to the impact of Plato’s own works, or works attributed to him, upon medieval

thinkers. The medieval Byzantines possessed all thirty-six of the dialogues ascribed to

him by his ancient editors (the great majority of which are now accepted as genuine) as

well as the standard collection of ancient spuria, and a number of other pseudonymous

writings of later date and various origin that were attached to the name of Plato during the

medieval period. The Latin West and Arabic South were less well supplied, but even there

the handful of dialogues known in Latin and Arabic, when combined with reports of

Plato’s thought found in various compendia and in works of other ancient authors, were

sufficient to guarantee Plato’s position as a leading authority in philosophy.

Yet even this direct transmission of Plato’s thought was of less significance in the

Middle Ages than the indirect tradition. Already, prior to the medieval period, Plato’s

thought had formed the basis of the most important philosophical traditions of late

ancient times, now known as Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism, and it was primarily

within these traditions that the Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theologies had attained their

intellectual majority. Thus, at an early period of their development, the sacred literatures
of the three great medieval religions were seeded with Platonic themes and language and

informed by Platonic habits of thought, and this (as it were) latent Platonism in religion

was responsible for much of the vitality Platonic philosophy enjoyed even after the

Aristotelian revolution of the twelfth century.

In this article, however, we shall not consider that broader and more diffuse

stream of Platonic philosophy transmitted by the pagan and Christian writers of the later

Roman Empire, but shall concern ourselves solely with the relatively smaller subject of

the study and impact of Plato’s own works between AD 500 and 1500.

Plato in the Byzantine World

By rights the Byzantine East ought to have been the most fruitful field for the study of

Plato during the Middle Ages. Unlike Latin, Arabic, and Jewish students of Plato, the

Byzantines had available the entire corpus of Plato’s writings, and in their own language.

That Byzantium was not in fact, relatively speaking, greatly productive of Platonic

scholarship was no doubt largely a result of the separation and polarization of inner

(sacred) and outer (pagan) knowledge fostered by Orthodox Christianity, and the

relatively greater importance within it of the mystical tradition and the doctrine of the

unknowability of God. This led, despite the example of the three Cappadocian fathers and

St. Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580-662), to an ambivalence about—often even to a

positive hostility toward—the use of philosophical methods in theological speculation.

After the eleventh century the hostility of Greek Christianity to philosophy intensified to

the point where philosophy became devalued as an autonomous science.

 Moreover, Platonic scholarship in many cases was actually hindered by the very

availability of Plato’s works. In the West, Plato’s thought was gradually assimilated by

Christian thinkers over a period of several centuries, and the incompatibility of his

theological beliefs and moral attitudes with Catholicism was in many cases concealed by

bowdlerized and even Christianized translations. The Greek East had no opportunity for

such gradual and painless assimilation; there, the un-Christian and “immoral” features of

Platonic thought were instantly evident to the (in the early period) more sophisticated

theologians of Orthodoxy, and were only disguised with difficulty.

The suspicion that attached to philosophy as an autonomous discipline thus

prevented the Byzantines from accepting the Aristotelian view that philosophy was the

architectonic science, and encouraged the tendency, going back to Isocrates in the fourth

century B.C., to subordinate philosophy to rhetoric and literary purposes generally. The

approach of the Byzantine scholar to the texts of Plato was thus that of the philologist, the

educator, and the man of letters, rather than that of the pure philosopher. This meant that

Byzantine disputes about Plato’s value rarely followed the lines they did in Latin

scholasticism, where Plato’s scientific authority was defended or challenged according as

his doctrines exhibited a logical consistency with one or another system of Christian

thought. Instead, these Byzantine disputes were cast in the form of a debate (similar to

that of the early Italian Renaissance) between a Christian humanism and a philistine

fundamentalism. The defense of Plato made part of a general defense of the value of

pagan literature, a defense drawing heavily on such sources as St. Basil of Caesarea’s

epistolatory tract Ad adolescentes, in which Plato was highly praised. Byzantine

humanists lauded Plato’s works both as models of pure style and as sources of pious
doctrine, the contemplation of which even in a pagan would strengthen a Christian in his

faith. Much was made of the seeming consonance between Christian beliefs and the

Platonic doctrines of creation, immortality, providence and free will, evil, rewards and

punishments, and homoiōsis theō (becoming like God). Alternatively, doctrines

considered immoral or heretical would be passed over or excised, and the rest declared fit

for Christian consumption. Such an orientation did not entirely preclude free

philosophical speculation on Platonic themes, but it was by nature a fragmentary and

literary approach to Plato’s thought, an approach that stood in the way of a genuine grasp

of Plato’s philosophical system, such as was achieved at a surprisingly early date in the

Latin West. It was the Byzantine humanists who initiated the tendency, later followed by

the Italian humanists of the fifteenth century, to reduce Plato to a set of pious and

melodious loci communes, stripped of their connecting tissue of dialectical reasoning, and

hence of their systematic force.

It has sometimes been asserted that there was an unbroken continuity of the

Platonic tradition in Byzantium from antiquity to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. And

if the mere existence of manuscripts of Plato’s works were the sufficent condition of such

continuity, the point would have to be granted. It is nevertheless difficult to find evidence

for the study of the Platonic dialogues between what may be considered the end of the

ancient Platonic school in the early seventh century, when Stephen of Alexandria lectured

on Plato in Constantinople at the court of Emperor Heraklios (610-641), and the second

and third decades of the ninth century, which find Leo the Mathematician teaching

philosophy privately in Constantinople. Leo is thought to have made a recension

(diorthosis) of Platonic texts, a fact which fits well with what is otherwise known of the
philological orientation of his teaching. Leo was likewise the key figure in the attempt by

Caesar Bardas (d. 866) to found a school in the Magnaura Palace (ca. 855/856), where

the second important student of Plato of the ninth century, Photios (ca. 810-ca. 897), also

taught. Photios was later the patriarch of Constantinople (858) and one of the most

powerful political figures of the age. Not withstanding his declared preference for

Aristotle, Photios was well informed about Plato’s works, though his knowledge seems to

have come chiefly, if not entirely, from intermediary sources. At least in the famous

Bibliotheca (ca. 837/838), Photios relied for his information and opinions entirely on

Hierokles, a Christian Platonist of the fifth century, the second-century rhetorician

Aristides, and an anonymous life of Pythagoras. With Hierokles, Photios approves the

view that Plato and Aristotle are fundamentally in accord on providence, the immortality

of the soul, and cosmology, while reproving Plato for his belief in the pre-existence of the

soul and in the eternity of prime matter, and for his immoral and utopian political views.

With Aristides, he admits that Plato is a great stylist, but faults him for his attacks on

Homer, Pericles, and rhetoric and poetry in general. Rhetoric is in fact more useful and

complete (teleoteros) than philosophy, Photios declares, because while the latter merely

avoids injustice, the former actively causes justice.

Whatever Photios’ dependence on intermediaries, there can be no doubt that the

text of Plato was thoroughly familiar to the next great figure of Byzantine Platonic

scholarship, Photios’ student Arethas of Patras, later the archbishop of Caesarea (fl. 895-

ca. 944). Four surviving manuscripts and three sets of scholia have been plausibly

associated with his studium, and to him also may probably be attributed the most

important collection of philosophical prolegomena to Plato. As this last bit of evidence

indicates, Arethas’ interest in Plato was more than merely philological. While many of his

scholia are textual and grammatical, a sizable number (especially in Vienna,

sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS Phil. gr. 314) show a keen interest in philosophical

issues. Though something of a Platonist himself, Arethas does not hesitate to reprove

Plato (in the second person) for doctrines he considers contrary to Christian truth, and to

warn future readers of potential dangers to their faith.

The revival of humanistic studies in the mid-tenth century under Emperor

Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos (905-959) apparently did not lead immediately to a

revival of philosophy, for Michael Psellos (1018-1078) in an autobiographical passage of

his Chronographia claims sole credit for resuscitating the moribund discipline of

philosophy, presumably in the middle years of the eleventh century. This cannot have

been literally true, however, since Psellos himself shortly afterward speaks of having had

teachers in philosophy; and the manuscript evidence for Plato’s text, at least, shows that a

considerable number were copied and annotated in the later tenth and eleventh centuries

(like the well-known Vienna, sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, MS Suppl. gr. 7).

Psellos may have meant that he was the first in his day to take more than a literary

interest in the philosophical authors of antiquity, an impression borne out by the list he

gives of his reading—Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus—and by his own

numerous writings on philosophical subjects. Psellos’ claim to have personally revived

philosophy is further strengthened by the necessity he was under of defending

philosophical study against the attacks of religious anti-intellectualism, as in his famous

letter to his friend John Xiphilinos (patriarch, 1063-1073) in 1054. Yet despite his plea

there to follow the example of the church fathers in using philosophy to refute heretics
and strengthen faith, Psellos’ own philosophical works, as far as they are presently

known, do not attempt to execute such a program. His works on Platonic philosophy in

particular are highly derivative, being based more or less closely on works of Proclus (as

in his commentary On Plato’s Psychogony), Hermeias (in his Explanation of the Platonic

Chariot-driving of Souls in the Phaedrus and of the Campaigns of the Gods), Plotinus (in

his treatise On the Ideas Which Plato Mentions), and other Neoplatonic intermediaries.

The Platonic renaissance of the eleventh century culminated in the career of

Psellos’ student, the philosopher John Italos (ca. 1025-after 1082), who of all Byzantine

philosophers came nearest to the methods and outlook of Western Scholasticism. For

Italos was a genuine dialectician who wanted to use philosophical doctrines to elucidate

truths of faith and who was even willing to entertain, hypothetically, philosophical theses

contrary to Orthodoxy. But Italos might be viewed as well as having revived the tradition

of Christian Platonism handed down by the Cappadocian fathers, John Philoponus, and

St. Maximus the Confessor. His doctrines are in many respects similar to theirs, and his

doctrines which appear novel are developments very much in their spirit. Italos used

Platonic methods to prove the anti-Platonic doctrines that the world was created ex nihilo

and that the soul was immortal but not eternal. He held that both the Forms and

particulars were causally dependent on God and contingent on his will, an idea ultimately

destructive of the notion of ontological hierarchy, since contingency is the differentia of

that which shares in non-being. His psychology was a complicated mixture of

Aristotelian and Platonic doctrines. What is interesting for our purposes is that Italos

apparently based his teaching in great part upon a reading of Plato’s dialogues themselves
(particularly the Timaeus) as explained by the Neoplatonic commentators and illuminated

by the Christian Platonism of the Fathers.

Yet despite Italos’ adherence to the example of the Fathers, and despite, indeed,

his complete orthodoxy, Italos ran into trouble during the regime of Alexios I Komnenos

(reigned 1081-1118), which in a frenzy of politically motivated anti-intellectualism

condemned him and his doctrines in a famous trial on the Feast of Orthodoxy, 13 March

1082. A number of years later appeared one of Italos’ pupils (and a friend of Alexios I):

Eustratios, bishop of Nicaea (ca. 1060-1120), who wrote, among other works, a

Platonizing commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (translated by Robert Grosseteste

into Latin a century later); Eustratios, too, was condemned (on more substantial grounds)

for theological error in 1117. These two condemnations reveal at once the difficulties

serious students of philosophy faced in the Eastern empire, and help explain the general

transfer of philosophical interests during the twelfth century to the safer waters of

Aristotelian school philosophy.

The greatest setback for medieval Greek Platonism, as for Byzantine culture in

general, was the disaster of 1204. Aside from some copies of Plato’s works dating from

the early Paleologan period there are few signs of interest in Platonic philosophy until the

time of the great fourteenth-century polyhistor and humanist Theodore Metochites, who

praises Plato as the “Olympus of Wisdom,” and cites him many times in his

Hypomnematismoi or Commentaries. He, too, defends the orthodoxy of Plato’s

cosmology. Although his knowledge of it would seem to be largely derived from

Iamblichus’ (d. ca. 330) De communi mathematica scientia, the knowledge of it

possessed by his opponent in the controversy that developed, Nikephoros Choumnos (ca.
1250-1327), was certainly based on a first-hand knowledge of the Timaeus and was

probably informed by the speculation of the Cappadocian fathers as well. Metochites’

interest in Plato was continued by his student, the little-studied Nikephoros Gregoras

(1290-1359/1360), who is regarded by some scholars as a forerunner of Georgios

Gemistos Plethon (d. 1452).

In the later fourteenth century, intellectual energies were absorbed in the

hesychast controversy, in which Platonism took a part, but more as a rallying cry for the

humanists than as an object of serious study. The last act of Byzantine Platonism came in

the fifteenth century and was played out mostly on Italian soil by Byzantine migrés.

One of the earliest, Manuel Chrysoloras (d. 1415), translated the Republic into Latin (ca.

1402) and inspired the first generation of Italian humanists, especially Guarino da Verona

(1374-1460) and Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), with a keen interest in Plato. Gemistos

Plethon, who had founded a school of Platonic philosophy in Mistra, near ancient Sparta,

is credited with having inspired Cosimo de’ Medici with the idea of founding a Platonic

Academy, if this story is not (as it is likely to be) an invention of Marsilio Ficino.1

Plethon’s political views (based obscurely on the Republic) and his even more bizarre

proposals for the revival of a Neoplatonized paganism to serve as a unified world

religion, replacing Christianity and Islam, gave rise to the important Plato-Aristotle

controversy of the mid-fifteenth century, and to Cardinal Bessarion’s famous reply to

George of Trebizond, the In calumniatorem Platonis (1469), a book which helped shape

the Western reading of Plato for more than a century.

Plato in the Arab World

The study of Plato in the Arabic world began at about the same time it was being revived

in the Byzantine East, in the early ninth century. This age saw a number of Plato’s works

translated into Arabic by Nestorian Christians working in the court of the caliphs in

Baghdad. In the early ninth century the Timaeus was translated by Yahya ibn al-Bitriq;

later in the century the famous Syrian Nestorian Christian Hunain ibn Ishaq (Johannitius,

808-873) and his school translated at least the Republic, the Laws, the Sophist (with

Olympiodorus’ sixth-century commentary) and (for a second time) the Timaeus, as well

as Proclus’ commentary on the Timaeus and Galen’s medical commentary on the same

work. The Jacobite Yahya ibn ‘Adi in the tenth century retranslated the Laws and revised

the earlier translation of the Timaeus; to him may also be attributed the translations of the

Apology, Crito, and Phaedo quoted by later philosophers. Of these translations, nothing

today survives but fragments of Proclus’ and Galen’s commentaries on the Timaeus and

some collections of sententiae.

The translators not only provided the Arabic world with translations of Plato

himself, they also made versions of a number of late ancient commentaries and

compilations based on his work. In addition to the works of Olympiodorus, Galen, and

Proclus already mentioned, they turned Galen’s Synopsis of the Platonic Dialogues (of

which a part survives), Plutarch’s commentary on the Timaeus (now lost, or perhaps

identical with his De animae procreatione in Timaeo, handed down with many Greek

manuscripts of Plato), and a work on the order of Plato’s books by Theon of Smyrna (fl.

second century), of which a fragment survives. A compilation based on Proclus and

known later in the West as the Liber de causis was probably translated into Arabic from a
late Greek source and became an important authority in Islamic philosophy, just as did

the Theologia Aristotelis, a work based loosely on Enneads IV-VI of Plotinus. A

collection known as the Platonica (Istanbul, Aya Sophia MS 2821) contains a variety of

political and moral maxims from Plato, with a commentary on the last book of the Laws

at the end. There were in addition a number of apocryphal works attributed to Plato of

apparently Arabic origin, including two letters (Istanbul, University Library, MS 1458,

fols. 105-106 and fols. 206-211), a collection of medical recipes (Paris, Biblioth que

Nationale, MS arab. 2577, fol. 104), the Liber de tredecim clavibus sapientiae majoris

(surviving in Latin in Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, MS Zan. lat. 324), and the so-called

Liber quartus, which was translated into Latin around 1200 with commentary and had

some influence in the West.

As the range and character of these texts suggest, the interest of the Arabs in

Plato’s works was chiefly scientific, moral and metaphysical, and their interpretation of

his philosophy regularly Neoplatonic. Philosophical ethics as a whole in the Islamic

crescent was based on Plato rather than Aristotle, although it remains a matter of some

doubt whether this situation reflected a genuine preference or arose merely from the

accident that Plato’s Republic and Laws were available in Arabic, whereas Aristotle’s

Politics was not. With Plato’s metaphysics, or his metaphysics as interpreted by

Neoplatonic commentators, Islam had an obvious affinity, for the doctrine of emanation

was the cornerstone of Arabic philosophy until the time of al-Ghazali (1058-1111). All

Arabic philosophers, it may be said, were Platonists insofar as they were metaphysicians,

but the degree to which this Platonism was the result of reading Plato himself was in most

cases probably small.

 The Islamic philosopher most influenced by Plato was al-Farabi (Alfarabius), who

flourished in the first half of the tenth century (d. 950). Al-Farabi seems to have known

nearly all of Plato’s works—at least he quotes their titles—as well as the important

conciliatio of Plato and Aristotle preserved in Simplicius’ (sixth century) commentaries

on the De caelo and the Categoriae, which the Islamic philosopher repeated with

approval. He wrote a treatise on the order of Plato’s books and made an abridgment of the

Laws with commentary; both works survive. In his theological works he shows himself a

Neoplatonist, and his political philosophy makes interesting use of the Republic by

introducing the notion of the philosopher-king as a way of reforming the Islamic

caliphate.

Other Islamic philosophers had less close relations with the text of Plato. Ibn Sina

(Avicenna, 980-1037) was a Neoplatonist who espoused a hierarchical emanationism and

shows considerable acquaintance with Plato’s cosmological and political doctrines. Ibn

Rushd (Averroës, 1126-1198), though he wrote a commentary on the Republic, was

chiefly concerned with cleansing the interpretation of Aristotle of Neoplatonic elements.

So, too, al-Ghazali attacked Avicenna’s Neoplatonizing theology and cosmology in the

name of Islamic fundamentalism, but by a curious irony became himself an important

source of Neoplatonic doctrine for the West when the first book of his Incoherence of the

Philosophers (Tahafut al-Falasifah) – which summarized the doctrine of the philosophers

(that is, Neoplatonists) as a prelude to refuting them – was translated into Latin and taken

by the Scholastics as representative of al-Ghazali’s own views.

Plato in Jewish Philosophy

Within the orbit of Islamic philosophy, at least until the early thirteenth century, moved

also the Jewish philosophers of the Middle Ages, who indeed wrote most of their

philosophical works in Arabic until the early twelfth century. There are, as far as is

known, no Hebrew translations of Plato and no direct study of the dialogues by any

medieval Jewish philosopher, yet most of the Jewish philosophy before the later twelfth

century was marked more or less deeply by the Neoplatonism widely diffused in Arabic

lands, and especially by the doctrine of the Theologia Aristotelis. Such philosophers as

Isaac ben Solomon Israeli (ca. 855-ca. 955), who was translated into Latin in the mid-

twelfth century, Joseph ibn Saddiq (early twelfth century), and Solomon ben Judah ibn

Gabirol (Avicebron, ca. 1021-ca. 1058) can be plausibly classified as Neoplatonists; the

latter’s Fons vitae, translated into Latin in the thirteenth century, evidently influenced

Bonaventure with its sub-Plotinian notion that spiritual substances were composed of

matter and form. But in the later twelfth century, along with its Byzantine, Islamic, and

Latin cousins, Jewish philosophy, led by Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), became

rigorously focused on the works of Aristotle.

In the thirteenth century, Jewish philosophy shifted to Latin Christian lands, a

circumstance which only reinforced its existing Aristotelian bias. It is indeed difficult to

find any examples of Jewish study of Plato in Arabic or Christian lands in the later

Middle Ages, aside from Samuel ben Judah ha-Marsili’s fourteenth-century Hebrew

translation of Averroës’ commentary on the Republic, which in the fifteenth century was

translated into Latin by the Jewish teacher of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Elijah ben
Moses del Medigo (ca. 1460-1497), and is preserved in Siena (Biblioteca Comunale, MS

G.VII.32, fols. 158-188).

Plato in the Latin West

It was within Latin Christianity, the last of the three medieval traditions to reach

philosophical maturity, that the future of Platonic studies and the Platonic tradition lay.

The Latin West had initially the smallest firsthand knowledge of Plato. The only dialogue

it possessed until the twelfth century was the first third of the Timaeus, translated in late

ancient times by Calcidius (or Chalcidius) and provided by him with a commentary

whose philosophical character was highly eclectic. In the mid twelfth century (between

1154 and 1160), Henricus Aristippus, archdeacon of Catania under William I of Sicily (d.

1166), translated the Meno and the Phaedo, and in the later thirteenth century (between

1274 and 1286) the Flemish Dominican William of Moerbeke (ca. 1215-1286) translated,

at the request of Thomas Aquinas, Proclus’ commentary on the Parmenides, which

included a substantial part of the dialogue itself. But the ad verbum technique employed

by both translators rendered much of these versions obscure and thus limited their impact

on medieval thinkers. It was chiefly the Timaeus, with Calcidius’ commentary, that

represented Plato’s thought to the medieval Latin West; it has survived in over 180

manuscripts and was glossed and commented upon dozens of times between the late

eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, though only a handful of these glosses have seen

print. The portion of the Timaeus translated by Cicero under the title De mundo does not

appear to have been the object of study or glossing before the late fifteenth century.
 For the rest, Plato’s writings and opinions were preserved in testimonia and

summaries contained in the writings of ancient Latin authors, particularly Cicero, Seneca,

Apuleius, Macrobius, St. Augustine, and Martianus Capella. In late antiquity there was

also translated into Latin a Middle Platonic summary of Plato’s dialogues, called by

Raymond Klibansky the Summarium librorum Platonis, but whose correct medieval title

was De Platonis pluribus libris compendiosa expositio. This unpublished work had some

circulation and was apparently known to Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200-1280) and Thomas

Aquinas (1224-1274). Boethius among other quotations reports the teaching of the

Timaeus in metrum 9 of book III in his De consolatione Philosophiae, a poem that was

commented upon frequently throughout the Middle Ages. Porphyry in his Isagoge and

the Pseudo-Dionysius, translated respectively in the sixth and ninth centuries, gave

accounts of a number of Plato’s doctrines, albeit in Neoplatonic dress. The great wave of

Aristotelian translations in the thirteenth century further increased the West’s knowledge

of the dialogues, for Nemesius, Themistius (both fourth century), Proclus (d. 485),

Simplicius (fl. early sixth century), Avicenna, and Averroës between them provided a

copious store of Platonic testimonia. Most important of all, ironically enough, was

Aristotle himself, who in many of his works, especially the Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics,

and De anima, gives Plato’s views on a given question (however tendentiously), thus

supplying the matter for a revival within Latin Scholasticism of the ancient tradition of

the comparatio, or comparison, of Plato and Aristotle.

The net effect of this profusion of texts was, as might be expected, considerable

confusion. Unlike the situation in Byzantium and Islam, where the Neoplatonic

interpretation of Plato reigned relatively undisturbed, in the West Plato’s thought was
presented by Academic skeptics, Stoics, Aristotelians, and eclectics as well as

Neoplatonists. In the books of auctoritates there thus appeared many doctrines ascribed

to Plato that a modern scholar would have great difficulty in recognizing as Platonic. In

some few cases this was a fructuosa confusio which allowed men of learning and

philosophical penetration, such as Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns

Scotus, to develop a fairly sophisticated grasp of Plato’s doctrines concerning the forms,

participation, the soul, and the process of cognition. But for most medieval thinkers, if the

philosophy of Plato meant anything coherent at all, it meant the natural philosophy and

cosmology of the Timaeus.

It was the Timaeus, certainly, that engaged the attention of early medieval

students of Plato. John Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century was familiar with the

dialogue, and through it scholars of the tenth and eleventh centuries were able to

recognize the philosophical paternity of Boethius’ Consolatio (III, 9), thus giving rise to

a lively debate whether the latter was in his Consolatio writing as a Christian Platonist

or as a Platonist simpliciter. This controversy was, however, largely a mask for a more

fundamental debate on the value of secular learning. In it, Plato became the symbol of

secular learning (or “philosophy”), just as Aristotle was to become in the thirteenth

century. Bovo II of Corvey (d. 916) regarded the Consolatio as a work of pagan

philosophy, and hence as a book to be studied with caution, if at all; yet, like Augustine,

he would take the trouble for apologetic purposes at least to attempt to understand its

doctrines and identify its errors. A more positive attitude is represented by Adalbold of

Utrecht (d. 1026), who regarded Boethius as a Christian philosopher and Platonism as a

kind of secondary source of divine wisdom. Of yet greater interest is a controversy with
political overtones in the late eleventh century (ca. 1085), this time between the

Gregorian Manegold of Lautenbach and Wolfheim of Cologne, a Benedictine who was

at once an opponent of Gregory VII and (through Boethius) a sectator Platonis.

Wolfheim’s uncritical acceptance of heretical Platonic doctrines, says Manegold, has led

to his refusal to obey the will of God in political matters, and to his belief that “we have

no pontiff but Caesar.” Manegold admits that the Fathers did well to take over certain

Platonic ethical doctrines, but he rejects the cosmological speculations of the early

medieval schools as representing a dangerous challenge to the truths revealed in

Genesis.

It was in this heated polemical atmosphere that the Platonist masters of the

cathedral schools of northern France set about their mission in the early twelfth century

of reconciling the cosmology of Plato with the doctrines of Genesis. To counter the

hostility exhibited in some quarters to pagan philosophy, they had recourse to the

Christian Platonism of the Greek Fathers, which they had probably absorbed via Scotus

Eriugena. Nature, and all objects presented to man’s senses and reason, they argued, are

sources of divine light provided by God to pagan and Christian alike – inferior, no

doubt, to Scripture, yet useful for bringing pagans to Christian truth and for enlarging

the Christian’s knowledge of divine wisdom. Since all nature was modeled on Ideas

contained within the mind of God, which were engendered in matter (hyle, materia,

silva) by his Word (identified with Christ), a knowledge of creation will lead ultimately

to a knowledge of the mind of the Creator.

With this conviction, and with a new and broader literary culture, the Platonists

associated with Chartres and other cathedral schools of northern France developed in
the course of the twelfth century an important body of commentaries and glosses on the

Timaeus (mostly unpublished), which drew upon an ever-wider range of sources in the

effort to fathom Plato’s thought, and especially upon Boethius, Macrobius, Apuleius,

and Seneca. Although the chief goal of these works was to reconcile the Platonic and

biblical accounts of creation, so that they were oriented primarily towards questions of

physics and cosmology, the commentary form allowed digression into such diverse

areas as medicine, politics, number theory, optics, and music. This is a progressive

movement. While in Bernard of Chartres’s (d. ca. 1130) recently-identified commentary

on the Timaeus the concerns remained primarily moral and theological, by the time of

William of Conches (d. ca. 1154), the text of the Timaeus had become the focus of the

entire range of early twelfth-century learning. The study of the Timaeus and other

Platonic texts moreover gave rise for the first time in the Latin West to a large and

independent body of Platonic literature, such as Thierry of Chartres’ (fl. 1121-1148) and

Clarembald of Arras’ (d. ca. 1187) treatises on Genesis. Bernard Silvesters’ (fl. 11410-

ca. 1160) visionary dialogue, the Cosmographia, modeled on Boethius and Martianus

Capella, gave literary expression to the Chartrean vision of God’s glory reflected in the

order of nature. The most interesting of the group from the philosophical point of view

was Gilbert of Poitiers (Gilbert de la Porrée, ca. 1076-1154), whom tienne Gilson

credits with having encouraged “the diffusion of that particular form of Platonism we

might call the realism of essences,” a form of Platonism that was to culminate in the

metaphysics of Duns Scotus.

The later twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw the universities mature into the

leading centers of learning; they saw a movement away from the literary concerns of the
twelfth-century masters, and the various branches of learning transformed into well-

defined and ordered bodies of scientific knowledge, fully synthesized with Christian

theology. Contact with Islam and heretical sects imparted a new apologetical direction

to university studies, especially in the new preaching orders. All these changes were

inimical to the study of Plato’s works, with their literary dress, dialogic uncertainties,

and suspect doctrine. The works of Aristotle, now translated in great numbers, satisfied

much better the new orientation of medieval learning: they had encyclopedic range,

apparent scientific certainty, and a textbook approach ideal for university teaching.

Moreover, their doctrine, if no less heretical in places than Plato’s, had had many of its

blemishes disguised or excused by the Islamic commentaries that were translated at

about the same time: hence, the Aristotelian revolution of the later twelfth and early

thirteenth centuries and the consequent eclipse of Plato.

Yet, though no longer the leading auctor in philosophy, Plato continued to be

studied. The Timaeus was still copied and glossed, and remained an important authority

in cosmology, physics, mathematics, and optics. The new translations of Aristotle and

his commentators cast more light on Plato’s metaphysical, psychological, and political

doctrines. Plato’s theory of forms and his notion of being exercised some influence

(mostly indirectly) on realist metaphysicians; his psychology and cosmology were still

adhered to by Albertus Magnus and his Rhenish disciples when the rest of the

intellectual globe had turned to Aristotle; his doctrine of participation figured in Thomas

Aquinas’ teachings on metaphysics and natural law. Plato’s political views, on the other

hand, known chiefly through Aristotle’s inaccurate report of them in Politics II, were

routinely condemned as impracticable and perverse. In the later thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries, though the so-called “light-metaphysics” of the Neoplatonists

enjoyed a renewed vogue, the study of Plato remained restricted to a few scholars, such

as Henry of Ghent (d. 1397), Henry Bate of Malines, and Petrarch. In the theological

faculties of the universities the doctors had taken warning from the condemnation of

1277 and had begun to dissociate themselves from the thirteenth-century program of

reconciling theology and philosophy. In the arts faculties, philosophical studies were

concentrated upon logic, physics, and moral philosophy, and in all of these disciplines

Aristotle was taken as the authority par excellence, although there are some signs that

the Timaeus was occasionally used as a text in physics. Petrarch summed up the

situation as he saw it in his well-known dictum, “A pluribus Aristoteles, a majoribus

Plato laudatus est” (More men praise Aristotle; better ones, Plato).

The Italian Humanists and the Revival of Christian Platonism

The revival of Platonic study in the West had to await the fifteenth century and the first

generation of Italian humanists instructed in Greek. A new wave of Latin versions then

appeared, this time translated into readable literary prose, often with bowdlerizations

and Christianizations of passages the humanists thought inappropriate. The migré

Greek Manuel Chrysoloras translated the Republic with his student Uberto Decembrio

around 1402; this translation was thoroughly revised in the late 1430s by Uberto’s son

Pier Candido, who also translated the Lysis (1456). Another student of Chrysoloras,

Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444), translated the Phaedo (1405), Letters (1411), part of the

Phaedrus (1424), the Crito and the Apology (in two redactions, both before 1427), and a

speech from the Symposium (c. 1435). During the 1430s Francesco Filelfo translated
three of the Letters and the Euthyphro. At mid-century George of Trebizond (Georgius

Trapezuntius), despite his anti-Platonic prejudices; translated the Parmenides for

Nicholas of Cusa (1459) and the Laws for the Senate of Venice (1450/1451). Perhaps

the most popular dialogue was the pseudo-Platonic Axiochus, which was put into Latin

by four different translators and had a wide circulation. The translation activity of the

fifteenth century culminated in the work of Marsilio Ficino, who published the first

complete translation of the nine tetralogies in 1484; this version became the most

important channel of Plato’s thought to early modern Europe.

Despite this extraordinary burst of translations, Plato did not succeed in

reentering the universities during the fifteenth century. Platonism and the study of Plato

flourished, to be sure, but outside the universities, among the educated gentlemen who

formed the audience of the humanists, and in the courts of popes and princes. The early

humanists had themselves no very profound understanding of Platonic philosophy and

were chiefly interested in Plato as an example of one of their favorite themes (borrowed

from their Byzantine teachers), the necessity of joining wisdom with eloquence. Then,

too, they sought to use Plato in the defense of the studia humanitatis against the

philistines by showing how his philosophical arguments strengthened Christian beliefs

in such doctrines as the immortality of the soul and rewards and punishments after

death. But the dialogic form of Plato’s works presented them with severe difficulties

when it came to the task of interpreting Plato’s philosophy, and Bruni, Guarino, and

Uberto Decembrio at least, like John of Salisbury and Petrarch earlier, tended

consequently to embrace the easier Academic interpretation of Plato found in Cicero

and in Augustine’s Contra academicos.

 The revival of Christian Platonism as a real philosophical alternative came in the

mid- and late fifteenth century with Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), Cardinal Bessarion

(ca. 1403-1472), Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

(1463-1494). Nicholas of Cusa possessed and annotated copies of most of the medieval

and humanistic translations of Plato, and though he wrote no study of Plato himself, he

did much to spread Platonic thought in Italy and Germany by means of the original

blend of mystical and Neoplatonic elements in his own philosophical works. The Plato-

Aristotle controversy of mid century, incited by Georgios Gemistos Plethon and

continued by both Greek and Latin scholars, was a channel for the introduction to the

West of the Byzantine study and interpretation of Plato; the two major works it

produced, George of Trebizond’s Comparatio Platonis et Aristotelis (1458) and

Bessarion’s In calumniatorem Platonis (1469), began the Renaissance tradition of

comparing or synthesizing Plato and Aristotle which was to reach its peak in the

sixteenth century. Bessarion was moreover responsible for the preservation of much of

ancient Platonic philosophy through the donation of his large collection of Greek books

to the city of Venice, a gift which became the nucleus of the present-day Biblioteca

Marciana.

There is, however, little doubt that the greatest contribution to Platonic study in

the fifteenth century was made by Marsilio Ficino, who in addition to his own original

synthesis of Christianity and Platonism translated the entire corpus of Plato’s dialogues

into Latin and provided with them lengthy commentaries and arguments explaining the

text. In these commentaries a Christian Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato

predominated, but he exploited other sources as well, as in his Compendium in

Timaeum, which draws some of its material from the medieval glossary tradition of the

dialogue. Ficino also translated Plotinus (1492) and several Neoplatonic commentaries

on Plato. These translations were extremely influential; they were reprinted many times

and successfully ousted their rival versions for several centuries. Ficino also exercised a

personal influence as the leader of a circle of philosophers, theologians, doctors, and

gentlemen scholars interested in the study of Platonic thought; through visitors to

Florence and through his correspondence, Ficino was able to spread his revived

Christian Platonism throughout Europe. Thus it was Ficino’s work, built upon centuries

of medieval thought and learning, that presented Plato and Platonism to the modern

world.
 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY IN ENGLISH

General works

Arthur Hilary ARMSTRONG, ed., The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early
Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge 1967, repr. with corrections 1970; Stephen GERSH,
Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism: the Latin Tradition, 2 vols., Notre Dame
(Indiana) 1986; Raymond KLIBANSKY, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition
During the Middle Ages, Oxford 1939; repr. with supplement, Munich 1981; James
HANKINS, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., London—Leiden 1990.

Plato in the Byzantine world

Lowell CLUCAS, The Trial of John Italos and the Crisis of Intellectual Values in
Byzantium in the Eleventh Century, Munich 1981; Paul Oskar KRISTELLER,
Byzantine and Western Platonism in the Fifteenth Century, in his Renaissance Thought
and Its Sources, New York 1979, pp. 150-163; Leendert Gerrit WESTERINK, Texts and
Studies in Neoplatonism and Byzantine Literature, Amsterdam 1980; Christopher
Montague WOODHOUSE, George Gemistos Plethon, the Last of the Hellenes, Oxford
1986.

Plato in the Arab world.

Alexander ALTMANN, ed., Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Cambridge
(Massachusetts) 1967; Muhsin MAHDI, tr., Alfarabi’s Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle,
rev. ed., Ithaca (New York) 1969; Franz ROSENTHAL, On the Knowledge of Plato’s
Philosophy in the Islamic World, in <<Islamic Culture>>, XIV, 1940; Richard
WALZER, Platonism in Islamic Philosophy, in his Greek into Arabic. Essays on Islamic
Philosophy, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1962, pp. 236-252.
Plato in the Latin West
Michael J. B. ALLEN, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of His “Phaedrus”
Commentary, Its Sources and Genesis, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1984; F. Edward
CRANZ, The Transmutation of Platonism in the development of Nicolaus Cusanus and
of Martin Luther, in Nicolò Cusano agli inizi del mondo moderno Florence 1970, pp.
73-102, reprinted in CRANZ’s Nicholas of Cusa and the Renaissance, ed. Thomas M.
Izbicki and Gerald Christianson, Aldershot 2000, pp. 169-193; Peter DRONKE,
Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Leiden 1974; The
“Glosae super Platonem” of Bernard of Chartres, ed. Paul Edward DUTTON, Toronto
1991; Leopold GAUL, Alberts des Grossen Verhaltnis zu Plato, M nster 1913;
Margaret GIBSON, The Study of the Timaeus in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,
<<Pensamiento>>, XXV, 1969; Nikolaus M. HRING, Chartres and Paris Revisited,
in Essays in Honour of Anton Charles Pegis, ed. J. Reginald O’Donnell, Toronto 1974;
Robert John HENLE, Saint Thomas and Platonism, The Hague 1956; Édouard
JEAUNEAU, "Lectio philosophorum": Recherches sur l’école de Chartres, Amsterdam
1973; Raymond KLIBANSKY, The School of Chartres, in Twelfth-century Europe and
the Foundations of Modern Society, ed. M. Clagett, G. Post and R. Reynolds, 1961,
repr. 1966, idem, Plato’s Parmenides in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in
<<Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies>>, I, ii, 1943; Paul Oskar KRISTELLER, The
Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, New York 1943, repr. Gloucester (Massachusetts) 1964;
idem, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, Rome 1956, and idem, Renaissance
Thought II: Papers on Humanism and The Arts, New York 1965; Stephan KUTTNER,
Gratian and Plato, in Church and Government in the Middle Ages, ed. C. N. L. Brooke
et al., Cambridge 1976, pp. 93-118, reprinted in KUTTNER, The History of Ideas and
Doctrines of Canon Law in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed., Brookfield (Vermont) 1980; Arthur
LITTLE, S. J., The Platonic Heritage of Thomism, Dublin 1949; Edward Patrick
MAHONEY, Metaphysical Foundations of the Hierarchy of Being According to Some
Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophers, in Philosophies of Existence, Ancient
and Modern, ed. Parviz Morewedge, New York 1982, pp. 165-257; John MONFASANI,
George of Trebizond. A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic, Leiden-
London 1976; Richard W. SOUTHERN, Humanism and the School of Chartres, in his
Medieval Humanism and Other Studies, New York 1970, pp. 61-85, and idem, The
Schools of Paris and the School of Chartres, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth
Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 1982,
pp. 173-200; idem, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Oxford 1995;
Eugène N. TIGERSTEDT, The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of
Plato, Helsinki 1974; Winthrop WETHERBEE, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth
Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres, Princeton 1972.
1
[See article VIII, below.]