CHAPTER NINE
MONOTHEISTS, DUALISTS AND PAGANS

Christopher Livanos

The scholarly literature devoted to paganism and Orthodoxy in the Byzantine empire has understandably focused on the very earliest part of the Byzantine history, when paganism still had significant numbers and prestige.¹ The empire, however, did not cease to have important relations with groups of people, internal as well as external, whom we would today classify as “pagan.” We may note from the outset that no satisfactory equivalent to “pagan” existed in the language of the Byzantines. Any essay purporting to cover the topic of “Orthodoxy and Paganism” in Byzantium ought to discuss not only the pagan holdouts of late antiquity, but polytheistic people such as the pre-Christian Slavs, and Byzantines whose interest in paganism ranged from the syncretism of Michael Psellos to George Gemistos Plethon’s full embrace of a Neoplatonic form of pagan religion. After paganism forever lost the battle for the empire’s soul to Christianity, the pre-Christian past remained an important part of the cultural heritage of educated Byzantines. Officially, a Byzantine was expected to revile the ancient religion while admiring other aspects of ancient culture. The boundary between acceptable and excessive admiration for pagan antiquity was not always clear, and charges of paganism could be leveled against scholars of antiquity by their opponents for reasons of theological disagreement, political rivalry or personal animosity.

Nobody in the medieval or late antique world referred to himself as a “pagan.” Conversely, everyone, whatever his religious beliefs may have been, regarded himself as orthodoxos, or “right-believing.” I believe it is important to discuss paganism and Orthodoxy not only in the empire’s early years but throughout its existence, but one of the admitted obstacles is how we are to understand these terms. Kaldellis suggests that Byzantines used “pagan,” literally hellene, to mean polytheist;² but I prefer not to use that wording due to the problems that emerge in attempting to sort out which religions are polytheist and which are not. Zoroastrians and neo-Platonists thought of themselves as the purest of monotheists, while Christians were accused by their opponents of idolatry and tritheism. To the Byzantines, a pagan was not so much a polytheist as a worshipper of a false god. Those who differed from the true Orthodox faith were divided into those who worshipped false gods and those who worshipped the correct god in an incorrect manner. In the former group were the hellenes, and in the latter Jews and heretics, though terms such as “pagan” and “heretic” could also be used as generic terms of abuse with little theological precision.

It has been argued that monotheism is an abstraction at which few believers arrive and that popular religion is often polytheistic and always at least dualistic.³ This chapter will not be concerned with the influence of polytheistic religions on the cults of saints and angels. It is sufficient to say that, by late antiquity, paganism had developed a monotheistic belief system at the level of the doctrine taught by elite theologians. One who argues that, in practice, Orthodox and Catholic Christianity have absorbed elements of paganism must also acknowledge that pagan theologians were, in theory, monotheistic or monistic. Plotinus may have had a sounder claim than a Christian, Muslim or Jew to the title of monotheist, since his theology did not include the doctrine of an evil spirit that has always been difficult to reconcile with the avowed monotheism of the Abrahamic faiths. Even religions like Protestant Christianity that do not have multiple gods or quasi-divine intermediaries such as saints and angels nonetheless teach that the one supremely good God is opposed by a supremely evil adversary. We must, then, ask how Christianity differs from Manichaeism, and the answer is not always clear. Christianity in all of its traditional Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant forms resolves the problem of evil by stating that evil has no being in itself but is rather a privation of being.⁴ Such a definition of evil arose in opposition to Manichaeism’s insistence that good and evil are both essences that have always existed in opposition. Properly understood, Orthodox Christianity’s response to the Manichees in no way diminishes the reality of evil. Cold and starvation are two harmful physical phenomena defined by the privation of something else, heat and nourishment, and Christianity transposes the same sort of physical phenomena into the metaphysical realm in formulating its understanding of the nature of evil. For all its nuance, “battle with the forces of the privation of good” does not have the same ring as “battle with the forces of evil,” and Christianity, like most monotheistic religions, maintains a strong streak of dualism at the level of practical piety. Since the Christian idea of evil as privatio boni was used mostly as a refutation of dualistic belief systems, we ought to point out that the doctrine does not really contradict a dualistic view of reality. While the Fathers of the Christian Church were refuting dualism with the argument that goodness is existence and evil is non-existence, Zoroastrian theologians were defending dualism with precisely the same argument.⁵ The privatio boni argument probably has its origins in Zarathustra’s statement that Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu are, respectively, “life and not-life.”⁶

If true monotheism is rare at the level of piety, true polytheism is equally rare at the level of theology. The “pagan” philosophers of antiquity, from the pre-Socratics down through the neo-Platonists all maintained a belief in a single transcendent god. Zoroastrian theologians likewise have always viewed their religion as a pure form of monotheism. Their belief in heavenly beings is no more polytheistic than the Christian, Jewish or Muslim belief in angels; and their belief in a divine heptad (Ahura Mazda and six divine beings exemplary of the created order) is inspired by a monotheistic impulse as profound as that behind the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Even the famous “Zoroastrian dualism” is not a true bi-theism, as the evil principal is never thought of as a “god” nor viewed as in any way equal to the good creator. When we consider the Orthodox conflict with Manichees and later dualistic belief systems, we would do well to recall the words of the Iranologist E. W. West:

Neither party seems to have fairly considered how any religion which admits the personality of an evil spirit, in order to account for the existence of evil, can fail to become a dualism to a certain extent. If, therefore, the term is to be used in controversy, it behooves those who use it to define the limits of objectionable dualism with great precision, so as not to include most of the religions of the world, their own among the number. If it be necessary for a dualism that the evil spirit be omnipresent, omniscient, almighty, or eternal, then is the Parsi religion no dualism.⁷

West’s remarks on the weakness of Christian polemics against Zoroastrianism apply equally to most of the charges against allegedly bi-theistic and polytheistic belief systems.

The persecutions that took place from the beginning of the Christian era until the conversion of Constantine shaped how all Christians would view paganism. In general, Christians in lands that experienced violent conflicts between Christianity and the pre-Christian religions viewed the achievements of pagan antiquity with ambivalence, while peoples such as the Irish and the Norse, who converted to Christianity with little bloodshed, were frequently positive in their portrayal of their own pagan ancestors. Dante agonized over the fate of just pagans until he was driven to put them in Limbo, previously reserved for unbaptized infants. We may contrast the Beowulf poet, who states with no equivocation that the just pagan king Scyld Scefing “crossed over into the Lord’s keeping.”⁸ Greek Christians of late antiquity had an especially ambiguous attitude toward their pagan past. While the doctrine of Limbo was not an option to consider for an eleventh-century Byzantine poet, John Mauropous clearly felt concerns similar to Dante’s when he composed a prayer for God to save the souls of Plato and Plutarch.⁹

Byzantinists and neo-Hellenists are familiar with the argument that the term “Hellene” was synonymous with “pagan.” A more convincing argument is that “Hellene” meant not so much “pagan” as “ancient.”¹⁰ A Byzantine would have been confused under most circumstances had he heard a non-Greek polytheist referred to as a “Hellene.” “Ancient” may be a more fitting rendering of the term “Hellene,” because “ancient” may mean either venerable or backward, or both, depending on the context; and similar connotations are found in Byzantine use of “Hellene.” Greek Christians commonly referred to themselves as Hellenes, which is why “pagan” is not a fully satisfactory translation. “Ancient” may seem an even worse translation because, in Byzantine Greek, it is common to call oneself and one’s contemporaries “Hellenes,” but when helln is chosen rather than christianos, Romaios or another alternative, the speaker is often invoking pride in the antiquity of his people. This is especially true in works from the twelfth century onwards.¹¹

Study of pagan classics was a fundamental part of Byzantine education, and the danger that pagan religion might be absorbed through osmosis as one mastered the language of the Hellenes was a dilemma first addressed seriously by Church Fathers of the fourth century. Prior to that, the threat of persecution made Christians uninterested in how to appreciate Homer’s language without accidentally worshipping his gods. Recent studies, including those of Kaldellis and Roilos, have contributed significantly to the already considerable body of scholarship on pagan influence on Byzantine intellectual life.¹² Another important way in which paganism influenced Byzantine society was in the absorption of pagan gods into the ranks of demons of the Orthodox Church. If elites had to grant the pagans at least a grudging respect for their contributions to the empire’s high culture, demonology was important to all ranks of Byzantine society and it contributed to an overwhelmingly negative perception of the pagan past. The most astute study of the topic that has been done to date is Cyril Mango’s Diabolus byzantinus, which argues, “The system of demonology adopted by the Church was specifically a response to the situation of the second and fourth centuries, and its chief plank was the identification of paganism, its cults and oracles, and, of course, its persecution of Christians with the demonic.”¹³

After the rise of Christianity and the eclipse of the old polytheistic religion, the Christian empire inherited pagan Rome’s rivalry with Persia. The complex history of relations between Zoroastrian Persia and Greek civilization from the time of the first Greco-Persian wars until the Muslim conquest of Persia deserves more attention than it has received. Discussion of Zoroastrianism in this chapter will be confined to how Zoroastrianism was characterized, quite wrongly, as a form of paganism in times of conflict between the Byzantine and Persian empires.

Edward Said has dated the beginning of a western animosity toward “the East” back to Aeschylus’ Persians, and found traces of an anti-eastern sentiment as early as Homer’s Iliad.¹⁴ Had Said traced Orientalism not to Aeschylus or Homer but to George of Pisidia, his argument would be more convincing. George’s poem On the Coming of the Barbarians is arguably the most xenophobic piece of literature surviving in the Greek language. Bulgars, Turks, Scythians and Persians are among the barbarians portrayed as threatening the world of the Romans. No attempt is made to humanize the “Other,” such as we find in the works of Herodotus, Aeschylus and especially Homer. “By race and custom the barbarian does not control the reigns of his mind,”¹⁵ is typical, exemplifying the depth of character we find in George’s martial poems. The poet’s choice of terminology merits discussion, as barbaros is clearly a more pejorative term than helln, which through a remarkable reversal in meaning was another possible word George could have chosen. It was unusual until the eleventh century for Byzantines to refer to themselves as Hellenes. Anthony Kaldellis has noted that the word helln was applied by Byzantines to groups of people as disparate as Zoroastrians and Chinese as well as the pagan peoples of Russia, Arabia and North Africa. Kaldellis argues that the implication of calling all these people Hellenes was that they were all polytheists. It is not my intention here to quibble over the terminology of Kaldellis’ excellent study, but it would probably be more accurate to say “worshipper of a false god” rather than “polytheist.” We may also note that the term still had positive connotations in many cases, and that a word such as eidlolatrs could be used when the author wished to be more unambiguously harsh in his connotations. If we look to the example of Evagrios Scholasticus’ odd reference to Zoroastrians as “Hellenes,” the context can perhaps elucidate Evagrios’ avoidance of “fire-worshipper,” “barbarian” and other overtly negative terms in this particular instance. The Persian king Chosroes declares his love for a Christian woman, lamenting that he cannot marry her because he is a “Hellene.” Chosroes then gives an expensively decorated cross to the Christian community and says a prayer to St Sergius, all making the point that even pagans can be instruments to proclaim the glory of God.¹⁶ This example suggests that “Hellene” was a nuanced word with a wide range of meanings and connotations even in sixth-century Byzantine prose.

It is not surprising that George echoes the charge that Zoroastrians are “fire-worshippers,”¹⁷ but we may still marvel at how he appropriates scriptural imagery to vilify Zoroastrianism, which is, in fact, the one non-Jewish religion whose adherents are praised in both the Old and New Testaments.¹⁸ George’s mention of Lucifer in reference to the Persians is strikingly ironic considering that the term Heosphoros comes from a passage in which Isaiah chides the Babylonian “Lucifer” who has fallen to the Persian “Messiah.”¹⁹ “Magi” is a term of abuse in George’s work, despite the central role played in the Gospel of Matthew by the gift-bearing magi, members of the Zoroastrian priestly class. George’s contemporary, the prophet Muhammad, seems to have shared with George the view that the Greeks under Herakleios were champions of monotheism against the Persians. Sura 30 of the begins:

(2) The Greeks have been vanquished

(3) in the nearer part of the land; and, after their vanquishing, they shall be the victors

(4) in a few years. To God belongs the Command before and after, and on that day the believers shall rejoice

(5) in God’s help; God helps whomsoever He will; and He is the All-mighty, the All-compassionate.

(6) The promise of God! God fails not His promise, but most men do not know it.²⁰

It is clear that these verses express the belief that Greek Christianity is closer than Persian Zoroastrianism to the true religion of Muhammad and his followers. The status of Zoroastrians under Islam has often been ambiguous. At times they have been viewed as heathens, and at other times as People of the Book. Zoroastrians, naturally, rejected the charges of being fire-worshippers and idolaters, and they defended their dualistic beliefs as a more logical form of monotheism against the claims of Christianity and, later, Islam.²¹

Each side in the Byzantine-Persian wars could claim to be the defender of the pure, original monotheism and the avenger of centuries-old injustices. The story of the heroic stand of tiny Greek city-states against the hordes of imperial Persia can still attract western moviegoers, and the Greco-Persian wars provided culturally defining episodes to the Persians as well as to the Greeks. Alexander of Macedon’s sack of Persepolis and alleged burning of its library earned him in Zoroastrian tradition the title “the accursed,” which is shared only by Ahriman, the evil principal which the Abrahamic faiths borrowed from their Persian neighbors as the devil.²² Zoroastrianism was no longer an existential threat to the Byzantines after the Muslim conquest of Persia, but Zoroastrian dualism certainly influenced the prophet Mani, whose threat to Orthodoxy was so great that his name was attached to all dualistic heresies, however tenuous their connection with Mani. Zarathustra (Zoroaster in Greek) remained a figure of great appeal to spiritual seekers not content to stay within the confines of the Orthodox Church, although his name came to be associated in Byzantium with esoteric writing such as the Chaldaean Oracles that had little in common with Zoroastrian teachings found in the Zend Avesta and even less with the Gathas composed by Zarathustra himself. Byzantines such as Evagios Scholastikos and George of Pisidia viewed Zoroastrianism with hostility as a form of paganism. Wrong as their characterization of the Persian religion was, it has some curious similarities with the doctrine developed much later by George Gemistos Plethon, who viewed Zoroaster as a great prophet and a major influence in his attempt to reconstruct the ancient (i.e. Hellenic) religion.

At the same time that Zoroastrianism survived as the Persian state religion, a dualist religion of some sort was practiced among the pre-Christian Slavs. It is unclear what the Slavs’ beliefs had in common with Persian dualism.²³ Direct or indirect Zoroastrian influence is not implausible, nor is it out of the question that the cosmic dualism found among the Iranians and the Slavs has a common Indo-European source. Without speculating on the origins of Bogomilism, we certainly must note that the sect’s dualistic teachings must have appealed to tendencies that continued to exist within Slavic cultures after their nominal conversion to Orthodox Christianity.²⁴ Mango has reprimanded the author of the De operatione daemonum, traditionally Michael Psellos, for engaging at the height of the Bogomil crisis in the seemingly trivial task of articulating a syncretic demonology that works the hordes of the Orthodox hell into a neo-Platonist framework. Without commenting on whether or not the text succeeds in synthesizing the disparate systems of neo-Platonic monism and popular demonology, we may look precisely to the theological crisis prompted by the Bogomils to explain why the author, whom I shall call Psellos, felt that theologians needed to reexamine the Orthodox response to the problem of evil. No theologian has successfully reconciled the reality of evil and suffering with the existence of an omnipotent and good being, and the doctrine of the Bogomils and other dualistic sects offered a complete, non-evasive answer: God is not omnipotent but is countered by an evil force. Mango writes, “The death of the old paganism left, in any case, a gap in the demonic realm that might have been filled by new entrants, such as the pagan Slavs now settled on imperial territory, Muslim and various heretics, in particular Paulicians and Bogomils, who reinterpreted the Biblical data on the Devil in a manner that did not lack all semblance of credibility.”²⁵ The dualistic doctrine of the Bogomils is, in truth, not only credible but quite a bit more straightforward than the Orthodox doctrine in which God has complete power but delays using it. We may agree or not with Mango’s opinion of the De operatione daemonum, but we must recognize, as Mango rightly points out, that it is “the only piece of original Byzantine speculation” on the topic of demonology.²⁶ This piece of information shows that the author turned to Plato in a time of religious crisis, perhaps in the hope that Platonic thought could lead to a more profound understanding of Christian doctrine, or perhaps, if those who doubt Psellos’ orthodoxy are correct, simply to reach a personal understanding of the problem of evil amid the conflicting claims of the Orthodox and Bogomil parties.

The Chaldaean Oracles attracted intense interest from Michael Psellos, who ingratiated himself enough to the empire’s rulers that he did not have to defend seriously the orthodoxy of his beliefs. A serious account of Zoroastrianism does not seem ever to have been undertaken in Byzantium, but Zoroaster was a figure of interest as a sage of antiquity and, later, as the author to whom the Chaldaean Oracles were attributed. It cannot be said for certain that any Byzantine before George Gemistos Plethon in the late Palaiologan period regarded the Chaldaean Oracles as sacred scripture, but Michael Psellos seems to have viewed them as the work of a righteous early monotheist. There is no question that Psellos held the Chaldaean Oracles in great esteem, but it is difficult to ascertain how much he accepted their teachings as philosophical or theological truth. Psellos is a pivotal figure in the history of Byzantium’s views on pagan culture. He explores the affinities that Christianity has with ancient Greek learning, and most significantly he lists the Hellenes as one of five ancient peoples with significant intellectual traditions, the others being Chaldaeans, Egyptians, Jews and finally Christians themselves, “our own people” in Psellos’ words. After Psellos’ clear distinction between the beliefs of the Greeks and those of other “pagan” peoples, it becomes increasingly rare in Byzantine letters to find the term “Hellene” used indiscriminately of all alleged polytheists. Conversely, it also becomes difficult to identify an equivalent of “pagan” in the usage of the twelfth century onward. When we consider the harsh penalty dealt to Michael Psellos’ student John Italos in part for excessive devotion to the pagan Artistotle,²⁷ Psellos’ own avowed admiration for the pagan oracles is especially remarkable. Comparison of the fates of the two men also indicates the political astuteness of Psellos. In the twelfth century, the most important Byzantine to take an interest in the Chaldaean Oracles was the philosopher and rhetor Michael Italikos. In contrast to Psellos’ admiration for the spiritual content of the oracles, Italikos’ approach to their study is purely scholarly.²⁸ His commentary has occasional contemptuous remarks on the absurdity of the belief system put forward in the oracles, in a tone not unlike that of a modern Byzantinist with low regard for Byzantine culture.

The Greeks were confronted with their own pre-Christian heritage in the wake of the Crusades when Latin Christendom introduced to Byzantium the tradition of scholastic philosophy and its profound debt to Aristotle. By the fourteenth century, it was normal in religious debate to use Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning, even when the authors did not profess any respect for western scholasticism or any special admiration for Aristotle himself. One important fourteenth-century writer who rejected syllogistic reasoning as a means of arriving at theological truth was Nicephoros Gregoras. Katerina Ierodiakonou and Lowell Clucas have studied the anti-rational movement in fourteenth-century Byzantium.²⁹ Gregoras is a figure who deserves further attention as a figure who pointed out the flaws in Aristotelian logic. Whether or not the modern reader agrees with Gregoras’ assertion that logic is an inferior pursuit because it can never be a substitute for divine grace, Gregoras warrants our attention for pointing out that Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning is flawed to the point of being useless as a method of scientific inquiry. Aristotle is currently referred to as the father of modern logic, although the Aristotelian syllogism is really of no use to modern logicians, who owe much more to Euclid than to the Stagirite. At present, logicians and classicists tend to take each other’s word regarding Aristotle’s importance, but Aristotelian logic is flawed in that it allows one to work with only one variable. In contrast to Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning, Euclidean axiomatic reasoning allows for multiple variables. While caricatures such as “All men are human; Socrates is human; therefore all men are Socrates” are notoriously unfair to Aristotle, it is unfortunately true that Aristotle’s method, given the first two clauses, will still not allow one to make a conclusion of any consequence about anyone or anything other than Socrates.

The very final years of the Byzantine empire witnessed a genuine but small resurgence of paganism in the circle of philosopher George Gemistos Plethon of Mistra. The Peloponnese during the late Palaiologan period was also the site of a renewed interest in classical themes in visual art, so Plethon’s turn to paganism did not take place in a cultural vacuum.³⁰ It is not clear from his surviving work when Plethon abandoned the Christian faith and became a pagan, but it seems likely that his conversion coincided roughly with the Council of Florence in 1438–9, which Plethon attended. Perhaps the failed attempt at union left him disillusioned with Christianity and in search of another belief system to guide the Greek people.

Plethon attempted to reconstruct the ancient religion of the Hellenes and incorporate into it the best features of other ancient belief systems, especially those of Persia. In addition to the philosophy of Plato, one of his major influences is the book of the Chaldaean Oracles, which he believed were written by Zoroaster.³¹ Kristeller has argued that what survives of the Plethon’s philosophy is a hatchet job, made to seem particularly offensive by the editing of Plethon’s rival George Scholarios.³² Kristeller’s reading of Plethon is probably colored, however, by his expertise in western Renaissance philosophy. Renaissance humanists in the West commonly used deeply pagan imagery, although in most cases it would be wrong to question the sincerity of their Christian beliefs. There was likewise a tradition of allegorical, Christianizing reading of seemingly secular, even pagan, literature in Byzantium, so Kristeller is not without basis. The case that Plethon was indeed a pagan who sought a revival of the ancient religion was put foward convincingly by C. M. Woodhouse.³³

One of the most important studies of Plethon undertaken in the two decades since the publication of Woodhouse’s book is Polymnia Athanassiadi’s examination of Plethon’s use of the Chaldaean Oracles, which he attributed to Zoroaster.³⁴ Woodhouse concentrated on Plethon’s antiquarianism. Athanassiadi builds upon the work that has been done on Plethon’s debt to antiquity, the focus of her article is Plethon’s formulation of “a new spiritual way.”³⁵

Although Plethon’s paganism, as Woodhouse demonstrates, was not allegorical, he was an important influence on the tradition of Christian humanist Platonism that flourished in Renaissance Italy, particularly in Florence. The “Plato versus Aristotle” controversy that bitterly divided Renaissance humanists began in late Byzantium with the divide between followers of Plethon and Scholarios. George of Trebizond, a member of the Aristotelian camp, went so far as to declare Plato and Plethon two of the three most wicked men who ever lived, joining ranks with none other than Muhammad.³⁶

In part what led Kristeller to suspect that Scholarios creatively edited Plethon to make the philosopher of Mistra’s views seem less crude and more allegorical was probably a subtle monotheism underlying the complex belief system that Plethon devised. It is not, as I have attempted to show in this chapter, accurate to equate “pagan” and “polytheist.” However one may choose to define “pagan,” it must surely include Plotinus, whose philosophy was more monist than polytheist in any practical sense. What offended Scholarios so deeply was that Plethon rejected Jesus Christ. Compared to that, the number of gods Plethon substituted in his place was probably less important in the patriarch’s eyes.

True polytheism had since pre-Christian times been exceedingly rare or nonexistent in complex learned theology of the sort that interested Plethon. It has been stated that Scholarios distorted Plethon’s views in order to enhance the polytheistic aspects of Plethon’s beliefs and obscure an allegorical and more orthodox meaning. There is no reason to suppose that Scholarios misunderstood Plethon’s monotheism or that he deliberately hid it. What would have mattered to Scholarios in formulating the opinion that Plethon had lapsed into hellenism was not the question of whether or not he believed ultimately in one god or many but the fact that Plethon’s god was the One of Porphyry and Plotinus rather than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

One point in common between Scholarios and Plethon is that both men turned to late antiquity in their search for religious inspiration to guide the Greek people.³⁷ The two men lived at a time when Greeks and Latins alike were becoming increasingly drawn to the study of the first 500 years of the Christian era. We can look to Byzantium in the mid-fifteenth century to find important influences on several Renaissance humanist traditions, including Protestantism. In one of his letters to a churchman named Joseph, Scholarios wrote that the situation of the Greeks after the Turkish conquest had some similarities to that of the early Church before Constantine. He urged a relaxation of canonical rigor, arguing that the canons did not exist before the Church won the empire and did not need to be enforced in quite the same way now that the Christian empire was no more. Though Plethon did not live to see the conquest of Constantinople, having died in 1450, it was clear to him (as it was to everyone) that the empire was in danger. Like Scholarios, he looked to the time before Constantine for guidance, though he turned to paganism rather than to primitive Christianity.

Scholarios’ religious beliefs were entirely Orthodox, and there is in his work no sense of the reformist zeal that would shake the foundations of western Europe some forty-five years after his death, but it is still significant to the ecclesiastical historian that Scholarios drew a clear distinction between pre- and post-Constantinian Christianity and recognized that church practice was dynamic, evolving and able to change to meet the needs of a changing world. For purposes of this chapter, he is perhaps the villain who prevents us from seeing the pagan ideas of Plethon in their fullest form, yet, for someone whose motivation was supposedly to censor the apostate and preserve only enough to tell us how horribly Plethon had allowed the devil to delude him, he preserved a tremendous amount of Plethon’s Book of Laws.

One of the most significant contributions of scholarship on Plethon over the past ten years has been to show the diversity of his philosophical influences and his apparent desire to establish a syncretistic, universal religion. Woodhouse was concerned with Plethon’s intellectual debt to Greek antiquity. The debt cannot be overstated, but Athanassiadi is right to emphasize what she calls Plethon’s “cosmopolitanism.”³⁸ Stausberg discusses the significance of Zarathustra in Plethon’s religious writings in great depth, and Athanassiadi traces possible patterns of influence from the Iranian scholar Sohrawardi through the Jewish esoteric teacher Elissaeus to Plethon. If late Byzantine paganism was a very minor religion in terms of the number of adherents, it was nonetheless vibrant and internationally focused, and the influence it had on the Italian Renaissance through Florentine Platonism and the works of humanist scholars such as Marsilio Ficino marks it as a spiritual and intellectual tradition worthy of our attention and respect.³⁹

NOTES

1 A fine study of the attempt in very early Byzantine society to blend pagan learning and Christian piety is found in Ruether 1969. More recently, the topic of pagan influence on Byzantine culture was studied by eleven contributors to the volume edited by Ierodiakonou 2002b. Kaldellis 2007 is a comprehensive study, emphasizing a reemergence of “hellenic” influence beginning in the eleventh century and reaching an apex in the twelfth. Kaldellis ends his study with the recapture of Constantinople by Michael VIII Palaiologos in 1261, and acknowledges the need for further investigation of Hellenism under the Palaiologans. The most comprehensive work to date on the subject, although it is confined to one figure, is Woodhouse 1986. The essays by Athanassiadi and Ierodiakonou in Ierodiakonou 2002b contribute much to our understanding of later Byzantine Hellenism. The present essay will not attempt a discussion of the much-studied topic of Hellenism in late antiquity. The reader is referred to Fox 1988, Lee 2000 and Ruether 1969.

2 Kaldellis 2007.

3 The fifth chapter of Stewart 1991: 137–61, examines the dualistic tendencies that exist within Orthodoxy at the non-doctrinal level. The topic is also discussed with reference to western Christianity in Marius 1999: 50–1.

4 Athanasios De incarnatione 1, Gregory of Nyssa Great Catechism 7, Augustine De natura boni contra Manichaeos.

5 Shaked 1994: 22–3.

6 Quoted in Boyce 1984: 35.

7 Quoted in Boyce 1984: 134.

8 Heaney 2000: verse 27.

9 Lagarde and Bollig 1882: 24, epigram 43.

10 Duffy 2002: 139.

11 See now Beaton 2007.

12 Kaldellis 2007; Roilos 2005.

13 Mango 1992: 217.

14 Said 1979: 20–1.

15 Tartaglia 1998: 112. On Emperor Herakleios and the Persian Wars: 3, 17–18.

16 Evagrios, Ecclesiastical History 6.21–2.

17 Tartaglia 1998: 74; On Emperor Herakleios and the Persian Wars: 32.

18 Isaiah 45:1. Iranologists debate whether or not Cyrus the Great was a practicing Zoroastrian, but he was clearly a worshipper of Ahura Mazda who held Zoroastrianism in high regard (Boyce 2001: 50–4).

19 Isaiah 14:12; Matthew 2:1–12. For George’s use of Heosphoros, see Herakleias 1.53, at Tartaglia 1998: 196. Ostensibly, the reference is to the planet Mercury and not to the fallen angel, but the double meaning of the Persian monarch looking to Lucifer for guidance is unlikely to have escaped the poet’s notice.

20 The translation quoted is that of Arberry 1955: 105. For Zoroastrianism under Muslim rule, see Boyce 2001: 145–95.

21 The best-known defense of classical Zoroastrian dualism is that of the ninth-century theologian Mardanfarrokh, The Doubt-Dispelling Exposition, discussed and quoted in English translation in Boyce 1984: 101–4.

22 Boyce 2001: 78.

23 Stoyanov 2000: 132–6 discusses Slavic dualistic cosmogonies in comparative Indo-European and Central Asian contexts.

24 Similarities between accounts of Slavic creation stories and Bogomil belief are discussed in Obolensky 1971: 287–8.

25 Mango 1992: 222.

26 Mango 1992: 222.

27 For a recent discussion of Italos’ career see Kaldellis 2007: 228–30.

28 For comparison of Psellos’ and Italikos’ approaches to the Chaldaean Oracles, see Duffy 1995.

29 Ierodiakonou 2002b and Clucas 1985. I owe a debt of gratitude to Jeffrey Kegler for his valuable insight on the importance of Euclid to the development of modern logic and irrelevance of Aristotelian syllogistic reason to scientific problem solving.

30 Mouriki 1983.

31 For the importance of Zoroaster to Plethon, see Stausberg 1998: 35–92.

32 Kristeller 1979: 156.

33 Woodhouse 1986.

34 Athanassiadi 2002.

35 Athanassiadi 2002: 251.

36 Quoted in Woodhouse 1986: 367–8.

37 Livanos 2006: 89–94.

38 Athanassiadi 2002: 251.

39 For Plethon’s influence on Italian Humanism, see Woodhouse 1986: 357–79.