Other Natural Religions

[Husky]

BV's #65:

Bharatvarsh2

Posted 13 May 2010 - 06:03 AM



Quote

Georgius Gemistus (Greek: Γεώργιος Πλήθων Γεμιστός; ca. 1355–1452/1454) — later called Plethon or Pletho — was a Greek scholar of Neoplatonic philosophy. He was one of the chief pioneers of the revival of Greek learning in Western Europe. In the dying years of the Byzantine Empire, he advocated a return to the Olympian gods of the ancient world.[1]



http://en.wikipedia....Gemistus_Pletho

Official translation (my inserts in purple):

[color="#0000FF"]<"pogroms, bloody spectacles of executions".>[/color]

[color="#800080"](I.e. christianism systematically genocided the remnants of 'pagans' of the erstwhile empire. Achieved by concerted efforts of both the eager faithful christian local mobs and christian rule. No different from islam. Same terrorist ideology.)[/color]



Evidently there were other pockets of paganism and armed missionaries from Byzantium ventured out into some of them very late. The Laconians, isolated on the arid rocky peninsula of Mani, but protected by that very geography and prosperous because of their excellent olives, were not converted until the reign of Basil I in the ninth century. It is explicitly said by our source that these were not Slavs, as was so often the case in the Peloponnesus at the time, but descendants of the ancient population of the region.38 We probably will never know the nature of their religion.[color="#800080"]**[/color] With them, in this impoverished center of Greece, my chronicle of dogged rural paganism ends.



38. Constantine Porph., De administr. imperio, 50.



[color="#800080"](** Hellenismos.

http://www.ysee.gr/index-eng.php?type=en...ovestories

"804

The Gentile Hellenes of Laconia, Greece, resist successfully the attempt of Tarasius, Patriarch of Constantinople, to convert them to Christianity.



950 to 988

Violent conversion of the last Gentile Hellenes of Laconia by the Armenian "Saint" Nikon.")[/color]





Epilogue



And yet, the tracks of the last pagans are not completely lost in the sands of folklore, nor do they entirely disappear behind the screen of Islam. Rather, they resurface at the end of the fifteenth century, three hundred years after the school of Harran [place which had "unrepentant pagans" earlier] had been swept away. A talented young Greek, who had become suspect to the church authorities of his country--by then reduced to one city, Constantinople--left to study for a time among the people across the way, the Ottoman Turks. He did not have far to go: whether to Edirne or to Bursa, it was at most a journey of a few days that brought him to a refined and multilingual court. There he made the acquaintance ofa Jew, Elissaios,

attached to Averroes and to other Persian and Arab commentators of Aristotle whom the Jews had translated into their own language. As for Moses and what the Jews believe and practice through his intermediary, that did not concern him at all. It was that man who taught him the doctrines of Zoroaster and others. Through this man, a Jew in appearance but more accurately a pagan, whom he not only long regarded as his teacher, but whom he served as needed and who supported him, for this man, Elissaios by name, was one of the most powerful people at the court of those barbarians, through this man, then, he succeeded in becoming who he was.1

Who was the young Greek? The philosopher Georgius Gemistus, called Plethon. He later returned to Constantinople, but his method of explicating Aristotle displeased the religious authorities, and so he settled in Mistra, in the southern part of the Peloponnesus, near Mani, which was then the capital of a Byzantine principality. He died there in 1452, one year before Mehmet II conquered Constantinople.

Plethon traveled only once to the West, accompanying the Greek delegation to the Council of Florence (1438-1439). The group desperately sought unification with Rome in the vain hope that the termination of the schism would protect the last Byzantines from the crushing superiority of the Turks. But Plethon's ideas traveled throughout Renaissance Europe--thanks to his illustrious disciples, the Greek John Bessarion, who ended up as a cardinal of the Roman church, and the Florentine Marsilio Ficino--and had an extraordinary effect.2

By whatever means, the torch was passed during the three centuries that separated the closing of the school of Harran and Plethon's apprenticeship with Elissaios. The philosophical paganism of Late Antiquity made its contribution to the birth of the world in which we still live.



1. I am merely following here some of Michel Tardieu's remarkable conclusions in two articles, "Pletho Arabicus, identification et contenu du manuscrit arabe d'Istanbul, Topkapi Serai, Ahmet III 1896," Jour. As. (1980); 35-57 (with J.Nicolet), and "Plethon lecteur des oracles," Metis 2 (1987): 141-164.

2. E. Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London, 1958), a masterly book on the subject.

About the final line: "The philosophical paganism of Late Antiquity made its contribution to the birth of the world in which we still live."

As BV's post 65 showed, it was not any Hellenistic philosophy devoid of the religion it is inextricably tied to: Gemistus/Plethon advocated (the religion of) the Gods.



Even the Renaissance and rediscovery of GrecoRoman materials is not owing to secularism - let alone christianism - but Hellenismos itself.