Thought

What mainly survives from his writings is the commentary on the second, third, and fourth book of Aristotle’s Topics; two small treatises on dialectic and on the Aristotelian syllogisms together with a very brief synopsis of rhetoric; and finally, the Quaestiones quodlibetales, a collection of 93 answers to philosophical questions posed to him by his students.

Regardless of the positions Italos advocated in these texts, positions some of which after all were not at all different from those of other philosophers, notably from Psellos’, what seems to have been really unacceptable for the religious and the political establishment at the time was his rationalist approach toward doctrines, which the Orthodox Church considered as beyond comprehension, as something, which Christians should simply accept on faith, and as something, which only the Church had the authority to judge. Furthermore, Italos questioned in his writings the supremacy of theology and defended the ancient conception of philosophy, well known from both the Platonic and the Aristotelian traditions, according to which theology is part of philosophy, since philosophy culminates in the attempt to understand the first principle of everything. It probably was this supposedly arrogant attempt on his part to develop a natural or philosophical theology that the Orthodox Church also refused to accept, and that led to Italos’ trial and condemnation.

More specifically, the 11 anathemas that were added to the Synodikon of Orthodoxy are concerned with: (1) the application of logical arguments to theological issues such as the incarnation of Christ or the relation of Christ’s two natures; (2) the introduction of natural philosophy into the Church; (3) the acceptance of the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul and the denial of Christian eschatology; (4) the acceptance of the view that matter and forms have no temporal beginning or end; (5) the preference for Greek philosophers to Christian saints; (6) suspiciousness against divine miracles; (7) the study of Greek philosophy not only for the sake of education but as a repository of truths to which all other beliefs should ultimately be reduced; (8) the denial of God’s voluntary creation of the world ex nihilo and the acceptance of Platonic Forms; (9) the denial that our bodies will be the same at resurrection as now; (10) the acceptance of the preexistence of the soul and the denial of its creation ex nihilo, of eternal punishment, and of the eternal kingdom of God; and (11) any ‘‘Hellenic and heterodox’’ doctrines taught by Italos.

Italos’ views on universals, which he discusses in many of his Quaestiones quodlibetales, are also worth mentioning. Just like many other Byzantine philosophers, Italos defended the Neoplatonic theory that universals exist in three modes; namely, they exist as universals ‘‘before the many (particulars)’’ in God’s mind, as universals ‘‘in the particulars” within perceptible individuals, and finally as universals ‘‘after the particulars’’ in the form of concepts acquired by our mind by abstraction of the common characteristics of perceptible individuals. Benakis has labeled this position conceptual or moderate realism and stressed that it has nothing in common with the nominalist position on universals that we find in western medieval philosophy; for even the third mode of the universals’ existence, namely the universals after the particulars, should not be confused, on his view, with what western medieval philosophers thought about universalia post res, since the a posteriori status of such universals does not alter the fact that they do exist.

Indeed, Italos argued that universals are incorporeal in a weak sense, because they are not strictly speaking incorporeal but depend on a body for subsisting; in other words, universals are incorporeal per accidens and not per se, because they are incorporeal insofar as they are in the human soul, while at the same time they are corporeal by participation (kata methexin) insofar as they subsist in the particulars. Being incorporeal in this weak sense, univer-sals are said to be beings also in a special sense: Italos often made use of another distinction that is a commonplace in Platonic texts from Plotinus to Simplicius, but seems to have its origins even earlier; namely, the distinction between something subsisting and something depending on mere thought. According to Italos, things that do not subsist (anupostata) but depend on mere thought are not beings. As for things that subsist, he distinguishes between two different kinds of beings, those that subsist per se, which he calls subsistences (hupostaseis), and those that subsist in something else (enupostata); subsistences are particulars and for the most part bodies, whereas beings that subsist in something else are predicates shared by many things and concepts (noemata/dianoemata). Italos distinguishes these two kinds of beings from the standard examples of things that do not subsist, that is, goat-stags and centaurs, as well as from his own examples of many-eyed men and fourheaded horses; for all these are, on his view, nothing but fabrications of the human mind and products of our imagination (phantasmata). Hence, Italos conceives of universals not as beings that subsist per se, but as beings that subsist in something else, and thus in no way can be treated, on his view, as mere products of the human imagination.

See also: > Eustratios of Nicaea > Logic, Byzantine > Michael Psellos > Universals