In the middle fifteenth century, a strong quarrel between George Gemistos (or, as he called himself, ‘‘Plethon’’), the only pagan Byzantine thinker, who adhered to Platonism and rejected the idea that Aristotle can be reconciled with Plato, and George Scholarios - Gennadios II - who defended Christianity in terms of his professed Thomism, took place. Plethon accused Aristotle of having an ‘‘atheistic’’ conception of nature. He rejected Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘‘entelechy’’ as the metaphysical principle immanently present in everything, causing the transition from ‘‘potentiality’’ to ‘‘actuality’’ and bringing about the perfect ‘‘form’’ of any particular being. In his own metaphysics, he postulates a hierarchy of beings, each of them responsible for the existence and the qualities of its inferior. Instead, therefore, of Aristotle’s supposed selfactualization (energeia in the sense of ‘‘entelechy,’’ that is being energes) of a being, Plethon spoke of energia as the productive action of every being, that is as its being ‘‘efficacious’’ (energon) and bringing about its proximate being. Scholarios, for his own part, replied by setting forth Aquinas’ doctrine of causa remota and causae proximae, each of the latter ones being directly dependent on the former and producing not beings, as in Plethon’s system, but just effects in virtue of their nature as created and ‘‘predestinated’’ by God. To Scholarios, Aristotle’s metaphysics of ‘‘forms’’ fitted better with Christianity, because of Aristotle’s idea that each ‘‘form’’ is an autonomous cause (even though they all depend on the ‘‘first mover’’ or ‘‘first cause,’’ God). A peculiar feature of Plethon’s metaphysics, which contrasts both with Christianity and ancient Platonism, is that it is absolutely ‘‘cataphatic.’’
World History
