Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/731

 best to become a religion, and had tried out of its school to make a Church. Hence, the new mind in the first flush of its awaking turned from its ancient master, Aristotle, and threw itself into the arms of the Neo-Platonists. Gemistos Plethon, who took part in the Council of Florence, 1439, was intellectually the most potent of the Greeks who helped in the Renaissance. He regarded Aristotle as a westernised Mohammadan rather than as a Greek, a man who had indeed once lived on the Hellenic soil, but who had become an alien in race and an enemy in religion, speaking in the Latin schools ideas which he owed to a Moorish interpreter. So Plethon expounded to the awakening West Plato as the Neo-Platonists understood him, "the Attic Moses," the transmitter of a golden tradition which the secular Aristotle had tried to break and which ran back through Pythagoras to Zoroaster on the one hand and Abraham on the other. His philosophy was at once monotheistic and polytheistic; God was one and infinite, but He acted by means of ideas or spirits, or minor deities who filled the space between us and Him. As first and final cause He ordered all things for the best, and left no room for chance or accident. Providence was necessity and fate providence, the world in all its parts and life in all its elements were vehicles of a divine purpose. The soul of man was immortal; the doctrine of reminiscence proved that it had lived before birth and so could live after death.

Plethon emphasised in every possible way the differences between Plato and Aristotle, refusing to allow them to be reduced to a mere question of terminology. This teaching lifted men above the arid syllogisms of the schools, enriched their view of themselves and nature, of God and history, and gave reality to the ancient saying " ex oriente lux." For it came more as a religion than as a philosophy; even the apparatus of worship was mimicked; ceremonies were instituted, holy or feast days were observed; celebrities became saints, before the bust of Plato a taper was ceremoniously burned. The neophytes underwent a species of conversion; Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) was said to have been called in his youth to be a physician of souls, and designated as the translator of the two great masters, Plato and Plotinus. Man was conceived as like unto God, and was named divine; his destiny was to seek eternal union with the God from whom he came. That God was the archetype of the universe, its unmoved mover and orderer, the ground of all our reasoning, the light of all our seeing. He knew the world from within when He knew Himself, for creation was only the expression of the divine thought, God as it were speaking with Himself, and man overhearing His speech.

The circle of those devoted to the study of this philosophy contained the most distinguished scholars of the day. Besides Ficino there stood his friends or converts, Angelo Poliziano, though his fame is mainly philological; Cristoforo Landino, the exponent of Horace, of Virgil,