Universe of Platonic Thought 2020

Universum of Platonic Thought: Plato and Rhetoric

Dmitry Biriukov, DSc in Philosophy; Institute of Philosophy and Law of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences (Novosibirsk, Russia), Associate Research Fellow; National Research University Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia), Associate Research Fellow

Does the Byzantine-Slavic world prefer Platonism? A Research of Sources and Context of Ivan Kireyevsky’s Narrative about Byzantium*

In my previous research, I have identified two lines of interpretation of the philosophical status of Palamism and the Byzantine Orthodox doctrine as such in Russian thought of the late 19th – early 20th centuries. One of them, conducted by the circle of Pavel Florensky and became very influential in the XX century, linked the Byzantine Orthodox doctrine with Platonism. In this report I will examine the prehistory of this line in Russian thought in the 19th century. In my opinion, this line originates in the Russian thought of the 19th century from the Slavophil historiosophical teaching of Ivan Kireyevsky, expressed primarily in his article “On the nature of the Enlightenment of Europe in Its Relation to the Enlightenment in Russia”, where Kireyevsky contrasts the philosophy of Plato, as more entire, with the philosophy of Aristotle as more formal, rational and external, and claims that the Byzantine Christian thinkers, and especially those who lived after the division of the Churches, preferred Platonic philosophy to Aristotelian one.

Keywords: Ivan Kireyevsky, Byzantium, Palamism, Barlaam of Calabria, T. Granovsky

Carefully reading Kireyevsky's article “On the nature of the Enlightenment of Europe in Its Relation to the Enlightenment in Russia”, we can find that this idea is in a connection with the topic of the Byzantine enlightenment of the West. Indeed, according to Kireyevsky, it is the Byzantine enlightenment (now we would say “Byzantine philosophy”) what is a perfect kind of knowledge, which, according to the thinker, should completely penetrate the Russian society and which, in a mode that is expected (although unlikely), can penetrate the Western society as well. Attempts of this penetration of the Byzantine enlightenment to the West, according to Kireyevsky, occurred earlier. In this relation, the thinker discusses 1) the impact which the Greeks made in the West after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks; it destroyed (according to Kireyevsky) the Aristotelian Western scholasticism; and 2) the Palamite controversy of the 14 century in the result of which Barlaam the Calabrian (for Kireyevsky, he was infected by the Western rationalistic spirit) went to the West and educated the Italian humanists. I wonder what are the sources of Kireyevsky’s information on the Palamite controversies, and what is the context of his statements about the connection of the Byzantine enlightenment with Platonism. My research has shown that the likely source of Kireyevsky’s account of the Palamite controversies is Edward Gibbon’ book “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, which gives a general outline of the controversies and tells about the fate of Barlaam in Italy. As for Kireyevsky’s views about the Byzantine enlightenment and its contribution to the education of the West, according to my research, its polemical context is connected with Timofey Granovsky’s “Lectures on the History of the Middle Ages” and the position held there which denies this contribution. Regarding the linking the Byzantine enlightenment with Platonism, I find the context of this in the teachings of Franz Xaver von Baader and the Platonism of the early Sergey Uvarov, expressed, in particular, in his project of “Asian Academy”.

* This research was carried out with financial support of the Russian Science Foundation, project 20-68-46021, “Slavophilism in Its Religious and Philosophical Connexions: 1836-1917”.