Byzantium has recently attracted much attention, principally among
cultural, social and economic historians. This book shifts the
focus to philosophy and intellectual history, exploring the
thought-world of visionary reformer Gemistos Plethon (c.1355-1452).
It argues that Plethon brought to their fulfilment latent
tendencies among Byzantine humanists towards a distinctive
anti-Christian and pagan outlook. His magnum opus, the pagan Nomoi,
was meant to provide an alternative to, and escape-route from, the
disputes over the Orthodoxy of Gregory Palamas and Thomism. It was
also a groundbreaking reaction to the bankruptcy of a pre-existing
humanist agenda and to aborted attempts at the secularisation of
the State, whose cause Plethon had himself championed in his two
utopian Memoranda. Inspired by Plato, Plethon's secular utopianism
and paganism emerge as the two sides of a single coin. On another
level, the book challenges anti-essentialist scholarship that views
paganism and Christianity as social and cultural constructions.
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