CCSL

Corpus Christianorum Series Latina

CHRP

C. B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, Eckhard Kessler and Jill Kraye (eds), The Cambridge history of Renaissance philosophy, Cambridge 1988, repr. 1990

RQ

Renaissance Quarterly

In 1523, at the height of the West's re-enchantment with ancient Greek language, letters, thought and art, Pope Clement vii (1478–1534) awarded the Latin titular patriarchate of Constantinople to the Roman Catholic cardinal Giles of Viterbo.Footnote ¹ In all the factors that can be relevant in the selection of a senior cleric for that honorific foreign title, including knowledge of the Greek language, literature and philosophy, Greek patristics and ‘Greek’ or Orthodox Christianity, Giles's education and reputation made him the prime choice. It was the same reputation that made him the dedicatee of the first printed edition of Origen's Homilies, by Aldus Manutius at the famous press in Venice. However, phil-Hellenism is a feature of Giles's thought and writing that is still incompletely understood and underappreciated. New editions and studies have shed light on Giles's participation in the merging of humanism and Scholasticism in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, and particularly the transformation of both his underlying Augustinism and theological formation under Aristotelian scholastic theology by his subsequent encounter with Plato's writings.Footnote ² The relationship of Giles's thought with Greek Christianity, however, has received only cursory treatment. The combined pagan and Christian notions of Hellenism as affecting Giles are the focus of this study.

In the arena of church politics and doctrine, the generation before Giles had witnessed efforts on both sides of the Latin and Greek divide to bring the two worlds closer. Roman and Byzantine hierarchs and scholars had already effected a short-lived agreement on ecclesiastical union at the Council of Ferrara–Florence (1438–45). Some Byzantines had moved toward Rome. A few had become fond of Latin scholasticism.Footnote ³ Joseph Kontaratos, Greek bishop of Methone (1437–9), even composed a liturgical canon in honour of Thomas Aquinas.Footnote ⁴ Byzantine ambassadors promoted Hellas to the Romans for cultural reasons but also to gain Western aid against the encroachment of the Turkish Empire. There were aspirations that Old and New Rome would fully reunite, bringing the restoration of Latin and Greek learning and the synthesis of Catholic and Orthodox traditions. While at Rome, Manuel Chrysoloras, for example, wrote optimistically to the Emperor Manuel ii Paleologos about the future of the Byzantine state.Footnote ⁵ At the Council of Ferrara–Florence, Bessarion (1403–72), Orthodox Metropolitan of Nicaea, called for reconciliation between the doctrines and religious culture of Rome and the Orthodox East. Bessarion sided with the West over the disputed autonomy of the Roman pontiff and on contested points of theology.Footnote ⁶ He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1439, was made a cardinal of the Roman Church, and his palace at Rome became a centre of the renewed Greek learning. In Florence there were those who could be called Hellenes insofar as they demonstrated a range of characteristics: teachers of ancient Greek literature and philosophy, supporters of the moral and aesthetic perspective of the ancient Greeks, or even promoters of the idea of ethnic connections between the Byzantines and the ancient Greeks. In the literature of the period up to the fall of Constantinople, what Hellenism and Hellene mean is contextual. ‘Hellene’ can simply denote one who speaks Greek, or possesses Greek paideia or literary culture. ‘Hellene’ is often equivalent to ‘pagan’, but in an ecclesiastical context it means Orthodox in contradistinction to Roman (Catholic). At other times ‘Hellene’ acquires the sense of ethnic nationalism. The situation changed with the fall of Constantinople in 1453. In 1469, the year in which Giles was born, the titular patriarchate of Constantinople was held by Cardinal Bessarion, but Italian interest in Greek literature began to decline just as Western interest in Byzantium began to decline after the fall of its capital city.

The aim here is to present evidence for Giles not merely as a scholar influenced by humanism but as a phil-Hellene in every sense, despite his belonging to the generation born after the fall of Constantinople. This is significant, for although scholars acknowledge Giles's interest in ancient Greek language and letters, there has been less awareness of or interest in Giles's attitude towards Byzantine Christianity and doctrine. And while recent scholarship attests to Giles's interpreting ancient Greek myths in a Christian context, his vision of a synthesised Eastern and Western theological disposition is still imperfectly understood. Although rightly seen as a champion of the Roman papacy, Giles promoted reform efforts that included a closer study of the Greek Fathers and the theology of the Eastern Church. The first aim, then, is to summarise the elements of Hellenism in which Giles participated. The second is to examine Giles's regard for ‘Greek’ Christianity as part of his comprehensive Hellenism. Both are intended to contribute to the intellectual biography of a religious leader whose thought is still coming to light. While the focus on one person may be thought to open only a small window onto the history of Christianity, the window in this instance gives a view of a larger trend in the Church's cultural history through this high cleric's appropriation of Ficinian Platonism into the Roman curia during the High Renaissance and at the dawn of the Reformation. Had Giles been more influential in the Curia, had he become pope, or even had his writings been made more widely available, the course of the Protestant Reformation or Catholic efforts at counter-reform might have had another dimension.

In the background to questions related to Giles and Greek Christianity are the many other aspects of Hellenism. So it is right first to review them and their chief proponents. At the extreme end of the spectrum, there was a Hellenic identity that included a re-emerging sense that Hellenism carried not only a cultural reference but a national character, with the Peloponnese as the nation's geographical centre. The term Hellas as an ethnic label for all Greek lands developed gradually in the ancient world.Footnote ⁷ In the decades before the fall of Constantinople, Cardinal Bessarion's former tutor George Gemistos Pletho (1355–1452) championed a nationalist, ethnic conception of Hellenism reminiscent of the ancient Greek concept, in the face of increasing pressure on the Byzantine Greek inhabitants of the Peloponnese by the Turks on the one hand and the Western powers on the other. Pletho's Hellenism had a religious component, but it was centred on a revival of the ancient gods and customs and advocated, ‘if not a return to the pagan Hellenic past, at least a more mature reflection on the nature of Hellenic monotheism’.Footnote ⁸ Gemistos studied many subjects but apparently took no active interest in Orthodox Christian theology. His statement on the Filioque at the Council of Ferrara-Florence is considered to be orthodox, but Gemistos, ‘almost certainly, though not avowedly, already a lapsed Christian, was being disingenuous in that Orthodoxy but deliberately provocative in his neo-paganism’.Footnote ⁹ The sense is that although Pletho could not bring himself to reject Christianity outright, he favoured a view of the pagan gods that had a certain affinity with Christian teachings. This was evident in the nomenclature that he used, which was vaguely and anachronistically conceived, so that he was comfortable to refer to a ‘trinity’ of Zeus, Poseidon and Hera as corresponding in an analogical way with either Father, Son and Holy Spirit, or possibly Father, Jesus and Mary.Footnote ¹⁰

In 1459 John Argyropoulos, another Greek émigré, became the teacher of a young Italian student passionate for Greek: Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). Ficino came closer than any Renaissance western European of his day to promoting Christian Platonism. He saw in Plato's philosophical idealism an approximation to Christian doctrines of the Trinity, redemption and the soul's immortality, and he sought to inject that theological vision into a contemporary culture replete with ancient wisdom. As a result Ficino disregarded Byzantine criticism of the Neoplatonist Proclus as a threat to the Orthodox Christian theology of the Trinity.Footnote ¹¹ He taught that the doctrine of humanity's participation in the divine life was intimated in the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus, then Pythagoras, and finally Plato before being reified by Christ's incarnation.Footnote ¹²

It was mainly at the expense of Byzantine Orthodox Christianity, however, that the generation of scholars which included Pletho, Bessarion and Ficino succeeded in reintroducing aspects of Hellenism into the West. Pletho looked past Eastern and Western Christianity, back to ancient Sparta and the gods. Bessarion so earnestly cultivated both Latin and Greek literary culture that Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) called him ‘inter Graecos Latinissimus, inter Latinos Graecissimus’ and acknowledged that it was Bessarion who had recommended him for the task of integrating Hellenic and Latin culture, in this case translating the Greek historian Thucydides into elegant Latin; but Bessarion's movement both physically and theologically was to Rome.Footnote ¹³ Ficino never abandoned Christianity but cultivated the theologia platonica and the religious sensibilities of ancient Athens.

In general, Latin humanists, for all their love of ancient Greece, for the most part held Byzantine Orthodox Christians in contempt, loving the ancient classics but retaining ‘virtually undiminished traditional animosity toward the medieval Greeks’, that is to say the Byzantine Christians, who, as we know, called themselves Romaioi, not Hellenes, and surely not Graikoi.Footnote ¹⁴ Even Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1504), hailed as the princeps concordiae, for all his exposure to Florence's efforts to renew Platonism and for all his friendship with Ficino, embraced Platonism more than Byzantine Christianity, Jewish mysticism more than Plato, and Scholasticism and the Aristotelian masters more than Jewish mysticism or any other system.Footnote ¹⁵ With similar scorn, many Orthodox Christians regarded the Renaissance as indeed a rebirth of Hellenism, but by that they meant paganism. Even George Scholarios (c. 1405–68), bi-partisan in the debates over union and supporting first the Latin and then the Byzantine side of the issue during his most influential years, would not call himself a Hellene. He said that we are all children of the Hellenes but ‘I do not believe as the Hellenes (i.e., the ancient Greek pagans and their humanist devotees) believed.’Footnote ¹⁶

At Ficino's death in 1499 Giles of Viterbo promoted a more thorough reintegration of ancient and Christian Hellenism and Roman Catholic culture. Although formed in the intellectual culture of Padua as had been Pico, Giles reached beyond Paduan Aristotelianism and dialectical method and became determined to show that ancient Hellenic myth, especially as used in Plato's philosophy, was witness to the truth that was ultimately revealed in biblical and Christian teaching. The poetry was Homer's and Vergil's, and philosophy embracing mainly Plato, but Hesiod and Epictetus too were made to overlie Aristotle as presented through Averroes. Giles also worked to show that Greek Christian teachings expressed true faith even in places where there was seeming disparity between Western Catholic and Eastern Orthodox doctrine and method. Besides being a man of the new humanist letters, Giles was a theologian, like Bessarion. The ceremonial patriarchate of Constantinople was awarded to Giles in recognition of his learning which promoted Hellenic culture, broadly understood. It marked a recognition of him as a leading cleric of the Catholic Church, headquartered in Rome at the dawn of a new Golden Age, who none the less acknowledged his indebtedness to both the pagan and Christian Greeks and shared with them a living legacy of truth.

For Giles, as for many Western scholars, Hellenism was rooted in the rediscovery of the Greek language. Francis Martin, who produced much ground-breaking scholarship on Giles in the mid-twentieth century, summarised his work by observing that ‘Giles … showed himself the humanist and Neoplatonist, harmonizing the writings of the Grecian and Christian worlds.’Footnote ¹⁷ By the time of Giles's second sojourn in Florence in 1497, when he was sent there as a young Augustinian monk to teach theology, he was studying and annotating Greek texts. John Whittaker drew attention to Giles's extensive collection of Greek manuscripts:

Whittaker's survey includes twenty-four Greek manuscripts of which fourteen were surely owned by Giles, and another four were almost certainly his as well. Besides the Aldine Origen that was dedicated to him, a copy of a Greek anthology containing Epictetus, Plato, Plutarch, Ps.-Dionysius and Philo was not a simple purchase but a major collection of Greek literature that had been donated to him.Footnote ¹⁹ Whittaker notes elsewhere that even after Giles achieved proficiency in Greek he preferred to work from Latin translations when they were available.Footnote ²⁰ It is not a detraction from zeal but evidence of it, however, for a scholar to reinforce study of original sources with translations. Further, we know that Giles continued to have translations of Greek works made for him. Giles's main protégé Nicholas Scutellius, who was with Giles from 1512 until Giles's death, worked extensively as a translator for him. Giles even supported his protégé's interest in Pletho. John Monfasani, who describes Scutellius as ‘Giles's house Hellenist’, notes that Scutellius, while in Giles's household, translated Pletho, Iamblicus, Proclus, Lucian and Homer.Footnote ²¹ Further observation of Giles's encounter with Greek thought and letters suggests that he came as close as any of his contemporaries to achieving, if not a complete and successful synthesis of Hellenism, an intellectually satisfying harmony among the disparate and at times mutually exclusive associations referenced under that name.

Giles's lengthy Sentences commentary reflects his engagement with Greek language, letters and thought from the time that he took his teaching licence in theology in 1496 through a term as prior-general of the Augustinian order in 1506, up to at least 1512.Footnote ²² Work on the commentary stopped before his appointment as cardinal in 1517. Between 1496 and 1512 Giles also took an interest in the cabbala and Jewish mysticism.Footnote ²³ That is another instance of Giles's conciliatory spirit and drive to unite the different traditions of East and West, biblical and classical; Hebrew, Greek and Latin; ancient and medieval. Giles's Hellenism dominated, however, between 1512 and the early 1520s, before his interest in the cabbala arose.

Giles began to prepare his commentary on the Libri sententiarum of Peter Lombard as a school exercise. By the late fifteenth century, writing a commentary on this standard textbook had changed from being merely a fixed milestone in the journey towards the teaching licence in theology to being a chosen genre for theological expression.Footnote ²⁴ One result of their early connection to the curriculum is that Sentences commentaries in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries are less often representative of the mature work of the theologian, much as today's doctoral dissertations may reflect the promise but not the best product of scholars. By the mid-fourteenth century that was changing.Footnote ²⁵ Giles continued to work on his commentary long after receiving the teaching degree, until his administrative responsibilities and other theological pursuits prevailed.

Many historians now view the Sentences genre, together with the many commentaries, within the broader spectrum of theology that is centred upon interpretation of Scripture on the one hand and on a more systematic treatment of doctrinal questions on the other; that is to say, between theology as sacra pagina and as scientia divina. Medieval theology was never, of course, a matter of the one to the exclusion of the other, but the emphasis shifted. In the mid-twelfth century Peter Lombard's Libri sententiarum, completed in 1158, advanced a general movement of theology toward scientia in the Aristotelian sense: as an approach to knowledge in the speculative order through reason and ordered principles. Soon after its publication around 1225 the Franciscan Alexander of Hales contributed to the systematising of the Sentences genre by adding what became a familiar and much used outline format of ‘distinctions’ to Peter's book and chapter divisions. Subsequent commentators, like Hugh of St-Cher, made further divisions of the text. Medieval commentators displayed an increasing penchant for dialectical method, and of course the popularity of the Sentences commentaries was severely strained but not broken by the rise of the summa as a rival theological genre. The history of the methodological bent of commentaries on the Sentences is not strictly linear, but the movement generally followed a pattern: close attention to Peter's text during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; a more free-flowing discussion of questions in the thirteenth century; and a return to Scripture in the fourteenth and fifteenth. Many individual Sentences commentaries contain now one and now the other emphasis. In the decades leading up to the Reformation, however, the practice of theology was returning among many writers to closer focus on the Bible.Footnote ²⁶ Giles, composing his Sentences commentary in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, disregarded the arrangement of the material into the familiar ‘distinctions’ and ‘articles’ used by the majority of his predecessors, and used instead simple chapter division. His chapter arrangement resembles that of early Christian theological writings, not just Augustine's treatises but also the monastic Centuries, such as those composed by Maximus Confessor and John of Damascus. Although Giles's treatise consists of 118 chapters, it resembles the simpler format of the individual chapters of a Century.

Giles's commentary format, however, is also distinct from that of later commentators like Martin Luther, his one-time junior in the Augustinian order. For while Luther's commentary came with a conscious appeal to refrain from philosophical discourse about God, Giles commented ad mentem Platonis, ‘according to the sense of Plato’, ending the discussion of each chapter with analogies drawn from poetry and myth, philosophically interpreted. Phillip Rosemann writes of the caution of the proto-reformers about philosophising about God as a sort of non-Dionysian via negativa.Footnote ²⁷ With Giles there is, by contrast, a via negativa through Platonic mysticism. That strain may be said to be neither medieval scholastic nor proto-Reformation, but of a phil-Hellenic Renaissance. Giles's particular version, however, incorporating Platonic myth into the Sentences commentary genre is a rare juxtaposition even for the Renaissance. The Roman humanist Paolo Cortesi (1465–1510) composed a similar work, addressing the inherited theological problems in the Latin of Cicero.Footnote ²⁸ But Cortesi's interest in Cicero contrasts with the centrality of Plato, Homer and Greek myth in Giles, where he reads Christian meanings back into the ancient Greek analogues to the theology revealed through the life of Christ and his Gospel.

A pointed description here of how Giles treats a question will serve to illustrate what he does in over five hundred printed pages of his Commentary that is a significant aspect of his Hellenism. In the long-standing debate over whether the soul's enjoyment of God is an act of the human will or the intellect, Giles emphatically states where he stands on the issue: ‘I say that it belongs to the will, not to the intellect.’Footnote ²⁹ For Giles, intellect is motus, ‘activity’, but will is superior because it seeks the ultimate goal of quies, ‘repose’. This aligns with the Neoplatonic sentiment that opens and closes Augustine's Confessions: ‘Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.’Footnote ³⁰ As such, Giles's Hellenism might be seen as only a reflection of what was present in the Western tradition from the time of Augustine, whom Giles repeatedly calls his pater and dux.

In the medieval commentaries such debates were usually conducted through a standardised method of argumentation, and this structure is apparent even in Ficino: ‘Happiness seems to pertain to wisdom rather than to pleasure, and it appears to be received more by the intellect than by the will … The supreme good is achieved more in a higher faculty rather than a lower. And the intellect is a higher faculty than the will. (Therefore …).’Footnote ³¹ Syllogistic argumentation is especially fitting in arguments for the intellect. By contrast Giles exchanges some of the aspects of a rigid syllogism for philosophical reflection on ancient myths, much as is done in the Platonic dialogues, and as did the later Ficino after he reversed his decision about the answer. In this instance first Ficino and then Giles evoke the myth of the banquet of the gods. They are served first nectar, then ambrosia, which for Giles represent first the delight of the intellect, then the repose of the will. Intellect receives a preparatory delight, an aperitif as it were, followed by the sumptuous banquet of eternal blessedness of the will:

Use of Platonic allegory such as this links Giles to a tradition of Renaissance-Platonist participation in the debate. Ficino, who reversed his position on this question after reflecting upon the original Platonic texts, made a lasting impression on Giles. Although Ficino had at first maintained that the summum bonum is located in our intellect, as early as 1453, after a discussion with Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92), he and his patron came to hold that the will is more responsible for human happiness. Lorenzo's Altercazione and Ficino's Epistola de felicitate both make this point. Further, both use the images of nectar and ambrosia: the nectar of the will's joy and the ambrosia of the intellect's vision, the menu items being reversed when the decision about the chief faculty changes. In their final analysis, knowledge of God was less satisfying than love of God. Critics like Paolo Orlandini wrote in 1496 that the new Ficino was misrepresenting Plato in championing the appetitive faculty.Footnote ³³ It may be that the humanists' championing of the will was not primarily motivated by a desire to reflect Plato more accurately but to read Plato against what was perceived as an excessive intellectualising of the summum bonum by their medieval predecessors.

Humanists of the early Renaissance typically, and perhaps topically, criticised medieval scholastic theology not only as deficient in eloquence in its own right but built on a weak foundation owing to ignorance of the Greek language.Footnote ³⁴ As they described the matter (although it was not as prevalent among the medieval theologians as the humanists would have it), scholastic privileging of intellect depended on a dialectic that obfuscated the truth which could be grasped and failed to appreciate mystery about what could not. Humanists often imagined themselves as Hercules slaying the Hydra, as symbolic of their opposition to the complex multi–headed theology of the Scholastics, ‘more humbly and accurately dependent on the divine text, directed less on the presumptuous and inevitably disputatious goal of trying to know God in his fullness’, as Eugene Rice has put it.Footnote ³⁵ Therein, for them, was rooted Scholasticism's ultimate failure to satisfy. The Church Fathers were seen by contrast as having adorned Christian wisdom with writing and preaching that offered greater clarity about the known and greater eloquence about mystery, a balanced theological language which the humanists of the Renaissance considered essential to the renewal of theology in their time. Cultural Hellenism played the leading role, reviving the classical idiom and restoring texts of the masters in Greek and in Latin translations.

By the late fifteenth century, humanists like Giles's contemporary Angelo Poliziano were coming to better terms with scholastic theology. Giles, however, ever considered it his mission to render into Latin what he had been privileged to study of original Plato, using this in a campaign against Averroean Aristotelianism.Footnote ³⁶ His commentary cites copiously from Plato's dialogues and Homer, and translates only so that, as he says, those who have no Greek can appreciate something of the meaning and relevance of those texts in relation to God's revelation through Christ.Footnote ³⁷ Further, Giles validates aspects of ancient Hellenic philosophy's preliminary conceptions of God and of God's relation to humanity. He reminds readers, for example, that the Apostle Paul had pointed out how the Greek philosophers had revelation from God:

This does not lead Giles to equate Christian theology and ancient Greek religion but to discover elements of Christian meanings in the ancient Greek myths, as Gemistos Pletho had attempted to do. Thus, Aphrodite offered the ancient Greeks an intimation of the Holy Spirit; Apollo did the same in regard to Christ. The account of Saturn's devouring of his children is seen to foreshadow, albeit imperfectly, the mystery of divine unity. Giles knew that the ancient Greeks themselves had read religious meaning in their myths and thus ‘approached the ancient poets with awe justly reserved for those who by their own antiquity were closest to the original sources of revelation’.Footnote ³⁹ And, as Francis Martin observed, ‘Giles in fact saw full harmony [with Christian doctrine] in the ideals of the moral teachers of Greek and Roman antiquity, and in defense of Plato we have his own words in a marginal note written in his copy of Bessarion's In calumnatorem Platonis: “if Plato is condemned, religion suffers”.’Footnote ⁴⁰

If ancient Greek language and letters thus played a significant role in Giles's thought, the role played by the language of the Christian Graeci must be called essential because it was seen to reflect the knowledge of God to a degree that ancient Greek texts, for all their privileged affinity with subsequent Revelation, never possessed outright. Further, Giles was able to draw upon a consensus of early Christian writers and medieval theologians to the effect that although both the Greek and Latin theological terms mutually express what has truly been revealed about God, the Greek have the greater clarity as a result of their detailed evolution from the formative Christian councils. Giles stands, for example, in the long line of reflections on the words used in Trinitarian formulas. In the fourth century a technical vocabulary was formed to express the orthodox consensus that emerged in the decades after the Nicene Council to articulate the real distinction of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, neither commingled nor comprising three divine essences. The Greek term ὑπόστασις evolved from its use as a virtual synomym for οὐσία or essence, to a term, understood as ‘subsistent entity’ or ‘individual sharing a common οὐσία or essence’ that played a key role in expressing the mystery of the triune God in the Cappadocian Fathers. Both οὐσία and ὑπόστασις had been embroiled in the controversies among the various theological trajectories in the decades after Nicaea. The meaning of these terms did not come ready-made; and while it is an overstatement to speak of the emergence of an orthodox consensus by trial and error, as some scholars have done, it is necessary to see the received theological terminology as a development out of which the Church acquired a term for the One and another for the Three.Footnote ⁴¹

Giles is heir to centuries of theological reflection on the words used to express the orthodox Trinitarian consensus. In his early formation the focus was on Latin writers, where as a synonym for ὑπόστασις, the Latin persona stands as equivalent. Augustine was an early influence on Giles's Hellenism through his conciliatory efforts to present the Latin and Greek at least as equivalent insofar as any terminology is a recognised struggle to approximate an ineffable mystery. As a translation of ὑπόστασις, however, persona was seen by most Latin writers as potentially ambiguous as to whether it adequately describes a genuinely distinct individual. This is the case especially when ὑπόστασις and persona are used in connection with distinguishable divine actions, even when expressed, for example, in Latin as generare ‘to beget’, on the one hand, and generari ‘to be begotten’, on the other, or spirare ‘to produce (the spirit)’ and manare ‘to proceed (as spirit)’. Persona, which was used also to translate πρόσωπον, ‘countenance’ or ‘mask’ as well as ‘person’, can evoke Modalism, which holds that the members of the divine Triad are simply the divine nature in various manifestations, like characters wearing theatrical masks (personae) in a play, without distinct ontological reality.

Giles's major influence, Augustine, was also aware of the problem that arose when the Greek οὐσία and ὑπόστασις were translated into Latin by essentia and substantia respectively, because the Latin terms were understood as virtually equivalent in meaning, just as once the Greek terms had been virtual synonyms. The Latins, Augustine then adds, speak instead of three personae:

But Augustine was reluctant to use persona language because of its Monarchian and Adoptionist associations. In fact, in the next sentences of the same paragraph of De Trinitate, although he admits that persona is perhaps the only alternative in Latin, he will still speak usually of the Trinity formally as Three Distinct [Somethings]:

Augustine later repeats his explanation but in a more sympathetic tone:

Soon after Augustine speaks of the equivalence of Latin and Greek teaching, insofar as the users of each language chose terms that presented the least ambiguity:

Boethius, a near contemporary of Augustine, is also important in the tradition. His comparison of the key Latin and Greek terms in De duabus naturis (Contra Eutychen) summarises the relative value by saying that between persona and ὑπόστασις, favouring the Greek:

The so-called Creed of Athanasius, originating in Gaul during the mid-fifth century and thus not influential until after Augustine's time, was also of major influence on most subsequent attempts at framing substance and person in the Latin tradition. Among the Latins, however, more qualification was required regarding the equivalence of the Latin terms to their historical Greek counterparts. In the subsequent medieval tradition it is unlikely that any scholastic commentator advocated an unqualified preference for the term persona over ὑπόστασις. Thomas Aquinas, however, took more determined steps than Augustine in defending persona as a way to denote a concretely subsisting rational nature. Although he drew on Augustine and Boethius, Thomas made more direct connection to Aristotle's Metaphysics v, where Aristotle distinguishes between a first and second form of substance. First substance is a ὑπόστασις: since persons are first substances, Aquinas reasons that every person is a concretely subsisting rational nature. Following on that distinction, then Aquinas makes a more concerted defence of persona. When he discusses the relation of person, ὑπόστασις, subsistence and essence, he concludes that ‘person’ is valuable because it adds the genus of rational nature to ὑπόστασις.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is beyond the scope of this study to examine all of the witnesses in the discussion, but enough has been said to indicate the patristic and medieval exegetical tradition that Giles inherited.

Closer to Giles's time the discussion resorted to a more philological emphasis in the debates on these terms among humanists such as Theodore Gaza (d. 1478), Lorenzo Valla (1400–57), George of Trebizond (1396–1484) and others. Valla, for example, was critical of Boethius' definition of ‘person’: ‘In Latin, persona signifies a quality of the soul or body or condition, although Boethius, with a great lack of skill, wants to argue that it is the substance.’Footnote ⁴⁸ Valla offered an alternative explanation based on a linguistic and philological analysis of the traditional terms. It has rightly been suggested that his critiques were related to the debate on the Trinity between Catholic and Orthodox theologians at the Council of Ferrara, and that Valla's work ‘brought to stronger light the linguistic-semantic difficulties originating in a tenuous transposition of Greek terms into Latin as well as in the use of Aristotle's speculative vocabulary in the sphere of Christian theology’.Footnote ⁴⁹ At the council, reconvened in Florence, where discussion finally centred on the theological aspects of Trinitarian theology over which East and West disagreed, the Latins were faced with the recognition that many medieval theologians had maintained the use of substantia to translate the Greek οὐσία, and so to translate substantia, which is the linguistic equivalent of ὑπόστασις, they used persona, which the Greeks, thinking of πρόσωπον, found to be rife with heretical potential.

Giles's treatment of this abundantly discussed topic, composed in the wake of a substantial record of discussion of this matter in Christian literature, is an instance of his Hellenism not because he presents a new theology but because his deep and fundamental Augustinianism includes a conciliatory defence of pre-Augustinian Nicene formulae. In the basic matter of choosing whether Latin or Greek has the better terminology, he defended the Greek simply and explicitly. Some of this acknowledgement he derived from Augustine himself, but he further supported both the Greek terminology and the Greek theology in significant ways. Giles's discussion of the Greek ὑπόστασις as the superior term to persona moved beyond Augustine. There were many important contributors to the Latin discussion. Peter Lombard himself quoted Augustine's defence of persona in light of Augustine's self-acknowledged inability to distinguish between οὐσία and ὑπόστασις. Giles participated in this tendency too, and in his commentary expressed caution about the use of persona, suggesting the use of more accurate descriptive terms to approach the mystery with theologically safe labelling:

In this discussion of the topic, involving the evaluation for precision of a Greek and a Latin theological term, which was virtually obligatory for commentators, most Latins, even the Scholastics, had to concede that the Greek carried most weight. Giles, however, joined the discussion emphatically and creatively. It is reasonable to conclude that he intended to be faithful to Augustine's teaching about the Trinity, especially as articulated in De Trinitate, while also setting out from his reading of Greek to refine and safeguard the language used in the original theological discourse.

Stronger support for Christian Hellenism on Giles's part can be found in the more intense matter of the procession of the Spirit. This topic gains further importance because the Latin teaching of the Spirit's procession from the Father and the Son (Filioque) was also grounded in the writings of Giles's mentor Augustine, and again Giles shows significant development from his starting point. By the time of the inclusion of a summary resolution of this doctrine by Peter Lombard, the issue had acquired a standard line of essentially Augustinian argumentation. Book i, distinction 11 of Lombard opens with a combative declaration of the Western teaching on the procession of the Holy Spirit: ‘Here it must be said that the Holy Spirit is from the Father and the Son and proceeds from the Father and the Son, which many heretics have denied.’ The treatise then summarises the Latin case systematically, touching on the traditional proof-points, first addressing the question from sacra pagina by including the oft-quoted supporting texts from the Bible, such as those which contain the phrases ‘Spirit of the Son’, ‘Spirit of Christ’ and Christ's words about the Spirit, ‘whom I will send to you from the Father’.Footnote ⁵¹ The Lombard then addresses the texts that were traditionally put forth in opposition to the Filioque, such as ‘the Spirit of your Father’,Footnote ⁵² and ‘whom the Father will send in my name’,Footnote ⁵³ and, the firmest, Jesus' own words about the Holy Spirit, ‘who proceeds from the Father’.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Lombard observes that even those texts which seem to deny the Filioque, when properly understood, confirm that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. This is so, as the argument from Augustine ran, because Jesus' words should not be taken to mean that the Spirit proceeds from only the Father: Jesus did not add solo ‘only’, and mention of the Father does not amount to a denial that the Spirit also proceeds from himself.Footnote ⁵⁵ The Lombard finally states the main point of contention by observing that both sides accept the phrase ‘Spirit of the Son’ but not ‘Spirit from the Son’. Most of the hundreds of Sentence commentators who preceded Giles accepted Peter's observation as the blueprint for their own treatment of the question.

Further, since the Filioque was added unilaterally to the Creed in the Latin West, the matter of papal claims of supremacy was entangled in this issue, and it became perhaps the most significant issue regarding Christian Hellenism. Given the claims of Western supporters of the pope's authority to approve changes to the Creed, it was not an easy matter for Giles to articulate a stance more conciliatory to the Orthodox on the Filioque as part of a commentary on Lombard's textbook, especially since Giles remained committed to the idea of Rome's preeminence in a reformed and reunited Christendom. To limit or correct the Filioque Giles could have looked to the pro-unionists at the council, especially George Scholarios and Cardinal Bessarion, and even Gemistos Pletho, who continued to write on the Filioque in moderate terms, as in his Reply to the treatise in support of the Latin doctrine.Footnote ⁵⁶ There also arose a younger generation of scholars, like John Argyropoulos (1415–87), who was writing on the Filioque up to the year in which Giles was born, and of whom several were Byzantines who escaped to the West after the fall of Constantinople. But none of those writers was as versed in the Western academic theological tradition as was Giles.

For his part, Giles makes reference not simply to John Damascene's acceptance of the Spirit's proceeding ‘from the Father through the Son’, a line of argument featured in Lombard himself and throughout medieval commentaries. Rather, Giles addresses the question in an effort to present a firmer position on the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father essentially, and also from the Son when viewed from a different perspective under that essential principle. He also inserts a mythological backdrop, invoking a legend which held that pagan polytheism began in Etruria in Italy and moved to Greece and the Middle East when Dardanus migrated there, whereas Judeo-Christian monotheism began in the Middle East and moved to Greece and subsequently into Italy:

Giles acquired that lore from a document forged by the fifteenth-century Italian Dominican friar Annio da Viterbo (1432–1502).Footnote ⁵⁸ For Giles, however, what could have remained simply erudite, probably irrelevant, Renaissance mytho-history was used to suggest the primordiality and respectability of the East as the seedbed of Christianity. It is also a way of providing, in epic fashion, an αἰτία. The related neuter noun αἴτιον denotes a literary genre made popular in Hellenistic poetry. As a literary motif inserted into a larger work, like the Acontius and Cydippe account in Callimachus, the αἴτιον provides historical background to a famous individual or event. Giles is in this case using this motif as a way of accounting for the lingering confusion over the mystery of unity and multiplicity in God.

Giles adopts a strongly conciliatory tone over and above the traditional lines of theological argument. He first notes, with not a little irony, that it was when the Greek Christian Fathers and the ‘Etruscan’ Christians sat down to talk about Love, namely, God the Holy Spirit, that a great dispute arose. When he presents what he wants to be understood as the true teaching, he maintains the strict ontological procession of the Spirit from the Father alone, but he accepts a participation of the Son in the Spirit's procession as joined with the Father in that act. He does that by invoking the tradition that the Son can be seen as one with the Father in the Spirit's procession by sharing ‘the power of spirating’ (vis spirandi) with the Father in that divine act. Giles first, however, maintains that the Spirit does not proceed from the Son principally or chiefly (praecipue): ‘We attribute to the Father therefore the chief responsibility for the spirit's flowing forth, the Father, who is the only person who does not receive from elsewhere, but whatever he possesses, possesses of himself.’Footnote ⁵⁹ To this point Giles is reflecting the attempt at conciliation presented at the Council of Florence by the Latin delegate John of Montenero.Footnote ⁶⁰ John's position must be said to defend the Filioque and even a role of the Son in the Spirit's essential and not just historical procession, but his efforts to acknowledge the Father as source of all and to qualify the Son's participatory role are palpable.

Similarly, on the Filioque, Giles holds that it must be granted that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone essentially, since the Father is the source of all. If, however, one is speaking of the way in which the Spirit comes into the world, temporally, then it is thoroughly right to speak of two spiratores, the Father and the Son. That was an argument which had been attempted earlier even by Greek theologians in a conciliatory spirit. The point to note is not that Giles discovered a breakthrough theological distinction that was hitherto unknown to theologians East or West, but rather that in his discussion of that long-disputed distinction between the Spirit's eternal or ontological procession and temporal procession, that is, his coming into the world, Giles reflects the Greek emphasis, as some Latins had done. But Giles also chastises his Latins for attacking the Greeks. Further, Giles does not press the Latin insistence that the procession which Filioque references is the eternal one. Rather, he emphasises, as ecumenically-minded Greeks had done, that the Latin Filioque was imprecise Latin for what appeared to be a reference to the Spirit's eternal procession but which actually referenced his temporal procession. He makes his emphasis clear in his use, for example, of the analogy of Christ as the Bridegroom of his Church in the world:

Giles is here commenting on the love between Christ and his Church using the patristic interpretation of the analogy of the bride and bridegroom presented in the Old Testament book of Canticles. He says that the Bridegroom is the source of the loving-kindness (Amor et gratia) between them. Now Amor is a divine person, a gift, and that gift proceeds from the Son – here emphasising procession in time, coming into the world as divine gift. In this sense Giles is comfortable to speak of Christ as the causa Amoris. Giles has moved his reflection beyond the question of the essential procession of the Spirit from the Father to the phenomenology of divine love's gift to the world, from the Bridegroom to the Church that is his bride.

To witness discussions of this same topic in a different tone and with a different emphasis, one has only to compare the discussion of Bonaventure on the spiration, which epitomises much of the Western resolution of the question that Giles was to inherit. Bonaventure says that the Latins emphasise this divine act not so much as the exterior breath (‘flatus exterioris’), as the Greeks have done, but as interior love (‘amoris interioris’) between the Father and Son.Footnote ⁶² In the second question Bonaventure emphasises the single distinctive way in which the Spirit proceeds from Father and Son. There is an argument for a singular principle at work, which had become a standard qualification of the Filioque doctrine: ‘The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, not insofar as they are distinct Persons, but insofar as there is in them one fecundity of the will, or one active spiration.’Footnote ⁶³ Thus far Bonaventure's commentary could be a fitting example of a harmonious approach, in that it seeks to acknowledge a procession from Father and Son which nevertheless functions through a unified divine act. But Bonaventure strikes an adversarial posture. The Latins, he states, have operated in truth, necessity and authority, and the Greeks in ignorance, pride and pertinacity.Footnote ⁶⁴ Under that critical shadow Bonaventure asserts that the early conciliar prohibitions about professing the faith ‘otherwise’ than as articulated in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed still allow valid statements to be added to the Creed.

Now if Giles were really supporting the Greeks, would he not simply have said that the Latins were wrong? Could he not have taken the anti-Filioque position presented by the Orthodox Eugenicus at the council, rejecting the obfuscating and complex arguments of the conciliatory Latins? There are Orthodox theologians in all periods, including today, who see the solution only in that light. Giles did not go that far, nor would his position necessarily have appeased the Latins who insisted that they meant the Spirit's eternal procession, as well as the temporal, came from the Son. The point, however, is that it was surely his principal aim to defend true doctrine but, as he saw it, that doctrine allowed him to be irenic and affirmative towards the Greeks if given the proper emphasis.

As if his emphasis on the position of at least the ecumenically-minded Greeks is not considered strong enough to convince his Latin readers, Giles shows that he has more arrows of love in his quiver which can even be aimed at the Latin insistence on the question of the Spirit's eternal procession. In another lyrical section of his lengthy final chapter, for example, Giles praises God as the sunlight of understanding for illuminating the mystery of the Trinity, which earlier philosophers only glimpsed in shadow. He returns to Platonic mythology, and in an encomium of the Spirit as Amor observes that the ancients, both Hebrews and Greeks, spoke repeatedly of Amor as most ancient of Gods, not according to time but by the principle of origin. Here he posits that the Spirit is the auctor whereby the Son is from the Father and that the Father begat the Son. Now since Amor is the principle whereby the Son is generated of the Father, and the Father generates the Son, then, Giles reflects,

Giles is saying that according to origin the Father is the auctor, originator of the other persons, yet the binding is attributed to Amor. He notes that the Scriptures speak of God as ‘ancient’, but if Amor was also auctor, it was as originator of the Son being born of the Father. And in the Son there is the subtle grace of music, which he relates to the mythology of Apollo's music. So Amor is auctor of every grace in the human soul.Footnote ⁶⁶ Amor is celebrated as He who connects the Graces (three goddesses) in Greek mythology. Augustine had said that Amor is the nexus between Father and Son, and that nexus is God. Giles accepts Plato's inclusion of Amor as among the three, and he calls Plato the father of philosophy. From this perspective the focus is not on Filioque but rather a parallel notion of Spirituque, the Son proceeding from the Father and the Spirit. Giles knows what he is about and is not fostering a new Trinitarian heresy. Rather, it is to emphasise that among the co-equal and co-essential hypostases of the Trinity, only the Father may be said to be sole principle, but he may be understood to interact with both Son and Spirit in producing each the other. Giles was aware of the range of answers to the ancillary question about the Spirit that was disputed in the Sentences commentaries: namely, in what way is it to be understood that God the Father and God the Son love each other in virtue of God the Spirit. The disputation is largely the result of efforts to understand the implications of the Augustinian analogy for the Trinity in connection with the Filioque as an eternal procession. The question was open-ended in the sense that scholars came down in various ways on the question as to whether the love was rightly understood as the expression of the will of one person of the Trinity (personal or essential) or two (notional).Footnote ⁶⁷ Giles is seen to have presented the essential position, as the Orthodox maintain. He does this through his Augustinianism, even though the Greeks in the controversy over the Spirit's procession did not focus the issue on the notion of the Spirit as Amor.Footnote ⁶⁸

Further, in his call for mutual love and respect, Giles even connects the Byzantine Orthodox to the ancient Greeks whom the humanists revered, as a continuity of national identity: ‘That [Greek] nation’, he wrote, ‘in all the world have been either the discoverers or promoters of every kind of branch of learning, and they seem therefore most worthy of protection and defence rather than accusation or summoning to trial. Further, they have been the preeminent leaders and teachers even of the Latin theological writers.’Footnote ⁶⁹ And while this makes it clear that Giles did not consider himself a Hellene in ethnic terms, in the way that he claims for the Byzantines, it does show that Giles had respect for Hellenes, contemporary as well as ancient. In his praise for them Giles joins other humanists, such as Marc Antonio Sabellico, who attributed the greatest prominence to Greek teachers like Chrysoloras even for the history of humanist Latin.Footnote ⁷⁰

With the addition of conciliatory efforts toward such a major theological dispute with the Hellenism of Greek Orthodoxy, Giles achieved a cultural and religious Hellenism that was more comprehensive than that of Bessarion, Pletho or even Ficino, and not seen since the age of Michael Psellos (1017–78) at the time of the Great Schism between Rome and Constantinople in 1054. Five hundred years earlier, at the time of the closing of the Platonic Academy in 529, seven philosophers who refused to abandon philosophical Hellenism for Christianity had to escape to the Persian Empire to avoid arrest. Later they were granted amnesty and allowed to return to Byzantium. Arnold Toynbee spoke of them as ‘the last students of Hellenic philosophy who were able to follow their bent with impunity’.Footnote ⁷¹ Between the Platonists of Justinian's sixth century and Pletho's fifteenth, Photios of Constantinople in the ninth century, and Michael Psellos and John Italòs (c. 1018–91) in the eleventh, struggled to synthesise elements of Hellenic philosophy with Christianity. All of them incurred the suspicion of church officials. As Toynbee put it, ‘Italòs and Pletho asked for trouble; Photios and Psellos did not; they tried to be discreet, but that did not save them.’Footnote ⁷²

The interpretive method adopted in Giles's distinctive version of a Sentences commentary, therefore, already constituted a new approach, as he exalted the divinising power of Platonic Love in this academic theological genre. This theme, regardless of its academic medium, was for Giles inextricably connected with the Christian doctrine of divinisation through the Holy Spirit. Like his humanist predecessors who drew on Plato's Phaedrus, 246–7, Giles invokes the allegory of the intellect and will as twin wings by means of which the soul, in love with the divinity, is able to ascend to heaven and experience fruitio, felicitas and quies, the image complementing the banquet of the gods. Giles might surely have been influenced in this by Augustinian mysticism, insofar as the striving for rest in God is a characteristic not only of the Confessions but of De Trinitate. But the added mythology is not from Augustine. The twin wings give poetic colouring to the debate, much as Plato himself did in his dialogue. And this Platonic transcendentalism is reflected in the idea of theosis in the Eastern Christian spiritual tradition, where Christ's salvation of fallen man in the small arc of human history is seen in relation with the Father's eternal design of recalling his beloved creation to himself. In the final section of his commentary, Giles offers an extended reflection on the soul's native rationality, which retains godlike qualities, diva, as he says; but when returned fully to God, by the power of God's love, it becomes dea, truly divine:

In the final chapters of his commentary as it stands, loosely corresponding to distinctions 16 through 18 of book i of the Sentences, Giles reaches that point of the discussion which he sought at the beginning. Enjoyment of God is an assenting will in response to divine love. This return to the Father's loving presence, which is effected first by divine Wisdom and the Word and finally by the Spirit of love received and returned by the creature, is the aim of Christian life. It need not be limited to Christian mysticism. It is therefore important to see that despite the unfinished nature of Giles's project as an academic Sentences commentator, Giles did reach his thematic and theological and pastoral objectives. It is not likely that he would have continued to write a commentary in the scholastic manner on every individual question in the Lombard's later three books, even if he had had the leisure, the years, and the lack of curiosity about other sources of wisdom that such a project would have required, given the degree of detail with which he wrote. In no small measure Giles derived his theological emphasis on the will and the captivating power of divine love from Augustine. We hear the major chord in Giles that was sounded by Augustine and which Peter Lombard noted:

Giles, however, does not display the same eagerness to fuse Augustinian theology with direct knowledge of the Greek Platonic tradition in other characteristic Augustinian themes of nature and grace, original sin, purgatory and predestination, except in what can be said during discussions of the Trinity. This is largely a consequence of his commentary's intense focus on the nature of the godhead and the relationship of the divine hypostases. Thus, his treatise does not reach the ‘small arc’ of theological anthropology and salvation history directly. But it should also be pointed out that Giles does include and in fact concludes his commentary with a discussion of human salvation from the ‘large arc’ of divine providence and the divinisation of the human creation made in God's image and likeness. The emphasis is on a Trinitarian theology embodied in Neoplatonic analogy.

In this emphasis it is appropriate to mention the affinity between Giles and Origen. The dedication to Giles, in Greek, by Aldus Manutius in 1503 has already been mentioned. It is also known that Giles owned copies of Origen's De principiis and other texts in Latin translation. He praises Origen often. In the commentary on the Song of Songs the Alexandrian exegete wrote of the relationship between Father and Son as Love, and the expectation that that Love in Christ is what brings us into fellowship, rather kinship, with God:

Giles's Hellenism therefore resembles the Latinism of George Scholarios (1400–73), the Byzantine admirer of Latin philosophy who kept faith that union could be achieved by the reconciliation of doctrinal differences and not by surrender, but who eventually lost hope and withdrew to an anti-unionist position. In Giles it can be seen how far that reconciliation had come before it stalled. Giles's efforts, however, had their own limits within Hellenism. George of Trebizond (1396–1486), for example, suggested a common relation between Christianity and Islam, which Giles does not endorse but which called for a Western response to the Turkish advance on Byzantium.

Giles's visionary, irenic tone and his tempering of his defence of the Western theological doctrine and method are aspects of a Hellenism intended to close the gap between Eastern and Western Christendom. Scholars have long recognised Giles's interest and competency in Greek language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato, as important to Christianity in the new Christian Golden Age that was his vision. It is right, however, to say that his Hellenism goes deeper than has been recognised and that examples of it will continue to be revealed. Anthony Kaldellis has observed that ‘Rome, Greece, Scripture, and the history of the Church provided the Byzantines with a diverse source of ideals and potential identities awaiting (re)activation at the right moment, to be excerpted, recombined, and infused with new meaning.’Footnote ⁷⁶ That impulse in the Hellenism of the Byzantines toward renewal through synthesis plays a role in the European Renaissance, although the impulse to draw upon East and West can be found in all European centuries from antiquity until the present. One chapter of that history traces the Latin West's renewed encounter with those elements of culture at the fall of Constantinople, of which the newest and most problematic concept was ‘Hellas’. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ἕλλην and Graecus continued to have diverse and often contradictory senses, including Greek language, ancient Greek paganism, Hellenistic literary culture, Orthodox ‘Greek’ Christianity and a re-emerging Greek nationalism in spite of the loss of the capital.

Giles presents a complex vision in his Sentences commentary. His ability to synthesise and integrate is further evident in his interest in cabbala, so much so that John O'Malley twice expressed wonder in print: ‘Our imagination staggers at the prospect of what the adoption of the cabala would have meant for the subsequent history of Western theology.’Footnote ⁷⁷ But Giles's alleged mysticism is to be seen not in isolation as the controlling factor but as part of a vision of a restored Christendom with its intellectual, cultural, political and religious parts again made whole. This vision was shared by many of Giles's humanist contemporaries who had a deep commitment to ecclesiastical reform. These included Erasmus (1456–1536), Philip Melancthon (1497–1560) and John Colet (1467–1519). This is why, amidst all the mysticism, we know, too, that Giles repeatedly called for a Western military response to the invasion of Constantinople by the Turks. Further, he did this not for aggrandisement of Western power but because the loss of Constantinople made it likely, as he saw it, that the Orthodox could be exterminated or forced to abandon their faith.Footnote ⁷⁸ Giles would be delighted to know that not only was Orthodox Christianity not destroyed, but that it was integrated into the idea of Hellenism from his time forward, even with the tenuous survival of the principal see of the Orthodox Church in New Rome.