Pantelis Golitsis

The present article provides an overview of Aristotle’s fate in Byzantium from the eighth to the fifteenth century. In opposition to accounts that consider Byzantine philosophy either as a mere continuation of Greek philosophy or as neutrally disposed towards it, the article argues that the reception of Aristotle’s philosophy in Byzantium (like the reception of Plato’s philosophy) oscillated between enthusiastic approval and vehement rejection: some Byzantines argued in favour even of Aristotle’s theology, assessed as admirably monotheistic, whereas others associated Aristotelian science with heresy and Thomism. The article discusses these two extreme positions in conjunction with the moderate assessment of the Stagirite in Byzantium, which focused on his logic and on topics of his physics in accordance with Byzantine eclecticism.

Just as it happened in the Latin West, so it also happened in the Byzantine East: Aristotle was always omnipresent either in a positive or in a negative way; his philosophy was either admired and espoused or downgraded and dismissed. Contrary, however, to the intellectual concerns of their Western peers, whose interpretation of Aristotle was largely shaped by the Arabic tradition (most importantly, through the commentaries of Avicenna and Averroes), in which philosophy appeared free from religious concerns, the Byzantine philosophers did not usually argue about how to interpret Aristotle’s philosophy. Instead they mostly argued about its use and its overall value. To take a prominent example, the claim for the unity and singularity of the human intellect, which came to be known as Averroism in the Latin West in the thirteenth century, was rejected by Thomas Aquinas precisely as a false interpretation of Aristotle’s noetics; indeed, Averroes himself and the Averroists at the University of Paris put forward the doctrine of the singular human intellect as an accurate interpretation of the passive intellect, which Aristotle discusses in his treatise On the Soul III 4–5. There is no doubt, of course, that Thomas was committed to rejecting Averroism for the benefit of the Christian doctrine on the immortality of the individual soul. But what matters for my present purpose is that he did so through what he put forth as a correct interpretation of Aristotle’s text. Thomas had also battled against the so-called ‘doctrine of the double truth’, usually associated with Boethius of Dacia and Siger of Brabant, that is, the doctrine which separates the