Unintended consequences

In 1439, representatives of Eastern and Western churches met in Florence to heal the schism of 1054. An agreement was reached, but it remained a paper agreement only. But the event had enormous consequences for the future of the Western world. Because of the good will this ecumenical meeting produced, East and West achieved a unity in arts and sciences that it failed to achieve ecclesiastically.

Rosenstock-Huessy summarizes some of the results:

"The Greeks who fled from the Turks and came to Florence brought with them something more in demand than Christian dogma at that time, namely Plato, and Platonism thus entered the West under the veil of Church collaboration. The man who specially combined the work for reunion with the introduction of Plato was Bessarion, a Greek Bishop who later became a Roman Cardinal. He hailed from the very city of Nicaea whose name conveys so vividly the memory of the schism, and of the original unity. Shortly after the fall of Constantinople, Cosimo de Medici gave Villa Coreggi, near Florence, to Marsilio Ficino, and Ficino opened there the famous Florentine Academy which was the first of its kind in modern times. It became the model of later academies, and through it Plato was introduced into all our universities." From the Humanist revival of Plato, the modern world inherited, among other things, an enthusiasm for mathematics, already anticipated in the work of the Christian Platonist Cusa.

This illustrates a number of Rosenstock-Huessy's themes. First, it shows how the reunion of the human race - which he sees as the great end of the gospel - can be achieved outside the normal ecclesiastical channels. Second, he notes that this sequence of events implies that the Renaissance, though in some respects pagan, was "in the long view an event inside Christainity, begun by sparks ignited in a common plight of Eastern and Western Christendom." He argues that the wound of schism, the result of a failure of faith and love, is the means for the resurrection of arts and sciences associated with the Renaissance: "Without the schism and its pains, without the yearning for the lost unity of the church, our academies would not have been built on the synthesis of medieval university traditions with Plato." Finally, he notes the ironic fact that science received much of its impetus from "the most rigid orthodoxy, that of the Eastern Church."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, January 03, 2007 at 03:29 PM

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