Required to serve the sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror after the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the invasion of his native Trebizond in 1461, the Byzantine philosopher George Amiroutzes (ca. 1400-ca. 1469) put into writing a literary recreation of several conversations held with the Ottoman ruler on matters of philosophy and the Christian faith. He probably left the dialogue unfinished due to his death. Unique in its historical, philosophical, and theological significance, this work was only known for centuries through an anonymous and incomplete Renaissance Latin translation.
We owe it to Professor John Monfasani to have finally brought to light in this precious volume Amiroutzes’s original Greek text of The Philosopher, or On Faith together with its first English translation in facing pages. Indeed, Monfasani discovered the sole manuscript of the dialogue by chance through an incipit in a catalog of the library of Toledo’s cathedral in 2004. As he narrates in the introduction (10-15), at that time he had just identified the author of the extant Latin version as the renowned humanist and Dominican friar Zanobi Acciaiuoli and supplemented its critical edition by Óscar de la Cruz Palma--which was based on a single codex from the National Library of France--with five missing sections found in three Vatican manuscripts.
After a brief preface, in which the author expresses gratitude to the institutions and colleagues who made this edition possible, the book opens with a concise yet rich introduction. Monfasani had already explored Amiroutzes’s biography and historical-cultural context in his editio princeps of fifteen short philosophical treatises preserved in the same Greek manuscript as this dialogue (George Amiroutzes: The Philosopher and His Tractates. Leuven: Peeters, 2011). In the present volume, the references to the Byzantine author’s life and works include certain political and religious controversies surrounding his final years. They are followed by an account of the textual history of the dialogue--where the editor details the discovery of the manuscript--and a summary of its main contents, structure, and context, along with an analysis of the text’s nature and purpose.
The final section of the introduction, addressing the editorial principles adopted, is perhaps too brief. It might have been useful to include references to the Latin translation in the Greek critical apparatus, especially given that the edition relies on a single manuscript--with additions and corrections by a second hand--and Monfasani acknowledges that the Latin version originates from a separate textual witness. While the Greek exemplar is, of course, of incomparably greater importance to establish the text, the Latin version, due to its temporal proximity, ingenuity, and evident fidelity to the original, could have aided in the restoration of the original reading in cases of ambiguities, unclear writing or punctuation, and evident lacunae in the Greek manuscript (e.g., 70.12-13; 180.25ss; etc.). A closer collation with Acciaiuoli’s Latin could also have helped favor or dismiss several conjectures devised by the editor. Although I will not treat them individually here, I found that, in a few cases, Monfasani could have made better sense of the text as it appeared in the manuscript (e.g. 36.6; 52.9; 84.22; 172.8; 172.15; 198.6).
At the end of the bilingual edition of the dialogue, the editor includes two appendices featuring excerpts from a letter by Amiroutzes to Cardinal Bessarion, written shortly after the fall of Trebizond (1461), and the preface by Johannes Werner to the Latin version of a now-lost Greek treatise by the Byzantine philosopher, De his quae geographiae adesse debent, as well as bibliographical references, a general index, and an index of biblical citations.
Unfortunately, I could not obtain a copy of the codex unicus from Toledo to compare with our edition. Furthermore, my limited knowledge of Greek philology would not have enabled me to conduct a thorough technical analysis of the critical text. I leave this task to my colleagues who possess the necessary expertise.
Instead, I would like to focus on some of the rich and complex philosophical and theological questions embedded in the text and its translation. Monfasani’s talent and experience as an intellectual historian are beyond question. His reconstruction of the historical, political, cultural, and religious fabric surrounding the dialogue is commendable, both in the preliminary study and in the extensive notes accompanying the translation. This effort is particularly valuable given the nature of the text--a fictionalized version of conversations reportedly held between the Ottoman sultan who conquered the enduring Byzantine Empire and a philosopher who is one of the most prominent representatives of that defeated civilization.
While the primary focus of the discussions transmitted in the text is the reasonableness of the Christian faith, the fascinating cultural backdrop of this encounter constantly surfaces. The dialogue intertwines two religions, centuries-old civilizations, and contrasting perspectives on the relationship between faith, reason, and power structures. It also reflects two different modes of engaging with and transforming Greekpaideia and philosophical traditions, particularly those of Aristotle and the Platonists. Indeed, this extraordinary cultural interplay between the dialogue’s protagonists renders its interpretation and translation all the more challenging. Amiroutzes is deeply versed in the classical, Hellenistic, and late antique schools of Greek thought, both pagan and Christian. He demonstrates remarkable command of Neoplatonic, Peripatetic, and Patristic trends of thought, as well as familiarity with certain medieval Latin philosophers, notably Thomas Aquinas, whose works he must have accessed through their Greek translations by Demetrios Kydones.
Mehmed II, like Monfasani and other historians of the period note, was an enthusiast of philosophy and the sciences. He likely had a certain grasp of the Arabic Peripatetic tradition, especially the works of Avicenna. In the Islamic territories, this Aristotelianism was significantly shaped by the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Proclus, whose writings had been partially translated into Arabic and considerably adapted under the name and authority of Aristotle--for instance, the so-calledTheologia Aristotelis and the Liber de causis. This influence may explain some of the apophatic and Neoplatonizing references to the first principle attributed to the sultan, who elsewhere uses a more common Aristotelian jargon.
Amiroutzes’s version of Aristotle, on the other hand, is profoundly shaped by its Byzantine and Scholastic receptions, especially by Thomistic philosophy. Interestingly, as Monfasani frequently observes, even Amiroutzes’s knowledge of Arab philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes surely came through Aquinas’s Summae.
This intricate amalgamation of such diverse sources and transmissions underpins the dialogue. For example, the two interlocutors continually strive to ground their respective arguments in “common notions” (κοιναὶ ἔννοιαι). These shared principles of reason and demonstration were regarded as universally acceptable opinions in both Byzantium and the Islamic world, albeit arising from distinct conceptual histories. The expression was distilled in Late Antiquity by Alexander of Aphrodisias, drawing on its earlier use by Euclid and the Hellenistic schools, but combined with Aristotle’s idea of common opinions. Greek Neoplatonists and later Byzantine philosophers followed Alexander’s synthesis. And so did the traditions of Falsafa from al-Fārābī onward, developing these foundational principles of philosophical demonstration in dialogue with Islamic jurisprudence and Quranic interpretation.
Faced with all these complexities, Monfasani’s translation is, on the whole, clear, eloquent, and skillfully executed. His effort to render Amiroutzes’s sometimes intricate conceptualizations into more plain and accessible English is particularly commendable, especially given that it would be a long haul to elucidate and contextualize such diverse philosophical and theological ideas. However, this adaptation task occasionally risks obscuring the precise technical meaning of certain expressions in some of the most arduous passages of the dialogue. In the following, I will highlight a few examples of this technical vocabulary, grouped according to their respective philosophical or theological disciplines.
The rigor of Aristotelian terminology becomes vital in the domains of Metaphysics, Physics, and Anthropology. To begin with, Monfasani generally renders Aristotle’s interplay of possibility and actuality as modes of being, expressed by the dative pair δύναμει-ἐνεργείᾳ, as “potentially” and “actually.” Although normally acceptable for those terms, these adverbs may sometimes lead to confusion regarding the theory, whereas “in potentiality” and “in actuality” seem more appropriate.
Let us look, for example, at a short passage (42.13-14) that includes a quotation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The translation reads: “What potentially can be otherwise ‘either absolutely or in the particular sense in which it is said’ potentially ⟨can change⟩” (43). A closer rendering of the Greek, with no need for additional insertions, might be: “What is in potentiality admits of being otherwise ‘either in an absolute sense or in that particular sense in which it is said to be’ in potentiality.”
One of the Greek verbs in that same passage, ἐνδέχομαι, often appears in the text as a substantivized present participle, τὸ ἐνδεχόμενον. While Monfasani translates it on the same page (42.16) and elsewhere as “what admits possibility,” it would be more helpful to render it consistently throughout as “contingent,” which the translator does occasionally (cf. 50.10-15). In fact, in Amiroutzes’s usage, this term reflects the influence of Aquinas’s theory of the modes of being and modal logic--more specifically, his notion of contingens, that which is neither necessary nor impossible. Through that notion, Aquinas bridges Aristotle’s concept of logical potentiality with Christian understandings of creaturehood and metaphysical dependence.
Interestingly, this Thomistic idea itself has roots in Avicenna’s modal logic and metaphysics, which could explain Mehmed’s apparent familiarity with the concept. It is an excellent case of the various transformations in the Begriffsgeschichte that underlie Amiroutzes’s text: from Aristotle to his Greek commentators, to the Arabs, to the Latins, and back to the Byzantine Greeks.
As further evidence of the Thomistic origin of this notion of τὸ ἐνδεχόμενον, Antonis Fyrigos has recently documented that among the improvements made by Bessarion, Amiroutzes’s associate, to Kydones’s Greek translation of the Summa contra Gentiles was precisely the substitution of συμβεβηκός with ἐνδεχόμενον as a more faithful rendering of the Latin contingens, an adjustment particularly evident in chapter 67 from book one.
Moving to psychology, the distinction between νοῦς (mind or intellect), νοητόν (intelligible), and νοερόν (intellectual) is central, as it reflects the nuanced interplay between metaphysical and epistemological uses of these terms. The accuracy of their meanings should not be overlooked (cf. 144.17ss; 156.7; 158.14; 180.25) because they point to quite different realities: νοῦς as the faculty of understanding--whether human or hypostatized, νοητόν as the quality of being capable of apprehension by the intellect, and νοερόν as the property of possessing the intellectual faculty or belonging to the realm of thought.
Spatial concepts like διάστημα and διάστασις could be improved as “interval,” “dimension,” or “extension,” capturing the breadth of their metaphysical and physical imports (62.18-20). Something similar could be argued with χῶρος (186.11; 192.6), whose Platonic resonance would be better expressed by “region” than by “locale”; with Aristotle’s τελειότης, rendered at some point as “purpose” (90.10ss), which I would translate as “perfection” or “fulfilment”; with Plotinus’s deictic language of ἐκεῖ or ἐκεῖθεν, i.e., “there,” “from there,” usually paraphrased (178, 180.14, etc.), which should have been preserved as linguistic markers of transcendence, gesturing toward the ineffable nature of the One; or finally with Proclus’s typical pair μεθεκτός-ἀμέθεκτος, here: “mixed” and “unmixed” (156.12:), which could have been read more literally and technically as “participable” and “imparticipable.”
Concerning Logic and Epistemology, technical language would require equally careful treatment. An expression such as καθ’ αὑτό is sometimes rendered a bit loosely (e.g. 146.15-16; 196.24). Strictly meaning “by itself” or “absolutely,” this logical category is traceable to the Old Academy and even to Plato’s dialogues, denoting the supreme mode of independent existence in most schools thereafter. In the case of κατηγορία, the orthographic equivalence with the word “category” (180.4) may distort its simpler logical sense as “predicate.” Moreover, the translator appears to disregard the technical function of the relative pronoun ὅπερ, which usually serves to express identity in Aristotle’s theory.
Adding up some of these slight missteps can change the whole meaning of a phrase. For example, the Greek “ἐκεῖ δὲ τὸ ὑποκείμενον, ὅπερ τὸ κατηγορούμενον ἐστί, καὶ τὸ πλῆθος συνῄρεται εἰς τὸ ἕν” (180.14-15) rendered as: “In God, however, the predicated category and multiplicity are brought into unity,” should probably read something like: “There, however, the subject--which is identical with the predicate--and multiplicity are reduced to the One.”
A word like φαντασία, rendered as “phantasm” (46.7), would be better understood as “representation,” which aligns with Aristotle’s faculty mediating sense perception and intellectual cognition. Similarly, θεωρέω as “contemplate” can better capture a higher speculative function than the narrower “think” (46.4) or “conceptualize” (178.20).
The rare formula λόγος τῆς εἰκόνος applied to the cosmos (178.1) conveys the image theory of Plato’s Timaeus, later taken up by Neoplatonic commentators and Greek Christian authors, wherefore it seems more suitable to speak of “proportion” or “correspondence” (λόγος) of the image to its archetype rather than a “definition of its archetypal image” (177-179).
When engaging with Christian theology, Amiroutzes exhibits his thorough command of Greek Patristic and Byzantine intellectual traditions. The Ottoman ruler is keen on questioning the rational plausibility of the core Christian dogmas. So, the Greek philosopher struggles to defend them by adapting centuries of Trinitarian and Christological controversies into a language tolerable to Mehmed’s theoretical training. Once more, the accuracy of meaning is tantamount to a proper translation.
When it conveys the hypostatic distinctions among the persons of the Trinity, which are unshareable between them, one might avoid translating the plural noun ἰδιότητες as “properties” (e.g. 154.15; 174.12; 176.1), because this word can refer to common essential attributes of the Divine such as Goodness, Truth, Beauty, etc. Thus, using “peculiarities” or “singularities” would be preferable in those cases.
Despite its Pythagorean ring, the noun τριάς surely names here the Christian “Triad” or “Trinity,” which are more precise translations than the adjective “triune” (154.4). Curiously, when Mehmed’s character later brings up the term again, pairing it with another numerical noun, δεκάς, the latter is rendered as “decady” (170.10), a neologism by which the translator perhaps tries to convey the sultan’s scorn for the Christian Trinity or any multiplicity attributed to the Godhead.
The word γαστήρ should certainly not be translated as “stomach” when referring to the presence of the Son of God in the Virgin Mary (56.14; 60.24; 62.11; 62.21, etc.), but rather as “womb,” since the sultan and the philosopher are discussing Christ’s conception and incarnation. Monfasani uses the more appropriate “belly” in the dialogue’s outline (16).
There is a more intricate issue with verbs relating to birth and generation: γίγνομαι, γεννάω, τίκτω, etc. In Greek theological debates on the Trinity, γίγνομαι gradually came to be exclusively associated with the realm of becoming and creation, not to be confused with the eternal generation of the Son of God, expressed more exclusively by the verb γεννάω.
So, in those contexts, γίγνομαι should be rendered as “originate,” “become,” or “come to pass” rather than “engender” (142.6ss). Likewise, the verb τίκτω was related to Christ’s human birth, sharply distinguished from his transcendent generation or begetting by God the Father, and thus should probably not be read as “beget” (62), but perhaps as “give birth,” “bring forth,” or “bear.”
Other Christological terms like ἀσύγχυτος (misspelt in the Greek text) and ἀμετάβλητος (112.13), currently translated as “uncombined” and “unmixed,” were vital to establishing the manner of coexistence of Christ’s two natures during the Council of Chalcedon, and therefore could be more traditionally read as “unconfused” and “unchangeable.”
Finally, the term ὑποκείμενον--like a few others I will not deal with here--presents particular trials due to its polyvalence across disciplines, and the translation at times overlooks these subtleties. As we have shown, in logical contexts, ὑποκείμενον may function as the “subject” of predicates, and occasionally it can refer to “assumptions” or to “alleged” principles in a demonstration (better than “premises”: 198.15-16). In the field of Physics, however, ὑποκείμενον denotes a material “substrate” underlying physical realities and supporting form or quality. Now, theological contexts further complicate its meaning, and so, in some cases, ὑποκείμενον becomes interchangeable with ὑπόστασις, denoting a personal “subsistence” within Trinitarian discourse, a unique hypostasis distinct from and irreducible to the shared essence or οὐσία. This usage also applies to Christology, where Christ’s two natures subsist in a single ὑπόστασις or ὑποκείμενον. Shifts in meaning like these exhibit Amiroutzes’s ability to navigate fathomless waters of philosophy and theology, but inconsistent handling of such nuances may end up veiling some of the text’s richness (e.g. 50.12ss; 180.14; 196.25).
These technical notes are not intended to diminish the countless merits of Monfasani’s discovery and sustained scholarship on this fascinating dialogue. Rather, they highlight the monumental scope of the endeavor he has undertaken. Amiroutzes is a significant yet unjustly overlooked figure in Renaissance and Byzantine studies. While much remains to be explored about his life, philosophical and theological ideas, and diverse influences, Monfasani has laid a solid foundation and opened promising new avenues for future research.