Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantium and the Crusades

Ιnternal affairs under the Comneni and Angeli 

Page 5

As not all the works of Italus are published, it is impossible to form a fixed opinion about him and his doctrine. There is, therefore, some disagreement among scholars on this problem. While, as Th. Uspensky said, the freedom of philosophical thought was limited by the supreme authority of the Scriptures and the works of the Fathers of the Church, Italus, as some investigators, Bezobrazov and Bryanzev, for example, state, judged it possible, in some problems, to give the preference to pagan philosophy over church doctrine; he separated the domain of theology from that of philosophy, and admitted the possibility of holding independent opinions in one or the other domain. Finally, in connection with the case of Italus, N. Marr raised the most important question of whether the initiators of the trial of Italus were on his level in intellectual development, demanding the separation of philosophy from theology, and whether, having condemned the thinker for intrusion upon theology, they granted him his freedom in purely philosophical speculation? Of course, the answer is no: at that time such freedom was impossible. But Italus is not to be considered only as a theologian. He was a philosopher who was condemned because his philosophical system did not conform to the doctrine of the Church; and the most recent investigator of the religious life of the epoch of the Comneni said that all the information clearly shows that Italus belonged to the Neoplatonic school. All the discrepancy and difference in opinion show how interesting is the problem of John Italus from the point of view of the cultural history of Byzantium at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth century.

But this is not all. Attention has been paid to the doctrines which appeared in western European philosophy in the lifetime of John Italus and resembled the doctrines of the latter; for example, such a resemblance is to be found in the doctrine of Abelard, a famous French scholar and professor of the first half of the twelfth century, whose autobiography, Historia calamitatum, is still read with intense interest. In view of the complicated and insufficiently investigated problem of mutual cultural influences between the East and West in this epoch, it may be too sweeping a statement to say that the western European scholasticism depended on that of Byzantium; but it may be affirmed that the circle of ideas in which the European mind was working from the eleventh to the thirteenth century was the same that we find in Byzantium.

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