Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 21
George’s comments were directed not at Bruni but at his fellow Greek,
Theodore Gaza (c. 1400–75). Gaza was the protégé of Cardinal Bessarion (c.
1403–72), a distinguished Byzantine theologian and philosopher who had
transferred his allegiance to the Roman Catholic church. Bessarion’s political
and intellectual clout (he himself had translated the Metaphysics) helped to
convince Nicholas V that he should commission Gaza to make new Latin
versions of some of the Aristotelian texts translated by George. 36 George’s loss of
papal favour and patronage was no doubt caused by his notoriously difficult
behaviour, 37 as well as his failure on occasion to live up to his own high
standards of translation. There was a theoretical difference between his position
and that of Gaza, however. Gaza’s primary concern was to ensure the elegance
and Latinity of his translations even when this entailed imprecision and
inconsistency. George, by contrast, took the view that in rendering philosophical
works exactitude and fidelity to the author’s words were all-important; judged by
this criterion, the medieval translators, for all the inadequacies of their Latin
style, had been more successful than Gaza. 38
George believed moreover that Gaza’s version, or rather ‘perversion’, of
Aristotle would undermine scholasticism, which relied on the long-established
terminology of the medieval translations. For George, a Greek convert to Roman
Catholicism, a humanist admirer of medieval thinkers such as Albertus Magnus
and Thomas Aquinas, and a deeply paranoid personality, the classical Latin
which Gaza put in Aristotle’s mouth was part of a conspiracy to destroy
Christian theology by removing the scholastic Aristotelianism which
underpinned it. 39 And that, he believed, was only the beginning. The hidden
agenda of Gaza and his patron Bessarion included the replacement of
Aristotelianism by another ancient philosophical system, one which (as we shall
see) George thought was destined to pave the way for a return to paganism.
George’s merits as a translator of Aristotle found at least one admirer. Angelo
Poliziano (1454–94), the most learned Italian humanist of his day, recognized
that Gaza’s much-praised translation of the zoological works borrowed heavily
from the earlier version by George, whom Gaza had ungenerously referred to as
a ‘brothel keeper’. 40 The fact that Poliziano, a teacher of Greek and Latin
literature at the Florentine studio, was sufficiently concerned with Aristotelian
natural philosophy to study these translations is an indication of the widening
philosophical interests of late fifteenth-century Italian humanists. In 1490
Poliziano lectured on the Nicomachean Ethics, a treatise which was within the
typical humanist ambit of moral philosophy; but during the next four years he
worked his way through the entire Organon. Though keenly interested in
Aristotle’s logic, Poliziano—like Petrarch and Bruni—held no brief for the
British logicians who dominated the scholastic curriculum. He wanted to apply
humanist philological methods to Greek philosophical texts in order to reform
subjects such as logic and natural philosophy, corrupted by centuries of
scholastic ignorance. 41