“Sun Worship in Fifteenth Century Rome? Bessarion and the Worship of the Sun/Son”
Abstract
In his attacks on Platonism, the Byzantine neopagan philosopher George Gemistos (Plethon), and Plethon’s student the cardinal Bessarion in the later 1450s, George of Trebizond repeatedly mentions that he had seen hymns to the sun god written by Plethon, in which Plethon celebrated the sun as the soul of the universe and the creator of all. Modern scholars have long noted that George’s report conflicts with Plethon’s surviving Platonic hymns that assign the sun a less important role as the boundary between the material and ideal worlds. In this paper, I will suggest that the cardinal Bessarion, not Plethon, wrote Trebizond’s hymns. Fascinated by the sun in Platonic theology, Bessarion had read and annotated Julian the Apostate’s hymn to the sun god. In his In calumniatorem Platonis (Against the Slanderer of Plato), Bessarion would suggest that Plato had some knowledge of the trinity via the sun. Just as Plato treated the sun as the offspring of the good, a real-world manifestation of the Good in the Republic (508b-c), so Christ, the son of God, bridged ideal and material. As Bessarion wrote Platonizing Christian hymns such as a hymn to the archangel Michael, “a most pure form,”this suggests that he may have composed hymns syncretizing the Son with the sun as he does in the defense. As such, this paper speculates how Bessarion and his followers may have syncretized their Christianity with Platonism. More concretely, it will show that Bessarion’s syncretism is a missing link, connecting the Platonic theology of Plethon with the later sun worship of Demetrios Rhaoul Kabakes as well as more importantly Marsilio Ficino’s syncretizing project in his Liber de Sole et Luna (Book on the Sun and Moon).
