Encyclopedia of Philosophy: RENAISSANCE PLATONISM

Cardinal Bessarion, who had introduced the future Pope into this quarrel, was no enemy to Aristotle: he produced a new Latin translation of the Metaphysics. But he was himself involved in a different controversy about the relationship of Aristotle to Christian teaching. Greek scholars at the Papal court were now making the works of Plato available in Latin, but some of them were doing so with a degree of reluctance. One, George of Trebizond, published a choleric tract denouncing Plato as inferior in every respect to Aristotle (whom he presented in a highly Christianized version). Bessarion wrote a reply, published in both Greek and Latin, Against the Calumniator of Plato, arguing that while neither Plato nor Aristotle agreed at all fully with Christian doctrine, the points of conflict between the two of them were few, and there were at least as many points of agreement between Plato and Christianity as there were between Christianity and Aristotle. His tract was the first solidly based account of Plato's philosophy to appear in the West since classical times.