Michael Psellos

Michael Psellos was the leading scholar and statesman of eleventh-century Byzantium — a courtier and historian whose Chronographia is a brilliant memoir of the emperors he served — and the chief reviver of philosophy in his age. At a time when the Church regarded pagan thought with suspicion, he championed Plato and, above all, Proclus, whose works he studied and digested.

He wrote an exposition of the Chaldean Oracles and summaries of Neoplatonic doctrine drawing heavily on Proclus, and so preserved and passed on much that might otherwise have perished. His enthusiasm carried risks: his pupil John Italos was later condemned for pressing Platonism too far against Christian teaching.

By keeping the texts and ideas of late Neoplatonism in circulation, Psellos forms a vital Byzantine link in the chain — one of the bridges by which the tradition survived to be carried west by Plethon and reborn in Ficino's Florence.