THE SCHOOLMEN A tempestuous defence of Aristotle was made by George of Trebizond, who was at this time translating, for Pope Nicholas V, works of both Plato and Aristotle as well as many Greek Fathers His Comparison of Plato and Aristotle (1458) makes Aristotle a Christian hero and Plato a heretical villain George claims that Aristotle believed in creation out of nothing, in divine providence, and in a Trinity of divine persons Plato, on the other hand, propounded disgusting doctrines such as the beauty of pederasty and the transmigration of souls into animals, and encouraged gymnastics for both sexes together in the nude Devotion to Plato had led the Greek Church into heresy and schism; Latin Aristotelians had combined philosophy with orthodoxy Only scholars who were more concerned with style than content could prefer Plato to Aristotle Two cardinals entered the debate to redress the balance Nicholas of Cusa, for whom George had translated Plato’s Parmenides, wrote a dialogue, On the Not Other, in which he stressed the limitations of both Aristotelian logic and Platonic metaphysics, while endeavouring to build on both of them in attaining knowledge of God, the divine Not-Other More soberly, Bessarion wrote a treatise, published in both Greek and Latin, entitled Against the Calumniator of Plato He pointed out that many Christian saints had been admirers of Plato While neither Plato nor Aristotle agreed at all fully with Christian doctrine, the points of conXict between them were few, and there were as many points of similarity between Plato and Aristotle as between Aristotle and Christianity Aristotle, he said, pace George of Trebizond, did not believe that God freely created the world out of nothing, and Plato was much closer to the Christian belief in divine providence Aristotle, again, did not prove that individual human souls were immortal The way in which Aristotle explains concept-formation by the inXuence of the agent intellect is very close to Plato’s theory of human links to the Ideas in recollection Bessarion balances George’s citation of licentious passages from the dialogues with others in which Plato exhorts to continence and virtue Both Plato and Aristotle were outstanding thinkers, sent by providence to bring humans to the truth by diVerent paths Plato’s anthropology, Bessarion maintains, is closer to what life would have been without original sin; Aristotle gives a more realistic account of fallen humanity By the 1460s it was universally accepted that the study of Plato was appropriate for Catholic scholars in the West The fall of Constantinople to 107