ABSTRACT
Georgios Gemistos Plethon rebuffs the accusation of heresy by referring to the literary theory of unwritten mythology to the effect that his own revival of ancient paganism acquires rationality and moral necessity. By the act itself, when Scholarios burned Gemistos' work he paradoxically underscored its urgency for their times. Ever since, it has been beside the point to try to reconcile Plethon's paganism with his Orthodox Christianity. Lorenzo Valla had shown that linguistic humanism, engrossed with pagan sophistication, could precipitate, if not come head over heels, into a fundamentalism that acknowledges only human linguistic creativity and divine omnipotence and nothing in between. Hence what was needed in the first half of the fiftenth century was a further investigation into the theological competence of antiquity and the humane relevance of the divine. Here, of course, Raymond Lull's and Raimundus Sabundus's first attempts at naturalizing theology and re-Platonizing Christianity came in handy.
