Theodore Metochites’ Political Views

In Chapters 93 to 98 of the Sententious Notes (1320s), Theodore Metochites put forward an idea that the basic social and political agents in the society, i. e. emperor, aristocracy, and the people, belonged to different natures. Such a consideration, which was also uttered in passing by Shakespeare in Hamlet (1599–1601), meant theologically a transposition into the political philosophy of some tenets of the heresy of Tritheism, which was known to have emerged in the sixth century AD and to have become the target of polemics lead by Leontios of Byzantium, some Fathers of the Church, and anonymous polemists. In the late-thirteenth century, some allegations of this heresy came to be rejuvenated by John XI Bekkos in his messy theological system. Evidently, Metochites reinvigorates those Latinophile statements that already in the last third of the thirteenth century had been close to his father George Metochites, who had been condemned at the Council of Blachernai in 1285 together with John Bekkos and Constantine Meliteniotes. Metochites was certain to recognize aristocracy as the entelechy of the people and its political role, in compliance with a tenet of Theodore II Laskaris’ (1254–1258) Neoplatonism, to wit, that entelechy and difference are the two principles which govern all the beings. This article also considers some partly similar ideas about the role of the people and of the aristocracy in the social structure from the Foreigner (Forestiero) by Giulio Capaccio (1560–1634), a baroque thinker from Napoli. Capaccio was closer, than Metochites, to the concept of the people’s representation in the authorities, working on a regular basis. But Capaccio was also too close to the aforementioned notions of the Mediaeval Neoplatonism. Therefore, we believe, unlike Eva de Vries – van der Velden, that Metochites’ political views should be compared not with those of Montesquieu, but with those notions and concepts which were characteristic for the representatives of the Renaissance and Early Baroque world from the fourteenth to seventeenth century. Simultaneously, the idea of maintaining social harmony, which was conceived as similar to the musical one, was proffered as early as in the first century BC in the Confucian treatise Records of Music. Consequently, this concept goes beyond the Indo-European civilizational community

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