lineages kept up their own creative arguments during most of this time. The
impact of translation on creativity depends more on the structure of the
surrounding factions than on the carriers of foreign ideas themselves, who tend
to be traditionalists within their own camps. Idea imports stimulate innovation
only to the extent that indigenous factions have strong enough bases and the
energies of ongoing disputes, so that the imports enter into a conflictual
realignment of the attention space.
If importing ideas stifles creativity, in the reciprocal part of the world
network exporting ideas can have stimulating effects. In the case of Muslim
Spain in the mid-1100s, contact with a network of Christian importers at
Toledo fostered the upsurge of cosmopolitan philosophy among the Jews who
bridged the Arab side, stimulating Averroës and Maimonides to break free
from dominant Neoplatonism and formulate an aggressive Aristoteleanism.
The stimulating effects of exporting to an eager audience are seen most
strikingly in places where intellectual life was flat before exports began. The
pattern is found in the Renaissance, not on the side of the Italian importers
but among the Byzantines. Gemistus Pletho was the leading actor (261 in
Figure 9.6), a cosmopolitan diplomat in both Turkey and Italy in the 1430s,
and an inspirer of the Medici circle at Florence which fostered Ficino and Pico.
In the early 1400s he broke with Christian Neoplatonism and reintroduced
elements of paganism, indeed reviving the old Platonist religion. It was his
position which was so influential in Italy, and which Ficino followed; other
neo-pagans of this network, such as Bessarion, included even a cardinal of the
church. A receptive market on the importing side makes bolder the exporters,
even as it makes the importers more dependent.
Pletho’s position is equivalent to the religion of reason which emerged
among the Muslim cosmopolites in Spain of the late 1100s. There are parallels
too in the surrounding circumstances: the disintegration of the Córdoba ca-
liphate, heading toward its climax in the years after Averroës’s death; and the
final decline of the Byzantine Empire, reduced by Ottoman conquests in the
1300s to a tiny survival, which was finally extirpated in 1453. The episode is
conventionally explained as a contingent event, the fortuitous flow of Byzantine
exiles to the west, which brought in “new” Greek texts and helped set off the
Renaissance. But in fact Byzantine philosophy became creative only in the very
process of migration, and previously had been stagnant for many centuries.^39
The geopolitical crisis in the background was important only because, as in
Spain, it introduced cosmopolitan connections and rearranged the networks.
A third case is post-Meiji Japan. When the European university system was
introduced, the period of dependence on Western intellectual imports was
remarkably brief, only one generation. Buddhist philosophy, long since stag-
nant, suddenly revived, and captured the new institutional base through an in-
Tensions of Ideas: Islam, Judaism, Christendom^ •^449