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Marsilio Ficino and Christian Humanism
James Hankins
The humanism of the Renaissance is Christian humanism, at least in the
minimal sense that no humanist in the Renaissance publicly disavowed
Christianity.^1 It is also true that many humanists, like Petrarch, Ficino,
and Erasmus, were deeply committed to their faith. But the humanism of
the Renaissance began as a secular movement, understanding‘secular’in the
medieval sense of the word, as having to do with temporary matters in this life,
as opposed to eternal matters and man’sfinal destiny. Renaissance humanism
came to itsfirst maturity in the fourteenth century, in a Christian world that
had lost confidence in the great universal institutions of the Middle Ages, the
Empire and the Papacy, a world suffering from war and schism and disease
and social unrest, a world where the great scholastic project of the High Middle
Ages—bringing the world under the rule of natural law and reason, enlightened
by Christian truth—seemed to many to have run aground in scepticism and
triviality. Worst of all, the world seemed to lack any leadership at all that could be
respected. Petrarch’s view, for example, expressed in a famous letter to Stefano
Colonna, was startlingly negative, even to modern eyes cynical about political
leadership. There was no virtue, no hope of reform to be found anywhere.
Rome, the mother of Western civilization, was crushed by the vices of her own
people and in a hopeless state. The rest of Italy was‘oppressed with everlasting
tyranny’, thirsting for war, beset by masterless armies of brigands and by civil
commotions. Beyond the Alps, the rest of Europe and the Mediterranean was‘no
less sick than Italy with civil uprisings’, threatened with wars, enslavement to
non-Christian powers, and heresies.^2(^1) The latter part of this essay appeared in a more primitive form as‘Marsilio Ficino and the
Religion of the Philosophers’,Rinascimenton.s. 48 (2008), 101–21.
(^2) Francesco Petrarca,Le familiari, ed. Vittorio Rossi, vol. 3 (Florence: Sansoni, 1937), 148– 52
[Ep. fam. 15.7], quoted from the forthcoming translation of Elaine Fantham in the I Tatti
Renaissance Library, vol. 76. For similar expressions of disgust with contemporary politics in
the works of Boccaccio, see my study,‘Boccaccio and the Political Thought of Renaissance