medicine, and theology.^9 In the case of theology this meant passing beyond the
secular boundaries the humanists had created for themselves in the time of the
great humanist educators, and the exploration of new sources of religious
wisdom not found in the scholastic textbooks of the Middle Ages. The
humanists had long been critics of certain aspects of scholasticism—Petrarch
for example criticized scholastics in his time for impiety, triviality, and bad
Latin—but by the mid-fifteenth century humanists were producing their own
theological writings, with new goals and methods. One goal was an extension
of the humanist call for a‘return to antiquity’, which meant a return to the
philological study of the Bible and the church fathers, an emphasis on exegesis,
and the application of humanist eloquence to changing the hearts of the
unbelieving and the lukewarm. Another, potentially more radical, goal was
to scour the libraries for information about other faith traditions, ancient and
modern, with a view to enriching the wisdom and universality of Christian
theology. This project came to a head in the famous events surrounding Pico
della Mirandola’s900 Thesesin 1486, where the papacy eventually rejected the
humanist philosopher’s call to hold a great disputation in Rome. Pico’s aim, it
seems, was to integrate the fundamental theological insights of all known
religions into a new theology of human deification, inspired at its deepest
level by the study of medieval Jewish Kabbalah.^10
The Christian Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, which I mean to address in the
rest of this essay, was part of the humanist project to embrace non-Christian
sources of religious wisdom, and, truth to tell, it was a far more serious and
influential part of that project than the short-livedfireworks display mounted
by Pico. Like Pico, Ficino believed that Christianity was in desperate need of
reformation, both in terms of the moral behaviour of its priests and prelates
and in terms of its theological content. In Ficino’s mind, Christian theology
had been barbarized by centuries of ill-conceived dependence on Aristotelian-
ism. As a brilliant student of ancient philosophy—he was certainly the most
learned philosopher of the Renaissance—Ficino understood that in antiquity
the best Christian theologians had relied on Platonism, and that Aristotle
had been chiefly consulted as a guide to natural philosophy. Plato wastheios,
(^9) The basic work on humanist theologies is still Charles Trinkaus,In Our Image and
Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols (Chicago, IL and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1970). More recent literature may be accessed through Amos
Edelheit,Ficino, Pico and Savonarola: The Evolution of Humanist Theology 1461– 1498 (Leiden
and Boston, MA: Brill, 2008).
(^10) See Brian P. Copenhaver,‘Magic and the Dignity of Man: De-Kanting Pico’sOration’,in
Allen J. Grieco et al. (eds),The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, Acts of an
International Conference, Florence, Villa I Tatti, June 9–11, 1999 (Florence: Olschki, 2002),
295 – 320; idem‘Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’,Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(2012:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pico-della-mirandola/)..)
58 James Hankins