Aristotle merelydaimonios.^11 Hence Ficino’s goal was to use a revived Pla-
tonism to dramatically reshape contemporary Christianity. In particular his
goal was to rethink the relationship between Christianity and the other great
world religions, to break down the narrow, dogmatic barriers imposed in late
antiquity that separated Christianity from other forms of religious wisdom.
This led him to a new kind of Christian apologetics that, unlike the Christian
apologetics of the medieval period, did not seek in any straightforward way to
demonstrate the falsity of other religions and the truth of Christianity. Instead
it aimed, in the light of Christian truth, understood as afinal, plenary
revelation of metaphysical reality, to reform Christian belief and praxis in
his own day as well as the beliefs and practices of other world religions,
revealing them all as dim and partial and corrupt visions of the tremendous
transcendent reality glimpsed by Plato and unfolded in the divine humanity
of Christ.
As always when dealing with humanism’s relationship to religion, there
were unintended consequences. In Ficino’s case the sympathetic study of a
philosophical religion like Platonism required him to naturalize the sources of
religious belief if he was to advance the claim that its wisdom deserved respect
from Christian theologians. In the end, Ficino argued that there were two
sources of religious belief, not only the outward source, the Word and
Revelation, but an inner one as well, rooted in the consciousness all human
beings shared of their ontological dependence on a divine source. This inner
religion of the soul was universal and transcended Christian salvation history
and embraced all of time and space.
An inner religion of the soul sounds vaguely Plotinian, and Ficino’s philo-
sophical writings are certainly steeped in Plotinian themes. But Ficino’s
conception of the mode in which religious belief is present to mankind is
not Plotinian. Belief in or awareness of the divine is not a cognitive state
achieved only or mainly through a process of thought. It is also implicit in our
natures as ensouled beings. For Ficino, all people, Christian or non-Christian,
are naturally religious.
When I say religion, I mean that instinct which is common and natural to all
peoples and which we everywhere and always use to think about providence and
to worship it as the queen of the world. Assuredly we are led to this piety by three
main causes. Firstly by a certain, as it were, natural sagacity infused in us by
providence itself; then by philosophical reasons establishing the providence of the
architect from the very order of his edifice; and lastly by words of prophecy and
by miracles.^12(^11) See in general James Hankins,Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1990),
part 4.
(^12) Marsilio Ficino,Platonic Theology, ed. and tr. Michael J. B. Allen and James Hankins, 6 vols
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–6), 293 (book 14, chapter 9, paragraph 2):
Marsilio Ficino and Christian Humanism 59