The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.
This is the fifth of a projected six volumes.
The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his Platonic Theology, translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.
This is the fifth of a projected six volumes.
Michael J. B. Allen is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. James Hankins is Professor of History at Harvard University and founder and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. He is the author of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, winner of the Marraro Prize and a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year; Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena; and Plato in the Italian Renaissance; and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy. Widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on Renaissance philosophy and political thought, he is a Corresponding Member of the British Academy.
Ficino set out to show that the ancient Neoplatonic philosophy
embodied a "gentile theological tradition," one that complemented
the Mosaic revelation to the Jews and prepared its devotees for the
final truths of Christianity. Ficino worked in full knowledge of
the internal complications of Neoplatonism. He wrote and argued in
styles that ranged from the logical and synthetic to the poetic and
evocative, as he struggled to find ways to prove that the universe
was orderly and governed by a Creator and to lay out the place
within it of the immortal human soul.
*New York Review of Books*
As in previous volumes, Allen has rendered an elegant translation
of an often daunting neo-Latin text.
*Classical Bulletin*
The English translation of volume 5 seems to have captured the
sense of the Latin well...Although Neoplatonic philosophy will
never be easy reading, this translation and the accompanying Latin
text should be helpful to any student of Florentine
Neoplatonism.
*Sixteenth Century Journal*
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