PLATONIC THEOLOGY. VOLUM 1: BOOKS I-IV

The Platonic Theology is a visionary work and the philosophical
masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the Florentine scholar
philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the
Renaissance revival of Plato. Though an independent, scholastically
trained thinker, Ficino was profoundly influenced throughout his
life by the rational mysticism of Plotinus (third century A.D.), the
founder of the Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato, and by the
later Neoplatonism of the fifth century Proclus and his disciple,
Dionysius the Areopagite. The latter, significantly, he identified
along with most others during the Middle Ages and the early
Renaissance, with St. Paul's Athenian convert on the Hill of Mars
(Acts 17:34) and thus as bearing witness to a complex Neoplatonism
at the very onset of Christianity. From the 146os Ficino be-
came an accomplished scholar and exegete of the texts of these
and other Neoplatonists, and soon achieved a penetrating, com
prehensive understanding of the intricacies of Plotinian and
clian metaphysics and a remarkable grasp too of its pagan
development and history. However, he was also committed to reconciling
Platonism with Christianity, and Platonic apologetics with the
Church Fathers and the great Scholastics, in the hope that such a
reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival, a return of the
golden age with a new Pope and a new Emperor. In this regard he
speaks to some of the recurrent millenarian and prophetic impulses
that galvanized Renaissance Italy and witnessed their cul
mination in the ministry of Savonarola at the end of the fifteenth
century.

In addition to these and to the traditional concerns of theology
and philosophy, as a scholar Ficino was also fascinated by music,
magic and harmonic theory, by medicine, astrology, demonology...