On the Christian Religion

by Marsilio Ficino

This is the first translation into English of Marsilio Ficino’s De Christiana religione , a text first written in Latin in 1474, the year after its author’s ordination in the Roman Catholic Church. On the Christian Religion is this Florentine humanist’s attempt to lay out the history of the religion of Christ, the Logos ("Word" or "Reason"), in accordance with the doctrines of ancient philosophy. The work –focuses on how Christ in his pre-incarnate form was revealed as much to certain ancient pagan sages and prophets as to those of the Old Testament, and how both groups played an equal role in foreshadowing the ultimate fulfilment of all the world’s religions in Christianity. The first part elucidates the history of the prisca theologia – the ancient theology – a single natural religion shared by the likes of Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, and Plato, and how it was fulfilled by Christ’s Incarnation and the spread of his Church through his apostles. The second part of the work, however, constitutes a series of attacks against the ways in which the books of the Old Testament were variously interpreted by Islamic and, more importantly, Jewish sages who threatened Ficino’s own Christological interpretations of Scripture. This new English translation includes an introduction that situates the text within the broader scope of Ficino’s intellectual activity and historical context. The book allows us to encounter a more nuanced image of Ficino, that of him as a theologian, historian, and anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic, anti-pagan polemicist.

Genres: Catholic, Philosophy

280 pages, Hardcover

Published September 30, 2022

About the author

Marsilio Ficino (Italian: [marˈsiːljo fiˈtʃiːno]; Latin name: Marsilius Ficinus; 19 October 1433 – 1 October 1499) was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was also an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with every major academic thinker and writer of his day and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin. His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, had enormous influence on the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy.

Reviews

[Catholicus Magus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ficino’s De Christiana religione is designed to be an introductory volume preceding the first Platonic Theology, but only perhaps the first 8 chapters truly provide any propaedeutic content. This work, which seeks to lay out the Prisca theologia that Pico della Mirandola, Vico, and the 17th century Jesuit missionaries were to subsequently take up—seems so radically far from the Platonic optimism we project back onto the Renaissance, that I had great difficulty reading the last 20 chapters. Ficino seems more interested in imitating Jerome of Santafe & Pablo Christiani, that one wonders whether he is writing on the Catholic religion or polemicizing against the Jews. Most of his polemics reduce to, “either your expectation of the Messiah is carnal and thus he will never arrive,” or, “this learned Rabbi in the 2nd century clearly implies the person of Jesus as the Messiah.” Both of which are massive diversions from the notion of Ad fontes strictly advocated for henosis.