CHAPTER 11.
THE NEO-PLATONIC IDEAL
The Earl of Oxford read his Bible through the now anachronistic lens of Renaissance neo-
Platonism-- the 16th century cultural movement originating in the table talk, translations and writings of
the founders of the Florentine academy --
pre-eminently Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and his famous
disciple Pico Della Mirandola (1463-1494). These new philosophers sought to reconcile the newly
rediscovered "wisdom of the ancients” -- Plato, Plotinus, and "Hermes Trismegistus" -- with the Judeo-
Christian traditions of Book, Church and Temple. The philological and hermeneutic enterprise of
collating, comparing and -- if possible -- reconciling texts as diverse as Plato's Symposium, the spuriously
believed pre-Christian writings of the pseudonymous mystic (actually dating to the 3rd century c.e.)
"Hermes Trismegistus,” the Kaballah (Mirandola's special passion), Ovid, Pythagoras, Egyptian
hieroglyphs and the Pentateuch, started in late 15th
century Florence. Before it was finished, the
movement was to become one of the most fertile stimulants of Renaissance high culture --
leaving an
unmistakable and enduring imprint on projects as diverse as Whittingham's 1560 translation of the
Geneva Bible, Andreas Alciat's Livret de Emblemes
(1536) --
the inspirational fount of what was to
become the most popular genre of pagan books in Europe for the next two hundred years --
and
Botticelli's Birth of Venus or Primavera¹.
Inevitably, the humanist endeavor to reconcile pagan and Judeo-Christian traditions depended upon
positing a
rupture between sign and meaning. In the Florentine doctrine, although visible symbols,
including words, belonged to the world of external (fallen, deceptive) accidence, they could still direct the
subject towards a higher, invisible plane of universal spiritual realia. The task of the exegete was to
penetrate the profane, fallen surfaces of things to apprehend a hidden spiritual essence.
1
By a curious footnote to intellectual history, Socrates, the son of the sculptor Sophronicus, is said by Pausanias to have sculpted a group of three
graces which stood at the entrance to the Acropolis at Athens. Pliny, recounting the same tradition, says that these statues were "not inferior to the
finest works of marble in existence.” One may well believe that the mystique associated with Primavera from its earliest conception by Botticelli
may have been in part inspired by this tradition.
 |