the mystical theology of valentin weigel - DataSpace at Princeton ...

after the birth of Christ in Greek (probably sometime between the first and third
centuries), mostly likely by Greek-speaking writers like Dionysius. 495
An intense interest in the occult has long been considered integral to Renaissance
humanism, as well as a marked tendency to syncretize. Given the difficulties involved in
justifying the desire to read the ancient heathen philosophers—Plato in particular—one
solution (proposed by, for instance, Marsilio Ficino) was simply to declare that Plato was
in fact a witness to Christ, but that he did so in secret, under the cover of paganism. 496
The various pagan integuments (Jewish, Greek, Roman and even Egyptian 497 ) served to
conceal one single truth, which, conveniently, was the Gospel of the coming of Christ
into the world. 498 Marsilius Ficino, a passionate reader of both Dionysius and the Corpus
Hermeticum, wrote in a letter (entitled “Divine Providence has decreed the restoration of
495 The transmission history of the Hermetic writings is extremely complex, and is still disputed. Modern
scholarship has suggested that there was, in fact, an Egyptian context for the Corpus, but one that dates
back to the 3 rd and 2 nd centuries BCE rather than back to the Old Kingdom (3000 BCE). At this time, Egypt
was occupied by Greeks and Romans successively, and so it might be more accurate to say that the
Hermetic writings have a Greco-Egyptian heritage. Whatever the case, though, the important point is that
the authorship of the Corpus Hermeticum was not what Ficino and other 15 th century writers believed it to
be. For an overview of the transmission history debate see for instance Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica:
The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1992), xlv-lix; Tröger, Karl-Wolfgang, “Hermetica”, Vol. 18, in Theologische Realenzyklopädie
(Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1989), 749-752.
496 Ficino wrote that “...the ancient tradition of theologians was to shroud the divine mysteries in the
numbers and forms of mathematics as well as in the images of poetry” (22). This is from a letter entitled
“Concordia Mosis et Platonis”, where according to Ficino, all of the Academic philosophers, from Zeno to
Plato (Dionysius included) preach essentially the same message—a message that is entirely consonant with
Christianity. The following letter, entitled “Confirmatio Christianorum per Socratica” makes essentially the
same point, that “Socrates was, so to speak, a forerunner of Christ, the author of salvation” (12). Marsilio
Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Members of the Language Department of the School of
Economic Science, London, Vol. 7 (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2003). Hannaway describes Ficino’s
project as an attempt to “construct a genealogy of...Gentile gnosis.” Owen Hannaway, The Chemists and
the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 13.
497 Although, of course, the Egyptian writings were actually neo-Platonically influenced Greek writings,
and so, with the exception of the Jewish writings (both the Old Testament and the kabbalistic writings), the
real interest is in Platonism and neo-Platonism as it influenced Greek and Roman writers.
498 See for instance: Michael J. B. Allen and James Hankins, Introduction, Vol. 1, in Platonic Theology,
trans. Michael J. B. Allen and James Hankins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), viii-ix. The
Platonic Theology was Ficino’s “mature attempt to sketch out a unitary theologial tradition, and
particularly a theological metaphysics. This he fervently believed stretched back to Orpheus and beyond, to
Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster, even as it had culminated in the Christian revelation most luminously
articularted for him by the Areopagite, Augustin, and Aquinas.”
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