The Return to Origins. It is a fact that the humanists
maintained the theological conception substantially
intact. They held that the natural world has an order
which is rational and that the origin of this order is
God. Their preference went nevertheless towards
Plato, or better towards Neo-Platonism, although
Aristotelianism also had an important role in the
thought of the Renaissance (to which we shall return
below). The foundation of the Platonic Academy in
Florence and the work of Marsilio Ficino and his
followers are the best evidence of the preference of
the humanists for Platonism. What were the reasons
for this preference?
Platonism was better suited than Aristotelianism to
placing man in the ideal center of the world. In the
Theologia platonica (1482) Marsilio Ficino distin-
guished five levels of reality: body, quality, soul, the
angel, and God. The soul is at the middle point and
is the
third essence or
median essence; whether
ascending from body to God or descending from God
to body, it is on the third level. Thus it is the living
knot of reality. God and body are at the two extremes
of reality and neither the angels nor quality mediate
these two extremes, because the angels are turned
towards God, and quality towards body. As a creature
endowed with soul, man can therefore turn either
towards corporeal things or towards divine things and
is thus free, because what he is or becomes depends
on his choice.
These features of Ficino's Platonism, which recur
also in his numerous followers, have nothing in com-
mon with classical and medieval Platonism. The con-
ceptual structures of Platonism remain, but are utilized
only in granting to man a specific capacity, a freedom
of choice not even known to beings superior to man.
The second reason for the diffusion of Platonism
among the humanists is that the doctrine furnished
them with a theme which returns like a leitmotiv in
their writings: that of the return to origins. In ancient
and medieval Neo-Platonism this theme is of a strictly
religious nature. The origin is God and the return to
this origin consists in reversing the emanative process
which goes from God to things, in remounting the
pathway upward and in tending to identify oneself with
God. This religious meaning remains in the works of
the humanists, but to it is joined, or at times substituted,
a worldly and historical meaning, according to which
the origin to which one should return is not God but
the earthly origin of man and the human world.
Already Dante had written in the Convivio (IV, 12),
“The highest desire of each thing, and the first given
by nature, is the return to its origin.” Pico della
Mirandola in De ente et uno defined happiness as “the
return to the origin,” which is also the return to the
primordial knowledge of man; this knowledge is
diffused and diversified through the many channels of
his history, but remains one in its substance and in its
unity, and ought to be reintegrated by reconciling
religion and philosophy, Platonism and Aristotelianism,
moral science and natural philosophy, natural philoso-
phy and theology.
With the return to origins, according to Pico, au-
thentic religious peace can be realized, because it can
be seen that all religions, all philosophies, and the most
diverse forms of wisdom which humanity possesses
derive from a single source which is God Himself.
Renaissance humanism means by religious tolerance
not the peaceful coexistence of different religious pro-
fessions, but something founded on the unity of origin
which deprives religious differences of any value.
Obviously in classical Platonism or Neo-Platonism
there was nothing similar. The return to origins was
only the mystic ascesis for the reunification of the soul
with God.
But outside of Platonism the return to origins
assumed a definitely worldly and historical character.
Machiavelli understood it as the instrument which
human communities used to renew themselves and to
recapture their primordial strength. In states, he says,
the reduction to origins is brought about by extrinsic
accident or intrinsic prudence. In ancient Rome defeats
(in battle) were often the cause of men's seeking to
return to the original order of their community; these
were extrinsic accidents. And appropriate institutions,
such as that of the tribunes of the people or of the
censors, as well as the work of individuals of excep-
tional virtue, had the task of recalling the citizens to
their original virtue; this was the intrinsic prudence
of the Roman state. But also, religious communities
are saved only by a return to their origins. The Chris-
tian religion would have dwindled to nought if it had
not been returned to its origin by Saint Francis and
Saint Dominic, who with the poverty and example of
the life of Christ, restored its primitive strength
(Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, III, Ch. 1).
And in fact the historical research of Machiavelli was
carried on precisely as a model by which the Italian
community, finding new knowledge of itself in its
original political orders, might renew itself and regain
strength and political unity. In Renaissance humanism
these innovative graftings of new interpretations on
old trunks are very frequent. If one looks only at the
old trunks, one does not see the originality of
humanism. But if one sees what has been grafted onto
the trunks, its originality and its modernity emerge as
obvious.
