Volume 20, Number 15 · October 4, 1973
II: Underground Routes
By Frances A. Yates
The Ancient Theology
by D.P. Walker
Cornell University Press, 276 pp., $14.50
The revolution in the attitude to Renaissance thought which has taken place in recent years rests largely on a new understanding of Renaissance Neoplatonism. In the nineteenth century Neoplatonism meant a movement arising from the rediscovery of the works of Plato and the ancient Neoplatonists, centered in the Medici circle in Florence. There was nothing wrong with this as a fact; what was wrong with the old view of Renaissance Neoplatonism was the assumption that Ficino and his friends read the texts in much the same way as nineteenth-century classical scholars were doing. This assumption led to the impression that Renaissance Neoplatonism meant a vaguely mystical and Christianized revival of Platonic idealism, which had pleasing results in many ways, as in its influence on art and poetry, but which was weak as a philosophy and certainly not in a line of development leading to important seventeenth-century movements.
Review, 2041 words
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