Theological Origins of Modernity

82 chapter three
including Lorenzo de’ Medici, Leone Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano,
Christoforo Landino, Pico della Mirandola, Botticelli, Michelangelo,
Raphael, Titian, and Dürer, as well as an indirect impact on many more. He
was convinced that Plato and the Neoplatonists could sustain the synthesis
that Petrarch had sought, because they revealed the immortal and divine
principle within each human being that Scripture pointed to in characterizing
man as the imago dei. He had good reasons for this opinion. He knew
that the church fathers had drawn heavily on Platonic and Neoplatonic
thought, and he was convinced that Christianity and Platonism had a
common origin in the more ancient thought of Hermes Trimegistus and
Zoroaster.
While contemporary scholars agree that Neoplatonism had a profound
impact on early Christianity and even recognize that Greek and Judeo-
Christian thought are indebted to Zoroastrian thought in some ways,
they reject the idea of a literal Hermetic tradition as the common origin
of both. 42 For more than two hundred years, however, the belief in such a
common origin was widespread and played a central role in the self-understanding
of Christianity and, as we shall see, in the formation of modern
thought. Indeed, unless one recognizes the importance of this Hermetic
tradition, it is very diffi cult to make sense of the origins of modernity.
Nearly all of the later church fathers drew heavily on the conceptual
resources of Neoplatonism, but the awareness of this fact was lost for a long
time, in large part as a result of Justinian’s closing the Platonic Academy in
A.D. 529 and his general antipagan initiative that helped separate Christian
thought from ancient philosophy. Th e only source of Neoplatonism known
in the Middle Ages was Apuleius, who was also the reputed translator of
the dialogue Asclepius, the only account of Hermeticism available in medieval
times. 43 Th e decisive fi gure in the revival of Platonic and Neoplatonic
thought was Michael Psellos (1018–81), a Byzantine scholar who combined
Platonic philosophy, the Chaldean Oracles (attributed to Zoroaster), and
the Corpus hermeticum (attributed to Hermes Trismegistus) with Scripture.
He was thus the father of the Byzantine tradition that culminated in
Pletho and Bessarion and that was reborn in the West with Ficino. 44
What then was Hermeticism? Hermes Trimegistus was thought to
have been the voice of ancient Egyptian wisdom. He supposedly taught
not merely Moses and through him the Jews and the Christians but also
Orpheus and thus the Greeks, including Pythagoras and (indirectly) Plato.
Th e work of Hermes and other ancient wisdom texts such as the Chaldean
Oracles, along with the Jewish Kabbalah, were thought to be the source of
Jewish and Christian Scripture. In order to revive a more genuine Chris-