With his groundbreaking study on The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, Paul Oskar Kristeller (1905–99) laid the foundation for eight decades of continued scholarship on the eminent Florentine humanist scholar Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). This scholarship has been enriched by the English translation of Ficino's De Christiana Religione. The treatise was completed in 1474, a year after Ficino's double Roman Catholic Church ordination as deacon on 18 September 1473 and as priest on 18 December 1473. Ficino's volume represents a most provocative contribution to the contemporary debate over the precedence of religio over scientia. Ficino's De Christiana Religione provides a logical continuation of his scholarship on the ancient Greek tradition, including the eighteen-volume Platonic Theology on the Immortality of the Soul (written ca. 1470; published 1484), as well as his translation of the Opera Omnia Platonis (published 1576).
In this volume, the topics of the individual chapters suggest a subdivision of the volume into two parts. In the first part, comprising chapters 1–28, Ficino dwells on the importance of ancient theology—the prisca theologia shared by such luminaries as Aglaophemus, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Plato, Pythagoras, and Zoroaster—as the sole foundation of Christianity, though conceding a raison d’être to any religion with an orientation toward God. Ficino regards Christianity as the preferred natural religion, understanding natura in the double sense, connected to the Renaissance paradigm of scientia and the concept of nascor (giving birth), with God serving as the binding force between the material and the divine. In the second part of De Christiane religione, Ficino offers his refutation of fifteenth-century Jewish and Islamic commentators on the Old Testament, whose readings undermined his Christian interpretation of scripture.
The collaboration between David Porreca, Dan Attrell, and Brett Bartlett has resulted in a lucid translation based on the modern authoritative edition of the Latin text prepared by Guido Bartolucci (Edizione de la Normale, 2019). This translation is intended for both the specialist and the nonspecialist. It tackles a rather complex text with critical annotations detailing manifold sources of diverse origin (including history, philosophy, theology), to which Ficino often refers in a cryptic fashion. This common practice in Renaissance literary writings, along with Ficino's occasional erroneous identification of the actual source, necessitates the emendation of the modern translator/editor.
In their preparation of the first English translation of Ficino's De Christiana Religione, the three scholars also pay special attention to variable English renditions of the same Latin noun occurring in different contexts, thus necessitating an adjustment in the translation in order to justify its meaning in a particular passage. An example is the case of gentilis, variably rendered as pagan, gentile, and nation in accordance with the context at hand; the English translation followed by the bracketed Latin term adheres to a standard convention of modern philology.
In their forty-page introduction to the English translation, the editors situate Ficino's text within the broader scope of his intellectual activities as historian; philosopher; theologian; and anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic, and anti-pagan polemicist, and thus open for the reader a window into the exceptionally broad critical narrative of the author's discourse. The English translation of Ficino's text is further enhanced by a table of references to his correspondence with a wide variety of persons, among them his principal patron, Lorenzo de Medici, and a number of fellow humanists, including Naido Naidi, Girolamo Rossi, and Giorgio Antonio Vespucci, all of them directly or indirectly involved with the completion of his De Christiana Religione. There is also a comprehensive index of citations found within the treatise itself, evidence of Ficino's wide consultation of sources, as well as an index of names and technical terminology. The inclusion of a selected bibliography of secondary literature attests to the healthy state of Ficino scholarship.
This English translation of his De Christiana Religione offers yet another applauded publication and an important milestone in ongoing study of a humanist who benefited from Medici patronage, and who is revered for his breadth of knowledge across a vast spectrum of disciplines and subdisciplines. Despite his generous gifting of the De Christiana Religione to some twenty-five individuals, mostly of Italian descent, among them high-ranking as well as local churchmen, noblemen, local officials of North Italian towns, and personal friends, Ficino's treatise had little circulation during the fifteenth century and thereafter, thus accounting for the lacuna in scholarship on Ficino's treatise from the Renaissance to more recent times. The three translators of this seminal document have fortunately filled this gap with their insightful and impressive contribution.
