Hermeticism in 15th Century Europe: Religious Reform and Intellectual Renaissance

In previous conferences we have seen how towards the second half of the Fifteenth century a movement was born in Florence whose purpose was to reform the Catholic Church in order to overcome the momentary decline due to excessive secularization. In this conference we will see how this movement extended throughout Europe and how it influenced the intellectuals and artists of the era. We will examine the terms of this attempted religious reform by analyzing its main exponents, means and purposes. The necessity of religious reform First, let us try to understand why in the Fifteenth century the need for religious reform appears. A religious reform seemed necessary at the time on various fronts: the first is a moral front; the second is a political front; the third is an intellectual front; the fourth is a spiritual front. Moral Front From a moral point of view, the Church found itself at the time in a very questionable state. At the time, indeed, there had been a succession of Popes who did not leave a great memory among the people for their Papacy. Forty years had passed since the Eastern Schism and the struggle between Pope and Antipope, and now they were trying to mend the Eastern Schism with the Orthodox Church through the Council of Florence in 1439, which however failed. Following this failure, Paul II, Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII and Alexander VI successively sat on the papal throne who, from a moral point of view, are remembered as one worse than the other. The best of the four, Sixtus IV, upon his death was remembered by the Roman people with the following nursery rhyme that testifies to the people's benevolence towards the character: "Sixtus, you have died at last: and Rome behold in joy, for while you reigned, she suffered famine, massacres and iniquity. Sixtus, you have died at last: you eternal motor of discord even against God, descend into the dark inferno." After Sixtus IV came Innocent VIII who opened Rome excessively to corruption: "[...] Innocent VIII and his son even erected a bank of temporal graces, in which, upon payment of rather high taxes, one could obtain impunity for any assassination or crime: of every fine one hundred and fifty ducats fell to the papal Chamber, the rest to Franceschetto. And so Rome, especially in the last years of this pontificate, swarmed everywhere with protected and unprotected assassins: the factions, whose repression had been the first work of Sixtus, flourished again in full vigor; but the Pope, closed and well guarded in the Vatican, cared about nothing other than setting up ambushes here and there, to make wrongdoers who had means to pay well fall into them. For Franceschetto then, there was only one fundamental problem: the main question was knowing how he could slip away with as many treasures as he could, in case the Pope came to die. He betrayed himself once on the occasion that of this death, now expected, a false news ran (1490);" (Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy) Political Front From a political point of view we have the political problems dictated by excessive secularization of the Church. An exemplary case is the Pazzi conspiracy against Lorenzo de' Medici in which Sixtus IV's nephew was directly involved. Intellectual Front The necessity of reform from an intellectual point of view was beginning to become evident. While indeed until the 13th century culture involved almost exclusively figures from the ecclesiastical world, in the 14th and 15th centuries the range of intellectuals had broadened considerably outside the Church. Certain restrictions such as reading on the scriptures or their interpretation began to become narrow. Finally, the return to the classics initially promoted by Scholasticism had increasingly overshadowed and alluded to a form of extra-religious knowledge preceding the appearance of Christianity, to the possibility of an archaic tradition outside temporal and cultural contingencies. Spiritual Front Finally there is the problem of the scholastic movement which, while having given so many results in the past in the 13th century, in the 14th and 15th centuries seemed to have exhausted its vein. The reconciliation between Faith and Reason seemed to have largely exhausted its task without having produced that effective spiritual transmutation of the Old Man into the New Man that Christianity was called to accomplish according to Pauline precepts. All these reform needs both moral and spiritual were profoundly felt by the people and intellectuals so much so that starting from 1439 with the Council of Florence there was hope of being able to reunite the Eastern Church with the Western Church and when this project failed, the belief still spread, associated with a special Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 1484 in Scorpio (sign of reforms), that a small prophet would reform the Church. After the failure of the reform attempt tried with the Council of Florence, a religious reform was hoped for through the recovery of classical philosophies, in particular Platonism. Thus began that movement of recovery of the classics, inspired by Gemistus Pletho and continued by Ficino and Pico that we have seen in previous conferences. Now from a moral point of view the religious reform was conducted mainly by Luther and Protestantism and we will not be interested in this. As for the more or less explicit reform undertaken by Ficino and the early Pico della Mirandola, it affects more than anything the intellectual aspect highlighting the presence of an immortal doctrine outside of time, but as we will see it also lays the foundations for a reform with objectives almost entirely of a spiritual character that will take shape in Germany and will then develop in England. This is indeed the topic we will mainly be interested in tonight. To try to understand the situation thoroughly we must nevertheless start again from the Academy of Florence and from Pico della Mirandola. Pico's Kabbalah The great merit of Pico della Mirandola and that for which he is di-