ABSTRACT
‘IF THERE is any characteristic by which the Renaissance can be recognised it is, I believe, in the changing conception of Man's relation to the Cosmos.’ 1 That is a quotation from a fairly recent book on Science and the Renaissance, the writer of which proceeds to inquire where we should look for the origins of a change in the climate of opinion in western Europe which could have produced this changed relation to the cosmos. He looks, naturally, first of all in the movement known as ‘Renaissance Neoplatonism’, originating in the renewed study of Plato and the Platonists in the Florentine circle of Marsilio Ficino, but he dismisses this movement as useless for his search. There is no evidence, he thinks, that the Florentine academicians had any but an incidental interest in the problem of knowledge of the external world or of the structure of the cosmos. 2 Yet the movement loosely known as ‘Renaissance Neoplatonism’ is the movement which – coming in time between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century – ought to be the originator of the changed climate of opinion, the change in man's attitude to the cosmos, which was to be fraught with such momentous consequences. The difficulty has been, perhaps, that historians of philosophy may have somewhat misled us as to the nature of that movement. When treated as straight philosophy, Renaissance Neoplatonism may dissolve into a rather vague eclecticism. But the new work done in recent years on Marsilio Ficino and his sources has demonstrated that the core of the movement was Hermetic, involving a view of the cosmos as a network of magical forces with which man can operate. The Renaissance magus had his roots in the Hermetic core of Renaissance Neoplatonism, and it is the Renaissance magus, I believe, who exemplifies that changed attitude of man to the cosmos which was the necessary preliminary to the rise of science.
