ABSTRACT
Two philosophical problems troubled Coluccio Salutati throughout his scholarly life: the freedom and dignity of human actions and the usefulness of ancient traditions for the life of a Christian. Salutati's hermeneutic method encompasses the elements: trust in God's revelatory power even by means of verbally ungodly myths, man's participation in divine spirit, which is omnipresent, and the moral duty to find God in any and every expression. This opens the route towards that form of thought that will characterize Renaissance Platonism, especially in Ficino and Pico, namely the prisca theologia to which Christianity is heir as legitimately as to the Old Testament and to Jewish wisdom. His true vocation as a humanist, he saw in recuperating the wealth of ancient literature and its instantiations of matters human and divine. The author of the Bible conveys the message of self-reference and reference to humanity and analogously secular fiction narrates about actors and actions.
