ABSTRACT
The Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance was no new thing in the sense of having no roots in the philosophies that immediately preceded it. The contacts of the early doctors of the Church with the Neoplatonists of Alexandria brought into Christian philosophy elements which became so inextricably mixed with it that even those philosophers who professed themselves rigid Aristotelians could not always succeed in discarding them. The naturalistic current appeared most notably in the Arab philosophers like Avicenna; the mystic had its most famous exponents in the pseudo-Dionysius and St. Augustine. It was scarcely surprising that the Platonic Academy of Florence should have seen in Dante an illustrious forerunner. It was Petrarch, however, who first definitely linked the name of Plato with the ideals of Italian humanism. Petrarch himself could not read Greek and knew only the scantiest translations of Plato, who was so little known during the Middle Ages that he was commonly supposed to have written only two works.
