ABSTRACT
Heresy in Greek antiquity meant, a choice, or what is chosen, particularly a tenet. But heresy takes many forms. The central heresies of Renaissance Neoplatonism were sandwiched uneasily between the past orthodoxies of Scholasticism and the coming orthodoxies of the Reformation, and its child, the Counter Reformation. Marsilio Ficino, the most eminent of the Renaissance Platonists, had to exercise all his subtlety to argue that two passages at least in Plato's Letters. One in the second letter at 312E, the other in the sixth at 323D, were interpretable as Trinitarian in content, and only then in the elliptical and enigmatic manner of a prophet—necessarily so, since the full Trinitarian revelation was bestowed on mankind only by Christ. For Ficino spent his whole Neoplatonising life on the very borders of heterodoxy, even though his work strikes at first glance as massively Christian and as being in the direct line of the great Scholastics and their summae.
