Prisca theologia: the idea of an original wisdom

In 1438 there arrived in Italy, with the Byzantine delegation to the Council of Ferrara and Florence, an elderly philosopher from Mistra, George Gemistos known as Plethon. His lectures on Plato made a deep impression on the Florentine humanists and, according to an account by Marsilio Ficino, inspired Cosimo de' Medici with the project of reviving Platonic philosophy. With Plethon an idea entered circulation that would dominate the esoteric thought of the Renaissance: the existence of a prisca theologia, an ancient theology common to the sages of every people.

One truth, many voices

The underlying idea was that God had communicated the truth from the beginning and that it had been preserved not only by Moses and the prophets, but also by a series of pagan sages. Plato would therefore not have been an inventor, but the heir of a long tradition, which his works gathered in philosophical form. This vision made it possible to read Greek texts in harmony with Christianity, because both derived from a single source.

The roots of the idea were ancient. Some Christian apologists, such as Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea, had already argued that the Greek philosophers had drawn, directly or indirectly, on the wisdom of Moses, and Plato himself had been called by an ancient author a “Moses speaking Attic”. The late antique Neoplatonists, too, had in their own way built genealogies of inspired sages.

Ficino and the genealogy of the wise

It was Marsilio Ficino who gave the doctrine its most influential formulation. In the preface to his translation of the Corpus Hermeticum, published in 1471, and later in the Theologia Platonica, he traced an ordered succession of masters: Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus and finally Plato. In other passages he placed Zoroaster at the beginning of the chain. The expression prisca theologia, the “ancient theology”, became the usual name of this tradition.

For Ficino it was a design of providence. God had willed that, alongside biblical revelation, there should be a philosophical path to the truth, capable of leading to faith even sceptical intellectuals, who would not let themselves be persuaded by the authority of Scripture alone. Platonic philosophy thus became a kind of preparation for the Gospel, a “pia philosophia” in the service of religion.

From prisca theologia to philosophia perennis

In 1540 the Augustinian canon Agostino Steuco, librarian of the Vatican, published at Lyon De perenni philosophia. The work maintained that a single wisdom, born with humanity, had been preserved through the centuries among Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks and Latins. The expression “perennial philosophy” enjoyed a very long legacy and was taken up again in the twentieth century.

For Cornelius Agrippa the prisca theologia was a given. He cites Hermes, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato and the Jewish kabbalists indiscriminately as witnesses of a single science of divine things, and he moves from one to another without sensing any contradiction. Precisely this syncretism, which brings together sources from very distant ages and cultures, forms the backbone of De occulta philosophia.

The doctrine, however, rested on datings that would prove mistaken. When in 1614 Isaac Casaubon showed that the Hermetic writings belonged to the Christian era, the genealogy began to totter. Yet it remains an essential key to understanding why the Renaissance heard Plato, Hermes and Moses as voices in a single choir.