Philosophy Seeks What Religion Worships

Abstract

The preface to the Platonic Theology introduces the work as a search for God which uses the Platonic philosophy as a guide. Ficino chooses this guide in order to make manifest the inseparability of philosophy and religion and the special place which man holds in God’s revelation of himself. Platonism recognizes that every intellectual enterprise, even physics and mathematics, is en route to the divine. It seeks to make its way through the levels of knowing to the point at which it touches God himself, and it does this, not in order to know a fact, but in order to contemplate and venerate a wondrous reality. But if he would know God, man must know himself, for the way to God inevitably leads to this place where God is revealed in a special way. Ficino gives this as a reason for focusing his Platonic theology on the immortality of the soul. In some way, the essential orientation of philosophy toward God becomes manifest in man’s everlasting destiny.