On the top of the mountain - a cross

Neoplatonism in the Face of Plato's Critique of Mythopoetic Thought

A few words about the article by Y. Kagramanov

A Few Thoughts on the Present and Future of Christianity in Europe

On the spirit of the times and a sense of humor

About Simone Weil

The Image of Antiquity in Western European Culture of the XX Century

ru Your Name FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 22 October 2010 44DFDFF1-8474-47BB-8BD0-987B2834F1C2 1.0

The Ancient Rhetorical Ideal and the Culture of the Renaissance

In the famous anti-Averroist pamphlet of 1367, "On the Ignorance of His Own and Many Others," Petrarch discusses the question of the extent to which a Christian is allowed to be a "Ciceronian." The word "Ciceronianus" was overshadowed by the reproachful words of Christ, heard in a dream by Blessed Jerome almost a millennium earlier: "Ciceronianus es, priest Christianas."

"Of course," Petrarch declares, "I am neither a Ciceronian nor a Platonist, but a Christian, for I have no doubt that Cicero himself would have become a Christian if he had been able to see Christ or to know Christ's teaching."

The conventional mode of unreal assumption (if only the pagan classic could know Christ's teaching, he would become a Christian) prompts us to recall the words of the late medieval Mantuan sequence about the Apostle Paul: "Being led to the tomb of Maron, he poured out the dew of compassionate tears over it: 'What,' he said, 'what would I make you if I found you alive, O greatest of poets.'" In general, the need to baptize ancient authors posthumously, as it were, is characteristically medieval4. The Byzantine poet of the middle of the eleventh century, John Mauropodus, Metropolitan of Euchaita, formally prayed in verse for the repose of the souls of Plato and Plutarch: "If You, my Christ, were pleased to remove any pagans from Your condemnation," reads his epigram in literal translation, "remove Plato and Plutarch at my request! For both of them, both in word and in disposition, came closest to Thy laws."5 The example was set back in the patristic era. In Jerome's time, Virgil was often called "a Christian without Christ" for his fourth eclogue, which, however, Jerome himself disapproved.6 In one of his epistles, Augustine pondered over whose souls, in addition to the Old Testament righteous, were led out of hell by Christ - were not the souls of the ancient pagans, especially those "who

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