Iamblichus, Ficino and Schleiermacher on the Sources of Religious Knowledge

Abstract

In one of the Platonic schools of late antiquity Iamblichus developed a philosophical defence of religious experience, describing it as a precognitive awareness of humanity’s existential dependence on a divine principle of unity. The argument was directed against the high rationalism of Porphyry. Marsilio Ficino, the first student of Iamblichus in the Latin West since antiquity, made the argument a foundational one in his own philosophy, implicitly responding to sceptical themes in Renaissance scholasticism. The argument was revived a third time by Friedrich Schleiermacher in response to the scientific materialists of the Enlightenment and as a development of Rousseau’s religious thought.