Saturn wrote:Heaven/Hell wrote:The Byzantine period - the time of the famous (in literary circles) de Medici family?
Not exactly....
Byzantium was a unique civilization, incorporating and propagating the ideals, the artistic and spiritual, and legal ethics of the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.
The Renaissance movement itself can in part be attributed to the Byzantine Empire.
After the fall of Constantinople, and even before it fell, in 1453, Byzantine scholars brought with them to the west priceless manuscripts of many of the works of the greatest ancient Greek and Roman authors, previously unknown or thought lost in the west.
Quite an interesting read, O Learned one.
But it seems you are not familiar with the de Medici family or have not come across them in the vast literature you have meticulously read, as you have contradicted your initial statement ("Not exactly") with these paragraphs.
If it were not for Cosimo de Medici, his son Lorenzo and their agents, headed by Marsilio Ficino of the Florentine Academy, we would not even have come into contact with the sacred Neoplatonic, Platonic, (the most important being Timaeus, a stark contradicition to the religious history purported by the Papal 'dictatorship') Hermetic and alchemical writings as described in the last paragraph of your eloquent essay; for they procured literature of this type which prevailed which was, as you noted, almost doomed to be lost forever in the archives of time thanks to the Inquisition. These writings in themselves and their revelations inspired the artists of the Renaissance, most notably Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael.
They allegedly survived from the ruins of the Cathars and Knights Templar, and subsequently precipitated the launch of several new underground groups who hid the writings from the tentacles of the Orthodox Christian groups who saw them as heretical, and would seek to suppress them, as they revealed man's true nature with God. It's been alleged that while the Cathars and Knights were being decimated, there were several Inquistioners working for the 'other side', who preserved the writings; and this is how Ficino and the other great scholar Giovanni Pico of Mirandola came into contact with them. One of the most important bodies of work in the era was the Corpus Hermeticum.
You won't get all that off wikipedia either.
