|
The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: practical and social purposes was to be manifested, as utterly as it was
in Alexandria or in Athens of old. Ficinus and Picus of Mirandola
worked no deliverance, either for Italian morals or polity, at a time
when such deliverance was needed bitterly enough. Neoplatonism was
petted by luxurious and heathen popes, as an elegant play of the
cultivated fancy, which could do their real power, their practical
system, neither good nor harm. And one cannot help feeling, while
reading the magnificent oration on Supra-sensual Love, which
Castiglione, in his admirable book "The Courtier," puts into the mouth
of the profligate Bembo, how near mysticism may lie not merely to
dilettantism or to Pharisaism, but to sensuality itself. But in
|
