Nicolò CANTONI
Demetrios PARASCHOS
Eszter KOVÁCS
Jeffrey Charles WOLF
Cornelis Johannes SCHILT
Intellectual traditions tell a story about themselves. The story told by the Renaissance concept of prisca sapientia is at once powerful and laden with profound implications for early modern Christianity, natural philosophy, and humans’ place in the cosmos. Scattered through the writings of the most revered pagan sages of the ancient East lay fragments of a primordial divine revelation, as old or perhaps even older than
the Bible, preserved across millennia and eventually recovered in the 15th century. It was the knowledge of the Persian Zoroaster, the Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus, of Orpheus, and the Sibyls—pagan authorities who came to be seen as divinely inspired prophets of Christianity. In Renaissance Italy, possessing ancient wisdom meant standing in an unbroken line reaching back to the origins of things, holding divine truth.
The claim that this was, at least in part, story—a narrative identity fashioned from heterogeneous and late antique materials, legitimized through the authority of the Church Fathers—makes the historical fact of its (re-)construction even more significant. For those who transmitted this narrative, it was indistinguishable from history. It was a genuine attempt to recover what they believed to be a sacred truth. The Truth. It is precisely this blurring of history and story, of historical facts and self-fashioning, that makes ancient wisdom so fascinating and important for the history of ideas.