The Papal Grave-Digger of Europe
By Michael HoffmanThe ideology of Neoplatonic Hermeticism gained firm purchase among members of the Catholic elite in Florence, Italy circa 1450; after that it entered the Vatican toward the end of the 15th century, and the papacy itself by 1515. It predates Hegel’s concept of thesis-antithesis-synthesis by centuries. Among its most famous early Renaissance practitioners were Cosimo and Lorenzo Medici and Nicolo Machiavelli.But what of the pope’s victory at Lepanto and the papal burning of the Talmud?
