[2017] …The path from humanist excitement about ancient philosophical religion to the Enlightenment cult of reason had several steps. 15th-century humanists such as Poliziano, Aurispa, and Filelfo made the excited but modest claims of first discoverers, astonished and vindicated by finding that—as Petrarch had prophesied—their long-sought ancients did indeed align miraculously with Christianity.
…In the later 1400s, Ficino and other syncretists sought to explain the similarity between Christian and pagan theology, now attributed to the influence of Hellenistic and Neoplatonic thought on early Christianity. But Ficino and his peers had a different chronology, placing Pseudo-Dionysius centuries too early, mistaking late antique verses for pre-Socratic fragments, and reading too literally Boethius’s (ca. 480–524) ubiquitous image of Lady Philosophy walking happily with early thinkers, while in later ages her robe was shredded and carried off in scraps by selfish inferior schools.95 Ficino’s intellectual genealogy of pre-Christian sages depicted an original, pure, untattered theology fragmenting as it traveled forward from Moses to later ancients who clutched its scraps. In constructing this timeline, Ficino mistook Neoplatonism—now considered a late, syncretic hybrid of Platonism and other ancient schools—for the original, and he mistook what are now considered separate schools—Stoicism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism—for the shredded scraps waiting to be knit back together by the aid of Lady Philosophy.
After Ficino’s death in 1499, 16th-century scholars acquired more sources, and began to identify some of Ficino’s chronological and factual errors. Successors modified or rejected the details of his genealogy, but retained the image which the concept of a philosophical revelation had forever sealed onto the Sistine Chapel ceiling: ancient sages seeing truth by a light far older than that shed by the Incarnation.