The Bond of All Creation: Renaissance Humanism and the Incarnate Word

Dr. Matthew Gaetano on May 15, 2024 at Ruth Lake Country Club. The Italian Renaissance rarely plays a central role in our understanding of the story of Catholic theology, even though many of us love Renaissance art and literature. In this talk, Dr. Gaetano showed how philosophers, poets, and painters of this era saw faith and reason as “two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Key figures of the Italian Renaissance such as Petrarch, Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico, and Raphael went back to the sources in Greek antiquity and found in Plato a yearning for the divine Logos or Word, a Word only fully revealed in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.