Restoration of patristic thought from late 14th century to early 16th century

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The revival of patristic thought from the end of the 14th century to the first half of the 16th century, which is the subject of this research project, can be divided into the humanist and philosophical reception of the Church fathers during the 15th and the beginning of the 16th centuries, and the use of the Fathers for dogmatic purposes from the reformation on. In the 15th century, patristic thought becomes a stimulating element in philosophical speculation. Cusanus developed a subject-centered latonism by re-interpreting Dionysios Areopagites' mystical theology in a transcendental-dialectic manner. Marsilio Ficino took Augustine's early works as guarantee for a possible amalgamation of the Platonic tradition with Christian thought and found the climax of such a Christian Platonism in Dionysios Areopagites. In the north, the movement towards a re-newal of Christian life based on scholarship and piety combined with Italian humanism und inspired the study of the Church fathers in Erasmus und his followers. With Jerome as model of the Christian scholar and, following Valla, Holy Scripture as normative source, Erasmus saw the fathers mainly as cxegetes and, drawn by their rhetoric and their stress on Christian life, developped a Christian humanism deeply imbued by Origen's spirituality. With Melanchthon as central figure, protestant patristic scholarship opposed the Platonism of this fathers and stressed the doctrine of Augustine's later works, taking the doctrine of justification by faith as standard of critical discernment of the fathers. Thus, from the middle of the 16th century on, patrology, while rapid-ly developping as an academic discipline, showed a strong inclination to be dominated by the strife between catholic and protestant dogmatics.