During Humanism and Renaissance, the ancient culture, even in its pagan features, is a great basin from which one can draw what he likes most, to use it in the way he likes to, sometimes with little regard for the original meanings. Especially ancient mythology and religion are presented under a non-ancient point of view and fit, from time to time, to ideas and needs of the person who's dealing with them at that time: this is very clear for neoplatonism, but all the ancient Greek and Roman culture is affected by this way of thinking it in the Renaissance.
This is true also for poetry; we have already dealt on this site with the Hymns by George Gemistos Plethon, on this page we'll deal with the Natural Hymns (Hymni naturales) by Michael Tarchaniota Marullus. Unlike the former, the latter are written in Latin and without any desire to bring the ancient religion back to life: they're poetry hymns, not religious hymns, even though they were composed according to a philosophic conception that needs figures from classical antiquity to express itself. This is why we chose to add a page about those hymns in this site, in spite of them being not pagan poetry in a strict sense. Furthermore, we have already dealt with the recovery of classical mythology in non-pagan literature from the middle ages on, in the episodes of the podcast "Back to Alexandria".
Michael Marullus, called Tarchaniota, was born the year after Plethon's death, in 1453, in Costantinople, the same year it was conquered by the Turks; he was both a literate and a soldier, and because of both he travelled across Italy, from Naples to Florence. In his hymns, Neoplatonic philosophy merges with Lucretian thought and something from the Orphic hymns; unlike Plethon's hymns, that belong to the utopia of restoring a Pagan religion, Marullus' are well placed in his times, in his nostalgia for the lost Greek homeland, in referrals to contemporary politic context. For example, the Turks are compared with the Giants besieging the Olympus and Marullus' patriotism is particularly clear in the hymns to Saturn and to Mars.
From Neo-Platonism, Marullus borrowed in his hymns the idea of the soul as the divine spark inside the man, incarcerated in the body which is the cause of pain. Life can't be happy on the earth, but only in the hyperuranion; in spite of this, Marullus regrets for the lost Greek homeland, mythicized but also land of the myth, of the Gods to which Marullus dedicates his hymns. In the world, Marullus sees the opposition between the chaos and a principle of order, Jupiter; but the chaos is especially strong in the world of matter: this resembles the so-called 'pessimism' of Lucretius. At least, this is how some literature and philosophy scholars call this attitude: since they had a christian education, they use to consider pessimistic a view of religion without salvation. Nevertheless, it's acceptable to use the definition for Marullus, who was born Christian too, and assumes this point of view because of the desperation in seeing no divine intervention for his homeland's salvation.
The hymns were written in Florence, where Marullus met not only the Neo-platonism of Marsilio Ficino (a kind of Neo-platonism, we must remember, that unites platonic ideas to Christian dogmas, definitely not a Pagan Neo-Platonism), but also Ficino's translation of the Orphic hymns, though never published. Somewhere in Marullus' hymns we see that various Gods are depicted as manifestation of a unique God or principle: Pan is called Diespiter, i.e. God father, that is Jupiter, in the same way the Orphic hymns considered identified various gods with Phanes and the Renaissance Neo-Platonists considered them to be a representation of one only divine principle, that later coincided with the monotheistic god considered from a philosophic point of view. A part from influences of ancient authors, in Marullus' work we can find many features of Renaissance and its conception of the physical world: the four elements, astrology as a science, magic, can all be found in his Natural Hymns.
The Natural Hymns collection is so constituted:
The hymns are some kind of path that goes from the maximum principle of the universe (Jupiter Optimus Maximus) to the Earth that will welcome all bodies at their death, where the death is not only destruction of the soul's prison, like in Plato's works, but also a moment of peace and rest, finally, like in Lucretius.
If Marsilio Ficino didn't ever want to publish his translation of the Orphic hymns and of Hesiod's Theogony to avoid charges of paganism, Marullus too exculpates himself for those hymns saying that he has nevertheless disapproved the ancient belief, that is paganism. His Gods are first of all symbols and allegories, and never independent religious figures; the myth is sacred to him, not for its religious value, but because it's Greek, like he felt himself to be.
So why are we dealing with these hymns, if they have so little of pagan in them? Because through the Gods, Marullus recalls his homeland, so the hymns are a proof of how much, even after one thousand years of christianity, Greece still identified itself with is ancient Gods: they and their remembrance, not byzantine churches, are what make the Greek Renaissance man.
Manuela Simeoni
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