But he found support in Italy, especially from the philosopher and former Minister of Education Giovanni Gentile, who secured for him a position as lecturer in German at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, the most elite university in Italy. In 1931, sponsored by Heidegger, he began to work on the most important Platonist of the Renaissance, Marsilio Ficino.
The Nazi victory in 1933 ended Kristeller’s career in Germany. He gave what he called “an existentialist interpretation” to the classical Neoplatonist Plotinus in his 1929 dissertation under Ernst Hoffmann at Heidelberg. Born into an affluent Jewish family in Berlin in 1905, during his university years he not only trained in classical philology under some of the giants of the age, including Werner Jaeger, Eduard Norden and Ulrich von Wilamowitz, but impelled by an interest in philosophy he also attended the lectures of Ernst Cassirer on Kant, heard the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, and studied with the existentialists Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. He may prove to have been, after Jakob Burckhardt, the most important student of the Renaissance in modern times.

PAUL OSKAR KRISTELLER had one of the most remarkable scholarly careers of the 20th century. I believe that respect for, openness to, and dialogue with, other religious traditions, must be part of any authentic religious tradition.” Amen to that.. It is incumbent on all religious leaders in a pluralist society to work out a simple practical model of how this might be done and thought about.So I would be happy to recite the end of Max Charlesworth’s creed: ” I believe that religious diversity is in some sense willed by `God’ and has its own intrinsic meaning and purpose and is not merely the result of sin and ignorance. Perhaps the French philosopher Jacques Derrida is right that God’s “deconstruction” of the Tower of Babel is the story of the “deconstruction of the vain hope for literal and universal unity of meaning” We have to make do with fragmented stories. But in Stamford Hill we negotiate the post-modern fragments daily.

And by allowing, say, Christianity or Islam to present itself for its believers as the paradigmatic way to God – though not the only way – it may also offend liberal sensibilities.This would be a pity. It will be too radical for Rome, which fights shy of a “many paths to God” approach. It fails to acknowledge that God has “revealed aspects of `the divine’ in other religious systems” and that authentic religious values, not found perhaps in Christianity, are found in other religions. The point that he wants to underline is that religious diversity has a positive meaning. The fullness of God’s revelation will only be known when all the “revelations” found in the variety of the world religions “are brought together in some way and the jigsaw is completed”.The difficulty with his version of a “third way” is that it both allows the different world religions to assume their privileged status for their believers and does not allow any one revelation to claim itself as an exhaustive expression or revelation of God So it may not satisfy anyone.

He was largely successful and his views are not too distant from those of Pope John Paul II.But Charlesworth thinks this will not do, since it measures all other religions in relation only to Christianity. Not surprisingly this earned him some brickbats, though somewhat unfairly, since he was writing for a Christian audience, trying to move the debate forward into a fuller understanding of God’s grace. The Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner’s unfortunate phrase for such people in 1961 was “anonymous Christians”. The first holds that by following their own spiritual path and truths people of different religious traditions are indeed saved or achieve enlightenment “though what is valuable in those traditions can be found in a much fuller and richer and explicit way in Christianity”.