Florence, 1473
His name was Rinaldo Orsini. A bishop. My cousin by blood, which made the verdict more precise in its particular cruelty.
I was fifteen years old. I had been in his household since infancy, sent north from Umbria after the deaths of both my parents. He had educated me in the classics, in rhetoric, in Latin and Greek. He had given me access to his library, which was substantial. He had not anticipated that I would read everything in it and then ask questions about what I had read.
The books that concerned him most were Neoplatonist texts: Ficino’s translations, fragments of Plotinus, material about the soul’s relationship to the divine that did not map neatly onto the Church’s official positions. I was not rejecting faith. I was trying to understand it more precisely. Rinaldo understood this as the same thing as rejection, which tells you something specific about what institutional religion requires from those inside it.
He called me damned. Not for harm done to anyone. Not for violence or theft or any act that affected another human being. For reading carefully and refusing to stop the reading when it became inconvenient for the authority structure above me.
I carried that verdict into Florence and into the Medici circle, where men like Ficino and Pico were doing exactly what Rinaldo had condemned: asking hard questions about the sacred, treating the divine as something to be understood rather than merely obeyed. Lorenzo’s Florence reversed the verdict without erasing the brand. Five hundred and fifty-three years later I am still asking the same questions.