Studies in the Platonism of Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico

Michael J.B. Allen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351547567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Fifteen of these essays by one of the leading authorities on Renaissance Platonism explore the complex philosophical, hermeneutical, and mythological issues addressed by the Florentine, Marsilio Ficino (1433-99). Ficino was the pre-eminent Platonist of his time and a distinguished philosopher, scholar and magus who had an enormous influence on the intellectual and cultural life of two and a half centuries, and who is one of the most important witnesses to the preoccupations of his age, above all to its fascination with ancient poetry and philosophy and their uneasy accommodation as an ancient "theology" with Christianity. Two further essays treat of cognate themes taken up by Ficino's younger friend and rival, the dazzling prince of Concordia, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-94), who was fascinated by Platonism in his youth but also by other philosophical legacies from the past, including Cabala and the Scholastic Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages. This volume's initial essay serves as an introduction to the comprehensive phenomenon of Renaissance Platonism.

1

THE RENAISSANCE: PLATONISM

* * *

PLATONISM

Whatever their attitudes toward Aristotelian philosophy, Renaissance readers knew it as a various but familiar institution, part of the ancient intellectual heritage passed on to them by the many medieval scholars who had studied Aristotle since the twelfth century. Plato’s recovery, however, was distinctly a Renaissance achievement and mainly the work of a single person: Marsilio Ficino, the most accomplished Hellenist of his time. Earlier Quattrocento work on Plato had begun with a few dialogues and letters Latinized by Leonardo Bruni, the translations of the Republic by the Decembrii (father and son), and the Laws and Parmenides, badly, by George of Trebizond. But these pioneering humanist attempts bore full fruit only with Ficino’s rendering of the complete canon, published in 1484 with commentary and introductory material under the generous patronage of Filippo Valori, a member of a Florentine family hardly less celebrated than Ficino’s other patrons, the Medici.

In the centuries before Ficino restored Plato, Europeans had known very little of or about him. They had only part of the Timaeus in the fourth-century Latin of Chalcidius; unreadably literal versions of the Phaedo and the Meno done in the twelfth century by Henricus Aristippus; and sections of the Parmenides embedded in the commentary by Proclus and translated—again literally and often unreadably—in the thirteenth century by William of Moerbeke. Platonic concepts were also known, of course, from such authorities as Cicero, Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, and Boethius and from the numerous cosmological works that drew upon the Timaeus. In this way, “participation,” “recollection,” and other key terms had entered the philosophical lexicon not only in the Platonizing Bonaventure but even in the Peripatetic Aquinas. Nonetheless, the impact of new and direct access to Plato’s complete dialogues and letters in Latin was vastly greater than the influence of the few and fragmentary bits available before the Renaissance. Plato’s presence in a reclassicized Latin was all the more appreciated by a learned culture awakening to the importance of Greek, of which Plato is a paradigmatic stylist.

One might have supposed that it was the story of Socrates’ death that most captured Plato’s new admirers. Early on, Brum had chosen the Socratic drama of the Apology, Crito, and Phaedo for his first translations, and eventually the fascination with Socrates grew into an obsession in the sixteenth century. It was Erasmus and later Rabelais and Montaigne who gave Socrates his Christian apotheosis, even though Ficino and others had sketched the main lines of accommodating argument: that Socrates, like the heroes of the Bible, was a type of Christ; that his passion resembled the Lord’s passion (including silver, a cup, a blessing, a cock, a turning of the other cheek); that his piety and justice had at last been divinely vindicated; and that he had set the health of the soul over all bodily comforts, even the very life of the body (soma) punningly described as a tomb (sema). But the example of Socrates, however much the humanists honored him, was not the main reason for reviving Plato. To the contrary, the early Socratic dialogues were generally neglected in favor of later works where Socrates appears and speaks, but often in a role subordinated to other figures with Eleatic or Pythagorean authority. In these texts, the insistent Socratic questioning, defining, and discovering of distinctions—largely for ethical ends—has given place to the exploration of metaphysical doctrine and a new complex dialectic. The attraction of these later works of Plato for early modem readers lay close to hand within the prevailing Christian tradition.

One of the supreme testimonies to the Christian life of faith is the story of Saint Augustine, in many ways the fountainhead of medieval spirituality and an eloquent witness to the experience of conversion and belief. His probing theological analysis of freedom and necessity, grace and free will, was a primary stimulus, too, for the innovations, preoccupations, and divisions of the Reformation. Augustine was a philosopher of great depth and originality—many would call him the father of Christian philosophy—and his compelling account of the part played by Greek metaphysics, and signally by Platonic metaphysics, in returning him to the faith of his mother and his youth had special meaning for Renaissance thinkers. While many had grown sceptical of the methodological and terminological elaborations and fixations of late Scholasticism, they remained committed to the rational defense and understanding of faith and were still possessed by the medieval desire for a summa, for a rational system comprehending all questions in the light of divine truth. Early modem intellectuals who shared this spiritual vision called each other ingeniosi (loosely, the “spirited” or perhaps “the gifted”) and it was they especially who looked to the great North African Father, as Petrarch had looked to him on the summit of Mount Ventoux.

In the Confessions, Augustine tells a graphic story about the summer when he obtained “through a certain man, puffed up with overweening haughtiness … a few books of the Platonists,” including Latin translations by Marius Victorinus of some, if not all, of the Enneads of Plotinus and probably of two works by Porphyry. It was these books that drew Augustine into the world of the Platonists and resulted in an integration of Plotinian metaphysics into his mental world. Later in life, Augustine repudiated this encounter with the pagan Platonists and no longer advocated their study as the natural prelude to conversion for a Christian intellectual. But his retraction lacked the rhetorical force of his Confessions and of other works that spoke to Plato as a Gentile prophet, an Athenian voice from the world of the Old Testament with the implication that one could interpret biblical revelation by way of Plotinus and his successors. The same hermeneutic motivated and legitimated the study of Plato’s predecessors as well, those who had adumbrated the ancient theological wisdom that Plato himself perfected.

The notion of a pre-Platonic succession of sages in possession of Platonic truths was an ancient one that long antedated Augustine’s strategy of “back-reading.” The Greeks often claimed Egyptian, Chaldaean, Lydian, Persian, Thracian, or some other “barbarian” ancestry for their gods, cults, and mysteries. Plato himself, speaking through Socrates, intimated that many of his ideas derived from others, most notably the Pythagoreans. At the end of. the Republic, for example, he credits a Pamphilian named Er with a visionary journey to the afterlife; his Laws are presented as the wisdom of the Cretans; his Sophist as a vehicle for the visions of an Eleatic, a follower of Parmenides. Throughout his works, Plato quotes verses from Orpheus, the mythical Thracian bard, and accords him greater authority than he accords Homer and Hesiod, who are severely criticized in the Republic. By late antiquity, the Platonists had worked out a pre-Platonic genealogy of wisdom stemming from Zoroaster in Persia and Hermes Trismegistus in Egypt and then passing through Orpheus and Pythagoras down to such sages as Aglaophemus and Philolaus and on to Plato. Loosely associated with this wisdom “tree” were other theologi such as Heraclitus, Empedocles, and, above all, Parmenides, the founder of the Eleatic school and author of a philosophic poem describing the soul’s chariot ride up through the gates of night and day to the feet of an anonymous goddess. Parmenides was famous for his radical monism and for maintaining—in the teeth of apparent contradictions—that nonbeing cannot be in a world of absolute (and, according to him, spherical) being.

In the opinion of the Platonists of antiquity, Parmenides was the most important philosopher before Socrates because the dialogue Plato had named after him presented them with their greatest philosophical challenge. Slighted by the Middle Platonists as an eristic exercise, the Parmenides came to be seen by the Neoplatonists as the apex of Plato’s work and the repository of his highest mysteries concerning the ultimate ground of being and nonbeing, of the One that Plotinus put at the summit of his metaphysical hierarchy. The first part of the dialogue criticizes Plato’s theory of Ideas and discusses the kinds of things that do not have Ideas. The second part sets forth what the later Neoplatonists determined were nine hypotheses: a set of five positive and a subordinate set of four negative hypotheses. The first set they saw as treating the five hypostases (roughly, levels of being or reality) in what for them had become the standard pentad of the Platonic metaphysical system: the One, mind, soul, Forms in matter, and matter (or matter in extension as body). The four negative hypotheses establish the absurdities that would follow if the one were not to exist, and these correspond to the last four positive hypotheses.

The effect of this subtle Neoplatonic analysis was to make the Parmenides into a summa of Plato’s “theology” and the capstone of his thought; the other dialogues were deemed tributary to it. Once the Parmenides was understood, argued Proclus, Plato’s other works became essentially unnecessary. In any case, they could be fully understood only in terms of the Parmenides. Hence the decision to make this work the climax of the Neoplatonic teaching cycle, the supreme test of an initiate’s dialectical and exegetical training. The Neoplatonists saw the Parmenides as the crown both of the ancient theology of pre-Platonic Platonism and of Plato’s own meditation on the One and the good. Parmenides of Elea becomes Plato’s spiritual grandfather, if you will, and Plato presents his dialogue as a sublime and filial tribute to the metaphysics learned at the feet of the disciples of this Pythagorean, above all Melissus. Significantly, the most authoritative presentation of this exalted view of Parmenides and his eponymous dialogue, namely the incomplete commentary on it by Proclus, was selected for translation by William of Moerbeke and thus made available to a few medieval readers. Moreover, when Parmenides presented the ultimate metaphysical truths, he had also defined his absolutes by way of negation in the dialogue’s last four hypotheses. In Christian eyes, then, he had anticipated the apophatic (negating) theology of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, a thinker revered in the Renaissance as Saint Paul’s first Athenian convert but later exposed as a late fifth- or early sixth-century follower of Proclus.

Whether William or other medieval readers really plumbed the depths explored by Proclus is doubtful. In the West at least, Ficino was the first since antiquity who clearly achieved a mastery of Proclus’s complex works. As an authority on the Platonic tradition, he became indeed supreme in his day, remaining so for centuries to come, and he is listed among Europe’s most accomplished Hellenists. Who taught him Greek is still in question. His father, a court physician, intended a medical career for him, but we have evidence of his youthful interest in philosophy, specifically in the Latin Platonic tradition, both pagan and Christian. From the late 1450s, when he was in his mid-twenties, examples survive of his paraphrases and translations of difficult Greek texts, treatises by Iamblichus, and the hymns attributed to Orpheus. In 1462, the aging Cosimo de’ Medici, having purchased a complete codex of Plato’s works and anxious to learn what was in them, ordered Ficino to translate them. Hardly had he begun than Cosimo gave him another manuscript that contained the first fourteen treatises of the Hermetic corpus, which he wanted to read or hear in Latin. As Cosimo lay dying in July 1464, he requested that Ficino read him the ten Plato dialogues that he had already managed to translate, including two masterpieces: the Parmenides and a cognate work concerned, they thought, with the supreme, not just human, good, the Philebus.

Under Cosimo’s son Piero, and his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent, Ficino worked through the entire canon with extraordinary accuracy, penetrating insight, and not a little eloquence. He composed a long and brilliant commentary on the Symposium, which he called the Symposium on Love; a first version of a commentary on the Timaeus; and introductory epitomes or arguments for all the other dialogues and for the Letters, These were published together in Florence in one of the great monuments of early printing, the 1484 Complete Works of Plato, reprinted in 1491 in Venice along with a massive work of original philosophical speculation called Platonic Theology: On the Immortality of Souls, a name suggestively compounded from titles by Proclus and Augustine. Ficino’s enormous labor built on earlier humanist efforts to a degree and where available, but he produced independent renderings throughout based on his unrivaled understanding of the Greek text and of the ancient scholarship devoted to it. Later Renaissance versions corrected him on a few things while adding errors or tendentious readings of their own, but they never supplanted Ficino’s Plato. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) read and annotated a copy of it in his youth, and Ficino’s work remains the supreme Latin version to this day.

Having put Plato into a language that educated Western Europeans could read, Ficino turned immediately to Plotinus in the fervent belief that Plato’s soul had been reborn in his third-century disciple and, following Augustine, that Plotinus was at times even more profound than his master. Ficino’s esteem for Plotinus and his school explains why Ficino’s philosophy has often been called Neoplatonist, a term he would have rejected on the grounds that the Platonic tradition is unitary. Moreover, even as Plato’s works constituted for him a unified whole, so did the works of Zoroaster, Hermes, and other ancient theologians bear witness that the highest truths had long been revealed to the Gentiles in a revelation parallel (and, one suspects, barely subordinate in Ficino’s eyes) to the revelation of scripture. Once again, Ficino accompanied his translation of the enormously difficult Enneads of Plotinus with explanatory materials amounting to a running commentary. All this was published in 1492, and, like the Plato volume, preceded the first edition of the Greek text by several decades. Ficino also published a number of translations of later Neoplatonist works by Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Pseudo-Dionysius; the Pythagorean Golden Sayings; the brief treatise attributed to Alcinous; Athenagoras on the resurrection of the body; Synesius on dreams, and others. In its totality, this work of translation and interpretation emerges as a monument of energy, sustained intellectual commitment, and formidable, authoritative learning.

But translation and commentary were only part of Ficino’s labors. He also proselytized for Platonism through an immense web of influential correspondents in Italy and abroad. Among the epistolary commonplaces in the twelve books of his published letters are many penetrating Platonic formulations and analyses, some of the letters being in effect small essays. After he was ordained a priest in 1473, he prepared an eloquent treatise in defense of the Christian religion and, presumably, to advertise his own orthodoxy.

In a less orthodox mode, he also wrote Three Books on Life, dealing with physiology and psychology as well as the pharmacology, astrology, and demonology involved in prolonging human life, especially the life of the scholar; it became the most influential statement of a philosophical theory of magic since antiquity. In it he reappraised Aquinas’s comments on magical talismans and symbols in light of Neoplatonic theories of cosmic sympathy and antipathy, taking particular notice of a work by Proclus, On Sacrifice and Magic. Essentially a therapy manual—seen by some in our own day as a foundational text of Jungian psychology—it nonetheless stirred opposition from the papal curia, even a threat of formal investigation. The threat came to nothing, but the incident shows that Ficino was treading a fine and possibly unorthodox line when he raised controversial issues concerning natural and demonic magic governed by the harmonies and ratios he derived from the mathematical and musicological treatises of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

For Ficino was an accomplished performer on his “Orphic lyre”—a lute designed to reproduce what were thought to be the Greek chords—to which he sang Platonic hymns with magical intentions. More important, he was learned in the theory of harmonics that, together with his medical training and his study of the Timaeus, helped him to formulate an integrated view of cosmic and human nature and to center it on twin notions: that the spirit (spiritus or pneuma) making up the soul’s vehicle or chariot is the link between the sensible and intelligible realms; and that the world is governed by the world soul, the soul of the all, by way of harmonies, ratios, and correspondences—that is, by musical “powers” and relationships.

The Parmenides, the Philebus, and the Sophist were the three dialogues that supplied. Ficino with the core of his Plotinian metaphysics, as apparently they had Plotinus, himself. The Timaeus—with its cosmological and biological concerns, its striking numerology of the triangles making up the four elements, its master image of the demiurge, and its equally effective concept of ruling proportions—provided the material for his speculations on the world soul. Other dialogues dominated his anthropological and ethical thinking. The Symposium and the Phaedrus, two of Plato’s greatest mythopoetic works, provided him with his theories of love, divine beauty, and the soul’s origin in, descent from, and event...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 “The Renaissance: Platonism,” The Columbia History of Western Philosophy, ed. Richard H. Popkin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 303–315
• 2 “Cultura hominis: Giovanni Pico, Marsilio Ficino and the Idea of Man,” Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (1494–1994), Mirandola, 4–8 ottobre 1994, ed. Gian Carlo Garfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1997), pp. 173–196
• 3 “Renaissance Neoplatonism,” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Volume III: The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge: CUP, 1999), pp. 435–441
• 4 “Marsilio Ficino: Daemonic Mathematics and the Hypotenuse of the Spirit,” Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton & Nancy Siraisi (Boston: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 121–137
• 5 “In principio: Marsilio Ficino on the Life of Text,” Res et Verba in der Renaissance, ed. Eckhard Kessler & Ian Maclean, Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissance-forschung 21 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2002), pp. 11–28
• 6 “The Ficinian Timaeus and Renaissance Science,” Plato’s Timaeus as Cultural Icon, ed. Gretchen J. Reydams-Schils (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), pp. 238–250
• 7 “Paul Oskar Kristeller and Marsilio Ficino: e tenebris revocaverunt,” Kristeller Reconsidered: Essays on his Life and Scholarship, ed. John Monfasani (New York: Italica Press, 2006), pp. 1–18
• 8 “Marsilio Ficino, Levitation, and the Ascent to Capricorn,” Éducation, Transmission, Rénovation á la Renaissance, ed. Bruno Pinchard & Pierre Servet, Cahiers du Gagdes 4 (Geneva: Droz, 2006), pp. 223–240
• 9 “Marsilio Ficino and the Language of the Past,” Forme del Neoplatonismo, ed. Luisa Simonutti (Florence: Olschki, 2007), pp. 35–50
• 10 “The Birth Day of Venus: Pico as Platonic Exegete in the Commento and the Heptaplus,” Pico della Mirandola: New Essays, ed. M. V. Dougherty (Cambridge: CUP, 2007), pp. 81–113
• 11 “Quisque in sphaera sua: Plato’s Statesman, Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology and the Resurrection of the Body,” Rinascimento, 2nd ser., Vol. 47 (2007), pp. 25–48
• 12 “At Variance: Marsilio Ficino, Platonism and Heresy,” Platonism at the Origins of Modernity: Studies on Platonism and Early Modern Philosophy, edd. Douglas Hedley & Sarah Hutton, International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d’histoire des idées, vol. 196, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008), pp. 31–44
• 13 “Sending Archedemus: Ficino, Plato’s Second Letter, and its Four Epistolary Mysteries,” Sol et Homo: Mensch und Natur in der Renaissance: Festschrift zum 70. Geburtstag für Eckhard Kessler, ed. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer, Helga Pirner-Pareschi und Thomas Ricklin (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2008), pp. 413–428
• 14 “To gaze upon the face of God again: Philosophic Statuary, Pygmalion, and Marsilio Ficino,” Rinascimento, 2nd ser. 48 (2008), pp. 123–136
• 15 “Marsilio Ficino on Saturn, the Plotinian Mind, and the Monster of Averroes,” Bruniana & Campanelliana 16 (2010/1), pp. 11–29
• 16 “Eurydice in Hades: Florentine Platonism and an Orphic Mystery,” Nuovi maestri e antichi testi: Umanesimo e Rinascimento alle origini del pensiero moderno: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi in onore di Cesare Vasoli (Mantova 1–3 dicembre 2010), ed. Stefano Caroti e Vittoria Perrone Compagni (Florence: Olschki, 2012), pp. 19–40
• 17 “Prometheus among the Florentines: Marsilio Ficino on the Myth of Triadic Power,” Rinascimento, 2nd ser. 51 (2011), pp. 27–44
• 18 “Ratio omnium divinissima: Plato’s Epinomis, Prophecy, and Marsilio Ficino,” Epinomide: Studi sull’opera e la sua ricezione, ed. Francesca Alesse & Franco Ferrari, with Maria.Cristina Dalfino, Elenchos 60–1 (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2012), pp. 469–490
• Addenda and Corrigenda
• Index