1 The Story of the Resurrection of Plato
For almost 1000 years, the old Roman Empire was divided: between the East, centred on Constantinople, and the West.1 Both sides were heirs to classical (Roman and Greek) civilization, but East and West gradually went down different paths theologically, intellectually and culturally. The West went through a ‘Dark Age’, with Rome overrun by barbarians and its knowledge almost completely lost: the light of classical civilization only kept burning through the scattered monasteries of Western Europe. But in the East, the Roman Empire flourished, and came to be known as the Byzantine Empire. It expanded its power and influence across the Eastern Mediterranean, and even to Italy. For the Byzantines, there was no rupture between the Rome of Augustus and the Medieval world. The philosophy and culture of Rome, originally filtered from classical Greece, and now filtered once again through Byzantine Greece, was a living tradition, with significant intellectual centres flourishing in different periods, for instance in Athens and Alexandria.
By the early fifteenth century, the East was in retreat. Surrounded by the Ottoman Turks, the Eastern Romans looked to their very distant cousins in the West for military help, but a price had to be paid. To galvanize the Western world into a crusade against the Turks, the Byzantines needed the voice of the Pope. The Emperor John VIII Paleologus appealed to the Pope for help, and support was promised if, in return, an accommodation could be made between the Eastern Christian Church (Orthodoxy) and the West (Catholicism). In 1438, a grand council was called in Ferrara, Italy, with the Pope, his delegation, the Emperor John, grandees of the Eastern Church, and some of the greatest intellectuals of the Empire, in attendance. However, plague hit Ferrara, and the Council needed to move. The ambitious banker to the Pope, Cosimo de’ Medici, saw his opportunity to bring prestige to his hometown of Florence. He lobbied the Pope, who was already in debt to the Medici Bank, and in 1439 the Council moved to Florence.
Into the middle of the world of Brunelleschi and Donatello—a world that was just beginning to rediscover its extraordinary classical past, a world in the midst of rebirth after the terrors of the Black Death—walked a strange procession of living relics. Rome walked through the streets of Florence, but it walked transmogrified into a mysterious East. The scene is memorialized in Benozzo Gozzoli’s picture, ‘Journey of the Magi to Bethlehem’. Gozzoli’s patron, Cosimo de’ Medici with his family represent the Magi, surrounded by a procession of Eastern exotica. Looking at Gozzoli’s picture, we can well visualize the impact of those Eastern visitors on the collective imagination.
The Council ended relatively successfully, with a proposal for reunification of the two churches. However, the agreement was never carried through, and the Pope’s promise of aid to a beleaguered Byzantium was never fulfilled. In 1453, Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the Eastern Roman Empire was dead.
Back in Florence, the visit of Byzantium made a lasting impression, particularly on Cosimo himself. At the Council, Cosimo had listened to some of the greatest living heirs of classical philosophy: in the West, Aristotle’s work was known, translated into Latin and taught in the great universities, but Plato had all but disappeared. Scholars knew what he had written from references that other people made to his work, but the manuscripts were thought lost with a few scattered exceptions. The Greek language was barely known, and so even those exceptions could not be read.
Imagine ‘Greeks’ walking and talking; Greeks expounding lost ideas, as if an everyday matter; manuscripts in Florence that should not have existed for more than a 1000 years. At the Council, Cosimo listened with rapt attention to George Gemistos Pletho, the famous Greek Platonist, expounding Plato’s work with his own copy of Plato’s Complete Worksin front of him.
Cosimo was not a scholar; he was a businessman. However, he loved learning enough to understand the significance of this sudden ‘opening of a door’ into a lost past. He was inspired to act, and decided to bring Plato and those others thought lost, back—back to the West, and back to Florence from where he would endow the Platonic inheritance to the world. The resolution was even more significant, as the Empire was crumbling to the advancing Turks: so out of the fires of Byzantium, lost wisdom had to be saved. Three things were needed: the precious manuscripts that, once translated, would bring the lost wisdom of the past to a revivifying West; the knowledge of the Greek language to support translation, so that all could share the ideas and, finally, an intellectual leader capable of understanding the Platonic inheritance, and of translating and making that inheritance accessible to the world. This leader would build around himself the new Academy of Plato, not this time in the countryside outside of Athens, but rather in the countryside outside of Florence, close to the villa of Cosimo himself.
When the Eastern Roman Empire finally fell, there was no shortage of rulers ready to claim the eagle standard of Rome as the true political heirs to Empire. Florence, under the guidance of the Medici, intended to be the intellectual heir. It would lay claim to the Academy itself, a direct line of knowledge from Socrates, and perhaps tantalizingly even further back, all the way to Adam.
The first step was to bring Byzantines to Florence more permanently in order to prepare its young citizens in the Greek language, for without understanding Greek, they would not be able to access the stored up knowledge of their past. Secondly, agents were sent out into the field with orders from Cosimo to collect ancient wisdom from the ruins of the East. But who would be his new Socrates? A young man came to his attention, the son of his physician, a young man called Marsilio Ficino, who showed some promise and an enthusiasm for learning. Cosimo encouraged him, and when Ficino was ready, had learned the Greek language and had gained a good understanding of the basics of philosophy, then Cosimo presented him with an extraordinary gift—the Complete Works of Plato—and told him to go and translate it. Along with this gift, Cosimo gave Marsilio a farmhouse in the countryside, near his own villa at Careggi near Florence. Marsilio was able to use his country retreat to work in peace and start his life’s task, which was translating Plato’s works into Latin, with commentaries and arguments appended. For the first time in 1000 years, Plato’s works would be available to the West.
Marsilio’s task was interrupted at various moments, most famously at Cosimo’s own request when he was asked to stop working on Plato in order to translate the Egyptian–Greek Hermetica, which had also come into Cosimo’s possession. The request was urgent, as Cosimo was now dying. Ficino was able to give him the Hermetica in Latin, and read some of the newly translated Plato to him at his bedside. After Cosimo’s death, the work continued, and eventually Ficino was able to complete and publish the Complete Works of Plato through the support of Cosimo’s son, Piero, and then later his grandson, Lorenzo. By that time, Ficino had a large circle of admirers and followers in Florence. This circle is known as the Platonic Academy of Florence. It was the new Academy, which included an eclectic circle of thinkers, poets, courtiers and artists and the first ‘return’ of the original Athenian Academy to the West. Cosimo’s original vision at the Council of Ferrara-Florence was fulfilled.
Over his career, Ficino also established a network of correspondents across Europe, from John Colet in England, to King Matthias of Hungary in the East. Ficino’s translation received immediate dissemination throughout Europe, and Plato’s influence extended across the continent. Additionally, his translation came with new introductions and some very full commentaries on particular dialogues. For the next century, and arguably all the way to the eighteenth century, Plato’s thought was accessible primarily through Ficino.2 It was his interpretation that was read and, together with his Academy, he ensured Plato took root across the disciplines and the centuries. For Ficino’s legacy is not just his influence on the history of philosophy but also on literature, architecture, the courtly imagination and even science.
This is the story we receive from the early historians of Ficino and his work, or at least a simplified version. It is also in many ways the story that we receive from Ficino and his followers. Why is intellectual history never quite that simple?
The story of Plato’s arrival in the West, courtesy of Cosimo’s vision and Ficino’s grand project, is a strong, alluring narrative for any writer. Such a narrative is compelling when the man and his work are so very distant from our understanding, and even distant from the mainstreams of philosophy or cultural thought. As we hurtle always towards the Birth of Enlightenment, the importance of the revival of a classical philosopher in the 1400s can feel like irrelevant archaeology. How important it is then to have a great story: the fall of an Empire, the rise of Florence as the centre of the Italian Renaissance and the inspired foresight of a businessman eager for intellectual life. If we add Ficino’s own sense of destiny, we have the makings of a legend: Plato moves out of the ruins of Byzantium, lands in the right place with the right man ready to receive the inheritance of Greece and make it live once again in Italy. The problem is that so much of our story is not quite true, and all of it is a lot more complicated. However much we may want the grand narrative, to give our heroes a sense of inevitability and to lend their philosophy an internal coherence and sense of manifest destiny, life and the flow of ideas tend not to work to our script.
We need to start again. Our purpose here is to see Ficino’s life and work as a consciously fashioned and successful Platonic revival, which then impacted thinkers and writers for hundreds of years. As this revival is so consciously fashioned, his and others’ story of the birth of the revival are part of the argument. If we are to assert that a cohesive, constructed Platonic revival occurred in the fifteenth century, and was high...