## 1. Life, Style of Philosophy, the Platonic "Academy"




Ficino was born on 19 October, 1433, in Figline Valdarno, a small
community southeast of Florence, to his mother Alexandra (the daughter
of a Florentine citizen) and her husband, Dietifeci Ficino.
Dietifeci, a physician, eventually served early fifteenth-century
Florence's greatest patron, Cosimo de' Medici, who by the time of
Ficino's birth was one of the richest men in Europe. The precise
course of Ficino's education is uncertain, but it is plausible that
from a young age he was exposed to the medical traditions shared by
his father (folk elements, no doubt, had their part in these
traditions, even if those elements are not often recorded). Two
educators, Comando Comandi and Luca di San Gimignano, carried out
Ficino's early exposure to "grammatica," which is to say
basic Latinate education. The outlines of Ficino's early career begin
to appear a bit more clearly in the 1450s; and while it is still
unclear with whom, exactly, he studied Greek and other matters, the
names of the likely candidates, Francesco da Castiglione (who may have
taught him Greek), Antonio degli Agli, Lorenzo Pisano, and
Niccolo Tignosi, all point in a similar direction: that of an
excellent but traditional education, focused on questions drawn from
the realm of scholastic theology (Field 1988; Hankins 1989 and
2003-4; Vasoli 1997a).




The middle of the 1450s saw Ficino begin a practice that continued
throughout his life: writing philosophical letters to friends. A
noteworthy letter from 1458 shows him interested in four
"sects" of philosophers: Platonists, Aristotelians,
Stoics, and Epicureans (Ficino, "De sectis philosophorum,"
in Kristeller 1938, 2: 7-11). There is little surprising in
Ficino's account, drawn primarily from Latin sources, apart from the
minor fact that he devoted more space to Epicureanism than to the
other schools, indicative of a possible early "Lucretian"
period alluded to in certain sources (Brown; Hankins, *Plato*).
Ficino notes that some Peripatetics have held that Aristotle believed
the human soul would die along with the body, though significantly he
avoids attributing this position to Aristotle himself.




Yet if this early epistolary treatise does not contain revolutionary
opinions, it does signify a guiding principle that runs through
Ficino's career: "philosophy" and the "history of
philosophy" are closely tied. Another way to put this is that
for Ficino, imitative exegesis represented a way to
philosophize. Ficino regarded himself as a Platonist, but this did not
mean that he was interested in finding Plato's intentions in a
historicist manner. Instead, he saw himself as one member of a
venerable sequence of interpreters who added to a store of wisdom that
God allowed progressively to unfold. Each of these "prisci
theologi," or "ancient theologians," had his part to
play in discovering, documenting, and elaborating the truth contained
in the writings of Plato and other ancient sages, a truth to which
these sages may not have been fully privy, acting as they were as
vessels of divine truth.




The 1460s saw Ficino gain an audience in Florence. Much later in life
he would write that the wealthy and powerful Cosimo de' Medici had not
only been his most important patron, which was certainly true, but
that he had also acted as the guiding genius behind a Platonic
Academy. While extant sources do not permit us to understand the
Platonic Academy as a formal school or advanced institution with
regular meetings, there are some facts that can be documented: Cosimo
in 1463 gave Ficino a small property in Careggi with a domicile
("cum domo pro laboratore et hoste et terris laboratis,"
as the document in the State Archive of Florence puts it; see Gentile,
Niccoli, and Viti 1984, 175-76). There is also a letter from
Ficino to Cosimo from September of 1462, in which Ficino writes:
"spiritedly do I devote myself to the Academy you arranged for
us on the estate in Careggi, as if I worship rightly at a kind of
shrine of contemplation" (See Ficino in Kristeller 1938, 2:
87-88; and Gentile, Niccoli, and Viti 1984, 176). These two
sources allow the inference that, while the specific gift of property
did not occur until 1463, Ficino and his cohort met at least once on
Medici property in the hills outside Florence. There is another
document, again from 1462, which shows that he received a house in the
city of Florence as a gift from Cosimo, which was then rented out, so
that Ficino received the income from the rent (Gentile, Niccoli, and
Viti 1984, 174-75).




Ficino's connection with the Medici family waxed and waned after
Cosimo died in 1464, but the relationship signals something important:
for a time, Ficino represented one of the central elements of
Florentine intellectual life. He cultivated a wide correspondence
network and counted among his friends and patrons some of the city's
most influential citizens. Ordained in 1473, he later became a canon
of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence's cathedral with its famous dome
designed by Brunelleschi. The rest of Ficino's life was marked by a
twofold aspect, priestly and medical, in which he can be seen as a
healer both of souls and of bodies.




Another way to understand Ficino and his academy is to examine the
various ways he uses the word "academy" and its
variants. What one finds is that Plato's dialogues themselves could be
referred to as an "academy," rich with precious teachings
as they were. An "academy" could be a private school
organized to teach youths, though not necessarily located in one
specific place or devoted to one doctrinal tradition. And the word
"academy" could refer to regular meetings of literary
men. Ficino's "academy" seems to have been more associated
with the first two meanings of the word. Rather than leading a regular
gathering in a specific place, Ficino preferred to teach Florence's
elite youth when he could and, as a Socratic, philosophical friend, to
try to draw out of his associates the better part of their natures in
conversation. (Hankins 2003-04, vol.2; Celenza 2007, 83)




Illustrative on a number of levels is a letter of 1491 written to a
German friend and correspondent, Martin Prenninger (in Ficino 1576,
936-37). There, Ficino discusses his network of friends and
acquaintances. Though it does not contain the word
"academy" or "academic," the letter gives a
good idea of what Ficino believed he was doing when it came to
his program of sharing Platonic wisdom, which was linked with
what he saw as true Christianity. His correspondent had asked him
about his friends, and Ficino is careful in response to qualify what
"friend" means: "Know that all [of my friends] are
indeed well-tested both with respect to their intellectual talent and
their character. I have never considered anyone a friend unless I also
determined that he had joined literary learning together with
uprightness of character." For Ficino, the notion that one
should combine book learning with good moral character was
"Platonic," and immediately after the cited section he
alludes to a passage in the (for Ficino authentic) Platonic
*Letters*, expressing a similar sentiment. In truth,
however, this sentiment (and countless others like it in Ficino's
work) belongs to no specific school of thought; rather, it is part of a
long, pre-modern tradition stressing the need to link learning with
morals. For Ficino, it was "Platonic" because it was
true, and it was "true" because it was Platonic. For
us, however, Ficino's framing of his catalogue of friends in this
way reminds us just how generally and broadly he believed
"Platonic" wisdom to extend. That is, in the broadest
sense, *for Ficino*, everything he did could be considered
"Platonic."




There are more precise ways of looking at what Ficino's
"academic" activity might have entailed. He continues, in
that same letter, to separate his friends into three categories. There
are "patrons" (in which category all the Medici family
members were included). These are followed by "familiar friends,
fellow conversationalists, so to speak" ("consuetudine
familiares, ut ita loquar, confabulatores"); and third, there
are "*auditores*" or "students." The
*confabulatores* include numerous prominent intellectuals, among
them Leon Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano and Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola. Ficino writes that, if the people he lists are
"almost pupils [*discipuli*], still, they aren't
really pupils, since I wouldn't want to imply that I had taught
or am teaching any of them, but rather, in a Socratic fashion, I ask
them all questions and encourage them, and I persistently call forth
the fertile geniuses of my friends to bring about birth."
Ficino saw his influence in the classic Socratic manner, as midwifery
of knowledge, an image made famous in Plato's
*Theaetetus*. Uniting his medical and priestly missions,
Ficino's goal was to help cure the diseases of ignorance
and impiety, which he regarded as related.




Ficino also taught occasionally in a more formal sense. Early in his
career, he lectured publicly on Plato's *Philebus*, though
where and in what context precisely is unknown. He taught very briefly
at the Florentine *studio*, or university (see Davies
1992). He also instructed youths at the Camaldolese convent of Santa
Maria degli Angeli, and he probably taught privately at various times
to supplement his income. But what exactly he taught remains uncertain
(even as what exactly Plato taught within the confines of the Academy
is uncertain). One compelling source, the
*Declamationes* of the little-known humanist Benedetto Colucci,
represents Ficino presiding in 1474 over a group of five well-born
youths (see Colucci 1939). All of them (students
contemporaneously of his humanist friend Cristoforo Landino at the
Florentine *studio*) are given the task, supervised by Ficino
(referred to as the "Academiae princeps"), of delivering a
speech exhorting Italian leaders to fight against the advancing
Turks. Here Ficino seems to have been teaching rhetoric and the
art of declamation. Other instances in his writings appear to
indicate that one meaning he and others associated with the word
"academia" was something close to "gymnasium,"
or elementary school.




In the broadest sense, then, Ficino's "academy" was not a
specific place but a mindset; and as tempting as it is for moderns to
fit Ficino into a Platonic "system" of philosophy (seen as
in stark contrast to what is assumed to be an equally unitary
"Aristotelian" system), doing so would be deeply
anachronistic. Like almost all late ancient Platonists and high
medieval thinkers, Ficino believed, for example, that one should start
with Aristotle, just he himself had done. In the letter mentioned
above, he listed, as an *auditor*, or student, a thinker named
Francesco Cattani da Diacceto, whom Ficino eventually considered his
successor. And in a letter written to that same Diacceto in July 1493,
Ficino stated a classic position (for which see Gerson): that
philosophy was such a broad enterprise that a division of labor was
necessary, and that "whoever rightly understands that natural
matters lead us to divine matters will realize that Peripatetic
learning represents the way toward Platonic wisdom, so that it has
come about that no one is ever admitted to the inner reaches of the
Platonic mysteries without first having been initiated into the
Peripatetic branches of learning" (Ficino 1576, 952). Truth was
one, philosophy was broad in its scope, and for people to realize the
truth and appreciate philosophy's reach, they needed to be trained
properly.


## 2. Work




Ficino's wide ranging conception of what it meant to practice, rather
than only to theorize about, philosophy inflected his entire career,
marked as it was by a series of works, from translations, to letters,
to philosophical treatises. Ficino's initial activity, in the late 1450s, included short
treatises, mostly epistolary, on certain basic philosophical
matters. The 1460s saw him come into his own as a translator; these
years also represent the beginnings of his work as a commentator and
exegete. In 1464, when Cosimo de' Medici was in the final stages of
his life, Ficino read to him his new translations of certain Platonic
dialogues (some of which are now considered spurious). And it is
noteworthy that, by this point in the fifteenth century, Platonic
sources seemed suitable for traditional, Christian end of life
preparation; admittedly it is Ficino's own much later account from
which this story is drawn, but he would hardly have mentioned it had
such a scenario been wholly implausible (Hankins 1989,
267-68). As that decade wore on Ficino authored commentaries on
and summaries of Plato's writings, many of which he continued to work
on for the rest of his career; these included
the *Timaeus*, *Phaedrus*,
*Symposium* (less a commentary and more of a free-standing
dialogue), and the *Philebus*.


### 2.1 The *Platonic Theology*




This process of intense reading and commenting set the stage for
Ficino to write one of his most interesting works. Between 1469 and
1474 he composed his *Theologia platonica* (*Platonic
Theology*), which awaited print publication until 1482. The work's
subtitle, *On the Immortality of Souls*, is indicative of
Ficino's goals. He feared that his contemporaries were losing their
way, and he believed that the right sort of approach would help them
find it. Above all, there was a tendency, he wrote (in the work's
dedicatory preface, addressed to Lorenzo de' Medici), to separate
philosophy from religion. Using Plato, and trying "to paint a
portrait of Plato as close as possible to the Christian truth,"
(Allen and Hankins 2001-06, vol.1, proem, sec.3,
pp. 10-11) seemed to Ficino the way out of this impasse.




How to paint this portrait as fully as possible was the key
question. Ficino considered the Platonic corpus a treasury of wisdom,
filled with different subject matters but always, when rightly
interpreted, leading one to the divine. In the same preface, he writes
of Plato that "whatever subject he deals with, he quickly brings
it round, in a spirit of utmost piety, to the contemplation and
worship of God." Ficino conceived his own *Platonic
Theology* as a similar sort of treasury, and as a Christian
corrective to a work he greatly admired, Proclus's own
*Platonic Theology*, a work that, precisely because of its
threefold status, seems emblematic: first, Proclus's work was for the
most part "new" for the fifteenth-century West, one of the
many interesting texts uncovered by that century's tireless search for
matters ancient; second, Proclus was a decided anti-Christian; third
and no less powerfully, Proclus's style of philosophizing, like much
pagan later Platonism largely unknown to Ficino's medieval
predecessors, shared deep family resemblances with Christianity. Among
these aspects one can include: the efficacy of theurgic rituals, which
had their Christian analogy in sacraments (see Celenza 2001); and a
"monotheism" that respected the necessity of having one
supreme being (for later Platonists, "the One," for
Christians, "God") but that permitted its practitioners to
access the divine directly, for pagans, through worship of various
gods; for Christians, through the cult of the saints (see Athanassiadi
and Frede 1999, 1-20).




Yet Ficino needed to guard not only against the seductive danger of
these "new" ancient texts, important though they were for
the simultaneous appeal and potential instability they generated. He
also inherited from his humanist counterparts in the earlier part of
the fifteenth century (men like Leonardo Bruni, 1370-1444) the
notion that it was imperative to educate society's elites, the
*ingeniosi*, or acute wits, as Michael Allen translated the
term (see Allen 1998). His *Platonic Theology*, Ficino hoped,
would contain genres of argumentation and styles of language that,
together, would represent a treasury of wisdom, perfectly apt for
different varieties of his contemporaries who might have wavered in
their faith. For those inclined to the newly fashionable classicizing
Latinity, Ficino includes in the *Platonic Theology* countless
quotations from Latin classics; for those of an Aristotelian bent,
Ficino has natural philosophical arguments (for one example see Allen
and Hankins (eds.) 2001-06, 5.4, vol. 2, pp. 20-23 and
cf. Aristotle, *Meteor.*, 1.3 and 1.9 for descriptions of
"antiperistasis" to which Ficino seems there to be
alluding); and for those who might be more inclined to an
anti-rationalist religiosity, Ficino includes copious biblical
allusions and quotations. Ficino even has an entire book of the
*Platonic Theology* devoted to refuting Avveroistic ideas, in
which the lion's share of argumentation harks back in content, if
not always in form, to Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic
tradition. The *Platonic Theology* was a work of
synthesis, but not of systematic philosophy, as thinkers from the
eighteenth century on would have understood that latter term.
Different styles of argumentation, flights of rhetorical fancy,
numerous puns, intertextual allusions, un-sourced citations, and overt
appeals to faith all compete for the reader's attention.


### 2.2 1474 and beyond




The *Platonic Theology* represented in some ways a turning
point for Ficino: a summing up of the work he had done until then and
a way forward to other projects, which he completed soon after 18
December 1473, when he was ordained a priest. As he was completing
the *Platonic Theology*, he wrote his *On the Christian
Religion*, a treatise that, in its lapidary beginning, synthesized
much of his life-long commitment to the centrality of religion to
human experience. He begins the work's first chapter: "We do
observe, at times in some animals, some individual gifts of the human
race, with one exception: religion" (Ficino 1576, 2). And he
had already written, in the preface to Lorenzo de' Medici, that God's
wisdom had established that the "divine mysteries," which
is to say religion, should be handled by "those who were true
lovers of true wisdom," in short by true
"philosophers." Humanity's uniqueness with respect to
religion also demanded that religion should be watched over by members
who adhered to its highest calling: the love of wisdom, or
philosophy. Ficino produced both a vernacular and a Latin version of
this work; the vernacular version was published in 1474, whereas the
Latin came out in 1476, even as Ficino seems to have published two
later, different redactions (Kristeller 1938, 1: lxxviii).




The rest of that decade was filled with work that reflected Ficino's
propensity to join philosophy and religion: in different contexts
(letters and discussions) he spread some of the doctrines elaborated
in his yet-to-be printed *Platonic Theology*. He continued work
on commentaries, and he wrote his work on the rapture of St. Paul
(*De raptu Pauli*); Paul's "rapture" referred to a
passage in II Cor. 12:2-4, where Paul is said to have known a
"man" (widely assumed to have been the Apostle himself)
"who was taken up into heaven and heard the secret words
[*arcana verba*] that man is not allowed to hear." This
passage, which was resonant with themes of ecstatic, extra-mental
ascent, had been important to Augustine and Aquinas (Newman); and for
Ficino, it also proved a touchstone, given that themes of ascent were
dear to the Platonic tradition.




Ficino's medical mission continued to play a role in these years. He
worked on his "Advice against the Plague" (*Consiglio
contro la pestilenza*) in 1478-79, a treatise that was
printed in 1481 (Katinis 2007).


### 2.3 The *Complete Works of Plato* and the place of translation




Chronologically, the next signal event was Ficino's publication of
the *Complete Works of Plato* (*Platonis Opera Omnia*),
which included his translations of Plato's writings, thirty-six in
all. This number encompassed all those works contained in the nine
tetralogies (some now considered spurious), an arrangement attributed
by Diogenes Laertius (Diog. Laert., 3.59) to Thrasyllus (possibly the
otherwise unknown court astrologer to Tiberius); included were
thirty-five dialogues and the Platonic
*Letters*. All of these translations were complete in draft
form by 1468-69 (Hankins 1989, 300-18). After the
completion of the *Platonic Theology*, Ficino returned to them,
writing commentaries along the way, and in October 1484, the work was
printed. This year was almost certainly chosen for astrological
reasons, since it appeared to contemporary astrologers to portend
great matters, occurring as it did during a conjunction of Jupiter and
Saturn (Hankins 1989, 303). Ficino was especially eager to get this
work into print, it seems, as he included only a few commentaries;
although he did provide "argumenta," or short summaries of
the Platonic works, his fuller *Commentaries on Plato* waited
another twelve years for publication.




As mentioned, Ficino lived in an era when
interpretive exegesis represented a form of philosophical
composition. He believed, on the one hand, that he needed to bring out
the philosophical truth for his own times and, moreover, that the
truth was contained in Plato's works. On the other hand, these works
were filled with dialogical ambiguity and passages which, if not read
carefully, could prove dangerous if not overtly heretical. So Ficino's
enterprise of translation was as much designed to render the texts
themselves from Greek into Latin as it was to translate Plato, and
indeed the entire "ancient theology" of which Plato had
been the prime representative, into the cultural idiom of the late
medieval and Renaissance world in which Ficino found himself.


### 2.4 The 1480s and 1490s




As time went by, Ficino's intellectual energies moved in the direction
of deepening his understanding of Platonism and of expanding this
project of cultural translation. Having translated and explicated much
of Plato's work, he shifted, in the late 1480s, to Plotinus, an
exegetical project that included the first full Greek to Latin
translation of Plotinus's works along with commentary. 

In 1489, Ficino published a work, *Three Books on Life* (*De
vita libri tres*), that had a substantial printing history in
early modern Europe, even as its contents contributed to his later
reputation as a less-than-serious philosopher (see Kaske and
Clark; and Robichaud 2017a). The manuscript tradition prior to its printing tells the story
of a work composed of three separate books: 'On Healthy
Life' (*De vita sana*), completed around 1480,
corresponded to Book One in the eventual printed edition. An amalgam
of folk medicine and learned commentary, *De vita sana* was
intended to help scholars, thought to have a "melancholic"
humoral temperament, achieve a healthy style of life. Toward that
end, it counseled various recipes, dietary regimes, and personal
habits, all to be undertaken under the umbrella of what were
considered proper astrological conditions. The second book, 'On
Long Life' (*De vita longa*), completed in 1489, was
written in a similar vein and directed to the aged. Finally, the third
book, 'On Obtaining Life from the Heavens' (*De vita
coelitus comparanda*), composed sometime between the first two
books, grew out of Ficino's commentary project on Plotinus (it was
specifically a commentary on *Enneads*, 4.3.11).


Of the three books of *De vita*, the third proved most
controversial, dealing as it did in places with seemingly heretical
themes, including potentially idolatrous "statue
animation", which is to say the possibility of drawing down
celestial forces into inanimate objects, thus rendering them
animate. For Ficino, the ritualized activation of occult properties
("signed" images and "sympathies") represented a legitimate part of
natural philosophy, one to which the recently available range of later
Platonic and "Hermetic" material had opened new pathways. Ficino tells
(to take one typical example) of certain stars that possess discrete
powers (Ficino in Kaske and Clark, 3.8, 278-79). He reports that
Thebit, an ancient thinker known from the *Hermetic Corpus*,
"teaches that, in order to capture the power of any of the stars just
mentioned, one should take its stone and herb and make a gold or
silver ring and should insert the stone with the herb underneath it
and wear it touching [your flesh]" (ibid., tr. Kaske and
Clark). Channeling powers that the divine had implanted in nature for
humankind to use could indeed seem legitimate. Yet Ficino came close
enough to theological unacceptability that the publication
of *Three Books on Life* signaled the only time, seemingly,
that his work drew negative attention from Church authorities. What
precisely happened is vague, but a substantial correspondence after
May, 1490, in which Ficino asked certain friends of his at the court
of Pope Innocent VIII for help, suggests that certain people had
called his orthodoxy into question (Kristeller 1956-96,
4:265-76). By August of that year, Ficino was assured that his
reputation was favorable at the Papal Court.


The year 1496 saw the publication of an expanded version of
some *Commentaries on Plato*, including
the *Parmenides*, *Sophist*, *Philebus*,
*Timaeus*, *Phaedrus*, and the "nuptial
number" in the *Republic* (Allen 1994). In 1497 Ficino
published, with Aldus Manutius, a volume devoted to other
"Platonic" authors, with works by Iamblichus, Proclus,
Porphyry, Synesius, and Psellus making appearances.


## 3. Philosophical themes


### 3.1 The "ancient theology"




Ficino considered himself a Platonist, but a Platonist in a very
specific mold: as part of a long tradition of which Plato was a key
part but which needed interpreters to keep it going. This
"ancient theology" included figures who, divinely
inspired, advanced true philosophy. One of the key figures in this
sequence was the ancient sage Hermes "Trismegistus"
("thrice great," because he was considered the greatest
king, philosopher, and priest). For Ficino, as for the late ancient
Platonists he admired, Hermes was an ancient Egyptian, roughly
contemporary with Moses. In the early seventeenth century, Isaac
Casaubon would prove that the writings attributed to Hermes could not
have been as ancient as they were believed to be (they are considered
now to be products of late antiquity). Ficino described the ancient
theology in this fashion in his Preface to his Latin translation of
the *Hermetic Corpus*, discussing Hermes as first in this chain
of sages (Ficino 1576, 1836, cit. and tr. in Copenhaver and Schmitt
1992, 147):



> 
> 
> Among philosophers he first turned from physical and mathematical
> topics to contemplation of things divine, and he was the first to
> discuss with great wisdom the majesty of God, the order of demons, and
> the transformations of souls. Thus, he was called the first author of
> theology, and Orpheus followed him, taking second place in the ancient
> theology. After Aglaophemus, Pythagoras came next in theological
> succession, having been initiated into the rites of Orpheus, and he
> was followed by Philolaus, teacher of our divine Plato. In this way,
> from a wondrous line of six theologians emerged a single system of
> ancient theology, harmonious in every part.




After the year 1469, Ficino changed the order and placed Zoroaster
first, linking him to the Magi who visited the infant Christ (Allen
1998, 1-49). Unphilosophical though such speculations might seem
to modern readers, there are at least two ways in which Ficino's
ancient theology manifested ties to what, in his era, could be
considered part of philosophy. First, the model of
"successions" (Latin "successiones", Greek
"diadochai") would have been intuitively familiar to many
thinkers. At its most emblematic in Diogenes Laertius's
*Lives of the Philosophers*, the "succession" model
posited the notion that a powerful initial figure, whose style of life
and doctrines were considered exemplary, would have founded a
"school" in which many others had followed. (The 1433
translation into Latin of Diogenes Laertius' *Lives*
vaulted it onto Renaissance thinkers' desks; it had a significant
predecessor in the Middle Ages in a series of Lives then attributed to
Walter Burley, though see now Grignaschi). Second, and more
powerfully, like medieval thinkers before him, Ficino saw
"philosophy" and "theology" as linked domains,
with philosophy as subordinate to theology (Marenbon 2000, esp.
studies XII and XV). "Philosophers" could only be
considered authentic lovers of wisdom if they graduated from
disputatious word games, which Ficino thought were commonly taught as
dialectic, to the source of ultimate truth.


### 3.2 Ontology




Although it would have seemed artificial to Ficino to separate certain
areas of philosophizing from each other, nevertheless, it is useful,
as a heuristic device, to consider subjects such as ontology
separately (see Allen 1982). And here, in the context of discussing
being and its levels, without doubt Ficino's first debt was to
Plotinus. Plotinus had expressed himself variously, but it is not
inaccurate to say that, for him, there had been four general levels to
the cosmos, beginning with The One (*to hen*). This level
represented, for Plotinus, a hybrid of Plato's Form of the Good and
Aristotle's prime mover. It stood at the summit of the ontological
hierarchy and was so great, indeed, that it was outside of Being
itself. It was everywhere, "filling all things," yet it
was also nowhere, since it must be distinct from the world it created
(*Enneads*, 3.9.4). Thinking, it overflowed into the next
ontological level, Mind, which in succession overflowed into Soul,
which overflowed into a fourth realm that included Nature, Matter, and
Sensation. Just as Plotinus varied his descriptions of these
ontological levels throughout the *Enneads*, so too did Ficino
(Allen 1982). That said, Ficino did, in numerous places, suggest a
five-part (instead of a four-part) ontological scheme, which began
with God, followed by Angelic Mind, Rational Soul (in which human
beings take part), "Quality" (a kind of ontological glue
that stands between matter and soul), and finally matter, the level in
which we human beings are embodied and from which we must try to
liberate ourselves by living a philosophical life. 




Ficino's ontology thus shared aspects with Plotinus's, including: the
hierarchy which human beings, through their birth and appearance in
the world, have descended; the importance of meditation and
philosophical practices in fashioning re-ascent; the presence of
"sympathies," or hidden connections (which the properly
observant philosopher could find and reveal) between material and
celestial things that helped link the different levels of the
hierarchy; and the hierarchy's background of Platonic echoes (such as
the cave imagery from the *Republic* and the same dialogue's
myth of Er, and the post-death journey in the
*Phaedo*).


### 3.3 Psychology




Similarly, he shared much with Plotinus when it came to psychology,
the study of the soul. The immortality of the human soul represented
Ficino's main preoccupation, fearing as he did the potential loss of
belief among intellectual elites. He entitled the first chapter of
his *Platonic Theology* accordingly: "Were the soul not
immortal, no creature would be more miserable than man." (Allen
and Hankins 2001-06, 1.1, vol. 1, p. 14-15) The reason
behind this statement is Ficino's conception, shared with many other
thinkers, that the human soul is endowed with a "natural
appetite" that induces it, however haltingly and diversely
(owing to its en-mattered state), to return to its divine origin
(Kristeller 1988, 181; Ficino 1576, 1187). Ficino writes that
"man alone never rests in his present habit of living: he alone
is a pilgrim in these regions and cannot rest on the journey as long
as he aspires to his celestial homeland, which all of us seek,
although we proceed on sundry paths on account of the diversity of
opinion and of judgment." (Allen and Hankins 2001-06,
14.7, vol. 5, p. 272-73)




If Ficino shared this notion with Plotinus, and indeed with all
Platonists, he differed concerning the issue of the transmigration of
souls. Since Plato's Myth of Er in the *Republic*
(10.614-621), a staple of Platonism had been the notion that
souls were not only immortal but that they had also pre-existed before
their human embodiment and that they would exist again in another body
when the human body-soul dyad was severed after death. Since this
notion was heretical to Christian ears (both because it precluded
the *ex nihilo* creation of each and every human soul and
because God, having created man in His own image, could not allow a
human soul eventually to be reincarnated as an animal), Ficino had to
combat it. In his view, Plato himself must be read more sensitively,
so that in different contexts Ficino spoke of this heretical notion as
prefiguring bodily resurrection, as allusions to the return of the
soul to the One, or failing that as a hateful doctrine that must be
attributed, not to Plato, but to Pythagoras (Hankins 1989,
358-59; Celenza 1999, 681-99; Allen and Hankins
2001-06, 17.4, vol. 6, p. 45-63)




One final point needs to be made regarding Ficino and the human soul,
which is that he emphatically did not theorize it as an
"extension-less" mind, as Descartes later would do in his
*Meditations* (Descartes, *Oeuvres* 7: 71-90). Ficino's
soul-body dualism was not the same as "mind-body" dualism,
nor indeed was it for Plato, for late ancient Platonists, or for
medieval thinkers before Ficino (Celenza 2007, 88-89). For
Ficino as for his predecessors, the human soul, and "Soul"
in general, could have material effects on the phenomenological world
in ways that "mind" could not in the Cartesian
tradition.


### 3.4 Ethics, Love




Part of the reason for this "activist" conception of Soul
on Ficino's part had to do with a search to find forces binding human
beings to one another. For Ficino, love linked all things together;
and love flowed first from God into all existing things, which
consequently shared the property of similarity, outwardly different as
they might be on the surface. It is for this reason that
"spirit," or *spiritus*, was so important in
Ficino's thought. Ficino suggests: "Spirit is defined by doctors
as a vapor of blood - pure, subtle, hot, and clear. After being
generated by the heat of the heart out of the more subtle blood, it
flies to the brain; and there the soul uses it continually for the
exercise of the interior as well as the exterior senses" (Ficino
in Kaske and Clark 1988, 1.2, 11-15, p. 110). This blurring, to
modern eyes, of the metaphysical and the physical, in which the
"immaterial" soul can use a vaporous material entity to
have effects on the physical world, presents Ficino at his most
characteristic. Love between people occurs when the lover's spirit is
exhaled toward the beloved and the beloved returns the gesture
reciprocally; unreciprocated love can thus become a kind of homicide,
as one human being loses a vital element to another. "When we
speak about Love," Ficino writes (and here he means earthly
love), "you should understand this as meaning the desire for
beauty. For this is the definition of love among all
philosophers." Ficino goes on: "The purpose of love is the
enjoyment of beauty" (Ficino 1576, 1322-23; Kristeller
1988, 282).




For Ficino, in classic Platonic fashion, it is the manner in which one
enjoys beauty which differentiates true from false love. Beauty is
"bait" and a "hook" for Ficino: "The
splendor of the highest good is refulgent in individual things, and
where it blazes the more fittingly, there it especially attracts
someone gazing upon it, excites his consideration, seizes and occupies
him as he approaches, and compels him both to venerate such splendor
as the divinity beyond all others, and to strive for nothing else but
to lay aside his former nature and to become that splendor
itself" (Allen and Hankins 2001-06, 14.1.4, vol. 4,
222-23). Once this attraction has taken place, "...
the soul burns with a divine radiance which is reflected in the man of
beauty as in a mirror, and ... caught up by that radiance
secretly as by a hook, he is drawn upwards in order to become
God" (ibid.). And God would be a "wicked tyrant" if
he implanted in human beings this aspiration without allowing the
possibility of its eventual fulfillment (ibid.).




The development of the whole person was of paramount importance to
Ficino, and it is for this reason that his "educational"
mission must be fore-grounded. As we have seen, Ficino taught only
once, and very briefly, at the Florentine *studio* (Davies
1992); and there would be no chair in any European university devoted
to the teaching of Plato until later in the sixteenth century. This
absence of Plato and Platonism from university faculties is
understandable: Aristotle's more pedagogically suitable work had,
since late antiquity and even among Platonists, been deemed basic to
education; this fact is unsurprising, given that Aristotle's work was
preserved in the form of lecture notes. And the medieval university
curriculum reflected a similar propensity to begin with Aristotelian
texts in the arts faculties, before a student, having graduated with a
bachelor of arts degree (*baccalaureus artium*), would move on
to the higher faculties of medicine, law, or theology. This intense
focus on Aristotelian texts, especially logic, was useful, providing
medieval university students with a common vocabulary and similar
approaches to argumentation. Yet by Ficino's era, the number of
universities had risen dramatically, and unsurprisingly the
Aristotelian curricula came under scrutiny (Celenza 2007). For some,
earlier in the fifteenth century, it was the seemingly inelegant Latin
of scholastic philosophers that was unappealing. But for Ficino, the
problems had less to do with language and more to do with morality.
Character needed to be developed before dialectic was taught. As
Ficino wrote in his commentary on Plato's dialogue *Philebus*,
Plato "shows that [dialectic] must not be given to adolescents
because they are led by it into three vices: pride, lewdness,
impiety. For when they first taste the ingenious subtlety of arguing,
it is as if they have come upon a tyrannous power of rebutting and
refuting the rest of us" (*Comm. In Philebum*, ed.
Ficino, in Allen 2000, 230; Hankins 1989, 272). The natural prideful
ignorance of youth, when fueled by a capacity to win arguments, could
be heightened and led into undesirable directions by the unrestrained
power of dialectic.


## 4. Legacy




Ficino died in 1499, leaving a significant cultural legacy.
Textually, he provided western European thinkers with authoritative
versions of Plato, Plotinus, and other Platonizing thinkers. Ficino's
Latin translations of those texts became standard ones for over three
centuries after his death. Ficino's theories on love permeated
sixteenth-century literature, as writers from Baldassare Castiglione
and Pietro Bembo in Italy to Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard
in France took up "Platonic" love in their literary
works.




Ficino also helped legitimize, for a time, a style of thinking that
one sixteenth-century thinker, Agostino Steuco, termed
"perennial philosophy" (*philosophia perennis*), a
designation that became more famous when Gottfried Leibniz took it up
in a 1714 letter (Leibniz, DPS, 3: 624-25; Schmitt
1966, 506, n.11). Adherents believed that there was a discernible
core of truth in many philosophies seen as different on the
surface. The late sixteenth century saw the teaching of Platonism at
the University of Ferrara, with the Croatian-born Francesco Patrizi
(1529-1597) holding the chair from 1578-92, moving thence
to teach Platonic thought at the University of Rome from 1592 until
his death.




As the new science took hold in the seventeenth century and as, in the
eighteenth century, new styles of thinking about the history of
philosophy grew, Ficino's reputation declined. The canon-making
historian of philosophy Johann Jakob Brucker wrote in the 1740s that
Ficino "obtained a humble rank" because, "captivated
by the trifles of later Platonists, he feigns, re-feigns, and changes
Plato" (Brucker, 4.1: 55). For Brucker, as for many who followed
him, the enterprise of philosophy needed to become a
"critical," rationalistic enterprise; and philosophy
itself, separating itself from natural philosophy, grew ever more
concerned with questions of epistemology. This is to say that
philosophers' concerns began to revolve, if sometimes only obliquely
and unconsciously, around the question of how a formally distinct,
"extension-less" mind could know things about and within
an exterior world to which it was fundamentally unconnected. Citizens
of this new philosophical republic had little time for semi-mythical
ancient sages, hidden natural sympathies, and the interpretive style
of philosophizing (concerned more with styles of life and less with
systematic theories) at which Ficino so excelled. Yet his thought
permeated many aspects of western intellectual life. Making Plato and
Platonism respectable subjects of research and philosophical
reflection; embracing a broad view of human religious history; and
focusing overtly, through practice as well as theory, on the
importance of teaching the young: these aspects of his achievements
and more make Ficino a Renaissance philosopher worth remembering
today.