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Renaissance Humanism: Neo-Platonism
Prepare a brief (seven-minute) introduction to Florentine Neo-platonism, paying
particular attention to the aims and achievements of Ficino and Pico
1. Overview of Neo-platonism
From the death of Plato (347 BC) until Justinian closed the Platonic school of Athens in 529
AD and the Platonic heritage of Alexandria passed to the Muslims in 641 AD, more than ten
centuries of response to Plato’s Socrates had already occurred. The neo-platonisms prior to
that in Renaissance Florence include the Ancient (Plotinus, Proclus, etc.) Ancient Christian
(Augustine, Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius, etc.) and Medieval (John Scotus Eurigena, aspects
of Aquinas, etc.). Whilst there were always suggestions of Plato in works right throughout
history, it was not until the likes of Ficino, Cusanus and Pico that a Renaissance of Platonic
ideas resurfaced as a contender to rival the dominant western investment in Aristotelianism.
(Remember, however, that Petrarch had works by Plato and preferred them to Aristotle, back
in 1336.)
2. Sources
The textual story as to how Plato’s works re-emerged is long and complex, so I urge you to
read of it in a work such as Copenhaver and Schmitt’s Renaissance Philosophy. Please note,
however, that it was the official patronage of Cosimo Medici in 1462 that gave Ficino the
chance to study and translate Plato into Latin at leisure. The role of the scholar in society
would seem to have taken root.
3. Syncretism
The efforts of the Florentine Neo-Platonists were to make Plato’s works available and further,
to try and reconcile them with Christian doctrine. They had a basic advantage over similar
efforts made with Aristotle, in that Plato advocated the immortality of the soul and an
atemporal creation for the universe where his pupil did not, but faced a greater challenge
when it came to dealing with Plato on the pre-existent and migratory soul, and his ideas of
love and sexual relations. (see Plato notes)
Broadly speaking, the Neo-Platonist Christians (esp. Pico) opposed the medieval view
that what we learn about God is inverted (because the world is the antithesis of the divine),
and advocated that everything is an expression of the divine. As such, the works of Plato
could be said to contain mystical truths that could be syncretized with the truth of
Christianity. Some (Ficino?) would go so far as to advocate that Plato was party to the
divinely inspired wisdom of Moses – and was a precursor to Christ’s revelation of truth. (This
‘genealogy of wisdom’ thinking deriving from taking works like the Corpus Hermeticum at
face value.)
4. Ficino’s De Amore (1469)
Ficino’s most influential work was his commentary on Plato’s Symposium, known as De
amore (On Love). Unlike Ficino’s other commentaries, the De amore was cast in the form of
a literary dialogue, in the villa of Lorenzo de’Medici, with Ficino’s friends and patrons as the
interlocutors. Each interlocutor gives a speech which is effectively a Neoplatonic reading of
the several speeches in Plato’s Symposium. It was this work, and translations of it into Italian,
French and German, that popularized the concept of ‘Platonic love’, a concept that became a
popular poetical conceit in the later Renaissance and is still used in a debased sense in modern
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colloquial speech. (Paraphrased from The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, III, pp.
653-59.)
In essence, Ficino argued that the experience of love indicates the soul’s desire for
unity with God. The basis of love is the search for truth, and is what should be the tie that
binds loving relationships together. The Biblical command to love thus implies a
metaphysical as well as moral imperative in terms of humans having concrete relationships
with others - based on the pursuit of truth and desire of unity with God. Such relations are, in
fact, a cosmic necessity.
The immortality of the soul was central to Ficino’s response to Plato. As the
contemplation of God is the highest state a person can achieve, so this state must be
extendable beyond the bounds of the finite. Ficino draws on Plato’s notion of ascendance and
the Ancient neo-platonist’s notion of a hierarchy of being (ranging from God, through angel
and soul, to quality and matter) to place soul as the mediating link between the higher and the
lower.
When it came to the problems of reconciling the pre-existence and transmigration of soul,
and the apparent advocacy of homosexual love in Plato’s works, Ficino argued that Plato was
either not expressing his own views, or else using such thoughts as mysteries or allegories.
5. Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (c.1486)
“Pico was a both a Neoplatonist and a humanist; in fact, Pico is one of the most read of the
Renaissance philosophers because his work synthesizes all the strains of Renaissance and late
medieval thinking: Neoplatonism, humanism, Aristotelianism, Averroism (a form of
Aristotelianism), and mysticism.” (Richard Hooker)
As we have seen already, Pico’s project went beyond mere reconciliation of Plato
with Christian theology – he sought to bring together all philosophies and theologies via the
thought that everything expresses the divine. The dignity of man was found, for Pico, in his
freedom and ability to self-transform, to be a microcosm of the divine creativity of his maker.
Pico’s Platonism can perhaps be seen best in his advocacy of the state of ‘free enquiry’ given
to mankind – such that Man’s autonomous reasoning stands in contrast with the Christian
notion of the Fall of Man. (Aquinas first had implied that the intellect was not fallen – in Pico
this position is at its most explicit.)
If one is to compare Pico’s view of man with the notion of ‘ascendancy’ advocated in
some of Plato’s writings, one must draw the distinction that for Pico the fundamental
condition of man is divine, such that what we start with we can but express or deny – as
opposed to its being an end towards which we can only be inspired. In this sense one can see
an aspect of Christian thinking (man made in God’s image) being taken to an extreme via the
influence of Platonism, which could be said to become untenable with its Christian origins. In
Christianity the divine spark of humanity evidenced by freewill is balanced by the misuse of
that freewill evidenced by the Fall. The potential difficulty for Pico’s positivism (which is so
refreshing after Medieval negativism) is that it leaves no room for Christ to be the only true
divine-human.)
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Plato on Love and Soul and Man (from Phaedrus, The Symposium,
and Phaedo)
Of the Nature of Man: Phaedrus
(1) from Socrates early remarks to Phaedrus:
I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that
which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be
ridiculous. And therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for
me. For, as I was saying, I want to know not about this, but about myself: am I a
monster more complicated and swollen with passion than Typho, or a creature of
a gentler and simpler sort, possessing by divine grace, a nature devoid of pride?
(or, “to whom Nature has given a diviner and lowlier destiny?” – Jowell)
(Phaedrus, 230a)
Of Love: Phaedrus
(2) from Socrates’ first speech on love, which he goes on to criticize:
Every one sees that love is a desire, and we know also that non-lovers desire the
beautiful and good. Now in what way is the lover to be distinguished from the
non-lover? Let us note that in every one of us there are two guiding and ruling
principles which lead us whither they will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the
other is an acquired opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes
in harmony and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the other
conquers. When opinion by the help of reason leads us to the best, the conquering
principle is called temperance; but when desire, which is devoid of reason, rules in us
and drags us to pleasure, that power of misrule is called excess. Now excess has
many names, and many members, and many forms, and any of these forms when
very marked gives a name, neither honourable nor creditable, to the bearer of
the name. The desire of eating, for example, which gets the better of the higher
reason and the other desires, is called gluttony, and he who is possessed by it is
called a glutton-I the tyrannical desire of drink, which inclines the possessor of
the desire to drink, has a name which is only too obvious, and there can be as
little doubt by what name any other appetite of the same family would be called;it will be the name of that which happens to be eluminant. And now I think that
you will perceive the drift of my discourse; but as every spoken word is in a
manner plainer than the unspoken, I had better say further that the irrational
desire which overcomes the tendency of opinion towards right, and is led away to the
enjoyment of beauty, and especially of personal beauty, by the desires which are her
own kindred-that supreme desire, I say, which by leading conquers and by the force of
passion is reinforced, from this very force, receiving a name, is called love.
(Phaedrus, 237d-238c)
(3) from Socrates’ remarks before his second speech responding to his first. His
description of Love in terms of desire and madness is to be reconceived:
For if love be, as he surely is, a divinity, he cannot be evil.” (…): "I told a lie when
I said" that the beloved ought to accept the non-lover when he might have the
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lover, because the one is sane, and the other mad. It might be so if madness were
simply an evil; but there is also a madness which is a divine gift, and the source of
the chiefest blessings granted to men.
(Phaedrus, 244a)
Of Soul: Phaedrus
(4) from Socrates’ preamble to a “backward looking” (towards the prehistory of the
soul) view of love, which argues for the immortality of the soul in terms of motion:
The soul through all her being is immortal, for that which is ever in motion is
immortal; but that which moves another and is moved by another, in ceasing to move
ceases also to live. Only the self-moving, never leaving self, never ceases to move,
and is the fountain and beginning of motion to all that moves besides. Now, the
beginning is unbegotten, for that which is begotten has a beginning; but the beginning
is begotten of nothing, for if it were begotten of something, then the begotten would
not come from a beginning. But if unbegotten, it must also be indestructible; for if
beginning were destroyed, there could be no beginning out of anything, nor anything
out of a beginning; and all things must have a beginning. And therefore the selfmoving is the beginning of motion; and this can neither be destroyed nor begotten,
else the whole heavens and all creation would collapse and stand still, and never again
have motion or birth. But if the self-moving is proved to be immortal, he who affirms
that self-motion is the very idea and essence of the soul will not be put to confusion.
For the body which is moved from without is soulless; but that which is moved
from within has a soul, for such is the nature of the soul. But if this be true, must
not the soul be the self-moving, and therefore of necessity unbegotten and
immortal? Enough of the soul's immortality.
(Phaedrus, 245c-246a)
(5) from Socrates’ description of the human soul as divided between noble and
ignoble nature:
Of the nature of the soul, though her true form be ever a theme of large and
more than mortal discourse, let me speak briefly, and in a figure. And let the
figure be composite-a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses
and the charioteers of the gods are all of them noble and of noble descent, but
those of other races are mixed; the human charioteer drives his in a pair; and one of
them is noble and of noble breed, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble breed; and
the driving of them of necessity gives a great deal of trouble to him. I will endeavour
to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The
soul in her totality has the care of inanimate being everywhere, and traverses the
whole heaven in divers forms appearing--when perfect and fully winged she soars
upward, and orders the whole world; whereas the imperfect soul, losing her wings and
drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground-there, finding a home, she
receives an earthly frame which appears to be self-moved, but is really moved by
her power; and this composition of soul and body is called a living and mortal
creature.
(Phaedrus, 246a-c)
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Of the Soul in Love: Phaedrus
(6) from Socrates’ description of the turmoil of the human soul in love:
Now when the charioteer beholds the vision of love, and has his whole soul warmed
through sense, and is full of the prickings and ticklings of desire, the obedient steed,
then as always under the government of shame, refrains from leaping on the
beloved; but the other, heedless of the pricks and of the blows of the whip, plunges
and runs away, giving all manner of trouble to his companion and the charioteer,
whom he forces to approach the beloved and to remember the joys of love. They
at first indignantly oppose him and will not be urged on to do terrible and unlawful
deeds; but at last, when he persists in plaguing them, they yield and agree to do as he
bids them.
And now they are at the spot and behold the flashing beauty of the beloved;
which when the charioteer sees, his memory is carried to the true beauty, whom he
beholds in company with Modesty like an image placed upon a holy pedestal. He sees
her, but he is afraid and falls backwards in adoration, and by his fall is compelled to
pull back the reins with such violence as to bring both the steeds on their haunches,
the one willing and unresisting, the unruly one very unwilling; and when they have
gone back a little, the one is overcome with shame and wonder, and his whole soul is
bathed in perspiration; the other, when the pain is over which the bridle and the fall
had given him, having with difficulty taken breath, is full of wrath and reproaches,
which he heaps upon the charioteer and his fellow-steed, for want of courage and
manhood, declaring that they have been false to their agreement and guilty of
desertion. Again they refuse, and again he urges them on, and will scarce yield to their
prayer that he would wait until another time. When the appointed hour comes, they
make as if they had forgotten, and he reminds them, fighting and neighing and
dragging them on, until at length he, on the same thoughts intent, forces them to
draw near again. And when they are near he stoops his head and puts up his tail, and
takes the bit in his teeth. and pulls shamelessly. Then the charioteer is. worse off than
ever; he falls back like a racer at the barrier, and with a still more violent wrench
drags the bit out of the teeth of the wild steed and covers his abusive tongue and-jaws
with blood, and forces his legs and haunches to the ground and punishes him sorely.
And when this has happened several times and the villain has ceased from his
wanton way, he is tamed and humbled, and follows the will of the charioteer, and
when he sees the beautiful one he is ready to die of fear. And from that time forward
the soul of the lover follows the beloved in modesty and holy fear.
(Phaedrus, 253e-254e)
Of the Transmigration of the Soul: Phaedrus
(7) from Socrates further description of the pre-history of the soul and its
metaphysical journeying:
Ten thousand years must elapse before the soul of each one can return to the place
from whence she came, for she cannot grow her wings in less; only the soul of a
philosopher, guileless and true, or the soul of a lover, who is not devoid of
philosophy, may acquire wings in the third of the recurring periods of a
thousand years; he is distinguished from the ordinary good man who gains wings in
three thousand years:-and they who choose this life three times in succession have
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wings given them, and go away at the end of three thousand years. But the others
receive judgment when they have completed their first life, and after the judgment
they go, some of them to the houses of correction which are under the earth, and are
punished; others to some place in heaven whither they are lightly borne by justice, and
there they live in a manner worthy of the life which they led here when in the form of
men. And at the end of the first thousand years the good souls and also the evil
souls both come to draw lots and choose their second life, and they may take any
which they please. The soul of a man may pass into the life of a beast, or from the
beast return again into the man. But the soul which has never seen the truth will
not pass into the human form. For a man must have intelligence of universals, and
be able to proceed from the many particulars of sense to one conception of reason;this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw while following Godwhen regardless of that which we now call being she raised her head up towards the
true being. And therefore the mind of the philosopher alone has wings; and this is
just, for he is always, according to the measure of his abilities, clinging in
recollection to those things in which God abides, and in beholding which He is
what He is. And he who employs aright these memories is ever being initiated into
perfect mysteries and alone becomes truly perfect. But, as he forgets earthly interests
and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see
that he is inspired.
(Phaedrus, 248e-249d)
Of the Nature of Man and the Origin of Love/Desire: The Symposium
(7) from Aristophanes’ comic myth of the pre-history of the species and its
sexuality:
In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the
original human nature was not like the present, but different. [189e] The sexes were
not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman,
and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which
had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word "Androgynous" is only
preserved as a term of reproach. In the second place, the primeval man was round, his
back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with
two faces, looking opposite ways, [190a] set on a round neck and precisely alike; also
four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk
upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll
over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like
tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted
[190b] to run fast. Now the sexes were three, and such as I have described them;
because the sun, moon, and earth are three; and the man was originally the child of
the sun, the woman of the earth, and the man-woman of the moon, which is made up
of sun and earth, and they were all round and moved round and round like their
parents. Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were
great, and they made an attack upon the gods; (…)
Zeus discovered a way. He said: "Methinks I have a plan which will humble their
pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, [190d] but I will cut
them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in
numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They
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shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I
will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg." (…)
…so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted [191d] in us,
reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.
Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the
indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.
(Symposium, 189e-191d)
Of Love as mediating between mortal and immortal: Symposium
(8) from Socrates’ report of his conversation with Diotima, – contradicting
Agathon:
"What then is Love?" I asked; "is he mortal?" "No." [202e] "What then?" "As in the
former instance, he is neither mortal nor immortal, but in a mean between the
two." "What is he, Diotima?" "He is a great spirit (daimon), and like all spirits he is
intermediate between the divine and the mortal." "And what," I said, "is his power?"
"He interprets," she replied, "between gods and men, conveying and taking across to
the gods the prayers and sacrifices of men, and to men the commands and replies of
the gods; he is the mediator who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore
in him all is bound together, and through him the arts of the prophet and the priest,
their sacrifices and mysteries [203a] and charms, and all prophecy and incantation,
find their way. For God mingles not with man; but through Love all the
intercourse and converse of god with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried
on. The wisdom which understands this is spiritual; all other wisdom, such as that of
arts and handicrafts, is mean and vulgar. Now these spirits or intermediate powers are
many and diverse, and one of them is Love."
(Symposium, 202d-203a)
Of the ascent of desire from physical to mental to knowledge of the form of Beauty:
Symposium
(9) from Diotima’s account to Socrates of the final cause of love in perception of
the form of beauty – a feat accomplished through the transcendence (?) of earth:
"He who has been instructed thus far in the things of love, and who has learned to
see the beautiful in due order and succession, when he comes toward the end will
suddenly perceive a nature of wondrous beauty (and this, Socrates, is the final
cause of all our former toils) -- a nature which in the first place is everlasting,
[211a] not growing and decaying, or waxing and waning; secondly, not fair in one
point of view and foul in another, or at one time or in one relation or at one place
fair, at another time or in another relation or at another place foul, as if fair to some
and foul to others, or in the likeness of a face or hands or any other part of the bodily
frame, or in any form of speech or knowledge, or existing in any other being, as for
example, in an animal, [211b] or in heaven, or in earth, or in any other place; but
beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting, which without diminution and
without increase, or any change, is imparted to the ever-growing and perishing
beauties of all other things. He who from these ascending under the influence of true
love, begins to perceive that beauty, is not far from the end. And the true order of
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going, [211c] or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the
beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using
these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms,
and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until
from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows
[211d] what the essence of beauty is.
(Symposium, 210e-211d)
Ficino’s De amore and Theologia platonica de immortalitate animae
From The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, III, pp. 653-59. To be
reprinted in J. Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance,
Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura.
Of Love:
Ficino’s most influential work was his commentary on Plato’s Symposium,
known as De amore (On Love) (1469). Unlike Ficino’s other commentaries, the De
amore was cast in the form of a literary dialogue, in the villa of Lorenzo de’Medici,
with Ficino’s friends and patrons as the interlocutors. Each interlocutor gives a speech
which is effectively a Neoplatonic reading of the several speeches in Plato’s
Symposium. It was this work, and translations of it into Italian, French and German,
that popularized the concept of ‘Platonic love’, a concept that became a popular
poetical conceit in the later Renaissance and is still used in a debased sense in modern
colloquial speech.
Ficino is usually credited as the inventor of this concept, and the expression
amor platonicus actually occurs in one of his letters (though not in the De amore).
Ficino’s account of love, however, is closely based on Plotinus (in particular Enneads
3.5), and a similar Plotinian reading of the Symposium can be found in Cardinal
Bessarion’s In Calumniatorem Platonis (Against Plato’s Calumniator), printed within
a few months of the publication of Ficino’s De amore in 1469. Nevertheless, it was
certainly Ficino who gave the concept its currency in Renaissance Europe and
invested it with the philosophical richness that gave it its wide appeal. As Kristeller
(1943) points out, the concept combines a Plotinian reading of love with the will of St
Augustine, the charity of St Paul, and ideas on friendship found in Aristotle, the
Stoics, and Cicero’s Laelius.
Ficino’s basic move is to interpret our experience of love in terms of the
spiritual dynamics of the Neoplatonic cosmos. A true experience of love awakens one
to the natural desire of the soul for union with God. It may begin with a sensual
element but that is a mere preparation for genuine love, which is the love of God. The
instantiations of beauty or goodness that kindle mutual desire between human beings
are to be understood as reflections of the divine beauty and goodness. What we love
in others rightly belongs to God; to give love to another without at the same time
giving love to God, as Ficino says in a striking formulation, is ‘nothing but robbery’.
Yet the true basis of active love is not the unconscious dependence of attributes on
their divine source, but a conscious striving of souls together towards God in
contemplative experience. It is the active search for truth in the philosophical life
which is the true basis of love and forms a genuine union between lovers. Real, divine
love is thus independent of the sex of the lovers and can exist between members of the
same or opposite genders. Ficino’s concept of love in this way subsumes the Pauline
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and Augustinian concept of charity; it also absorbs the classical pagan concept of
friendship. In the Nicomachean Ethics, for example, Aristotle argues that true
friendship is necessarily between equals and has as its subject common pursuits.
Ficino understands this to mean that souls united in contemplation of the same object
are eo ipso equal. Such souls are always present to each other even when separated,
and love even has the power to transform the lover into the image of the beloved.
Ficino insists that the biblical command to love one another has a
metaphysical basis; he argues that unrequited love is, so to speak, spiritually
defective. Mutual love which constitutes a concrete communion between persons is
the only true and perfect form of love; it is not only a moral obligation but a cosmic
necessity. If love is based on a similarity or equality between the souls of lovers and
has the same divine source, then it must exist in both souls equally. A failure of
charity is a denial of one’s essential nature. It has recently been suggested that
Ficino’s emphasis on Platonic love has a political meaning, that it was meant as a cure
for the endemic divisions in Florentine civil society. It has also been argued that
Ficino feared criticism of Plato on account of the numerous scenes of homosexual
gallantry depicted in the dialogues, and that the doctrine of Platonic love was in part
intended as an exegetical device to protect Plato from this charge. Both statements
may well be true. But the doctrine of Platonic love is one that grows naturally from
the central themes of Ficino’s philosophy, especially his emphasis on the special
dignity of contemplative noesis among human cognitive powers and his belief in the
unitive functions of soul within creation.
Of Soul:
The question of the soul’s immortality was perhaps the most hotly debated
philosophical issue of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century. After a long
period in which ‘the common doctrine of the philosophers’ (that is, Averroism) had
reigned almost unchecked in Italian universities, the 1470s saw a revival, in the
religious orders and among secular thinkers like Ficino and Apollinaris Offredi, of
attempts to establish rational proofs for the immortality of the soul. The campaign
culminated with the Fifth Lateran Council (1512-7), summoned by Ficino’s former
pupil Leo X, which denounced ‘those who assert that the intellective soul is mortal or
is one for all mankind’. Ficino, like Thomas Aquinas and many others who argued for
immortality, held that those who denied personal immortality were undermining the
traditional belief in rewards and punishments in the afterlife, and thus removing a key
sanction against immoral behavior. In his argument to the tenth book of Plato’s Laws
Ficino went so far as to say that the immortality of the soul was the main foundation
for religion.
This historical background does not however account fully for Ficino’s
preoccupation with human immortality. Ficino was the first philosopher to give the
immortality of the soul the central place in his thought, a prominence indicated by the
full title of his principal work, Theologia platonica de immortalitate animae (Platonic
Theology, On the Immortality of the Soul) (1474). In his classic study of Ficino’s
thought (1943), P.O. Kristeller maintained that immortality was central to Ficino’s
work because of its close connection with contemplative experience. For Ficino, the
experience of God which may be attained in contemplation constitutes the highest
human act of consciousness, and it therefore both defines the essence of humanity and
establishes the end of human existence. Since the contemplative experience of God in
this life is only partial and transitory, the soul must be capable of some form of
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separate incorporeal existence in which its natural appetite for the knowledge and
enjoyment of God may be fulfilled. Ficino does not seem to realize that this is at best
an argument for the soul’s survival after death and not necessarily for eternal
existence, since he admits elsewhere that souls are created in time. But in fact, many
of the dozens of immortality arguments that fill the last thirteen books of the
Theologia platonica begin from similar subjective analyses of acts, habits, faculties,
appetites and affinities of soul. The arguments from affinity, drawn in the first
instance from Plato’s Phaedo, are of particular importance, but Ficino also employs
the argument from self-motion found in the Phaedrus, while the arguments from
appetitus naturalis have Augustinian and Thomistic antecedents.
The immortal soul is also central to Ficino’s philosophy in a broader
metaphysical context. The early books of the Theologia platonica lay out an
ontological hierarchy of five substances, God, angel, soul, quality and matter. This
hierarchy was probably taken from Proclus, though the hypostasis of quality seems to
be original with Ficino. Within the hierarchy soul functions as the central link: what is
above soul is eternal, immaterial, unchanging, intelligible; what is below it is
temporal, material, mutable and sensible. It is soul that binds the two spheres together
and makes them a unity. Paradoxically, the unifying functions of soul within total
metaphysical reality mean that the soul is radically divided within itself. It contains
within itself two separate and opposing impulses. It has a natural desire for God which
drives it to cut itself off from the body and empirical reality, to turn within and
upwards to the source of its being through rational activity. In addition to this
contemplative nisus, obviously inspired by Plotinus, Ficino posits another which leads
the soul to ‘care for’ lower things such as the body, for which it has a natural
affection. To these two natural tendencies or affections there correspond the higher
parts of the soul, pre-eminently the reasoning and noetic powers, and the lower parts
of the soul such as sensation and vegetation which are responsible for its empirical
activity.
Ficino’s definition of the soul, partly in consequence of this radical division
within the soul, is not entirely satisfactory. In some passages he asserts following
Aristotle and Aquinas, that it his hylomorphic relationship to the body, that is, it is the
substantial form of the body. He rejects the Plotinian formulation of the relation of
soul to body, in which the soul, while remaining separate from body, controls it by
means of a physis or reflection of itself which it projects into the body. He also will
not endorse the implausible solution of some medieval Augustinians, which calls for
the soul to be a distinct substance, though composed of form and ‘spiritual matter’.
Yet in most contexts Ficino does speak of the soul in Platonic terms as though it were
an independent substance and not subject to material potencies. He infers from the
fact that we form simple concepts and can conceive of pure simplicity that the soul
itself is simple; he uses many of the old Platonic analogies, such as that the soul is
imprisoned in the body, that the soul is to the body as the person at the helm is to the
ship, and so forth.
Plato’s doctrine of the pre-existence and transmigration of souls presented
Ficino with a major interpretative challenge, since it threatened the Florentine’s larger
project of demonstrating the compatibility of Platonism and Christianity. ‘Be doctrine
had been confidently attributed to Plato by Plotinus, Augustine, the standard
commentary on the Bible (where King Herod is also said to have believed in it) and
Thomas Aquinas. Several of Ficino’s contemporary opponents, such as the
Dominicans Savonarola and Dominic of Flanders, used it to discredit Ficino’s
Platonic revival and the doctrine was, significantly, condemned by the Inquisition in
M.J.Huxtable 11
articles published at the University of Pisa in 1490. Ficino’s response was to deny that
Plato had ever really held the doctrine. Metempsychosis as referred to in Plato and the
other ancient theologians was to be understood as a mystery; to understand it in a
literal sense was a vulgar error fast put about in the late Academy. In reality the
doctrine of transmigration must be taken as an allegory of the return of the soul to the
One in contemplative experience, or typologically as a prophecy of the resurrection of
the body, or as an obscure, proto-Christian premonition of the doctrine of purgatory.
Ficino also employed the not wholly consistent argument that when Plato discussed
transmigration in his works he was simply retailing a Pythagorean doctrine to which
he was not himself necessarily committed. To the metaphysical problem of explaining
how an eternal substance could have been created in particular souls at particular
moments of time, Ficino argues that creation in this instance is to be understood as the
ontological dependence of the temporal manifestations of soul on their eternal source,
not as the production ex nihilo of new substances in time.