Ficino, Marsilio
FICINO, MARSILIO (1433–1499), was the most eminent philosopher of the Renaissance. Ficino employed Neoplatonism, the characteristic form of Renaissance philosophy, as a support for Christianity. Cosimo de' Medici, impressed with Ficino's precosity, gave him the opportunity to learn Greek and presented him with his country house at Florence, the Villa Careggi, where Ficino presided over his "Platonic academy."
Ficino edited the complete works of Plato, translated Plato's Dialogues, wrote a commentary on the Symposium, and edited and translated various works of Neoplatonists such as Plotinus (the Enneads), Proclus, Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Dionysius the Areopagite. He also translated from Greek to Latin various second- and third-century mystical and gnostic texts (Poimandres) ascribed to Hermes Trismegistos.
In 1473, after an extended period of melancholy, Ficino became a priest. His own best-known works are On the Christian Religion and Platonic Theology, the latter an elaborate statement of his Christianized Neoplatonic philosophy. Ficino's "pious philosophy" or "learned religion" presupposed an epistemology of poesy and faith. Divine poetry and allegory serve as a veil for true religion, for the rhapsodic and the mystical express religious truth, which cannot be expressed by simple intellectual formulas. A religious syncretist and universalist, Ficino believed that truth has been transmitted through a long tradition from the ancient philosophers and that wisdom has been revealed in many forms. Plato and the Neoplatonists, he believed, encompassed in their thought all the elements of the "ancient philosophy of the gentiles." Ficino envisioned everything within the cosmos as a great hierarchy of being. The One (God) is the absolute and uncontradicted original essence prior to the plurality of finite things, the ultimate unity of all things. The lesser orders are brought into being by emanations proceeding from the One. The way of ascent to the eternal One moves from bodies, through qualities, souls, and heavenly intelligences, with humanity at the center of this great chain of being, for humans are bound to the world of matter by their bodies and linked to the realm of the spirit by their souls. Humanity is assured of its own divinity, since God is immanent in humans through emanation. Ficino added a Christian patina to this Neoplatonic theodicy by identifying the demiurge, or intermediary, between the One and the subdivided spiritual and material world with the divine Logos, Christ, through whom the world was made and who "became flesh and dwelt among us." The church through dogma and sacrament keeps its people in touch with the spiritual world. Someday the immortal human soul, freed from the prison house of the body, will enjoy the beatific vision of God without mediation.
All parts of the universe, Ficino taught in his treatise On Light, are held together by bonds of sympathetic love. The highest form of love, Platonic love, moves the true lover to love another for the sake of God. This love guides humanity in its choice of good over evil and of the beautiful over the unlovely. Ficino's close association of goodness and truth with beauty appealed to the aesthetic sense of the Renaissance and influenced literature and art as well as philosophy and theology.
Bibliography
Ficino's works have been published as Opera omnia (1576), 2 vols. (Turin, 1959), and Supplementum Ficinianum, 2 vols., edited by Paul O. Kristeller (Florence, 1937). See also The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, 3 vols. (London, 1975–1981). On his thought, the most comprehensive study available in English is Kristeller's The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (1943; reprint, Gloucester, Mass., 1964). For a brief introduction to his thought, one may turn to Kristeller's Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, Calif., 1964), pp. 37–53, and The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Ernst Cassirer et al. (Chicago, 1948), pp. 185–212. For the larger picture of Neoplatonism and its influence, see Nesca A. Robb's Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance (1935; reprint, New York, 1968).
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