Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 340 - Footnotes to Plato - Marsilio Ficino.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Footnotes to Plato, Marsilio Ficino. When I started talking about Plato back on episode 18 of this podcast, I mentioned Alfred North Whitehead's famous remark that, the European philosophical tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I can just about go along with that, with the proviso that a good footnote, like an empty pepper mill, is nothing to sneeze at. Back when I was a grad student I found myself in the library one day and realized that I was scanning through an article more or less ignoring the main text and reading only the footnotes. This I thought must be some kind of milestone in my scholarly formation, for better or worse. And since those early podcasts on Plato, we've seen time and again that glosses, commentaries, and other exegetical labours have played a central role in the history of philosophy, inside and outside the European tradition. So I mean it as the highest of compliments when I say that no one has written greater footnotes to Plato than Marsilio Ficino. Well not footnotes exactly, but full blown commentaries, which Ficino produced in addition to his full Latin translation of Plato's dialogues. As we saw last time, Ficino tells us himself that this prodigious feat of scholarship was done at the behest of the Medici. He even read from his translations of Plato to Cosimo de' Medici while the latter lay on his deathbed. That was in 1464, the year after Cosimo's gift to Ficino of a villa on the outskirts of Florence. Petty stuff for a young scholar who was still in his early 30s, having been born in 1433. Originally, he planned to become a doctor like his father before him, and Ficino never entirely lost his interest in medicine. Indeed, no less an authority than Paracelsus wrote in 1527 that just as Avicenna was the greatest of the Arab doctors, so Ficino was the greatest among the Italians. But Platonism was always at the core of his scholarly career, from the moment he received the Plato manuscript from Cosimo, to the completion of his Latin version of the dialogues in 1468, to his translation and commentary on Plotinus in 1492, and finally the appearance of his commentaries on Plato in 1496. He thus came along at the right time to become one of the first intellectuals whose works could be read across Europe in printed editions. His own complete works and his Latin Plato would both be printed numerous times in the coming centuries. Ficino was also a devout Christian, who was ordained a priest in 1473 and became a canon of the Florence Cathedral in 1487. He saw, or claimed to see, no conflict between his devotion to the faith and his devotion to pagan Platonist texts. To the contrary, he believed that Platonism was part of God's plan for humankind. In a work called On the Christian Religion, he argued that late ancient Platonists, pagan though they may have been, were actually influenced by Christian ideas in their interpretation of Plato. But not all Ficino's readers were persuaded of the coherence of these two traditions. Michael Allen, a leading scholar of Ficino's thought, has written that Ficino spent his whole Neoplatonizing life on the very borders of heterodoxy. He came closest to stepping over the borders when he wrote a work about the arts of extending one's life, whether Neoplatonizing or otherwise. The three books on life, which we'll discuss in greater detail in a future episode, got him in trouble with the Church authorities because of its talk of magic and astrology. But he was acquitted by the Pope in 1490. He died in 1499 at the age of 66, which is not particularly impressive as proof of his skill in increasing longevity, but would probably have pleased Ficino no end for numerological reasons. Indeed, his commentaries on Plato, deeply influenced as they are by late ancient authors, explore Pythagorean numerology, demonology, magic, and astrology, as well as a wide range of issues within Plato's metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and psychology. Actually, let's not put it that way. It would be better to emphasize that Ficino saw no divide between the Pythagorean and occult side of Platonism and the philosophical questions that occupy the attention of most Plato scholars today. He had good reason for this attitude. When discussing demonology, he could point to Socrates' famous divine sign, which warned him away from ill-omened actions, and he could find numerology in dialogues like Plato's Timaeus. In fact, he saw Plato as the last of six great sages, the number six being of course particularly significant to him, on a list that also included Zoroaster, Hermes, Orpheus, Aglophamus, no me neither, and of course Pythagoras himself. Again, we may raise our eyebrows at this ostentatiously non-Christian roster of authorities, but Ficino was at pains to connect his heroes to religion where he could, as when he argued that the wise men who attended upon Christ's birth were disciples of Zoroaster. Among Ficino's many numerological indulgences, none is more prominent than his fivefold analysis of God and the created universe. He is here drawing on the third century Neoplatonist Plotinus, who had set forth a hierarchical vision in which a perfectly simple first principle, the One, emanated a universal intellect, followed by soul, and then finally the material world in which we find ourselves. Ficino's scheme is very similar, but more precise about the exact number of levels, namely five, God, Angel, Soul, Quality, and Matter. The great modern-day scholar of Renaissance thought, Paul Oscar Costeller, believed that Ficino went out of his way to modify Plotinus so as to put soul right in the middle of the hierarchy. This would emphasize the soul's function of mediating between the intelligible and sensible realms. Subsequently though, the aforementioned Michael Allen discovered that Ficino was actually led to his fivefold scheme by reading late ancient commentaries on Plato's Parmenides. These commentaries link a succession of five arguments in that dialogue to the layers of a fivefold version of the Neoplatonic hierarchy and Ficino simply followed suit. Nonetheless, as Allen would readily admit, it was indeed vitally important to Ficino that the soul occupied the middle place in his scheme. He says of the soul that it is nature's center, the mean of everything in the universe, the knot and bond of the world. This remark is found in his magnum opus, a sprawling work in 18 books that takes up no fewer than six volumes in a modern edition and translation. It is called the Platonic Theology, a title that, tellingly enough, echoes that of a major work by Proclus. Where Proclus' Platonic Theology was a systematic attempt to show how pagan religious beliefs could be connected to Plato's dialogues, Ficino's is mostly focused on a single philosophical claim, the rational human soul is immortal. Reading through it, you might be convinced that Ficino himself must have been immortal in order to find time to devise so many arguments for this conclusion. He also finds time to lay out his five-fold scheme, talk about God's nature, and refute the views of Epicureans and Averroists, two groups that attract his particular enmity. Though the Neoplatonic basis of Ficino's cosmic vision is evident, closer inspection reveals that he's also drawing on Scholastic philosophers, especially Thomas Aquinas. From the Scholastic tradition, he takes, for instance, a theory of transcendentals, that goodness, unity, truth, beauty, and so on are all coextensive and appear in God in their purest form. He also makes use of such conceptual items as the distinction between essence and existence, originally devised by Avicenna but also fundamental to Aquinas' metaphysics, and the pairing of intellect and will which had played such a central role in Scholastic psychological theories. When push comes to shove though, he usually goes with the ancient Platonists. For instance, he interprets humankind's status as an image of God in strictly Platonic terms, we participate in his goodness, unity, and so on, rather than stressing, as medieval Scholastics did, that the gift of grace is required to be a true image of God. We can observe something similar with his handling of angels, which as already mentioned are at the level occupied by intellect in Plotinus. Ficino has some trouble drawing this equivalence. The Neoplatonic intellect is a single mind that eternally graphs the Platonic forms. By contrast, of course, Christian theology recognizes many angels, and when it recognizes intelligible forms, usually makes them thoughts in God's own mind. One idea which we see in the medieval tradition as early as the 9th century Platonist thinker Eriugena would be to equate the forms with the second person of the divine trinity. Ficino sometimes speaks this way too, but he is also attracted by the idea that God transcends intellectual life completely, which he sees as the unanimous teaching of the whole ancient Platonist tradition. That would leave angels to be the only pure minds, like many beings, each of which plays the role of Plotinus' single, universal intellect. And this is pretty much what we get in Ficino's Platonic theology. His angels are thus like a heavily Neoplatonic updating of the intellect of entities envisioned by say Aquinas, but they no longer play the role of serving as messengers between God and the created world, which was really the main function of angels in most medieval theories about them. That dynamic, intermediary role is instead played by the human soul. It reaches down to the body, giving it life, but also reaches up to the divine, at its best even attaining something like the intellectual understanding of an angel. Like Plotinus, Ficino exhorts the soul to turn away from the body and its concerns. We achieve knowledge not so much by studying the natural world, as by learning to avoid its distractions. Some more materialist philosophers would deny this. These would especially include the Epicureans. As we saw in a previous installment, early on in his career, Ficino was enamored of Lucretius and Epicurus, but he turned against them, destroying an early work of his devoted to Epicurean thought. Here in the Platonic theology, they appear only as opponents to be refuted, who can offer no cogent argument for their physicalist view of human nature. Against their down-to-earth, empiricist theory of knowledge, Ficino argues that the soul has many functions it performs without sensation. He also offers the occasional picturesque image to encourage us to lift our minds. The soul that takes itself for a body, he says, is like a child looking down a well and thinking that he is the reflection he sees at the bottom. The intermediate position of soul exemplifies a favorite type of argument found throughout the Platonic theology. It's a line of thought taken especially from Proclus, who in turn got it from Iamblichus, who in turn was inspired by the mathematical musings of Pythagoreanism. It's appropriate that the argument came to Ficino through a chain of authorities, since it has to do precisely with the continuity of the metaphysical chain that holds the whole universe together. A basic assumption of their late Neoplatonism is that, between any two extreme terms, there must be a mean term. In arithmetic, this would be something like 4 as a mean between 2 and 6. In metaphysics, it demands that two kinds of being that are sufficiently dissimilar will have in between them another kind of being that is similar to both. Thus, we need to have angels between God and the soul because God is unchanging unity while soul is changing plurality, because soul moves from one thought to another. Angels mediate between the two, since they are unchanging like God but plural like the soul. The same style of reasoning can be used to establish the need for soul. Angels, as just mentioned, are unchanging. They never alter in their nature nor in their activity but just permanently engage in thought, like Plotinus' universal intellect or, for that matter, the divine celestial movers, recognized in Aristotle's cosmology. They are thus above soul, which again does change as it thinks about one thing and then another. But soul is like angels in that it does not change in its very nature or essence. So it is a mean term between angelic nature and quality, which is subject to change in every respect. Here we might think of the way that qualities such as heat or colour become more or less intense and disappear altogether. As a bonus, this gives Ficino one of his many arguments for soul's immortality, it cannot be destroyed, since its immunity to destruction is precisely what makes it superior to quality and a suitable intermediary between quality and angels. Indeed, as already mentioned, soul is the ultimate mean, the intermediary that binds together the whole universe. Though that line of argument probably strikes you as pretty abstract if not arbitrary, it brings us to the very heart of Ficino's psychology. Almost everything he says about the soul can be related to its function as a mean term. Take for instance its relationship to body, which as we know is just matter that has qualitative properties like colour and heat. For starters, we know that the soul can't be in the body like quality is, dispersed through the body's parts as one patch of colour is on a giraffe's neck and another on its rump. Instead, the soul is fully present in the whole body, yet it is indeed in or related to a body, unlike an angel. So again, it plays a role halfway between the roles of the angel and quality. Or consider the fact that your soul can make your body move, as when you leap aside to avoid a charging giraffe. The reason your soul can do this is that it too is moving or changing. As we saw, this is what makes it inferior to an angel, which can cause motion too, but not by moving. The soul passes its immaterial motion onto the material body, an idea that can be found in dialogues of Plato like the Phaedrus, which famously establishes the need for soul as a self-moving principle that causes other motions. Here we might actually want to turn briefly away from the Platonic theology to Ficino's commentary on that dialogue, the Phaedrus. This dialogue features a famous image of the soul as a charioteer, steering two horses, a white horse, representing reason, and a black one, representing imagination and lower nature, at least on Ficino's interpretation. Ficino does not see the black horse as bad exactly, since he thinks that desire and imagination can be put to good use to orient ourselves towards God. But he follows Plato's mythic narrative by exhorting us to pull the soul upwards into the heavens until it partakes of the unchanging, perfect intellectual contemplation enjoyed by angels. This by the way is something you won't find real horses or even giraffes doing. Beasts have no rational soul, so they lack many of the features that make soul similar to angelic nature. Thus animals will enjoy no afterlife. The functions of our own souls that we share in common with animals like sensation and bodily desire will likewise die along with our bodies. The human soul is then special in its ability to survive death. But what about birth? Plato and his late ancient followers were very clear that our souls have existed already before we came into our bodies. This was problematic from a Christian point of view. And still worse, Ficino could read the Pythagoreans and Plato saying that the soul may previously have been in other bodies, even the bodies of animals, and that if we live badly we will be reborn the next time as beasts. This must have been rather embarrassing for Ficino, but to his credit, he does not try to hide the Platonic teaching. He mentions the theory of reincarnation, but dismisses it as merely poetical and not philosophical, a kind of metaphor in which life in an animal body represents living as if one were a beast. As for soul's existence before birth, Ficino rejects this outright. If souls found themselves in a state of complete freedom, they would never be willing to enter into bodies in the first place. He has to walk a tightrope here, insisting that the soul's nature means that it can never stop existing even though it started existing. His idea is that soul can, so to speak, keep itself existing under its own steam. Its capacity for self-motion is a sign of this, and as a pure form it has no potentiality for being destroyed or for that matter generated out of matter, yet soul is not self-causing. Though it is not generated, it is indeed created, meaning that it acquires existence from some other source, namely God, who creates it without creating it from matter. You might notice that I keep going back and forth here between talking about soul and souls, leaving some unclarity as to whether I am talking about a single principle that is part of a cosmic hierarchy or many life-giving principles that belong to individual humans. That's a habit Ficino has himself, but he came by it honestly, since Plotinus does the same thing. Ficino's more careful formulations show that the single universal soul is simply that of the physical cosmos, the famous world soul introduced by Plato in the Timaeus. While Ficino is happy to accept this doctrine, he firmly rejects what may look at first like a similar idea, which is that there is a single mind shared by all humans. This of course is the theory of Averroes that caused so much trouble back in the 13th century. At that time, radical Aristotelians like Boethius of Dacia and Sigé of Brabantse at Paris flirted with following Averroes on its score, and also on the eternity of the world. Thomas Aquinas attacked them, calling them Averroes, and as you may recall there is a scholarly debate today as to whether the phrase Latin Averroes can accurately be applied to those Parisian arts masters. Soon enough, we'll be seeing that the Italian Renaissance had its own Averroes. This explains why Ficino is so keen to criticize their position, even though Averroes himself is sometimes cited with approval in this very same work. Ficino devotes an entire book of to refuting the claim that all humans share a single mind, dutifully explaining the theory and its justification before burying it under a barrage of counterarguments and objections. He's less keen than Aquinas had been to show in detail that Averroes had Aristotle wrong. Instead he argues on abstract philosophical grounds that there can be no universal potential intellect that receives ideas from a single actual intellect, as Averroes supposed, because mind cannot be pure potency. One of the reasons Averroes thought that there could be only one intellect is that intellect has no matter, and matter is needed to distinguish one thing from another. The fact that Hiawatha and Harold are two giraffes is not due to the universal nature of giraffe, which they share, but the difference between the two parcels of matter that make up their bodies. That line of thought had been difficult for Aquinas to rebut, since he also thought that matter or potentiality is what makes things individuals. But Ficino waves it away dismissively. God can simply create individual minds as distinct from one another. Relatedly, Averroes supposed that since intellect is just the same as whatever it thinks about, and there's only one set of universal forms, there can only be one intellect. To this, Ficino replies that the human mind is not actually grasping intelligible forms in themselves. As a good Neoplatonist, he would locate the forms higher in the system, above rational souls. So what the souls get is only a kind of representation or image of the true forms. Yet again, Ficino here exploits the soul's intermediate status, since he can say that forms in the human mind are in the middle between the transcendent, intelligible forms posited by Plato and the immanent forms found in matter. Ficino's furious rejection of the Averroes theory of mind may suggest that, like George Gumistos Platon before him, his enthusiasm for Platonism led him into antipathy towards Aristotelianism. But actually, he does not follow Platon's harsh criticisms of Aristotle. If anything, he was critical of Platon himself, as we can see from a few notes he made in a text containing Platon's works. Though Ficino was willing to stand up for Plato when Aristotle criticized him explicitly, he was not out to emphasize the differences between the two great authorities. On a matter of soul, for instance, he distanced Aristotle from Averroes by claiming that for Aristotle, the individual rational soul does survive the death of the body, something ruled out by the absurd theory of a single mind put forward by Averroes. And that's typical of Ficino, who had no real stake in attacking Aristotle and reserved his ire for contemporaries in Italy whose enthusiasm for Averroes led them into heretical falsehoods. Which brings us back to the question of Ficino's own orthodoxy. We already saw that he was accused of heresy but cleared of all charges by the Pavese, and he even wound up shaping Church doctrine when his arguments in favour of the soul's immortality led to this being declared as official dogma in 1513. Of course, Ficino was dead by then, but if the soul really is immortal, he still had a chance to be pleased by the decision. Even in life, he believed, or spoke as if he believed, that Platonism could lend support to Christian faith. The anecdote of his reading Plato to the dying Cosimo illustrates the point well. Ficino claims that his patron died straight away, as if impatient to go to the blessed afterlife affirmed by Plato. In his summary of Plato's Phaedo, the dialogue that depicts the last hours and courageous death of Socrates, Ficino remarked that, Socrates' life is a kind of image of the Christian life or its shadow. Of course, he was well aware of the pagan content in some of his favourite sources, like Eamblichus of Proclus, but he did his best to rationalize these features of the texts, fulfilling his promise in the prologue of the Platonic theology to set forth Platonist arguments insofar as they agree with true religion. Confronted with Proclus' particularly baroque version of the Neoplatonic system, designed to make room for the many pagan deities within the hierarchy, Ficino managed a feat of reverse engineering, assimilating the pagan gods to his own, simpler hierarchy. Uranus, Saturn, and Juno are just names for God, Angel, and Soul, while other gods are mere aspects of these principles, with Venus, for example, simply being the beauty of the world soul's mind. He was expert in finding ways to discover agreement between the Platonists and his faith. The Platonic theology ends with two books on the subject of the bodily resurrection, which certainly looks like a specifically Christian doctrine that would be in tension with Platonism. But Ficino noted that Platonists believed that liberated souls go to the heavenly realm and take on celestial or ethereal bodies. A philosophical thesis tantamount to the Christian view that souls will receive perfect, risen bodies from God. It's an appropriate move for Ficino to make. After all, his life's mission was nothing less than the resurrection of Platonic philosophy. This has been an unusually long episode, yet we have barely scratched the surface of Ficino's extensive and fascinating body of work. Much as Pselos appeared recurrently in our series on Byzantium, so Ficino will keep turning up in episodes to come. In fact, in the very next episode, he'll be like the soul within the universe, a central figure. Because we'll be looking at Renaissance ideas about love, a topic Ficino embraced in his commentary on Plato's erotic dialogue The Symposium. And he wasn't the only Renaissance Italian with a passion for the subject, as we'll discover next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.