 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 historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode… True Romance – Theories of Love If love had a colour, what colour would it be? Green, obviously. As in Al Green, the singer whose linky, seductive and soulful tributes to this emotion include I'm Still in Love with You, Love and Happiness, and the imaginatively titled L-O-V-E, Love. I myself would love to know how many people alive today were conceived while Al Green's music was playing in the background. Or am I making a basic mistake here, confusing love with lust? Marsilio Ficino would say so. If you asked Ficino what colour love is, he would probably say white, referring not to Maurice White, whose band Earth, Wind and Fire produced more than its share of slinky soul, but to the snowy white of purity and chastity. Ficino would approve of our using the phrase platonic love for affection that does not involve sex. Indeed, he can take a good deal of the credit for associating this idea with Plato. He made a case that this author of several often rather sexually suggestive dialogues about the erotic life was actually encouraging us to turn away from the body, to abandon physical beauty for the sake of higher beauties, and ultimately the beauty of God himself. Like Cardinal Bessarion before him, Ficino was concerned to rebut charges brought by critics of Plato, including George of Trebizond. Drawing on scurrilous details from ancient biographies of Plato and the erotic dialogues themselves, George condemned Plato as a depraved lover of boys. Ficino's case for the defense began with his translations of Plato, as when he rendered the Greek word Παιδαραστην, meaning to love boys, with a less explicit Latin verb. A bit of massaging in the process of translation could turn talk of erotic attraction into talk of fond friendship. But the purification of Plato was carried out especially in Ficino's commentaries. In his summary of the Republic, for example, he dismisses as a harmless joke the suggestion that the best guardians of the ideal city will be rewarded by being allowed to kiss their most beautiful fellow citizens. The high point of this bolderizing project comes in Ficino's De Amore, or On Love, the commentary he devoted to Plato's symposium. It does not take the form one would normally expect from an exegetical work. Plato's dialogue is set at a drinking party, where a succession of speakers take it in turn to discuss the nature of love. Ficino's commentary imitates this format, being written as a kind of meta-dialogue, which purports to describe a restaging of the symposium held in Careggi in 1468. At this gathering, each speech in Plato's dialogue was explained by a member of Ficino's circle, particularly prominent was Giovanni Cavacanti, the guest of honor and exegete for several of the speeches. This could hardly have been more appropriate, since Giovanni was a descendant of Guido Cavacanti, the 13th century's answer to Al Green. This earlier Cavacanti's famous poem about love, Dona me prega, helped invent the sweet new style of Italian literature. In broad outline, the teaching of Ficino's commentary on the symposium is familiar to us from his Platonic theology. It assumes a metaphysical hierarchy in which an angelic world of mind emanates forth from a single simple god, followed by the realm of souls and then the physical cosmos. If this reminds you not so much of Plato as of Neo-Platonists like Plotinus, then pat yourself on the back. Ficino is indeed drawing extensively on Plotinus for his understanding of the symposium. Plotinus dedicated a brief treatise to this dialogue, which informs Ficino's interpretation. Both take an allegorical approach, especially to the more mythological aspects of the dialogue. A good illustration is Ficino's handling of the famous speech given by Plato to the comic poet Aristophanes, explained here by none other than Cristoforo Landino. Again he is an apt choice for this task, since as we saw in episode 339, Landino was known for his philosophical readings of literary works. In the speech of Aristophanes, we are told that humans began as eight-limbed, ball-shaped creatures that were split in half by the gods. Humans, as we know them, are thus each half of a full organism, with erotic desire explained as a longing to be made whole once again. There were originally male-male, female-female, and male-female pairings, which explains what we would nowadays call sexual orientation. Eliminating this frankly sexual aspect of the speech, Ficino has Landino say that the masculine androgynous and feminine natures represent three virtues that have gendered connotations, courage is manly, temperance womanly, and justice the balance of both. Not that Ficino wants to eliminate all talk of desire. To the contrary, towards the beginning of the commentary he has defined love as a desire for the beautiful. So it turns out that explaining love requires explaining beauty. The erotic is closely connected to the aesthetic. His definition of beauty is a bit of a mouthful, but worth looking at in detail. It is, Let's start with the end of this definition and its suggestion that love is a kind of frenzy or inflammation. Ficino, who let's remember was the son of a doctor and interested in medicine, did indeed see some kinds of love in terms of illness. The so-called love sickness would literally enter the bloodstream of a victim, struck or we might say infected by visual contact with a beautiful love object. Since this is really just an imbalance of humours in the body, like many other sicknesses, it can be cured with physical remedies like purging the blood. For once this literally medieval remedy would probably be quite effective. A good round of bloodletting should calm down even the most ardent of lovers. The idea that the erotic impulse is a kind of derangement has wider significance. Ficino counts it among several types of madness, which also include the inspiration that takes over prophets and poets. When love manifests as desire for physical beauty, it is the most common and crude form of madness. Notice that in Ficino's definition of beauty he says that even this lower kind of desire is relatively chaste. Beauty can be appreciated only by sight, hearing, and thought, powers that have more to do with the soul and less to do with the body. As for the pleasures of touch, these relate to lust, not love. The lust to touch the body, he says, is not a part of love, nor is it the desire of the lover, but rather a kind of wantonness and the derangement of a servile man. Forget making babies, Ficino wants us to strive for a different kind of conception, namely the more exalted and transcendent type of erotic madness, which means being transported by suitably exalted and transcendent beauty. This would be the intelligible beauty of the angelic realm, or even better, the beauty of God himself. As we saw when talking about Ficino's work, the Platonic Theology, he embraced the medieval doctrine of the transcendentals, according to which being, goodness, truth, oneness, and beauty all correlate with one other. Accordingly, here in his commentary on the symposium, Ficino calls beauty, the blossom of goodness. Whatever is good is beautiful, and the more goodness something has, the more beautiful it will be. Thus God is the highest of all beauties, desired by mind or angel, as it turns back towards its principle and origin. Likewise, when soul strives to unite with mind, it is urged on by its desire for intelligible beauty. Love also explains order and unity in the physical cosmos, implying celestial motion to govern the world of the elements. Yes, like Maurice White, Marsilio Ficino uses love and soul to keep earth, wind, and fire together. It's all equally true to what we find in Plotinus too, but there are some subtler differences between Ficino and Plotinus. His remarks on actual sex may be the literary equivalent of a cold shower, but Ficino is warmer than Plotinus had been towards the phenomenon of physical beauty. He thinks it is a natural accompaniment of virtue in the soul, with inner beauty showing itself outwardly. All this sounds like it would in turn warm the heart of any Renaissance Platonist. So it's a surprise to see Ficino's commentary being harshly criticized by his younger colleague Pico della Miranda. Pico also wrote a commentary on a text about love. Not Plato's symposium this time, though its influence looms large in Pico's presentation. The occasion is instead a poem by another member of the Florentine Platonist circle, Girolamo Benevigni. Benevigni wove ideas from Ficino into his verses, which were a kind of philosophical updating of the aforementioned Donna Me Prega, that famous poem written by Guido Cavacanti. Pico responds by setting out his own views about love, emphasizing how these differ from Ficino's. He also criticizes Ficino for failing to observe correct philosophical method. Showing off the scholastic training he received in Paris, Pico insists on the need to define one's terms at the outset of any such discussion, and charges Ficino with blundering at this early stage. Love should in fact be defined as desire to possess what is, or merely seems to be, beautiful. With a stroke, Pico has undermined Ficino's case for eliminating lust and sexuality from discussions of love. Even if physical attractiveness is not truly good or beautiful, it's merely seeming beautiful is enough to spark genuinely erotic desire. Accordingly, Pico argues that even irrational animals can experience love, which causes them to mate. Still, he would agree with Ficino that higher love, which he calls heavenly as opposed to earthly, is directed towards the intelligible beauty we behold in acts of contemplation. I use the word behold here advisedly. In another departure from Ficino, Pico insists that beauty is perceived only by sight, not hearing. It is analogous to harmony, which characterizes music that we might call beautiful, but really beauty and harmony are different. Beauty is whatever gives delight to vision, whether this vision is that of the bodily eyes or the eye of the mind. And by the way, the beauty that is perceived by either kind of vision is not, as Ficino suggested, an effect or blossom produced by all kinds of goodness. It is just one of many ways for a thing to be good, or as Pico puts it in the scholastic terms he tends to favor, beauty is a species belonging to the genus of goodness. The Platonic circle's interest in these rather abstract questions of love was confirmed by the work of a follower of Ficino's named Francesco Cattani di Teccetto. They were close enough that Ficino bequeathed a valuable manuscript of Platonic works to Cattani, who wrote a paraphrase commentary on the symposium and independent treatises on beauty and love. In these writings, Cattani did his best to smooth over the differences between Ficino and Pico, but where this could not be done he sided with Ficino. More famous are the echoes of the whole debate in more popular, often vernacular literature. Here, a key figure is Pietro Bembo, who wrote an entertaining dialogue about love called Gli Asolani. The title just means the people from Asolo, which is north of Venice. This was a great success, printed initially in 1505 and then dozens of times over the following century in the original Italian and in French and Spanish translations. It depicts a group of aristocrats meeting over several days in a garden to debate the value of love. The group is of mixed gender, presided over by the Queen of Cyprus, Catarina Coronado, and featuring several other women, though the main speakers are three men who present contrasting ideas about love. Bembo knows aware of he speaks here since he engaged in several amorous affairs, one with celebrated beauty Lucrezia Borgia. His own experience of bitter rejection and unrequited passion is palpable in the speech given by the first main character, Perro Tino, who emphasizes the suffering caused by love. In fact, he goes so far as to say that all of life's griefs result from love. Any pleasure taken in the brief attentions of a beloved woman will be more than outweighed by the exquisite pain of rejection later on. This speech recalls the laments that were a stock feature of medieval courtly love literature. You may recall such diverse texts as the Romance of the Rose and the works of the Beguine mystics performing variations on the theme. But Bembo juxtaposes Perro Tino's bitter pessimism with something more up-to-date, as two further speakers offer more optimistic views of love that recall what we've just found in the Florentine Platonists. Next up is a character called Gismondo who argues that all love worthy of the term is in fact good. How could it be otherwise since love is natural and everything natural is good? Gismondo agrees with Ficino that love has to do only with sight, hearing, and reason, not the other faculties of soul, and that love can be a spur to virtue. Then the tone is raised even further. The last speaker, Lavinello, relates an encounter he has had with a pious hermit. Evoking the most transcendent aspects of Ficino's theory, this character of the hermit rejects the value of all earthly love. It is irrational to desire a beloved object that will change and pass away, so we should direct our love only to God. As with other Renaissance dialogues we've considered, it is not easy to extract Bembo's own position from this work. The diversity of views is surely part of the point, so it was rather simplistic to proceed as Baldessar Castiglione did in his Book of the Courtier. This much longer dialogue, which we've had occasion to discuss before, features Bembo himself as a character, discoursing on the topic of love. The fictional Bembo most resembles the second speaker of Liasolani as he speaks very much in favour of love, including erotic love for women. The background of Ficino's ideas is evident here too, though as one modern interpreter has put it, Castiglione's version of Bembo is interested in philosophy only as a source of literary and conversational conceits and is concerned especially with the lowest rung of the ladder of love where he engages in sensual love in its excusable courtly form. For the fictional version of Bembo, love is a longing to possess beauty, which we initially encounter not through touch, but through the sight of lovely bodies. Like Ficino, Castiglione's Bembo understands physical beauty to be the outward sign of a virtuous soul, just as the beauty we see elsewhere in the cosmos is the manifestation of the good order given by God to the universe. Only idiotic people, who are content to remain at the level of beasts, are satisfied with bodies though. He echoes a famous passage in Plato's Symposium in which the female philosopher Deotima describes moving one's gaze from individual beautiful bodies step by step up to the form of beauty itself, an itinerary sometimes called the ladder of love. Carried away on a flight of rhetoric, the character of Bembo waxes enthusiastic about the ascent to the beauty of the intellectual realm until he's brought crashing back to earth by a tug on his sleeve and teasing comment from one of the female characters. Evidently Castiglione thinks it is worth including the Platonic tradition of erotic philosophy in his Book of the Courtier, but he also pokes fun at it. And, in a typical move, he pits Bembo against a more hedonistic character who thinks it is absurd to talk of possessing beauty without pursuing attractive bodies and who identifies the climax of the erotic life as begetting children with a beautiful woman. So far women have featured in this story only as beautiful love objects, apart from the relatively minor characters who populate the dialogues written by Bembo and Castiglione. But that changes with one final work I want to discuss, the Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, published in 1547 by Tullia Daragona. Like Pietro Bembo, Daragona enjoyed the honor of being both the author of such a dialogue and a character in one. She was the model for one of the speakers in Sperone Speroni's Dialogue on Love from 1535. There she was presented as a critic of the kind of spiritual approach to love, espoused by Ficino, Pico, and Bembo. This no doubt seemed a natural bit of typecasting to Speroni because Daragona was a renowned courtesan. But in her own dialogue, she distances herself from what she calls vulgar love, echoing those more high-minded predecessors by associating sexuality with animals, and true honest love with rationality. Yet Daragona is not just reiterating Ficino's Platonist position. Her dialogue is different from the ones we've been discussing. For one thing, it really is a dialogue and not just a series of speeches. Our two characters are Tullia Daragona herself and Benedetto Varchi, a prominent intellectual and philosopher of mid 16th century Florence. The two tease and flirt as they debate one another, both exploring and embodying the idea of honest love as a refined and rational but still pleasant pursuit. Thus, at one stage, Daragona agrees to concede a point made by Varchi, but only out of love for him. And there is much lighthearted jousting about points of logic and grammar as the two try to clarify the thesis that has been proposed for debate. The dialogue is a gentle parody of the scholastic form of the disputed question, as well as a response to the Platonist treatments of love. As for the question being disputed, this also distinguishes Tullia Daragona's treatise from other works on love. Though she does exonerate Socrates and Plato from pederasty, insisting that their sole interest was inducing virtue in young men, this dialogue is not in any sense a commentary on the symposium. Rather, Daragona and Varchi seek to answer the question whether it is possible to love within limits. Again, taking a gently satirical approach to scholasticism, Daragona shows the character of Varchi getting obsessed with the wording of this question, for instance by pressing Daragona to admit that the noun love and verb to love mean the same thing, despite their different linguistic functions, because they refer to a single essence. This distantly recalls ideas about language we first met when looking at 13th century speculative grammar. Once the terms have been clarified, Varchi absurdly declares that he is thereby already answered the question, forcing Daragona to point out that he has done no such thing. Yet it does not seem that Daragona is entirely dismissive of scholastic philosophy, because the ultimate solution to the dialogue's central question turns on a distinction beloved of the schoolmen, originally made by Aristotle. Love is boundless, but not actually infinite. Its infinity is potential, in that the lover's desire for the beloved can never end, is never satisfied. She compares this to the way that numbers can be counted up without end, or time can pass indefinitely, but without ever reaching an actually infinite number, or actually infinitely long period of time. Since we don't have an infinity of time to keep discussing this, I'm going to wrap things up there for now, even though we still haven't looked at one of the most important treatises on this topic written in the Italian Renaissance, the Dialogues of Love, written by Giuda Abravanel, also known as Leone Ebreo. His writings were actually a major influence on Tullia Daragona, as she says openly in her own dialogue, referring him explicitly to other authors who had tackled the topic, including Ficino. This despite the fact that, as she also notes, he was Jewish. She has the character of Valki say he is willing to excuse this, though not approve of it. This openness towards Jewish intellectuals is something she shared with another of the protagonists of this episode, Pico della Mirandola. And of course we haven't yet explored his work as a philosopher, with nearly the thoroughness it deserves. So Pico will get his own episode, as well the writings of Leone Ebreo and other Jewish philosophers like Elijah del Medico. But before we get to those topics, it seems like a good time to give Plato a bit more love and have a look back at Ficino, Poliziano, and the whole question of the reception of Plato in the Italian Renaissance. That will be our subject next time as we're joined by an expert on Renaissance Platonism, Denis Robichaud. So as Al Green sang, let's stay together for that next installment of The History of Philosophy without any gaps.