Marsillio Ficino: Copycat or Renaissance Original
...ecome a doctor, but he did not succumb to these wishes. This was largely in part to his remarkably zany mother, as Kristeller calls her. She lived her life accurately predicting calamities for people. These predictions included: the death of her own mother, the suffocation by a nurse of her seventeen-day-old infant and even predicting the very spot in which her husband would fall from his horse. Marsilio explained this by saying, “Some people can leave their bodies and see things because their souls are so pure.” This gives a glimpse into the beginning of his philosophy of the soul, also to be discussed later. Ficino’s biographer contributes Marsilio’s neurasthenic temperament, his mysticism, and his ecstasies to this, his Italian mama. These attributes shaped his philosophy and what he chose to believe. This was the beginning of his thinking and philosophy independent of Plato. The next step in his life that contains evidence is his education. Through his education it can be proved that he was influenced by many men and did not have strict thought foundations on Plato. He was brought up and educated in humanist Florence. “Ficino moved in the same social and cultural circles as the earlier humanists.” His Latin style shows the formal education of the humanistic school and imitation of classical writers. He was very interested in the old Tuscan poets and was a translator of Dante. Because of Ficino’s writings and his being influenced by humanistic thought, it gave the above all emphasis of man as the center of the universe, as opposed to the medieval Walker 4 emphasis on God. While Ficino was still in school, research shows that men such as Aristotle, Pythagoras, Argiropolos, Augustine, Aquinas (especially the latter two) and many others influenced him just as much as he was influenced by Plato. It was not until he moved into the Medici Careggi that he even had manuscripts of Plato’s work to translate and examine. By this time he had already written several of his own works. His early education was actually Aristotelian, and his first taste of Plato came with lectures he attended at the University of Florence. As he began to study Plato and write historical essays, he went through a time when he doubted the simple Christian faith of his youth. He was then forbidden by the Archbishop of Florence, hostile to humanists and antiquity, to attend Argiropolos’ lectures. He returned home to Figline and studied Lucretius, from whom he developed his Epicureanism. His father then sent him to an Aristotelian-dominated medical school at the University of Bolgna. Now one might argue that Marsilio Ficino, being a devoted Platonist and proclaimed Christian, would have been opposed to Aristotle and his teachings. This was, indeed, the mind of most people of his time- to either be a Platonist opposing Aristotle or Aristotelian opposing Plato. This was not the case, however. He quotes Aristotle and the Arabic Aristotelians with great respect, and he never launched a general attack against Aristotelianism or scholasticism, as so many humanists of his day did. Some of Ficino’s earliest works are largely Aristotelian and scholastic in form and content and are written in the typical form of ‘Quaestiones’. Walker 5 His theological works and even a lot of his philosophical ideas show many forms of Augustinian influence. Unhesitantly, in reading Ficino’s Book of Life and his letters, the foundation and heart of his philosophy was directly from Augustinian thought- “Our hearts are restless, O Lord, until they rest in Thee.” This was also a Neo-Platonist idea, that the soul does not want to be in the body and it cries out for escape, but it was Augustine who canonized it. This evidence proves that many of his foundations in education and study were not even Platonic, and seems to support that he was not a direct copy of Plato and his philosophy. The philosophy of Marsilio Ficino- this intends to be the backbone and bulk of supporting evidence. This paragraph is to show, first some of Ficino’s philosophy, and then to do a small comparison of Plato’s philosophy, emphasizing and focusing on their ideas on the soul and love, though not limited to these topics. Ficino had many ideas about the soul that were very similar, if not identical to those of Plato. Further examination and comparison, however, reveals some interesting and noteworthy differences. The ascent of the Soul to God was the core of Ficino’s philosophy. He believed that man’s unrest, which sometimes he called melancholy, drove him upwards from the things of this surrounding world into higher certainty. He also placed a large importance on the contemplative attitude of man. This was the second of his theories of the ascension of the soul. This topic in Ficino’s philosophy is much to complex to explain in a paper of this purpose, but to show his originality it is necessary to analyze it. Walker 6 Paul Oskar Kristeller seems to be relatively unbiased in terms of Ficino’s originality and has argued points on both sides. He has done extensive work on his life, and he believes that Ficino went directly back to Augustine for his doctrine on the will of man, which connects inseparably to his philosophy of the soul. To briefly show the connection: “The will, for Ficino, is not an independent part of the soul….” Ficino believed that man’s soul desired the highest good possible, and whether directly or indirectly it tried to achieve this through every action. He said, “But all truth and all goodness is God himself, who is the primal true and primal good. Hence we desire God Himself.” Plato believed, and was the first to do so, that the soul was a substance and was existent in and of itself, apart from the body. Aristotle defined the soul very differently, as a form of the body and it could only exist apart from the body in the active part of the mind. Ficino, most often, used this Aristotelian view of the soul in his writings and reason. He did, however, later lean toward the Platonic view that the soul can subsist outside of the body, which can be seen in some of his untranslated works. In Ficino’s case, “the incorporeal existence of the soul is not derived primarily from the inner ascent of consciousness, as in Plato and Plontius, but it is evidently related to inner certainty and receives a new justification from it.” Walker 7 In one of Marsilio’s letters, this one written to his friend Michele Mercati, a fellow philosopher, he has a dialogue between God and the soul in which his philosophy seems identical to that of Plato’s. It begins with God asking the soul why it is grieved and unhappy, and God tells the soul that He is with him, and his cure and salvation. The soul’s response to God reveals a great deal of Ficino’s thought. It shows the soul desperately trying to reach its father, but questioning with great anguish how God could be both living inside of him and outside of him in creation at the same time. God then responds by saying that He is both within and without, and that He is in the soul as the soul is in God. He then tells the soul how to reach him-through unity. He says to stop the movement trying to find him and unify diversity. God tells the soul that He is above all things, and that just His shadow is the most beautiful of all physical things. In this we can see Ficino’s “Christianity” appear. Still, it is not concrete enough to...