Life, Style of Philosophy, and the Platonic Academy
Marsilio Ficino was born in Figline Valdarno on October 19, 1433.
His father, Dietifeci Ficino, was a physician who served Cosimo de’ Medici.
Ficino's early education included exposure to medical traditions and basic Latinate education under Comando Comandi and Luca di San Gimignano.
By the 1450s, Ficino was studying Greek and other subjects under Francesco da Castiglione, Antonio degli Agli, Lorenzo Pisano, and Niccolò Tignosi, focusing on scholastic theology.
From the mid-1450s, Ficino began writing philosophical letters to friends. In one noteworthy letter from 1458, he discussed the four main philosophical sects: Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics, and Epicureans.
He gave slightly more attention to Epicureanism, possibly indicating an early "Lucretian" period.
Ficino noted some Peripatetics believed the human soul dies with the body but did not attribute this view to Aristotle.
For Ficino, philosophy and the history of philosophy were closely connected, and imitative exegesis was a way to philosophize.
Ficino considered himself a Platonist and part of a sequence of interpreters adding to a store of wisdom that God allowed to unfold.
These "prisci theologi" or "ancient theologians" discovered and elaborated the truth in Plato's writings, acting as vessels of divine truth.
In the 1460s, Ficino gained an audience in Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici was his most important patron and the guiding genius behind a Platonic Academy.
While not a formal school, Cosimo gave Ficino a property in Careggi in 1463.
A letter from Ficino to Cosimo in September 1462 indicates meetings on Medici property.
In 1462, Ficino also received a house in Florence from Cosimo, renting it out for income.
Ficino's relationship with the Medici family fluctuated after Cosimo's death in 1464, but he remained a central figure in Florentine intellectual life.
Ordained in 1473, he became a canon of Santa Maria del Fiore and was seen as a healer of both souls and bodies.
Ficino used the word “academy” in various ways:
Referring to Plato’s dialogues.
To private schools.
To regular meetings of literary men.
Ficino’s “academy” was more aligned with the first two meanings, teaching Florence’s elite youth and drawing out the better parts of their natures in conversation.
In a letter from 1491 to Martin Prenninger, Ficino emphasized the importance of combining book learning with good moral character, considering it “Platonic”.
Ficino categorized his friends into three groups:
Patrons (including the Medici family).
"Familiar friends, fellow conversationalists" ("consuetudine familiares, ut ita loquar, confabulatores"), including Leon Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
"Auditors" or "students".
Ficino saw his influence as Socratic midwifery of knowledge, aiming to cure ignorance and impiety.
He lectured on Plato’s Philebus and briefly taught at the Florentine studio (university) and the Camaldolese convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
Benedetto Colucci’s Declamationes depicts Ficino in 1474 supervising well-born youths in delivering speeches to fight against the Turks, teaching rhetoric and declamation.
The word “academia” was sometimes associated with “gymnasium” or elementary school.
Ficino also gave public sermons, integrating his research into vernacular religious culture.
Ficino’s “academy” was more a mindset than a specific place. He believed one should start with Aristotle, as he did.
In a letter to Francesco Cattani da Diacceto in July 1493, Ficino stated that Peripatetic learning leads to Platonic wisdom, requiring proper training to realize truth and appreciate philosophy's reach.
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Work
Ficino’s philosophical practice included translations, letters, and philosophical treatises.
His early work in the late 1450s consisted of short, epistolary treatises on basic philosophical matters.
The 1460s marked his emergence as a translator, commentator, and exegete.
In 1464, he read his translations of Platonic dialogues to Cosimo de’ Medici, who was nearing the end of his life.
Ficino authored commentaries on and summaries of Plato’s writings, including Timaeus, Phaedrus, Symposium, and Philebus.
The Platonic Theology
Between 1469 and 1474, Ficino composed his Theologia platonica (Platonic Theology), published in 1482.
The work’s subtitle, On the Immortality of Souls, reflects Ficino’s goal to address the separation of philosophy from religion.
Ficino aimed to portray Plato as close as possible to Christian truth, considering the Platonic corpus a treasury of wisdom leading to the divine.
He saw his Platonic Theology as a Christian corrective to Proclus’s Platonic Theology.
Proclus's anti-Christian philosophizing shared family resemblances with Christianity, such as the efficacy of theurgic rituals analogous to sacraments, and a "monotheism."
Ficino incorporated various elements to appeal to different contemporaries:
Quotations from Latin classics.
Natural philosophical arguments for Aristotelians.
Biblical allusions for those inclined to anti-rationalist religiosity.
A book refuting Averroistic ideas, drawing from Thomas Aquinas and the scholastic tradition.
The Platonic Theology was a work of synthesis, not systematic philosophy, featuring different styles of argumentation, rhetorical flourishes, puns, intertextual allusions, and appeals to faith.
1474 and Beyond
The Platonic Theology marked a turning point, leading to other projects after Ficino was ordained a priest on December 18, 1473.
As he completed the Platonic Theology, he wrote On the Christian Religion, emphasizing the centrality of religion to human experience.
He stated that God’s wisdom had established that divine mysteries, or religion, should be handled by true philosophers.
Ficino produced both vernacular and Latin versions of this work, publishing the vernacular version in 1474 and the Latin in 1476.
The rest of the decade was filled with work joining philosophy and religion, spreading doctrines from his Platonic Theology in letters and discussions.
He continued work on commentaries and wrote De raptu Pauli (On the rapture of St. Paul), exploring themes of ecstatic ascent from II Cor. 12:2–4.
Ficino also worked on his Consiglio contro la pestilenza (Advice against the Plague) in 1478–79, printed in 1481.
The Complete Works of Plato and the Place of Translation
Ficino published the Complete Works of Plato (Platonis Opera Omnia), including his translations of Plato’s writings, thirty-six in all.
This number included all those works contained in the nine tetralogies (some now considered spurious), an arrangement attributed by Diogenes Laertius (Diog. Laert., 3.59) to Thrasyllus.
These translations were complete in draft form by 1468–69. After the completion of the Platonic Theology, Ficino returned to them, writing commentaries along the way, and in October 1484, the work was printed.
The year 1484 was chosen for astrological reasons, during a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn.
Ficino included only a few commentaries, providing short summaries of the Platonic works.
Ficino’s translation aimed to render the texts from Greek into Latin and to translate Plato and the entire “ancient theology” into the cultural idiom of the late medieval and Renaissance world.
The 1480s and 1490s
Ficino deepened his understanding of Platonism and expanded his project of cultural translation.
In the late 1480s, he shifted to Plotinus, including the first full Greek to Latin translation of Plotinus’s works along with commentary.
In 1489, Ficino published Three Books on Life (De vita libri tres), which had a substantial printing history in early modern Europe.
It consisted of three separate books: ‘On Healthy Life’ (De vita sana), completed around 1480, corresponded to Book One in the eventual printed edition.
‘On Long Life’ (De vita longa), completed in 1489, was written in a similar vein and directed to the aged.
‘On Obtaining Life from the Heavens’ (De vita coelitus comparanda), composed sometime between the first two books, grew out of Ficino’s commentary project on Plotinus.
Of the three books of De vita, the third proved most controversial, dealing as it did in places with seemingly heretical themes, including potentially idolatrous “statue animation”.
Ficino tells of certain stars that possess discrete powers (FTBL 3.8, 278–79).
He reports that Thebit “teaches that, in order to capture the power of any of the stars just mentioned, one should take its stone and herb and make a gold or silver ring and should insert the stone with the herb underneath it and wear it touching [your fl esh]” (ibid.). Channelling powers that the divine had implanted in nature for humankind to use could indeed seem legitimate.
The publication of Three Books on Life signaled negative attention from Church authorities, with Ficino seeking help from friends at the court of Pope Innocent VIII.
In 1496, Ficino published an expanded version of some Commentaries on Plato, including the Parmenides, Sophist, Philebus, Timaeus, Phaedrus, and the “nuptial number” in the Republic.
In 1497, Ficino published a volume with Aldus Manutius devoted to other “Platonic” authors, including Iamblichus, Proclus, Porphyry, Synesius, and Psellus.
The 1490s also saw Ficino write commentaries on the Letters of St. Paul and the work of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.
Pseudo-Dionysius, considered the first gentile convert to Christianity, was the product of late fifth or early sixth century CE Platonism and served as one of the principal ways that later Platonism entered medieval Christian life.
Philosophical Themes
The Ancient Theology
Ficino considered himself a Platonist within a long tradition needing interpreters.
This “ancient theology” included divinely inspired figures advancing true philosophy.
One key figure was Hermes “Trismegistus”, believed to be the author of the Hermetic Corpus.
Ficino described the ancient theology, discussing Hermes as first in this chain of sages:
"Among philosophers he fi rst turned from physical and mathematical topics to contemplation of things divine, and he was the fi rst to discuss with great wisdom the majesty of God, the order of demons, and the transformations of souls."
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After 1469, Ficino changed the order and placed Zoroaster first, linking him to the Magi who visited the infant Christ.
Ficino’s ancient theology manifested ties to philosophy in his era through successions and linking philosophy with theology.
The model of "successions" (Latin “successiones”, Greek “diadochai”) was familiar to many thinkers. At its most emblematic in Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers
He saw “philosophy” and “theology” as linked domains, with philosophy as subordinate to theology
Ontology
Ficino’s ontology was primarily indebted to Plotinus.
Plotinus described four general levels to the cosmos, beginning with The One (to hen), which stood at the summit of the ontological hierarchy and was outside of Being itself.
Thinking, it over fl owed into the next ontological level, Mind, which in succession over fl owed into Soul, which over fl owed into a fourth realm that included Nature, Matter, and Sensation
Ficino suggested a fi ve-part ontological scheme:
God
Angelic Mind
Rational Soul
“Quality”
Matter
Ficino’s ontology shared aspects with Plotinus’s, including:
The hierarchy which human beings, through their birth and appearance in the world, have descended
The importance of meditation and philosophical practices in fashioning re-ascent
The presence of “sympathies,” or hidden connections (which the properly observant philosopher could fi nd and reveal) between material and celestial things that helped link the different levels of the hierarchy
The hierarchy’s background of Platonic echoes
Psychology
Ficino shared much with Plotinus regarding psychology.
The immortality of the human soul was Ficino’s main preoccupation.
He entitled the first chapter of his Platonic Theology accordingly: “Were the soul not immortal, no creature would be more miserable than man.