Journal of the History of Philosophy

Love and Natural Desire in Ficino's Platonic Theology ARDIS B. COLLINS IN 1462, COSIMO DE' MEDICI gave to Marsilio Ficino a house at Careggi near Florence and commissioned him to translate the Platonic works from Greek into Latin. By 1469, Ficino had given to the men of the West the first complete translation of Plato's dialogues. Not unnaturally, the translator became known in Europe as an expert on Platonism. Around him a group of scholars gathered to study the Platonic and neo-Platonic writings. Men of learning came to Florence to participate in the activities of this circle. The group at Careggi became known as the Florentine Academy, after the Platonic academies of old? Ficino had a very special view of what he was doing in leading this revival of Platonism. The year after finishing the translation of the Platonic dialogues, he began his major work, the Platonic Theology. With this work, he officially took upon himself the role of a Platonic philosopher-theologian, and in the preface he explains what this role implies. When Ficino chooses Platonism as the primary instance of philosophy, he is taking a stand on the nature of philosophy itself. Platonism recognizes that every intellectual enterprise, even physics and mathematics , is en route to the divine. It seeks to make its way through the levels of knowing to the point at which it touches God himself, and it does this not in order to know a fact, but in order to contemplate and venerate a wondrous reality. Philosophy is a search for God and hence is necessarily related to the worship of its object. This, of course, is Ficino's stand against the Aristotelians at the University of Padua. The professors at Padua defined their profession explicitly as autonomous philosophizing following the model of Aristotle and Averroes. Philosophy was to begin with the Aristotelian texts, taking from them its principles and some of its objects for discussion. In the light of these, other questions were considered and judged. Thus, philosophy had its own realm and its own laws distinct from those of the faith, and no matter how strong and sincere a man's belief in the teachings of the Church, his philosophical endeavors must follow the laws of philosophy.2 For Ficino's biography, see Arnaldo della Torre, Storia delrAccademia Platonica di Firenze (Florence, 1902);Raymond Marcel, Marcile Ficin (Paris, 1958); Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought 11 (New York, 1965). z For studies of Averroism in fifteenth and sixteenth century Italy, see John Herman Randall, The Career of Philososphy from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (New York, [4351 436 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY But according to Plato, says Ficino, the mind is related to God as sight to the light of the sun. We cannot know anything without the divine light as we cannot see anything without the sunlight. All things exist and are revealed in a divine milieu. Hence, no matter where we turn for knowledge we are looking for God. If, however, a man would know God, he must know himself, for the way to God inevitably leads to this place where God is revealed in a special way. Ficino intends to go the old Platonic route, referring material things to the soul's knowledge of them and the soul itself to the revealing presence of God. According to Ficino, however, this movement through self-knowledge is essentially a contemplation of man's immortality. There is something in man which manifests an everlasting destiny, and this manifestation both justifies the claim that philosophy is inseparable from religion and points the way to the object of worship. Ficino's first argument for immortality indicates in a general way the area of human experience which answers these three questions. Man, he says, suffers from a chronic dissastisfaction with his life on this earth. Restless in soul, weak in body, frustrated by the poverty of all he sees, he continually yearns for something more fulfilling than anything he can find in his earthly environment. If he had no hope of a better life, nothing would be more tragic, more unhappy, more truncated than the life of man. His longing, at least, points beyond...