Abstract

Marsilio Ficino is the best representative of Renaissance Platonism as well as the most prominent member of the Florentine Academy that he organized at the request of Cosimo de’ Medici. After he had given to the Western world the first complete Latin translation of the works of Plato and Plotinus, he wrote numerous commentaries, dialogues, and treatises, but his major work is the Theologia Platonica in eighteen books. In this treatise Ficino portrays the universe as a harmonious system of beings where man occupies a central position and serves as a bond between spiritual and material substances. The main theme of the treatise is the immortality of the soul, as the subtitle De immortalitate animorum indicates. Ficino proves this doctrine by man’s inner tendency to union with God and other arguments of scholastic philosophy. Ficino’s primary concern in this treatise, however, is to reconcile Plato’s philosophy with Christian doctrine.