Marsilio Ficino, De amore

‘AVCTORIS FICINI MANVS’: ‘The hand of [Marsilio] Ficino, the author.’  Like the Sallust we have seen, this manuscript (c. 1480-85) now in Oxford belonged to the Venetian patrician Bernardo Bembo, who obtained it while ambassador in Florence and who added these words in the margin.  The text, De amore (On Love, originally 1469), is technically a commentary on Plato’s Symposium, though in effect functions as a stand-alone dialogue.  Ficino – scholar, translator, philosopher, and priest – was the central figure in the Renaissance revival of Plato, of whose works there had been little direct knowledge in the medieval west.  Under the patronage of the Medici, Ficino established an ‘academy’ – less a physical place than a network of scholars and readers with whom he corresponded via philosophical letters.  To Ficino, there was no contradiction between Platonism and Christianity: true philosophy was tantamount to true religion.  Ficino believed in what is called the ‘ancient theology’ – that is, the idea that a succession of philosophers, though neither Hebrews nor Christians themselves, had been given knowledge of divine truths; these included Plato, as well as Hermes Trismegistus (the purported Egyptian priest-king) and Zoroaster.  Along with his commentaries on dialogues, Ficino translated the works of Plato from Greek into Latin, and wrote the Platonic Theology, itself modelled on late antique Neoplatonic authors, in which he attempted to reconcile Plato with Christian truth.  And, the truth was, despite the influence that Plato and contemporary Neoplatonic philosophy had had on the early Church, there was a lot to reconcile: the love that leads to the appreciation of divine beauty in the Symposium is homosexual; the theory of the transmigration of souls is, in Christian terms, heretical.

Bembo’s book reveals something of the charisma of Ficino, as well as the sociability of the academy; another page in the manuscript contains an epigram in praise of Bembo by Cristoforo Landino, the Florentine humanist who wrote an influential vernacular commentary on Dante.  Bembo was a social elite from Northeastern Italy; another one was Pico della Mirandola, who studied with Ficino and befriended Poliziano, and extended his philosophical interests to the Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism).

Credit: Oren Margolis (July 2018)