FICINO, MARSILIO. – Platonic philosopher and restorer of Platonism, born at Figline in Valdarno on 19 October 1433, to Ficino (abbreviation of Diotifece) d’Agnolo di Giusto, a physician; died at Careggi (Florence) on 1 October 1499.
He studied the humanities at Florence and Pisa. The three books De Vita, the Consiglio contro la pestilentia, written in 1479, and some Ricette contro alla peste demonstrate that F. had studied medicine in his youth.
His spiritual orientation between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-four is attested by the Epistola a’ fratelli (1455), the short treatise Di Dio et anima (1457), the De magnificentia (1457), the De furore divino (1457), the De voluptate (1457), and the declamations De laudibus philosophiae and De laudibus medicinae, De quatuor sectis philosophorum. Having only just begun the study
of Greek, he began translating the hymns attributed to Homer, Hesiod’s Theogony, the hymns and Argonautica of Orpheus, and the hymns of Proclus. At Careggi, when he was barely thirty, he undertook the series of his great translations, from the Corpus hermeticum, or Pimander, to the Enneads of Plotinus. After translating several Platonic dialogues, such as the Symposium, the Philebus, and the Phaedrus, he undertook to comment on them. The most notable is the commentary on the Symposium, composed no later than 1469 and translated into the vernacular a few years later by F. himself, and in 1544 by Ercole Barbarasa.
The labor of translating and commenting nourished in him the speculative spirit. If Plato had appeared to Numenius as nothing other than a “Moses speaking Attic,” Augustine, “quo latinorum nullus platonicorum maiestatem tum sapientia tum eloquenti expressit exactius” (Theologia Platonica, XI, 6), pointed to Christ as Plato’s guide. With this conviction F. set about gathering the fruit of his Platonic meditations in a work of great scope, the Theologia Platonica de animorum immortalitate, whose first version was composed between 1469 and 1474. St. Thomas had made Aristotelian philosophy a propaedeutic to theology. But Averroism and Occamism had challenged the Thomistic interpretation of Aristotle. Cardinal Bessarion himself (In calumn. Platonic., III, chap. 22) had demonstrated that, according to the most certain principles of Aristotelian metaphysics, the human intellect either perishes with the body, as Alexander of Aphrodisias maintained, or is one and the same for all human beings, as Averroes thought. Plato, on the other hand, gave us a solid demonstration of individual immortality and of the future life, and pointed out the supreme end of human life in the ἐμοίωσις τῷ θεῷ κατὰ τῷ δυνατὸν (Theact., 176 b). It is noteworthy that precisely while F. was preparing to demonstrate the harmony between Platonic philosophy and Christian Revelation, he matured the resolve, having now reached the age of forty, to seek priestly ordination, which was conferred on him on 18 December 1473. Alongside the Theologia Platonica he composed a commentary on the Gospels, now lost.
In his new state he continued alternating between stays in Florence and at Careggi, where the noblest spirits gathered to discuss Platonic doctrine with him. What was later improperly and not without some confusion called the “Florentine Platonic Academy” was nothing more than this circle of friends gathered around F. and animated by the spirit of the Symposium.
Having developed the religious elements of Platonism, F. wrote the De Christiana religione in 1474, as the logical complement to the Theologia Platonica. The Incarnation of Christ appeared to him as the greatest work of which God, in his omnipotence, was capable (De Chr. rel., chap. 16), since only through the union of created nature with the infinite and eternal nature of God is the distance between God himself and the world bridged and the perfect unity of the finite with the infinite attained. This concept would suggest that F., like Pico della Mirandola somewhat later, adhered to the Scotist thesis that Christ would have become incarnate even if Adam had not sinned.
In 1475 he resumed his commentary on the Phaedrus, and between October 1476 and the first months of 1477 he completed several short treatises, five of which were collected under the title Quinque claves Platonicae sapientiae; two others are the De raptu Paoli and the De luce. Although F., wholly absorbed in his philosophical world, remained detached from the political events in Florence after the death of Cosimo, he could not remain insensitive to the storm unleashed by the Pazzi conspiracy in April 1478, especially after Sixtus IV had excommunicated Lorenzo the Magnificent. The Oratio Christiani gregis and the Vaticinium ad Pontificem (Ep., VI, p. 808 ff.) refer to this event. The war was followed by the plague of 1478–79, during which literary activity came to a halt. Nevertheless, he composed the Causiglio and the Ricepte against the plague.
When calm returned, he was able to devote himself to putting the finishing touches to the Theologia, whose Florentine edition he prepared on 7 November 1482; this was followed, at the beginning of autumn 1484, by the edition of Plato’s dialogues, so that he could announce to Pico della Mirandola, who had gone to visit him: “Plato noster... hodie liminibus nostris est egresus” (Opp., p. 1537). And it was the “heroic mind” of the Mirandolan that urged him to begin as soon as possible the translation of Plotinus’s Enneads, which he had long been contemplating and completed on 16 January 1485. Thus Plato would no longer wander among the Latins without his “faithful Achates” (Opp., p. 870). Around 1478, he translated the De mysteriis of Iamblichus, together with other brief treatises or excerpta by Neoplatonic philosophers. The dedication of the De vita coelitus comparanda to Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, dates from 1489. Because of this latter book, he was accused of magic and heresy before the Roman Curia in May 1490. But the accusation led to nothing, and a few months later Ermolao Barbaro reassured him of Innocent VIII’s favorable sentiments toward him. In the same year, while preparing the edition of Plotinus (translation and commentary), he began translating and commenting on the De mystica theologia and the De divinis nominibus of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in whom he seemed to discover the highest expression of Platonic theology no less than of Christian theology: “Dionysius Areopagita platonicae disciplinae culmen et christianse theologiae column” (Opp., p. 1014).
After the death of the Magnificent, the retreat at Careggi became more agreeable to him than ever; but even there he could not withdraw from what was happening in Florence. And although at first he had seen Savonarola as a prophet sent by God to admonish the Florentines, the political disturbance that followed the first upheavals, and the fanaticism of the “weepers,” even when the friar rebelled against the Pope and the civic authorities, led him to denounce in the audacious Dominican, recently hanged and burned, the Antichrist.
Ficinian Platonism exerted the broadest influence on Renaissance thought, and helped restore harmony between religious aspirations and the passion for resurgent classical beauty, in the light, full of mysteries, of the teaching of Diotima.
FICINO, MARSILIO – Frontispiece of the Epistole filosofiche with the portrait of M. F. in the illuminated manuscript (15th century) – Rome, Casanatense Library.
of his time, Kristeller’s Supplementum is indispensable. As an appendix to the study The scholastic background of M. F. (in Traditio, Studies in ancient and medieval history, thought and religion, 2 [1944], pp. 274–318), Kristeller himself edited the Summa philosophiae and the other short treatises of cod. Palagi 199.