Abstract
This chapter discusses the Florentine thinker Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who is usually credited for his attempt to revive the Platonic tradition and introduce esoteric forms of knowledge, such as natural magic, into intellectual discourse. Yet narratives of Ficino often describe him as hesitant and perhaps unaware of his own audaciousness. By focusing on De vita coelitus comparanda, part of his medico-magical treatise Three Books on Life (1489), this paper recasts Ficino as a consciously innovative thinker who affirmed the ability of the soul to be deified through magical-theurgical practice. By upholding the concept of oracular intelligence, Ficino maintained that astral magic could give prophetic insight. Implicitly, his vision transcended the Scholastic distinction between the “natural” and “supernatural” domains, asserting a continuum between humans and divinity.
“By diligence and the divine oracle”; Marsilio Ficino, De vita coelitus comparanda (henceforth Dvcc), in Three Books on Life, eds. Carol Kaske and John Clark (Binghamton, NY: Society of Renaissance Studies, 1989), Ch. XXI, 356–57, §47. The Latin translations of excerpts from Dvcc in this chapter are from this edition, which is based on the editio princeps of 1489. All other references to and quotations from Ficino’s Latin texts are from Marsilio Ficino, Opera Omnia (Basel: HenricPetri, 1576, repr. Paris: Phénix, 2000). Dvcc was originally written as part of Ficino’s commentaries on Plotinus, but by August 1489 he had revised it and made additions to the text; Carol Kaske and John Clark, “Introduction,” in Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, eds. Carol Kaske and John Clark (Binghamton, NY: Society of Renaissance Studies, 1989), 7.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Wouter Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 41–52; James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance (Leiden and New York: Brill, 1991), 267–317. By “ancient theology,” Ficino meant a succession of pagan sages from Zoroaster (or Hermes Trismegistus) to Plato who transmitted a “perennial wisdom” which Ficino understood himself as reviving. For details of the lineage, see Ficino’s Preface to his translation of the Corpus Hermeticum in Ficino, Opera, 1386, trans. Brian Copenhaver, Hermetica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), xlviii; D.P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (London: Duckworth, 1972).
- 2.
In his treatise De Christiana religione, Ficino laments the profanity of his age and states his mission to “liberate philosophy from impiety” and to “redeem holy religion”: “I therefore exhort and implore all philosophers to reach out and embrace religion firmly, and all priests to devote themselves diligently to the study of legitimate religion.” (“liberemus obsecro quandoque philosophiam, sacrum Dei munus, ab impietate, si possumus—possumus autem, si volumus—religionem sanctam pro vivus ab execrabili insitia redimamus, Hortor igitur omnes atque precor philosophos quidem, ut religionem vel capessant penitus vel attingant, sacerdotes autem, ut legitimate sapientiae studiis diligenter incumbent”); Ficino, Opera, I, quoted in Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 289.
- 3.
Ficino tells us in the Proem to his Three Books on Life (Ficino, Three Books on Life, 102–03, 19–22) that he had two fathers, his natural father (a physician) and his patron Cosimo de’ Medici: “The former commended me to Galen as both a doctor and a Platonist; the latter consecrated me to the divine Plato. And both the one and the other alike dedicated Marsilio to a doctor—Galen, doctor of the body, Plato, doctor of the soul” (“Ille quidem me Galieno tum medico tum Platonico commendavit; hic autem divino consecravit me Platoni. Et hic similiter atque ille Marsilium medico destinavit: Galienus quidem corporum, Plato vero medicus animorum”).
- 4.
Ficino was ordained as a priest in 1473, and later became a Canon of Florence Cathedral.
- 5.
On the Neoplatonic elements in Ficino’s natural magic in Dvcc, see Brian Copenhaver, “Renaissance Magic and Neoplatonic Philosophy: Enneads, 4.3–5 in Ficino’s De vita coelitus comparanda ,” in Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Platone, ed. G. Garfagnini (Florence: Olschki, 1986), 351–69; D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000); Frances Yates, in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), ch. 4 emphasizes Ficino’s magical and Hermetic sources. On the power of the imagination in Renaissance magic and its associations with eros, see Ioan Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), ch. 2.
- 6.
Further on this dissociation and its implications in the Renaissance period, see Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), ch. 9.
- 7.
Dvcc constitutes Book III of Ficino’s Three Books on Life. Vernon Wells has drawn attention to the ambiguity of the title in “Tempering Heaven: A Commentary on the First Chapter of Marsilio Ficino’s De Vita Coelitus Comparanda” (MA thesis, University of Kent, 2010), 3–5. “Comparare” can be translated as “prepare, provide, compose, collect, get together/hold of; raise (force), unite, place together, match, couple, pair, set/pit against, treat as equal, compare, set up/establish/institute, arrange, dispose, settle, buy, acquire, secure”; “Comparanda,” http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wordz.pl?keyword=comparanda, accessed 31 July 2015. I am grateful to Georgiana Hedesan for suggesting the appropriate translation of “aligning.” The first two books of the treatise, De vita sana and De vita longa, are devoted to medical and regimen advice for over-intellectual scholars.
- 8.
My approach will be more hermeneutic than historiographical, in that I am particularly interested in how Ficino understood and worked with the powers of imagination and what the Neoplatonic metaphor may reveal about dimensions of human consciousness. I am fully aware of the arguments raised by Wouter Hanegraaff concerning the contrasting approaches of “methodological agnosticism” and “religionism” within historical studies of Western Esotericism; Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism and the Academy, 237–38, but fully support the view of Jeffrey J. Kripal, who calls for a “gnostic scholar” who is both “passionate and critical, personal and objective, religious and academic” and committed to a methodological approach which integrates criticality and empathy; Jeffrey J. Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2001), 5. Further on this, see Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Serpent’s Gift (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2007), 4–14; Angela Voss, “A Methodology of the Imagination,” Eye of the Heart Journal 3 (2009): 37–52.
- 9.
See Brian Copenhaver, “Scholastic Philosophy and Renaissance Magic in the De vita of Marsilio Ficino,” Renaissance Quarterly 37, no. 4 (1984): 523–54; Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 36–44; the main critic here is Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 2.23.36, 29.45.
Copenhaver points out that Ficino would have found more sympathy toward his talismanic magic in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra Gentiles and De occultis operibus naturae, but the crux of the problem lay in the question of the ontological status of any “independent” spiritual agency involved. On Ficino’s concern about daemonic invocation, see Michael J. B. Allen, “Summoning Plotinus: Ficino, Smoke and the Strangled Chickens,” in Michael J. B. Allen, Plato’s Third Eye: Studies in Marsilio Ficino’s Metaphysics and its Sources (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995), 63–88.
- 10.
See, for example, Copenhaver, “Scholastic Philosophy;” “Renaissance Magic and Neoplatonic Philosophy,” 351–69; Kaske and Clark, “Introduction”; Thomas Moore, The Planets Within (repr. Hernden, VA: Steinerbooks, 1992); Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1989), ch. 4; Marsilio Ficino, Writings on Astrology, ed. Angela Voss (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2006); Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 3–53; Yates, Giordano Bruno, 64–83.
- 11.
Kaske and Clark translate toni as “tones” (Ficino, Dvcc, XXI, 42), but tonus (from the Greek tonos meaning “note, interval, region of the voice or pitch”) may also refer to a Church mode or plainsong recitation formula, that is a series of tones arranged as a species of octave scale or as a melodic fragment. See Cleonides, “Harmonic Introduction,” in Source Readings in Music History, trans. Oliver Strunk (New York: Norton, 1965), I, 34–46; Andrew Barker, “Harmonic and Acoustic Theory,” in Greek Musical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), II, 17–19. On Ficino’s probable use of the modes in his planetary music, see Angela Voss, “The Music of the Spheres: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance Harmonia,” Culture and Cosmos 2, no. 2 (1998): 16–38, and Angela Voss, “Orpheus Redivivus: The Musical Magic of Marsilio Ficino,” in Marsilio Ficino, his Philosophy, his Theology, his Legacy, eds. Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees (Leiden and New York: Brill, 2002), 227–42.
- 12.
Ficino, Dvcc, XXI, 44–47: “Difficillimum quidem est iudicatu, quales potissimum toni qualibus convenient stellis, quales item tonotum compositiones qualibus praecipue sideribus aspectibusque consentient. Sed partim diligentia nostra, partim divina quadam sorte id assequi possumus…” Kaske and Clark translate sors as “destiny,” but the word has a range of other meanings, including “lot, fate and oracular response” (“Sors,” http://www.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/wordz.pl?keyword=sors, accessed 31 July 2015).
- 13.
See Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods and On Divination, translated by C.D. Yonge (New York: Prometheus Books, 1997), I.34, also M. Loewe and C. Blacker, eds., Divination and Oracles (Berkeley, CA: Shambhala, 1981), 116–22, on different ways of divining by lot. Generally speaking, “chance” is envisioned as the working of some impartial power which makes dice fall in a specific way, or an odd or even number of pebbles jumping out of a buffalo horn, or a specific individual drawing a certain lot. These may be ways of revealing divine will, or simply of ensuring fairness.
- 14.
See Cicero, On Divination, II.56.
- 15.
Ficino, Dvcc, XXI, 51: “totam medicinam exordium a vaticiniis habuisse;” also Marsilio Ficino, The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975), I, 127. See Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, trans. Emma C. Clarke, John M. Dillon and Jackson P. Herschbell (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Studies, 2003), III.3, and the Epitome in Ficino, Opera, 1883; also Philostratus, Vita Apollonii, in Opera auctiora, ed. C.L. Kayser (Leipzig: Teubner, 1870–71), I, 3.44.
- 16.
In Dvcc, I, 23–25, Ficino insists that his natural magic only engages celestial or daemonic rather than supercelestial powers: “And so let no one think that any divinities wholly separate from matter are being attracted by any given mundane materials, but that daemons rather are being attracted and gifts from the ensouled world and from the living stars” (“Nemo itaque putet certis mundi materiis trahi nmina quaedam a materiis penitus segregate, sed daemones potius animatiue munid munera stellarumque viventium”), although he is clearly attracted by Iamblichus’ and Proclus’ appeal to forces “which are not only celestial, but even daemonic and divine” (Ficino, Dvcc, XIII, 30–32: “vires effectusque non solum coelestes, sed etiam daemonicos et divinos”). He attempts to subdue any scholastic concern about daemones as deceitful spiritual intelligences by stating that “some regard the spirits of the stars as wonderful celestial forces, while others regard them as daemons attendant upon this or that star” (Ficino, Dvcc, XX, 23–24: “Spiritus autem stellarum intelligent alii quidem mirabiles coelestium vires, alii vero daemonas etiam stellae huius illiusve pedissequos”).
- 17.
Ficino, “On Divine Frenzy,” in Ficino, Letters, I, 42–48 (Ficino, Opera, 612–15). On poetic frenzy, see Plato, Ion, 533e–536d; Phaedrus, 245a, in Complete Works, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961). We know that Ficino himself was possessed by such frenzy on occasion, as we have an eye witness account from Bishop Campano in 1471: “And there is frenzy; when he sings, as a lover to the singing of his beloved, he plucks his lyre in harmony with the melody and rhythm of the song. Then his eyes burn, he leaps to his feet and he discovers music which he never learnt by rote” (“Et furor est, cum cantata amans cantante puella /Ad flexum, ad nutum percutit illi lyram. /Tunc ardent oculi, tunc planta exsurgit utraque,/ Et quos non didicit, comperit ille modos.), quoted in Arnaldo Della Torre, Storia dell’Accademia Platonica (Florence: G. Carnesecchi e figli, 1902), 791. Other references to Ficino’s own performance include Letters, I, 144 (Ficino, Opera, 651), 179 (Ficino, Opera, 665), 198 (Ficino, Opera, 673) Letters, II, (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1978), 14 (Ficino, Opera, 725), 33 (Ficino, Opera, 734–35); Letters, IV (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1988), 16–17 (Ficino, Opera, 788).
- 18.
Ficino, “On Divine Frenzy,” 47. On Ficino’s understanding of prophecy, see Letters, VII (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2003), 26–28, “Prophets and their Interpreters,” Opera, 873–74. Ficino finds consistency in both Platonic and Christian views that foreknowledge of the future is in the mind of God alone, and that the prophet as “God’s tongue” may not know the import of what they utter. However, he adds an intriguing comment (Letters, VII, 27, Opera, 873) that men can perceive the future through divination, which is “a property of the senses and imagination rather than of the mind and reason” (“Quod si praesagi dicuntur, id est, praesentientes, id ipsum praesagium non ad mentem et raionem, sed ad sensum imaginionatemque pertinere videtur”).
- 19.
“Natural” in a theological sense would be understood to refer to the created order below the primum mobile of Aristotelian cosmology, and to the powers of the created world and the human being as opposed to the supernatural powers of God and the angels, who were located beyond any human intelligence and whose essence constituted a mystery. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/ (accessed 13 August 2015), 2.1.94, on “natural law.” We must also note that divination through inspiration or dreams was regarded as “natural” in that it did not rely on “artificial” apparatus or deliberate induction, such as in divination through entrails, birds, or lots. This term in no way denied the “supernatural” provenance of the revelation (see Plato, Phaedrus, §244).
- 20.
Ficino, Dvcc, I, 13–20. Plotinus describes the logoi spermatikoi (“seminal reasons”) as the productive powers or essences of the world soul , produced by divine intelligence (nous); see Enneads, trans. Stephen McKenna (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1991), V.9.6–7. For an overview of medieval and Renaissance cosmology, see Edward Grant, Planets, Stars and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
- 21.
See, for example, Leo Elders, The Philosophical Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: Brill, 1990). This topic is far too complex to address here, but I would just make the point that one essential difference between Neoplatonic and Scholastic texts lies in their modes of discourse: the former valuing the power of poetic metaphor and symbol to evoke direct noetic understanding, the latter relying on rational argument and logical demonstration to appeal to the rational mind. On Ficino’s critique of Scholasticism and the errors of his contemporary Aristotelians, see Hankins, Plato, 272–76, 340.
- 22.
For Plotinus’ understanding of magic as natural sympathy, see Enneads, IV.4.
- 23.
Ficino, Dvcc, I, 56–57: “A quibus formis ordinatissimis dependent inferiorum formae.”
- 24.
Ficino, Dvcc, I, 57–62.
- 25.
As in Plato, Timaeus, §41d-e, in Plato, Complete Works, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961).
- 26.
On the higher and lower parts of the soul (the “divisible” and “indivisible”) and the necessity of bringing them into single focus, see Plotinus, Enneads, IV.3.19, 31. On the nature of the Plotinian soul, see Margaret Miles, Plotinus on Body and Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 57–82. On Plotinus’ understanding of the role of imagination as facilitating the mirroring of divine Ideas, see Enneads, IV.3–5; John Dillon, “Plotinus and the Transcendental Imagination,” in The Religious Imagination, ed. John Mackey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), 55–64. Gerard Watson in the same volume gives a clear overview of the development of phantasia from its negative connotations in Plato to its elevation as an intermediary between sense-perception and intellect by the early centuries CE; Gerard Watson, “Imagination and Religion in Classical Thought,” in The Religious Imagination, ed. John Mackey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1986), 29–54.
- 27.
Plotinus comments “all teems with symbol, the wise man is he who in any one thing can see another” (Enneads, II.3.7); in “Are the Stars Causes?” (Enneads, II.3), his message is that the stars and planets signify, they do not cause, events in the material world or human characteristics.
- 28.
Aquinas, Summa theologica, 172.1, see also De veritate 12.1–2; Summa theologica, 2.2.173.
- 29.
See fn. 19. On Ficino’s lack of distinction see James Hankins, “Ficino, Avicenna and the Occult Properties of the Rational Soul,” in La Magia nell’Europa Moderna: tra antica sapienza e filosofia naturale, eds. F. Meloi and E. Scapparone (Florence: Olschki, 2003), I, 35–52. Christian orthodoxy did not acknowledge a “higher” imaginative faculty of the soul in the Neoplatonic/Avicennan sense of partaking of the divine mind, for it understood the imagination as having a corporeal basis, not existing outside time. See Aquinas, Summa theologica, 1.84, 7, 3 and Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (London and New York: Psychology Press, 1994), 41–58. The question of the theological compatibility of Scholastic doctrine, heavily dependent on Aristotle, with Neoplatonic theories regarding the nature of the soul and its faculties of perception was the central theme of Ficino’s major original work, the Theologia Platonica of 1469–74, in which he set out to achieve a synthesis of philosophy and theology and demonstrate the immortality of the soul; Marsilio Ficino, Theologia Platonica, eds. Michael J. B. Allen and James Hankins, 6 vols, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–2006).
- 30.
Ficino’s understanding of the nature of the</IndexTerm> daemones is derived from Iamblichus and Proclus and explained in Letters, X (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2015), 56–57 (an excerpt from Ficino’s summary of Proclus’ commentary on Plato’s Alcibiades, Ficino, Opera, 1908–28). The cosmic deities rule over ranks of daemones who share in their power, and human souls in turn participate in the daemones. The whole communion is presided over by the Creator God in as an uninterrupted flow of “soul.” When speaking “Platonically” in this way, Ficino does not refer to contrasting Christian views.
- 31.
Hence Ficino’s attempt to justify his practice as harnessing “life” rather than the world soul (see Ficino, “Apology” in Three Books on Life, 395–401, 102–08). On the theological argument, see Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1984), 344f, 324f; on Ficino’s position regarding demonic magic, see Copenhaver, “Scholastic Philosophy;” Angela Voss, “God or the Daemon? Platonic Astrology in a Christian Cosmos,” in Temenos Academy Review 14 (London: The Temenos Academy, 2011), 96–116; Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, 45–53.
- 32.
In Ficino, Opera, 1873–1907. Many of Ficino’s letters in Liber IX reveal his preoccupation with Iamblichus at this time; in his “Preface to Iamblichus,” Letters, VIII (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2009), 14–15 (Ficino, Opera, 897), Ficino writes to Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici that Iamblichus is both a “high priest” and “divine,” and has much to teach the Cardinal about “religion and matters divine.” In the light of this, one cannot overestimate the theurgic implications of Ficino’s natural magic .
- 33.
See Gregory Shaw, “Living Light; An Exploration of Divine Embodiment,” in Seeing with Different Eyes; Essays in Astrology and Divination, eds. Angela Voss and Patrick Curry (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 57–81.
- 34.
Ficino, Letters, X, 56, Opera, 1912 (“Proinde mortalia per hos daemones divinos nanciscuntur influxus”).
- 35.
On the Platonic history of phantasia and its relationship with the pneuma or astral body, see Plotinus, Enneads, IV.3.31; Porphyry, Sententiae: Auxiliaries to the Perception of Intelligible Nature, trans. by Thomas Taylor, http://tertullian.org/fathers/porphyry_sententiae_02_trans.htm, accessed 1 July 2020, §29, To Gaurus on How Embryos are Ensouled and On What is in Our Power, trans. James Wilberding (London: Bristol Classical Papers, 2011), VI.1; Synesius, De insomniis—Donald A. Russell and Heinz-Günther Nesselrath, eds. On Prophecy, Dreams and Human Imagination: Synesius, De insomniis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), §4–6; Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, III.2, 14, 24; also Anne Sheppard, “Phantasia and Inspiration in Neoplatonism,” in Studies in Plato and the Platonic Tradition: Essays Presented to John Whittacker, ed. J. Joyal (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 201–10; Gerard Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway: Galway University Press, 1988), chs. 5 and 6. It is Iamblichus who develops the idea of symbolic images pointing to a divine source (On the Mysteries, I.7–8, 3.8). See also Leonard George, “Iamblichus on the Esoteric Perception of Nature,” in Esotericism, Religion and Nature, eds. Arthur Versluis et al (West Lancing, MI: North American Academic Press, 2010), 73–88; Gregory Shaw, Theurgy and the Soul (Philadelphia, PA: Penn State Press, 1995); “Containing Ecstasy; the Strategies of Iamblichean Theurgy,” Dionysus 21 (2003): 53–88; “The Role of Aesthesis in Theurgy” (unpublished paper, personal communication, 2010).
- 36.
See Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, 96, 15–18: “the perfect efficacy of ineffable works, which are divinely performed in a way surpassing all intelligence, and the power of inexplicable symbols, which are known only to the Gods, impart theurgic union.” The Platonic source for the religious function of astronomy and music in regulating the soul and aligning it with the divine order is Timaeus 47b–d. See also Epinomis (attr. Philip of Opus). On music as a living spirit, see Ficino, Dvcc, XXI, 81–85.
- 37.
Ficino, Dvcc, XXI, 105–07: “Cantus autem hac virtute, opportunitate, intentione, conceptus factusque Solaris et agens tum in te, tum in proximum potestate Solari.”
- 38.
On the chains being used in magical operations, see Proclus, Elements of Theology, trans. E. R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933); De sacrificio et magia, trans. S. Ronan as On the Sacred Art, https://web.archive.org/web/20130307124941/http://www.esotericism.co.uk/proclus-sacred.htm (accessed 20 July 2015); David Pingree, ed, Picatrix (London: The Warburg Institute, 1986). See also A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1964); Peter Struck, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Writers at the Limits of their Texts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 227–34.
- 39.
The cosmic spirit has its origins in Stoic philosophy, which postulates a world spirit (spiritus mundi) flowing through the universe, as a channel between the cosmos and material world. In Dvcc, III, 30–32 Ficino calls it the quinta essentia, or fifth element, that is, aether, “a very tenuous body: as if now it were soul and not body, and now body and not soul” (Ipse vero est corpus tenuissimum, quasi non corpus et quasi iam anima, item quasi non anima et quasi iam corpus).
- 40.
Ficino, Dvcc, XXVI, 9.
- 41.
Ficino, Dvcc, XII, 109–13: “…sic et materialis actio, motus, eventus talis aut talis non alias efficaciam sortitur effectumque perfectum quam quando coelestium harmonia ad idem undique consonat.”
- 42.
See Plotinus, Enneads, III.1.6: the stars are like letters “on which the augur, acquainted with that alphabet, may look and read the future from their pattern—arriving at the thing signified by such analogies as that a soaring bird tells of some lofty event.”
- 43.
See, for example, Ficino’s letter “Good Fortune is in Fate” in Letters, IV (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1988), 61–63, where Ficino exhorts a young member of the Medici family to meditate on the symbolic meanings of “the planets within,” stating that they are not “outside, in some other place” (“Non enim sunt haec alicubi nobis extra quaerenda, nempe totum in nobis est coelum, quibus igneus vigor inest et coelestis origo”) (Ficino, Opera, 305).
- 44.
For example, see Hankins, Plato, 301–04. Ficino chose the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Scorpio in 1484 as the date to publish his Plato translations, the symbolism of the “great conjunction” relating to the union of philosophy and religion, or wisdom and power. In this way, he was aligning his action with cosmic principles in order to gain divine authority for the renewal of Christianity.
- 45.
Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, VIII.4.
- 46.
The election of suitable astrological times for ritual action is a common theme in Dvcc. For example, Ficino quotes Albertus Magnus (XII, 121–24): “Freedom of will is not repressed by the election of an excellent hour; rather, to scorn to elect an hour for the beginnings of great enterprises is not freedom but reckless choice” (“Non enim libertas arbitrii ex electione horae laudabilis coercetur, sed potius in magnarum rerum inceptionibus electionem horae contemnere est arbitrii praecipitatio, non libertas”).
- 47.
Arabic treatises on astrology, magic, and medicine, influenced by Neoplatonic and Hermetic ideas and translated into Latin in the medieval period, provided another source for Ficino’s natural magic. See Liana Saif, The Arabic Influences on Early Modern Occult Philosophy (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
- 48.
Ficino, Dvcc, XX, 36–39: “Tradunt Arabes spiritum nostrum quando rite fabricamus imagines, si per imaginationibus mentibusque coelestium, vim quoque vehementissimam ex affectu illorum…” On the theory of rays, see Al-Kindi (c.800–870 CE), De radiis, eds. M.-T. D’Alverny and F. Hudry, in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littérature du moyen âge 41 (1974): 139–260. Ficino refers further to the ray theory in Dvcc, XVI.
- 49.
See Plato, Symposium, 210a–12a, in Complete Works, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961); Phaedrus, 246a–56e.
- 50.
Proclus, In Cratylem, 30.19–32.3, quoted in Struck, Birth of the Symbol, 237. See Michael J.B. Allen, “Marsilio Ficino,” in Interpreting Proclus from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 353–79. Allen states that it is not known if Ficino was familiar with Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Cratylus (360).
- 51.
Ficino, Opera, 1928–29.
- 52.
“Longing to go beyond [the powers inherent in physical objects], [the theurgists] came to know the Daemonic Powers which are essentially linked to the activities of nature and physical bodies, and by this means they drew down (epêgagonto) these Powers in order to communicate (sunousian) with them. From the Daemonic Powers they moved straight up towards the actual Doings of the Gods (autas…tas tôn theôn…poiêseis), instructed in some matters by the Gods themselves, but in others moved by their own efforts to an accurate conception of the appropriate symbols. And so, leaving nature and physical operations below, they came to directly experience (echrêsanto) the Primordial (prôtourgois) and Divine Powers” (Proclus, De sacrificio).
- 53.
Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, VI.10, trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1985), 127, also Couliano, Eros and Magic.
- 54.
Marsilio Ficino, “Disputatio contra iudicium astrologorum,” in Supplementum Ficinianum, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller (Florence: Olskchi, 1937), II, 11–76. Although this treatise was unpublished, Ficino included large extracts in both the Theologia Platonica and his commentaries on Plotinus, as well as in a letter to the Duke of Urbino, Divina lex fieri a caelo non potest, sed forte significari; Ficino, Letters, VI (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1999), 23–31. It should be noted that Kaske and Clark mistranslate the title as “Disputation against Judicial Astrology” (Ficino, Three Books on Life, 31). Ficino was not however condemning judicial astrology as such, rather the deterministic stance of his contemporary practitioners.
- 55.
Ficino, “Disputatio,” 50: “Denique per quamcumque artem future querantur, plus admodum ex quadam anime singulari dote quam iudiciis presagitur. Hinc sepe indoctiores in arte verius iudicant quam doctiores. Quapropter Ptolemeus ait: Astrorum scientia et ex te est et ex illis, quasi dicat hoc ipsum quod sis in iudicando verdicus non tam illorum inspection quam presagio quodam tibi naturali habes. Sive potius exponatur quod hanc scientiam consequaris tum ex diligentia tua, tum naturali illorum possideas beneficio.” This is reiterated in “In Plotinem,” Opera, 1626, where Ficino says astrologers can approach the truth of things through a certain “strength of soul” (vim animae).
- 56.
See Ficino, “On Divine Frenzy,” 47 (Ficino, Opera, 615): “Plato considers the last kind of frenzy, in which he includes prophecy, to be nothing other than foreknowledge inspired by the divine spirit, which we properly call divination and prophecy” (“Postremam vero furoris naturam, in qua vaiticinium point, nihil aliud esse putat, nisi divino afflatu inspiratam praesensionem, eamque proprio vocabulo, divinationem ac vaticinium nominavimus”).
- 57.
Further on Ficino’s astrology, see Melissa Bullard, “The Inward Zodiac, A Development in Ficino’s Thought on Astrology,” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (1990): 687–708; Angela Voss, “The Astrology of Marsilio Ficino, Divination or Science?” Culture and Cosmos 4, no. 2 (2000): 29–45.
- 58.
Ficino, Opera, 1905: “Ergo vero censeo primum quidem haberi posse per divinum vaticiniu veritatem certissimam circa stellas.” For Iamblichus the goal of “inspired” divination was the union of the theurgist with the gods, achieved through a transcendence of the subject-object divide characteristic of syllogistic knowing. See Crystal Addey, “Oracles of the Gods: The Role of Divination and Theurgy in the Philosophy of Porphyry and Iamblichus” (PhD diss, University of Bristol, 2009), 263–67.
- 59.
Ficino, Letters, VI, 23–31, Opera, 850–53. See fn. 56; also Ficino, Theologia Platonica, XIII.II, 8, where Ficino says the predictions of “augurers, diviners, soothsayers, astrologers and mages … testify to their minds’ divinity” (“augures, haruspices, auspices, mathematicos, magos … Mentes vero divinas illa prae ceteris praesagia indicant”). At TP II.10 Ficino describes the prediction of future events as possible because prophetic power “gathers the fleeting intervals of time into an eternal moment, is itself eternal” (“praesaga virtus … Est autem substantia haec aeterna quae in aeternum momentum …”).
- 60.
Ficino, Letters, VI, 26, Opera, 851: “Plotinus … docet, effectus infra Lunam pene omnes a ceolo significari, non tamen omnes a ceolesti corpora dependoere, sola eim corporea posse vel a corpora coelisti, vel potius per coeleste corpus, quasi super instrumentum, ab ipsis coeli motoribus fueri. Si qua vero apud nos omnino corporeum genus excedunt, atque ad mentem divinitatemque accedunt, solum a mente divina mentibusque eam sequentibus proficisci.” See also Plotinus, Enneads, III.2.
- 61.
Earlier in the letter to Federico (Letters, VI, 25) Ficino puts forward the view of Plotinus and Avicenna that events on earth are the result of a mixture of corporeal and incorporeal causes, adding: “But since no one is ever able to understand all these things, it is not surprising that no one can hold a definite view about anything of this kind” (“Cum autem cuncta haec nullus unquam comprehendere valeat, nimirum neminem certam ulla de re huiusmodi ferre posse sententiam”) (Opera, 850). That Ficino readily “prophesied” using astrology is demonstrated in his letter to Pope Sixtus IV (Letters, V, 16–19) where he predicts various misfortunes over the coming two years.
- 62.
See Ficino, “Letter on Divine Frenzy,” 47 where he calls prediction a false copy of prophecy. I also refer the reader to the work of Geoffrey Cornelius, The Moment of Astrology (Bournemouth: Wessex Astrologer, 2003) and “Field of Omens: A Study of Inductive Divination” (PhD diss, University of Kent, 2010) for thorough discussions on the oracular and divinatory dimension of astrology, and of the hermeneutics of divinatory knowing in general.
- 63.
Plotinus, Enneads, I.6.8.
- 64.
Geoffrey Cornelius has drawn attention to Giovanni Pontano’s commentary on (Pseudo-)Ptolemy’s Centriloquium: Pontano, Commentariorum in centum Ptolomei sententias libri duo (Basel: Cratandrus, 1531), in which he discusses the phrase a te et a scientia—that knowledge of the stars derives both “from you and from the discipline/art [of astrology].” Pontano interprets the a te as the intuitive inspiration of the astrologer, yet which is also “stimulated by the stars.” Whether or not Pontano derives this idea from Ficino, both men link prophetic vision with a cosmic intelligence that cannot be defined as either “inner” or “outer.” See Cornelius, Moment of Astrology, 321–25.
- 65.
Ficino, “Commentary on Plotinus,” Opera, 515: “remember our daemon and genius is not only, as is thought, our intellect, but a numinous being (“Ac memento nostrum daemonem geniumque non solum, ut quidam putant, nostrum intellectum esse sed numen.” On the Platonic and Neoplatonic sources for this idea, see Allen, “Summoning Plotinus,” 64, fn.2. Also, Plotinus, Enneads, III.4.3, 3–8 and III.4.5, 19–24.
- 66.
Hankins, “Ficino, Avicenna,” 35–52.
- 67.
See Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Avicenna’s “De Anima” in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul 1160–1300 (London: Warburg Institute, 2001), 154–74.
- 68.
Hasse, Avicenna, 155.
- 69.
Hasse, Avicenna, 157.
- 70.
Hasse, Avicenna, 158.
- 71.
Hasse, Avicenna, 160. Of relevance here is Henry Corbin’s essay Mundus imaginalis (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1976), which delineates the ontological reality of the imaginal realm in the metaphysics of the Islamic illuminist philosophers. On the theme of imaginal perception and its relationship with sense-perception, see also William Chittick, Imaginal Worlds: Ibn ‘Arabi and the Problem of Religious Diversity (New York: SUNY Press, 1994), chs. 5 and 6.
- 72.
See the Proemium to the Disputatio contra iudicium astrologorum in Letters, III (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1981), 75–77. For an example of Ficino’s “causal” language, see Letters, II, 26–27 where he complains about Saturn’s melancholic influence in his own horoscope.
- 73.
Hasse, Avicenna, 164, quoting Avicenna, De anima, V.6.
- 74.
Ficino, De vita sana, VI.19–28, in Ficino, Three Books on Life, 121–23: “animus instrumento sive incitamento eiusmodi quod centro mundi quodammodo congruity, atque (ut ita dixerim) in suum centrum animum colligit, simper rerum omnium et centra petit, et penetralia penetrat. Congruit insuper cum Mercurio atque Saturno, quorum alter, altissimus omnium planetarum, investigantem evehit ad altissima. Hinc philosophi singulars eadunt, praesertin cum animus sic ab externis motibus atque corpora proprio sevocaatus, et quam proximus divinis et divinorum instrumentum efficiatur. Unde divinis influxibus oraculisque ex alto repletus, nova quaedam inusitataque semper excogitat et futura praedicit.”
- 75.
On resemblance and similitude in Renaissance magic in general and Ficino’s songs in particular, see Tomlinson, Music, 101–44.
- 76.
For an astrological interpretation of Saturn, see Julius Firmicus Maternus, Ancient Astrology, Theory and Practice: Matheseos Libri VIII, trans. Jean Rhys Bram (Abingdon, MD: Astrology Classics, 2005), 89, 138–39, 184–85; for examples of Ficino’s own difficulties with Saturn, see Letters, III, 50–51; V, 59–60. Yet “[o]ur Plato placed the higher part of the soul under the authority of Saturn in the realm of mind and divine providence, and the lower part under Jupiter, in the realm of life and fate” (“Partem quidem illam aimae superiorem Plato noster in regno Saturni, id est, in mentis et providentiae, inferiorem autem in regno Iovis, id est, vitae fatique locavit” [Opera, 658, Letters, I, 161]), referring to Plato, Timaeus 34b–36e. Key passages on Saturn in Dvcc include II, 54–66, XXII, 59–90. The most important source for Renaissance interpretations of Saturn is Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (Michigan, MI: University of Michigan, 1964).
- 77.
Plotinus, Enneads, I.6.8.
- 78.
See Ficino, “The Two Lights of the Soul,” in Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, IV.4, 75–76, Opera, 1332.
- 79.
George, “Iamblichus,” 81. See also Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, III.2.
- 80.
Ficino, Dvcc, XXII, 81–90: “Noxium vero influxum Saturni effugiunt subeuntque propitium, non solum, qui ad Ioven configuiunt, se etiam qui ad divinam contemplationem ab ipso Saturno significatam tota mente se conferunt. Hoc enim pacto malignitatem fati devitari posse Chaldaei et Aegyptii atque Platonici putant. Cum enim coelestia nolint esse corpora vana, sed divinitus animata atque insuper mentibus recta divinis, nimirum illinc ad homines non solum quam plurima ad corpus et spiritum pertinentia, sed multa etiam bona quodammodo in animam redundantia proficisci volunt, non a corporibus in animam sed ab animis. Magis autem haec pluraque eiusmodi a mentibus superioribus coelo profluere.”
- 81.
Ficino, Dvcc, I, 23–24, “Nemo itaque putet certia mundi materiis trahi numina quaedam a materiis penitus segregata, sed daemones potius animatique mundi munera stellarumque viventium.”
- 82.
Ficino, Dvcc, XXVI, 126–27: “Quas quidem rationes appellat etiam deos, quoniam ab ideis supremae mentis unquam destituuntur.”
- 83.
Ficino, Dvcc, XXVI, 132–34: “Fieri vero posse quandoque, ut rationibus ad formas sic adhibitis sublimiora quoque dona descendant ….”
- 84.
On Ficino’s theory of immortality, see Paul O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), ch. 15. Michael Allen has pointed to “the extraordinary tension” generated by the attempt of the Christian Platonists to “accommodate Neoplatonic metaphysics to the Hebraeo-Christian notion of an omnipotent, ineffable God” and states that although fruitful, “it signalled ultimately the underlying incomparability of the two systems” (Michael J.B. Allen, “Marsilio Ficino on Plato, the Neoplatonists and the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity,” in Michael J.B. Allen, Plato’s Third Eye, 561).
- 85.
Ficino, Theologia Platonica, XIII.II, 18: “Mens autem illa, quae est animae caput et auriga, suapte natura angelos imitate, non successione sed momento quod cupit assequitur ….”
- 86.
Ficino, Theologia Platonica, XIII.II, 22: “Ea vero vacante, quid prohibit angelicam aliquam rationalibus viribus cogniationem irrepere, licet unde surrepat non videamus?”
- 87.
Ficino, Theologia Platonica, III.IV, 3.
- 88.
“Angel” in Ficinian metaphysics is equivalent to the Neoplatonic nous; on the relationship between the angel and the soul, and the problematic of fitting the Christian angel into the Plotinian hypostases, see Michael J.B. Allen, “The Absent Angel in Ficino’s Philosophy” in Michael J.B. Allen, Plato’s Third Eye, 219–40. Ficino’s idea of the Angel was derived from scriptural sources, Pseudo-Dionysius’ On the Celestial Hierarchy, and medieval Scholasticism. Allen discusses Aquinas’ absolute distinction between human and angelic intelligence, but asserts that “the whole thrust of [Ficino’s] strictly systematic thought is directed against the fundamental postulate of Christianity, that God is ineffably transcendent” (224). Allen points to Ficino’s essentially Neoplatonic definition of the angelic as “the sphere of pure intelligences” and discusses how his revisioning of Christian metaphysics essentially weakened the position of the Angel and “seriously impaired” its ontological validity (227–28). On Ficino’s apparent confusion regarding the identity of angels and planetary intelligences, see Allen, “The Absent Angel,” 231–32. On the angel as mens, the highest part of the soul, see Allen, “The Absent Angel,” 235–35.
- 89.
Ficino, Theologia Platonica, XIII, IV, 12 “Qui hinc inspirationi totum se committit, cessat esse anima fitque, deo regenerante, dei filius, angelus.”
- 90.
Ficino, Theologia Platonica, XIII.IV, 13; Hankins, “Ficino, Avicenna,” 18.
- 91.
Quoted in Hankins, “Ficino, Avicenna,” 28.
- 92.
See Ficino, Theologia Platonica, XIV, 3, Opera, 311 (translation courtesy of J. L.Burroughs): “animam nostrum per intellectum et voluntatem tanquam geminas ilas Platonicas alas, idcirco volare ad Deum, quoniam per eas volat ad omnia. Per primam omnia sibi applicat, per secundam se applicat omnibus. Itaque anima cupit, conatur, incipit Deus fieri; proficitque quotidie. Motus autem omnis qui ad terminum aliquem directus, incipit quidem primo, pergit deinde, intenditur paulatim, et proficit, profecto quadoque perficitur. Eadem namque facultate intenditur, qua coepit. Eadem postea perficit, qua et intendebatur. Eadem tandem perficitur, qua proficit. Quamobrem animus noster quandoque fieri poterit quodammodo omnia, ac Deus quidam evadere).”
- 93.
See, for example, Ficino, Dvcc, XXV, where Ficino puts a fictional “severe ecclesiastical prelate” in the position of devil’s advocate.
- 94.
Emanationism lies at the heart of Neoplatonic thought, being the never-ending overflowing of divine goodness into creation, from the transcendent source, via the hypostatic layers of Divine Mind, World Soul, and material world, decreasing in potency of divine essence as it descends. This contrasts with Creationism, which posits a divine creator separate from his creation.
- 95.
Henry Corbin, Avicenna and the Visionary Recital (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2014), 101.
- 96.
See Ficino, Letter to Paul of Middelburg of 1492 in Letters, X, 51 (Ficino, Opera, 944): “This age, like a golden age, has brought back to light those liberal disciplines that were practically extinguished: grammar, poetry, oratory, painting, sculpture, architecture, music and the ancient singing of songs to the Orphic Lyre, and all this in Florence” (“Hoc enim seculum tanquam aureum, liberales disciplinas ferme iam extinctas reduxit in lucem, grammaticam, poesim, oratoriam, picturam, sculpturam, architecturam, musicam, antiquum ad Orphicam Lyram carminum cantum, idquae Florentiae”).
- 97.
Geoffrey Cornelius has pointed out in that astrology as a practice unites the two modes of vision: “we understand that Sun, Moon and planets are visible in two lights, and not one; the world of sense, where they may be measured by the astronomer, and the world of imagination, where they reveal their hidden light to the astrologer”; “Astrology’s Hidden Light: Reflections on Ficino’s De sole,” Sphinx, Journal of Archetypal Psychology and the Arts 6 (1993): 121–22.
- 98.
Iamblichus, On the Mysteries, I.3.
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Voss, A. (2021). Diligentia et divina sorte: Oracular Intelligence in Marsilio Ficino’s Astral Magic. In: Hedesan, G.D., Rudbøg, T. (eds) Innovation in Esotericism from the Renaissance to the Present. Palgrave Studies in New Religions and Alternative Spiritualities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67906-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67906-4_2
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-67905-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-67906-4
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)