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Using Ficino: Chrysostomus Javelli on Love and amor sui

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Chrysostomus Javelli

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Abstract

The treatise on amor sui in Javelli’s Epitome in Ethicen, hoc est, moralem Platonis philosophiam (1536) provides an effective case study to discuss his modus operandi when reworking a recurring source like Ficino’s Platonic commentaries. Amor sui, a philosophical as well as theological concept, was in fact only the starting point for discussing the topic of love from a general perspective. And in doing so, Javelli consistently relied on Ficino’s Commentary on the Symposium. Javelli, nonetheless, did not merely copy and paste material from Ficino’s text, but he re-elaborated it by making selections and by manipulating its meaning, all aimed at proving that Plato’s philosophy was indeed a ‘docta religio’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bibliography on this topic is very extensive. See at least Hankins 1991; Kraye 1994; Bacchelli 2001; Ebbersmeyer 2002; Lauster 2002; Toussaint 2014; Robichaud 2021. The Aristotelian tradition was instead prominently present in the medical treatment of love as a sickness.

  2. 2.

    Nygren 1953, who rejected self-love as egocentric and embraced a purely sacrificial form of Christian love, influenced many philosophical and theological debates in the past century.

  3. 3.

    See O’Donovan 1980.

  4. 4.

    On Aquinas and self-love see the well-known polemical remarks by Nygren 1953, 643–645. On the debates in scholarship on Aquinas about Nygren’s claim, see Gallagher 1999.

  5. 5.

    See, e.g., John of Salisbury, Polycraticus, 3.III.1–2, in which innate self-love is opposed to superbia, cause of all sins.

  6. 6.

    Aristotle 2014, 533: ‘The forms which friendly feeling for our neighbors takes, and the marks by which the different forms of friendship are defined, seem to be derived from the feelings of regard which we entertain for ourselves’. See also Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on this passage: ‘Sic enim videtur esse unus homo alteri amicus, si eadem agit ad amicum quae ageret ad seipsum’ (Sententia libri Ethicorum, lib. 9 l. 4 n. 1). On Aristotle, self-love and love see also Rhetoric, 1371b 19.

  7. 7.

    Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I–II, q. 77 a. 4 arg. 4: ‘sicut homo quandoque peccat propter inordinatum sui amorem, ita etiam interdum peccat propter inordinatum amorem proximi’. On amor sui and love of God see, e.g., ST I–II, q. 89, a. 6, c

  8. 8.

    On Aquinas and amor sui there is a very vast bibliography. See at least De Weiss 1977; Osborne Jr. 2005; Imbach 2019.

  9. 9.

    See at least Osborne Jr. 2005.

  10. 10.

    For Javelli’s works, I use Javelli 1580. The Epitome in Ethicen, hoc est, moralem Platonis philosophiam, originally printed in Venice by Arrivabene in 1536, is in Javelli 1580, II, 277–326. It should be noted that while Plato’s works were for the most part inaccessible during the Middle Ages, several Neoplatonic sources dealing with self-love were well known, most notably Pseudo-Dionysius, De divinis nominibus 4, 10, a text commented on by Aquinas himself.

  11. 11.

    These ‘triangular’ comparationes were otherwise quite common as single treatises; see on them Del Soldato 2020. Javelli occasionally inserted sections with direct comparisons between Plato and Aristotle, on the meaning of virtue into the Epitome in Ethicen (Javelli 1580, II, 298) and a defence of Plato’s politics against the accusations made by Aristotle in his Politics, in In politicam, hoc est civilem, Platonis philosophiam (Javelli 1580, II, 372–377).

  12. 12.

    See on this Vanhaelen forthcoming, also for previous bibliography.

  13. 13.

    Of course, the association between self-knowledge and amor sui was canonical. For the connection between self-knowledge and self-love in Augustine, see O’Donovan 1980, 60ff. On the connection between amor sui and self-knowledge in the early modern period, see Bosco 1989, 42.

  14. 14.

    Plato, Laws, 731d–732b. On the passage see Sheffield 2020; Oliveira 2021. On the intrinsic self-involved nature of love in other works of Plato, including the Symposium, see Kraut 2008.

  15. 15.

    ‘Therefore, it is quite clear to us that there is as much difference between goodness and beauty as there is between a seed and a flower that is originated by that seed, and just as the flowers that are originated by the seed produce themselves seeds, so beauty which is originated by goodness, leads lovers to love goodness.’

  16. 16.

    ‘For these reasons I believe it has been demonstrated quite clearly that there is as much difference between goodness and beauty as there is between a seed and a little flower; and that just as the flowers that are originated by the seeds of the plants produce themselves seeds, in the same way beauty, this flower of goodness, as arises from the good, so leads lovers to the good.’

  17. 17.

    E.g., the passage on ‘publica amicitia’ in Javelli 1580, II, 283 is taken from In Alcibiadem primum (Ficino 1576, II, 1133), while the passage at 284 on the role of human beings in the divine production of the universe is from In Timaeum (Ficino 1576, II, 1464bis).

  18. 18.

    Javelli himself was a ‘victim’ of these practices, see De Robertis 2022.

  19. 19.

    See Tavuzzi 1990, 1991.

  20. 20.

    The reference is to Plato, Symposium, 186a, Eryximachus’s speech.

  21. 21.

    There are sections in Ficino’s commentary in which the idea of self-love, both in its positive and negative meaning, is implied: I.6, on the utility of love, and VI.17, on the beauty of the soul, where the myth of Narcissus is evoked (‘hinc hominum miseranda calamitas’). For other mentions of amor sui in Ficino, with several different meanings, see Theologia Platonica, V.1 (Ficino 1576, I, 135: ‘Et quia numquam deserit se ipsum, cum in qualibet natura insit amor sui ipsius perpetuus, numquam desinit vivere’), In epistula Pauli Apostoli commentarius et ascensus ad tertium coelum ad Paulum intelligendum (Ficino 1576, I, 439), and Liber de lumine (Ficino 1576, I, 983). Ficino did not specifically leave remarks on the relevant passage in his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s De divinis nominibus 4, 10 (Ficino 1576, II, 1066).

  22. 22.

    Javelli 1580, II, 286.

  23. 23.

    Javelli’s choice of words in this context, ‘abusum’ and ‘vituperare’, was based on the final sentence in Ficino, Commentary, II.7 (Ficino 1576, II, 1327).

  24. 24.

    A possible source of Ficino in his treatment of Pseudo-Dionysius could be Thomas’ commentary, in which the reference to five loves on the basis of Hierotheus’ definition is made explicit (In de divinis nominibus 4, 12).

  25. 25.

    See Javelli 1580, II, 113.

  26. 26.

    Javelli 1580, II, 139ff.

  27. 27.

    On Ficino’s engagement with Lucretius see Hankins 2011; Snyder 2011; Hankins 2013; Passanante 2018. On Lucretius and Epicureanism in the Renaissance see Brown 2010; Passanante 2011; Palmer 2014.

  28. 28.

    Here Javelli quoted from his Epitome of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (book 7), and especially from the first Tractatus, devoted to continence and incontinence. See Javelli 1580, II, 93–103.

  29. 29.

    We should not forget the treatment offered by Erasmus in his Moriae encomium, in which blind amor sui is the foundation of self-deceit and therefore happiness (see at least Marsh 1998, 173; Blackburn 2014, 54–55).

  30. 30.

    Equicola 1525. On Equicola and amor sui, see Palumbo Mosca 2007.

  31. 31.

    Patrizi 1963. On Equicola and Patrizi see Plastina 2019. See also Vasoli 1988.

  32. 32.

    In this second instance he listed amor sui among the daughters of luxuria, in the footsteps of Gregory the Great (Moralia in Job, XXXI, 45).

  33. 33.

    See Garin 1946, 90. In particular, Garin suggested the influence of Ficino’s De Christiana religione on Javelli’s Christiana philosophia. See also the article of Maude Vanhaelen, Chap. 8, in this volume.

  34. 34.

    See Javelli 1580, II, 277b: ‘unde non immerito dici consuevit Platonicam Philosophiam non aliud esse quam doctam pietatem ac religionem’; 293: ‘Cognovit enim divinus Plato, neminem felicitari posse ut in ultimo tractatu tibi constabit, nisi Dei amicus evadat, amicus autem non erit nisi amet et ametur a Deo, tu igitur adverte mentem fuisse Platonis in tota doctrina sua, quae, ut diximus alias, non aliud videtur esse quam docta religio […]’. The first passage is from the Proemium to the Epitome in Ethicen Platonis, while the second is from the treatise De colendo Deo, which follows the treatise on amor sui in this Epitome.

  35. 35.

    See Bessarion, In calumniatorem Platonis, IV.2.21–22. For Diogenes Laertius, see Lives of the philosophers, III.2.

  36. 36.

    On the pedagogical meaning of Javelli’s Platonic works see Vanhaelen forthcoming.

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    Eva Del Soldato

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    Tommaso De Robertis

  2. KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Luca Burzelli

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Del Soldato, E. (2023). Using Ficino: Chrysostomus Javelli on Love and amor sui. In: De Robertis, T., Burzelli, L. (eds) Chrysostomus Javelli. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 243. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27673-6_9

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