Platonic Theology (review)

Michael J. B. Allen and James Hankins have brought their six-volume edition and English translation of Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology to a close with the issuance of these two volumes, which are, again, fine additions to the I Tatti Renaissance Library. The present reviewer discussed the editing and translation choices in reviewing the first four volumes in an earlier issue of this journal (58, no. 4 [2005]: 1302–05), and what was said there remains true here: this edition and translation will prove indispensable to scholarship on Ficino, the history of Western philosophy, and cultural history as a whole. Volume 5 in the series covers books 15 and 16 in the Platonic Theology, while volume 6 contains books 17 and 18. Volume 6 also has three significant additions: first, there is Ficino’s Argumentum in platonicam theologiam, which the editors tell us was “presented to Lorenzo de’ Medici sometime after 1480” (273), as a retrospective reflection on and summary of the complete, yet still unpublished Platonic Theology, which Ficino had substantively completed by 1474 but did not have printed until 1482. Second, Allen and Hankins have added an extremely useful “Outline of Ficino’s Platonic Theology,” which presents in summary form the principal arguments of the entire text, geared to the cues within the different books of the Platonic Theology. Finally there are corrigenda for all six volumes as well as a series of indices that cover all six volumes.

These last two volumes represent the culmination of the work as a whole, as Ficino effectively poses a number of key questions, all of which were subjects of controversy. They are summarized in the editors’ “Outline” (vol. 6). One, for example, is as follows: “Is there one soul for all mankind?” This question takes up the preponderance of book 15, Ficino’s most extensive refutation of Averroes. In a sense this book portrays Ficino at his pre-Cartesian best. On the one hand, as a Platonist Ficino believes he must defend the idea that one of the principal tasks of individual human beings is to liberate the soul from the body through meditation, purification, and ritual practices. On the other hand, Ficino spends much of this book refuting the Averroist notion that there was a unity of intellect for all humankind, a notion that would destroy individual immortality, effectively merging the individual human soul, separated from the body after death, with a vast, eternal (but undifferentiated) intellect, so that individual rewards and punishments would be out of the question and a staple of Platonic-Christian ethics would become impossible.

Yet the manner in which Ficino mounts his defense is noteworthy, since he leans in the direction of linking the body and soul in one individual, a position that is indebted to Christian doctrine, in addition to Aristotle and later Platonism. The mind, Ficino argues, is present to the body in a particular way. One should not, he writes, “suppose it absurd for a rational substance to be joined to matter, since the order of nature cannot be preserved in any other way” (15.4.4). As a substance the soul is incorporeal, but as characteristic of humanity, soul “belongs to a body, is a particular act, in other words, in a particular substrate” (15.7.11), Ficino writes, following Aristotle. Later in book 15 Ficino writes: “To confute the many fallacious arguments with which the Averroists obstinately strive to trap the Platonists, we must remember that it is not over and beyond nature for the human soul to be joined with the body; but that it is natural for this eternal soul to be joined to an eternal and heavenly body forever but only for a limited time...