Francesco Patrizi

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Francesco Patrizi da Cherso was born on the island of Cres — Cherso, then in Venetian Dalmatia — on 25 April 1529, into the leading branch of the Petris family, and he died in Rome in February 1597, where he was laid in the church of Sant’Onofrio in the tomb already holding the poet Torquato Tasso. Between those two points he built one of the period’s most ambitious attempts to displace Aristotle from the schools and put in his place a Platonic and Hermetic account of the cosmos. He spent his career between Venice, Ferrara, and Rome, and held in turn the first chairs of Platonic philosophy established at the universities of Ferrara and Rome — posts created, in effect, for him. The Ferrara chair, founded in 1578, was the first endowed professorship of Platonic philosophy in Europe, and the move to Rome in 1592 carried that novelty into the city of the Curia itself.

He came to the chair already a known enemy of the Aristotelians. His Discussiones peripateticae, the fullest version printed at Basel in 1581, is a sustained scholarly assault on the figure the universities had made into the very shape of philosophy. Patrizi questioned the authenticity of works passing under Aristotle’s name, set the Stagirite against the older Greek wisdom he claimed Aristotle had borrowed and betrayed, and argued that Aristotle’s God — a thinker thinking itself, indifferent to the world, neither its maker nor its providence — could not be the God of Christians. The attack was philological as much as metaphysical. It belonged to the same critical temper that, applied a generation later by another hand, would undo Patrizi’s own ancient authorities.

The cosmos built from light

His central work, the Nova de universis philosophia, appeared at Ferrara in 1591 from the press of Benedetto Mammarelli, with a Venice reissue under Roberto Meietti in 1593. It is a four-part summa, each part named for what it surveys: the Panaugia on light, the Panarchia on first principles, the Pampsychia on souls, and the Pancosmia on the body of the world. Read in order, the four descend from the source of all light to the ordered cosmos, and the order is the argument: where the schoolmen began their physics from matter and form, Patrizi began from light.

Light, in the Nova, is the first emanation of God and the medium through which the divine reaches down into the visible world, ordering everything beneath it. It is not one created thing among others but the first procession of being from the source, the bond and kinship of all things, the radiance of the Father of Lights diffused through every level of the real. The visible light of the sun is the lowest and densest case of a principle that is, higher up, incorporeal and intelligible — so that to study optics is, on this scheme, to study the self-communication of God. Beneath light Patrizi set space. Where Aristotle had made place a relation between bodies and denied the void outright, Patrizi treated space as a real and prior thing, the first of all created beings, an extension that exists in its own right and into which bodies are received rather than one that bodies generate. Space comes before body; body presupposes the room to be. The doctrine reads at moments like a metaphysics reaching toward what a later physics would call absolute space, and historians of early modern cosmology have followed its echoes forward into Gassendi, Henry More, and the Newtonian century. The lowest part of the system, the Pampsychia, fills that lit and extended world with soul at every level — a panpsychism in which nothing is wholly inert, because everything participates, however faintly, in the descent from the One.

The result is a fusion rather than a borrowing. The descent of Neoplatonism supplies the skeleton — emanation from the One, a graded hierarchy of being, the return of all things toward their source — and in the figure of God as an infinite source whose light fills a universe without a fixed edge, the system carries forward the learned ignorance of Nicholas of Cusa, the fifteenth-century cardinal whose paradoxes of the infinite stood behind so much of the bolder Renaissance cosmology. The light-metaphysics has older relatives still, in the luminous emanationism of Ibn Gabirol and the light-physics of Robert Grosseteste, and contemporary cousins in the anti-Aristotelian naturalism of Bernardino Telesio. But the optics, the treatment of space, and the quantitative ambition are Patrizi’s own century at work, and over it all lies the conviction that drove the whole enterprise: that the oldest theology and the truest physics were, at bottom, one thing.

Hermes, Zoroaster, and the campaign for the schools

That conviction had a name and a lineage. Patrizi belonged to the Renaissance current that took the prisca theologia — an “ancient theology” running from Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster down through Orpheus and Pythagoras to Plato — to be a genuine and venerable wisdom, older than Christianity and in harmony with it. The genealogy was not his invention. Marsilio Ficino had set it at the head of his Latin Hermetica in the 1460s, after Cosimo de’ Medici directed him to translate the Corpus Hermeticum before Plato; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Agostino Steuco had widened it. Patrizi inherited the chain and made it the architecture of a system, not a preface to one.

He did the textual work himself. To the Nova he appended the Greek and Latin of the Hermetic corpus, the so-called Chaldean Oracles under the name of Zoroaster, the Hermetic excerpts from Stobaeus, and a Platonizing treatise then passing as Aristotle’s Theology. The Oracles he gathered into a numbered recension — some three hundred and twenty of them, ascribed to Zoroaster the Persian — and in 1593 reissued the Zoroastrian and Hermetic material on its own, drawn from a manuscript in the library of the Holstein nobleman Heinrich Rantzau, under the title Magia philosophica. That body of verse is a real text with a real history: a corpus of Greek hexameters of the second century, treated as revealed scripture by the later Neoplatonists — Iamblichus and his successors built the architecture of theurgy in part upon them — transmitted through Byzantium, and edited in the chain that ran from the late-antique commentators to the Renaissance presses. Patrizi stands inside that chain of transmission, one of the editors who fixed the Oracles for early modern Europe. What the verse is not is the scripture of the Persian prophet. The genuine sacred books of Zoroastrian religion are the Avesta, composed in Old Iranian and unrelated to these Greek lines; the attribution to Zoroaster is a Hellenistic and then Renaissance act of pious back-dating, and the Magi who actually preserved the Avesta would not have recognized a word of it.

From this base Patrizi mounted a campaign rare in its boldness. He did not keep the ancient sages in the study; he proposed that the Church teach them. In the dedication of the Nova de universis philosophia to Pope Gregory XIV — once a fellow student of his at Padua — and in his teaching, Patrizi pressed the case that the Catholic schools should set Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroaster, and Plato in their lecture halls in place of Aristotle, whom he judged both philosophically wrong and a poor ally for the faith. The argument turned the prisca theologia from a flattering historical thesis into a practical program: if the oldest pagan wisdom was a providential first draft of Christian truth, and Aristotle a pagan who had denied creation and providence, then the universities had enthroned the wrong gentile. The boldness was institutional as much as intellectual. Other figures of the esoteric current kept their Hermes in dialogues and dedications; Patrizi carried him into the open arena of the chair and the Curia.

The boldness was not naive. Patrizi knew the antiquity of his sages was already under attack. Doubts about the age of the Hermetic books had been voiced through the sixteenth century — the chronology Ficino had taken on the authority of Lactantius and Augustine was not unquestioned — and Patrizi answered the doubters directly, marshalling the patristic citations, the internal claims of the texts, and the doxographers’ notice of the three Hermeses to defend a Hermes older than or contemporary with Moses. The defense was learned, and it was the wrong shape for the threat: it argued from authorities and traditions when the case against Hermetic antiquity would finally be made from the language of the texts themselves. Patrizi met the historical argument with more history; the philology that would settle the matter was a tool his own Discussiones had practiced against Aristotle but that he did not, or could not, turn on the sources he needed to be ancient. He shared this exposure with the wider Hermetic current of his age — with the Florentine line of Ficino and Pico, with the astral natural magic that Ficino’s De vita had made respectable, and with Giordano Bruno, who in the same decades pushed the Egyptian theology toward an open break with the Church that Patrizi never contemplated.

The closing of the door

The campaign failed, and the failure is part of the record. Patrizi was called to his Roman chair in 1592 by Cardinal Ippolito Aldobrandini — who that same January became Pope Clement VIII — and so taught Platonic philosophy at the Sapienza under the very papacy he was asking to overturn the curriculum. The Nova de universis philosophia was examined almost at once. A censor flagged propositions; the Congregation of the Index ordered the work suppressed donec corrigatur, until it should be corrected, and the condemnation was confirmed in the Clementine Index of 1596. Patrizi spent his last years preparing the demanded revision. It never appeared in print, and he died in Rome in 1597 with the larger project — a whole philosophy installed in the schools of the Church — unrealized. The same critical edge he had turned on Aristotle’s pseudepigrapha had been turned, by the censors, on the orthodoxy of his own system.

The deeper foundation gave way after his death. Much of his reading of the ancient sources rested on a chronology that a single book overturned. In 1614 the Huguenot philologist Isaac Casaubon, in a chapter of his great refutation of Cardinal Baronio, demonstrated that the Hermetic texts were not the work of a primeval Egyptian sage but compositions of the early Christian centuries — late Greek in their diction, dependent on the Greek of the Septuagint, marked by Platonist and Stoic commonplaces and by phrases that alluded to Christian rite, and cited by no writer of antiquity before the Christian apologists who had reason to want a pagan witness. Once the Hermetica were dated after Plato and after Christ, the prisca theologia lost the external authority on which it leaned: Hermes could no longer be the ancient herald who anticipated the Gospel, because the texts that made him so were younger than the Gospel. The genealogy Patrizi had built his system upon dissolved into a chronology running the other way.

The scholarship and the texts

Patrizi survives in modern study as a significant if eccentric figure of late Renaissance Platonism — an independent system-builder rather than a follower of Ficino, sharper than most in his attack on Aristotle, and unusually willing to carry the esoteric current into the open. His light-metaphysics and his theory of space have drawn renewed attention from historians of early modern cosmology, and his place in the Hermetic story has its own dedicated literature; the fullest single overview of his thought and career is the article on him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Frances Yates, in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), set him in the line of Renaissance Hermetists alongside Ficino, Pico, and Giordano Bruno. Frederick Purnell’s study “Francesco Patrizi and the Critics of Hermes Trismegistus” (Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6, 1976, pp. 155–178) examines how Patrizi answered the sixteenth-century doubters of Hermetic antiquity — the philological erosion was under way well before Casaubon brought it to a head. Benjamin Brickman’s An Introduction to Francesco Patrizi’s Nova de Universis Philosophia (New York, 1941) remains the standard English analysis of the light-and-space system, and Anthony Grafton’s “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 46, 1983, pp. 78–93) anatomizes the redating that left Patrizi’s foundation in ruins.

The primary documents are recoverable. The Nova de universis philosophia of 1591 survives in full and has been digitized from the Ferrara edition; the Magia philosophica of 1593 carries the Zoroastrian and Hermetic appendix in its own covers. The Oracles Patrizi edited can be read in the editorial descent that ran through him: the order he inherited and passed on is the one printed in Isaac Preston Cory’s Ancient Fragments, and the verse itself is rendered in G. R. S. Mead’s translation of The Chaldæan Oracles. The Hermetic books on which he leaned are present in the Corpus Hermeticum, and the Platonic dialogue nearest his cosmology, the account of a world made by a craftsman from a paradigm, is the Timaeus.

What Patrizi wanted is clear, and what he could not have was equally clear in hindsight: a single philosophy in which the oldest wisdom and the new science agreed, taught from the chairs of the Church on the authority of sages older than Moses. He built it with care, dedicated it to a pope, and watched the institution he addressed place it on the list of forbidden books while he was still alive to correct it. The sages he set at its head turned out to be younger than the faith he meant them to confirm. What he left behind is not the system he intended but the careful, strange record of that wanting.

→ In the library: The Chaldæan Oracles (Mead, 1908) — the 'Zoroaster' Patrizi edited · Plato — Timaeus (Jowett) · The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres · Cory, Ancient Fragments — the Oracles in the order Patrizi inherited

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Cosimo De Medici · Paracelsianism · The One · Prisca Theologia · Marsilio Ficino · Isaac Casaubon · Corpus Hermeticum · Chaldean Oracles Tradition · Aristotle · Plato · Giordano Bruno · Nicholas Of Cusa · Iamblichus · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Renaissance Astro Magic · Avesta