Francesco Patrizi

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Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–1597) was an Italian Renaissance philosopher who built one of the period’s most ambitious attempts to replace Aristotle with a Platonic and Hermetic account of the cosmos. Born on the island of Cres, then in Venetian Dalmatia, 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.

His central work, the Nova de universis philosophia of 1591, set out a universe organized not around Aristotle’s matter and form but around light. Patrizi took light as the first emanation of God and the medium through which the divine reaches down into the visible world, ordering everything beneath it; space, rather than being a mere relation between bodies, he treated as a real and prior thing, the first of all created beings. The system reads as a fusion: the descent of Neoplatonism, the optics and cosmology of his own century, and a conviction that the oldest theology and the truest physics were one.

That conviction shaped a public campaign. Patrizi belonged to the Renaissance current that took the prisca theologia — an “ancient theology” supposedly running from Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster down through Plato — to be a genuine and venerable wisdom, older than and in harmony with Christianity. He edited the so-called Chaldean Oracles under the name of Zoroaster and drew on the Hermetic writings, and he pressed the case, in a dedication to the pope and in his teaching, that the Church should set these ancient sages in the schools in place of Aristotle, whom he judged both philosophically wrong and a poor ally for the faith.

The campaign failed, and the failure is part of the record. Patrizi was called to a chair at Rome under Clement VIII, but the Nova de universis philosophia was examined and placed on the Index of Prohibited Books, to be corrected; the revised version he was asked for never appeared, and he died in Rome in 1597 with the larger project unrealized. Much of his reading of the ancient sources rested on a dating later overturned: the scholar Isaac Casaubon would show in 1614 that the Hermetic texts were not the work of a primeval Egyptian sage but of the early Christian centuries, dissolving the historical claim on which the whole prisca theologia leaned.

Scholarship treats Patrizi as a significant if eccentric figure of late Renaissance Platonism — an independent system-builder rather than a follower of Marsilio Ficino, sharper than most in his attack on Aristotle, and unusually willing to carry the esoteric current into the open arena of university and Curia. His light-metaphysics has drawn renewed attention from historians of early modern cosmology. What he wanted was a single philosophy in which the oldest wisdom and the new science agreed; what he left was the careful, strange record of that wanting.

→ In the library: The Chaldæan Oracles (Mead, 1908) — the 'Zoroaster' Patrizi edited · Plato — Timaeus (Jowett)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Cosimo De Medici · Paracelsianism · The One