Marsilio Ficino

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The first translation of the Corpus Hermeticum the Latin West ever possessed carries a colophon dated April 1463, in the hand of a Florentine scholar of twenty-nine. Marsilio Ficino had been handed the Greek of Plato only the year before — the commission of the age — and had been told to put it down. A monk named Leonardo da Pistoia had reached Florence around 1462 carrying a Greek codex of fourteen Hermetic treatises out of Macedonia, and Cosimo de’ Medici, old and near the end, gave his translator a new order, which Ficino himself recorded: Hermes first, Plato afterward. Cosimo wanted to read the older sage before he died. The order made sense to both men, for in the genealogy of wisdom they shared, Hermes Trismegistus — the thrice-great Egyptian in whom the Greek god of crossings and the scribe-god Thoth had long since merged — spoke before the Greeks learned to listen.

Ficino titled his version Mercurii Trismegisti Liber de potestate et sapientia Dei, the book of the power and wisdom of God; Europe, taking the name of the revealer in the opening treatise for the whole, called it the Pimander. Cosimo lived another year to read it. It circulated in manuscript until Gerardus de Lisa’s press at Treviso issued an unauthorized first edition on 18 December 1471; some two dozen printed editions and a family of vernacular versions followed by 1600, and the English Divine Pymander of 1650 in the library’s holdings descends from the tradition his Latin set moving. Ficino rendered only the fourteen treatises his codex held; the poet-scholar Lodovico Lazzarelli completed the corpus a generation later. More than any single figure, Ficino is the reason the Hermetic books have a modern career at all — every later chapter of that career, down to the modern Hermetic revival, opens from his Latin.

None of this was an accident of patronage alone. Ficino was born on 19 October 1433 at Figline Valdarno in the upper Arno valley, son of Diotifeci d’Agnolo, a physician who served Cosimo de’ Medici, and of his wife Alexandra. The father’s profession and the father’s patron laid the son’s twin tracks: medicine, which Ficino studied and practiced his whole life — physician to bodies as well as souls — and the Medici household, in whose orbit he passed from grammar lessons through the scholastic Aristotle to Greek itself, mastered just as the manuscripts of a collapsing Byzantium were arriving in Florence. In 1462 Cosimo gave him a house in the city; in 1463, a small property at Careggi with a house on it, near the Medici villa in the hills above Florence. Already in September 1462 Ficino was writing to thank Cosimo for the academy arranged for him at Careggi, and the circle that gathered around him there was long called the Platonic Academy of Florence. How formal an institution it ever was, modern scholarship doubts; what the documents yield is the property, a scene from 1474 of Ficino presiding over five young men at their studies, and decades of conversation — which was real, and which carried the revival. In 1464 the work returned to its patron: Ficino read his first finished dialogues — several of them works the canon no longer gives to Plato — to Cosimo as the old man lay dying.

The complete Plato took two more decades to reach print. A draft of the whole was finished by 1468–69; the years after went to revision and commentary; and in October 1484 — a year chosen partly by astrology, under a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn fit for a great book — the Florentine press of Lorenzo de Alopa issued the first complete Plato in any Western language. Printed with it was De amore, his commentary on the Symposium composed in 1469, which he also turned into Italian himself; from that book, and from his Latin letters to his close friend Giovanni Cavalcanti, Europe learned to speak of “Platonic love.” An expanded edition of his Plato commentaries followed in the mid-1490s, and his versions remained the Plato — and later the Plotinus — that Europe read into the eighteenth century.

Beneath the translations ran a single conviction: there exists an ancient theology, a prisca theologia, older than the Greeks, descending from Hermes through Orpheus and Aglaophemus to Pythagoras, Philolaus, and Plato — after 1469 Ficino sometimes set Zoroaster at the head of the chain — and agreeing in substance with Christianity. On the dating his whole age accepted, carried by Augustine, Lactantius, and Cicero, Hermes was a rough contemporary of Moses or older still, and the concord of Egyptian revelation with Mosaic looked like providence, not coincidence. Ficino was ordained a priest on 18 December 1473 and ended a canon of Florence’s cathedral, and he saw no betrayal in any of this: translating pagan revelation was a Christian act, the recovery of the first dispensation of wisdom to the gentiles. His De christiana religione (1474 in his own Italian, Latin in 1476) and the eighteen books of the Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animorum — composed between 1469 and 1474, printed at Florence on 7 November 1482 — built the architecture: the soul stands at the midpoint of the hierarchy of being, bound by natural appetite to climb back toward its source, and its immortality is demonstrable by Platonic reason. Even his certainties kept moving: late in life he came to hold that the Hermetic books had been written by Egyptian priests in veneration of Hermes rather than by the sage’s own hand. The chronology itself fell long after he did — Isaac Casaubon demonstrated in 1614, more than a century after Ficino’s death, that the Greek of the Hermetica belongs to late antiquity — but the synthesis built on the older dating shaped European thought for two hundred years. The current it set moving is told under Renaissance Hermetism; the school that formed around his Plato, under Renaissance Neoplatonism, where his younger ally Giovanni Pico della Mirandola — who bound Kabbalah into the synthesis — also has his place.

The Plotinus followed: the first complete Latin Enneads, with commentaries that effectively re-founded Neoplatonism as a living philosophy, printed at Florence on 7 May 1492. The procession of emanation and return that Plotinus taught became, in Ficino’s hands, the working metaphysics of a European century. And in September 1497 the Venetian press of Aldus Manutius issued Ficino’s Latin of Iamblichus — under the title De mysteriis, which Ficino himself supplied and the work has worn ever since — together with Proclus on sacrifice, Synesius, and Psellus: the volume that carried theurgy into Latin Europe and remained its principal vehicle until 1678.

He was also, carefully, a magus. De vita libri tres — Three Books on Life, printed at Florence on 3 December 1489 — is the book of Ficino the physician-magus: Book I, drafted around 1480, on the health of scholars; Book II on long life; Book III, De vita coelitus comparanda (“On Obtaining Life from the Heavens”), grown directly out of the Plotinus commentary. It is written for people of Ficino’s own kind — scholars born under Saturn, whose planet grants depth of contemplation and exacts melancholy as its tax — and for them it prescribes regimen, diet, music tuned to the planets, and talismans timed and figured to catch a planet’s gift, all of it working through the spiritus mundi, the fine circulating breath that binds the world’s body, by the cosmos’s own sympathies. This is natural magic, and Ficino insisted on the adjective: no commerce with demons, no cultic invocation — theurgy medicalized and Christianized, brought indoors to the study and the sickroom, with the god-making passage of the Asclepius glinting behind Book III’s most dangerous pages. The book ran through roughly thirty editions by the mid-seventeenth century, and it kept its author just clear of serious trouble. Scrutiny came: after May 1490 his letters ask friends at the court of Innocent VIII for help because certain people had called his orthodoxy into question, and he had armed the book with an Apologia of its own. No condemnation followed.

The letters bind the life together: twelve books of Epistolae covering 1474 to 1494, first printed at Venice on 11 March 1495 — philosophy, spiritual direction, dedication, diagnosis, and the steady self-portrait of the Saturn-born, melancholy scholar redeemed by study and by the certainty that wisdom has one source, however many mouths it speaks through. Writing in 1492, he measured his own era without false modesty: “This century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct.” He had named the achievement he spent his life making — a man who translated other men’s visions and stood behind every page. When the Medici fell in 1494 he withdrew to the Tuscan countryside, and he died at Careggi, where Cosimo had settled him thirty-six years before, on 1 October 1499.

From footnote to founding event

His reputation traveled a long arc after the chronology broke. Johann Jakob Brucker, the canon-making historian of philosophy writing in the 1740s, demoted him to a footnote of credulity, complaining that, “captivated by the trifles of later Platonists, he feigns, re-feigns, and changes Plato.” The modern recovery began with Paul Oskar Kristeller, whose Supplementum Ficinianum (1937) cataloged and dated the works and whose The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (Columbia University Press, 1943) reconstructed the system entire, the soul at the center of a five-substance hierarchy drawn home by natural appetite. D. P. Walker’s Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Studies of the Warburg Institute, 1958) made the magic a serious scholarly subject, isolating the spiritus-based, non-demonic “spiritual magic” of De vita III and showing how thin its wall against the demonic kind remained. Frances A. Yates, in Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), made the 1463 commission the founding event of a Hermetic tradition running through Giordano Bruno to the threshold of the Scientific Revolution — the grand narrative that made the scene famous, and the one every scholar since has had to argue with. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark’s critical edition and translation, Three Books on Life (Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989), established the Latin text of De vita, documented the 1489–90 scrutiny and the Apologia, and counted the early-modern editions. James Hankins, in “The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence” (Renaissance Quarterly, 1991) and a companion study in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1990), demonstrated from the documents that the “Academy” was a name and an informal circle, not an institution. Michael J. B. Allen and James Hankins’s six-volume Platonic Theology (I Tatti Renaissance Library, Harvard University Press, 2001–2006) gave the Theologia its first complete modern edition and English translation, now the working text of the field. Maurizio Campanelli’s critical edition of the Pimander (Nino Aragno, 2011) finally separated Ficino’s Latin from the corrupt 1471 printing, and building on it Wouter J. Hanegraaff’s “How Hermetic was Renaissance Hermetism?” (Aries, 2015) pressed the post-Yates conclusion to its point: Ficino read the Hermetica through Platonic eyes, and what the Renaissance produced was less a Hermetic tradition than “a discourse about Hermes.” However the argument lands, it is conducted over Ficino’s Latin.

In 1521 the city set a bust of Ficino by Andrea Ferrucci on the south side of the nave of Santa Maria del Fiore, the cathedral he had served as canon — an honor from the church that never condemned him. His own accounting had come earlier, in the letter of 1492: a century “like a golden age,” the almost-extinct liberal arts “restored to light.” The restoring, line by Latin line, had been his.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres · The Divine Pymander (Everard, 1650) · The Dialogues of Plato (Jowett) · Plato — Symposium (Jowett) · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna) · Plotinos: Complete Works (Guthrie) · Iamblichus — On the Mysteries (Taylor)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Renaissance Hermetism · Renaissance Neoplatonism · Cosimo De Medici · Prisca Theologia · Plato · Theurgy · Talisman · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Isaac Casaubon · Giordano Bruno