Marsilio Ficino

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Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was the Florentine priest, physician, and translator through whose Latin most of Plato — and the Corpus Hermeticum — entered Renaissance Europe. More than any single figure, he is the reason the Hermetic literature has a modern career at all.

The son of a physician in the orbit of the Medici, Ficino was set to work by Cosimo de’ Medici translating the Greek manuscripts then arriving in Florence in the wake of Byzantium’s collapse. By Ficino’s own account, when a manuscript of the Hermetic dialogues reached the city in the early 1460s, the elderly Cosimo ordered him to set Plato aside and translate Hermes first. The result, known by the title Pimander, spread through Europe in manuscript and print; the seventeenth-century English version in the library’s holdings descends from the tradition his Latin made famous. The complete Plato followed — the first in any Western language, printed in 1484 — and then Plotinus, with commentaries that effectively re-founded Neoplatonism as a living philosophy. The informal circle of scholars around him at the Medici villa at Careggi was long called the Platonic Academy of Florence; how formal an institution it really was, modern scholarship doubts, but the conversations were real.

What organized all this labor was a conviction: that there existed an ancient theology — a prisca theologia — older than the Greeks, running from Hermes Trismegistus and Orpheus down through Pythagoras to Plato, and agreeing in substance with Christianity. On the dating then accepted, Hermes was a contemporary of Moses or earlier, and the agreement looked like providence. Ficino was an ordained priest who saw no betrayal in this; translating pagan revelation was, for him, a Christian act. The dating was wrong — that demonstration came a century after his death — but the synthesis he built on it shaped European thought for two hundred years.

He was also, cautiously, a magus. His Three Books on Life (1489), written for scholars whose health suffered under Saturn, prescribes regimen, music, and talismans tuned to the planets — natural magic, he insisted, working through the world’s own sympathies, and no commerce with demons. The book ran through edition after edition, and kept its author just clear of serious trouble; church scrutiny came, but no condemnation.

Ficino’s portrait of the scholar is in the end a self-portrait: melancholy, Saturn-born, redeemed by study and by the conviction that wisdom has one source however many mouths. Nearly everything the later esoteric tradition means by “Renaissance Hermetism” passes through this one careful, tireless priest — a man who spent his life translating other men’s visions, and believed every page of it.

→ In the library: The Corpus Hermeticum (Mead) — I. Poemandres · The Divine Pymander (Everard, 1650)

→ Related: Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism