Renaissance Neoplatonism

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Renaissance Neoplatonism is the revival of Platonic philosophy that took shape in fifteenth-century Florence and ran on across Europe into the last years of the sixteenth, when the dialogues of Plato and the writings of Plotinus were translated into Latin, printed, and read together as a single ascending wisdom. At the core of the movement lies a genealogy. Truth is older than Greece: it descends through a golden chain of inspired sages — Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus at its head (Ficino ordered those first two links now one way, now the other), then Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Plato — one ancient theology handed down from near-contemporaries of Moses and flowing at last into the Gospel. To translate Plato was therefore not antiquarian labor but recovery, the reopening of a revelation. The man at the center of the work was Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), a priest and scholar whom Cosimo de’ Medici set to translating the Greek texts newly arrived in Italy; the movement he anchored became one of the defining currents of the Renaissance.

What the revival restored is the Neoplatonic architecture: reality descends from the One through Mind and Soul into the visible world by emanation, and the human soul’s proper work is the climb back toward its origin. Love is the ladder of that climb — the soul, struck by beauty, remembers its source and remounts toward it. Ficino read the whole structure as the Gospel’s forecourt, casting Plato as a forerunner of Christian truth and the ascent as a movement toward God. The ancient school itself, Plotinus to Proclus, is treated under Neoplatonism, and the longer tradition under Platonism; before the Florentine revival the Latin West held that inheritance only in fragments and channels — Calcidius’s partial Timaeus within Latin Platonism, the pseudo-Dionysian current of Christian Neoplatonism, and the parallel Islamic, Fatimid, and Jewish lines — while the Greek originals lived on in Byzantium.

The Greek arrivals

The decisive arrivals came before the fall of Constantinople, not after it. In 1438–39 the Council of Ferrara–Florence brought the Greek delegation, led by Emperor John VIII Palaiologos, west to negotiate the union of the churches as Ottoman pressure mounted; the union was proclaimed in July 1439 — read out by Bessarion — and largely repudiated in the East. With the delegation came George Gemistos Plethon (d. 1452 or 1454; the sources divide), the lay philosopher of Mistra whose Greek career, Book of Laws, and posthumous burning by Gennadios Scholarios belong to Byzantine Platonism. In Florence during the council — ill, and writing, he said, “without serious intent” for the devotees of Plato — he composed De differentiis, “Wherein Aristotle Disagrees with Plato,” and with it opened the Plato–Aristotle controversy: Scholarios answered with a defense of Aristotle, Plethon replied, and the quarrel ran on through Theodore Gaza, Andronikos Kallistos, Michael Apostoles, and George of Trebizond. Ficino would later honor Plethon as “the second Plato,” and in 1466 Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta carried his remains from Mistra to the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini.

Bessarion, Plethon’s former student, had come as a council delegate and stayed, a cardinal from 1439. Around 1458 George of Trebizond wrote his Comparatio philosophorum Platonis et Aristotelis (printed only posthumously, in 1523), three books casting Plato as ignorant, impious, and vicious and exalting Aristotle as a proto-Christian, closing with the prophecy of a coming “fourth Plato” — after Epicurus and Muhammad — who would menace the Latin West; the unnamed figure was possibly Plethon, possibly Bessarion himself. George had already warned, on the strength of Plethon’s talk at Florence, that the world stood within a few years of accepting “one and the same religion,” neither Christ’s nor Muhammad’s but one that “will not differ much from paganism” — the testimony of a single hostile witness, and a measure of what the controversy was felt to risk. Bessarion’s answer, In calumniatorem Platonis, was built over roughly a decade with his Roman circle — Latin polish from Niccolò Perotti, material in its third book from Giovanni Gatti — and dissolved the apparent quarrel by casting Plato as theologian and Aristotle as natural philosopher, the Christianized Plato standing as the better external aid to faith. It was printed at Rome in 1469 by Sweynheym & Pannartz, whose press that same year issued Alcinous and the Platonic works of Apuleius, probably as parts of a publishing program coordinated by the cardinal; with it the long quarrel ground to a halt, and its exegetical schemes passed to Ficino and his successors. Bessarion’s library, gathered against the fear that Greek learning would be entombed with its books, went to Venice around 1468 and formed the first nucleus of the Biblioteca Marciana.

The texts traveled by other hands as well. Around 1460–62 the monk Leonardo da Pistoia brought Cosimo, from Macedonia, the Greek codex containing the first fourteen treatises of the Hermetic corpus. The scholars who fled west after 1453 reinforced this inflow; they did not begin it. The council had already opened the channel.

The Florentine enterprise

In 1462 Cosimo gave Ficino a house in Florence and Greek manuscripts of Plato; in 1463, a small property at Careggi. Ficino’s letter of September 1462 thanks his patron for “the Academy you arranged for us … in Careggi,” and from that word a whole institution was later imagined. Ficino’s own preface to his Plotinus translation of 1492 traces the enterprise back to the council itself: Cosimo, he writes, heard Plethon speak in Florence and conceived the idea of an academy. The story is a founding legend, told half a century after the fact. James Hankins’s examination of the documents showed that no independent evidence puts Cosimo in Plethon’s company — the language barrier alone makes sustained contact doubtful — and that the famous “Platonic Academy of Florence” was never a formal institution: in Ficino’s own usage, “Academia” most often names his Plato project or his private teaching, a gymnasium in the period sense. The best-documented scene of that teaching is modest — Benedetto Colucci’s Declamationes (1474) shows Ficino presiding over five young men. What existed in fact was a circle, a correspondence, a patron’s gifts, and a labor of translation without precedent in the Latin West.

That labor can be dated almost year by year. The Pimander — the fourteen Hermetic treatises, finished in April 1463, before the Plato was begun — has its own career, treated under Renaissance Hermetism. The complete Plato was drafted by 1468–69 and printed at Florence in 1484, the first complete Plato in any Western language, the year chosen partly for its Jupiter–Saturn conjunction. The commentary on the Symposium, De amore (1469), gave Europe the term “Platonic love” and its doctrine: love as the ladder by which the soul remounts from the beauty of bodies to Beauty itself. The Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animorum, composed 1469–74 and printed in 1482, argued the soul’s immortality through eighteen books and canonized the genealogy of the ancient theology. De vita libri tres followed in 1489, the first complete Latin Plotinus with commentary on 7 May 1492, translations and commentary on pseudo-Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and Divine Names in the 1490s, and in 1497 an Aldine volume gathered Ficino’s versions of the school’s later masters: Iamblichus On the Mysteries — a title Ficino himself supplied, and which the work still carries — together with excerpts of Proclus, Porphyry, Synesius, and Psellus. In one working lifetime, Western Europe received a body of thought it had known until then only in fragments — and received it as a single tradition.

From the same desk came the practical dimension. The Three Books on Life treat the cosmos as a living web of correspondences and propose a natural magic of music, images, and plants by which a person may draw down beneficial celestial influences — defended, carefully, as medicine for the scholar’s melancholy rather than as the summoning of spirits. The theory and its fortunes are treated under Renaissance magic and Renaissance astro-magic, its ancient warrant under theurgy. The movement carried a practice with its metaphysics — philosophy, magic, and faith as aspects of a single knowledge.

Pico and the widening synthesis

Ficino’s younger associate Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) — born at Mirandola, settled in Florence from 1484 — pressed the synthesis wider, joining Kabbalah to the Platonic frame and projecting a philosophical peace in which Plato and Aristotle, Hermes and the Hebrew mysteries, witness one truth. The oration later titled On the Dignity of Man — unpublished in his lifetime, untitled in its first printing of 1496, the famous title reaching a title page only in 1557 — stages the human being at the center of the creation precisely by giving it no fixed place there: the Creator grants Adam no determined nature, leaving him free to rise toward the angelic or sink toward the beasts. The freedom in question is the soul’s ascent, the liberty to become what it contemplates, rather than the modern charter of human dignity that later readers found beneath the title. Pico’s life, his nine hundred theses, and the Roman storm they raised are treated in his own right; the current he opened runs onward through Christian Kabbalah. Thomas More’s English translation of the Life of Pico written by Pico’s nephew Gianfrancesco was an early sign of how far the movement would travel.

Diffusion

De amore fathered a literary genre. Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1505), dedicated to Lucrezia Borgia, commended Platonic love above carnal love; in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528) it is the character Bembo who delivers, in the fourth book, the discourse on love and beauty — the ladder rising from the beauty of one body to the divine beauty — that carried the doctrine into every court language of Europe. Leone Ebreo (Judah Abravanel, c. 1460 – before 1535), the Lisbon-born philosopher exiled from Iberia in 1492, wrote his Dialoghi d’amore around 1501–02, the genre’s philosophical summit and the Renaissance coda to the medieval Jewish Platonic line; it was published posthumously at Rome in 1535, and later Venetian title pages added a conversion claim the record does not support.

France took the current selectively. Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples (d. 1536) published Ficino’s Hermetica translation with his own argumenta in 1494, produced the first edition of the Latin pseudo-Dionysian corpus in 1498, and drafted a treatise on natural magic drawing on De vita — yet he was no Platonist: what Ficino had done for Plato, Lefèvre intended to do for Aristotle, and on the Plato–Aristotle question he and Guillaume Budé favored George of Trebizond. One of the current’s chief French carriers was, by conviction, an Aristotelian. Symphorien Champier (1471–1539), the Lyon physician, imported Ficinian Neoplatonism into French in the fourth book of La nef des dames vertueuses (1503), recycled Bessarion’s In calumniatorem in his own works without citation, and in 1507 printed Lodovico Lazzarelli’s completion of the Hermetic corpus. Among the poets of the Pléiade — Ronsard, Du Bellay, Baïf — the Platonic strand surfaced as a doctrine of poetry itself: verse as divine inspiration, the poet possessed.

In England, John Colet (1467–1519), back from Paris and Italy in 1496 and lecturing at Oxford on Paul’s epistles, read Ficino and corresponded with him — his annotated copy of Ficino’s Epistolae survives — and cited both Ficino and Pico in his writings; Erasmus said that listening to Colet was like listening to Plato himself. The long English afterglow came in the seventeenth century, when the Cambridge Platonists — Whichcote, Henry More, Cudworth, Smith, and their circle — held Plato and Plotinus in the highest regard and read them within the perennial-philosophy frame they inherited from Ficino and Agostino Steuco.

The movement’s only institutional footholds came a century after Careggi. Francesco Patrizi held a chair of Platonic philosophy at Ferrara from 1578 and was called to a second at the Sapienza in Rome in 1592; his Nova de universis philosophia (Ferrara, 1591), which printed the Hermetica and the Chaldaean Oracles alongside his new Platonic system, was condemned by the Congregation of the Index “until corrected” — in 1592 or 1594; the records disagree — and he died in 1597 still defending it.

The art question

Whether Botticelli painted this philosophy is a live scholarly debate. Aby Warburg’s dissertation of 1893 opened the modern study of the Primavera; E. H. Gombrich’s “Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism of His Circle” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 8, 1945) read the mythologies through Ficino’s letters, and Edgar Wind’s Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (1958) carried the reading further, the three Graces construed as Voluptas, Castitas, and Pulchritudo. Charles Dempsey’s The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton University Press, 1992) contests the whole line, placing the painting within the vernacular poetic culture of Poliziano — Petrarchan and chivalric registers — rather than within Ficinian metaphysics. No surviving text brings the Primavera’s particular company together: Poliziano is usually thought to have been involved in devising it, and Ficino has often been mentioned. The mythologies are certain evidence of the culture of the Medici circle; what program, if any, they encode remains an open question of scholarship.

Scholarship

The modern study of the revival rests on Paul Oskar Kristeller’s The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (Columbia University Press, 1943), the philological foundation for the dating and ordering of the movement’s texts. James Hankins’s Plato in the Italian Renaissance (2 vols., Brill, 1990) maps how Plato was translated, read, censored, and taught across quattrocento Italy; his “Cosimo de’ Medici and the ‘Platonic Academy’” (Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53, 1990) and “The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence” (Renaissance Quarterly 44.3, 1991) dismantled the academy legend from the documents, and his restatement “Humanist Academies and the ‘Platonic Academy of Florence’” is freely readable in Harvard’s open-access repository. Michael J. B. Allen’s The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of His Phaedrus Commentary, Its Sources and Genesis (University of California Press, 1984) anchors a half-century of Ficino exegesis and editions. John Monfasani’s George of Trebizond: A Biography and a Study of His Rhetoric and Logic (Brill, 1976) is the standard study of Plato’s Renaissance slanderer; Monfasani is also the principal advocate of 1454, against 1452, for Plethon’s death. The live Plethon debate is framed by Niketas Siniossoglou’s Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Plethon (Cambridge University Press, 2011), the strongest case for Plethon as a pagan reformer, and Vojtěch Hladký’s The Philosophy of Gemistos Plethon (Ashgate, 2014; Routledge, 2017), which answers with a perennialist Christian Platonist. Frances A. Yates’s Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964) fused the Platonic revival and Hermetism into a single “Hermetic tradition”; the philological reaction that followed re-separated them, and scholarship now distinguishes this current sharply from the ancient Neoplatonism it drew on and from Renaissance Hermetism, with which it overlapped but did not coincide. Sears Jayne’s John Colet and Marsilio Ficino (Oxford University Press, 1963) documents the English connection in marginalia and letters; Robert V. Merrill and Robert J. Clements’s Platonism in French Renaissance Poetry (New York University Press, 1957) surveys the Ficinian themes of the Pléiade; and Christopher S. Celenza’s The Intellectual World of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2018) sets the revival inside the larger humanist enterprise of which it was the visionary wing.

The confidence the Florentines bequeathed — that Plato, Plotinus, Hermes, and scripture weave into one tradition, and that philosophy, magic, and faith are aspects of a single knowledge — shaped a great deal of what followed: the magical systems of Cornelius Agrippa, the speculations of Giordano Bruno, and a strand of European esotericism that kept returning to Florence as its source. Part of the structure rested on a mistaken chronology: the Hermetic writings Ficino translated were products of late antiquity, not of Moses’ age — a dating established by Isaac Casaubon in 1614, before which the texts carried, for a century and a half, an authority their true age would not have given them. The mistake fell; the ideas kept their seats. The golden chain, the ladder of love, the soul free to become what it contemplates: these had entered the courts, the poetry, and the philosophy of Europe, and they did not leave when the dating fell.

→ In the library: Plato — Symposium (Jowett, 1892) · Plotinus — The Enneads (MacKenna, 1926) · Iamblichus — On the Mysteries (Taylor, 1821) · The Divine Pymander (Everard, 1650)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Marsilio Ficino · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Byzantine Platonism · Bessarion · Renaissance Hermetism · Cambridge Platonism · Hermes Trismegistus · Cornelius Agrippa · The One · Emanation