epistemology that posits the human intellect as a blank slate capable of becoming like anything that it intelligizes. On the contrary, something of the divine intelligibles is communicated to all human intellects insofar as a portion of our intellects always touches the Intellect.
Thus Ficino’s Platonic arguments in the previously quoted letter to Givoanni Cavalcanti, where Ficino recounts his philosophical discussions with Bernardo Giugni and Bartolomeo Fortini, can be distilled accordingly: the intellect is not only identical to its thinking, the human intellect becomes like the divine Intellect—like a form of divine painting—when it intelligizes. Here are Ficino’s words: “From intellect to intellect, from light to light. How easily does this happen? Most easily: for on account of a certain natural relationship, visible light immediately illuminates a transparent medium when it is first clear and pure, and visible light forms it into this very form, and through its own form, it forms the forms of all visible things. Similarly, the intelligible and the hyperintelligible light, that is God, forms the transparent intellectual medium, when it is first clear; it forms, I say, its form, and this is divine, and through this form, it forms all intelligibles into forms.”115 It is because of this common participation in the divine Intellect that humans can truly know one another. Ficino is not simply appealing to fairly common Augustinian theories of divine illumination on human thought. In his explaining the identity of the knower both with the known and with the divine, it is apparent that Ficino draws directly on Neoplatonism. Beginning with Plotinus, the late ancient Neoplatonists themselves had long appropriated Aristotle’s identity thesis between the intellect and what it thinks in order to argue that the Intellect qua hypostasis is identical to the intelligible forms. What is more, by his calling God hyperintelligible it is also clear that the explanation Ficino offers is based on a Neoplatonic philosophy of emanation. Even though the Neoplatonic Intellect is the first being, it is nevertheless posterior to the One. Ficino’s God is thus akin to the One as hyperintelligible and thus also, to use the language of Proclus, beyond being, or hyperousios. The exercise in Socratic self-knowledge of Ficino’s Platonic epistolography reveals that when one knows oneself through knowing another, one also begins to know God. Instead of positing that one knows others as though they were painted images external to us, like separate objects, in his correspondence Ficino expresses the unification of persons according to an identity thesis between intellect and what it intellegizes—all the while distinguishing his thinking from the Averroist theory of the single intellect. Ficino appreciated Plotinus’s description of the Intellect as a many-faced or innumerably-faced being, glowing with individual living faces.116 The communicated participation between two persons and God, both visual and sonorous, is expressed according to a metaphysics of light, which Ficino often understands according to geometrical optics whereby a voice is projected on a linear vector to touch its listener like a ray of light extending a transparent medium (diaphane).117 Ficino becomes like his interlocutors in his letters, and in turn, following the goal of deification or assimilating to the divine in the Theaetetus, he becomes like God.
At first glance one can understand Ficino’s Platonic letters as a correspondence network strengthening the social bonds of fifteenth-century philosophers, theologians, poets, statesmen, and scholars. That is, they simply perform a literary game in which members of an inner circle of elites are cast in roles played for their own amusement. They do indeed form a network of connections. In a famous letter to the aforementioned Martinus Uranius, Ficino catalogues a long list of his friends for his German correspondent. He classifies them into three kinds (genera): first, his Medici patrons, which he characterizes as a race of heroes; second, auditors (auditores), who are not necessarily disciples but friendly acquaintances and partners in dialogues who share a common bond in the liberal arts (included in this group are the likes of Naldo Naldi, Cristoforo Landino, Leon Battista Alberti, Platina, Demetrius Chalcocondyles, Poliziano, Pierleone Leoni, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, to name a few); and third, auditors who are Ficino’s students and disciples (including the likes of Filippo Valori and Filippo Carducci, Giovanni Nesi, Giovanni Guicciardini, Francesco Cattani da Diacceto, and Niccolò Valori).118 Documenting the interlocutors who participated in the epistolary games Ficino played, this letter certainly records the long reach of his cultural influence in his own day. The particular rules of the game are not arbitrary, however. The letters constitute a discursive process that encourages one to reflect Socratically on self-knowledge as an engagement with another. Ficino explicitly formulates this exercise in self-knowledge as something like a network uniting humanists—liberalium disciplinarum communione—in a common Platonic republic of letters: “For since neither should I nor would I ever want to be away from my friends, and since my very self is not only in Italy in me myself, but also in you in Germany, it is appropriate that I desire my friends here to be there also with me. Know that all these friends have been vetted with respect to their ingenium and character.”119 Playing variations on similar rhetorical themes of philosophical love, very often a letter’s author’s absence also leads Marsilio to reflect on Plato’s famous sayings on orality and writing at the end of the Phaedrus. Like Plato’s dialogue, Ficino’s letters exhibit dialogic traits: on one side of the coin, Ficino studies the consequences of the written rhetorical persona to reveal the existence of an interior prediscursive self that participates in a divine principle of unification; on the reverse side, however, the very same letters also present Ficino’s discursive exterior public persona with the mask of the Platonic philosopher.
Once more a comparison to later Renaissance depictions of Socratic philosophy is appropriate. In a painting by Pietro della Vecchia (1603–78) Socrates and a pupil, likely Theaetetus, study the similarities and differences in each other’s faces (Figure 9).120 There are differences between della Vecchia’s painting and Plato’s Theaetetus. Unlike the figures in the painting, Socrates and Theaetetus have snub-nosed faces. In the dialogue, Theaetetus has just oiled himself in a gymnasium, while in the canvas he is fully clothed—and not in ancient Greek garb. The painting is therefore not an exact realistic representation of the dialogue’s dramatic setting. Still, even if della Vecchia does not depict Socrates and Theaetetus’s physical likenesses, he (like Ficino’s letters) depicts their philosophic and dialogic roles. Their glances meet in the mirror, showing that a shared attention and dialogue with one another unites them in their self-knowledge.121 A third figure meets the gaze of the viewers of the canvas, inviting them into the same discursive process of self-knowledge. His hand holds a book in one version and a paper, perhaps a letter, in the other. Their exact contents are unclear, but philosophical elements are visible: geometric shapes, perhaps squares of opposition, or schematizations of arguments and concepts, as was fairly common in manuscripts and early modern books. These texts in the paintings are analogous to the canvases and face the readers/viewers as mirrors for their selves—mirrors that not only reflect external objects as though they were different images but also unify the reflected selves in the same way that the intellect ought to be identified with what it intelligizes when it self-reflects. Ficino’s intimate letters to friends are of course intended for a wider audience. One imagines that Ficino would like his letters to attract the gaze of all readers who, when confronted with the reflections of Cavalcanti and Ficino, would also be faced with their own as though in a hall of mirrors.
FIGURE 9. Socrates and Two Students (Know Thyself), by Pietro della Vecchia, c. 1650–60. Prado Museum, Madrid.
CHAPTER 2
Ficino and the Platonic Corpus
Moreover, one can certainly conjecture that the titles of these dialogues proceed in an ordered mode of succession from this reason, because the desire for the Good is inborn in all.
Therefore in the Phaedo and the Theaetetus Plato says the soul’s highest good is to be like God.
—Ficino, The Philebus Commentary
