Christianity, the Platonists, hiding their true opinion, can deceive and lead their readers astray from Christianity.
No one shaped Plato’s reception in the Latin West more than Augustine, but perhaps the strongest accusations against Plato’s confused style in the quattrocento came from the Greeks. The De differentis of Georgius Gemistus Pletho (c. 1355–1454) raised the stakes in the Latin West by sending the first volley in a series of exchanges, commonly known as the Plato-Aristotle controversies, that were largely contested between Greek scholars and émigrés.13 There is no need to step into the fray to study the Byzantine origins of these debates or to survey the question as a whole, but I do wish to discuss briefly the exchanges from the second generation of the controversy, between George of Trebizond (1395–1472/3) and Cardinal Bessarion (1403–72), particularly because Ficino was aware of them, and it was George who, despite translating Plato’s Parmenides and Laws, waged the Greek war on Plato on a Latin front.14 Drawing on his native knowledge of Greek, his translations of Plato, and his studies of rhetoric and Aristotelian philosophy, George critiqued Plato in his Comparatio Platonis et Aristotelis (1458), among other reasons, for being an inferior philosopher to Aristotle (in the fields of rhetoric, dialectic, logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics), for being incompatible with Christianity, for being a hotbed of heresies and vices, and for having a confused style. George largely dismisses Plato’s dialogic form, claiming that the argumentative method of Platonic dialectic is far coarser (rudis) than Aristotle’s demonstrations and syllogistics. Addressing the question why Plato is famous for his style, George asks, “But where did Plato teach on rhetorical invention? Where did he communicate lessons on eloquence? Where on poetics? For this subject also concerns greatly what he says, did this scholar of myths teach anything about his own vigilance and expertise? But Aristotle opened the fonts of poetics and disclosed the rivers of oratory.”15 Similarly, if one studies and imitates Plato’s prose, George believes, one realizes that Plato’s elevated and sublime style is nothing more than a confusion of symbols and enigmas.16 In comparing Plato to Aristotle, George in effect presents a dogmatic Plato who is inferior in rank to the dogmatisms of Aristotle and Christianity. In sum, George wrote that Plato’s dialogues were poor teachers of style and philosophy, as well as being unorthodox or heretical works.
Bessarion, as everyone knows, responded. First writing the In calumniatorem Platonis in Greek and later composing and circulating the work with the help of Niccolò Perotti’s (1429–80) Latin, he drew on a much larger corpus of Neoplatonic texts to come to Plato’s aid. The broad strokes of Bessarion’s response to George are to present a dogmatic Plato who, at the bedrock of his argument, is largely a Pythagorean who does not divulge all matters pertaining to the divine to the public. We have seen how Poliziano later adopts a similar strategy, but Bessarion goes much further. In the second chapter of In calumniatorem Platonis, responding to the charge that because of his enigmatic style Plato does not write clear teachings in the manner of Aristotle, Bessarion, like Poliziano, quotes the famous pseudepigraphic letter attributed to the Pythagorean Lysis and written to a certain Hipparchus, who was condemned for having revealed the master’s teachings to noninitiates.17 Bessarion concludes his comparison of Plato with the Pythagorean motivations in the letter: “This mos Pythagoricus was guarded until Plato’s time, and through all of the successors of his school. Plato also always protected this very truth itself most diligently. For Plato taught neither with books, but orally, nor about those matters, which he had taught, did he leave behind books. If he wrote something it is Socrates not Plato himself who speaks. Besides about divine matters he briefly transmits implicit and obscure teachings, which are not easily understood by reading.”18 To support his claims, Bessarion then appeals to Plato’s famous (or infamous) supposed Second Letter to confirm this interpretation of Plato’s oral teachings. Thus, the dialogic role of Socrates only comes into play for Bessarion as a cover to hide Plato’s own unwritten Pythagorean doctrines. In arguing in this manner, Bessarion proleptically stole his adversary’s weapon, that is, the accusation that Plato’s writings were unclear or confused, and turned it against his critic by arguing for the philosophical virtues of Plato’s enigmatic or esoteric style. To drive his point home to a Christian audience, Bessarion compares Plato’s strategy to Matthew 7:6 (as Poliziano once more also does), where it is written that one ought not to give what is sacred to dogs, nor throw pearls to pigs. Plato, therefore, like a good Pythagorean, never wrote down his oral teachings explicitly; he did so only through symbols.
Ficino encompasses some of the same strategies as those listed above, but he is much more complete in trying to fit Plato’s form of writing into a comprehensive hermeneutical understanding of his philosophy. For Ficino, Plato’s style of writing and his chosen dialogic form are directly related to the dialogue’s purpose. In a passage from the preface to his Commentaria in Platonem, addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Ficino describes Plato’s prose as lofty and elevated, reaching sublime heights almost unattainable by human language. Like his predecessors, Ficino thinks Plato calls down the heavens in his writings “as lofty thunder.”19 Ficino’s humility regarding his incapacity to imitate fully Plato’s Greek prose in his Latin translation, or to convey its qualities in his commentaries, only confirms how important Plato’s style was to him. The description of Plato’s prose as lofty and elevated dates back even earlier than its common occurrence among second sophistic authors, such as Dio Chrysostom, who would compare it to Homer’s sublime style. After quoting in his De vita Platonis Aristotle’s opinion, as recorded in Diogenes Laertius (fl. c. third century CE), that Plato’s style flows somewhere between oratorical prose and poetry and that Plato’s writings are full of charm and abundance, Ficino also paraphrases Cicero’s opinion from the Brutus that “if Jupiter wished to speak with a human tongue he would use no other tongue than the one with which Plato speaks,” which is a testament to Plato’s almost divine ability for prosopopoeia. Thus, like some of his humanist contemporaries, Ficino also compares Plato’s style to Homer’s capacity (pace what Plato says himself in the third book of the Republic) to give an adequate voice to the gods.20
Ficino also knows of the comparison by the Alexandrian Longinus (c. 213–73 CE) of the Athenian philosopher’s prose with Homer’s epos through the In Timaeum of Proclus. But because Proclus reiterates in the same breath the quotations from Longinus as well as Plotinus’s opinion that Longinus may have been a philologist but not a philosopher, he reveals a Neoplatonic assessment of stylistic criticism. He does not altogether disregard Plato’s style of writing but rather contends that by keeping his reading of the dialogues only to the level of textual interpretation Longinus misses the point of Plato’s elevated style.21 Proclus probably learned this interpretive approach from his teacher Syrianus († c. 437 CE), who saw in Plato’s different uses of language evidence of divine inspiration, that is, moments often interrupting the dialogues’ conversational logoi where Socrates launches into one of his many myths. These later Neoplatonists are not simply content to repeat tropes regarding the oracular or Homeric qualities of Plato’s style. They compare different passages in the corpus where Plato’s writing changes, and they interpret the philosophical significance of the different stylistic registers.
Hermias’s prosopopoeic interpretation of Socrates’ famous palinode from the Phaedrus is a prime example of this mode of interpreting the dialogues in Syrianus’s school.22 Hermias reminds his readers that after listening to Phaedrus deliver Lysias’s speech that it is best to gratify the nonlover, and before reciprocating with his own discourse on how one ought to avoid the lover, Socrates covers his head and face in order to avoid the shame of the speech’s subject matter.23 Thereafter, Socrates delivers the third speech of the dialogue in the persona of Stesichorus (c. 640–555 BCE), the famous lyric poet who was supposedly blinded for offending Helen with his poetry and who subsequently composed a palinode to recant this offense.24
It is mainly because of his assiduous study of late ancient Neoplatonists that Ficino goes beyond the traditional comparisons of Plato and Homer by quattrocento humanists and interprets philosophical meaning in Plato’s myths. Ficino thus appropriates Hermias’s reading of Socrates’
