Today the Republic is certainly one of the most popular works assigned in university classrooms. The Laws by contrast are normally studied only by more advanced students of Plato. Given the centrality of the Republic and the peripheral place of the Laws to many modern understandings of Plato, Ficino’s interpretation might appear at first glance odd or simply wrong. Yet a few recent interpreters, like Ficino, have identified of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws as Plato, albeit for different reasons.34 The Republic has a central role in Ficino’s interpretation of Plato, but often for reasons alien to Plato scholars today. Simply stated, the supposed Pythagorean dimensions in the Republic and in Plato’s works as a whole take on an importance for Ficino rarely found today.
Beyond this historical interest, Ficino’s reading of the Platonic corpus through a series of personae may have the salutary effect of distancing and destabilizing our own hermeneutical prejudices towards the Platonic corpus. They force us to think about our own interpretation of Plato in the longue durée of Plato interpretations.35 Renaissance philosophy has long endured the disparagements of eclecticism, syncretism, and lack of system that has been flung in its direction on occasion since the time of Johann Jakob Brucker (1696–1770).36 In certain respects there is a way in which Ficino’s Plato is more familiar to present readers than some ancient traditions of Platonism. On the one hand, we possess much more of Ficino’s writings than the fragmentary works of some Academic or Middle Platonists. With Ficino we are even better off than with most Neoplatonists for whom we still have many of their voluminous commentaries. Yet, on the other hand, Ficino stands at a point of convergence of many of these older interpretive traditions. To understand Ficino’s Plato, therefore, one needs to study both Ficino’s writings and the ancient interpretations of Plato that he appropriates.
Ficino’s Platonism is interesting precisely because he values Platonic traditions. As I argue at the end of this book, it is specifically the question of tradition that sets him apart from most interpretations of Plato inherited from Schleiermacher that were, until very recently, completely dominant. But there is at present a return—and a strong one at that—to studying philosophical traditions. The fields of Middle Platonism and Neoplatonism are more fruitful now than they have ever been. Similarly, to take another example, the study of late ancient Aristotelian commentaries is now much more advanced than a generation ago. For too long and primarily because of questions of canon formation in the nineteenth century, the study of Renaissance philosophy and intellectual history has suffered the same fate as that of late antiquity: marginalization.37 A reappraisal of Ficino’s reading of Plato—a reading in which traditions of Platonic interpretations form a bedrock to his hermeneutics—promises to contribute to the project of rereading Plato in traditions of interpretation.38
Ficino’s Plato is also important insofar as he wrestles with the dominant hermeneutical framework of Augustine that he inherited. I am not the first to note Ficino’s engagement with Augustine. Some, for instance, have written that Ficino is simply Augustinian in his approach to Plato. If there is a lot of Augustine in Ficino’s thinking it is because the bishop is always on the horizon. As Ficino was a Catholic priest and theologian invested in Platonism, it would be a surprise if it were otherwise.39 More broadly, it is also the case that Christianity is almost always present, even if only in the background, in Ficino’s interpretation of Plato. But it is to his great credit that Ficino attempts to untangle Plato and Platonic traditions from Augustine’s hermeneutics, even as he employs it frequently. It is in no small measure because of the critical impact of Platonism on Augustine’s own thinking that the study of Plato and Platonists was neglected, diminished, or subsumed under different goals in the Latin West (I do not wish to pronounce on the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, where Augustine exercised no such power). Why learn virtue from Socrates if, as Augustine believes, the ancient pagan virtues were not real virtues at all? I explain Ficino’s answer in Chapter 3. Although Ficino does not avow any kind of paganism, I will argue that he defends Socratic virtue forcefully by writing the De amore in the authorial voice of a Platonist qua pagan. Why study Plato if he does not have revealed truth? For Augustine he is valuable only if a reader pillages him for his philosophical treasures in the manner of the Israelites stealing from the Egyptians. Such Augustinian hermeneutics in effect converts and appropriates central Platonic doctrines to Christian theology and discards what remains of Platonic writings.40 Augustine’s attitude marginalizes Platonism as a whole even as he makes his study of the “books of the Platonists” the crucial propaedeutic for his conversion to Christianity. For Augustine, Platonism might begin to steer one in the right direction, but if one persists as a Platonist one will remain adrift in Platonism, to use his metaphor of the nostos (also favored by Plotinus), or, worse, one will sink under its waves or will wreck on its reefs and will never reach the true fatherland.41
Augustine paradoxically succeeded in marginalizing the texts of Plato and the Platonists for the Middle Ages, even despite or more accurately because of his own debt to Platonic traditions. Nor were Platonic traditions any more successful than Plato: Plotinus was not read in the Middle Ages perhaps simply because his philosophy was thought to have been superseded by Christian theology. Indeed, small but significant portions of his and Proclus’s philosophies were read extensively (and even became part of the Faculty of Arts curriculum at the University of Paris in 1255) in the Latin translation of a ninth-century Arabic collection of reworked paraphrases, known in Latin as the Liber de causis. Yet this work is stripped of all explicit references identifying it with Plotinus or Proclus. Porphyry’s introduction to logic, the Isagoge, was safe enough to read in scholastic classrooms as a preparation for Aristotle’s Organon, but the bulk of Porphyry’s philosophical writings (the Sententiae and the De abstinentia, for example) were not. Porphyry was of course preceded by his reputation. Since the Christian emperors Valentinian III and Theodosius II ordered that all copies of his Contra Christianos be burned, his polemics against Christianity survive only in fragments in the writings of church fathers who sought to refute him. As for Proclus, despite having a very large influence on scholasticism primarily through the Liber de causis, William of Moerbeke’s († before 1286) translations of the Elements of Theology and On Providence and Fate, a partial anonymous translation of the Elements of Physics, and the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (fl. c. late fifth or early sixth century CE), he too held a tenuous position.42 Medieval philosophers and theologians suspected his paganism and read neither his commentaries on Plato nor his Platonic Theology. Most other later Platonists (Iamblichus, Olympiodorus, Hermias, et al.) seem to have been ignored. However, the underground rivers of Platonism that watered the writings of Christian theologians and philosophers from late antiquity into the Middle Ages—often without their knowledge—fed into Ficino’s writings. Ficino tapped into the implicit Platonic sources of many Christian writings to irrigate the grounds of his explicitly Platonic projects.
Regardless of his role as a reviver of Platonism, I view his work in continuity with the previous centuries of medieval thought. This is evident from the fact that he is a dedicated reader of such authorities as Boethius (c. 475/7–c. 526 CE), Aquinas (1225–74), and especially Pseudo-Dionysius and that he completed his first translations of Platonic works, probably Proclus’s Elements of Theology and Elements of Physics, in a thoroughly scholastic context.43 Indeed, it is because so much Platonism and Neoplatonism forms part of the very fabric of various traditions of Christian theology—and not only because of Augustine—that Ficino is able to bring it to life. What distinguishes him from his predecessors is that he greatly expands the canon of Platonic works at an incredible pace—Plato’s complete corpus, Plotinus’s Enneads, as well as much of what survives of Alcinous, Porphyry, Iamblichus, and Proclus, to name the most obvious. With new sources come new perspectives. As a prime example, Pseudo-Dionysius was an authority both to Ficino and his predecessors, but in Ficino’s hands he takes on even greater importance specifically as a Platonic authority. In his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius, Ficino draws on Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus in ways that would have been impossible for writers of earlier generations. He still accepted the apocryphal conversion narrative
