Marsilio Ficino

Marsilio Ficino (born October 19, 1433, Figline, republic of Florence [Italy]—died October 1, 1499, Careggi, near Florence) was an Italian philosopher, theologian, and linguist whose translations and commentaries on the writings of Plato and other classical Greek authors generated the Florentine Platonist Renaissance that influenced European thought for two centuries.

Ficino was the son of a physician who was acquainted with the Florentine ruler and patron of learning Cosimo de’ Medici. After being trained in Latin language and literature, Ficino studied Aristotelian philosophy and medicine, probably at Florence. He was introduced to the Latin versions of the works of Plato and the Neoplatonists by such Western writers as Augustine of Hippo (5th century) and the leading medieval scholastic Thomas Aquinas. He then acquired a thorough knowledge of Greek in order to read and interpret the classical philosophers in their original texts. Supported by Cosimo de’ Medici and his successors, he devoted the remainder of his life to the translation and interpretation of Plato and the succeeding Platonic school, whose thought he attempted to integrate more closely with Christian theology.

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In 1462 Ficino became head of the Platonic Academy of Florence. Situated at the Medici villa at Careggi, outside Florence, the academy with its endowment of Greek manuscripts became one of the foremost intellectual centres of Europe. Ficino’s numerous translations from Greek into Latin include some Neoplatonic and early Christian writings and, above all, the complete works of Plato and the 3rd-century Neoplatonist Plotinus. Finished about 1470 but not printed until 1484, Ficino’s was the first complete translation of Plato into any European language. His versions of both Plato and Plotinus remained in general use until the 18th century.

Ficino was ordained a priest in 1473 and later was named a church official of Florence Cathedral. He was closely identified with the Medici family as protégé and tutor, and he retired to the Tuscan countryside after the expulsion of the Medici from Florence in 1494.

Noteworthy among Ficino’s commentaries are those on Plato’s Symposium (1469), also called De amore (“On Love”), and on various treatises of Plotinus. Of his original writings the Theologia Platonica (1482; “Platonic Theology”), actually a philosophical study of the soul, and the Liber de Christiana religione (1474; “Book on the Christian Religion”) are the most significant. His thought also was expressed in a collection of letters and in De vita libri tres (1489; “Three Books on Life”), a series of tracts on medicine and astrology.

Ficino revised the thought of Plato in a Renaissance perspective. In conceiving the universe as a hierarchy of substances that descends from God to matter, he was strongly influenced by Neoplatonic and medieval views. Yet in assigning to the human soul a privileged, central place in this hierarchy and stressing that the soul through its universal, infinite aspirations and thoughts links the highest with the lowest beings and acts as a bond and knot of the universe, Ficino reveals his affinity with the thought of Renaissance humanism, which gave special emphasis to man and his dignity. Seeing a parallel in the Platonic and Christian concept of love, he explained in his commentary on the Symposium that the highest form of human love and friendship is a communion based ultimately on the soul’s love for God. This theory of spiritual, or “Platonic,” love dominated European poetry and literature during the 16th century.

Ficino’s interpretation of Platonism greatly influenced subsequent European thought. His teaching that man naturally tends toward religion, distinguishing him from the lower animals, and that all religions have a measure of truth, appears to have inspired 17th-century deist thought as exemplified in Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury. Not only the 17th-century Cambridge Platonists but similar movements in France and Italy reflect Ficino’s original Platonist revival.