Ficinian Influence on Henry More's Arguments for The

FICINIAN INFLUENCE ON HENRY MORE’S ARGUMENTS FOR THE SOUL’S IMMORTALITY

David Leech

Since the publication of Cassirer’s Die Platonische Renaissance in England (1932) it has become a commonplace of Cambridge Platonism scholarship that the Cambridge Platonists owe a great intellectual debt to Ficino.1 The English Platonists share in the philosophia perennis ideal, and behind the works of the Cambridge thinkers is the silent presence of the Ficino translations of Plato and many of the late- antique Platonists without which the Platonism cultivated by figures such as Whichcote, Cudworth and More would not have taken the shape it did. However, it is also a fact that despite their readiness to quote sources there is a surprising lack of direct references to Ficino in the Cambridge Platonists, which makes tracing Ficino’s influence, beyond true but very broad generalities, more difficult. This is no doubt one of the reasons why the detailed work of finding out in which respects Cambridge Platonism is Ficinian has by and large not been attempted, although it is a desideratum of scholarship that this be done if we are to form a more exact idea of the nature and extent of the influence.2 In the present essay I propose to make a small contribution in that direction by examining probable traces of Ficino’s influence on the seminal Cambridge Platonist Henry More’s arguments for the immortality of the soul, a doctrine as central to the latter philosopher as it was

1 Ernst Cassirer, Die Platonische Renaissance in England und die Schule von Cam- bridge, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, 24 (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1932). 2 For existing studies concerning Ficino’s influence on More, see Craig A. Stau- denbaur, ‘Galileo, Ficino and Henry More’s Psychathanasia’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968): 565–78; Alexander Jacob, ‘Henry More’s Psychodia Platonica and its Relationship to Marsilio Ficino’s Theologia Platonica’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 46 (1985): 503–22; Sarah Hutton, ‘Henry More, Ficino and Plotinus: The Continuity of Renaissance Platonism’, in Forme del neoplatonismo. Dall’eredità ficiniana ai pla- tonici di Cambridge. Atti del Convegno (Firenze, 25–27 ottobre 2001), edited by Luisa Simonutti (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2007), pp. 281–96. In More’s large corpus, Ficino is mentioned very infrequently. For the lack of significant direct citation of Ficino in the works of More and of the Cambridge Platonists generally, see Hutton, ‘Henry More, Ficino and Plotinus’. 302 david leech

(famously) to the former, and where we would consequently expect to find a concrete influence.3 In the first part I shall consider some of the evidence for Ficinian influence in More’s embryonic (and not always mutually consistent) arguments for the soul’s immortality in his early philosophical poems. In the second part, I will take a deeper look at how More made selective use of his Ficinian borrowings, abandoning some by the time of his mature prose works while retaining others, but putting them to uses which go beyond his Florentine source. * * * More’s arguments for the soul’s immortality have generally been examined within the context of his controversies with Descartes and Hobbes. However, prior to the arrival onto the English philosophical scene of these famous adversaries, More had already outlined vari- ous arguments in defence of the soul’s immortality in his early poems which were meant to counter older threats to the doctrine, amongst them Italian Averroism, and it is to this earlier context that we must primarily turn if we are to look for Ficinian influence on More. More’s philosophical poems are a good place to start in considering the ques- tion of a Ficinian influence on his arguments for the soul’s immortality, since we know that Ficino was one of the authors he had read shortly before their composition. We learn from More’s own testimony in the General Preface of his Opera Omnia (1679) that by about 1634–5 he had become disenchanted with scholasticism, and in particular the School doctrine of the soul. More seems to have entered into a spiritual crisis at about this time, and over the following four years (1636–40) underwent a period of spiritual conflict, during which time he reports that he benefited from reading certain Platonic authors. The ‘Platonick Writers’ he refers to are ‘Marsilius Ficinus, Plotinus himself, Mercurius Trismegistus; and the Mystical Divines.’4

3 Cf. Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, translated by Virginia Conant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), p. 346. More was also intensely preoccupied with the topic and devoted what is often regarded as his most important work, the Immortality of the Soul (1659), to its demonstration. 4 Henry More, Opera Omnia, 3 vols. (London, 1679), vol. 2, ‘Preface General’, section 10, translated in Richard Ward, The Life of Henry More by Richard Ward (1710), edited by Cecil Courtney, Sarah Hutton, Michelle Courtney, Robert Crocker and A. Rupert Hall, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées, 167 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 18–20.