sign in sign up
<<
Home , Numenius of Apamea, On Virtue

CHAPTER 14 on Power, on Wisdom, and on

Michael J. B. Allen

One can wholly understand Ficino’s attraction to the ancient observation as- cribed to the second century Pythagorean, Numenius of Apamea, that ‘was nothing other than a second Moses speaking Attic Greek’.1 Indeed, in a let- ter written towards the very end of his life to Jacopo Rondini, bishop of Rimini, Ficino boldly calls Plato a ‘follower’ (sectator) of Moses.2 And in a letter to Braccio Martelli, he writes that Plato’s thought was in derivative accord (concor- dia) with that of Moses.3 At all events, the supposed author of the Pentateuch and the Lawgiver of the chosen people played a complex, though still a largely unresearched role in the unfolding of Ficino’s .4 At the conclusion of this tributary paper to Jill, our beloved and most learned colleague, I will focus on one aspect of the iconography that attends Moses and that derives, I believe, from the notion of virtue—virtue not so much as a single concept as a multi-faceted conceptualization that involves both wisdom and power. It is tied in part to the cognate notion voiced in the letter to Martelli: namely that Plato’s reference in the 322 BC to mankind’s having received the law as a gift from Hermes acting at Zeus’s behest is an allusion to Moses acting as

1 Cited, for instance in Ficino’s Platonic Theology, 17.4.6, ed. and tr. Michael Allen and James Hankins, 6 vols (Cambridge, MA, 2001–2006), and in his letters to Giovanni Niccolini and Braccio Martelli published in the seventh and eighth books of Ficino’s Epistulae and again in his Opera Omnia (Basel, 1576), 855.1, 866.3—hereafter Opera. The observation derives from , 9.6.9 and 11.10.14; and , Stromata 1.22.150. 2 Dated 2 February 1495 and now in Ficino’s twelfth and last book of letters (Opera 956.2). 3 This letter is entitled Concordia Mosis et Platonis (Opera 866.3–867), though it almost im- mediately proceeds to establish a proper itinerary for reading the dialogues and to address briefly the role of the Platonists in anticipating the fundamental Christian truths. After the opening two sentences it says nothing more about Moses. It is now the seventh letter in book VIII of Ficino’s letters. 4 In the introduction, however, to my edition of Ficino’s commentaries on Dionysius the Areopagite, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 2015), I have emphasized the central role that the Exodus account of Moses’ ascent of Mt. Sinai plays in Ficino’s challenging engagement with Dionysius.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/9789004355323_015 Marsilio Ficino On Power, On Wisdom, And On Moses 299 the ‘sole messenger as it were of ’ (a solo quodam dei nuncio); or at least it serves as a striking analogue. For Hermes too had been entrusted to bestow on humankind ‘the sense of justice itself’ in order that polities might learn to flourish in peace and union, after the preceding savage age, where all the civi- lizing ‘policing’ and ‘political’ skills had been wanting.

1

The scheme of the four goes back to Plato if not earlier and consists of temperance (sôphrosunē), prudence (phronēsis), courage (andreia), and justice (dikaiosunē).5 Sundry arguments in the dialogues, moreover, indi- cate that Plato believed, and long before the Stoics for whom it became a signal belief, that ultimately virtue had to be one, was indeed righteousness or even holiness. We could turn to a number of dialogues, and notably to the intricate and sometimes conflicting arguments in the , , and , but let us stay with the , one of Plato’s earliest dialogues, since it addresses most of the central issues, and since in the later Platonic skopological tradition it is subtitled On Virtue. argues that the individual virtues cannot exist independently of the others and must all be predicated on ‘a common form’ (72C–74A). Witness the contradictions involved in acting with prudence and yet acting unjustly; or in acting with fortitude and yet imprudently, without ‘good sense’ (88B). He also argues that wise people act in order to ensure the good for themselves, however belated or postponed, whereas foolish people, those lacking in wis- dom, end up making a bad choice instead of an available good one (88C–E). Hence wisdom must be seen as fundamental to the pursuit of virtue (88E– 89A.). Socrates realizes, however, that if virtue were synonymous with wisdom, then virtue would be teachable; and he had earlier discounted this is as a pos- sibility (89D). So, to cap his argument, he introduces the alternative notion of ‘correct belief’ or ‘true opinion’ (97B ff.) in lieu of wisdom, proposing that

5 Apart from the general encyclopedia accounts of the virtues and their history, see Jill Kraye’s essay ‘Moral ’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, eds C. B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner and E. Kessler, with Jill Kraye (Cambridge, 1988), 303–386. For an arresting counter view, see the introductory chapter of Michael Moriarty’s Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford, 2011). And for informed specu- lation about the Pythagorean backdrop to Plato’s account of virtue, see John Palmer, ‘The Pythagoreans and Plato’, in A History of , ed. Carl A. Huffman (Cambridge, 2014), 204–226.