Fortunio Liceti Against Marsilio Ficino on the World-Soul and the Origin of Life

CHAPTER FIVE

FORTUNIO LICETI AGAINST MARSILIO FICINO ON THE WORLD-SOUL AND THE ORIGIN OF LIFE

1. Introduction

The name of the Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino has surfaced several times in the previous chapters. To evaluate the impact of his philosophy on early modern science, it is important to consider the application of his metaphysical ideas to natural questions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In spite of some recent studies devoted to cosmology, the fĳields of matter theory and life sciences remain largely unexplored by specialists of Ficino. One of the most crucial problems of these domains is without doubt the origin of life. In this regard, the question of spontaneous generation or “abiogenesis,” that is, the birth of living beings from lifeless matter, is interesting since it illustrates the cause of matter’s activ- ity and its animation or ensoulment.1 Ficino actually used this phenom- enon as crucial evidence toward his thesis on universal animation. Thus the present chapter will focus on his theory of spontaneous generation. For this purpose, the criticism formulated by Fortunio Liceti (1577–1657), a Paduan professor of philosophy and a friend of Galileo Galilei (1564– 1642), seems to serve as the best guide.2 In his work On the Spontaneous

1 See Edmund O. von Lippmann, Urzeugung und Lebenskraft: Zur Geschichte dieser Probleme von den ältesten Zeiten an bis zu den Anfängen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1933); Jean Rostand, La genèse de la vie: histoire des idées sur la génération spontanée (Paris, 1943); John Farley, The Spontaneous Generation Controversy from Descartes to Oparin (Baltimore, 1974); Everett Mendelsohn, “Philosophical Biology vs Experimental Biology: Spontaneous Generation in the Seventeenth Century,” in Topics in the Philosophy of Biology, ed. Marjorie Grene (Dordrecht, 1976), 37–65; Remke Kruk, “A Frothy Bubble: Spontaneous Generation in the Medieval Islamic Tradition,” Journal of Semitic Studies 35 (1990), 265–82; Maaike Van Der Lugt, Le ver, le démon et la vierge: les théories médiévales de la génération extraordinaire (Paris, 2004), 131–81; Dag N. Haase, “Spontaneous Generation and the Ontology of Forms in Greek, Arabic, and Medieval Latin Sources,” in Classical Arabic Philosophy: Source and Reception, ed. Peter Adamson (London, 2007), 150–75. 2 On Liceti, see Dizionario biografĳico degli italiani 65 (2005), 69–73; Jean-Pierre Nicéron, Mémoires pour servir à la vie des hommes illustres dans la République des Lettres (Paris, 1734), XXVII: 373–92; Vasilij Zoubov, “Une théorie aristotélicienne de la lumière du XVIIe siècle,” Isis 24 (1935–36), 343–60; Giuseppe Ongaro, “La generazione e il ‘moto’ del sangue nel pensiero di F. Liceti,” Castalia: rivista di storia della medicina 20 (1964), 75–94; idem, 124 chapter five

Generation of Living Beings (De spontaneo viventium ortu), published in Vicenza (near Padua) in 1618, Liceti not only surveyed a wide range of existing ideas related to spontaneous generation but also devoted exten- sive analysis to this very theory of Ficino.3 Although Liceti is little known to historians today, his discussion enjoyed much success in its day and was widely difffused beyond the Alps in the seventeenth century through the works of Daniel Sennert. In Italy too, Liceti’s theory was well known, being literally absorbed into the writings of Athanasius Kircher, who pro- voked intense debates on the issue all over Europe.4 From antiquity, the problem of spontaneous generation was often linked to the idea of universal animation. To explain its mechanism, Aris- totle argued in his Generation of Animals, 3.11, that the pneuma resides in the earth’s humidity and conveys a “soul-heat” (thermotês psuchikê) every- where in the world, so that “all things are in a sense full of soul.”5 One of his most successful Greek commentators, Themistius, then connected the Platonic idea of the World-Soul to spontaneous generation more explic- itly. His theory was widely difffused through a quotation made by Aver- roes in his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 12.18.6 Averroes’s

“L’opera medica di Fortunio Liceti (nota preliminari),” in Atti del XX° congresso nazionale di storia della medicina (Rome, 1965), 235–44; Marilena Marangio, “I problemi della scienza nel carteggio Liceti-Galilei,” Bollettino di storia della fĳilosofĳia 1 (1973), 333–50. More recently, see Andreas Blank, “Material Souls and Imagination in Late Aristotelian Embryology,” Annals of Science 67 (2010), 1–18, which was published after my article on Liceti. 3 Fortunio Liceti, De spontaneo viventium ortu (Vicenza, 1618), 1.99, 98 = book 1, chapter 99, page 98. The BIU Santé has digitized this treatise in the project “The Medical Context of the Scientifĳic Revolution.” 4 See Ch. 6 of the present volume; Hiro Hirai, “Interprétation chymique de la création et origine corpusculaire de la vie chez Athanasius Kircher,” Annals of Science 64 (2007), 217–34; idem, “Athanasius Kircher’s Chymical Interpretation of the Creation and Spon- taneous Generation,” in Chymists and Chymistry: Studies in the History of Alchemy and Early Modern Chemistry, ed. Lawrence M. Principe (New York, 2007), 77–87; Pascal Duris, “L’introuvable révolution scientifĳique: Francesco Redi et la génération spontanée,” Annals of Science 67 (2010), 1–25. 5 Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 3.11, 762a18–21. Cf. Friedrich Solmsen, “The Vital Heat, the Inborn Pneuma and the Aether,” Journal of Hellenistic Studies 77 (1957), 119–23, esp. 122; Gad Freudenthal, Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance: Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul (Oxford, 1995), 123, 127. On the World-Soul, see among others Joseph Moreau, L’âme du monde de Platon aux Stoïciens (Paris, 1939); David E. Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmology (Columbus, 1977); Tullio Gregory, Anima mundi: la fĳilosofĳia di Guglielmo di Conches e la scuola di Chartres (Florence, 1955); Hiro Hirai, Le concept de semence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: de Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi (Turnhout, 2005), 141–45; idem, “L’âme du monde chez Juste Lipse entre théologie cosmique romaine et prisca theologia renaissante,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 93 (2009), 251–73. 6 Themistius, Paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 12.3 (Landauer, 9 = Brague, 64) on Aristotle, Metaphysics, 12.3, 1070a27–30. On Themistius’s treatise, see Shlomo Pinès, “Some