KNOW THYSELF: MARSILIO FICINO ON REVELATION, WISDOM, AND REFORM by James Sommerville A thesis submitted to the Department of History In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (January, 2015) Copyright ©James Sommerville, 2015 Abstract Marsilio Ficino’s Latin writings contain within them a program of clerical, social, and political reform. The agent of such reform was a disciplinary apparatus called know thyself. Through know thyself, an ideal philosopher would emerge. This philosopher had the potential to become, in time, a prophet. Ficino built his apparatus out of parts borrowed from the writings of the Platonists, early Christian monastics, and Ciceronians. It amounted to a process of daemonic combat, fasting and prayer. Citizens, under the Ficinian prophet, would be made to practice these arts in order to convert themselves to the truth contained in God’s light. The prophet would reform society and the church in order to eliminate heresy and ward off the influence of evil daemons. Ficino, looking at an Italian intellectual culture that denied the immortality of the soul and encouraged children to seek the praise of glory, wished to return society to its humble, devoted roots. There had once been a Golden Age of man, a reign of Saturn prior to the Flood. Know thyself would return man to that age and that kingdom. ii Acknowledgements In writing this book I have largely stuck to myself. As a friend says: “you do you.” This book is about as me as it comes. As such, all of the errors contained within are my own fault. But, having said that, I would like to thank my supervisor, Anthony D’Elia, for giving me the space and freedom to follow my Muse. In addition, I would like to say that the comments and suggestions offered by the members of the The Academy for the Advanced Study of the Renaissance, generously headed by Edward Muir and Regina Schwartz, were invaluable to me. I cannot thank my fellow participants enough. You are, each of you, remarkable. Finally, I would like to thank Cynthia for putting up with me over the years. Your patience and support made all the difference. This book was totally worth it Turk! iii Table of Contents Abstract....................................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ............................................................................................................................................. v Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2 Ficino ....................................................................................................................................... 33 Chapter 3 Know Thyself ........................................................................................................................... 61 Chapter 4 Revelation .............................................................................................................................. 109 Chapter 5 Wisdom .................................................................................................................................. 156 Chapter 6 Reform ................................................................................................................................... 205 Chapter 7 Conclusion.............................................................................................................................. 256 Appendix A Body and Cosmos ............................................................................................................... 265 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................................... 276 iv List of Figures Ficino’s Cosmos 1 266 Ficino’s Cosmos 2 269 Ficino’s Cosmos 3 274 v Chapter 1 Introduction This is the story of an appartus. The apparatus was constructed by Marsilio Ficino of Florence (1433-1499). He placed its various parts into letters, sermons, philosophical treatises, medical instruction manuals, and commentaries. When assembled and activated, it captures bodies, forming and disciplining them. It nullifies psychic landscapes, emptying them of imaginative content. In the remaining white space of mind, the apparatus builds a world of lines, angles, and rotating spheres. It teaches men how to die and ascend to heaven. This dissertation is an attempt to reconstruct Ficino’s apparatus, to describe its origins, functionality, and desired effects. Ficino constructed his apparatus, which I call know thyself, using parts taken from other similar constructs—those of the Platonists, Ciceronians, and monastics. Using it, he intended to reform the political, intellectual, and religious culture not only of Florence, but Italy. Know thyself would replace the standard grammar school and university curricula, creating a learned elite devoted to God in religio. Religious men would reorganize the state so that it resembled that of the Golden Age of angelic order that existed before the onset of sin. Know thyself would overcome the deceptions and heresies incited by evil daemons in this fallen world. Capturing, forming, shaping, conditioning, the apparatus would set Christians free. Ficino was the son of a physician to the ruling Medici family of Florence. Born in Figline Valdano, the young Ficino was given a grammar school education and then 1 enrolled in the University of Florence prior to its closure and relocation to Pisa.1 Like many Florentine youth, he participated in confraternal gatherings, ostensibly reenacting a Pauline spirituality.2 During this formative period Ficino learned the rudiments of scholastic philosophical method and the arts of the late-medieval physician. He also acquired a knowledge of Greek language.3 Associating himself with the learned Camaldolese monastics of Santa Maria degli Angeli and the theologians of the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella and the Augustinian Santo Spirito, Ficino studied manuscript copies of Greek and Latin patristic literature.4 For a brief period, ending in the 1450s, Ficino experimented with Epicureanism, having read the life of Epicurus in a recently translated version of Diogenes Laertius’ The Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers and the newly recovered copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things.5 However, this encounter with atomistic materialism, combined with Ficino’s tendency toward mental illness, precipitated a spiritual crisis that inspired in Ficino a full- throated rejection of the doctrine.6 Ficino turned instead to the Christian Fathers, especially to the fourth-century bishop of Hippo, Augustine, and to the thirteenth-century Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas.7 He also turned resolutely toward the works of 1James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, Two Volumes (Brill, 1990): 1.269-271 2 Ibid: 276 3 Ibid: 271-276 4 Charles L. Stinger, Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari (1386-1438) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissane (State University of New York Press, 1977): 75, 114-117; Dennis F. Lackner, “The Camaldolese Academy: Ambrogio Traversari, Marsilio Ficino, and the Christian Platonic Tradition,” in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, edited by Michael J.B. Allen and Valery Rees, with Martin Davies (Brill, 2002): 30 5 Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Harvard University Press, 2010): 21-23 6 Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance: 1.279 7 Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Augustine and the Early Renaissance,” in Studies in Renaissance Arts and Letters, Four Volumes (Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1956-1996): 3.368; Ardis B. Collins, The Secular is Sacred: Platonism and Thomism in Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology (Martinus Nijoff, 1974): x 2 Plato and the Platonists. This redirection toward Christian theology and Platonism would largely determine the shape of the rest of Ficino’s life. Under the influence of a Platonizing Christianity, Ficino became a priest in 1473, elected later to the parish of San Cristoforo a Novoli, a small church outside the Florentine city-centre.8 Between 1469 and 1474, he would produce On Christian Religion, a Platonizing imitation of Aquinas Summa Contra Gentiles, and Platonic Theology, an eighteen-book treatise arguing for the immortality of the soul and the reality of divine Providence. In 1487, Ficino became a canon of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence’s cathedral. Throughout his career as a priest, among the monks of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Ficino preached the Highest Good, equating it with God and love.9 The monastery’s library would later hold many of Ficino’s works.10 Ficino’s extant collected works contain sermons, dialogues, letters, and commentaries dedicated to mankind’s relationship with God, the Gospels, and to Paul’s Epistles. Indeed, one of Ficino’s last, unfinished works was an extended commentary of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, likely composed in opposition to the prophecies of Giorlamo Savonarola, Dominican theocrat of Florence at the end of the millennium.11 Ficino had translated, at least in draft form, all of Plato’s dialogues by 1468-69. In 1469 he produced a commentary on Plato’s Symposium