Justified True Belief

(●) The Florentine priest who put the whole of Plato into Latin, and who spent eighteen books arguing that a soul made for God cannot be allowed to die. + Before Marsilio Ficino, Europe knew Plato mostly as a rumour. A handful of dialogues had been turned into Latin over the centuries, and educated men knew the name and a few of the doctrines, but nobody in the Latin West could sit down and read Plato the way they could read Aristotle or Cicero. Ficino changed that single-handedly. He translated every dialogue, wrote summaries and commentaries on them, and got the whole thing into print in Florence in 1484. For roughly three hundred years afterwards, when a European opened Plato, the Latin in front of them was his. He did the same for Plotinus, the greatest of the later Platonists, and for a shelf of authors after him. But the translating was never the point for Ficino. He was a physician’s son who became a priest at forty, and he believed his age was suffering from one disease above all others: it had let philosophy and religion drift apart, so that a clever man went to the universities for arguments and to the church for comfort and never expected the two to meet. His answer was to show that the best philosophy the pagan world ever produced runs straight toward the God of Scripture, and that the soul which philosophy studies is the soul which the gospel saves. One fact is worth holding on to. The doctrine he cared about most, the immortality of the human soul, was still an open question in the lecture halls of his day, defended by theologians and doubted by philosophers. Within fifteen years of his death a church council had put it in writing as something every teacher of philosophy was obliged to defend.

(●) 1433 AD: Born in the Arno valley, the son of the doctor who attended Cosimo de’ Medici. + Marsilio Ficino was born on 19 October 1433 at Figline Valdarno, a small town in the hills southeast of Florence. His mother was Alessandra, the daughter of a Florentine citizen; his father, Dietifeci d’Agnolo Ficino, was a physician, and one of his patients was Cosimo de’ Medici, by then among the richest men in Europe and the effective ruler of Florence. The house he grew up in was a doctor’s house, with the pulse-taking and the herbs and the bad nights, and Marsilio never really left it. He spent his life saying he was a physician too, of bodies and of souls, and he meant both halves literally. His schooling is only partly recoverable. Two teachers, Comando Comandi and Luca di San Gimignano, gave him his early Latin. In the 1450s he studied medicine and the scholastic philosophy of the universities, the Aristotle-based system of argument that had governed European thought for two centuries, probably under Niccolò Tignosi, and he learned Greek somewhere along the way, possibly from Francesco da Castiglione, though the records do not settle it. He was a small, anxious, bookish young man who described himself as melancholic, which in the medicine he was being trained in meant weighed down by black bile, the humour his profession blamed for low spirits. In the mid-1450s he began a habit that lasted the rest of his life: writing long philosophical letters to friends. One of them, from 1458, surveys the four schools a young scholar had to choose between, Platonists, Aristotelians, Stoics and Epicureans, and gives more space to the Epicureans than to any of the others. He had been reading Lucretius, the Roman poet whose great work argues that the world is atoms falling through a void and that the soul dissolves at death, and he had written a little commentary on him. Years later he mentioned in a letter that he had burned it. The materialism he spent his old age refuting was one he had felt the pull of first.

(●) 1462 AD: Cosimo de’ Medici handed him Plato in Greek and a farmhouse in the hills, and the work of his life began. + In September 1462 Ficino wrote to Cosimo that he was giving himself wholeheartedly to "the Academy you arranged for us on the estate in Careggi, as if I worship rightly at a kind of shrine of contemplation." A document from the same year records a house in the city of Florence given to him, whose rent he lived on, and in 1463 Cosimo deeded him a small property at Careggi in the hills outside the walls, with a cottage and worked land. The commission that came with it was as large as any a scholar of that century received: translate Plato, all of him, into Latin. That word, academy, has carried more weight ever since than it can bear. Later ages pictured an institution with a roll of students, a curriculum and a founding charter, and Ficino’s own way of talking about it encouraged them. The documents will not support that picture. What can be shown is a circle of friends who met, sometimes on Medici land, to read and argue; a vast correspondence; a run of private pupils; and a Greek Plato in the house. When Ficino says "academy," he can mean a school, or a gathering of literary men, or simply the dialogues themselves. What made the commission so large is what the Latin West did not have. Of the thirty-odd Platonic dialogues, medieval Europe had read about half of one, the Timaeus, in the partial fourth-century version of Calcidius, plus the Meno and the Phaedo from the twelfth century and a few more done by the humanists of the generation before his own, the scholars who had set themselves to recover the literature of Greece and Rome and to teach from it. Plato had been a name and a set of second-hand opinions. Ficino had been given the job of making him a book.

(●) 1463 AD: Plato was set aside because the failing Cosimo wanted an Egyptian sage first, and the Hermetic books were done in a winter. + Around 1460 a monk named Leonardo da Pistoia came back from Macedonia with a Greek manuscript containing fourteen short treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, "Hermes the thrice-great," supposed to have been an Egyptian priest and king of enormous antiquity. Cosimo, in his seventies and failing, wanted this before he wanted Plato. Ficino put the dialogues down, worked through the winter, and had a Latin version ready in 1463. He called it the Pimander, after the first treatise, and when it reached the presses at Treviso in 1471 it became one of the publishing successes of the century. Ficino took Hermes for an Egyptian sage of roughly Moses’ own generation whose writings had foreseen the coming of Christ. He was wrong, and the error was not corrected until 1614, when the classical scholar Isaac Casaubon showed on the evidence of the Greek itself that these treatises were written centuries after Christ, not before Moses. The mistake matters, because the whole chain of God-taught sages he later drew up hangs from that first link (T5). What is worth seeing here is the motive under it. Ficino was not hunting for occult secrets. He was hunting for evidence that God had been sowing the truth among the nations long before it was preached to them, which is a thoroughly biblical expectation (Romans 1:19-20), and he thought he had found the oldest seed of all. In the summer of 1464 Cosimo lay dying at the villa at Careggi, and Ficino remembered long afterwards that he had gone up the hill and read his new Plato to the old man. The banker died on 1 August. Ficino was thirty, he had lost his patron, and the work had barely started.

(●) 1473 AD: At forty he was ordained a priest, in the middle of writing eighteen books on the immortality of the soul. + Between 1469 and 1474 Ficino wrote the book he is remembered for, the Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animorum, the Platonic Theology: On the Immortality of Souls. Eighteen books, hundreds of arguments, stacked one on another for a single conclusion. In the preface, addressed to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Cosimo’s grandson, he names the disease he thinks he is treating: his contemporaries had begun to keep philosophy and religion in separate rooms, and the separation was killing both. On 18 December 1473, with the manuscript nearly finished, he was ordained priest. He was forty years old, a layman until that year, and he had spent the previous decade on pagan Greek texts. In 1487 he became a canon of Santa Maria del Fiore, the Florentine cathedral under Brunelleschi’s dome, which meant a stall in the choir and a share in the daily prayers of the city’s greatest church. He never stopped prescribing for his friends’ headaches and low spirits either. The doctor’s son had simply added souls to his practice. Almost immediately he wrote a second book to sit beside the first. De christiana religione, On the Christian Religion, appeared in Tuscan in 1474 and in Latin in 1476, and it is the practical companion to the philosophical argument: the Platonic Theology shows that the soul is immortal, and On the Christian Religion shows what the soul is for.

(●) 1484 AD: The complete Plato came off a Florentine press in Latin, for the first time anywhere. + The translations had been finished in draft by 1468 or 1469. Then the Platonic Theology took five years, and afterwards Ficino went back over every dialogue, revising the Latin and writing an argumentum for each one, a short summary telling the reader what the dialogue is about and how a Christian should take it. The printed volume appeared in October 1484 and contained thirty-six works: thirty-five dialogues plus the Letters, following the ancient arrangement into nine groups of four that antiquity credited to Thrasyllus. Some of those thirty-six are now judged not to be Plato’s at all, but that was the shape of the corpus as the fifteenth century received it. The year was almost certainly chosen on purpose. Astrologers had been predicting for a long while that the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn due in 1484, the moment when the two planets appear from the earth to close on one another in the sky, would mark a turn in human affairs, and Ficino, who took such things seriously, brought his book out under it. Try to picture what arrived. A student in Paris or Oxford who had never seen a word of Greek could now hold the Phaedo and read Socrates arguing about the soul on the last afternoon of his life, and the Republic, and the Symposium, and the Parmenides. Ficino’s Latin was not beyond criticism, and later scholars complained that it smoothed Plato into something more pious than the Greek warrants. It was also, for three centuries, how Europe read him.

(●) 1489 AD: His book on health sold everywhere and brought the one serious question about his orthodoxy. + In 1489 Ficino published De vita libri tres, Three Books on Life, and it became the most widely reprinted thing he ever wrote. The first book is advice for scholars, who were thought to suffer from an excess of black bile and so to be prone to gloom; Ficino, gloomy himself, wrote it partly as a prescription for his own temperament. The second is for the elderly. The third, On Obtaining Life from the Heavens, is the one that caused the trouble. That third book treats the heavens as a source of usable influence and tells the reader how to draw it: which foods, scents, colours, songs and metals belong to which planet, and how to make an image or a ring that will catch its power. He quotes an authority he calls Thebit for the recipe, and the instruction, when it comes, is as homely as a cookery book: take the stone and the herb that belong to the star you want, set the stone in a gold or silver ring with the herb underneath it, and wear it against the skin. Elsewhere he discusses whether a statue can be made to hold a celestial power, which is very close to what the church had always called idolatry. He saw the difficulty coming. In September 1489, months before the book reached the shops, he wrote an Apologia for it addressed to friends who could be counted on to defend him, arguing that he had described only powers God had planted in creation and had written throughout as a physician. It did not settle the matter. Somebody in Rome noticed, and from May 1490 there is a run of letters in which Ficino asks friends at the court of Pope Innocent VIII to speak for him; by August he had been told that his standing there was good. Nothing further came of it. It is the only time in a long and public career that his orthodoxy was called into question at all.

(●) 1499 AD: After a last decade that gave Europe Plotinus in Latin, he died at Careggi and was buried in the cathedral he had served. + The last decade was as productive as any. In 1492 he published the first complete Latin Plotinus, the Enneads with a commentary of his own that remained the standard introduction to that difficult author for centuries. His letters were gathered into twelve books and printed at Venice in 1495. Fuller commentaries on Plato followed in 1496, and so did his translation of and commentary on the writings that circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Acts 17:34. In September 1497 he brought out, with the great printer Aldus Manutius, a volume of later Platonic authors: Iamblichus, Proclus, Porphyry, Synesius and others, most of them appearing in Latin for the first time. That same year he began a commentary on Paul’s letters, and death caught him in the fifth chapter of Romans. Then Florence turned upside down. The Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola had taken hold of the city with preaching about judgment and reform, and Ficino, who wanted reform too, was at first among those who welcomed him. He drew away as the years went on. Savonarola was excommunicated, cut off from the sacraments of the church, and then tried and burned in May 1498, and at some point in the sixteen months between that day and his own death Ficino wrote to the College of Cardinals asking them to deal gently with the Florentines who had followed the friar. He headed it an apology for the many Florentines deceived by the Antichrist, Girolamo of Ferrara, the greatest of hypocrites, and inside it he calls the friar a clever demon whose show of virtue had been pretence all along. It is an ugly document from a gentle man. He died at Careggi on 1 October 1499, eighteen days short of sixty-six, and was buried in Santa Maria del Fiore. In 1521 the city set up a marble bust of him by Andrea Ferrucci in the nave, where it still stands: a thin, sharp, slightly worried face, looking out over the floor of the cathedral where he had sung the offices, the round of prayers and psalms the canons kept hour by hour through the day.

What He Taught

(T1) If the soul does not outlive the body, then a human being is the most wretched creature alive. + Watch a dog for an afternoon. It eats when it is hungry, sleeps when it is tired, is delighted by a walk, and is not once troubled by the thought that its life might add up to nothing. Now watch a man who has everything a dog would want, and rather more, and cannot settle. He has the house and the work and the family and he still wakes at three in the morning wanting something he cannot name. Ficino thought that difference was the most important fact about us, and that it was evidence. The argument runs on a principle he took from nature and from Aristotle before him: no creature is built with an appetite that has nothing to feed it. Thirst exists because water does. Hunger exists because food does. The appetite for God, which shows up in every human society and in none of the animals, is the one appetite that nothing in this world satisfies. Either it is an exception to the rule, a cruelty planted in us by whatever made us, or it is aimed at something on the far side of death. Scripture says the same thing in a sentence: "he has put eternity into man’s heart" (Ecclesiastes 3:11). This is called the argument from natural desire, and its whole weight rests on that one premise, that nature plants no empty appetites. A determined opponent can simply deny it, and some do. Nothing stops a critic from answering that nature is perfectly capable of leaving a creature hungry for something that is not there, and that the hunger is a quirk rather than a signpost. Ficino knew quite well that the premise was carrying everything, which is why the Platonic Theology is eighteen books long rather than eighteen pages. He had two opponents in view, and it helps to know who they were. One was the Epicurean, heir of Lucretius, for whom the soul is a fine arrangement of atoms that comes apart at death the way a wave flattens back into the sea. The other was the Averroist, the follower of the Muslim philosopher Averroes, who read Aristotle as teaching that there is only one intellect for the whole human race, so that what survives is thought itself rather than you. Ficino argued against both at length: against the first that a soul which grasps unchanging truths is not the sort of thing atoms make, and against the second that a shared intellect is not immortality but the loss of the very person it was supposed to save.

(Q) "Were the soul not immortal, no creature would be more miserable than man." + Source: Ficino, Platonic Theology, Book I, chapter 1, the chapter heading (Michael J. B. Allen’s translation, I Tatti Renaissance Library). He put it at the head of the first chapter of the whole work, before a single argument has been made, because he wanted the reader to feel what was at stake before being asked to follow the reasoning. Everything else in the eighteen books hangs off this sentence (T1).

(T2) The soul sits at the centre of everything that exists, and holds the two halves of creation together. + Look at the hinge of a door for a moment. It belongs to the door and to the frame at once, and it is the only reason the two can do anything together; take it out and you have a slab of wood leaning against a wall. Ficino thought the human soul was the hinge of creation, and he built his whole picture of reality to show where it hangs. He inherited that picture from the Platonists, a set of levels running from God at the top down to bare matter at the bottom, and he rearranged it so that the human soul came out exactly in the middle. His version has five. At the top is God, who simply is, and from whom everything else comes. Below God is what he calls Angelic Mind, the level of pure intelligence where the eternal patterns of things are known all at once, without reasoning from step to step. Third is Rational Soul, which is where we live: mind that has to think things through in time, one thought after another, and which gives life and motion to bodies. Fourth is Quality, the level of the forms and powers that are actually at work in material things, the heat in a fire and the greenness in a leaf. Fifth and last is Body, sheer extended matter. Count from either end and the soul is third. That is the point, and it is not arithmetic for its own sake. Think of the one person in a room who speaks both languages, without whom the conversation simply stops. The soul, Ficino says, looks up and understands eternal things, and looks down and animates a body, and it does both without having to abandon either. Nothing else in creation is built that way. Two consequences follow, and he cares about both. The first is dignity: a creature at the centre of things, tied by nature to what is above it, is not a clever animal and should not live like one. The second is immortality again, because a thing that shares the nature of what is above it shares its permanence too. Christians can take the dignity straight from his hands, since it says in its own idiom what Genesis says by calling us the image of God. The five-level ladder itself is scaffolding rather than doctrine: it is Plotinus tidied up, not anything the creeds require, and Ficino would not have claimed otherwise.

(Q) "We would do well to call soul the third and middle essence, as the Platonists do, because it is the mean for all and the third from both directions. If you descend from God, you will find soul at the third level down; or at the third level up, if you ascend from body." + Source: Ficino, Platonic Theology III.2.1 (Michael J. B. Allen’s translation, I Tatti Renaissance Library). He is laying out the ladder for the first time, and the sentence is doing arithmetic on purpose: count down from God or up from a stone, and you arrive at the same rung (T2). A few lines later he adds that this middle essence "cleaves to the higher while not abandoning the lower," which is the whole doctrine in half a line.

(T3) Beauty is bait, and what feels like desire is a soul being drawn home. + Everyone has had the experience and nobody explains it well. You hear eight bars of something and your eyes sting, or you come round a corner and see a face and something in you stands up. It is out of proportion to what is actually there. A face is a particular arrangement of bone and skin; there is no obvious reason it should feel like a summons. Ficino’s answer, worked out in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium in 1469, is that beauty is not a property of the thing so much as a shining through it. The good that God is gets refracted in creatures, more brightly in some than in others, and when it catches you, what has happened is that you have been hooked. The desire that follows is not really for the face. It is for what the face was briefly transparent to, and the right response is to follow the pull upward rather than stopping where it started: from the beauty of one body to the beauty of bodies, to the beauty of souls and of the ordered mind, and at the top to the God from whom the whole thing was borrowed. That ascent is what he meant by amor platonicus, Platonic love. He coined the phrase, and the English expression descends from him, though he would have been puzzled by what it now means. He was not describing a friendship that stops short of the bedroom. He was describing a ladder. Later Christians have taken this in two minds, and both minds are reasonable. On one side, it is close kin to what Augustine says about restless hearts and what the psalmists say about beholding the beauty of the Lord, and it takes seriously something most moral theology handles awkwardly, that the pull of beauty is real and is not simply a temptation to be managed. On the other side, a ladder is a thing you climb off. The Christian doctrine of the body is not that it is a first rung: it is the good work of God, destined for resurrection rather than for escape, and a beloved face is a person rather than a window. Ficino is better on this than his reputation suggests, since he holds that the person ascending does not abandon the lower for the higher (T2). But the tug of the ladder is there, and it is the point at which a Platonist has to be watched.

(Q) "The splendor of the highest good is refulgent in individual things, and where it blazes the more fittingly, there it especially attracts someone gazing upon it, excites his consideration, seizes and occupies him as he approaches, and compels him both to venerate such splendor as the divinity beyond all others, and to strive for nothing else but to lay aside his former nature and to become that splendor itself." + Source: Ficino, Platonic Theology 14.1.4 (Michael J. B. Allen’s translation, I Tatti Renaissance Library). "Refulgent" is simply shining out. Ficino is describing the moment of being caught, and the sequence he traces is exact: something attracts, then holds the attention, then takes the person over, then leaves them wanting to be changed. Beauty in his hands is bait and a hook, the thing by which a soul gets pulled somewhere it had not set out for, and what it is pulled toward is the God the whole argument for immortality is about (T1, T3).

(T4) Religion is the one human thing no animal shares even a little. + This is the opening move of On the Christian Religion, and it is worth slowing down for, because Ficino sets it up by conceding as much as he can. Look at animals honestly and you find scaled-down versions of nearly everything we are proud of. Crows use tools. Elephants stand over their dead. Dogs grieve, wolves cooperate, ravens deceive each other, and a pack has something that functions like a sense of fair shares. Ficino had none of those particular observations, but he had the principle, and he grants it without a fight before he says a word in his own favour: memory, affection, cunning, courage, even a rough justice, all of it turns up somewhere in the animals. One thing does not. No animal worships. No animal has ever built anything like an altar, kept anything like a holy day, or acted as though its life were answerable to something it cannot see. And this is not a habit of some human cultures and not others. Wherever human beings have been found, in any century, they have been found praying to something. Ficino concludes that religion is not an add-on to human nature, one enthusiasm among many that a person may or may not take up. It is the thing that marks the species out, and he goes so far as to say that irreligion is a disorder, a fault in a human being in the way that blindness is a fault in an eye. The argument has real force and one real weakness, and both should be said. Its force is that it fits the evidence: universality across every culture we can survey is a fact that wants explaining, and Paul draws exactly this line, that what can be known of God is plain to everyone from the things he has made (Romans 1:19-20). Its weakness is that universality alone shows a faculty, not that the faculty is telling the truth, and a determined critic will say the instinct is universal because it was useful rather than because it was aimed at anything. Ficino answers that with the wider case (T1): a built-in appetite with no object is exactly what a wise Creator would not make. If that principle holds, the near-universality of worship is evidence. If it does not, it is only anthropology.

(Q) "We do observe, at times in some animals, some individual gifts of the human race, with one exception: religion." + Source: Ficino, On the Christian Religion, chapter 1, the opening sentence (Christopher S. Celenza’s translation, from the Basel Opera omnia, page 2). It is how the first chapter opens, straight after the proem, the short preface a book of that century put in front of itself, and the shape of the sentence is the argument. He gives the animals everything, item by item, and then names the single thing he will not give them (T4).

(T5) Philosophy and religion are one work, and Plato read rightly ends in worship. + Ficino thought his century had made a particular and disastrous mistake, and he says so at the front of the Platonic Theology: it had come to treat philosophy and religion as separate trades. The learned man argued in the schools and said his prayers at home and did not expect the two activities to have much to do with each other. The result, as he saw it, was two damaged things. Religion left to the unlearned drifts into superstition, and philosophy left to itself drifts into clever argument about nothing, or worse, into positions like the Averroists’ that quietly dissolve the soul which religion is trying to save. His programme has two halves and a Latin name for each. Pia philosophia, pious philosophy, means philosophy done as an act of worship by someone who expects it to end at God rather than at a conclusion. Docta religio, learned religion, means faith that has done its homework, held by people who can say why. He wanted the same men doing both, which is why he thought it fitting that the divine mysteries should be handled by genuine lovers of wisdom, and why, at forty, the translator of Plato became a priest. Behind this lies the idea he called the prisca theologia, the ancient theology: a chain of God-taught sages running down the centuries before Christ, each passing on a piece of the truth, which he listed as Hermes, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus and then Plato. Later he moved Zoroaster to the head of the line and linked him to the Magi who came to the manger. The particular genealogy does not survive scrutiny, since the oldest link in it turned out to be one of the youngest. The instinct underneath it does, and it is old and orthodox: God has never left himself without a witness anywhere, so the best pagan thought should be expected to contain real light rather than pure darkness. That is Justin Martyr’s argument in the second century and Paul’s on Mars Hill, where he quotes Greek poets to Greeks (Acts 17:22-31). Ficino’s version of it is more generous than Justin’s and considerably less careful.

(Q) "whatever subject he deals with, he quickly brings it round, and in a spirit of utmost piety, to the contemplation and worship of God." + Source: Ficino, Platonic Theology, the dedicatory preface to Lorenzo de’ Medici, on Plato (Michael J. B. Allen’s translation, I Tatti Renaissance Library). In the same preface he says his aim is to paint a portrait of Plato as close as possible to Christian truth. He is describing what he believes Plato is already doing, and announcing what he intends to do himself (T5).

(Q) "This century, like a golden age, has restored to light the liberal arts, which were almost extinct: grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music ... and all this in Florence." + Source: Ficino, letter to Paul of Middelburg, 13 September 1492 (Mary Martin McLaughlin’s translation, in The Portable Renaissance Reader). Paul of Middelburg was a Dutch astronomer, and the letter is Ficino at nearly sixty taking stock. The words the ellipsis stands in for are one more item on his list, the ancient singing of songs to the Orphic lyre, which he had revived himself and performed for his friends. He goes on to say that the age has joined wisdom with eloquence, that in Florence the teaching of Plato has been recalled from darkness into light, and that in Germany they have invented the machinery for printing books. It is one of the clearest statements anyone of that generation made about what they thought was happening to them, and his own two contributions, Plato and the press, are both in it.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) For three centuries, when Europe read Plato, it was reading Ficino’s Latin. + This is the plainest measure of his influence and the easiest to overlook. A translation that becomes the standard one stops being visible: nobody says "I am reading Ficino," they say "I am reading Plato." But from 1484 until well into the eighteenth century, the Latin Plato on a European desk was almost always his, and the same is true of Plotinus after 1492. Every argument about Plato conducted in the Renaissance and the early modern period was conducted through his words and shaped by the summaries he put at the head of each dialogue. The circle around him in Florence spread it first. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, the young prodigy of the Oration on the Dignity of Man, worked beside him. Painters took up his teaching on beauty, and the Florentine art of the period is full of it. Beyond Italy, the German Hebraist Johann Reuchlin, a Christian scholar of the Hebrew language, read him; so did the English scholar John Colet, later dean of St Paul’s in London, who wrote to him and carried his Christian Platonism home to the circle that included Thomas More and Erasmus. In the seventeenth century the Cambridge Platonists, Benjamin Whichcote and Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, were doing recognisably Ficino’s work: arguing that reason is a candle of the Lord and that a religion afraid of philosophy is a religion in trouble. Not everyone was persuaded, and the complaints are worth hearing, because they land on exactly the thing that had made him useful. Leibniz thought his definitions loose next to Plato’s own, and his Platonism too crowded with pagan material to be safe. Harder on his reputation was the eighteenth-century historian of philosophy Johann Jakob Brucker, who dismissed him for feigning and re-feigning and changing Plato to suit himself. That charge stuck, and for a long stretch afterwards Ficino was a footnote. The verdict has been substantially revised since the middle of the twentieth century, largely through the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller.

(†) He made the soul’s immortality a question the church decided it had to settle in writing. + It is hard now to feel how unsettled this was. In the Italian universities, and especially at Padua, professors of philosophy taught Aristotle for a living, and the honest reading of Aristotle on the soul does not obviously yield personal survival after death. Some of them taught the Averroist line, that the thinking mind is one and shared and impersonal. Some simply said that immortality was an article of faith which philosophy could neither prove nor establish, and left it there. Ficino found that division intolerable, and the Platonic Theology is his attempt to close it by making immortality a conclusion of philosophy rather than a consolation handed over to the theologians. He did not win the argument outright, but he changed where it sat. On 19 December 1513 the Fifth Lateran Council issued the decree Apostolici regiminis, which condemned the teaching that the rational soul is mortal, or that there is only one soul in all men, and required those who taught philosophy to answer such arguments rather than merely report them. That is Ficino’s complaint turned into church law within fifteen years of his death. The effect ran on: when Descartes dedicated his Meditations to the theologians of Paris more than a century later, he pointed to that very council in explaining why he had set out to prove the soul’s immortality and God’s existence by reason. The wider inheritance is harder to name but easy to recognise. Ficino is a large part of why, for the next several centuries, a Christian who wanted to argue with an unbeliever reached first for the immortality of the soul and the order of the cosmos. He made Plato respectable for Christian use, and he did it at a moment when a good deal of the newly recovered ancient world was arriving in Europe all at once and could as easily have been read as an argument against the faith as for it.

(†) His own record carries three faults: an Egyptian sage who was not there, a ring cut under a planet, and a letter written after a burning. + He was, by every account of him that survives, a kind and modest man, and the faults are the faults of his project rather than of his character. They are still his, and they are worth stating plainly. - The Egyptian who was not there. Ficino built a good deal of his case on Hermes Trismegistus being an Egyptian sage of Moses’ own era whose books had foreseen Christ, and he put Hermes at the head of the chain of ancient theologians (T5). In 1614 Isaac Casaubon showed from the Greek itself that those treatises were written well after Christ, by writers who had read Scripture rather than anticipated it. Ficino did not forge anything and the error was universal in his century, but the lesson holds: an apologetic that leans on an ancient pedigree is only as strong as the pedigree. The New Testament’s own way of arguing with pagans needs no such ancestry. Paul on Mars Hill quotes Greek poets to Greeks and appeals to what they already half know (Acts 17:22-31), without claiming that the poets learned it from Moses. - The rings cut under a planet. The third book of Three Books on Life tells a reader how to make an image or a ring that will catch the power of a star, and discusses whether a statue can be brought to hold a celestial force. Ficino’s defence was that these are natural powers God placed in creation and that he wrote as a physician, which is a real distinction and not a dodge. It is also a thin line to walk, and the law of Moses is blunt about which side of it the practices of the nations fall on (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). He knew the danger from the other side too: years earlier he had written a Disputation against the Judgment of the Astrologers, attacking the claim that a man’s fate can be read off the sky, and then never published it. - The letter after the execution. Savonarola was hanged and burned in the Piazza della Signoria in May 1498. Ficino, who had once been among those hoping for what the friar promised, afterwards wrote to the College of Cardinals asking pardon for the citizens the friar had misled, under a heading that called Savonarola the Antichrist and the greatest of hypocrites, in a text that called him a clever demon. Whatever the right verdict on Savonarola, and Christians have never agreed on one, that letter was written by a man in his mid-sixties about a dead man, to the Roman authority in whose name the sentence had been passed, in a city where saying the opposite had become dangerous. It is the least attractive thing in his life, and no reading of the circumstances makes it brave. None of this touches the core of what he did. A man can be wrong about an Egyptian, unwise about a ring cut under a star, and weak in a bad week, and still have handed Europe back Plato and spent his life arguing, against the drift of his age, that the human soul is worth more than the world that contains it.