Arne Malmsheimer. Platons Parmenides und Marsilio Ficinos Parmenides-Kommentar: Ein kritischer Vergleich.

(Bochumer Studien zur Philosophie, 34.) Amsterdam and Philadelphia: B.R. Grtiner, 2001. x + 325 pp. index, bibl. $95. ISBN: 90-6032-363-7.

Plato's Parmenides was accorded a unique theologico-philosophical authority by Plotinus and by the later Neoplatonists of the Athenian school. Through Proclus and his disciple, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, it played a formative role in the negative theologizing of early medieval Augustinianism. In the thirteenth century it influenced Aquinas, who had parts of Proclus' long commentary, along with the apposite lemmata, translated into Latin for him by the Dominican William of Moerbeke; and in the fifteenth, it molded the Platonism both of Cusanus, for whom it was quickly and sloppily translated by George of Trebizond (a rabid Aristotelian), and of Bessarion. Marsilio Ficino (1433-99), the architect of Florentine Platonism, included it among the first ten dialogues he translated into Latin for Cosimo de' Medici, and, following Proclus, regarded it as the capstone of ancient theology, the "innermost shrine" of the mysteries. He read it to Cosimo on his sickbed in the summer of 1464--vivid testimony to the part it was to play in a holy dying--and then included it in his 1484 Florence edition of Plato's works, prefacing it with a brief introduction.

Ficino's Parmenides commentary was much longer in gestation being composed in the 1490s and published in his 1496 collection, Commentaria in Platonem. Difficult in itself, and intricately though critically indebted to Proclus' commentary (in part directly and in part perhaps in Moerbeke's Latin version), it also contained a rebuke of Pico della Mirandola. In his treatise "On Being and the One," Pico had espoused the Aristotelian position identifying the One with ultimate Being and rejected the Neoplatonic position elevating the One above Being. Inevitably Pico had to confront the apparent advocacy of the primacy of the One in the Parmenides (and for the Neoplatonists in the Sophist). He therefore dismissed it as "an exercise in dialectic" (meaning logic), knowing that he was baiting Ficino. Ficino punningly responded, "Would that the marvelous youth had diligently considered the arguments and discussions I have dealt with above before he had had the rashness to confront his own teacher and to espouse an opinion so contrary to that of all the Platonists." The rebuke highlights the division between two luminaries often misleadingly thought of as "fellow Platonists"; but it also underscores Ficino's realization that Pico was challenging the Platonic tradition itself.

Ficino discovered from Proclus that the Parmenides, and notably its second part, had a dramatic interpretative history. Its correct interpretation had been lost soon after Plato's death and was rediscovered in stages by Plotinus and by his successors culminating with Plutarch of Athens, the teacher of Syrianus, the teacher of Proclus. The key was determining that its second part consisted of nine hypotheses: of five interlocking positive hypotheses and four interlocking negative, the positive each dealing with the five hypostases or levels of reality (beginning with the One and descending via Mind, Soul, and Quality to Matter), and the negative with the absurd consequences that would ensue if the One did not exist. I have argued that Ficino regarded the recovery of this interpretation as a signal triumph. It led him, again following Proclus, to view all the other dialogues as tributary to the Parmenides and, once its mysteries had been comprehended, as thereafter dispensable. It also prompted him to elevate Parmenides above Socrates as Plato's teacher; and, given his assumption that Parmenides was a Pythagorean, to view the dialogue as a masterpiece of Pythagorean theology and specifically of negative theology, of the dialectical stripping away of all that is not-one in pursuit of the One. With Ficino indeed the dialogue became the definitive key to Plato's ontology and dialectics alike, and its role in the history of Renaissance thought has hardly been acknowledged, let alone received its due.

Malmsheimer's philosophical study, in German, deals both with the Parmenides and with Ficino's-commentary, and is necessarily a technical piece of work focusing on the many complexities. Unfortunately, it neglects Ficino's analysis of the Sophist, the companion piece for Ficino of the Parmenides since he identified its speaker, the mysterious Stranger, with Melissus, Parmenides' disciple, the two dialogues constituting in his mind the pinnacle of Plato's metaphysical and dialectical achievement. A more serious flaw is that the Latin quoted in the footnotes is based on the Basle 1576 edition and not on that of the 1496 editio princeps (the only authoritative text). It is therefore dotted with omissions and mistakes to the point occasionally of distorting the logic of an argument. Such problems aside, this study provides us nonetheless with a valuable and thought provoking exploration of Ficino's eleatic masterpiece.

MICHAEL J. B. ALLEN

University of California 

Los Angeles