Plato's Third Eye: Studies in Marsilio Ficino's Metaphysics and Its Sources.

"Plato's third eye," according to an ancient anecdote, was an eye Plato dreamt he had grown after he had discovered the theory of ideas. In Marsilio Ficino's reinterpretation of it, it was an eye located in the center of Plato's forehead by which he perceived divine things - the eye of the mind, in other words. But we might, by a sort of postmodern allegory, identify Allen himself as Plato's Third Eye. For Allen has devoted the best part of his scholarly endeavors to interpreting a great interpreter of Plato, Marsilio Ficino. No scholar has penetrated so deeply and so learnedly into Ficino's vast project to revive the philosophy of Plato; no scholar has done so much to help us see Plato through Ficino's eyes. In addition to his 1984 monograph, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, Allen has published studies and editions of Ficino's commentaries on Plato's Philebus (1975), Phaedrus (1981), and Sophist (1989), as well as of Ficino's exposition of the "fatal number" in Book Eight of the Republic (1995). In the volume under review, Allen collects fifteen shorter studies on Ficino's Platonism published between 1975 and 1993, together with some addenda and corrigenda. Despite a few overlaps with Allen's other books, they are all independent studies that help round out our picture of Ficino as a thinker and exegete. While some (essays 2, 5, 6) are clearly parerga related to Allen's published editions, most strike out in new directions. They analyze Ficino's exegesis of other dialogues such as the Ion (15), the Timaeus (11), and the Parmenides (8, 10); or they treat particular themes in Ficino's thought such as his theory of the soul and the five substances (1, 8), his demonology (14), his exposition of the Hercules myth (13), or his relationship to Hermes Trismegistus (12). All display Allen's characteristic qualities of accurate scholarship, deep learning, literary elegance, and the occasional dash of controlled speculation.

A number of broad themes connect the essays in the volume, varied as they are. In all of his studies Allen has been concerned to situate Ficino's reading of Plato vis a vis his various ancient sources and guides. Allen's studies have established that, while Ficino had a grasp of the ancient Platonic tradition unequaled before modern times, his chief guides to understanding Plato were always Plotinus and Proclus. Allen shows, for example, that Ficino's theory of the five substances, once thought to have been original with him, was almost certainly derived from Proclus's Platonic Theology. Nonetheless, Ficino never followed even his paramount authorities slavishly, but developed his own distinctive vision of Plato's writings, a vision much more attentive to the Athenian philosopher's literary integument and his playfully serious tone than that of any ancient exegete. Allen also emphasizes Ficino's genuine concern with Christian orthodoxy. Against Edgar Wind, the early Garin, and an older tradition within Italian historiography that had seen Ficino in a somewhat conspiratorial light, as a kind of proto-Enlightenment figure pushing the envelope of orthodoxy or even as a crypto-pagan, Allen (in this respect a faithful disciple of Kristeller) takes Ficino au pied de la lettre, seeing him as a theological reformer, someone above all interested in saving Christian theology from what Allen labels the "integral Aristotelians." Ficino wanted to renew Christianity's corrupted theological traditions by abandoning the failed medieval synthesis with Aristotelianism and returning Christian theology to its ancient Platonic roots. Yet Ficino never tried to pretend that Plato's divinity was perfectly compatible with Christian doctrine. His position, brilliantly analyzed by Allen in essays 9 and 11, was a subtle one. Plato himself had been inspired with certain adumbrations of Christian mysteries such as creation ex nihilo and the Trinity, but his pagan Neoplatonic interpreters had hardened Plato's original insights into doctrines that had ultimately proved incompatible with an evolving Christian orthodoxy. Plato had not quite gotten it right, and his pagan interpreters were not quite wrong to read him as they did, but the great truth, from Ficino's point of view, was that Plato, the "Attic Moses," had come so close to the sublime mysteries of Christianity. Allen's analysis of all this obliges him to go deep into the Florentine's reading of the history of religion and revelation, disclosing to view a Ficino with a remarkably sophisticated sense of history and the evolution of thought.

JAMES HANKINS Harvard University