Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation & Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (1494-1994) & Die Erlosungslehre Marsilio Ficinos.

Michael J. B. Allen, Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation

Florence: Olschki, 1998. xiv + 236 pp. n.p. ISBN: 88-222-4664-0.

Gian Carlo Garfagnini, ed., Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (1494-1994) (Studi Pichiani, 5.) 2 vols. Florence: Olschki, 1997. lv + 721 pp. IL 135,000. ISBN:88 222-4566-0.

Jorg Lauster, Die Erlosungslehre Marsilio Ficinos

(Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, 69.) Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1998. viii + 268 pp. DM 134. ISBN: 3-11-015713-6.

In Synoptic Art, Michael J. B. Allen illuminates different facets of Ficino's conception of himself and his mission. Allen touches on Ficino's view of the possibility -- indeed, the necessity, as Ficino saw it -- of taking a philosophical approach to religious problems; on Ficino's opinions concerning the relationship of early Christian thought to later Platonism; on the manner in which Ficino cast the tenuous relationship between poetry and philosophy, given Plato's vigorous critique of the poets' place in society; on Ficino's conception of Socrates's daimonion; and on Ficino's hitherto neglected revival of Platonic dialectic. Allen shows that Ficino adhered throughout his life to the belief that it was important to involve the ingeniosi -- the "acute wits" -- in the spiritual renewal which he saw as so necessary for Florence. The ingeniosi could never be expected, Ficino thought, to accept the deepest mysteries of Christianity without being exposed to arguments that appealed to their reason. For the spirit ual renovation to have adequate force, it must have a rationalistically appealing structure of arguments on which it could lean, to prime, as it were, the hearts of men to accept its deeper, non-rational mysteries. This was the foundation of Ficino's belief that an anti-rational fideism could never be enough to cure the city of Florence. Thus his very principles set him on a collision course with Savonarola. This too led to Ficino's persistent desire to historicize the ancient religious past and his elucidation of the prisca theologia, which ultimately becomes an investigation not only of the Judeo-Christian tradition but of the history of monotheism broadly considered. Fleshing out the tradition of ancient Platonic interpretation was signally important for Ficino. Plotinus was critical, but he believed also that Plotinus needed to be explicated, i.e., "unfolded" in the Latin sense of term. Toward this end, the relationship of early Christianity to the Platonic tradition was understandably important for Ficin o.

Ficino believed that the tradition of Platonic interpretation had gone through and survived various catastrophes. The first was the Academy's turn to skepticism in the Hellenistic age. Also, the text of such a great Christian/Platonic thinker as Dionysius the Areopagite was, marvelous to say, suppressed though some unknown catastrophe, so that his doctrine was known only indirectly to later Platonists such as Plotinus, Iamblichus, and others (Ficino thus nicely solves the problem of there being no mention of pseudo-Dionysius in the work of anyone before the fifth century). Again focusing on Ficino's views on a late ancient figure, Allen describes brilliantly an "Augustinian" cast to Ficino. Not that Ficino's stance here is Augustinian in a philosophical sense; Ficino's sense of the ingeniosus does not demand the surrender of the intellect to the will. Rather, it is the sense of an evolving Christianity developing interdependently alongside a dynamic Platonic philosophy that makes the "Augustinian" model impo rtant to Ficino. As Allen puts it (89), Ficino's "goal, effectively, was to restore the links, not so much with Plato's Athens, as with Plotinus' Rome."

Yet one of Plato's concerns shone through clearly for Ficino: this was the controversy regarding the place of poets within the city, which was bound to be important in a late Quattrocento Florence whose intellectual life was far from monolithic. Here, due to Allen's masterful analysis, we see Ficino at his most modern and, paradoxically, at his most pre-modern. Plato had described the "ancient enmity" between poets and philosophers. For Ficino the poets' mistake had to do with perturbatio: they had impiously attributed human passions to the gods. The role of the true philosopher is redemptive in Ficino's eyes. Granted that there exists poetic furor, in which the gods may have provided supreme poetic (and divine) insight to an otherwise unknowing poet; still, it is inevitably a "veiled" insight. It is the philosopher who must remove the veil and arrive at the unadorned truth. A properly informed philosophical hermeneutics is the only answer. So on the one hand we have Ficino the modern: the burden of creative understanding falls not on the immediate producer of the creative product (the poet, the bard, the rhapsode) but on the critic, on the interpreter, on the hermeneutes. On the other hand we have a decidedly pre-Galilean Ficino, in step with the assumptions of his age, reproving poets for suggesting that things familiar to us in the subcelestial realm could be attributed to supercelestial entities.

As to Socrates, Allen argues that in Ficino's view the Athenian sage was an exemplar of all that was good in the philosophical life, and that Ficino's Socrates embodied what Christ would later represent. Ficino sought also a practical means to establish control over the ascent up the ontological hierarchy and to attain ecstatic union, however brief, with the One. "At the opposite pole," as Allen puts it (191), "from Valla's and Agricola's rhetoricism," Ficino saw Platonic dialectic as the proper means of ascent. Through it we comprehend matters ontological by including meontological concerns: we come to understand the structure and nature of being by understanding not-being. In Ficino's estimation, one of Plato's greatest bequests to Christian theologians was that of negative theology, the art so beloved by the pseudo-Dionysius, Nicholas of Cusa, and others, whose early Christian outlines had been drawn by St. Paul. Of course the Platonic dialectician must know when to speak of the vision attained through di alectic and when to keep silent, for dialectic is dangerous: youth must not be exposed to it too early, lest they fall prey to the vacuous contentiousness of eristic. Dialectic must be kept out of the wrong hands. But in the right hands -- in the hands, that is, of the informed, ingenious, "Augustinian," autonomous, daemonic philosopher -- Platonic dialectic is the only real means of spiritual and ontological ascent, a Promethean gift, explosive, perilous, and transformative.

In Die Erlosungslehre Marsilio Ficinos, Jorg Lauster approaches Ficino's thought from the perspective of a professional theologian. He shows that in the few previous theological studies of Ficino, scholars had judged the Florentine thinker in relation to either scholastic thought or the reformation, a categorical distinction which Lauster attempts to transcend in an effort to uncover Ficino's thought on redemption. Lauster analyzes the De christiana religione, and devotes quite a bit of space to Ficino's incomplete commentary on Paul's Letter to the Romans. He shows that Ficino had a definable interest in Paul, which rears its head in almost all of Ficino's theological writings. He also suggests that Ficino attached a special importance to the raptus Pauli, i.e., Paul's experience at Damascus. Ficino sees Paul's raptus as a paradigmatic instance of ontological ascent, paradigmatic especially because it is something that leads back to God, both as origin and foundation, and because human beings cannot effect it through their own powers. Lauster summarizes Ficino's ascent model using a fourfold conceptual categorization: there are ascensus and raptus, which have to do with the movement of the soul; and purgatio and deificatio, which deal with the qualitative change of the soul in the event of ascent (124). In this process, will and intellect function in a complementary fashion.

Lauster offers a chapter on Ficino's view of the need for revelation, a theme which Lauster fleshes out by examining Ficino's view of the ontological place of the human soul and of sin. Lauster argues that when Ficino does think about sin, it is in an ontological sense; sin becomes a reversal of the natural order (64-75); when one sins it is in reality because of a lack of knowledge (202-03). Lauster recognizes that Ficino did not have completely decipherable positions on certain aspects of the Christian dogmatic tradition; there is not much, e.g., on the crucifixion or on the incarnation specifically understood as redemptive for humankind in itself. Also, Lauster suggests that in the few places Ficino speaks of grace, he equates it with the movement of the divine ray of light; thus it becomes a kind of cosmic principle. Summarizing Ficino's doctrine of ascent (232), Lauster argues that the Erhebung of the soul to God is divinely facilitated and caused; the soul's beatific vision occurs in such a way that th e soul gains full knowledge of God, but not in the same way that God knows Himself. Thus the ontological distinction between God and humans is preserved. At times Lauster's Ficino seems a bit too consistent; but the author's stated intention is to examine Ficino's views on issues important to professional theology, as it is today categorized and subdivided. From that perspective the book is challengingly informative and should be read by all interested in Ficino in general.

The publication of the proceedings of the 1994 conference commemorating the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, edited by Gian Carlo Garfagnini, is a major event. The scholarly contributions begin with the inaugural discourse of Eugenio Garin, who calls for continued study of the influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the work of both Picos, Giovanni and Gianfrancesco. August Buck examines the theme of the dignity of man in the works of Manetti, Ficino, and Pico. Umberto Eco shows that Pico saw the cabala as the prototypical ars inveniendi, by which one found out things hitherto unknown, and that this vision shaped Pico's view of the Lullian art. Jacques Le Goff sees Pico as an independent intellectual, and a "professional" one as well -- not in a university context, but as a thinker who saw it as his job to be a part of the acquisition of knowledge in a global sense.

Vito Fumagalli sketches the medieval background of the area of Italy where Mirandola was situated. Giovanni Tocci focuses on the manner in which the city was perceived in the early modern era, the topos of the ideal city, and the signorial states in the regione padana from the late fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries. Angelo Spaggiari examines the evolution and dispersion of the various archival elements connected with the Picos and with Mirandola.

The late Charles Trinkaus argued that Pico's Heptaplus represented a synthesis of Pico's thoughts on humankind's relation to divinity. Edward P. Mahoney examines the relations between Pico and Elia del Medigo, Nicoletto Vernia, and Agostino Nifo. He shows that Elia had an influence on Pico but that his influence did not extend to Pico's interpretation of the Cabala. He suggests that Pico's influence may have been what led Vernia from an earlier allegiance to Averroes on certain key questions to a broader, more conciliatory interest later; and, with a focus on Nifo's De intellectu, shows how Nifo may have been indebted to Pico. Gianfranco Fioravanti discusses the Ferrarese studium and the manner in which various thinkers there may have influenced Pico's thought. Michael J. B. Allen focuses on the deep Platonic background to Pico's Oratio, with emphasis on certain later Platonic dialogues and later Platonic interpretations of those dialogues. He sees Pico's position on the ontological place of humankind as wit hin the Platonic tradition rather than as a break from it, and as informed by a metaphysical preconception which reflected a combination of neo-Platonic and Christologically anthropocentric concerns.

Albano Biondi studies the manner in which Pico's 900 Conclusions were examined by the ecclesiastical authorities. Brian P. Copenhaver discusses those Conclusions of Pico which touched on magic and the Cabala, and shows that Pico saw a fundamental similarity between what he thought of as "Pythagorean arithmetic" (i.e., based on the tetracrys) and certain forms of cabalistic reasoning. Gian Carlo Garfagnini examines the relationships of Giovanni and Gianfrancesco Pico with the doctrine, mentality, and person of Savonarola. Eusebi Colomer offers a study of the theme of "man as microcosm" in four thinkers. Fabrizio Lelli discusses Pico's relationship with one of his last Jewish collaborators, Yohanan Alemanno. Louis Valcke argues for a transition in Pico's thought, from a Ficino-influenced later Platonic view of the world to a peripatetic view, manifested in the De ente et uno, whereby Pico endorses the Aristotelian position that Being and One are convertible. Ernst Gombrich offers a brilliantly aphoristic piece on the limits of post-Hegelian Kulturgeschichte and the need to consider socio-psychological factors when interpreting the past.

Lina Bolzoni discusses Pico and the ars memoriae, sketching the exposure Pico could have had to various approaches to the art of memory, as well as Pico's possible influence on Giulio Camillo and Tommaso Campanella. Graziella Martinelli Braglia focuses on the Tale of Psyche motif effected by Jacopo Palma the Younger and Sante Peranda, commissioned by Alessandro I Pico della Mirandola. Vilmo Cappi shows that most portraits of Pico can be referred back to the late Quattrocento profile model. Jose V. de Pina Martins discusses the Nachleben of Pico in sixteenth-century Portuguese culture. Francesco Tateo's theme is "The Two Picos and Rhetoric"; he studies their implicit and explicit attitudes toward rhetoric.

Sebastiano Gentile examines Pico's own philological practice and shows that, just as Poliziano had a serious interest in philosophical subjects, so too did Pico engage in an increasingly detailed philological practice with the passing of the years. Giuliano Tamani traces the Hebrew manuscripts which Pico possessed, as these are reflected in the two extant inventories, one of which had been edited by Pearl Kibre. Mario Martelli discusses Pico's volgare work and devotes special attention to Pico's youthful poetry. Jader Jacobelli deals with the perception of Giovanni Pico vis a vis Gianfrancesco Pico in the Italian popular press. Jean Claude Margolin offers a comparative study of Pico and Erasmus. Gilberto Sacerdoti studies the influence of Pico in Walter Raleigh's History of the World Marc Laureys investigates "The Reception of Giovanni Pico in the Low Countries," and shows that Pico's influence was at its most intense at the early phases of the spread of Low Countries humanism. Finally, Cesare Vasoli condude s with a moving testimony to the necessity of continued consideration of the optimism, freedom, and cultural pluralism which for many Pico della Mirandola represents.