Marsilio Ficino

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The date is March the 1st 1983. This is the first lecture in a series of lectures on the origins of Hermetic Science. Tonight's lecture is entitled Marsilio Ficino: Hermetic Renaissance, Platonic Theology.

So I just want to express my joy and my appreciation for having him as our lecturer for this quarter. He has been a wonderful and marvelous and valued friend of ours and of mine for many years. And I know really no one else whom I'd rather see sitting in that chair now and wish you all the blessings. I need them I need them I need them. How can we begin? Also he also needs to eat as we do also. So don't forget that little golden bowl there and there'll be an intermission at which time I will drag out the cookies and various things for your refreshment. Very good. I also want you to know that Roger was determined to bring some brandy for those who need it in this weather but I think he forgot it somewhere in the chamber. Now I will have to bring it in the next three days. Yes yes. That's right. That's right. Well I guess I guess I should begin then since Stephan has made this introduction. Marsilio Ficino dedicated his third book on the book of life to the Most Serene King of Hungary and if that doesn't bring my host out. Nothing I will say tonight Will. And he says “To the most serene King of Hungary the ancient philosophers most happy king carefully scrutinized the powers and natures of the lower heavens since they thought that a man knew nothing if he did not know himself. They seem to have brought all their scrutiny to bear on making their life above all agree with the heavens. They decided in my opinion anyway that the elements and what they are composed of would be known in vain and the movements and influxes of the heavens would be pointless to observe unless all this knowledge at some point was conducive to life and happiness.”

So Ficino has a very practical bent to him and it's perhaps a sign of our civilization, our time that you can find almost no information on Ficino. Ficino ranks on a par with the greats of the Renaissance. He is eye to eye with the achievements of Michelangelo and Leonardo. He is on a par with anybody you care to name in the Renaissance and he is almost totally unknown in the English speaking world. In fact the first collected edition of Ficino's works was not published until almost 77 years after his death in Basel and that was 1576 and it was reprinted in Turin, Italy in 1959 and there are only 2 or 3 books in English on Ficino. One of them has been out of print for nearly 40 years. I have a Xerox copy. It's a translation of Ficino's commentary on Plato's Symposium. Because as we'll see one of the overriding concerns of Ficino was that love must be understood in the world. That love has a philosophic flavor. And in fact Ficino is responsible for the term ‘platonic love’. And I think the index to the misunderstanding of the Renaissance and the non-understanding of Ficino is how the trite phrase ‘platonic love’ has come to symbolize sort of a wishy-washy relationship in which holding hands is perhaps the most that one would do. But for Ficino the whole notion of love was rather hermetic in quality and we'll see that it plays a very very large role in his thought.

Now Ficino himself is actually a twice born character. He claims in his own writings that he was born physically from his mother and father but that he was reborn by the good graces of one of the great powerhouses of the early Renaissance, a man named appropriately Cosimo de Medici. And Cosimo who was born about 1389. And if you think of that date you think in your mind of just the most primitive medieval people. But actually Cosimo was from an ancient northern Italian family. Their family crest is six red balls upon a gold background rather in the shape of a shield, a heraldic shield. No one knows for certain what this means or where it came from, only that the Medici family is of ancient ancient lineage going back many hundreds of years even by the time of the early 14th century. Cosimo when he was 50 years old inherited by the death of his father an enviable position in Florentine circles. His family had been very successful bankers and Cosimo himself was somewhat of a genius. He was rather like J. Paul Getty in the sense that he was an absolute financial genius and all through his life he had the knack of making money. And the way that he made his money was that he made contacts between people and had the knack of picking out just the right person at the right time to talk to to encourage to make an interest free loan if necessary to set up some other contact so that by the time Cosimo de Medici was ready to be the kingmaker in Florentine political circles around 1429 many of the other powerful families sought to discredit him quickly to get him out of the way. And in fact about the time that Ficino was being born, 1433, one of the great powerful families in Florence, the Albizzi, were setting up a frame job on Cosimo and they got him under some infractions of some laws. They imprisoned him in the tower in Florence and then held a trial.

Well Cosimo had made so many friends that they really couldn't kill the man so they had to settle for exiling him. And when Ficino was one year old Cosimo was exiled to the city of Padua where he was received as a prince. And everybody in Padua went ga-ga over Cosimo. And he wore beautiful clothes. He had elegant manners. He was one of the most attractive personalities of his time and very soon the people of Venice were clamoring for Cosimo to come. And he made a visit, an extended visit to Venice. And there through. Such lavish banquets that pretty soon everybody in Florence was talking about the good old days when Cosimo was around their city. So they got rid of the Albizzi who didn't go so easily. They turned up with all their armed thugs in the town square of Florence. But the townspeople of Florence, the Guildsmen, the craftsmen, the little people that Cosimo had cultivated for 30 years finally paid off and they threw the Albizzi out. And 11 months to the day after he had been exiled from Florence, Cosimo de Medici came riding back in on a white horse all gilded with beautiful tapestry woven cloths big plumes in his hat and he rode past the deserted palaces of the Albizzi and he stood up in the saddle his beautiful purple spurs sort of shining and raised his finger and he pointed to the deserted palaces of his enemies. And from that moment on for the next 300 years the Medicis were the power in Florence. All based on the acumen of Cosimo’s judgment of men.

Cosimo saw the very young Ficino. Probably he was presented like, oh I would say maybe when he was 12 or 13 years old, like many promising teenagers are presented in some echelons of society today. The women have their debut and the young men are presented just to be shown because Ficino's father was the doctor for Cosimo di Medici and this doctor whose name was Ficino also a very straight laced stern medical man. His education had been based on purely Aristotelian galenic backgrounds but Ficino's mother was a curiosity. She's been described as zany as bizarre. She was in fact a highly clairvoyant prophetic woman dazzling in her vivacity. And so the young Ficino who was born prematurely and was always sickly, he was of small stature, when he was a youngster sort of imbibed this intuitive quality from his mother. And he imbibed from his father this capacity to pursue down to the Nth degree in his researches the basic background tracing down symptom by symptom till one came to the overall view of the cause of the disease, that sort of thing.

When he was 12 or 13 presented to Cosimo it made very little impression, seemingly, but somebody like Cosimo was able to keep a photographic reference in his mind and he would recall Ficino about five years later when he needed somebody for a specific purpose that he had in mind. In the meantime Ficino was given sort of the basic education of his day because his father was a doctor. You followed the father's footsteps so he was sent to school. He was, as a youngster, given just a regular public education. And when he was given a background, sort of a pre-med background, he began to absent himself from these studious lectures. And he started to show up at the lectures of a man named Cristoforo Landino. And Landino was talking about Plato and the young teenage Ficino, hearing these lectures by Landino on Plato, began to daydream about the possibilities of philosophy. At that time maybe the only lectures on Plato that were possible were lectures on Plato's Timaeus. Possibly a few other dialogues. Almost none of them were translated. Most of them were completely unknown in the Middle Ages and it remained for Ficino to make the first translation complete of Plato into modern languages which he would spend some 30 years of his life on. He began to daydream and to write little essays on Plato and finally he had amassed a huge manuscript which later he consigned to the flames. He actually burnt this manuscript of his vision of Plato. And of course the lack of attendance to his regular classes produced the classic case where the parent called the student home from university from school and kept him in the house to keep their eye on him. And during this time Ficino had what we would call a crisis of the soul. He began to have his spirit inside rebel against this enforced regimen upon him. But the father would not have it any other way and young Ficino was sent off to the University of Bologna, another northern Italian city in the Po River valley instead of the Arno River valley. Ficino had been born in Figline which is on the upper Arno about 30 or 40 miles into the Tuscan hills on the Arno from Florence. But Bologna is in the Po River valley over several mountain ranges.

There again they tried to force upon him this classic education for the doctor. Using Galen, using Aristotle, using Avicenna, the Arabic philosopher and Ficino just couldn't stomach it. And so he felt that he was wasting away there when all of a sudden almost as he would later say his guardian spirit took charge of affairs. Ficino was called back to Florence. We're not sure whether it was that his father relented. I rather doubt it. We're not sure whether it was Landino who recommended this daydreamy student. I doubt that. I rather think it was Cosimo himself because when he was called back to Florence he was presented into the maestro and Cosimo said I've been thinking for 20 years about building a school. I don't want it to be any regular school. I want it to be a reincarnation of Plato's Academy that was in Athens. Now Plato's Academy had lasted for a thousand years in Athens. It had weathered every catastrophe of the ancient world and only closed its doors because there were no more students finally in the reign of Justinian about 529 AD. But nobody in the ancient world had the temerity to close the doors. Only the lack of any students whatsoever led to the demise of the Academy. It was one of the most sacred institutions of the ancient world. All of this élan of the Platonic Academy had gone underground at the time had in fact gone underground about the time that the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite were coming out. The writings on the celestial hierarchy, the mystical theology, the divine names about that time. And for 900 years this underground current had been kept alive in various esoteric groups. There were some esoteric groups that were encamped along the Nile River in Egypt. One of those was the last rector of the Alexandrian Library, the Serapeum, who had gone along the desert caravan route across Lake Mareotis and into the desert and finally reaching the Nile River and he had taken for himself the name Horapollo - Horus Apollo. And the Hieroglyphics of Horapollo is one of the key books of antiquity that was to be translated in the Renaissance and give a rebirth to this old Hermetic tradition. Another one of the manuscripts that came to light were the Magical Papyri in which the magical evocations of the late Hellenistic synthesis were brought back to light during the Renaissance.

But the main key, the continuity, the major conduit by which integration had been maintained in the classical world was in Plato's Academy in Athens and the idea for reviving stronger not just reviving but reincarnating the Platonic Academy came from a Byzantine scholar named Gemistus Pletho and Pletho had come to Florence to give some lectures on Plato about the time that the Turks were surrounding Byzantium with greater and greater rings of men and machinery. Byzantium was to finally fall in 1453 but for 20 years before Mehmed the Conqueror finally breached the walls the Turks had pretty well surrounded the city so that it was isolated. In the early stages of that isolation certain Byzantine scholars had fled from Constantinople and had gone to northern Italy, especially Venice and Florence, to try to kindle an interest preparing the way for their move from Constantinople to northern Italy. And Plato had gone to Florence and had given such a dazzling series of lectures on Plato that the Northern Italians called him the second Plato and Cosimo as a younger man 30 had met Pletho and he had gotten the idea from Plato that Florence was to be the new Athens and that it was in Florence that the Platonic Academy should be reborn. Well 20 years had gone by and finally the vision had matured in Cosimo's mind and to show you what kind of judgment he had he picked out the 19 year old Ficino from the University of Bologna and called him in to his office in the Bank of Florence and he said you're my man. You're going to be the man who brings Plato back to life and I'm going to finance you and I'm going to set up everything with my contacts so that you will be left alone to bring back this spirit of Plato and the efficacy of his thought and his institution back into the life of man.

So the first thing that Cosimo did is that he purchased a house for Ficino in Florence near one of the churches in Florence, Santa Maria Nuova and he purchased also for him a farm in the Tuscan hills rather to the northeast out towards Fiesole and he set up in a part of the hills called Carregi his own villa which was to be the Florentine Academy and nearby actually within several hours walking distance Ficino's farm and several other philosophers were set up outside there also later on to help Ficino - Poliziano and several others, Vala and so forth. But it was Ficino who was being prepared. Now remember he was only 19 years old and Cosimo at 50 really couldn't look forward to that long a life although he lived for about 20 some years afterwards.

When Ficino began his preparation he was turned over to Landino and a few other Greek specialists to perfect his Greek and he spent seven years learning Greek better than anyone had learned Greek since the time of, well, John Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century was a great Greek scholar, Roger Bacon in the 13th was a great Greek scholar. But for Ficino for a comparison you have to go back to somebody like Proclus in the fifth century AD. In other words he became a masterful at the language so that he not only understood the language well enough to make a translation but he understood the emotional and intellectual tones of what was being said. And all of this sublime material so that he could recreate the ambiance as well as translate the language into contemporary, everyday, Italian and Latin. The first thing that they set up for Ficino to cut his metaphysical teeth on was that he was to make a translation of the Orphic Hymns. And the second thing was the Hymns of Homer. And if you've ever taken a look at the Orphic Hymns - we have good English translation by Thomas Taylor. Taylor was sort of the English version of Ficino about the time of William Blake in London. The Orphic Hymns are all incantations for divine spirits to come into the presence of man there to operate with their full power. And the tone behind them is that man manipulates ceremonial cycles to prepare a vessel for divine power to come in and charge it so that man in his motions, ritual motions in his life is rather like a condenser which is there to receive energy from the Cosimos.

Well he finished translating these Orphic hymns. He finished translating the wonderful Homeric Hymns. I don't know whether you know but Homer when he was preparing himself to write the Great Cycle of Man in two great parts one part to show how man stretches out and becomes distended by wrath, and the other part how man comes back to himself and has his homecoming, to prepare himself for this he wrote the hymns which are very much like the Orphic Hymns only it raises the Orphic Hymns from mystical, religious, intuitive style to a conscientious styling. Rather on the basis of the Olympian gods Homer creates Mount Olympus. There are great parallels and sometime we'll do a lecture series on Homer and we'll bring all this in. Some of the origins go back to about 1500 BC about 500 years before Homer with the Indian mythology Indra and Mount Meru and so forth are the prototypes for Zeus and Mount Olympus and the beginnings of the Rig Veda are very close to the beginnings of the Orphic backgrounds of Greek mystery religion.

At any rate Ficino cut his philosophic teeth on translating these while he was learning the language. Then when he was ready about 1460, 1461 they gave him the first massive test to see what he could do as a translator and as a reincarnate. They gave him the untranslated Corpus Hermeticum - all the dialogues of Hermes Trismegistus - and the Corpus Hermeticum in English translation take up four volumes in the Scott translation and three big volumes in the G. R. S. Mead translation. It's an enormous undertaking but the young Ficino went after it like a bear. And by 1463 he had finished this translation and it was the first time that the entirety of the Corpus Hermeticum was translated into a modern language. And if you take a look at some of those dialogues like the Poemander or the Asclepius. You see what a very high tone of religious philosophy is engendered there. And of course all of it is in a serious dialogue form so that Ficino's spirit and mind and temperament were being tutored to get into this form of using the dialogue. The play if you will as it later turned out in Western thought. The stage and the actor to declaim by the revealing of plot what the world is about. Not so much a line of argument but a gestalt of realization. In Shakespeare the play is the thing not the plot, not the line of argument but the realization of the wholeness, the totality of the world and every play declaims the same thing from a different perspective. So if you have the First Folio of Shakespeare you have all the wedges that make a cosmic view of reality. Just so with the Corpus Hermeticum and just so with The Dialogues of Plato the totality of The Dialogues of Plato sixteen or seventeen hundred pages make a complete circuit of all the basic necessary viewpoints of reality which we have to tutor ourselves to come to an understanding of the whole. By 1463 Ficino could take into the aging ailing Cosimo and show him the finished job. So he was given finally the great tomes. Cosimo had spent a lot of money on them and he'd collected from all over the world. Cosimo had maintained hostels in Jerusalem. He had lent money to Edward the Fourth of England. He had his arms stretched across the entirety of the ancient Roman Empire. And what he was doing was he was searching for the best manuscripts of Plato that he could find and he had amassed them together and he presented them to Ficino himself.

By the time that the next year, 1464, rolled around and Cosimo was ailing he had Ficino come in and read to him his latest pages of translation from Plato. So Ficino, loving the grand old man. He claimed that his father had given him a birth into a career to be a doctor of bodies but Cosimo had given him a rebirth to be a doctor of souls. And he says someplace in his writings he says I've been curing souls a long time now thanks to the good Cosimo de Medici. And incidentally one of his tasks was to be the tutor for the Medici family. And to show you how good a teacher he was one of his students was Lorenzo the Magnificent, Il Magnifico. And when Lorenzo finally took power a couple of years after Cosimo's death he remembered his teacher very well and never let him down and constantly helped him along. But when the dying Cosimo was ailing in his room. He cleared out everybody else and only the vibrant, young Ficino there reading Plato to him for the last several weeks of his life. And Cosimo is said to have went very very peacefully, enjoying the fact secretly that his greatest investment of his life was paying off. That the Florentine Academy was in fact bringing back to life the whole platonic tradition again. Cosimo passed from the scene in 1464. The eldest Medici was someone named Pietro and they called him Pietro the Gouty. He suffered from gout very very sickly. In fact whenever he had to be taken someplace they carried him on a litter. And once he had to quell an uprising in Florence - the Medicis were never the the leader, they were the kingmakers behind the leaders. The leaders were all chosen from a ballot box. But the Medicis always made sure that they knew who was going to be in that ballot box so anybody that came out they already had the show in hand. Pietro lasted for five years. He wasn't very effective. But all this time Ficino was let alone. And for those years he worked on his Plato. And in fact by 1469 most of Plato had been translated into a modern language. Then Pietro died and Lorenzo Il Magnifico came into power.

Lorenzo is one of those unbelievably vibrant persons but he did not have the quiet rooting influence of Cosimo. Lorenzo rather would raise himself up to his full stature throw his leonine hair back and his beautiful huge aquiline nose and point to somebody and say get out of my way. That sort of a character. He was one of the most learned men of his time. He could write poetry with the best. He could philosophize with the best. But he was rather brusque in his politics. So the enemy encampment sort of came up and caused him trouble all of his life. But Ficino was supported. In fact Lorenzo, who loved festivals and loved the brightness of northern Italian life, always made sure that whenever Ficino wanted to celebrate Plato's birthday - which he did every year. Plato was born they said on November 3rd. So every November 3rd out at the villa and Careggi they would have a huge confab. And you have to understand that Ficino constantly kept a bust of Plato with a candle burning in front of it in his own house and in the Florentine Academy. And this bust of Plato was surrounded by a huge fresco on the wall. And on one side of the fresco was the Greek philosopher Democritus who was weeping. And on the other side of the fresco was the Greek philosopher Heraclitus who was laughing. And between laughter and the tears was the equanimity of Plato with the constant eternal light in front of him. Every November 3rd they would throw a huge bash at the villa and of course Ficino who knew everybody. He kept the letters of the last 20 years of his life and just the list of who he knew was the list of everybody in the world at the time who was worth knowing. One of his favorite students out at the Academy was Sandro Botticelli who when he went out there in the mid 1470s got the inspiration. And Botticelli's Primavera which was done in 1477 shows you the early effervescence of coming into contact with this most energetic and charismatic. Ficino was small but he was dynamite. I'm sure that you've met the Italian sage who is excellent in his diction, excellent in his dress and just has this kind of electric current running through everything that he says and does. It just seems to have that extra flavor. Ficino had this often he would begin his books with these kinds of exhortations to his audience, I toast your health. I have nothing in mind except your health. But let's agree that our highest health is in philosophy. Therefore let us think about these things and in depth. And we have plenty of time for this. And aren't we blessed to have this? And now let's go into the subject that sort of thing.

Lorenzo was just the sort of patron to lionize these events and he made sure that they were the finest soirees in Florence. Lorenzo himself very often would go out to Ficino and imbibe from him the encouragement that everything that he was doing the kind of political stiff arming he had to go through and his everyday life had some kind of overweening purpose to it. And he was very pleased with Ficino. But they both realized that after all there were only 145 miles from the Vatican and the popes have a way of also pushing their power around. Lorenzo of course would take care of that because his son became Pope Leo the 10th, also trained by Ficino. But before they got to that stage of the game. Innocent the eighth was very concerned about Ficino and in fact at one time brought him to Rome to answer charges of practicing magic. But Lorenzo and Ficino were not people to be taken by surprise. So they prepared for all this. And as early as the 1470s Ficino was made a Dominican priest and he was given a church to give sermons at if he wished. And in fact one of his early Dominican classmates was a man that we'll hear about a little bit later - Savonarola.

It was quite interesting because all the time that Ficino was finishing up his platonic work he was thinking to himself about covering his tracks in terms of the external religion of the day and he wrote a wonderful little book called On the Christian Religion which showed that religion has two aspects. It has a common aspect and it has a rational aspect and the common aspect has for its roots scripture and that the circulation of understanding in scripture is via faith but that the rational aspect of religion had intelligence, intellect rather than faith as its circulating synthesizing principle and that in fact instead of scripture one then had to go to the writings of Plato and not just Plato as the fount, as the originator of philosophy, as the great intellectual expression of man's religiosity, but that Plato was where all this tradition had reached its fullest expression. But that in fact there had been before Plato a whole series of thinkers. There had been Pythagoras, and before Pythagoras there had been Orpheus, and before Orpheus there had been Zoroaster, and at the very beginning there had been Hermes Trismegistus - an ancient archaic Egyptian. And Ficino was very careful to point out that this tradition was ever so ancient that in fact Christianity was sort of like a younger brother. A younger version given to the common people to help them to acclimate themselves to a good life so that at some time they could wake up to the fact that there was a higher religion to be had. The religion of the reason, of the intellect, and that this religion was what philosophy was all about. In fact when he finished his great commentaries and translations of Plato he called it the platonic theology, the Theologica Platonica, saying that this was the highest religion of man and how could that be? He said there are as we know from our personal experience, and Ficino always used his personal contemplative experiences in his writings. He said we know from our personal experiences and from all this data that we have from antiquity going back to the dawn of time we know that there are hierarchies of the celestial realms and that at the very highest point is God. And that in fact there are nine very large horizons of being, leading up to God and emanating from God back down. But what we have not sufficiently realized, what has not occurred to us with great clarity, is that the hermetic messenger between these levels of being is not some angelic messenger or even somebody sent from Mount Olympus but is the soul of man and man has the most sacred part in the universe. It is he who is in contact with the natural realm and as he through his soul can ascend through all of the levels of the cosmos, up to God himself. so that he says when I talk about humanism, when I talk about man I don't mean this figure who at 70 years of age is near death I mean the soul of man that interior core that's eternal and mobile and can go wherever he will in the universe. Not only that but that man has a peculiar. Outstanding unique capacity in all the universe that he can express and manifest. God's love. And he can carry this message of love to all the realms of the universe. And what is that message of love? That man can affinitize himself through his soul bringing into manifestation at whatever level of phenomenal reality he will and by entering into a relationship with the phenomenon on those levels bring them into an integration into this core of being. So that all of this may be. Can we use the term redeemed? Yeah even before Luther all this can be redeemed and brought back into unity with God. So that man is the Hermetic messenger of God to bring the universe back into its wholeness its wholesomeness. And he says why shouldn't I be cheerful when I realize this? Why shouldn't I be filled with awe knowing that this is the sacred duty enjoined upon us and that here in our own time after a thousand years of darkness the light shines again and we know why we're here and we're ready to do it. And from this rediscovery from this rebirth of man came the term the Renaissance. True, it was coined by Jacob Burckhardt in Basel several hundred years after the fact. But it was when he realized what Ficino had brought to life again he said that is the synthesizing idea right there. The rebirth of classical antiquity is not just the rebirth of reading Homer again and reading Plato again but it's bringing what they were doing back to life again and human beings who can teach it to others. And so Ficino, of course, absolutely concerned with the fact that this be so in this career of translating.

Are we out of time here? Do you want to take a break or do you want to go on? Let me turn this over and we'll go on

Once he had finished with his translation of Plato he began to realize that Plato had been integrated once before in a very very high level. And that was in Alexandria and Rome in the third century AD by Plotinus. So, under suggestion of a very very good friend of his, Pico della Mirandola he began to undertake the massive translation of Plotinus and it would take him eight years to finish that. Plato's collected works are about 1700 pages. Plotinus about 600 pages. But Plotinus is by far the most difficult author in Western civilization bar none. Plotinus is almost unbelievably difficult. There are some philosophers like Martin Heidegger who is a sign of Zeit in both German and the English translation are difficult because the language is highly stylized and a technical philosophic jargon. But Plotinus is difficult because it presupposes that you know what he's talking about, that you have had those experiences, those mystical insights which he is talking about. And if you haven't a lot of Plotinus not only goes over your head but goes deep into your soul and reverberates there and you feel very uncomfortable because you have the intuition that you've been told something and you don't know what you've been told. You know that it's valuable but you can't get at it because you don't have a language for it. But that was just the point of Plotinus. There is no language for God so we have to stylize ourselves so that our mind exfoliates itself fully. And once it's exfoliated fully we can see that there's still something left over, something which we would call the spirit, and that it is the spirit which has a motion and its motion is towards a wholeness and its achievement of that wholeness is a unified experience of the divine. And Plotinus says in his writings that 2 or 3 times in his life he experienced this oneness with the divine. So when somebody like Ficino set out to bring Plotinus into translation you can begin to gauge for yourself what a tremendous mountain he was now setting himself to climb. He already climbed this enormous peak of Plato translated extensive commentaries. In fact he revised his translation and brought it out in 1484. And it was a triumph of the age. And now he was working on Plotinus. And the thing that started him on Plotinus was that his friend, the young Pico della Mirandola, suggested to him a passage in Plotinus which had bothered him immensely and he couldn't grapple with it. So he said I don't know Greek well enough, would you translate this for me? So Ficino translated this passage. And this passage is in the fourth Aeneid in book three part 11. And I think I'll just give you that passage, it's about a half a page. But this is what set Ficino off and started him on a direction which would end up with him finally translating the next final stage from Plotinus which was the Writings of Dionysius the Areopagite who was the great minded and experienced experimental spirit in antiquity who tried to bring the Neoplatonic and the Christian religion together into one full expression. And it would be the last works that Ficino would translate in his life. But he was ready for Plotinus. And this is the passage that got under Pico's skin and finally got under Ficino's skin so that he spent eight years completing the work. This is it. This is the Stephen McKenna translation of Plotinus the Great. Stephen McKenna. Plotinus said writes and this is on the soul, this whole book is about the soul.

I think therefore that those ancient sages Plotinus means that in 250 AD already those ancient sages thousands of years ago. I think therefore that those ancient sages who sought to secure the presence of divine beings by the erection of shrines and statues showed insight into the nature of the all. They perceived that though this soul is everywhere tractable its presence will be secured all the more readily when an appropriate receptacle is elaborated a place especially capable of receiving some portion or phase of it, something reproducing it or representing it and serving like a mirror to catch an image of it. And you begin to get all kinds of insights that all of the buildings of sacred architecture are receptacles to hold the presence of the divine. And every religious person is also trying to be a receptacle for them. So Plotinus and this is Plotinus and this is also Ficino and this is the whole new platonic tradition in a nutshell. Plotinus goes on. It belongs to the nature of the all to make its entire content reproduce most fallaciously the reason principles in which it participates. The reason principles in which it participates, archetype, every particular thing is the image within matter of a reason principle which itself images a material reason principle. Thus every particular entity is linked to that divine being in whose likeness it is made. The divine principle which the soul contemplated and contained in the act of each creation. Such meditation and representation there must have been since it was equally impossible for the created to be without share in the Supreme and for the Supreme to descend into the created. Nothing in fact is far away from anything. Things are not remote. There is no doubt the aloofness of difference and of mingled natures as against the unmingled but selfhood has nothing to do with spatial position and in unity itself there may still be some distinction. These beings the heavenly bodies are divine in virtue of cleaving to the supreme because by the medium of the soul thought of as descending they remained linked with the primal soul and through it are veritably what they are called and possess the vision of the intellectual principle the single object of contemplation to that soul in which they have their being. And then, of course, the follow up is that man is the creator of these receptacles. It is his soul which is the priest or if you like the magician maneuvering and manipulating the external in terms not only of the internal not just of a psychological internal but in terms of an interior - because the interior has in contradistinction to the internal which is simply a contrapositive of the external - the interior has an architecture and its architecture is the architecture of reality. Man's soul has the entirety of the shape of the intellectual principles of the universe all intact and he can ascend through contemplation in himself to the highest. That first one who is not a part of the structure but is transcendent of it all because his wholeness its wholeness her wholeness takes it all in. For Ficino this was one of the keys and he sought mightily to bring Plotinus into translation and he finished it about the time that Lorenzo died. And Lorenzo made sure on his deathbed that all the monies necessary to publish Ficino's Plotinus were in the bank and ready to go. And a month after Il Magnifico died Ficino who had rushed the job towards the end finished and published the first great translation of Plotinus since Plotinus had written it in Ancient Rome. And it was a bombshell almost even exceeding the translation of the Corpus Hermeticum or The Complete Dialogues of Plato. But it was so high falutin as we would say that almost no one outside of the Florentine circle understood what had been done. And then of course to carry it to its final coda. Ficino could see the composition of his life and see the pattern of his life. He had always been a sickly individual. In fact he once said to someone don't mention my health to me. I've been sick since the day I was born. I don't know what health is. Leave me alone. He took upon himself to finish the translation of the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite which he did towards 1494, around that time, about two years after the death of Lorenzo.

Just as he finished translating this enormous tradition he felt that with Hermes Trismegistus he had gone back to the antiquity of the Hermetic tradition in ancient Egypt and had brought it all the way through from Zoroaster the Chaldean hymns, he did a translation of that we've just discovered in the last few years, through all of Hermes and Plato, through Plotinus to Dionysius the Areopagite where the tradition in antiquity had ended. The Dark Ages had come. So that Ficino says I have now reinstated a bridge, I have created a pier in our time so that the bridge of ancient wisdom which has been held in the spirit all this time may come and manifest in the world again. I've created a vehicle, a school, a type of a person in whom this ancient truth can come and kindle its flame again so that we have sacred people again. They know what it's for. They know what the eye of God can see. And just as he finished that translation, the city of Florence went through one of those enormous upheavals which read almost like a fairy tale. This Dominican monk, Savonarola, began preaching prophetically the decline of the Medicis, the takeover of the whole of Italy by a foreign power. And sure enough within a couple of years Charles VIII of France was sending his troops in and Savonarola. The Dominican monk became the head of the city of Florence and there was this tremendous flowering of a totally different kind of republic. It was a republic of individuals. All the wealthy families were sort of pushed aside. But Savonarola became really a cause celebre and almost too powerful. And the Pope was afraid to say too much against him and began to try to invite him to Rome to get him out of Florence. And Savonarola feigned illness, would not come. Then he would send threatening letters to him and would say I represent the true church, the true God, do you come and inspect my sermons? See if I am not right. And of course on these grounds the Pope was in real danger. He had been living kind of a profligate life and he realized that Savonarola had a dossier on him. But he also was an expert. Savonarola was an expert in Thomas Aquinas as well as the scripture. So he was able to argue on a very deep philosophic level his religious positions. But coupled with this was this flair for visions almost Nostradamus-like in his prophecies. Only his prophecies would come true a year later or two years later.

So that finally he was trapped by his own brilliance. One of his young priests accepted a dare that Savonarola's visions were from God and not from the devil and that he would be willing to undergo an ordeal by fire in the town square of Florence before the entire assembled population and that this Franciscan critic would have to go through the same trial by fire and whoever survived God would have protected him. While the Franciscan didn't show up so there was no trial by fire but the seething populace of Florence these individuals who had been raised to be individuals were so angry that the expected miracle of all time of their age was not forthcoming that they seized Savonarola and they had him hung and burnt at the stake in the public square. So Ficino aged this time had seen just about everything and he realized that he had bequest a very interesting situation to the modern world. He had brought back to life. He had brought back into reincarnation a kind of human being that had not been seen since the great days of Alexandria some 1200 years before. And he died in 1499 at age 66. Realizing that there were afoot in the world dozens and dozens if not scores and hundreds of philosophers and that was the birth of our Hermetic tradition the rebirth of it.

Well let's quit there for tonight.