Ficino Quotes

In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.

The soul exists partly in eternity and partly in time.

Why do we think love is a magician? Because the whole power of magic consists in love. The work of magic is the attraction of one thing by another because of a certain affinity of nature.

At every person's birth, he or she is assigned a certain daemon by his own star, a guardian of life to help with his destined task.

Artist in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.

Then the syncretist Ficino, sitting hunched with Lorenzo standing at his side, put all the ideas together, along with Lorenzo's new song: chariots blazing between the worlds as gods fought rebel gods, the destruction of a city -- a planet? -- by fire, beasts beyond imagining both to terrify and befriend the heroes. "It needs a title," Signorina Scala said. Pulci had his mouth open, but Ficino beat him to the pun. "It shall be dedicated to Isis and Mars," he said, "and we will call it Stella Martis.

It’s often the case that in the bodies of several friends we see one soul. —Marsilio Ficino, Letter to Almanno Donati

The most important idea he gleaned from the swift, learned talk was that religion and knowledge could exist side by side, enriching each other. Greece and Rome, before the dawn of Christianity, had built gloriously in the arts, humanities, sciences, philosophy. Then for a thousand years all such wisdom and beauty had been crushed, declared anathema, buried in darkness. Now this little group of men, the sensual Poliziano, the lined Landino, the tiny Ficino, the golden-haired Pico della Mirandola, these few fragile men, led and aided by Lorenzo de' Medici, were attempting to create a new intellect under the banner of a word Michelangelo had never heard before: Humanism. What did it mean?

People always live badly today; they only live well tomorrow. For the sake of ambition they strive against each other with evil deeds, but the path to glory would be easier to tread by doing good to one another. Although they always speak evil, they hope to be well spoken of themselves; although they do evil, they hope to receive good. We proclaim that we are the authors of good, but that God is the author of evil.

In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world.

That is, through his imagination, Goethe could, when practising ‘active seeing’, enter into the inner being of whatever he was observing, in the way that the philosopher Bergson argued ‘intuition’ could. Here ‘imagination’ is not understood in the reductive sense of ‘unreal’ but in the sense given it by Hermetic thinkers such as Ficino and Suhrawardi, as a means of entering the Hūrqalyā, the Imaginal World or anima mundi that mediates between the world of pure abstraction (Plato’s Ideas) and physical reality (in Goethe’s case, a plant or a cathedral).

The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")

3. Plato, Timaeus 56c–57c. Plato’s devotion to mathematics is well-known, and this influence on Ficino is discussed below. Lindberg points out that, for Plato, “the cosmos is essentially mathematical.” Plato considered, “not that the elements have triangular shapes, but that the elements ultimately are triangular shapes.” The transformation of the elements is “the dissolution and recombination of triangles.” For Plato, “‘mathematical objects are closer to the Forms than physical [objects are]

Всеки, който обича, умира. Защото неговата мисъл, забравяйки себе си, винаги се обръща към любимия. Ако не мисли за себе си, той очевидно не мисли в себе си. Затова и дейността на душата не се осъществява в самата нея, доколкото главното нейно действие е мисленето. А който не действа в себе си, и не съществува в себе си. Защото битието е действието са равнозначни. Нито има битие без действие, нито действието надхвърля самото битие. Никой не действа там, където не е, и винаги действа там, където е. Следователно душата на влюбения не е в него, защото не действа в самия него. Щом не е в него, тя и не живее в него самия. Който не живее, е мъртъв. Значи всеки, който обича, е мъртъв в себе си. Живее ли той поне в другия? Разбира се.

Liefde is ook voor Marsilio Ficino een sterven in de ander: 'Nu ik jou, die mij liefheeft, liefheb, vind ik mijzelf in jou, die aan mij denkt, terug en krijg ik mij, nadat ik mezelf opgaf, in jou, die mij behoudt, terug.

the advice of Lorenzo’s personal philosopher, the Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino, was that women should be treated like chamber pots and locked away after use. 33

Una de las figuras principales del Renacimiento se llamó Ficino. Él exclamó: «¡Conócete a ti misma, oh estirpe divina vestida de humano!». Y otro, Pico della Mirandola, escribió un Diálogo de la dignidad del hombre, algo que hubiera sido completamente impensable en la Edad Media, durante la cual únicamente se utilizaba a Dios como punto de partida. Los humanistas del Renacimiento pusieron al propio ser humano como punto de partida.

People often think of Narcissus as the symbol of excessive self-regard, but in fact, he exemplifies the opposite. As the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino observed in the 1500s, Narcissus did not suffer from an overabundance of self-love, but rather from its deficiency. The myth is a parable about paralysis. The youth, who first appears in restless motion, is suddenly rooted to one spot, unable to leave the elusive spirit. As Ficino remarked, if Narcissus had possessed real self-love, he would have been able to leave his fascination. The curse of Narcissus is immobilization, not out of love for himself, but out of dependency upon his image.

But humanistic learning is also an end in itself. It is simply better to have escaped one’s narrow, petty self and entered minds far more subtle and vast than one’s own than never to have done so. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino said that a man lives as many millennia as are embraced by his knowledge of history. One could add: A man lives as many different lives as are embraced by his encounters with literature, music, and all the humanities and arts. These forms of expression allow us to see and feel things that we would otherwise never experience—society on a nineteenth-century Russian feudal estate, for example, or the perfect crystalline brooks and mossy shades of pastoral poetry, or the exquisite languor of a Chopin nocturne. Ultimately, humanistic study is the loving duty we owe those artists and thinkers whose works so transform us. It keeps them alive, as well as us, as Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini understood. The academic narcissist, insensate to beauty and nobility, trapped in the diversity delusion, knows none of this. And as politics in Washington and elsewhere grows increasingly unmoored from reality, humanist wisdom provides us with one final consolation: There is no greater lesson from the past than the intractability of human folly.

By the act of creating Adam, God has transferred His own creative powers to man, “the mortal counterpart of God.”40 This is Michelangelo’s secret message to his viewers: the secret of our own divine nature. We need only to recognize and unlock its potential to transform our lives and ourselves. Plato taught that if you wish to be able to recognize God, Ficino wrote, “you must first learn to know yourself.”41 The same is true for Michelangelo. As Machiavelli noted, the world is a grim place, especially in 1512, where it seemed that every trace of freedom or liberty had been snuffed out. The slave “grows so much accustomed to his anguish that he would hardly ask again for freedom.

It was also Colet who suggested to Erasmus that he fuse his two interests, the Bible and ancient literature, into one. He urged him to do for ancient Christian literature, including the New Testament, what Ficino had done for Plato: use the techniques of philology to produce a clean, definitive text free from copyists’ errors and scholastic muddles, a “pure Scripture” that would show people what the Bible really said, not what tradition or the allegorists said it meant.

Over time Ficino, Colet, and their colleagues raised the art of recovering a corrupt text’s lost meaning to a science, which they called philology. Cleaning up and clearing up the written works of antiquity became an Italian, and Florentine, specialty, as philology uncovered new or startling meanings in even the most familiar documents

What Ficino had proved (or at least seemed to prove) was that there was no real clash between Christian and pagan systems of theology. In the end, they arose from the same source: the soul’s love of beauty and perfection and its relentless aspiration for knowledge of God and therefore of ourselves.

For Ficino and his followers, inside every human body is a soul struggling to get out and realize its creative powers through the pursuit of the Eternal.

Michelangelo’s ceiling was finished in 1512. The next year a church council officially endorsed Ficino’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The world seemed on the verge of a final reconciliation of ancient philosophy and Christian theology, exactly what Raphael had made visible in his frescos in the Stanze. Instead, a chain of events was about to abruptly change the direction of European thought once again—a chain that started virtually outside the Stanze’s doors.

Giordano Bruno, my unofficial patron saint, wrestled with these familiar imbalances between lived personal experience and available physical evidence in this very town. Precisely what Bruno was doing in Oxford in 1583 is a matter of endless academic discussion. But it clear he was preaching and debating his own hermetic infinitism. Having stepped beyond Ficino’s Catholic veneer and returned to a fully pagan hermetic system, he believed his use of Egyptian symbols, talimans and visualisation had uncovered humanity’s ‘source religion’ and our clearest insight into the nature of reality. What he found in the Hermetica was a fervent belief in mankind’s stellar origins and immortal destiny among innumerable worlds. The

«Amor» también significa para Marsilio Ficino morir en el otro: «Sin duda cuando te amo, al amarte me reencuentro en ti que piensas en mí, y me recupero en ti que conservas lo que había perdido por mi propia negligencia».[33] Cuando Ficino escribe que

Neoplatonists also believed that the vast variety of human thought, if traced back to the One Source—what Leonardo da Vinci called the Prime Mover—would lead to spiritual enlightenment and ultimately to God. This and the mystical texts that Ficino was translating led him to attempt a fusion of all mystical beliefs, from Greek gnosticism to Egyptian hermeneutics to Christian cosmology—and to Jewish Kabbalah.

In essence, Ficino’s philosophy elevated the liberal arts, pure scientific research, and the centrality of the individual and his or her immortal soul’s redemption through beauty and love. It taught that there are absolute concepts that exist outside of human variations and distortions, among them the concepts of Absolute Good, Absolute Love, and Absolute Beauty. This is almost certainly what Michelangelo had in mind when in later life he explained, “In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and in action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.”5 For Michelangelo, imbued with this Platonic mind-set, art was not creating as much as it was uncovering hidden preexistent absolute beauty. “I saw the angel in the marble,” he said, “and I carved until I set him free.”6

One of Ficino’s influences was a well-known work called Fons Vitae (Fountain of life), one of the first European Neoplatonic texts, by an eleventh-century philosopher from Spain named Avicebron. Little did Ficino know that this was a translation of the Arabic translation of an original Hebrew text written by the great Jewish poet-philosopher Solomon Ibn Gavirol (died c. 1058). The idea of harmonizing monotheism with Platonic thought gripped Ficino and led him to attempt the construction of a universal faith, by which all humanity could achieve individual redemption. Of course, now that Jews had just been

The Hebrew Bible, speaking of the first sexual encounter between Adam and Eve, says that “Adam knew” his mate. Remarkably, the Hebrew word l-da’at, “to know,” means also to love or to make love. Sex, on the deepest level, transcends the physical and connotes spiritual union. A seemingly carnal act is invested with dignity and sanctity. The ideal of lovemaking is true intimacy—not merely of intertwining bodies but of mutually understanding souls. To be intimate on this level is to “know” the other person’s essence—his or her divine image—which is but another way of gaining greater kinship with God. Viewed in this light, lovemaking is meant not just for the single objective of procreation, as the Church then taught, but also to foster this ultimate sense of knowing. As the Kabbalah daringly puts it, when a couple “know” each other in a complete sexual-romantic-spiritual act, they actually unite heaven as well. Ficino preached this concept to his circle as “Platonic love,” a love that is not only body-to-body but also soul-to-soul. It was only later in history that “platonic” love came to mean a deep relationship devoid of sexual content.

Walker, D. P. Spiritual and Demon Magic from Ficino to Campanella. Sutton Press. Ward, Benedicta, translator. The Desert Fathers: Sayings of Early Christian Monks. Penguin Classics. Wear, Andrew, R. K. French, and I. M. Lonie, editors. The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century. Cambridge University Press. Weaver, Elissa B. Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women. Cambridge University Press. ________. Scenes from Italian Convent Life: An Anthology of Theatrical Texts and Contexts. Longo Editore. Weinstein, Donald, and Rudolph M. Bell, editors. Saints and Society. University of Chicago Press. Woolfson, Jonathan, editor. Renaissance Historiography. Palgrave Macmillan. Zarri, Gabriella, and Lucetta Scaraffia, editors. Women and Faith. Harvard University Press.

To his audience at John Flaxman’s home Taylor spoke of Orpheus, Hermes, Zoroaster and the ‘perennial philosophy’, the ‘primal wisdom’ of the ancients which Plato had imbibed from the sages who preceded him. Taylor was a one-man Platonic Academy, doing for the esoteric intelligentsia of late eighteenth century London what Marsilio Ficino did for the artists and poets of Renaissance Florence, with his Latin translations of the lost books of Plato and the Hermetica.55 Taylor believed that this primal wisdom was ‘coeval with the universe itself; and however its continuity may be broken by opposing systems, it will make its appearance at different periods of time, as long as the sun himself shall continue to illumine the world’.

Oh how corrupted is the man to whom a dog and a horse are better than the soul! Oh how deformed is he to whom a shoe, whatever its worth, is more beautiful than the soul! Nothing is truly good or beautiful in the house of that man where all things seem good and beautiful before himself, that is before the soul. If some Cynic philosopher were to enter the sanctuary of that man, in all its adornment, and were compelled by some necessity to spit, certainly he should spit in his face, for clearly he would see each single thing therein clean and adorned, in preference to the man himself.

Even sublimated ecstasy is unruly, however. Synesus, a Christian Neoplatonist studied by Ficino and known to Pico, therefore argued for a modified rapture that could sustain community, culture, and politics. To jump past human frailty straight to contemplation would be impulsive and ineffective. A rush to ecstasy would be barbarian, a 'Bacchic frenzy, a manic, enthusiastic leap to win the race without running it.' Synesius conceded that the mysteries aim 'not to learn anything but to have an experience and be put in a certain state.' Yet the Greek way of taking small steps, like going up a ladder, seemed better to him than a direct assault on the deity. Since humans are not pure contemplators, their best path to the visionary state would start with educated experience. To rise above all experience, both Greeks and barbarians cultivated cathartic virtues, but only Greeks like himself, according to Synesius, practiced them in a measured and effective way.

Copies of Ficino’s translations were owned by Ben Jonson, John Milton, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in England, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Jean Racine in France, by Bishop Berkeley in Ireland and Baruch Spinoza in the Netherlands, and by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant in Germany.56 The Ripoli Press’s 1484 edition is recorded at Harvard in 1735, at Yale in 1742, and even, by 1623, in China.57 More than 120 copies have survived into the twenty-first century: thirty-six in Italy, the remainder scattered from Malta, Slovakia, and Sweden to libraries in California, Kansas, Oregon, and the Rare Book Division of the Library of Congress.

The other is Pico della Mirandola, Marsilio Ficino’s friend and fellow Plato enthusiast: a tall, green-eyed intellectual virtuoso who can read, among other languages, Aramaic and Chaldean, and who can recite the entirety of Dante’s Divine Comedy both forward and backward. The awestruck Ficino regards him as a member of “a superhuman race.”5 “They wanted to see everything in our library,” Brother Gregorio later notes of his distinguished visitors.

L” energy is always within us, however, and we can become more aware of it not by trying harder but by slowing and quieting down to, as fifteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino suggested, turn toward the mystery of our own nature the way a sunflower turns toward the sun.

Beni seven kendimi severek kendimi sende, beni düşünen sende tekrar buluyorum ve kendimden vazgeçtikten sonra, beni muhafaza eden sende kendimi tekrar kazanıyorum.

Ficino’s translations were the means by which for many centuries readers across Europe gained access to Plato. His complete Latin translation was republished twenty-four times over the following century.

Cosimo heard was the Philebus, in which Socrates, arguing against the hedonistic Philebus, declared that “wisdom and thought and memory and their kindred, right opinion and true reasonings, are better and more excellent than pleasure.”22 At which point, as Ficino wrote, Cosimo “was recalled from this shadow of life and approached the heavenly light.”23 At Cosimo’s bedside as he passed from the shadow of life was his grandson, the son of Piero, a fifteen-year-old boy named Lorenzo.

Platonism,” writes historian Sem Dresden, “became the Renaissance philosophy.”6 This was in part because it came with the shock of the familiar. And no one contributed more to pointing out what was familiar but also what was new in Plato than Cosimo’s studious protégé Marsilio Ficino. He was born in Florence in 1433. He studied at the University of Florence, taking classes in philosophy, the humanities, and medicine, but does not seem to have completed a degree. In fact, Ficino would make formal university degrees largely irrelevant to the life of the mind for the next three hundred years.

Ficino offered the age a new intellectual master. “Aristotle’s genius is purely human,” he wrote, while “Plato’s is both human and divine.

By a mental sleight of hand, Ficino effortlessly merged Plato’s theory of love with Christian Neoplatonist ideas about divine love derived from familiar authors like Augustine or Saint Bernard—not to mention Italy’s two most famous love poets, Dante and Petrarch. And Plato’s doctrine of love as the desire for beauty had a peculiar attraction in quattrocento Florence.

The theology of Saint Augustine or Saint Bernard made the ultimate goal of love, or caritas, the abnegation of the self, in order to be the servant of God. Ficino’s Platonic theology, by contrast, resulted in an exaltation of the self. The attraction of physical beauty in the material world, as when we look at a person or a painting and say, “How beautiful!” turns out to be a powerful sign of the soul’s yearning for divine perfection, fired by that perfection’s palpable trace in the realm of appearances. And this is made possible, as Ficino explained in his most original work, the Platonic Theology, because the soul shares that same divine nature.

At this point, the theology of Ficino and that of Thomas Aquinas sound not so different. Thomistic man’s proper place is at the center of creation, because he is the crucial mediating point between spirit and matter. Ficino’s Platonic man occupies the same slot in the divine hierarchy. When the Book of Genesis tells us that we are made in the image of God, then we are to take it in a Platonic sense. Of all material creatures, we are the only ones who love God precisely because we are also spiritual beings like God. “At some point, therefore, our rational soul is able to become God, because with God inciting it, it naturally strives towards that goal”—in both the spiritual realm and the material one.15 This leads to a monumental conclusion: through the power of love we become fully conscious of our powers as spiritual beings. Suddenly we realize we have the power to shape our lives, our environment, our relations with others, with the same confidence and creative range as God Himself.

This love that manages to rise above the merely carnal and physical to a higher spiritual level, Ficino termed “Platonic love.” The term has stuck ever since. Platonic love is supposed to be about far more than two friends not sleeping together. As the great Ficino scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller explained, “There can never be two friends only; there must always be three: two human beings and God.

The Florentines of the generation of 1402, men like Bruni and Alberti, had wanted to use the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks and Romans to change the world. Marsilio Ficino wanted to use it to change the self.

Through the writings of Aristotle, Ficino reclaimed from Anaximenes, a fourth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher, the concept of pneuma (“breath” or “spirit”), a substance which he envisioned as constantly in flux and animating everything in the universe.

Ficino also conceived of eros, or love, as the spiritual force that drove the universe (Orion, 1995:86–87). Again, this presages Neo-Pagan and especially Wiccan notions of the polarity between goddess and god, feminine and masculine energies in the universe,

Yet, trust in the individual gives us one of our most prized ideals as well, for belief in individualism implies tolerance for all individuals - the very basis of humanness. That trust, if we can believe Marsilio Ficino, created a golden age in Florence:

Lorenzo fue educado, gracias a los intereses y a la cultura de sus padres, de acuerdo con las normas de la aristocracia septentrional, por lo que acabó convirtiéndose en un personaje refinado, amante de las letras y poco inclinado hacia las actividades típicamente burguesas. Primero fue un hombre piadoso, Gentile Becchi, que más tarde alcanzaría el obispado de Arezzo, quien educó al Magnífico. Luego siguieron Marsilio Ficino y el poeta neoplatónico Cristoforo Landino, así como el filósofo griego Janos Argyropoulos, que se había instalado definitivamente en Florencia en 1456.