A Renaissance Platonist’s Dialogue on Love as the Soul’s Ascent
What the Work Is
De Amore is the short title commonly given to Marsilio Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Symposium, written in Latin and known in full as Commentarium in convivium Platonis de amore. It is one of Ficino’s most celebrated works. The Florentine humanist, philosopher, translator, and physician — best known for producing the first complete Latin translation of Plato’s dialogues — composed this commentary out of a deep personal interest in love and its effects on the soul. He later translated the work into Italian as well.
What the Book Is About
The work takes Plato’s Symposium — the dialogue in which a series of speakers at a banquet deliver speeches in praise of Eros — as its subject and explains it. Ficino presents his commentary in the form of a dialogue with seven participants, each of whom expounds one of the speeches from Plato’s original. The framing occasion is said to be a banquet held at the Medici villa to mark Plato’s birthday. In setting out his reading of the Symposium, Ficino develops a central component of his own worldview, placing love at the center of his account of how the soul relates to the divine.
Key Ideas and Themes
The commentary’s governing idea is that love is the decisive force driving the soul’s ascent toward God. Ficino follows the Platonic tradition in treating love as the power that lifts the soul upward, and it is this function he has in mind when he writes of “Socratic” love — or, less often, “Platonic” love. The modern, watered-down phrase “platonic love” derives from the term Ficino popularized, though it retains only a distant resemblance to what Plato and Ficino actually meant.
For Ficino, human love is always directed toward the divine. Even love for another person aims at the divine within that person and therefore, ultimately, at God. Here he departs fundamentally from the ancient Neoplatonic outlook: love is not only a striving of the lower toward the higher, but also a love of the higher for the lower — God’s love for the world. On this basis he interprets creation as an act of the divine will, in which God’s love goes out from itself and communicates itself, as love by its nature does. This self-giving of God, which brings creatures into being, sets up a circular movement whose end is the return of creatures to their divine source — and with that, divine love returns to itself.
Following a traditional Pythagorean and Neoplatonic conception, Ficino gives love a cosmic dimension, declaring it the power that governs the entire universe. He holds that no part of creation can be hostile to another; even when living things destroy others — for instance, to feed themselves — the motive is not hostility but self-love. Evil, in his view, only appears to exist: it is a mere deficiency, a limitation of some good resulting from a thing’s imperfect participation in that good. Everything that exists is in itself and originally good, and nothing that exists is superfluous or worthless. The human will is always directed at the good, though it does not always aim at the best, since it sometimes mistakenly prefers lesser goods.
Ficino explicitly includes eros — desire directed at earthly, bodily beauty — within his conception of love. As a humanist, he connects this to the ancient pursuit of beauty. Although he recognizes dangers in erotic desire, the fundamentally medieval distrust of beauty in the sensory world as a distraction from God is foreign to him; he regards the appreciation of such beauty as itself a path toward the divine.
Significance and Influence
De Amore became one of Ficino’s most famous works and stands as a work in which he set out a core element of his worldview. Its influence is bound up with the broader reach of Ficino’s project: through his translations and commentaries he did more than almost anyone of his era to make Plato and the Platonic tradition known to Latin-reading Europe, and his Neoplatonically shaped understanding of Plato proved formative for the early modern period. The concept of love he articulated in this commentary entered European culture so thoroughly that its popularized descendant, “platonic love,” remains in common use — even as its original philosophical meaning has largely faded from view.
Ficino was born on 19 October 1433 in Figline Valdarno, roughly twenty-five kilometers southeast of Florence, and grew up in Florence itself. His father, Diotifeci d’Agnolo di Giusto, served as personal physician to Cosimo de’ Medici, and the name “Ficino” derives from Fecino, a diminutive of Diotifeci. As a man approaching sixty, Ficino recounted that Cosimo had encountered the Byzantine scholar Georgios Gemistos Plethon at the Council of Florence, that Plethon had won him over to Platonism, and that Cosimo — so impressed by the Byzantine Platonist — resolved to found an academy in Florence modeled on Plato’s school in Athens. By this account Cosimo had already earmarked the six-year-old Ficino for a role in that project and prepared him through a corresponding education. However exaggerated this presentation may be, an early contact between the young Florentine and the Platonism Plethon propagated in Italy is to be assumed; Ficino writes that from childhood he “followed the divine Plato.”
He studied the liberal arts and medicine in Florence. Among his teachers were the humanist Cristoforo Landino and the scholastically minded Aristotle commentator Niccolò Tignosi, who taught theoretical medicine and Aristotelian philosophy. During this period Ficino acquired a good command of the scholastic method and terminology that later showed in his works, along with sound knowledge of Aristotle. He also occupied himself with Lucretius, whom he esteemed for a time; in 1457 he composed a commentary on Lucretius that he later burned. In the letter De divino furore he cited with approval in December 1457 the medieval thinker David of Dinant, a pantheist from whose doctrine he later distanced himself — showing at that time an openness to concepts incompatible with church teaching. His main interest, however, was already Plato’s doctrine during his student years. In 1456 he summarized it briefly in a compendium titled Institutiones ad Platonicam disciplinam. At that point he could not yet read Plato in the original and depended on the modest knowledge available from Latin sources. Cosimo and Landino advised him to learn Greek first. In 1457 he wrote a treatise On Pleasure, describing the views of the various philosophical schools on pleasure. Then, according to his biographer Corsi, he went to Bologna to continue his medical studies, though the stay in Bologna is doubted in scholarship. He never obtained a degree, but later practiced as a physician.
Patronage and the Medici
After his student years Ficino spent the rest of his life in his homeland, where Cosimo supported him generously and provided the material basis for a life devoted entirely to philosophy and theology. By his own words the Medici was a second father to him. In 1462 Cosimo gave him a house in Florence and, on 18 April 1463, a modest country house in Careggi, a place near Florence that is today part of the city; Cosimo owned a splendid villa there. Ficino was largely without needs and always led a very modest life. He concentrated on his goal of opening up the principal sources of ancient Platonism that had become accessible in Western Europe as numerous Greek manuscripts of ancient texts reached Italy during and after the fall of the Byzantine Empire. After Cosimo’s death in 1464, Ficino continued to enjoy the favor of the leading members of the Medici family. First Cosimo’s son Piero il Gottoso took over as new head of the family in supporting Ficino’s work; from 1469 Piero’s son and successor Lorenzo de’ Medici was the humanist’s new patron. With all three benefactors Ficino had a close, trusting relationship.
The Translation Project
Ficino’s initial main task was producing the first complete Latin translation of Plato’s dialogues, which Cosimo had requested. He was able to present ten dialogues during his patron’s lifetime; a few days before Cosimo’s death he read from them to him. Nine further dialogues he dedicated to Cosimo’s son Piero. In 1484 the complete Plato translation appeared in print. On some dialogues he expressed himself in his own commentating writings. Since love together with its effects on the soul interested him especially, he dealt thoroughly with Plato’s dialogue Symposium, devoted to this theme. He also commented on Plato’s dialogues Parmenides, Sophistes, Philebus, Timaeus, and Phaedrus. In 1496 he published an edition of his collected Plato commentaries — with the exception of the Symposium commentary, which had already appeared in 1484.
Pico, Plotinus, and Other Translations
In the young scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Ficino found a kindred spirit. Pico shared some of his fundamental convictions but also contradicted him sharply. In 1484 Pico prompted him to translate the Enneads of the ancient Neoplatonist Plotinus. After two years this work was finished; Ficino then devoted himself to commenting on Plotinus. The entire result of these efforts was printed in 1492. Thereby the doctrine of this philosopher, which had previously exerted influence in the Latin-speaking world only by indirect routes, became accessible to broader circles for the first time. Ficino also translated and commented on further ancient writings, largely stemming from the tradition of Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Pythagoreanism. Among the works he made accessible to Latin-speaking scholars were also the writings traditionally ascribed to the mythical Hermes Trismegistus that form the Corpus Hermeticum. These treatises, whose translation into Latin he completed in 1463 on Cosimo’s commission, he regarded as an Egyptian variant of Platonic wisdom teaching. Besides Plotinus he also made later Neoplatonists known; he translated individual works of theirs (among them a treatise of Iamblichus known under the title On the Mysteries of the Egyptians) or published excerpts in Latin translation (as he did with writings of Porphyry, Synesius, and Proclus). He also translated two writings of the extraordinarily influential late-antique Christian Neoplatonist Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita, On Mystical Theology and On the Divine Names, into Latin, and Dante’s state-theoretical work De monarchia into Italian.
Renewing and Spreading Platonism
Ficino was not, like numerous Renaissance humanists, primarily a belletristic literary figure, philologist, and cultural historian. His interest was directed less at the linguistic form of ancient works than at their philosophical content. His main concern was a contemporary renewal of ancient philosophy. Its core for him was Plato’s doctrine, which he interpreted in the sense of the Neoplatonic tradition founded by Plotinus. Like many medieval thinkers before him, but on a far broader and more solid source basis than they, he strove for an understanding of ancient Platonism that would harmoniously unite it with the fundamental convictions of Christianity. With his striving for a consistent metaphysical worldview in which theological and philosophical statements would merge into an indissoluble unity, he aligned himself with the more strongly Christian-influenced current of humanism. Besides his translating and commenting activity he also composed treatises serving the systematic presentation and grounding of his (Neo)Platonic-Christian doctrinal edifice. Above all this included his philosophical-theological major work, the Theologia Platonica (“Platonic Theology”), completed in 1474 and printed in 1482. With this title, which he took from a work of the late-antique Neoplatonist Proclus, he indicated his program aimed at a synthesis of philosophy and theology, at a coherent worldview equally Christian and Platonic and plausible for humanists.
To realize this project Ficino strove incessantly to spread his ideas. In Florence his lectures on Christian Platonism served this purpose, delivered in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli and later also in the cathedral. On the European level he pursued his goal by means of his extensive correspondence with a multitude of significant figures of intellectual life. These Latin letters were intended not only for their respective recipients but also for the public; Ficino collected them, and in 1495 they were printed.
The claim, widespread for centuries, that a “Platonic Academy” led by Ficino was founded in Careggi at Cosimo’s instigation is inaccurate. This assumption, still found today in many reference works, has been proven false by more recent research. In reality the designation “Platonic Academy” for Ficino’s circle of friends is an invention of the seventeenth century, and he used the term “academics” to designate his numerous students without connecting it to the idea of an institutional framework. Of the figures he counted among his “academics,” only relatively few shared his enthusiasm for Plato and his hostility toward contemporary Aristotelianism.
Medical Writings
Ficino also occupied himself with health questions. An Oratio de laudibus medicinae stems from him. In 1482 he composed the book De studiosorum sanitate tuenda (“On Preserving the Health of Scholars”), a treatise on dietetics for melancholic, intellectually highly gifted, and creative people that found distribution outside Italy as well. He wrote in Italian a guide against the plague with the title Consiglio contro la pestilenzia (“Advice against the Epidemic,” Latin translation: Epidemiarum antidotus), published in 1479, and the treatise De vita libri tres (“Three Books on Life”), dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici and first published in 1489; the often-cited title De triplici vita is, according to Kristeller, not authentic.
De vita libri tres, briefly De vita, is a three-part treatise specifically on the health of the scholar — apart from Arabic medical textbooks of the tenth and eleventh centuries and the Erfurt Carthusian regimen from the first half of the fifteenth century, the first comprehensive health guide intended for a single social group — and deals in particular with dietetics. In the first book, composed around 1482, of his influential health doctrine, Ficino directs particular attention to the health of literary men (that is, “those who devote themselves to the sciences”) and the melancholic (black-bile) temperament prevailing among them. An excess of “black bile” is, on his conviction, an occupational ailment of intellectual workers, which he traces to their strong brain activity. He counts himself among the melancholics. The advice for a healthy conduct of life includes, among other things, precise dietary prescriptions. In the second of the three books he discusses the question of how a scholar can reach a great age in good health. This “macrobiotic” tract is followed by the third book, De vita coelitus comparanda, treating magical practices and above all astrology or astro-medicine (also called astrological medicine and iatroastrology), placing humans and medicine (with the inclusion of magia naturalis) in Neoplatonic-cosmological contexts, whereby Ficino — although in his expositions he refers to well-known ancient and medieval authorities — incurred a suspicion of heresy with the publication in 1489. The work, extraordinarily popular in the Renaissance, was printed around thirty times up to 1647; there were also printings of translations into German, French, and Italian. In contrast to Petrarch, Ficino, leaning on Gentile da Foligno, praised the (scholastic) medicine of his time and saw philosophy and medicine as complementary.
Later Years and Ecclesiastical Office
In 1473 Ficino received priestly ordination. He obtained several benefices, partly already before ordination. In 1487 he became a canon at the cathedral of Florence. At that time his patron Lorenzo de’ Medici even tried in vain to have him elevated to Bishop of Cortona. With the assumption of ecclesiastical duties, which included preaching, there was connected a strengthened interest of Ficino in specifically theological themes, though he remained true to his Platonic fundamental orientation. In 1474 he wrote De Christiana religione (“On the Christian Religion”), a justification of Christianity against Islam and Judaism. In it he seeks to prove Christianity as a natural, reasonable religion that one can accept from philosophical insight. He himself translated this treatise into Italian (Della religione cristiana). He also composed smaller writings in which he formulated his Platonic worldview in Christian theological language, among them De raptu Pauli (“On the Rapture of Paul”). In his last years he began commenting on the Epistle to the Romans; this work remained unfinished. It was part of a no-longer-realized project to interpret the New Testament, especially the letters of the Apostle Paul, in a Platonic sense.
With the death of the statesman Lorenzo il Magnifico in 1492, the epoch in which Florence was the most significant center of humanist intellectual life in Italy ended, and with it the long period that had offered optimal conditions for Ficino’s work. In the following time severe political and religious turmoil set in with violent confrontations. The Medici were driven from the city, in 1494 the invasion army of the French King Charles VIII occupied Florence, and finally with the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola a sharply anti-humanist direction came to power. Under these circumstances Ficino’s concept of a humanist Christianity in a Neoplatonic spirit found no favorable soil. He therefore withdrew largely from public life. The appearance of the penitential preacher Savonarola, who campaigned for a reform of morals, he initially followed — like other Florentine humanists and members of the upper class — presumably with goodwill (Pico della Mirandola even became a follower of the culture-hostile Dominican). Ficino’s initial understanding, however, turned into fierce opposition when the opposition of attitudes and goals became clear. After Savonarola’s execution in May 1498, Ficino composed a defense writing against him, in which he stated with satisfaction that divine mercy had recently “freed” the city, pleasingly, “from this plague.” On 1 October 1499 he died in his villa in Careggi. His epitaph is located in the cathedral of Florence.
Doctrine: Relation to Tradition
Ficino’s life’s work — atypical for a Renaissance humanist — consisted mainly in the erection of a philosophical-theological system in which Platonic (above all Neoplatonic) doctrines were to underpin Christian articles of faith. With many late-antique Neoplatonists and also with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, he shared the conviction that in metaphysics, cosmology, and anthropology there are universal truths in principle accessible to all seekers of wisdom. According to this view, the eternal truths were recognized in various cultures and traditions by the leading philosophers of the time or revealed to them from the divine side, or were transmitted to the wisdom teachers of later cultures by those of earlier ones. Accordingly, certain philosophical and religious doctrines from different epochs and parts of the world agree in certain objectively correct core statements (natural theology). These doctrines are designated by terms such as “ancient wisdom,” their non-Christian proclaimers as “ancient theologians” (prisci theologi). According to this interpretation of the history of philosophy, there is a human heritage of secured metaphysical knowledge. Later, in the sixteenth century, the term Philosophia perennis was coined for this.
Ficino held a certain group of religio-philosophical currents (Platonism, Pythagoreanism, Orphism, Hermeticism, Christian Neoplatonism, Zoroastrianism) to be divinely inspired. The striking agreements between the Christian theologian Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita and non-Christian Neoplatonists such as Plotinus and Proclus, which strengthened him in this view, rested on the error that Dionysius had been a student of the Apostle Paul and had influenced the non-Christian Neoplatonists of the late Roman imperial period. Although doubts about the authenticity of the writings of the supposed Dionysius already existed in the fifteenth century, Ficino did not know that these works in reality originated only in late antiquity and that the influence ran in the opposite direction. In Plotinus he saw not only a legitimate heir of Plato who reproduced his doctrine so authentically as if Plato himself spoke through his mouth, but also a thinker who occasionally even surpassed Plato in depth of philosophical insight. Its most venerable figure, he held, Platonism had received in the work of the apostle’s disciple Dionysius. Ficino often appealed to the church father Augustine, strongly influenced by the Platonic world of thought, and occasionally also to Nicholas of Cusa.
Doctrine: The Soul
Ficino’s thinking revolved around the soul, by which he meant the human rational soul. He sought to fathom philosophically its essence, its position in the cosmos, and its determination within the framework of the world order. A central concern for him was the demonstration of its individual immortality, for with this assumption both Platonic anthropology and the church’s contemporary doctrine of the soul stand or fall. Moreover, it corresponded to the image of man of his epoch to assign a high rank to individuality and to emphasize the uniqueness of individual human existence. The doctrine of immortality was supported during Ficino’s lifetime by a broad consensus of theologians but was not yet a binding church dogma; it was raised to that rank only in 1513 at the Lateran Council. With his defense of individual immortality Ficino turned against the view of Aristotelians such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, who declared a body-independent existence of the soul impossible, and especially against Averroism, a variant of Aristotelianism still widespread in Italy in the fifteenth century. This criticism was not directed against Aristotle himself. The Averroists held the opinion that human intellectual souls are not individual single substances; rather only a single universal active intellect manifests itself everywhere in individuals. Accordingly, the individuality that is merely apparent anyway is extinguished with death, and a personal immortality is excluded. Ficino’s argumentation rests in particular on the line of thought that the soul can grasp immaterial and eternal things (such as Platonic ideas) in thought; its access to such knowledge presupposes that it is itself of the same nature as these possible objects of knowledge and thus imperishable. For Ficino the soul is neither extended nor composite nor localized; spatial and temporal determinations are not properties in things but soul categories.
Regarding the soul’s position in the hierarchically ordered cosmos, Ficino emphasizes its mediating position in the middle between the intellectual (metaphysical) and the sensory world. He expresses this middle position through a symmetry by assuming two levels above the soul — God and the pure spirits (angels) — and likewise two levels below it — quality and (at the bottom) matter. Thereby he deviates from Plotinus’s system, in which a level of quality is not provided. By “quality” he understands an active force in physical objects that causes their physical interaction. He holds such a force to be necessary since he finds mere mass insufficient as a cause. Thereby he turns against the atomism of Democritus and the Epicureans. The soul’s mediating role results for him from the fact that the soul carries within itself on the one hand the images (imagines) of divine things and on the other hand also the concepts and archetypes (rationes et exemplaria) of sensory objects, whereby it to a certain extent even produces the latter itself. From above it is dependent, downward it is ordering and creatively active; from the highest to the lowest everything is accessible to it. Things not only accrue to it but are also constituted by it. Thus it is the middle of the universe and the bond of all things. With the tasks falling to it through this position and function, it gains a dynamic quality.
The goal of the soul, according to Ficino’s conviction, which he shares with Plotinus, consists in ascending into the intellectual, divine realm and ultimately “becoming God.” Intellect and will he regards as the two wings with which the soul soars upward. He holds this striving to be as natural to man as the striving to fly is to birds. However, man cannot reach the goal by his own means but needs divine help for it. A difference from Plotinus lies in the fact that Ficino trusts the human intellect with more than the ancient Greek did. While for Plotinus the apprehension of the One, which Christian Neoplatonists identify with the biblical God, takes place beyond thought since the One is inaccessible to thought, Ficino holds that philosophical thinking is able to reach God, though not in perfect manner. He does not in principle distinguish the knowledge of God from other acts of knowledge. The precondition for the soul’s ascent and its deification is a purification process in which it gradually frees itself from sensory-material influences. The highest stage of this purification process is reached exclusively through divine grace; external works and merits are irrelevant to it.
Doctrine: Will and Platonic Love
A far more essential role than thinking Ficino assigns to love and the will. Love he regards as an affect of the will. He argues that thinking grasps its object in the representational manner of thinking, whereas the will places itself into the object, grasps it in the manner of the object itself, and thus reaches it better. This voluntarist position, which assumes a primacy of the will over the intellect, Ficino worked out, however, only in the course of his philosophical development, starting from an original intellectualism. In a later phase he changed his view again and attempted to conceive the will as a form of externalization and mode of operation of the intellect.
In love he sees — also following the Platonic tradition in this — the decisive driving force for the soul’s ascent to God. This function of love is meant when he writes of “Socratic” or (more rarely) “Platonic” love. The modern, trivialized expression “platonic love” goes back to this term popularized by Ficino, which, however, has only a distant similarity to what Plato and Ficino meant. Ficino is of the opinion that human love is always directed toward the divine and therefore love for a human being also aims at the divine in that human being and thus ultimately at God. He deviates fundamentally from the ancient Neoplatonic view in that for him love is not exclusively a striving of the lower toward the higher but there is also a love of the higher for the lower, of God for the world. In this sense Ficino interprets creation as an act of the divine will in which God’s love steps out of itself and communicates itself, as corresponds to the essence of love generally. This self-externalization of God, which brings forth creatures, leads to a circular movement at whose end creatures are led back to their divine ground, whereby divine love then also returns to itself. Following a traditional Pythagorean-Neoplatonic conception, Ficino lends love a cosmic dimension by declaring it the power ruling in the entire universe. He asserts that no part of creation can be hostile to another, and even when living beings destroy others (for instance for the purpose of their own nourishment), the motive for this is not hostility but self-love. The bad he holds to exist only apparently; he regards it as a mere deficiency, as a limitation of a certain good resulting from a defective participation of a thing appearing “bad” in this good. Accordingly, everything existing is in itself and originally good, and nothing present is superfluous or worthless. The human will is always directed at the good; however, it does not always aim at the best, for sometimes it erroneously gives preference to subordinate goods.
In his concept of love Ficino also explicitly includes eros, which is directed at earthly, bodily beauty. Thereby he links, as a humanist, to the ancient striving for beauty. Although he sees dangers in eroticism, the principal medieval distrust of beauty in the sensory world as a distraction from God is foreign to him. Rather, he holds the appreciation of such beauty to be a path to
