Ficino and the Renaissance

The teaching

As the Renaissance reading of Hermes that Ficino began teaches it.

Thrice-great

Ficino's preface to his translation begins by explaining the name. Hermes was called Trismegistus, thrice-great, because he was the greatest philosopher, the greatest priest and the greatest king. He was the first to turn from the study of nature and mathematics to the contemplation of divine things, and so the first author of theology. He foresaw, Ficino says, the ruin of the old religion, the rise of a new faith and the coming of Christ, the judgement to come and the resurrection, and that is why a Christian may read him as a teacher.

The ancient theology

From Hermes the truth passed down a chain of sages. In Ficino's preface the chain runs from Hermes to Orpheus, from Orpheus to Aglaophemus, who was initiated into his mysteries, then to Pythagoras, to Philolaus his pupil, and to Philolaus's pupil, the divine Plato: one ancient theology, everywhere in agreement with itself, begun by Hermes and completed by Plato. In his later writings Ficino sets Zoroaster at the head of the chain, before Hermes.

Either way the lesson is the same. The pagan sages, rightly read, teach what the Christian faith teaches, so philosophy and religion are sisters, and Ficino's names for their union are a learned religion and a pious philosophy.

The soul, the bond of the world

Ficino builds a ladder of five levels: God, the angelic mind, the rational soul, quality and body. The soul stands in the middle, and that is its dignity. It looks up to God and the angels and down to qualities and bodies; it touches both and belongs to both. Ficino calls it the centre of nature, the middle of all things, the face of everything, the knot and bond of the world. To know oneself is to know that middle place, from which a person can turn either way.

A great wonder is the human being

Pico della Mirandola opens his Oration with the Asclepius's saying that a human being is a great wonder, and explains why. When God had made everything else and every place in the order of things was filled, he made the human being last and gave him no fixed seat, no form of his own and no task belonging to him alone. Pico has God say to Adam: you, bound by no limits, shall set the limits of your nature by your own choice; I have placed you at the centre of the world so that you may look about you; you can sink to the lower, brutish forms of life, or by your soul's judgement be reborn into the higher, which are divine. Who, Pico asks, would not admire this chameleon?

His way upward goes by moral philosophy, which calms the passions, by reasoning and the study of nature, which clear the mind, and by theology, which brings the soul to the divine.

The world's soul and spirit

The Renaissance reading takes from the Hermetic writings, and from Plato, the teaching that the world is alive. As a person has body, spirit and soul, so does the world: a body of the elements, a soul that gives it life, and between them a spirit, a very fine breath that runs through everything and carries the soul's life into the body. In a person the spirit is a fine vapour of the blood, which joins soul and body and serves the senses. It can be fed and strengthened, and the life of the heavens can be drawn into it through things that share in that life.

Life drawn from the heavens

This is the subject of Ficino's Three Books on Life, written for scholars. Students, he teaches, are children of Saturn: long thought and long sitting make them prone to melancholy, which dries and darkens the spirit. The remedy is to temper Saturn with the gentler planets, Jupiter, the Sun and Venus, whom he calls the three Graces, by living among things that share their nature: daylight and clear air, walks in green and pleasant places, bright colours, gold, sweet scents, cheerful company and above all music.

Music has a place of its own, because song is itself air and spirit in motion, alive with feeling, and so it passes most easily into the spirit of the one who hears it. Ficino sang hymns to the planets to the lyre and taught that a song made in the character of a planet draws its gifts. He calls all of this natural magic, the use of the natural likeness between things, and keeps it apart from any dealing with spirits. He wrote as a physician of his time; his counsel of light, air, walking and music is gentle, and none of it takes the place of a doctor's care.

The magus weds earth to heaven

Pico gives natural magic its image. As a farmer weds the elm to the vine, the magus weds earth to heaven, joining lower things to the gifts and powers of higher ones. Magic of this kind is, for him, the practical part of natural philosophy: the knowledge of the hidden sympathies that bind the world together, brought into use.

The three worlds

Cornelius Agrippa, in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy, orders the whole into three worlds, the elemental, the celestial and the intellectual. Every lower world is governed by the one above it and receives the influence of its powers, so that the power of the maker of all comes down through the angels, the heavens, the stars and the elements into everything below. The wise climb back up the same ladder: first the virtues of natural things, then the mathematics of the heavens, then the holy ceremonies of religion, and his three books follow those three steps.

The heavens reformed

Giordano Bruno takes the teaching furthest. The One is in all things, the universe is infinite and its worlds are countless, and the divine is to be found within nature, not outside it. In his Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, Jupiter, weary of a sky full of constellations that recall the vices of the gods, sends the beasts away and sets virtues in their places, with Truth where the Great Bear stood: a reform of the heavens that stands for a reform of the soul. In the middle of it Bruno quotes the Asclepius's lament for Egypt and praises the Egyptians for seeing the divine in living nature.

Reading in concord

The Renaissance way of reading these texts was concord. Hermes, Plato, Moses and the gospels were set side by side, and the reader looked for the one truth beneath all of them, sure that every sage had seen some part of it. Pico offered nine hundred theses for debate in that spirit, drawn from every school he knew, to show that they agreed. A reader who takes up the Hermetic books in this tradition reads them slowly, beside Plato and scripture, and asks of each passage where it meets the others.