The book of life

241 Pages·1980·76.478 MB·English

by  Marsilio Ficino

Marsilio Ficino: The Book of Life
A Translation by Charles Boer
of Liber de Vita (or De Vita Triplici)
Spring Publications, Inc.
Dallas, Texas
© 1980 by Charles Boer. All rights reserved
Second Printing 1988
Published by Spring Publications, Inc.;
P.O. Box 222069; Dallas, Texas 75222.
Printed in the U.S.A.
The frontispiece is a facsimile of the book's Latin text.
Gerald Burns designed and typeset the book.
The cover is an adaptation by Kate Smith Passy and
Pierre Denivelle of Michelangelo's Bacchus (Bargello, Florence).
Mary Vernon modified the design for the second printing.
International distributors:
Spring; Postfach; 8803 Ruschlikon; Switzerland.
Japan Spring Sha, Inc.; 12-10, 2-Chome, Nigawa Takamaru;
Takarazuka 665, Japan.
Element Books Ltd; Longmead Shaftesbury;
Dorset SP7 8PL; England.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ficino, Marsilio, 1433-1499.
Marsilio Ficino-the book of life.
(Dunquin series; 12)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Astrology-Early works to 1800. 2. Medicine,
Medieval. I. Title. II. Title: Book of life.
BFI680.F5513 1988 615.8'99 88-3073
ISBN 0--88214-212-7
Dunquin Series 12
CONTENTS
Acknowledgment
11
Introduction III
Dedicatory Letter to Lorenzo Medici 1
BOOK ONE: On Caring For The Health Of Students 3
Dedicatory Letter to Filippo Valori 37
BOOK 1WO: How To Prolong Your Life 38
Dedicatory Letter to the King of Hungary 83
An Exhortation To The Reader 85
BOOK THREE: On Making Your Life Agree With
The Heavens 86
The Apology of Marsilio Fieino 184
What Is Necessary For Composure In Life 190
GLOSSARY 193
INDEX 203
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Since my text for this translation was the Opera Omnia Basel edi
tion of 1576, notoriously full of errors, I have had to do much
consulting in other editions, for which I am emphatically grateful
to the staffs of the University of Connecticut Library and the Yale
University Medical Library_
I must thank Professor Tom Moore, of Southern Methodist
University, not only for making available to me the manuscript of
his own forthcoming book on Ficino, but for his many suggestions
for improving the present book.
Jay Livernois bestowed his vast Solar gifts on this project in
many hours of reading and discussion of the manuscript, and the
translation would have been abandoned many times had it not been
for his encouragement and help.
I must also thank my two Italian Graces: Grazia Sotis of Min
turno, for giving me considerable help with the names of Italian
herbs and spices, and Grazia Giorgi of Florence, who seems to have
been sent by the ghost of Ficino himself for inspiration.
Finally, it is perhaps in order here to offer a much belated
acknowledgment to a distinguished teacher, Eugenio Garin, in
whose classes at the University of Florence, twenty years ago, I
first entered Marsilio Ficino's gardens. The Gods alone know how
long and winding that garden path has been since those palmy days
in an ltalia pia calma, but if the present work can be taken in any
way as tribute to this great scholar, it is I who am honored.
II
INTRODUCfION
I
t is a singularly dismal comment on the state of Renaissance
studies in the English-speaking world that so many of Marsilio
Ficino's works are still untranslated_ The Symposium Commentary,
the Philebus Commentary, and some letters are all there is, except
for spot translations of passages in general works on Renaissance
Platonism_ Why has Ficino, the most important writer in the Flor
entine awakening, been so ignored in English? Why do our univer
sities attach so much attention to Pico della Mirandola'~ flummery
Oration On The Dignity Of Man-already in several translations
and neglect Pico's master, the high priest of the Florentine Acad
emy, the most adventuresome philosopher of the entire Italian Re
naissance?
Ficino's genius, acclaimed in his own lifetime as the inspirit
ing force behind some of the greatest poets and painters, philoso
phers and statesmen of the era, has slept unread in the libraries of
the western world for nearly five hundred years. It is surely time to
disturb that sleep, not only for the sake of the historical record, our
knowledge of Renaissance culture, or the tribute we clearly owe to
this seminal voice in the western imagination, but even, as readers
of the present book will, I hope, see, for the sake of knowing our
own psychological past and the origins of what we still call our
'spirit' and our ·soul.'
Marsilio Ficino was born at Figline, near Florence, on the
19th of October, 1433, at 9 PM, when Saturn, as Ficino himself so
often reminds us, was in the ascendant and making a gloomy horo
scope for this first-born son of the town doctor and his clairvoyant
wife.
Actually the horizon was far from gloomy, and foreign stars
only slightly less influential than Saturn were soon gathering over
Florence in the person of an eighty-year-old Greek s.cholar named
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THE BOOK OF LIFE
Gemisthus Pletho and his Byzantine Emperor, John Palaeologus.
They were coming, in 1439, to a Church Council in which an
accord would be reached for the first time in a thousand years
between the Greek and the Latin Christian Churches. Gemisthus
Pletho argued strenuously against the accord for philosophical rea
sons (the Greek tradition did not accept the Holy Spirit as an equal
member of the Trinity, and Pletho himself hated the Latin
Church), but with the Emperor needing western support in his
losing battle against the Turks, Mars took precedence over the
Holy Spirit, or at least over Pletho. In the bitter debates preceding
the accord, Pletho enthralled the audience of scholars and clergy
with his stunning erudition, but alienated them as well with an all
too enviable display of his firsthand knowledge of Plato and the
neo-Platonists. The Latin Church scholars had only a passing ac
quaintance with Plato, for Aristotle had long ago become their
favorite, and only, Greek philosopher. What they had heard of
Plato, through garbled Aristotelian sources, they didn't like. They
considered Plato, and neo-Platonists like Plotinus and Porphyry,
more or less anti-Christian. Some neo-Platonists, after all, had said
that what was divine in Christ was also present in other miracle
workers like Apollonius of Tyana. Some of those present at the
debates even grumbled that Pletho himself might be a neo-Platonist
incarnation of the devil! But the devil could quote Aristotle too, for
Pletho had read far more of him in the Greek original than the
Italians had in their faulty medieval translations.
Fortunately, not all the Florentines present felt outraged by
Pletho. Indeed, the single most powerful man in the room, though
he was neither Churchman nor scholar, was enormously interested
in what he was learning of the ancient philosophers. Cosimo de
Medici, whose banking wealth controlled Florentine politics and
Italian culture, invited the great Byzantine scholar to dinner. It
soon became apparent to Cosimo that Florence must start a school
for the study of Greek thought, especially this exciting new Platon
ic philosophy. Enough of the old Schoolmen and their Aristotle,
who had an answer for everything. Cosimo could see that Plato was
a crucial find, an invaluable opening onto the ancient world that
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TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCfION
was in turn now opening on the modern. Plato was a great undis
covered voice from antiquity calling out after centuries of Chris
tianized Aristotelian pettifoggery. Cosimo, one of those rare men
whom wealth deparochializes, apparently discussed with Pletho the
idea of founding a Florentine Academia (after the name for Plato's
own school) for the propounding of all this fascinating new stuff
coming out of Greece. But when Pletho left at the end of the
Council, the plan went no further.
Byzantium fell to the Turks in 1453 and Cosimo's idea for a
Platonic Academy came alive again only in 1457 when another
great Greek scholar, John Argiropolos, emigrated to Florence to
lecture on Aristotle and, on demand, Plato. But where was a man to
undertake Cosimo's Academy? It was certainly not Argiropolos,
whose official title was "Public Explicator of Aristotle."
Marsilio Ficino was a sickly boy, subject to quartan fever and,
as he later wrote in a letter addressed to all his friends who kept
asking about his health, "Stop asking-I've never had one entire
day when my body was strong-I've been weak by nature from the
beginning!" This is nothing unusual of course for the children of
doctors, as everyone knows, and especially for the children of am
bitious . doctors. Doctor Ficino had treated Cosimo, and was on
particularly friendly terms with Cosimo's son, Giovanni, to whom
he once sent a couple of bottles of Trebbiano wine-the standard
Ficino medicine for just about anything, as Marsilio himself would
discover.
With a successful doctor for a father, Marsilio might have
succumbed to his father's wishes and become a doctor himself, had
he not also had a remarkably zany mother. She went around accu
rately predicting calamities for people-the death of her own moth
er, the suffocation by a nurse of her seventeen-day-old infant, and
her own husband's fall from a horse, even telling him the spot.
(Marsilio's explanation of all this was that some people can leave
their bodies and see things because their souls are so pure.) Amal
do della"Torre, the superb Italian biographer of Ficino, attributes
Marsilio's neurasthenic temperament, his mysticism, and his ecsta
sies to this much-pampered gran signora, who lived into her eight-
v
THE BOOK OF LIFE
ies and died only a year or so before Marsilio himself. That's a big
ascription even for an Italian mama, but however they did it the
Ficinos had succeeded in producing the last thing any parents want
in a son, a philosopher.
Marsilio would have first heard of Plato from his Latin teach
er, Luca d'Antonio de Bernardi, in the course of reading Cicero.
From him he also learned music and his precious lyre playing. He
learned the rudiments of Greek from Francesco da Castiglione.
His early education, however, like everyone else's, was Aris
totelian. He studied under Nicolo Tignosi da Foligno, an orthodox
Peripatetic philosopher averse to the practice of Argiropolos and
others of mixing Platonism with Aristotelianism. Ficino's first real
taste of Plato came from lectures he attended at the University of
Florence by Cristoforo Landino, a friend of his father (as well as of
Cosimo de Medici).
In 1451 (at age 18), Ficino was installed, with his father's
help, as a cleric or seminarian (what else could you do with a kid
who wanted to be a philosopher?) though the youth was hungry to
explore Platonism and neo-Platonism. He started writing philo
sophical essays, some of which, in 1456, he showed and dedicated
to Landino, who encouraged him to perfect his Greek and to con
tinue Platonic studies. But suddenly, around the age of 24, just
when John Argiropolos was beginning his lectures on Plato in Flor
ence, Ficino had a 'crisis of faith.' All of this pagan study may have
begun to shake the simple Christianity of his youth, but more
importantly as a cleric he was suddenly forbidden by the Arch
bishop of Florence to attend Argiropolos' lectures. Instead, he was
sent home to Figline. It seems certain that he wanted very much to
study with Argiropolos but was the victim of the Archbishop's
notorious hostility not only to humanism but to all antiquity. He
accused Ficino of heresy and told him to read Thomas Aquinas
instead. Back at Figline, however, in the winter of 1457 Ficino
wrote, somewhat defiantly, a treatise on pleasure and a commen
tary on the Roman poet Lucretius, a sign of his budding Epicurean
ism. Then in the autumn of 1458 his father sent him to the Aris
totelian-dominated medical school at the University of Bologna,
VI
TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCfION
where he stayed, no doubt unhappily, until 1459. He could have
studied medicine in Florence and practiced with his father, but the
Archbishop had told his father to send him far away from Florence.
He must have been wretched, yet as he would write later,
Saturn, God of melancholy, offers compensations for the trouble he
causes his philosophical children. Suddenly, in 1459, Marsilio was
summoned by his father back to Florence and whisked into the
august company of the great Cosimo himself. He had met Cosimo
before, in 1452 (age 19), probably after asking Giovanni de Medici
to arrange for a formal introduction (there is a letter from Gio
vanni, Doctor Ficino's erstwhile patient, to Marsilio, reminiscing
about the friendship of their youth.) But Ficino made about as
much of an impression on Cosimo at that original meeting as those
beaming legions of sons and daughters people used to introduce to
Nelson Rockefeller every year, and for the same reason. This time,
however, Cosimo was summoning him. Though there is scant evi
dence, it seems that Landino, perhaps taking pity on what had
happened to the boy, brought Marsilio's essays to the attention of
the great man (another theory, more charming but less credible, is
that Doctor Ficino himself did) and convinced Cosimo that this, at
last, was the man for his Academy. Nonetheless Doctor Ficino, the
worried father, wanted and got assurances from Cosimo that his
son would be supported for life if he undertook this work. "You
are a doctor of bodies," Cosimo is supposed to have said to him,
"but he will be a doctor of souls."
Marsilio was enjoined to perfect his Greek, and Cosimo pro
posed he do this under Bartolomeo Platina (he and Landino seem
to have thought Argiropolos too Aristotelian to risk with their
young investment.) His first works, under Platina's training, were
translations of the Orphic and the Homeric Hymns.
Cosimo purchased Greek manuscripts of Plato and gave them
to Ficino to tr~nslate, along with a villa in the hills at Careggi, the
new home of the Florentine Academy. Ficino decorated the place
with astrological images (he thought such images of the Gods
should be contemplated daily), with a fresco of the Greek philoso
phers, Heraclitus and Democritus, the one weeping, the other
VII