Renaissance Studies Vol. 21 No. 5

© 2007 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2007 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKRESTRenaissance Studies0269-1213© 2007 The Author Journal compilation © 2007 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd.XXX Original Articles

Reviews of booksReviews of books

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees, with Martin Davies (eds.),

Marsilio Ficino:His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy

. Leiden, Boston, Cologne: Brill, 2002.520pp. $220.00. ISBN 978-9004118553.

That the significance of Marsilio Ficino depends on how one views the Renaissanceitself is the perceptive observation that is embedded in Anthony Levi’s contributionto the collection here under review. For Levi, Ficino employed Augustine’s stature,ironically, to rescue western theology from the irresolvable dilemmas which scholastictheology had derived from Augustine. His argument uncovers, identifies anddevelops the ‘real nature of the hugely important contribution which Ficino made tothe development of western culture’, essentially, the restoration of the moral dignityof human nature. Ficino ‘tried to give a Christian foundation to his age’s new self-confidence in man . . .’, as Jörg Lauster puts it in his contribution.

This fundamental notion articulates the view implicit in the book’s structureand the perspective of its many authors. The opening sentence of Michael J. B.Allen’s packed preamble to the volume introduces Ficino as a priest and canon ofFlorence’s Cathedral, the significance of which roles is explored in the very firstchapter (Peter Serracino-Inglott). This optic focuses the first set of contributions,framing Ficino foremost as a religious thinker, albeit a novel one, who viewed theclassical past through a Christian lens. Here we have Ficino the contemplative, be itphilosopher or mystic, seeking to rise in Neoplatonic harmony above the turmoil ofMedicean Florence, and beyond the inherited constraints of Augustinian theology.Whereas some contested paradigms of the Renaissance are even today shaped byan implicit binary divide between secular and sacred, pagan and Christian, for Ficino,writing just before his priestly ordination, those times are happy which ‘have keptsound this divine bond of wisdom and religion’. In the book, Ficino engages andis engaged in his sacerdotal efficacy, not as ritual cipher, but as philosophicalprophet. In some of his writings, the

De vita

in particular, ‘Ficino’s approach isconditioned by the Iamblichan and post-Iamblichan concern for manipulating theuniverse around us by using rituals and objects that have been divinely placed for ouruse’ (Christopher S. Celenza). One contributor usefully extends consideration ofFicino’s theurgic concerns into the realm of ‘musical magic’, and the way in whichmusic and song were, for him, analogous to the symbolic meaning of the heavens(Angela Voss). Here we have the Ficino who understood himself to be a doctor, ormedical philosopher, as much as a priest (Donald Beecher). Several contributorsattempt to show the way in which Ficino relates phenomena to celestial powersand the causal relations among things (Voss, Beecher, Stéphane Toussaint). ForFicino the natural power of words, in speech as well as song, connected to the

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divine, and revealed the artist’s disposition of soul, mind and will (Voss, TamaraAlbertini).

The collection is therefore anything but reductive. Its organizational scheme leadsthe reader through theology (loosely conceived), philosophy and legacy (whichincludes chapters on politics and visual culture); however, of necessity, no themeis sufficient to itself, and throughout the work the boundaries of discussion arepermeable in a way appropriate for studies devoted to a thinker for whom theinter-play of theology and philosophy were central. The volume’s

Iter Ficinianum

prof-fers a wide-ranging and rewarding journey along the highways and byways of Ficinostudies – a diversity of themes that reflect the varied cultural, intellectual, spiritual andscientific precocity of late Medicean Florence. The schema of legacy extends thevolume chronologically into the scientific speculation of the sixteenth century, whereit concludes with an exploration of the role which Ficino’s Neoplatonism playedin the poetry of Geoffrey Chapman and the ordering of political rivalries of TudorEngland into a ‘perfect image of political order’ (Stephen Clucas). That many of thechapters had their origins in a conference seems to have added a sense of integrityto the disparate studies the pages encompass. This integrity is re-enforced by MichaelJ. B. Allan’s lucid, if dense, introduction which presides insightfully and informativelyover the contributions that follow. Perhaps it was the further reflection that publicationentailed, or the commissioning of a third of the chapters especially for the volumewhich makes the reading so rewarding, something unusual in a book which can boasttwenty-one authors, many of them at the start of their careers. The consequentdiversity and multiplicity of perspectives and issues make this a difficult book for anyreviewer: full justice can be given to no single contribution, nor indeed to thecollection’s overall richness of suggestion.

Allen’s introduction proffers an integrated account of Ficino’s intellectualbiography – his debts, novelty, his influence for over two centuries on a Europeanelite with an ‘abiding, if clandestine, interest in entertaining many ideas that Platohimself would not have recognized and that had been continually censured and evenpersecuted by the Church’. This last observation applies particularly to Ficino’sapproach to science and the occult. These two areas of study, we are reminded, hadtheir own Renaissance meanings: ‘occult . . . designates simply that which producespalpable and predictable results for reasons that cannot be empirically explained’,and science was ‘a cognitive process’, a way of seeing the world, grounded inmetaphorical language (Beecher). The gulf between Renaissance and current under-standings is particularly apparent in Hiroshi Hirai’s amazing, seminal (excuse thepun) study of the concept of seeds in Ficino’s key philosophical texts, and SergiusKodera’s imaginative exploration of the concept of matter in Ficino. This lattercontribution brings gender and psychology into the volume. Gender is engagedthrough a discussion of the begetting of matter. Matter is a formless potency, ashadow in need of limitation, identified by Ficino with common matter, which, underthe gaze of God, turns into a mirror: ‘matter is created and at the same time shapedby the divine glance’ and so is a narcissistic gaze. The mirror is a signifier forboth matter and otherness. In Ficino, the medieval, often occult metaphor, themirror – the looking-glass – reddened by the highly refined beam of menstrual bloodemitted by the female eye becomes ‘the universalized symbol of the female aspect of

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creation’. This facet of the material hints at the potentially rebellious, demonic, anduncontrollable aspect of cosmological order which Ficino sought to understandthrough his exploration of the ancients.

So there is the humanist and philosopher’s sense of excitement at the ancienttexts and traditions that had preceded and prepared the way for Christianity as theultimate platonic revelation. Ficino, in his own vocation as

priscus theologus

, numberedamongst his predecessors Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Orpheus, and Hermes. Theseharbingers of ancient gentile wisdom Ficino long sought to reconcile ‘with thetheology of Abraham as perfected in Christ’ (Allen). In his introduction, Allentraverses succinctly the pivotal impact of Ficino’s ‘translating the fully fledged lateNeoplatonism of Proclus back to the time immediately following the Ascension’which enabled Ficino ‘to present a Neoplatonic view of the history of Philosophy,and to propel that history back into the remotest past’, a theme which he picks upin his own chapter-length contribution on repetitive time and its fit with Christiansoteriology. Ficino’s engagement with Plato’s notions of cyclical time underscores theinevitable problems confronting his attempts to reconcile Platonism and Christianity.Since Ficino was able to break the chains of an Augustinian ‘man-centred’ time andapprehend time’s vastness in a near modern way he was ‘a modern thinker’, despitehis ‘many debts to scholasticism’.

Ficino’s fervent, if problematic (Jill Kraye), ecumenical credo of the reconcilabilityof Platonism and Christianity is pursued, as you might expect, through a variety ofthemes and sources throughout the volume. The methodological approachesadopted by the different authors in the book reflect the diverse scrutiny underwhich Ficino has continued to be subjected, not only as a way of thinking abouthis contribution to the western intellectual tradition in his attempt to forge a

piaphilosophia

, but also to enlighten the context which both constrained and enlivenedhis endeavour. Never far from view is the background of factional politics, local wars,plague, death and poverty, corruption in public life, and neglect of religion, whichills penetrated to the soul, and for which the cure was the penetration of Plato’sunderstanding of the soul. Importantly, all the authors are aware, to greater andlesser degrees, that there was a crisis in late quattrocento religiosity, not in somecrudely conceived Burkhardtian pagan-christian divide, but rather what it meant tobe Christian in a world where opinions were many and Catholic orthodoxy was muchless defined than it would be a century later (Kraye). In many ways, Ficino emergesfrom this volume as an instantiation of the many textual and cultural issues that wereto the fore in the period, testing the boundaries of orthodoxy. So Ficino’s attemptsto revive hermetic magic and defence of judicial astrology occasioned the scrutiny ofthe inquisition in the 1480s. But what is clear, as is well expressed by Celenza in hiscontribution, is that ‘one could be a sincere Christian, as I believe Ficino was, andstill be a legitimate advocate of practices which in hindsight seem heterodox’. As JörgLauster points out, ‘hermeneutic charity requires us to measure [Ficino] by the stand-ard which he was claiming for himself ’, that of ‘a Christian thinker’. (To be consistentwith this dictum, though, the same contributor needed perhaps to be a little morescrupulous in identifying Ficino’s own structure and system, rather than applyingexternal identifiers in order to distinguish systematic theology.) For Ficino, religionwas not peripheral to his society and he himself was not a dégagé contemplative, but

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rather he believed in a Christianity re-vivified by a renewed Platonism that would healthe ills of society, and he, as a priest-doctor, had such a mission (Serracino-Inglott).That such a mission should find a ready home in the Renaissance city is traced backto the context engendered by the ‘Camaldolese Academy’ and its impact on Ficino’s‘soul father’, Cosimo de’Medici (Lackner).

The image of Ficino and his thought that emerges from this volume is complexand alluring, and one that projects a profound engagement with Florence in itsrenaissance. Here is a Ficino who, convinced that philosophy was about ‘integrity oflife’ and not merely an ornament, is not adverse to deploying his rhetorical skills towrite advice to princes and to invoke divine blessings on a world threatened by evilsof various kinds (Valery Rees). His complex, rich and varied life, is attested by his 200correspondents. Apart from patricians and patrons of the likes of Lorenzo de’ Mediciand curial officials, there were priests, pupils, friends, admirers comprising whatwas later known as his Platonic Academy. This last is the subject of a nuancedhistoriographical, if somewhat polemical, essay by Arthur Field, who engages thedebate opened up in the early 1990s by James Hankins.

Here too is the Ficino who is a cipher for his society, since in his view there is nodivision between philosophy, cosomology, religion, politics, and daily life. In thisrespect Valery Rees, in her meticulously contextualized distillation of Ficino’sunderlying political tenets, analyses how different aspects of Ficino’s unified vision ofthe order of things in God are articulated in response to the challenges of themoment – factional politics, local wars, plague, death and poverty, the Turkish threat– and addressed to the Medici, to popes, to kings. Rees’s close and astute reading oftexts and contexts produces a rich feast for political, social and intellectual historiansalike. Francis Amis-Lewis rehearses recent interpretations of visual representationsof Ficianian Neoplatonism and argues that ‘readings’ of such works as Donatello’s

David

and Botticelli’s

Primavera

should be set in the earlier Medicean culturalcontexts of the late 1450s–early 1460s.

If Ficino’s project can be summed up in a line, it was to seek a ‘concordiaphilosophica’ between Plato and Aristotle, which, as a rhetorical strategy, achievedthe ‘victory of the one and true and pious philosophy, the

Theologia Platonica

’ (JohnMonfasani). The image of Ficino that is projected by various contributors is thereforeone of a thinker who self-consciously desired to reconcile a variety of not necessarilycompatible positions: problems inherent in Aristotelian scholasticism’s understandingof the human person as revealed in the intellectus-voluntas debate (Anthony Levi,Tamara Albertini); the implications of the Corpus Hermeticum for Christian theology(Clement Salaman); and the mechanics and the liberal arts through his concern withthe ‘multi-zodiac astronomical clock clock’ – the mechanical prototype reflectingFicino’s magical astrological tenets (Stéphane Toussaint). Ficino moved towardsregarding intellect and will, in an epistemological framework, as parallel rather thanantagonistic forces (Albertini).

Ficino’s method was what Moshe Idel calls a historiography of knowledge, almostan Averroist ‘double truth’ in admitting, and reconciling diverse sources intotheological thought, especially Aristotle and Plato. This did not mean that he wouldfollow everyone on everything. Sometimes his assertions of harmony were rhetorical.While often citing and approving Averroes, he would refute his denial of the immortality

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of the Soul (Monfasani). A close reading of all these studies shows the importance ofdetail, nuance and subtlety. Celenza’s dictum about historical reading – ‘[t]o understanda Renaissance thinker fully, the ancient context, as well as the ancient text, should bestudied in detail’ – is adhered to almost universally throughout the volume.

The book closes with some astute studies of the fate of Ficino’s thought in thesixteenth century. Jill Kraye explores perceived failings in Ficino’s work in the latefifteenth and then sixteenth centuries, and the difficulties his ideas encountered,particularly in a Church whose ideas on what was properly Catholic were hardening.Dilwyn Knox re-evaluates the evidence relating to Ficino’s impact on the developmentof modern science by way of Copernicus, and concludes that, while Copernicus mayhave read Ficino’s translations of Plato, his heliocentric hypothesis owed little ornothing to the philosopher. Similarly, the poetry of George Chapman (1559–1634)is shown to have drawn Ficino’s ideas into a political rhetoric, or more fundamentally,Neoplatonism served both Ficino and Chapman by providing ideas and ideals of love,duty and statesmanship that resolved factional politics into an ideal political order(Stephen Clucas).

As editors, Allen and Rees clearly have ensured the consistently high quality ofscholarship. Their interventions and insight are gratefully acknowledged andfootnoted. The volume is pervaded by impressive scholarship and erudition, all thewhile accessible. Each author has had to articulate very clearly his or her approach.On this count, perhaps, the editors are to be thanked for the specificity of their briefto each contributor. While not all readers will examine the text cover-to-cover, anyoneserious about the nature of philosophy and religion, and its implications for societyat the end of the quattrocento will ponder the insights and diverse themes covered.The casual reader will find the excellent analytical index and bibliographical guideto be of valuable assistance in following up themes and issues. The idea of legacy canbe applied to the volume itself. As Ficino’s Plato was the most important Plato forseveral centuries, this volume sets a benchmark for Ficino studies at least for theimmediate future.

Monash University, Australia

Peter

Howard

Leo Catana,

The Concept of Contraction in Giordano Bruno’s Philosophy

. Aldershot:Ashgate, 2005. 220pp. £45.00. ISBN 0-7546-5261-0.

This book investigates a specialized subject of Giordano Bruno’s theory ofknowledge – the ‘contraction’ in the title – whose implications also span the realmsof cosmology and ontology. Scholars of Medieval and Renaissance philosophy havedealt at length with the idea of a correspondence between the hierarchical structureof the physical world, laid out on layers of decreasing perfection, and man’sepistemological efforts to ascend from the multiplicity of the material world to God’sperfect unity. Within this intellectual framework, knowledge is the process by whichthe mind passes from lower to higher principle (such as from a certain individual toits species). The term ‘contraction’, whose history in the Latin West is briefly retracedin Chapter 6, originally referred to the possibility of comprising the manifold into a