Forthcoming in: The Rebirth of Platonic Theology in Renaissance Italy. Proceedings of a
Conference in Honor of Michael J. B. Allen, Florence, 26-27 April 2007. Ed. James Hankins
and Fabrizio Meroi. To be published by the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento and
The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
JAMES HANKINS
Ficino’ s Critique of Lucretius
It is well known to students of Renaissance philosophy that the reception of Lucretius
effectively begins with Poggio Bracciolini’s rediscovery of a manuscript of the
Epicurean philosopher in 1417 at a monastery near Constance.1 Even if it is not true
that all Italian copies of Lucretius are descended from Poggio’s copy,2 it is still the
case that knowledge of Lucretius spread rapidly in Italy only after Poggio’s discovery.
By the second half of the century there were more than 50 manuscripts in circulation,
and the work was printed three times in the incunabular period. The De natura rerum
was studied and annotated by a number of famous humanists, including Giovanni
Gioviano Pontano, Pomponio Leto, Bartolomeo Fonzio, Angelo Poliziano, Marcello
Adriani and Michele Marullo. It also began to be imitated by various Latin poets of
the Renaissance, including Pontano in his Urania, Bartolomeo Scala in his lost poem
De rebus naturalibus, Poliziano in the Rusticus and Nutricia, and by Marullo in the
Hymni naturales. Even explicitly Christian epics such as those of Vida and Sannazaro
found Lucretius’ poetic language valuable for describing the natural world and its
processes.3 Lucretian influence on poets writing in Italian was widespread in the
sixteenth century.4 Art historians such as Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky, Charles
Dempsey, Steven Campbell and others, moreover, have signalled the influence of
Lucretius on Renaissance art, including works by Botticelli, Piero di Cosimo, the
sculptor Giovanni di Bertoldo (Michelangelo’s teacher), Leonardo da Vinci,
Giorgione and Titian. Alison Brown has recently hypothesized that certain Lucretian
themes were influential within a particular humanistic subculture in Florence during
the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and has pointed to the presence of a
Lucretian outlook in writers such as Bartolomeo Scala, Marcello Adriani, and
Machiavelli.5
What is less well known is that the first philosopher of the Renaissance to
have made a serious study of Lucretius was the Florentine Platonist, Marsilio Ficino,
the leading figure in the Renaissance revival of Plato. Ficino began his engagement
with Lucretius early, while he was still in his early twenties. Sometime in the late
1450s, he wrote what he later called a commentariola on Lucretius. This was
remarkably precocious, given that the next commentary on Lucretius did not appear
for more than half a century.6 Ficino’s commentary did not circulate and he later
destroyed it, but what look like quotations or paraphrases from it crop up in two early
works, the De voluptate and De quattuor sectis philosophorum.7 Ficino’s early studies
of Lucretius are also documented in three letters of 1457.8
What these surviving documents show is that Ficino’s study of Lucretius went
well beyond mere doxography. His reading of Lucretius was not undertaken merely to
acquire a working knowledge of Epicurean doctrines. He read Diogenes Laertius that
way, culling and summarizing doctrines of the various philosophers and schools
treated therein.9 His response to Lucretius was different, more engaged. Ficino can
be called in some sense a Lucretian and an Epicurean in this early period; he referred
to the Roman thinker in a letter to his disciple Antonio Seraphico as Lucretius ille
noster Epicureorum philosophorum clarissimus, and he used him as a true biou
kubernetes, as a guide to life. Like Leonardo Bruni in the Isagogicon moralis
philosophiae, Ficino treats the philosophy of the Epicureans in a positive way,
distinguishing Epicurean tranquillitas from the gross sensuality of ‘the followers of
Aristippus’, i.e., the Cyrenaics. He tries to find a way to assimilate the polytheistic
theology of the Epicureans to Platonic and Christian monotheism. Despite the
seeming naïveté of this syncretistic project, however, it is clear from the texts cited
that Ficino has an excellent grasp of the Epicurean system, including the natural
philosophy of books 1 and 2 of the De natura rerum.
It must be said, however, that Ficino in this youthful period cannot be called
an Epicurean in any exclusive or systematic sense. In the preface to the De voluptate
of 1457 for example – the same text where he praises Epicurus – he explicitly calls
himself a follower of Plato: Plato, quem tamquam philosophorum deum sequimur. In
this period, Ficino seems to have believed that all the ancient philosophers had a
certain value for persons who wished to live a philosophical life like the ancients. It
is indeed this latter idea – that is was possible for Christians to live a philosophical
life like the ancient pagans – that was the truly radical and potentially dangerous idea,
not Ficino’s indiscriminate embrace of Epicureanism.
However, sometime between 1457 and 1473, Ficino changed his mind about
Epicurus. In the year 1473 Ficino wrote a letter to Poliziano in which he denied hotly
that he had ever written certain letters Aristippicae et quadam ex parte Lucretianae
that were circulating under his name.10 From the same year we have a short poem of
Poliziano ad Bartolomeum Fontium, recently edited by Francesco Bausi, in which the
poet describes his friend Ficino as a man dedicated to the refutation of Lucretius and
Epicurus:
Impia non sani turbat modo dicta Lucreti,
Imminet erratis nunc, Epicure, tuis.11
Evidently something had happened between 1457 and 1473 – we don’t know exactly
what – to make Ficino perceive Epicurean philosophy as a positive threat to his
movement for the reform of Christian theology – a reform based on the recovery of
the ancient Platonic tradition.12 By the late 1460s, if not earlier, this had become the
fundamental goal of his life. As a result Ficino came to see the philosophy of
Epicurus and his popularizer Lucretius as an enemy of the spiritual vision he hoped to
nuture in Laurentian Florence. Perhaps too he wished to distance himself and his
followers from the ‘impiety’ of the first Roman academy of Pomponio Leto, which
had been accused of living una vita achademica et epicurea and had suffered
persecution when the ‘Academic conspiracy’ was uncovered in 1468.13 In any case,
by the time he composed the De christiana religione (1473-74), he had incorporated
Epicurus into his reconstruction of the history of religion. Epicurus was now firmly
yoked to the hedonist Aristippus as the main cause of the corruption of the GraecoRoman world before Christ; only the innumerable martyrs for Christ were able to
provide a medicine to counteract their poison.14
The devaluation of Epicurean and Lucretian philosophy in the work of Ficino
becomes manifest above all in his vast Platonic Theology, a work in eighteen books
written between 1469 and 1474 and published in 1482. It is often said that the
Theology is a kind of summa of Platonic philosophy, but this description really only
applies well to the first four books. In fact, most of the work, particularly the last
fourteen books, is directed to a specific purpose, which is to show beyond any
possibility of doubt that the individual human soul is immortal. By so doing Ficino
demonstrated that the ancient Platonic tradition could supply an armory of weapons to
defend the teachings of the Christian religion on personal immortality as well as those
on rewards and punishments in the afterlife. A subsidiary goal was to undermine the
arguments of all philosophers who denied this conclusion. In this context, Epicurus,
Lucretius, and the so-called Lucretiani became principle targets of Ficino’s criticism.
If one attends to the structure and subject matter of the individual parts of the Platonic
Theology, it quickly become evident that even Averroes, the explicit target of Book
15, ranks second as an enemy by comparision with the Epicureans, at least if one
reckons by the relative amount of space Ficino devotes to refuting them.15
The Theology is divided, like Gaul, in partes tres. The first part provides a
systematic treatment of the soul, in particular the animus, the rational soul. Ficino
discusses the place of the soul in the cosmos and in the chain of being and its
interactions with lower and higher essences. The higher essences include God and
“angel” (i.e. the Plotinian nous), while the lower comprehend the world of enformed
matter, space and motion. We then come to the second part, from the fifth to the
fourteenth book, where Ficino advances a series of arguments to demonstrate the
immortality of individual souls. In this part, Ficino addresses many times the
arguments of Epicurus and Lucretius – in fact a sizeable proportion of these nine
books is dedicated, implicitly and explicitly, to refuting Epicureans and Lucretians.
In Book 6, chapter 2 for example there is found an argument against materialistic
views of soul, above all those of Epicurus and Lucretius. Chapters 4 to 13 of that
book try to demonstrate the indivisibility of the soul in the body, a proof implicitly
directed against Lucretius’s arguments for the mortality of the soul in Book 3 of De
natura rerum. Chapter 6 attacks explicitly the teaching of Epicurus and other ancient
materialists that the soul is a fine-material body, arguing instead that the soul cannot
be an entity knowable by the senses, even on the hypothesis that the senses were
powerful enough to cognize the subtlest material bodies. Chapter 13 tries to show that
the soul does not grow with the growth of the body as the Epicureans maintained. At
the end of Book 14 (chapter 10), Ficino launches a broader attack on the Lucretiani
for their conception of religion as a sickness and a perversion, born of superstitious
fears about natural phenomena and the afterlife. Ficino advances a remarkable
argument that in fact it is atheism that is abnormal and sick, and gives a medical
etiology of atheism tracing it to the malign influence of melancholy and Saturn on the
souls of intellectuals.16
The third and last part of the Theology, Books 15 to 18, is dedicated to the
solution of five questions about the soul. After the enormous fifteenth book, dedicated
entirely to a vehement attack on Ficino’s great bête-noire Averroes, Ficino returns to
attack Epicureanism again in the sixteenth book, which carries the subtitle
Quaestiones solvit Epicureorum. The first six chapters in essence answer the question
raised in De natura rerum 3.800-805:
Quippe etenim mortale aeterno iungere et una
consentire putare et fungi mutua posse
desiperest; quid enim diversius esse putandumst
aut magis inter se disiunctum discrepitansque,
quam mortale quod est inmortali atque perenni
iunctum in concilio saevas tolerare procellas?
(Indeed, to join mortal with immortal,
and to think they can feel together and act upon the other
is foolishness; for what can one imagine more different
or more distinct from the other and discordant
than a mortal thing joined with something immortal
and deathless, weathering cruel storms in company?)
The last two chapters ask, respectively, why souls are afflicted with tumultuous
emotions if they are divine (16.7), and why rational souls are unwilling to depart from
their bodies (16.8). These chapters seem to respond to the points made by Lucretius in
De natura rerum 3.459-73 and 3.580-614, especially 612-614:
quod si inmortalis nostra foret mens,
non tam se moriens dissolvi conquereretur,
sed magis ire foras vestemque relinquere, ut anguis.
(But if our mind were immortal
it would not complain so much in dying of its dissolution
but would go out and leave behind its vestment like a snake.)
To appreciate the full extent and vehemence of Ficino’s response to Lucretius,
the reader will need to review Lucretius’s arguments against in immortality in Book 3
of the De natura rerum. Appendix I contains a detailed list of them, mostly drawing
on Cyril Bailey’s commentary and a few other sources.17 Appendix II contains a list
of Ficino’s arguments against Lucretius, keyed to the first appendix. Ficino’s
arguments will not be analyzed here in great detail; I shall simply draw attention to
some features of Lucretius’ principal arguments and Ficino’s responses to them.
First, most of Lucretius’ arguments presuppose his demonstration, in Books 1
and 2 of De natura rerum, of the atomic and material composition of the soul.
Second, Lucretius constantly tries to assimilate to each other the natural
processes of soul and body and to show that they must belong to the same broad
ontological classes. Thus he tries to show that both soul and body belong to the class
of things divisible, changeable, extended in space, and individuated in matter; and that
the functions of the soul take place in time. (These arguments are directed mainly
against the Platonic-Pythagorean conception of soul that sees it as an immaterial
substance which belongs ultimately to the timeless and motionless world of the
Forms.) Furthermore, Lucretius tries to show that there is a sympatheia between soul
and body, such that the body influences the soul and the soul is subject to material
potencies – for example, in the case of sicknesses that impair one’s ability to think.
He also tries to tie the functions of the soul to material processes, so as to show that
the soul is not the kind of thing that could have form and life separately from the
body. In general, Epicurus and Lucretius assume that thought is a species of
sensation, and that therefore thought, like all forms of sensation, requires a bodily
organ. Finally, Lucretius argues that the soul does not resemble things in nature
generally acknowledged to be eternal: i.e., the universe itself, the void, atoms and
gods.
Ficino does not mount a systematic and sustained assault on Lucretius’
arguments in any one place but rather responds to Lucretius in various passages of the
Theology. The reason for this scattershot approach, I believe, is that he did not want to
disturb the overarching order of his own exposition in Books 6-14, which moves
systematically from prime matter up to the angels and God. It should also be pointed
out that Ficino does not use exclusively “Platonic” arguments to refute Lucretius, but
borrows also from Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas and other philosophers. For
example, in Appendix II.3, Ficino’s response to Lucretius’s proof 2, Ficino invokes
Aristotle’s analogy from the De anima 3.5 that the relationship of soul to body is that
of an art to the instruments it uses. It is the instruments that wear out, says Aristotle,
the hammer and chisel, not the art (or formal cause); this is said to undermine
Lucretian arguments for the parallelism of soul and body. In Appendix II.1, Ficino
follows Aquinas’ argument in the Summa contra gentiles to argue that God’s
omniscience, including his knowledge of metaphysically inferior things, does not
compromise the dignity of his essence, since he knows particulars only indirectly,
through the ideas in the divine mind.18
Ficino follows several broad strategies in his efforts to refute Lucretius’
arguments. First, he stoops to a kind of ad hominem attack, labelling Lucretius as a
vulgar and impious philosopher, reputedly a madman (13.2.5), who did not
understand or value the spiritual nature of mankind. From Ficino’s Plotinian
perspective, Lucretius and Epicurus were too focused on the sensual nature of man
and the universe and neglected to turn inwards and upwards towards the true sources
of reality within their own psyches (6.2, passim).
The effort to reject Lucretius’ purely material and sensual vision of reality
leads Ficino to devise what looks prima facie like Cartesian thought-experiment –
though in fact it is adapted from Avicenna’s famous “flying man” argument – where
he imagines a man created fully mature by God but without sense powers.
Esse vero plebeiorum errorem a corporea consuetudine natum nosse
incipiemus aliquantum, si saltem contrariam illius educationem aliquam
cogitemus, qualem in sexto Naturalium excogitat Avicenna. Creetur a deo
homo aliquis subito, inquit Avicenna, in aetate perfecta constitutus, sed ita
dispositus, ut nihil per aliquem quinque sensuum apprehendat. Sic affecti
hominis mens aliquid cogitabit, cum sit in aetate adulta, in qua corporis
fabrica intellegentiam non perturbat, neque sit ad opera sensuum occupatus,
quae mentis operationem impediunt, ac etiam adsit aliquid quod possit
intellegi. Adest enim ipsa animae substantia menti. Mens igitur a nullo turbata
praesentem sibi animae substantiam cogitabit. At qualem cogitabit? Num
coloratam, longam aut amplam? Minime. Caecus enim similia non
apprehendit. Num sonantem vel bene olentem atque similia? Neque ista
quidem. Nondum enim talia quaedam per sensus accepit, ut possit talem
naturam animae assignare. Igitur nihil poterit corporale anima illa sibi
tribuere. Quid tandem de se ipsa asseverabit? Profecto id saltem, quod sibi
primo offeretur intuitu. Est autem hoc ipsius essentia. Quapropter affirmabit
esse se ipsam, neque tamen corporale quicquam in se ipsa perspiciet. Itaque
affirmabit esse se prorsus incorporalem. Neque fingere quidem poterit esse se
corpus, sicut plebis animae nunc aliter creatae atque educatae nequeunt se
ipsas incorporales considerare.
However, we shall begin to recognize somewhat the vulgar error born from
habitual intercourse with the body if we at least suppose an education opposite
to the body’s, such as that Avicenna devised in the sixth book of his Natural
Problems.19 Imagine a man instantly created by God, Avicenna says, made
fully mature but so disposed that he apprehends nothing through any of his
five senses. Now the mind of a man in this condition will think about
something since he is mature (meaning the body’s workshop does not interfere
with understanding) and not consumed by the activities of the senses (which
impede the operation of the mind); and since too there is something there
which he can understand. For the soul’s substance itself is present to the mind.
So with nothing to distract it, the mind will think about the substance of the
soul which is present in it. But how will it think about the soul? As being of a
particular color, length, or breadth? No! For a blind man does not perceive
these. As melodious or fragrant or such like? Again no! For the mind has not
yet received such qualities through the senses that it could ascribe a nature
having them to the soul. So that soul will not be able to assign itself anything
corporeal. So what then will it assert of itself? Certainly what is obvious at
first sight at least. But that is its essence. So it will affirm that it exists, but it
will not see anything corporeal in itself. So it will affirm that it is completely
incorporeal. Nor will it be able even to imagine that it is body, just as the souls
of the vulgar, created and brought up in different circumstances as they are,
cannot think of themselves as incorporeal.
In short, the essence of such a man’s soul would be present to his mind, but he would
be unable to attribute sensual properties to his soul as he has no experience of them,
not having senses. Such a creature will be unable to imagine that his soul is anything
other than incorporeal, just as vulgar persons, immersed in the senses as they are, are
unable to imagine that their soul is anything other than corporeal.
Another version of this argument can be found in Appendix II.9, Ficino’s
response to Proof 14 of Lucretius. Here Ficino tries to show that some mental
operations do not have reference to things bodily, such as reflection on the existence
and essence of the soul, “when it makes a judgment about what it is and the sort of
thing it is that is said to operate without the body” (quando iudicat quid sit and quale
idipsum, quod dicitur sine corpore operari). This is tantamount to a premodern
version of the argument, commonly found in modern debates on the mind-body
problem, that tries to infer the irreducability of mind to body from the mind’s
consciousness of itself.
Another broad strategy Ficino uses throughout the Theology to defend
immortality against Lucretian materialism is to argue constantly for the necessity of a
tertium quid, binding the world of the immaterial, eternal, immutable and universal to
the world of matter, time, change, and particularity. The fact that soul has this double
aspect explains for Ficino, among other things, why it is so often taken to be a
material thing by persons without spiritual vision. In particular it explains for Ficino
why the mind seems to respond to bodily states and medicine, a phenomenon which
Lucretius had seen as a strong indication of the soul’s mortality (see Proof 7). Ficino
maintains that the double role of the soul as the caretaker of the body and as a forager
in the Plain of Truth forces it to toggle back and forth between the worlds of body and
spirit. So in Appendix II.4-5, Ficino tries to show that the effects of sickness and
injury on the mind do not prove that it is subject to material potencies and is therefore
material, but rather that the soul has the power to focus its attention on the body when
the body requires its unifying and vital force. When the body is well and its corporeal
harmonies are restored, the soul becomes free to resume the search for truth.
Yet a third anti-Lucretian strategy Ficino uses is to distinguish as much as
possible from each other the processes and the metaphysical characteristics of soul
and body. Thus, for example, he tries to show that some mental processes are
instantaneous and not in time, showing that they belong to the hypostasis of reality
metaphysically prior to the world of movement. So, in Appendix II.3, the response to
Lucretius’ Proof 9, Ficino argues that when we learn something, the process of going
from confusion to illumination often takes place instantaneously. Similarly, in the
case of virtues, going from unstable continence to true possession of the virtue of
temperance is an instantaneous process that emerges the moment a harmonious
balance appears in the soul. If some mental processes are instantaneous and not
continuous in time, Ficino concludes, rational soul, the seat of mental processes, must
be a kind of res distinct from body, as somatic processes do take place in time.
Finally, Ficino addresses a few of Lucretius’ aperçus which seem so strongly,
on their face, to indicate the corporeal nature of the body. Lucretius had said that
successful medical treatment brings back mental as well as physical powers, and this
shows that both are linked in their corporeality. Ficino responds (Appendix II.7) that
there are also examples of people whose minds, but not bodies, have been cured. This
shows, for Ficino, that medicine can affect the mind in ways different from the ways
it affects the body, showing that their essences are unlike. Again, Lucretius asks why
– if (as the Platonists say) our true life is in the next life, life in separation from the
body – people seem to depart this life so unwillingly. Ficino counters (Appendix II.8)
by pointing out that babies cry loudly upon entering the world, as though realizing
that their lives here in this earthly existence will be an exile. Both of Ficino’s
arguments are skeptical in technique; he aims at equipollence of arguments in order to
weaken materialistic convictions.
To conclude, Ficino was the first Christian apologist to face seriously the
challenge of ancient materialism in its most detailed and persuasive form: that
represented by the De natura rerum of Lucretius. It is an interesting question to ask
why, to judge from the amount of time he devoted to refuting him, Ficino evidently
believed the threat posed to his Christian Platonism by Lucretius was even greater
than the threat from Averroism and Alexandrism, which Ficino once famously
described as dominating the world of Italian universities.20 Is this just compensation
for Ficino’s own youthful flirtation with Lucretius and Epicureanism, or did Lucretius
have a far deeper impact on fifteenth century thought than anyone has previously
guessed?
NOTES
1
Some key items in the large bibliography on the Renaissance reception of Lucretius
in Italy are: C. A. GORDON, A Bibliography of Lucretius, London 1962; S. Bertelli, La
conoscenza e la diffusione di Lucrezio nei codici umanistici italiani, Roma 1965; W.
B. FLEISCHMANN, Lucretius Caro, Titus, in Catalogus Translationum et
Commentariorum, ed. P. O. Kristeller and F. E. Cranz, vol. 2, Washington D.C. 1971,
349-365; E. FLORES, Le scoperte di Poggio e il testo di Lucrezio, Napoli 1980; U.
PIZZANI, Angelo Poliziano e i primordi della filologia lucreziana, in Angelo Poliziano
e il suo tempo, Atti del Congresso Internazionale, Chianciano – Montepulciano, 1821 luglio 1994, ed. L. Secchi Tarugi, Firenze 1996, pp. 343-55; G. SOLARO, Lucrezio:
Biografie umanistiche, Bari 2000; G. BOCCUTO, Riprese Lucreziane nel Marullo e nel
Poliziano, in Rapporti e scambi tra umanesimo italiano ed umanesimo europeo, ed.
L. R. Secchi Tarugi, Milano 2001, pp. 705-16; A. PALMER, Reading Lucretius in the
Renaissance, Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2009.
2
As is shown by M. D. REEVE, The Italian Tradition of Lucretius, «Italia medioevale
e umanistica» XXIII, 1980, pp. 27-46.
3
See the indices to Marco Girolamo VIDA, The Christiad, tr. J. Gardner, Cambridge
(Massachusetts) 2009 and Iacopo SANNAZARO, Latin Poetry, translated by M. C. J.
Putnam, Cambridge (Massachusetts) 2009.
4
V. PROSPERI, Di soavi licor gli orli del vaso: La fortuna di Lucrezio dall’
Umanesimo alla Controriforma, Torino 2004.
5
A. M. BROWN, Lucretius and the Epicureans in the Social Context of Renaissance
Florence, «I Tatti Studies» IX, 2001, pp. 11-62; EAD., Reinterpreting Renaissance
Humanism: Marcello Adriani and the Recovery of Lucretius, in Interpretations of
Renaissance Humanism, ed. A. Mazzocco, Leiden 2006, pp. 262-291; EAD.,
Machiavelli’s philosophy and religion, in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli,
ed. J. Najemy, Cambridge, forthcoming. Brown’s book-length study, The Return of
Lucretius to Renaissance Florence, will be published in 2010 by Harvard University
Press (I Tatti Monographs in Italian Renaissance History, 2).
6
This was the commentary of Giovanni Battista PIO, published in Bologna in 1511,
for which see FLEISCHMANN, Lucretius, 356-359.
7
Published respectively in Marsilio FICINO, Opera omnia, 2 voll., Basel 1576, reprint
Turin 1983, I, pp. 987-1012 (hereafter Opera) and P. O. KRISTELLER, Supplementum
Ficinianum, 2 vols., Firenze 1937, II, pp. 9-10 (hereafter SF).
8
SF II, 81-87.
9
See for example the doxography based on Diogenes Laertius he compiled in a
manuscript (dated 1454) of Calcidius, for which see J. HANKINS, The Study of the
Timaeus in Early Renaissance Italy, in Natural Particulars: Nature and the
Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed. A. Grafton and N. Siraisi, Cambridge
(Massachusetts) 1999, 77-119. Reprinted in ID, Humanism and Platonism in the
Italian Renaissance, 2 voll., Roma 2003-2004, II, pp. 93-142, esp. pp. 135-136.
10
Marsilio FICINO, Lettere I: Epistolarum familiarium liber I, ed. S. Gentile, Firenze
1990, p. 39 (= Ep. I 15).
11
Angelo POLIZIANO, Ad Bartolomaeum Fontium: Due poemetti latini, ed. F. Bausi,
Roma 2003, p. 30. (I owe this reference to Christopher Celenza.)
12
See most recently J. HANKINS, Marsilio Ficino and the Religion of the
Philosophers, forthcoming in Rinascimento n.s. XLVIII (2008).
13
See J. HANKINS, Humanist Academies and the “Platonic Academy of Florence,”
forthcoming in the proceedings of the conference, From the Roman Academy to the
Danish Academy in Rome, ed. H. Ragn Jensen and M. Pade, to appear in Analecta
Romana Instituti Danici Supplementum; on the transgressive character of the first
Roman academy see also the article of Concetta BIANCA, Le accademie a Roma nel
Quattrocento, in the same volume.
14
FICINO, Opera I, p. 55: ‘Graeci atque Romani paulo ante Christi lumen coeperant
Aristippi Epicurique contagiosa impietate magis indies magisque corrumpi.
Innumerabiles Christi exemplo martyres ubique Gentium, partim illiterati, partim
literatissimi, cum praesentem vitam Dei unius futuraeque vitae gratia prorsus
contemnerent, contra Aristippicum Epicureumque venenum medicinam hominibus
saluberrimam porrexerunt.’
15
For the structure of the work, see my ‘Outline of Ficino’s Platonic Theology’ in
Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, ed. and tr. M. J. B. Allen and J. Hankins et al., 6
voll., Cambridge (Massachusetts) 2001-2006, VI, pp. 319-326. All Latin quotations
and English translations in this article are taken from this edition, and all citations of
the Platonic Theology are from its book, chapter and paragraph numbers.
16
See J. HANKINS, ‘Malinconia mostruosa’: Ficino e le cause fisiologiche
dell’ateismo, «Rinascimento» XLVII, 2007, pp. 3-23.
17
LUCRETIUS, De rerum natura libri six, ed. with prolegomena, critical apparatus,
translation and commentary by Cyril Bailey, 3 voll., Oxford 1947.
18
See THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa contra Gentiles I, qu. 45.
19
AVICENNA, Liber de anima seu Sextus de Naturalibus, ed. S. van Riet, Leiden 1968,
I, pp. 36-37.
20
FICINO, Opera, II, p. 537 (the preface to his translation of Plotinus).