The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  “Very rarely will there be found a good man ready to use bad methods in order to make himself prince,” Machiavelli wrote. There are also plenty of bad men who are willing to take power without bothering to reform the society they lead.41

  Nonetheless, history shows that some men are willing to do evil in order to accomplish good. They are in fact history’s great heroes, like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar and even Moses, who raised the Hebrews out of their slothful servitude, mercilessly crushed their enemies, and then led them into the Promised Land. “Fortune, as it were, provided the matter but [these men] gave it its form,” Machiavellii wrote, echoing Aristotle; “without opportunity their prowess would have been extinguished and without such prowess the opportunity would have come in vain.”42

  The Prince explains that such a man must not let success go to his head, as it does to citizens in a free society. He has to constantly watch his back; he must not allow his followers to become too powerful on the one side or too resentful on the other. He must above all train his mind and body to stay focused on the state of his military: “The first way to lose your State is to neglect the art of war.” He must learn from the example of both the lion and the fox, Machiavelli wrote, since at times he will be forced to act like a beast as well as a human being.43

  Machiavelli understood “that such a ruler, especially a new ruler, will be forced to act treacherously, ruthlessly, or inhumanely, and disregard the precepts of religion” in order to maintain his power and thus save the State. He shouldn’t worry about a reputation for cruelty since that will discourage others from resisting his will: “It is better to be feared than loved if one cannot be both.”44 Yet such a man can still save the state, and preserve its liberty.

  Now, it’s a rare event in history when a figure like this appears. But when he does, Machiavelli argues, it’s a sign a society can protect itself from both its enemies and its own vices. This was still Machiavelli’s hope for Italy, even a figure like Cesare Borgia.a “What people would fail to obey him?” Machiavelli asks at the end of The Prince. “What Italian would deny him homage?”45

  These were questions a Leonardo Bruni would have been ashamed to ask. A century later, Machiavelli would have considered himself derelict not to ask them. However, no such superman appeared. Cesare Borgia died broken and discredited; when Machiavelli himself died in 1527, the outlook for Italy seemed bleaker than ever. But his point in The Prince was a more general one, which gets obscured if we treat the work as nothing more than a treatise on power politics. For Machiavelli had uncovered the final paradox of liberty on Aristotle’s model.

  Aristotle’s Politics is built on the back of his Ethics: The good life presupposes the virtuous life. However, in order to survive, free societies sometimes have to violate the very values they profess to uphold. They have to wage war and kill innocents; they have to imprison enemies and sometimes torture them. In extreme situations, they have to suspend civil liberties, even shut down traditional institutions—all to prevent something worse.

  To the just belongs injustice. All the same, Machiavelli knew there was no guarantee that people will put up with the measures that are meant to save them from themselves. At the battle of Prato, the Florentines preferred to run away and lose their liberty rather than die to save it. The masses can suddenly turn on their savior, just as they turned on Savonarola. Most rulers prefer not to run that risk. Instead, they will maintain the status quo, the false façade of normal politics, just as the Medici did in order to dupe the public into believing they were still free when in fact they were not.

  This had happened to ancient Rome under the emperors; it had happened to Florence under the Medici. It’s the risk that free governments run anywhere. It is ultimately why Machiavelli concluded that “it is difficult, or rather impossible, either to maintain a republican form of government in states which have become corrupt or to create such a form afresh.” Instead, the old vitality simply ebbs away. Final disaster comes not from outside, but from within.46

  Freedom is doomed to fail. This was the final dismal conclusion Machiavelli reached by the time he finished The Prince. By then Florence and Italy, the cradle of modern European liberty, were bowing down to foreign tyrants and their armies. Machiavelli called the situation a stench in the nostrils of humanity at least for now.47 But the political will for liberty had collapsed. If men wanted to be free and to realize their highest nature, they were going to have to look somewhere other than politics.

  * * *

  * “Modern devotion,” as distinct from a pro forma sacraments-based Christian worship. The term was coined by a leader of the group Brethren of the Common Life, devotio moderna’s most famous offshoot.

  † From freedom’s point of view, however, Roman law proved to be a double-edged sword. Nothing prevented a single figure from claiming to exercise that power in the name of the people, as the ancient Roman emperors claimed to do. Visconti could recite just as many passages from the Justinian Code reinforcing his claim to absolute rule as the Florentines could find protecting civic liberty.13

  ‡ Ironically, among them Aristotle’s great rival Plato. See chapter 17.

  § After their return to power in 1512, they made an exception. See below.

  ‖ See chapter 8.

  a Oddly, Machiavelli never mentions Gian Galeazzo Visconti in The Prince.

  Botticelli, The Birth of Venus: the fusion of divine and secular love, thanks to Plato’s Symposium

  Seventeen

  THE CREATIVE ASCENT: PLATO AND THE HIGH RENAISSANCE

  Aristotle’s genius is purely human, but Plato’s is both human and divine.

  —Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology

  Love wakens, rouses, puts the wings in feather,

  As a first step, so the soul will soar

  And rise to its Maker.

  —Michelangelo Buonarroti, Sonnet 258

  At dawn on May 25, 1453, the bells of Constantinople’s churches rang out an urgent appeal. Rich and poor, old men, women, children, priests, and nuns crowded into the Church of Holy Wisdom—the largest church in the world—to pray, receive communion, and await the inevitable. Armored soldiers clambered to their posts along the city’s fabled walls—walls that had withstood sieges by Goths, Avars, Persians, and Arabs for one thousand years.

  This time it was the Turks who were coming, fierce warriors from the steppes of Asia and followers of the religion of Muhammad. This time there were not enough soldiers, not enough cannons and ships, and nowhere to run. Nothing could save the Roman Empire’s last capital.

  A faint breeze rising from the Bosphorus stirred the emperor’s banners for the last time. Silently the weary Greek soldiers watched as wave after wave of attackers rushed toward the walls, shouting and brandishing swords while the Turkish sultan’s mercenary guards herded them on with whips and battle maces. The sultan’s great cannons belched enormous stones (one that fell short dug a pit six feet deep), punching hole after hole through the massive walls.1 After desperate fighting, the outer wall fell. The gatehouse leading to the inner wall became a scene of mass confusion and slaughter.

  The last emperor tried to rally his fleeing troops. Finally he threw off his imperial regalia, seized a sword, and plunged into the melee, never to be seen alive again (later his body was identified by his imperial purple slippers).

  By the time the triumphant Turkish sultan Mehmet reached the scene, the city was being sacked. All around him priests were being killed, nuns were being raped, and the other inhabitants were being herded together to be sold into slavery. The streets were bathed in blood mingled with hot soot from burning houses and shops.

  At the battered entrance to the Church of Holy Wisdom, the sultan dismounted and poured a handful of dirt over his red silk turban as a sign of humility and gave solemn thanks to Allah for his victory. As he did so, the historian Edward Gibbon tells us, he sang a Persian song softly to himself: “The spider has wove his web in the imperial palace, and the owl has sung he
r watch-song on the towers of Afrasaib.”2

  Constantinople, the largest city in the world and capital of the Byzantine Roman Empire (Rum to Arabs and Turks), had fallen. Europe’s last surviving link to the age of the Caesars would be remade as a Muslim city and renamed Istanbul. It would remain the headquarters of the sultan’s descendants for the next 460 years. The greatest church in the world would become a mosque and its magnificent mosaics of biblical scenes and images of the saints would be whitewashed into oblivion, where they remain to this day.

  Meanwhile, Greek refugees scattered in all directions to escape the chains of slavery or worse. These included scholars fleeing with their last precious possessions: their books. Unaccustomed to life outside their quiet studies, they looked for places where they could read, write, and meet other intellectuals in peace—and discuss the rich knowledge they brought with them, much of it still unknown in the West.

  Most of them found safe haven in Italy, and many of their manuscripts found their way to the library of the monastery of San Marco in Florence. Cosimo de’ Medici had helped to build the library and patronized its collection. More than anyone, he was responsible for bringing the refugees and their books, with their cursive Greek script and strange illuminations, to Florence.

  One day Cosimo came to visit the precious texts in the airy, light-filled room. He had brought along the six-year-old son of his doctor. “Someday,” Cosimo said to the awestruck boy, pointing, “you will grow up to translate those works and reveal their secrets to the world.”3

  Cosimo’s prediction proved correct. Because the books in the San Marco monastery contained intellectual gold. They were the lost dialogues of Plato. And thanks to the doctor’s boy, almost within a single generation the original Plato once again became a major force in European civilization.

  The boy’s name was Marsilio Ficino. His last portraits before his death in 1499 show an austere, rather sad-faced man, a dreamer and scholar rather than the robust citizen soldier of the Aristotelian civic humanist ideal.

  The Florentines of the generation of 1402, men like Bruni and Alberti, had wanted to use the rediscovery of the ancient Greeks and Romans to change the world. Marsilio Ficino wanted to use it to change the self. His translations of Plato and the founding of a new Platonic Academy in Florence in 1463 signaled a major reorientation of the Renaissance, and of European thinking. If freedom in terms of political liberty was proving to be a dead end in Italy and elsewhere, Plato offered a different path to freedom: freedom through the creative spirit.

  Through their reading of Plato, Ficino and his followers believed they had unlocked the secret of human creativity. Artists, poets, writers, and even scientists have followed their lead ever since. If historians are right and the Renaissance truly marks the birth of the modern world, then Ficino and his translation of Plato’s dialogues acted as midwife.

  It’s a metaphor Plato himself would have appreciated.4 The Middle Ages had known Plato’s Timaeus in various versions; its cosmology was unimaginable without it. The rest of his works, however, were a closed book for nearly five hundred years. In the 1100s, Arab libraries yielded up a sprinkling of Platonic dialogues, which found Latin translators. Leonardo Bruni himself did several, including the Phaedo and the Laws, which were widely admired.5

  But none of this was enough to shake loose Aristotle’s iron grip on the Western mind. It was the influx of Greek scholars into Italy in the 1400s, both before and after the fall of Constantinople, that finally woke the West from its dogmatic scholastic slumbers.

  Gemistos Plethon, for example, came to Florence in 1439 and lectured on Plato to a large and fascinated audience, including Cosimo de’ Medici. Another, John Argyropoulos, barely escaped the siege of Constantinople. He would become a fixture at the University of Florence and later in Padua. Among his listeners would be the young Leonardo da Vinci.

  Thanks to these Greek refugees, Westerners realized for the first time that the Platonic dialogues formed a system of thought as coherent and profound as that of Aristotle, in which every work from the Parmenides and the Republic to the Sophist and Timaeus had a significant place. However Plato’s appeal was not just that his works were fresh and engaging to read, compared with the dogmatic stuffiness of Aristotle and his medieval commentators.

  It was also that these supposedly unknown works had a strange ring of familiarity: and no wonder. At the end of the Roman Empire, Christian Neoplatonism had given Plato a shining new relevance. Now the reverse happened. The rediscovery of Plato in the fifteenth century reopened issues that had consumed Christian thinkers since Origen and Saint Augustine, such as the relationship between mind and spirit, and between God and the individual soul; the nature of rational truth and understanding the structure of the cosmos; and issues about mysticism and divine love—all with a stunning new force.

  “Platonism,” writes historian Sem Dresden, “became the Renaissance philosophy.”6 This was in part because it came with the shock of the familiar. And no one contributed more to pointing out what was familiar but also what was new in Plato than Cosimo’s studious protégé Marsilio Ficino.

  He was born in Florence in 1433. He studied at the University of Florence, taking classes in philosophy, the humanities, and medicine, but does not seem to have completed a degree. In fact, Ficino would make formal university degrees largely irrelevant to the life of the mind for the next three hundred years. He turned to Greek on his own just three years after the fall of Constantinople and began writing about Plato’s philosophy shortly after that.

  Ficino offered the age a new intellectual master. “Aristotle’s genius is purely human,” he wrote, while “Plato’s is both human and divine.” After all, it was Plato who first taught the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, even Saint Augustine had pointed out that he was the pagan philosopher who came closest to the doctrines of Christianity.

  Indeed, everyone in the ancient world, Ficino pointed out, from Greeks and Jews to early Christians and Zoroastrians, had recognized that Plato’s writings were divinely inspired. It was time for modern Florentines to note the same fact.7 Cosimo de’ Medici was so impressed that in 1462 he gave Ficino a large house in Careggi outside Florence, and provided money for creating a Platonic Academy there to carry on the mission of presenting the wisdom of “the Father of Philosophers” to a Latin-reading audience.

  In 1464, Ficino was able to come to Cosimo’s deathbed and read aloud passages from his translation of Plato’s Philebus, with its message that the soul never ceases its pursuit of the highest good because the desire for truth is part of its very nature. Translations of the other dialogues soon followed. Cosimo’s son Piero kept Ficino supplied with more Greek texts and urged him to publish his translations.8

  Those translations duly appeared in 1469, along with a commentary on the Platonic dialogue that had most impressed Ficino with its freshness and originality, not to mention its relevance to contemporary Florence. That was the Symposium—certainly the only major work of philosophy that takes place at a drunken party.

  The characters in the Symposium, including Socrates, have gathered for a festive soirée complete with large cups of wine and flute girls. The theme of the evening is praise of the goddess Love in all her physical and sensual aspects, including homosexual love. One by one, the speakers (among them the comedic playwright Aristophanes) rise unsteadily to their feet to make their speech. Socrates’s is the last. Not surprisingly, it is also the most profound.

  His theme is “Love Is Desire Aroused by Beauty.” Socrates reveals to his fellow revelers that the greatest form of love is actually the one that rises above carnal and physical desire and aspires to spiritual truth. Love’s most potent trigger, physical beauty, turns out to be the direct material copy of Goodness in Itself, in the same way that material objects are copies of the Platonic Forms. Once we realize that what arouses our desire for a beautiful boy or woman (and it is striking that Socrates tells the Symposium guests that the true spiritual nature of love was
revealed to him by a woman, the priestess Diotima) is actually only a glimpse of a higher perfection, then our love of beauty must eventually lead us forward toward a love of truth and goodness, and eventually to God.

  Can we really go from a Playboy centerfold (or Playgirl, for that matter) to an understanding of the mind of God? Socrates says yes, provided we look beyond the physical object that aroused our love and desire. Instead, we must ask the question “What do all beautiful objects, whether women or boys or vases or sculptures, have in common that makes them beautiful to our eyes?”

  In due course, the answer to that question will lead us to “see that each type of beauty is closely related to every other.” Suddenly the Playboy centerfold is no longer enough, either on paper or in the flesh. We want something more meaningful, as our soul realizes that the appearance of perfection in the world matches its own spiritual nature: “Instead of this low and petty-minded slavery, [we] will be turned towards the great sea of beauty” and the abundance of riches that can be found in its depths.9

  Slowly, love and desire move from the merely physical to the higher spiritual realm. The result, Socrates tells his audience, is “that [we] will regard beauty of body as something petty” compared with beauty of the mind and spirit. Finally, we will want to know Beauty in its purest form, as the source of all physical perfection: in other words, we want to catch “a sight of divine beauty itself,” which is the highest kind of knowledge—and love—there is.

  “Like someone using a staircase,” Plato writes, “[we] should go from one to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful practices, and from beautiful practices to beautiful knowledge.” It’s an ascent that ends finally in the highest enlightenment possible for man. “This is why every man should hold Love in respect,” he has Socrates say in the end, “and why on every occasion I praise the power and might of Love!”10