The Symposium is by far the strangest of all Plato’s dialogues. The modern classicist will tell us that it belongs very much to the homoerotic atmosphere of Athens in the early fourth century BCE, which Plato in the guise of Socrates seeks to downplay.11 However, to any reader of Plotinus (Ficino also translated the complete works of Plotinus into Latin) or the Pseudo-Dionysius, Plato’s reference to “a staircase” would have triggered immediate thoughts of heavenly hierarchies and the Great Chain of Being. So would the notion of a movement of the soul from lower to higher, as part of its processional return to its heavenly realm. Clearly, love as Plato described it in the Symposium had the same higher spiritual goal as his later Neoplatonist admirers: that of final mystical union with God.
“For whatever subject [Plato] deals with,” Ficino would write, whether it was ethics or physics or politics or mathematics, “he quickly brings around … to the contemplation and worship of God.”12 So it must be with his doctrine of love, despite its origins in a drunken orgy and in the realm of the carnal sexual side of human nature.* This love that manages to rise above the merely carnal and physical to a higher spiritual level, Ficino termed “Platonic love.” The term has stuck ever since. Platonic love is supposed to be about far more than two friends not sleeping together. As the great Ficino scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller explained, “There can never be two friends only; there must always be three: two human beings and God.”13
By a mental sleight of hand, Ficino effortlessly merged Plato’s theory of love with Christian Neoplatonist ideas about divine love derived from familiar authors like Augustine or Saint Bernard—not to mention Italy’s two most famous love poets, Dante and Petrarch. And Plato’s doctrine of love as the desire for beauty had a peculiar attraction in quattrocento Florence.
The production of paintings, sculptures, books, and buildings were important parts of Florence’s urban economy. Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Alberti: A visitor or citizen encountered their productions along every street like Orsanmichele and in every church or public building. What Plato and Ficino were saying was that these men were not just artisans, but exemplars of man’s perennial urging toward a higher realm of the self, thanks to their love of beauty.
“Don’t you see,” the priestess Diotima tells Socrates, “that it’s only in that kind of life, when someone sees beauty with the part [of the soul] that can see it, that he’ll be able to give birth not just to images of virtue … but true virtue?” It is the lover of beauty “who has the chance of becoming beloved by the gods, and immortal—if any human being can become immortal.”14
The theology of Saint Augustine or Saint Bernard made the ultimate goal of love, or caritas, the abnegation of the self, in order to be the servant of God. Ficino’s Platonic theology, by contrast, resulted in an exaltation of the self. The attraction of physical beauty in the material world, as when we look at a person or a painting and say, “How beautiful!” turns out to be a powerful sign of the soul’s yearning for divine perfection, fired by that perfection’s palpable trace in the realm of appearances. And this is made possible, as Ficino explained in his most original work, the Platonic Theology, because the soul shares that same divine nature.
At this point, the theology of Ficino and that of Thomas Aquinas sound not so different. Thomistic man’s proper place is at the center of creation, because he is the crucial mediating point between spirit and matter. Ficino’s Platonic man occupies the same slot in the divine hierarchy. When the Book of Genesis tells us that we are made in the image of God, then we are to take it in a Platonic sense. Of all material creatures, we are the only ones who love God precisely because we are also spiritual beings like God. “At some point, therefore, our rational soul is able to become God, because with God inciting it, it naturally strives towards that goal”—in both the spiritual realm and the material one.15
This leads to a monumental conclusion: through the power of love we become fully conscious of our powers as spiritual beings. Suddenly we realize we have the power to shape our lives, our environment, our relations with others, with the same confidence and creative range as God Himself. “Therefore the mind in understanding conceives as many things in itself as God in understanding creates in this world,” Ficino explains, “in speaking it utters them in the air; it writes them down on sheets [of paper] with a quill; in making images it figures them forth in the material of the world.” Love’s ascent, in short, teaches us how to become creators like God Himself.16
Ficino’s Academy spread his Platonic gospel across Italy. Eager visitors to the house in Careggi included Piero de’ Medici and his nephew Lorenzo the Magnificent; a throng of artists and poets and scholars; even (it appears) the Dominican friar Savonarola.17 They all absorbed from Ficino the Symposium’s message that “poets and other makers of beautiful things” share the same desire to achieve virtue through their creative powers—and through their love of beauty, they draw themselves closer to God.
The message surfaces in the poetry of Lorenzo de’ Medici himself:
The soul’s most holy bliss is to enjoy
this good by means of longing, for desire
proceeds from love and leads the soul to God.
Love is the just reward of love that’s loved.
Love is what gives us everlasting peace.
Love is true health, unfailing and complete.
And in the sonnets of another figure at the Medici court, Michelangelo:
Love, when the soul quit God, made you be light
And brilliancy, and me a steady eye;
So my great longing cannot fail to see
Him in what’s mortal in you, to our hurt.
As heat from fire, likewise my admiration
Cannot be parted from eternal Beauty
Praising Him most like it who is its cause.
The Platonic Academy set off a courtly love poetry revival based on the models of Dante and Petrarch, but really inspired by Ficino’s doctrine that love is the desire for beauty. Pseudo-Platonic dialogues discussing the nature of love, either profane or divine but preferably both, became steady bestsellers (as books like How to Find the Love of Your Life still are). All across Europe, poets from William Shakespeare to Pierre de Ronsard penned madrigals and sonnets to their Lady Love, which were actually testaments to a deeper love of the spirit. Meanwhile, painters like Titian used the rich pigments of the Renaissance palette to depict Sacred and Profane Love.
The best place to get a feel for Ficino’s Platonism at full flood, however, is at Florence’s Uffizi Gallery and Botticelli’s twin masterpieces, Spring and The Birth of Venus. Both were inspired by love ballads from the pen of Angelo Poliziano, a close disciple of Ficino’s and a major figure at his Academy:
Welcome to Spring
Who wishes a man to love,
And you, girls, in a ring
With those you’re lovers of,
To make yourselves lovely for love
With roses and flowers in May.
The “girls in a ring” are in fact the Three Graces, allegorical figures from pagan mythology whom Ficino identified (following Plotinus) as symbolizing the circular movement of divine love, flowing ceaselessly from God to the soul and then back to heaven again; but also the triad, that ancient Pythagorean symbol of wholeness and perfection.† At the same time, the Graces were identified with the pagan goddess of love Venus. She of course appears in both paintings: clothed in Spring, in the folds of classical drapery, but completely nude in the other as she emerges, newly born, from the sea—and the realm of the Forms.
Like the Graces and Spring, The Birth of Venus is arranged in a triad. On one side are the “passionate winds”—zefiri lascivi, Poliziano calls them—symbolizing the power of love at its carnal starting point, the passionate frenzy of Eros. On other side is the allegorical figure of Spring again, clothed, and looking very self-contained as she offers a cloak to the nude Venus. Physical profane love is transformed into chaste divine love, the endpoint of the
Platonic creative ascent—just as the face of Botticelli’s Venus dissolves into his depictions of the Virgin Mary.
Sexual desire carries the seed (literally) of its spiritual opposite; in a profound sense, they are indistinguishable. Through love we find the highest even in the lowest (as the Pseudo-Dionysius might say): perfection in imperfection; or harmony where others see discord. Ficino even claims that in the Timaeus, Plato locates Love at the very heart of the primeval Chaos from which cosmic order will emerge.18 As inspired by Ficino, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus blurs the frontier that divides the two sides of our nature, body and soul, in order to overcome their contradictions—and thus reconcile us with the unity of the cosmos.
Most people wouldn’t think of the pagan goddess of love as a symbol of concord and balance. Certainly not the Romans, who saw only her frankly carnal nature, let alone Augustine or Neoplatonists of the Middle Ages. But in the 1400s, the poets and scholars at the Florentine Academy did—just as she and her allegorical entourage in Botticelli’s painting symbolized the concord between ancient and modern thought. What Ficino had proved (or at least seemed to prove) was that there was no real clash between Christian and pagan systems of theology. In the end, they arose from the same source: the soul’s love of beauty and perfection and its relentless aspiration for knowledge of God and therefore of ourselves.
Cyril Connolly once said that in every fat person was a thin person struggling to get out. For Ficino and his followers, inside every human body is a soul struggling to get out and realize its creative powers through the pursuit of the Eternal. The evidence is all around us. Everywhere we go on the globe we find churches, temples, holy sites, and tombs dedicated to one deity or another, along with sacred texts and artifacts. All express the same spiritual impulse and movement; all are products of the same desire to realize the highest truth.
It was a stunning revelation. Renaissance Platonism realized that it was this quest for spiritual perfection that bound together all the great religions and civilizations: Egypt, the Chaldeans and Babylonians, the Persians and Hebrews, the Greeks and Romans. All were suddenly revealed to be part of the same spiritual Big Push. All were revealed to be different aspects of the One.
The desire to trace the origins and contours of that Big Push overtook Ficino’s Academy in its later years, especially after the arrival of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. As intellectually gifted as he was aristocratic (he was actually Prince della Mirandola), Pico read not only Greek and Latin, but Hebrew and Arabic. Although only in his twenties, he had studied science and mathematics as well as literature and philosophy. He was as much at home with the medieval scholastics as with the wisdom of the ancients. Historians have labeled several scholars in the Renaissance as being “the last man to know everything,” including Erasmus and Francis Bacon. Giovanni Pico is the true owner of the title.
His staggering range of interests and his inexhaustible scholarly energy were aimed at a single mission. This was to prove that all religions and philosophies, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, actually formed a single body of knowledge. On the surface, Plato and Aristotle, Hebrew, Islamic, and Christian theologies, seemed hard to reconcile. But underneath them all, Pico argued, was a shared set of universal truths handed down over the centuries to certain great wise men, who then passed them along to their successors.
In this way, the essential message of Christianity had been with the pagans all along, “and it was with the human race from its beginning to the time when Christ appeared in the flesh; from whence the true religion, which already existed, was called Christianity.”19 Pico even drew up a final list of nine hundred theses that underpinned all philosophies and religions and doctrines, drawing from such diverse sources as the followers of Plato and Aristotle, but also from Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, the Hebrew Kabbalah and Arab philosophers and Pythagoras—even the magical treatises of the mysterious ancient alchemist Hermes Trismegistus.
To modern eyes, the list veers from the esoteric (“What is called otherness in the Parmenides and supercelestial place in the Phaedrus is the same”) to the wildly commonplace (“Friendship is a virtue”). The entries also reveal the heavy impact of Pythagorean formulae (“The proportion of reason to sensual passion is an octave”). Above all, they are a tribute to Plato, especially the notion of the soul as immortal and as “the source of motion and the governess of matter.” For Pico, “the science of the soul is intermediate between natural and divine [knowledge].”20
In fact, Pico’s goal was to dissolve any difference between theology and philosophy, science and literature, art and poetry. All knowledge was One, as aspects of the One: and human beings come uniquely equipped to unravel its final secrets.
And since all knowledge forms a whole, the corollary is never throw anything away. Every doctrine, no matter how esoteric or seemingly irrational or irrelevant, may hold yet another secret to understanding the rest. This was why Ficino translated Plotinus with an extensive commentary and broke off his work on Plato at Cosimo de’ Medici’s insistence in order to translate the secret works of Hermes Trismegistus.21 It was also why Pico immersed himself in the Kabbalah and studied the ancient Orphic hymns in hopes that their harmonies might reveal special magical properties.
In truth as in love, what we want isn’t always what we get—nor is it always where we expect to find it. To the Renaissance Platonist, the highest truths arrive with a sign: “Handle with Care.” Christ and Moses clothed their revelation in allegories and parables; so did Plato (including the cave of the Republic and Atlantis in the Timaeus). “Divine subjects and the secret Mysteries must not be rashly divulged,” Pico says. All “divine knowledge … must be covered with enigmatic veils and poetic dissimulation.…”22 No one can know what other strange but powerful secrets might be buried in the most unlikely places, not by accident but by design.
It was a strange moment. The belief in the unity of all knowledge, and that throughout history the profoundest truths are the ones most heavily veiled, would lead the Renaissance mind down some dark passageways, including alchemy and black magic. In the age of Galileo, it led to a fascination with the Rosicrucians and the possibility that a secret brotherhood of the Rosy Cross controlled access to the world’s final hidden truths.23 Still later, the same impulse would lead researchers to pursue the “secrets” of the Freemasons and the Knights Templar, to hunt for the Lost Ark and the mysterious kingdom of Agartha in the bowels of the earth—or even UFOs.
If there was one Platonic staircase that led the soul from profane to divine love, there’s another that leads from Pico’s 900 Theses to The Da Vinci Code. In fact, scratch your average conspiracy theorist and you’ll probably find a renegade Platonist underneath.
Still, modern conspiracy theories are geared to reinforce our sense of helplessness in the face of dark, powerful forces. By contrast, Pico’s unity of knowledge, like Ficino’s doctrine of Platonic love, exalted and celebrated the powers of man. Of all creatures natural or celestial, the human being has no fixed place in the Great Chain of Being. He alone is capable of occupying, according to his choice, any degree of life from the highest to the lowest.
“Thine own free will,” Pico has God tell Adam in Oration on the Dignity of Man (the introduction to his 900 Theses), “shall ordain for thyself the limits of thy nature.” The highest and most marvelous happiness for human beings is that they face no divinely imposed limits. “To [man] is granted the power to have whatever he chooses, to be whatever he wills.” If he wants to be a sage or a garbageman, he is free to choose. However, if he chooses the life of intelligent understanding, “he will be an angel and a son of God” and be able to draw to himself the unity of all things—just as his own spirit is made one with God.24
Pico’s is a heady vision: Doctor Faustus, indeed, without the Devil. And certainly the Renaissance Platonist vision of the unity of all knowledge stood in sharp contrast with the Aristotle of the medieval schoolmen, with his insistence on making divisions and distinct
ions and creating niggling little categories and compartments.
Yet ironically it was Ficino, Pico, and the Renaissance Platonists who saved Aristotle from the historical rubbish heap where his followers were leading him. Pico was a keen student of Aristotle; his emphasis on the power of free will sprang directly from reading the Ethics.25 The Renaissance Platonist program recognized that Aristotle too was part of the One and that his insights had their place in the larger understanding of the cosmos.
In the end, it was Pico and his friends who gave Aristotle his significance in the life of the modern Western mind as the philosopher of nature, including human nature. That is how he appears in Raphael’s School of Athens, that glorious visual summing up of the legacy of Greek philosophy—and the direct product of the ideas of Pico della Mirandola.26
Now when we enter the Stanza della Segnatura with the Florentine Platonists in mind, we immediately see that the entire theme of the painting is Pico’s insistence that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle formed a single harmonious whole and that the unity of all knowledge extends across the entire room, from philosophy and theology (represented by the fresco called the Disputa) to the arts and law.
In fact, Pico himself appears not once but twice in The School of Athens. On Plato’s side he stands next to Pythagoras and looks directly at the viewer. He also stands with his back to the viewer on Aristotle’s side, gazing with open admiration at the famed Peripatetic. A similar balancing harmonizing act carries over to the other figures in the painting, almost all of whom also appear in the catalog of great sages in Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man.27 The practical geometer Euclid is balanced by the mystical Pythagoras; Diogenes, the philosopher who celebrated owning nothing, is balanced by the pleasure-loving Epicurus.
The Cave and the Light Page 35