The Rebirth of Venus

by Linda Proud

  The book sat immutable on its rest. Its presence in the room was palpable; everything revolved around it. I have heard that Egyptian priests attended their gods at dawn, washing and dressing them as if they were alive. The Plato sat like a god on a pedestal and, yes, it was alive, infused with divine spirit.

  There are two versions of history, one exoteric, one esoteric. Exoteric history is the true story of dust and bone, of fading documents mostly legal and administrative. It is the history of time, of dates running backwards to that age before time when there were no dates. Exoteric history written down by scribes and historians becomes itself a document and in time, along with the historians, dust and bone. Esoteric history, however, is oral, passed on from one generation to the next as a story, a myth or a teaching.

  ‘No book holds the truth,’ Ficino told me. ‘What I know, what I pass on to you is not derived from books.’ And then he confirmed the secret history of the Platonic Academy. Having survived nine hundred years since its inception, the original academy had been closed by the Emperor Justinian. The philosophers emigrated to Arabia and Persia; wherever they went, civilisation began to flourish. They taught caliphs and sheiks. Wherever they went, universities sprang up. The Arabs became the wisest of men, numerate, inventive and deeply philosophical.

  ‘Arabia was the repository of knowledge, while here in the west, after the barbarian invasions, we sank into superstition and ignorance. In time philosophy returned to her home in Greece, but not Athens. She came to rest in a corner of the Peleponnese called Mistra. And from Mistra in the 1430s came the last of the academicians to seek out the man who had obtained this book. George Gemistos Plethon found Cosimo de’ Medici, and to him imparted the teaching which I impart to you. To say we have refounded the Platonic Academy here in Florence is no empty rhetoric. We have refounded the Platonic Academy.

  ‘I remember the moment vividly. There was old Cosimo, Pater Patriae, the father of his country, but not as I had ever seen him before. We were in his own chambers and his usual look of stern resourcefulness, of grimness, was absent. We had discovered in each other a shared love of truth, for that was where his questioning had led – into the heart of me. Despite the years that separated us, we found in each other the same thing. Can you understand? I had grown up in a large family utterly alone, with no one to whom I could confess my innermost feelings, my desperation at the world and its ways, the shortcomings of our faith, the need for some principle by which to live. My reading had given me a thirst for Roman stoicism, but here was Cosimo telling me there was something better, something more ancient.

  ‘He told me that the original Stoics, who inspired the Romans, were great men, but their works were lost in the burning of the library at Alexandria. There was a greater man, however, whose works – though for centuries lost to us in Christendom – had survived in Arabia. “I have them here,” said Cosimo.

  ‘Unlocking a painted chest of the kind that usually holds golden treasure, he lifted out this very manuscript, heavy and dull with age. “The man I speak of was called Socrates,” he said. “His wisdom is enshrined in the Dialogues of Plato. I have been initiated into that wisdom by George Gemisthos Plethon, and what he has taught me will live with me. I need to read this book, Marsilio, but it is in ancient Greek and there is no one who can translate it.”

  ‘As I touched it, it was as if waking up from the delusion of time. There were no eighteen hundred years since the founding of the original academy. Wisdom has this exquisite property of being of the present moment and therefore it has no history. It is now and only now. Here in this book was the ancient, eternal flame passed on by generations of philosophers. Plato himself said he had received it from the school of Pythagoras, Pythagoras from Orpheus, Orpheus from Zoroaster, Zoroaster from Hermes Trismegistus in ancient Egypt. We do not know its ultimate origins, but I believe it has always been here in the world – a thread of gold in the dross of life.

  ‘Cosimo said that the work would take a lifetime. He looked at me with such far-seeing eyes. Would I grasp the torch? I made the decision without struggle, telling him I wanted for nothing else.

  ‘He said, “Our work is to wed the holy philosophy with our faith. Philosophy is not an alternative to religion. By this wisdom, Christianity will be enriched, will find its roots again. What do you say, young man?”

  ‘“Father,” I said, for in this hour he had become the father of my soul as Diotifeci Ficino was the father of my body. “Father, I surrender my life to you and to this work.” After that, I was taken from my family to be brought up by the Medici and educated by the finest Greek scholars. When I had mastered the language, Cosimo held a ceremony in which he presented me with all the Greek texts, not only those of Plato but also those of Plotinus. Then, a little while after I had begun, there came to Florence the book of Hermes Trismegistus and Cosimo told me to put the Plato aside and translate Hermes first. I did not return to the great work on Plato until 1463, when I was thirty, and Cosimo only survived a year after that, but he heard Hermes in Latin, and the first dialogues I had completed. At Cosimo’s deathbed, the Florentine Academy of Plato met for the first time.’

  Ficino fell quiet and reflective.

  ‘Father,’ I said to him quietly. ‘Your work on Plato is now done.’

  He did not answer.

  ‘What will you do next? Plotinus?’

  ‘Cosimo never asked me to translate Plotinus. Perhaps he did not wish to burden me, I do not know. All I know is that I must await further instruction.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘From the father of my soul.’

  Cosimo had been dead for twenty years.

  ‘Do you not understand what I have said, Tommaso? There is no death in Wisdom. It is eternal. It is now.’

  ‘There must be a thousand projects in mind that you wish to turn to.’

  ‘Of course, but I have always tried to avoid following my own will. I am at the end of the road that was laid out for me. I could wilfully plunge off in another direction, or I could just wait to see what Providence wants of me.’

  ‘You truly think you are going to die?’

  ‘It would be very neat and timely. I have enjoyed a life where there has been no question about how I should spend it. Only a monk could be happier. But now I am like an ox turning in a gin that has run out of corn. I have no desire to amble at leisure in the fields. I need something else to grind.’

  ‘Well, I am sure someone will commission something from you.’

  Ficino shook his head irritably. ‘You do not understand. I am not looking for something to do, or some money for doing it. I want to know what it is that my master desires!’

  *

  The courier arrived an hour before dawn and loaded our bag and its precious contents on to his saddle.

  ‘Take very great care of it,’ Ficino said.

  ‘I take very great care of all my mail.’

  ‘Especial care. Always take the safe road. I do not mind if it adds weeks to your journey.’

  The man agreed he would do so.

  ‘Mercury is in a very good aspect to Venus,’ said Ficino. ‘You have the blessings of heaven upon you.’

  ‘I’ll be off then.’

  Ficino had not let go of the saddlebag. Gently I prised his hands away. ‘Let it go, Father.’

  ‘Oh, Tommaso! I’m convinced I’ve forgotten something. What if I have? In a few months there will be a thousand copies of this book. What if I have made a blunder?’

  ‘You haven’t. We’ve checked it. Angelo has checked it. There are no blunders.’

  I smacked the rump of the courier’s horse and sent the Plato off.

  Ficino stood watching the road long after the courier had disappeared. Finally he came back into the house and sat at his empty desk.

  ‘What will you do?’ I asked, concerned about him.

  ‘Oh, write som
e letters.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Only have concern for the day, Tommaso, not for the morrow. Go now and leave me to my work.’ I bowed and left.

  As I went down the road into the city, I met a party of some young prince or ambassador, bright in flowered brocades and mounted on white horses, which I presumed to be making for the Villa Medici. As they passed, I glanced at the tall young man at its head but only recognised him once he had gone by. I stopped and turned in my saddle to watch Giovanni Pico della Mirandola ride past the Villa Medici and take the lane up to Ficino’s house.

  9

  PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA ARRIVES WITHOUT SAYING HELLO

  1484

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT BECAME FOLKLORE WITHIN THE WEEK, with many variations embellishing the tale. Giovanni Pico, it was said, had had a vision in his sleep in which Cosimo de’ Medici appeared, after which he hastened to Florence to see Ficino. Or, Ficino had been raising angels and Giovanni Pico suddenly appeared. Or, just as Ficino was putting the finishing touches to the Plato, Pico appeared and compelled him to start work on the translation of Plotinus. This last version was near enough the true one. Ficino interpreted Pico’s sudden, unannounced visit as the message from Cosimo he had been awaiting.

  Inspired by reading The Platonic Theology, Pico had decided to become Ficino’s disciple. Always impetuous, no sooner was the desire seeded than Pico was on the road. When he arrived at Ficino’s and discovered that the Plato had just left for the printer’s, he told Ficino that he must turn to Plotinus immediately, with such force and authority, Ficino said, it was difficult to believe Pico was only twenty years old.

  ‘I was born,’ Ficino told him, ‘the year that Plato came to Florence. You were born the year I began the work of translation.’ Ficino did not believe in mere coincidence. ‘You were born with Saturn in Aquarius. So was I, thirty years earlier.’

  Pico shone with the light of opals, a self-conscious light acknowledging his own part in this cosmic event as being natural and only to be expected. ‘It is obvious that somehow, in the divine scheme of things, we are connected. Wonderful! I have no doubt that it is the desire of Cosimo de’ Medici that you begin work at once on Plotinus.’

  Ficino was about to agree when he found himself being forcefully guided towards his desk by this smiling angel.

  ‘At once!’ said Pico. ‘Now! Do not waste a moment.’ He went to the books on the study shelf, leaving Ficino to begin his new work, but not a minute had passed before he was asking questions and commanding the philosopher’s attention. Ficino looked up, wondering – and it would not be for the last time – if his young guest were slightly mad, but whenever he looked into that seraphic, unblinking gaze, he remembered God and forgot his objections. Frenzy, after all, is a natural condition of the God-lover.

  That Pico wore rings on his thumbs and had threaded a strand of his long, wavy hair with pearls seemed somehow unremarkable in such a youth. He was the kind of man who chooses what to wear according to the planets and not to whim; that is to say, his choice of apparel and adornment were significant, but only to himself. It was not difficult for him to capture attention; neither was it difficult for any of us to become enslaved.

  And thus it was that Marsilio Ficino, without even a short space in which to be challenged by having nothing to do, finished Plato and began Plotinus. In the year when Saturn was conjunct with Jupiter, when Pope Sixtus the Fourth died and went to hell, when a statue of the Virgin at Prato wept tears, when Charles VIII came to the throne of France, when Lorenzo de’ Medici began his work of cleansing the Church by ordering that all wax tapers and banners be removed from the baptistery; in that year Pico della Mirandola came to Florence like a magus following the star and impelled Marsilio Ficino to the next part of his life’s work.

  Angelo had met Pico for the first time at Lorenzo’s villa on Fiesole five years before; they had met again in Mantua, during the long months of Angelo’s exile. Since that time, whenever Pico’s name arose in Angelo’s conversation – which was often – it was always accompanied by an air of loss and longing. I confess I was somewhat irritated by this, as if my company, or that of any man, was dull in comparison. Whenever a letter arrived from Pico, Angelo would leave it to last, like the tastiest morsel, and then go away to read it alone. Afterwards he would be cheerful for several hours. When he heard that Pico was in Florence, Angelo got up from his desk so quickly that his stool fell over with a crash.

  To describe Pico physically would be to mould him in clay when it was not his features that attracted, but that which animated them, his spirit. In brief, his hair was longer than the fashion, his complexion paler than a man’s, his eyes the colour of rain. There, I have done. I shall not mention his height, his robust figure, the bewitching power of his smile. Pico seemed to me to be a creature from a previous age, as if he had been sculpted for a niche in a French cathedral but had stepped down to join the living. He stood like a son beside Ficino but beside Angelo as a brother. Pico and Poliziano: where one was tall and fair, the other was short and dark, where one was mystical, the other was pragmatic, where one was deeply Christian, the other had a pagan heart. They were twins from complementary signs of the zodiac – Pisces and Cancer – and between them they covered all knowledge and all learning. Each found in the other what he considered himself to lack and that, according to Plato’s definition, is love.

  When he spoke, Pico’s youth seemed to be an illusion. His studies had vested him with such authority that we listened to him as to a master. He said repeatedly that he wished to study with Ficino, to ‘drink wisdom from the fount of Plato’, but he seemed less a disciple than an heir to the estate. Called to dine in the garden of Lorenzo’s villa, the Platonic Academy listened in fascination to a conversation between Ficino and the young man devoted to comparing the teachings of obscure philosophers. It was like watching two expert swordsmen at play, neither of them intent on killing the other, only in proving his skill. As they parried and thrust, I began to suspect that it was the first time that Ficino had met any intellectual resistance of a strength to try him. His ideas, too long unchallenged, were now being exercised by this animated youth.

  Pico changed swords frequently, using now the blade of Aquinas, now the point of Alexander of Aphrodisias, now the edge of William of Ockham. Ficino had only one sword, forged in heaven and inscribed with the name Platone. For unlike Pico he was not an independent thinker deriving his ideas from many sources but was the disciple of one master. The swords rang. The younger man’s made a pleasing sound against the clang of the elder, but suddenly, and for no reason apparent to us lesser mortals, Pico suddenly put up his weapon.

  ‘I have come to learn from Plato, not destroy him,’ he said, and apologised to Ficino for his hubristic display of learning. ‘I have to know,’ he explained. ‘I have to know everything. It is not enough to take anything on faith. Any proposition I must attack, for only that which survives is true.’

  ‘Poor Truth!’ said Ficino with feeling, but he gazed on Pico fondly, as if to say, ‘This is my son, in whom I am well pleased.’

  It was on that night that I realised for the first time that Ficino was not antipathetical to Aristotle. I had always believed that, in the fight between the Aristotelians and the Platonists, Ficino was unquestionably of the latter camp, but in this conversation he revealed himself much more sympathetic to Aristotle than I had supposed. Pico, in his years at the universities of Paris and Padua, had absorbed the traditional philosophy, which was Aristotelian as interpreted by Saint Thomas Aquinas; now he wished to absorb Plato, to compare one with the other, and, if he could, to harmonise them. Not for nothing was he the Count of Concordia.

  Angelo was growing restless. He had had enough philosophy and wanted music. He sent an attendant to fetch Ficino’s ‘Orphic lyre’, reconstructed by an instrument-maker from an image on an ancient engraved gem. As the sun sank in the west and the fireflies danced in the glow o
f lamps, Ficino plucked at the strings in the Aeolian mode and chanted a hymn to Apollo. The notes dissolved in the air like salt in water, purifying it, making it clearer. For a moment there was no such thing as time; I could have been one of the first men, listening to Apollo himself. Such hymns have been sung since time began, and to hear one now was to inhabit all time. Ficino’s enunciation of the Orphic hymn was so precise and sweet that it seemed to me that I fully understood Greek and knew the meaning of all words. For a moment the world was the right way up and I understood that knowledge is the true condition while ignorance is mere enchantment; it was as if I had spent all my adult life struggling with a language I already knew. There were no flames in the sky on this night, just streamers of vivid colour in the west. Little moths danced in the air and in my state of enhanced vision I saw the air to be full of spirits, and that they too were dancing in this blessed company that included Lorenzo de’ Medici, Marsilio Ficino, Angelo Poliziano and Pico della Mirandola.

  I saw all this and in the seeing knew myself to be separate, kept apart from the union of the company and the moment by grief, a blackness in my soul which was a hatred of God. I abjured goodness and kept apart. These men were happy, but I was not happy, could never be happy again, without Elena. Like leprosy, my loss was a disease without cure. I had to learn to live without my limbs, to drag myself crippled through the realm of love, forever condemned. All I could hope for was the power to accept my lot with good grace, to envy no one his wholeness and to limp through life the best I might.