Marsilio Ficino and the Magic of Cosmic Love
In Ficino's account, on the seventh of November, the supposed birthday of Plato, a group of friends sat down to dinner in a villa on a hill above Florence. They were scholars, poets, doctors and noblemen, and the host was a small, gentle priest who played the lyre and suffered from melancholy.
After dinner, a copy of Plato's Symposium, the dialogue of a banquet in Athens, was read aloud, and each guest spoke on love. The priest then set down what was said, or what he imagined was said. The book that came out of that evening, De amore, "On Love," gave the Western world the phrase "Platonic love." The priest was Marsilio Ficino, and he believed that love holds the universe together.
A Doctor's Son and the Medici
Marsilio Ficino was born in 1433 near Florence, the son of a physician. He studied medicine and philosophy and came to the attention of Cosimo de' Medici, the banker who ruled the city behind the scenes. Cosimo had a collection of Greek manuscripts and needed a translator.
Around 1462, he gave Ficino a villa at Careggi, in the hills, so that he could devote himself to Plato. Whether the gatherings at Careggi formed a formal "Platonic Academy" is a matter of discussion among historians, but there is no doubt that a circle of friends met there to read and talk.
Ficino was ordained a priest in 1473. He spent his life as a physician of the body and of the soul, and his letters show a warm, humorous man who wrote about music, melancholy and friendship with equal ease.
Hermes, Plato and the Lost Wisdom
Ficino's greatest labor was translation. He was asked by Cosimo to put aside Plato for a time and turn first to a newly arrived Greek manuscript, a collection of Hermetic treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. He finished the Latin version in 1463, and it was printed in 1471 under the title Pimander.
He believed, like most scholars of his day, that these texts were extremely old, written by an Egyptian sage who had taught Moses and Plato. Scholars proved in the early seventeenth century that they date from the early centuries of the Christian era.
Ficino went on to translate all the works of Plato into Latin, published in 1484, as well as the Enneads of Plotinus, completed in 1492, and works by Iamblichus, Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius. For many Europeans, this was the first time they could read these authors in a language they understood.
De Amore: Love as the Ladder
In De amore, Ficino takes up the Platonic theory that love is a longing for beauty, and beauty is a reflection of the divine. When we love a face, a voice or a landscape, he says, we are touched by a ray from the source of all beauty.
The first stirring is sensual, but it can be trained to climb: from the beauty of bodies to the beauty of souls, then to the beauty of ideas and, finally, to the divine itself.
He taught that love moves in a circle. God, who is beauty, pours himself out into the world; the world, awakened by this gift, longs to return; love is the force that makes the return possible. He called it the golden circle. Seen this way, desire is not an enemy of the spirit, but a means by which the soul remembers its home.
Ficino also stressed that "Platonic love" is not a love without feeling. It is a love that does not stop at the first object. He wrote warmly of friendship between men, and his letters to his friends are full of passionate affection.
The Magic of Life
In 1489, Ficino published De vita libri tres, "Three Books on Life," a work on health that offended some churchmen because it spoke about the influence of the stars and the making of talismans. The first book gives advice to scholars, who, he said, often suffer from melancholy, the temperament linked to Saturn. His remedies are gentle: walks, fresh air, good food, time in the sun, aromatic herbs, and above all music.
He sang hymns attributed to Orpheus to the lyre, and believed that music could tune the soul to the harmony of the heavens. The third book describes how to draw on the power of the planets, the Sun in particular, through colors, scents, stones and songs.
Ficino was careful to claim that this was natural magic, and not demonic. Still, he had to write a defense of the work, and no harm came to him.
A note of caution: this is Renaissance medicine, and it should be read as history. Melancholy, depression and other conditions deserve proper care today.
Closing
Ficino died in 1499, and his body lies in Florence Cathedral. He had no army, wrote no manifestos and founded no church. Yet his translations changed what Europeans read, and his idea of love as a ladder of beauty entered poetry, painting and the language of courtship.
His image of the soul as a traveler, drawn upward by a beauty it half remembers, remains one of the loveliest in Western thought. Perhaps this is why a quiet priest at a dinner table is remembered after the banks and the princes are forgotten.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- The Platonic Theology of Marsilio Ficino: The Immortal Soul and the Harmony of the World
- Marsilio Ficino and the Art of Natural Magic: Tuning the Soul to the Stars
- Marsilio Ficino and the Platonic Theology
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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