Platonic Theology, Volume 1: Books I–IV (The I Tatti Renaissance Library)

Anyone who enjoys the art of reasoning in pursuit of philosophy may enjoy this book as much as I did. When I stopped to recall when all these philosophies were derived, in the B.C. time era, I was truly amazed. An oddity of the book is that the left-hand pages are in Latin and the right-hand in English. How they deduced their theology, the postulates they use (as in geometry) is worth following. And I agree with their conclusions. The five levels of how our Universe is designed is something I have only heard of suggestively, but never stated as clearly as this. I highly recommend it to anyone who may be exploring the God-concept from a different, maybe rational, viewpoint.

I have started reading the first volume and have the rest on order. This translation is beautiful in style and contemplative in tone. It is truly a gift to have this work available in translation. It is an intellectual and spiritual feast and not to be missed!

Ficino is a highly underrated philosopher. The book is well organized, his prose is clear, he defines his terms and summarizes his predecessors well, and his examples are cogent. I find that stylistically and in terms of content Ficino’s Platonic Theology is far and away superior to Aquinas’ Summa.

Wonderful. Real y great

Thank you!

Useful to the scholar. Thought provoking as intellectual work. Life changing in world view. There is an alternative to secularism or post-modernism.

The Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who was renowned for his Latin translations of all Plato's dialogues, set out to prove that the tenets of Platonism, instead of Aristotelianism, were fundamentally compatible with Christianity. He attempted this not only by acting as the primary mover of the Florentine academy, but also through his magnanimous patron Cosimo de' Medici who apportioned Ficino the leisure to commence his monumental work, "The Platonic Theology," which is offered here for the first time in a long-awaited English translation. Marsilio Ficino's work--from what may be seen from the first of five anticipated volumes--is an artful, straightforward representation of the divine philosophy of Plato, magnificently garbed under a brilliant and definitive medieval synthesis. Of the work itself Ficino says, "the Platonic mysteries are set forth as clearly as possible...so that...we may reveal the Platonic teaching, which is in complete accord with the divine law." Like all Christian-Platonists, Ficino used Augustine as a model for his orthodox amalgamation of the teachings of Plato and Christ, and believed so strongly in it that he said, "the Platonic teaching...is related to the divine law of both Moses and Christ as the moon is to the sun." With this in mind, it may be said that the vision of Marsilio Ficino, so clearly manifested in this work, will come as a relief to anyone ardently devoted to the school of Plato and the religion of Christ. The translated works of Ficino are certainly a great benefit to those confined to the English speaking world, and the other up-and-coming volumes in new I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard) are likely to produce the same effects. The value of these newly translated masterpieces of western culture cannot be described.

Marselo Ficino was one of the leading scholars in Renaissance Italy. Charged by the famous and powerful Medici family with recovering classical literature and philosophy, Ficino played a critical role in translating such works as the Hermetic Corpus and the works of Plotinus and Plato.Ficino's Platonic Theology is a Renaissance restatement of the metaphysical system of Neo-Platonism, particularly that found in Proclus's Platonic Theology. The core of the system is the First Principle, the One, which while itself is immutable, eternal, and timeless, produces the universe through a chain of being through which it transmits its goodness and being, from the highest level of reality to the lowest, which then returns back to the One in an processing cycle.Ficino made some accomodations to Christian belief and theology so his system would not raise the ire of the religious authorities, though he also had considerable freedom from ecclesiastical control.This work is of interest to any philosopher interested in Neo-Platonic idealism and how it has influenced the shape of modern thought.

Todo conocedor del Renacimiento sabe que es una obra maestra del periodo, pues Ficino es un imprescindible del Renacimiento y ésta una de sus obras más importantes.

Many readers will be familiar with the Leob series of translations of classical authors – Greek in Green dust covers, Latin in Red dust covers, that for many not only provide accurate translations but also the original texts (on the facing page). The same production model has been used for the I Tatti Renaissance Library – also published by Harvard, of Renaissance authors (who wrote in Latin), published in a slightly larger format, but also in hardback, with pale blue dust-covers; “….the Platonic Theology was very much a product of its Renaissance Italian, specifically Medicean, context. A summa theologica, it was a summa philosophica and a summa platonica, a bold, albeit problematic attempt to appropriate ancient philosophy for the ingeniosi, the intellectuals and forward wits of the Republic and its governing elites. This may in part account for its style which sets out to emulate in Latin what Plotinus had achieved in his Greek: that is to approach sublimity in an unadorned and apparently artless way that is nonetheless syntactically and rhetorically challenging…” (From Allen’s excellent introduction.)So what have we got? Something which goes beyond Proclus’s ‘Theology of Plato’ in terms of range, and includes the influence of Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine, and Aquinas, in much the same way that Plotinus, writing some 600 hears after Plato, absorbed from philosophers writing about Platonic issues post-Plato. So this is Ficino’s ‘Summa’. Volume 1 opens with a caveat” ‘Whatever subject I discuss here or elsewhere, I wish to state only what is approved by the Church,’ and the Inquisition was never far away. Essentially the same caveat is paraphrased in his dedication to Lorenzo de Medici: ‘I would not want anything proved in these pages which is not approved by divine law.’ Which rather nicely, as was Ficino’s wont, places divine law above human law.In the original ‘Platonic Theology’ Ficino wrote what he called 18 Books, but Tatti’s Book 1 here, contains a translation of Books 1-4. If one were to consider what Plato’s primary interests were, they would be: the immortality of the soul, and the significance of the existence of the forms. It is to the former that Ficino addresses his attention. In a typically scholastic manner; for focus for each book is given; and the focus for each chapter, and a chapter might be long, or even as short as one paragraph. What is very obvious that in this example of Ficino’s version of it, is that it is very reader-friendly: The first book ascends up to God. Its chapter headings: (1) Were the soul not immortal, no creature would be more miserable than man; (2) Body does not act of its own nature; (3) Above the form that is divided in body there exists an indivisible form, namely, soul; (4) In its substance rational soul is motionless; in its activity it is mobile; in its power it is m partly motionless and partly mobile; (5) above soul is motionless angel; (6) above angel is God…The second book discusses God who has now been discovered….I cannot speak for the Latin emulating Plotinus’s style in Greek, but one cannot but notice the lucidity and clarity of Allen’s English translation. Allen takes Plotinus to be a Neo-Platonist, which I do not, but particularly because of the influence of Proclus – a Neo-Platonist and his Syrian Christian student ‘Denys’ Ficino would be a Neo-Platonist. For those familiar with the letters of Ficino, this is as direct, but in a quite different way. For anyone interested in the Italian Renaissance – which was a melting pot of ideas and changing perspectives, this provides another viewpoint; for those interested in the transmission of Plato’s ideas, this is essential reading, for one might say that without Plato there would not have been a Ficino, and of course Ficino was the first to translate the whole of the Platonic corpus into Latin. And perhaps more importantly, this was not written, just to be read, but something to be studied, discussed, and reflected upon, and because we are perhaps more heirs to the Italian Renaissance, and its mirror image of the Northern Renaissance, to resound and reconsider those ideals at the present time, will be particularly useful. Excellent.