CHAPTER VII.
MARSILIO FICINO AND CRISTOFORO LANDINO.
In order to gain a complete view both of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s own life and of his influence on the scientific progress of his time, it is necessary to contemplate the circle in which he was placed in his youth, and which, though greatly modified in the course of years, preserved the same character in essentials to the end. The persons of whom it was composed carry us back to the time of Cosimo. The first we meet are Marsilio Ficino and Cristoforo Landino. Both owed their rise to the house of Medici; both contributed to its glory.
The last twenty-five years at least of Ficino’s life were occupied with the endeavour to reconcile Platonism and Christianity, to make the one expand within the other. At the end of 1473, when forty years old, he entered holy orders, after seriously weighing the duties and obligations of that sacred office, and after coming to the conclusion that there is nothing on earth nobler than a good priest, nothing more vile than an unworthy one. At the same time he held counsel with his own mind as to the direction of his philosophical studies. The example of St. Augustine, who, after he became a Christian, inclined to the Platonics of the Christian era, decided him the more easily, because it confirmed the direction of his whole previous life. When he became aware how Platonism recognises Christian dogma on account of the analogies which the latter presents to its own doctrines, he thanked God, and felt himself confirmed in his Christian faith. He did not, however, long remain free from a suspicion of the divergence which Platonism had caused in the mediæval development of Christian teaching from the Aristotelian system, which was the standing-ground of scholasticism, in its efforts to reconcile the faith of the Church with the researches of reason. He had started from the view that religion and philosophy are sisters. As true philosophy, he says, is the loving study of truth and wisdom—as God alone is truth and wisdom—so true philosophy is nothing but genuine religion, and genuine religion nothing but true philosophy. Religion is innate in every man; every religion is good, in so far as it turns to God, but Christianity is the only true one, inspired by the divine power which dwelt in its Founder. For himself, he declares he needs nothing but the teaching of Christ. He would rather believe divine things than know human ones; for divine faith is more secure than human knowledge, and what proceeds from it is confirmed by true science. But there are spirits for whom the authority of the divine law is not enough, and who require the arguments of reason. Divine Providence has ordained that the teachings of Platonism should agree in many things with those of Christianity, in order to bring such spirits to Christ; for, as Augustine said, with the exception of a few things the Platonists were Christians. As Plato always connects religion with philosophy, and does not merely disclose to us the principles and order of natural things, like Aristotle, but teaches us our duty towards Him who orders all things by number, measure, and weight; so he himself has no other object than to make this intimate connection clear, so far as his weak powers permit.
Any one who puts together his numerous remarks on Christianity, dogma, and morality, although he may deem some of his views peculiar, cannot reproach him with constructing a Christianity of his own. Though he found such an agreement between Moses and Plato that he saw in the latter only a Moses writing in the Attic tongue, and though he compared the life of Socrates with the life of Jesus, yet he acknowledged in the Socratic doctrines only a confirmation of the Christian, and guarded himself against seeing in the Greek philosopher a shadow of the Saviour, and from interpreting the Christian mysteries by Platonic writings. Strange was the position of the thinkers of that time, placed as they were between Christianity and the strongly-reviving influences of heathen antiquity, and we should do them great injustice did we not consider the spirit which governed the whole of that period. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola believed he had found in the Cabala the foundation of the faith and the explanation of the Christian mysteries; both he and Marsilio held confidential evening discussions with learned Jewish doctors on the divine inspiration of the Prophecies, and plunged deep into both ancient and mediæval Hebrew lore. By a gradual enlightenment of his mind, filled with the fantastic images of the later Platonism and the half rationalistic mysticism founded on it, Pico came back to the pure Christian faith, which finds in Holy Scripture a living heavenly force whose wonderful power raises man to the height of divine love. Marsilio Ficino’s mysticism, increased by his strong tendency to astrology, assumed in more than one of his writings a colouring which made his friends uneasy. In 1489 he was even accused of magic before Pope Innocent VIII., but was cleared of the charge partly by his own apology, partly by his friends, Francesco Soderini, Ermolao Barbaro, and the archbishop Rinaldo Orsini, who was then at Rome.
Marsilio Ficino always keeps in view the connection between Christianity and philosophy, both in his speculations and in the practical application of his principles and their corollaries. If we are astonished at the fantastic flights which seem to lead him far away from the course he had traced out for himself, we yet gain a clear and comprehensive development of the aim of his whole teaching, the attainment of the highest happiness by the individual as well as by the community, the end for which God created us. In the harmony between the spirit of government and the divine law, whence the written law is derived, he recognises the essential element of general well-being. As regards forms of government, he decides that many are good, if rightly administered—aristocracy, if its limits are not too narrow; democracy, if it produces respect for law. Mob rule is a polypus, all limbs and no head; tyranny has no legal ground and no legitimate limits. Monarchy would be preferable, if it could be maintained according to Plato’s ideal, by power and wisdom united. But the true end of all forms of government and civil constitutions, both in theory and practice, can be reached neither by the few nor by the many, but only by the co-operation of the united forces of the human race, by the maintaining and enforcing of uniform laws by a ruler who is raised above all enmity, ambition, and envy, because he is acknowledged and loved by all. The Christian Platonist, who lived to see the beginning of the new era, the dawn of which had been heralded by the school to which he attached himself, arrived at the summit of his philosophical and political speculations exactly at the same standpoint which the greatest poet of the middle ages had reached more than a century and a half before him, amid the conflict of parties in the State. Wide as was the difference between their positions and experiences of life, and between the civil and political conditions both of their own immediate home and of a large part of Italy, this is a remarkable circumstance, which explains the interest felt by Marsilio Ficino in that book, so diversely judged, in which Dante Alighieri developes his theory of monarchy—a work well-nigh forgotten, despised by the learned on account of its style, and sealed to the generality, till the Platonist of the Medicean times made it accessible to his contemporaries by a translation.
Numerous works were composed by Marsilio Ficino, who occupied himself not only with philosophy but with theology, medicine, and music, and was wont to say that they belonged to each other like body, soul, and spirit in nature. His book on Christian doctrine, begun after his entrance into the priesthood, seems to have been finished in the beginning of 1475, and appeared in the following year, with a declaration that the author submitted himself in all things to the judgment of the Church. He presented his work to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Rather more than two years later he seems to have finished his translation of Plato’s works from the manuscripts given him by Cosimo and by Amerigo Benci. These he submitted to the revision of Demetrius Chalcondylas, Antonio Vespucci, and Giovan Battista Buoninsegni, and also sought advice from Angelo Poliziano, Landino and Bartolommeo Scala. Filippo Valori bore the expenses of the printing, which seems to have been completed at the end of 1482—a proof how men of high Florentine families assumed the character of Mæcenas. Meanwhile, the industrious writer had concluded his great work on the Platonic doctrine of immortality (‘Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animarum’), which came out at the same time with the translation of the writings on which it was founded. The Laurentian library possesses the parchment manuscript which was given to Lorenzo. It contains ideas new and old blended together, and comprising the philosophic system of its author and the defence of the supernatural against Materialism and Pantheism, which at that time numbered many disciples, in opposition to the Platonic school. The scientific value of this work, in which the doctrines of Plato and the teachings of his most dissimilar scholars in ancient and modern times are not easy to distinguish, must rest on its own merits, as must the validity of Lorenzo’s remark that the Materialists, for whom there is no life in the next world, are already dead in this. But we cannot deny the importance of Ficino’s great work in the history of civilisation, nor question its beneficial influence on the time.