Ficino on Force, Magic, and Prayers: Neoplatonic and Hermetic Influences in Ficino’s Three Books on Life DENIS J.-J. ROBICHAUD, University of Notre Dame This article analyzes new evidence from the marginalia to Ficino’s Plotinus manuscripts and offers a novel reading of Ficino’s “De Vita” 3. It settles scholarly disagreements concerning Paul O. Kristeller’s manuscript research and Frances Yates’s Hermetic thesis about “De Vita” 3, and reconsiders accepted conclusions regarding the centrality of Hermetic magic in Ficino’s philosophy. It demonstrates the origins and sources for “De Vita” 3 in Ficino’s reading of Plotinus’s explanations of prayer, and also reveals Iamblichus’s overlooked influence on Ficino: on the performative nature of philosophy in “De Vita” 3, and even on Ficino’s acknowledgment of the pseudonymity of the Hermetica. INTRODUCTION: PLOTINUS’S INTERPRETER OR HERMETIC MAGUS? A HANDBOOK FOR helping scholars and philosophers stay healthy, live long lives, and bask in the heavens’ glow, Marsilio Ficino’s (1433–99) De Vita Libri Tres (Three books on life, or simply De Vita) is also the cornerstone of Renaissance theories of melancholy, saturnine genius, astrology, and magic. Despite its difficulty the De Vita was a Renaissance best seller: between 1489 and 1647 it was printed in over thirty editions and multiple vernacular translations.1 The De Vita has also attracted the attention of some of the brightest luminaries of twentieth-century Renaissance scholarship. Its third and final book, the De Vita Coelitus Comparanda (On obtaining life from the heavens),2 has become with some controversy the source text for understanding two central currents of the Renaissance: Neoplatonism and Hermeticism. Ficino tells his readers on a few occasions that the third book was originally written as a commentary on Plotinus’s Enneads, and Paul O. Kristeller first argued I wish to thank Christian F€orstel at the BnF and David Gura at the University of Notre Dame for discussing MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fols. 157v–158r. I benefited from questions at annual conferences of the Renaissance Society of America and the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, and from the members of Notre Dame’s Classical Tradition Working Group, who read a draft of this article. 1 Kaske’s introduction to Ficino, 2002, 3. All translations are mine except where otherwise noted. 2 Walker, 1958, 3n2, suggests two translations: “on obtaining life from the heavens or on instituting one’s life celestially.” Renaissance Quarterly 70 (2017): 44–87 Ó 2017 Renaissance Society of America. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 45 that since Ficino’s longer commentaries on the individual chapters of the Enneads end shortly after Ennead 4.3.11, at ca. 4.3.12 (thereafter replaced with short argumenta), the third book of the De Vita seems to pick up where the commentary to Ennead 4.3.11 left off.3 Tracking De Vita 3’s origins in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s (1449–92) deluxe manuscripts of Ficino’s translation and commentary of the Enneads, Kristeller noted that an earlier draft of the work begins at 4.3.11.4 In fact, Ficino repeats the title to the commentary of this section, De Vita Coelitus Comparanda, as the title for De Vita 3, and its removal in subsequent printings of the Plotinus commentary has thrown off the numbering of the argumenta for the remaining sections of the Enneads.5 Yet ever since Kristeller formulated this argument the difficulty of identifying the specific passages in Plotinus on which De Vita 3 comments has caused considerable scholarly debate, and has persuaded some to conclude that the work does not comment on Plotinus at all. The present article reviews the scholarly disagreements centered on Frances Yates’s Hermetic interpretation of Kristeller’s research in order to analyze new evidence from Ficino’s marginalia to his Greek manuscript of Plotinus’s Enneads.6 Reconstructing Ficino’s work on Plotinus through these fragmentary notes, I identify novel sources and establish connections between Plotinus and De Vita 3. On a few occasions Ficino interrupted his labors on Plotinus to translate a group of texts by Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, et al., that he published in Venice (1497) with Aldus Manutius.7 Ficino’s marginalia to Plotinus further reveal ties between these Neoplatonic works and De Vita 3. Despite the arguments of Yates and others to the contrary, these findings show that De Vita 3 is, in fact, Neoplatonic in nature. This study, therefore, reconsiders accepted conclusions regarding the centrality of Hermetic magic in Ficino’s philosophy and demonstrates the origins and sources for De Vita 3 in Ficino’s reading of Plotinus’s explanations of prayer. These findings also reveal the overlooked influence of Iamblichus (an acquaintance and likely student of Plotinus’s disciple Porphyry) on Ficino. Iamblichus’s incorporation of Neopythagorean philosophy and mathematics into Neoplatonism in his De secta pythagorica (On the Pythagorean sect), and his debate with Porphyry on 3 On Ficino’s work with Plotinus, see Kristeller, 1:cxxvi–cxxviii, clvii–clix; Gentile and Gilly, 106–07, 111–12; Toussaint’s introduction to Plotinus, 2008; F€orstel; Robichaud, 2015 and 2017, where I refer to the present article by “Plotinus’s Hermeneus,” and the scholarship cited therein. At Ennead 4.3.14, Ficino remarks that he is interrupting his longer commentary: Plotinus, 1580, 371. 4 Beginning at MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (hereafter LAUR), Plut. 82.11, fol.13r. 5 Kristeller, 1:xii, lxxxiv–lxxxvi, cxxxvi–cxxviii. 6 MS Paris, Bibliotheque nationale de France (hereafter BnF), Gr. 1816. 7 For example, the letter to Faventino from August 1489: see Ficino, 1576, 900. This volume is known by Ficino’s title: Iamblichus’s De mysteriis. See Iamblichus, 1497. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 46 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 the place of theurgy (working with/on gods) and religious ritual within philosophy in his De mysteriis (On mysteries), influenced the performative nature of philosophy and the understanding of power and symbol in De Vita 3.8 Ficino’s study of Iamblichus’s De mysteriis even compelled him to acknowledge the Hermetica’s pseudonymity. The point of contention for the question at hand emerged once Yates, in her influential Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), built upon Kristeller’s manuscript evidence by arguing that in De Vita 3 Ficino only proposed a Hermetic reading of Ennead 4.3.11, where Plotinus speaks of the images or statues of the divine: “And it seems to me that the ancient sages who made temples and statues [ἀγάλματα] wishing that the gods would be present for them, examining the nature of all, understood that the nature of soul is easily accepted everywhere, and it would be easier most of all if someone were to make something sympathetic to soul capable of receiving a portion of it.”9 In Yates’s opinion, “Ficino’s commentary on the Plotinus passage becomes, by devious ways, a justification for the use of talismans, and of the magic of the Asclepius, on Neoplatonic grounds.”10 She continues, “this means that the De Vita Coelitus Comparanda is a commentary only secondarily on Plotinus and primarily on Trismegistus, or rather, on the passage in the Asclepius in which he described the magical Egyptian worship.”11 For Yates, Plotinus and other Neoplatonists only serve as pretexts for Ficino’s circuitous (and in her view devious) commentary on the so-called “god-making” passage describing ancient Egyptian practices of luring and trapping the divine in statues from the Asclepius, the pseudepigraphic text of the first centuries CE (also known as the Perfect Discourse), purportedly authored by Hermes Trismegistus (and once thought to have been translated from Greek into Latin by Apuleius). The debate on the genesis of Ficino’s De Vita 3 seems often to have been held in the halls of the Warburg Institute. Scholars of the De Vita have argued whether the third book is indebted to one of two sections of Plotinus’s Enneads. The first, on images and statues of the divine, is the passage just quoted from Ennead 4.3.11. The second, where Plotinus primarily explains the function of prayer, is from Ennead 4.4.26–45. What is at stake in the long-standing debate is that those who interpret De Vita 3 as a work of Hermetic magic pin their argument to the claim that its source text is the first passage from Plotinus on images and statues of the divine, whereas those who interpret De Vita 3 as a work of Neoplatonic philosophy point to the second passage from Plotinus on prayer as its source text. Before Yates, and seemingly 8 Iamblichus is also known for dividing reality into multiple suborders (a metaphysics also advanced by Proclus and Pseudo-Dionysius), for organizing the corpus of Platonic dialogues into a specific philosophical and pedagogical series, and for writing commentaries on Plato and Aristotle. 9 Plotinus, 1964–83, 2:26 (Ennead 4.3.11.1–6). 10 Yates, 70. 11 Ibid., 71. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 47 unaware of Kristeller’s evidence, Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, in their famed Saturn and Melancholy (1964), identified the second section on prayer as Ficino’s source (along with Plotinus’s critique of astrology).12 D. P. Walker cited Kristeller’s argument yet also agreed with Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, whom he does not quote, that De Vita 3 is more likely a commentary on the second section on prayer.13 Nevertheless, Walker also discusses the importance of the “god-making” passage from the Asclepius and connects it to the first section from Plotinus on divine images and statues.14 Eugenio Garin also recognizes Kristeller’s arguments as important and accepts them (without explicit acknowledgment) in his own significant study, “Le ‘elezioni’ e il problema dell’astrologia” (1960), on Ficino, Plotinus, and elective astrology.15 According to Garin, in the first section, on divine images and statues, Ficino found the central node for De Vita 3, namely the Plotinian concept of a mediating soul that fabricates things according to the rational forms that it contains; but Garin also writes a few lines comparing Ficino’s project to the Hermetic “god-making” passage of the Asclepius.16 Thus one ought to contextualize Yates’s thesis in relation to these four major studies.17 All of these scholars, including Yates, draw on a variety of sources to show the rich complexity of Ficino’s text.18 Nevertheless, Yates’s argument forcefully suppresses 12 Plotinus’s critique of astrology is in Plotinus, 1964–83 (Ennead 2.3). Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, 263n67. They argue that De Vita 3 seeks to reconcile medicine with Neoplatonism through the Neoplatonic principle of series, which Ficino chiefly encounters in Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia. Ibid., 254–74. Περὶ τῆς καθ᾽Ἕλληνας ἱερατικῆς τέχνης was previously thought to have survived only in Ficino’s Latin translation before Bidez published the Greek text in 1928: Bidez, Cumont, Delatte, et al., 139–52. 13 Walker, 1958, 3n2, 14n5. Walker understands Ficino’s spiritual magic principally as Neoplatonic or Orphic, and refers to Plotinus’s discussion of figures as Ficino’s source for his own thinking about celestial figures and images. Ibid., 14–15n7, where he refers to Ennead 4.4.34. 14 Walker, 1958, 40–44. 15 Garin, 1960, 18–19. 16 The dynamism of Garin’s argument does not rest on one source very long, directing the reader to multiple references including other passages of the Enneads (notably Ennead 4.4.40), the works of Albumasar, Iamblichus’s De mysteriis, the Theologia Aristotelis, Psellus’s interpretation of the Chaldean Oracles, and Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia. In fact, it seems as though for Garin that Ennead 4.3.11 has its closest affinities not so much with the Asclepius as with Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia. What is of first importance to him is the common mimetic ontology in Proclus, Ficino, and the mirror of Dionysus at Ennead 4.3.12: Garin, 1960, 19, 21. 17 For Yates’s use of Kristeller’s evidence, see 66n2 and 68; for Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, see ibid., 67n3; for Garin, ibid., 66n1, 68n9, 70n11, 71n14, 219n34. Yates, 68n9, concedes in a note: “Walker (p. 3. note 2) points out that Enn. IV, 4, 30–42, may also be relevant.” Her work contains multiple references to Walker. 18 Kaske and Clark’s introduction and notes in Ficino, 2002, are helpful for an orientation of the sources. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 48 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 the text’s specifically Plotinian and generally Neoplatonic nature. Ficino primarily invokes Neoplatonists, she believes, as a cipher to encrypt his true Hermetic magic. Hardening the position that he had argued earlier in “Le ‘elezioni,’” Garin, in his magisterial survey of Renaissance astrology, explicitly agreed with Yates (who was in turn influenced by Garin’s “Le ‘elezioni’”) that the De Vita 3 is an exegesis of the Asclepius rather than a commentary on Plotinus.19 However, despite its influence, Yates’s interpretation of Kristeller’s evidence has not convinced everyone.20 Brian Copenhaver has been a vocal critic. He has argued that De Vita 3 is neither a treatise on Hermetic magic nor a long commentary on the Asclepius passage about the “god-making” statues, but a rigorous philosophical study of natural magic that draws primarily from Ficino’s studies of Plotinus, Thomas Aquinas, and Neoplatonic works. As Copenhaver notes, if the De Vita 3 is in fact a commentary on the statues from the Asclepius by way of commenting on the discussion of statues in Plotinus, the reader has to wait until the latter chapters of De Vita 3 to find any mention of them.21 Yates explains this away by claiming that Ficino deliberately hides his true intentions, in her words, by “muffling . . . the connection with the Asclepius under layers of commentary on Plotinus or rather misleading quotations from Thomas Aquinas.”22 In short, what for Yates are Ficino’s devious and deceitful misdirections are for Copenhaver Ficino’s actual sources. The question of Ficino’s sources for De Vita 3 is still a persistent debate. More recently, St ephane Toussaint discussed Ficino’s use of Oriental philosophy and Lauri Ockenstr€om has argued that Ficino’s writings should be considered Hermetic magic based on astromagical images in the Arabic Hermetica.23 This study aims to demonstrate that Ficino’s marginalia to his Plotinus manuscripts show that Plotinus’s writings on prayer served as a matrix to hold together a variety of sources (including, importantly, Iamblichus) central to Ficino’s thinking in De Vita 3. 19 Garin, 1976a, 73. See also Zanier, esp. 29–60. 21 To be precise, chapters 13, 20, and 26 (the work has 26 chapters in total). Copenhaver, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1993. Copenhaver thinks De Vita 3 draws on Ennead 4.3–5, whereas, to repeat, Yates only believes Ficino comments on the statues in Ennead 4.3.11 in order to discuss the statues in the Asclepius. 22 Yates, 97. 23 Zambelli critiques Copenhaver’s arguments, and there is still a steady stream of works trying to identify the sources for Ficino’s De Vita 3 (some of which are broached below). Most recently see Ockenstr€om; Toussaint. On the Arabic Hermetica now, see van Bladel. Debate on Yates’s interpretation of Kristeller’s evidence has also bled into the dispute concerning Yates’s larger argument (the so-called Yates thesis that is not addressed in this article) about Hermeticism in early modern thought (see Zambelli, 314–27; Copenhaver, 1990), and onto the discussion of the Hermetica in Ficino’s oeuvre: see Allen, 1990; Gentile and Gilly, 19–26; Moreschini. 20 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 49 THE ORIGINS OF DE VITA 3 IN FICINO’S PLOTINUS MANUSCRIPTS In translating the Enneads, Ficino chiefly utilized two manuscripts that are now housed in Florence and Paris.24 Sebastiano Gentile astutely detected connections between De Vita 3 and the Parisian manuscript.25 If one looks in the manuscript at the specific passage in question where Plotinus discusses statues, one finds, Gentile observes, two pertinent marginal annotations in Greek by Ficino. In the first Ficino writes, “How the ancient wise men through statues and sacred things made the gods present in them”; and, in the second, “in what manner and whence comes the power of the magi and prophets.”26 Gentile concludes: “Thus Frances Yates (1981, p. 82) was right when she said that the De Vita is not a commentary on Plotinus but on the passage of Asclepius.”27 Gentile’s brief comments correctly establish the significance of Ficino’s annotations in the Parisian manuscript, but a full investigation of the evidence complicates Yates’s thesis. If one juxtaposes Ficino’s annotations to this passage with the Greek text of Plotinus one will notice that in the first note Ficino only reformulates Plotinus’s own Greek terminology to indicate the passage’s subject matter.28 These Greek annotations merely record the passage’s content, in effect creating notabilia that serve as marginal catchwords for facilitating future referencing. In these instances Ficino is not adding much of his own interpretive content, Hermetic or 24 MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 87.03: a fourteenth-century manuscript from the circle of Nicephoros Chumnos (ca. 1260–1327), formerly possessed by Niccolo Niccoli (1364–1437) and the library of San Marco, and an important witness to one of the two most important textual families; its apograph, MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816 was copied in 1469 by Giovanni Scutariotes. For descriptions of the manuscripts, see Henry, 16–36, 45–62. 25 Gentile rightly points out a few significant annotations in two short entries of a manuscript catalogue. He supplies a few lines from Ficino’s annotations to 4.3.11 and 4.4 but neither transcribes them in full nor analyzes them in detail: Gentile and Gilly, 106–07, 111–12. 26 MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 137r: “πῶς παλαίοι σοφοὶ διὰ τὰ ἀγάλματα καὶ ἱερὰ θεοὺς ἐποιησαν ἀυτοῖς παρεῖναι.” MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 137v: “ποῖα καὶ πόθεν δύναμις μάγων καὶ προφήτων.” 27 Gentile and Gilly, 107; see also his entry in Gentile, Niccoli, and Viti, 136. 28 Plotinus, 1964–83, 2:26 (Ennead 4.3.11.1–6): “Καί μοι δοκοῦσιν οἱ πάλαι σοφοί, ὅσοι ἐβουλήθησαν θεοὺς αὐτοῖς παρεῖναι ἱερὰ καὶ ἀγάλματα ποιησάμενοι, εἰς τὴν τοῦ παντὸς φύσιν ἀπιδόντες.” Thus, for example, if one compares it to the first Greek note on the same folio one sees that Ficino employs the same reading strategy at 4.3.10. MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 137r: “ψυχὴ καὶ φύσις ποιεῖ οὐ γνώμη ἀλλὰ δυνάμει τῆς οὐσίας” (“Soul and nature do not make by intent but by the power of substance”). Plotinus, 1964–83, 2:25 (Ennead 4.3.10.13–15): “ὅ τι γὰρ ἂν ἐφάψηται ψυχῆς, οὕτω ποιεῖται ὡς ἔχει φύσεως ψυχῆς ἡ οὐσία
ἡ δὲ ποιεῖ οὐκ ἐπακτῷ γνώμῃ οὐδὲ βουλὴν ἢ σκέψιν ἀναμείνασα” (“For anything that touches soul is thus made so that its substance holds the nature of soul. But it makes neither by an external intent, nor by waiting for deliberation and examination”). This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 50 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 otherwise. This is not to say that these notes are trivial; a single note may point to an interpretation that is particularly interesting to him. Ficino’s almost continuous annotation of his manuscript in this manner also demonstrates his assiduous reading of the Enneads and the textual strategies that he employs to make the Parisian manuscript a useful tool for repeated study. Almost all of Ficino’s marginalia to Ennead 4.3 can be classified as notabilia, even if there are some short Greek notes that are important for determining Ficino’s exegesis.29 However, things are quite different for Plotinus’s explanation of prayer since Ficino heavily annotates the text. When compared to this second set of notes, Ficino’s annotations to Plotinus on statues and their supposed Hermetic undertones behind De Vita 3 are meager indeed.30 The first passage of importance to Ficino is where Plotinus inquires into the power of prayer, asking whether the heavens have sense and memory to hear our prayers. He responds that they receive prayers by way of sympathetic magic, linking our words to them by a certain contact.31 In his manuscript margins, Ficino writes Greek notabilia in a similar fashion to those discussed above: “where does the power of the magi come from” and “spherical souls hear prayers and grant prayers.”32 He follows this with long exegetical Latin notes: Al-Kindi says in his book on magic that in us there is a certain sense of nature more universal than the five senses in that universal. It draws out from these five senses by which all these things come to be known. But beyond these there are also certain sensibles that are hidden from the other senses. A fascination is made from their affect and a change occurs by something absent, remote, and hidden. Some will call this sense of nature the first source and unity itself of the senses both interior and exterior, or the sense that converges in the world soul that is present to all things, and by whose contact our senses Important annotations to Ennead 4.3 in MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816 are on fol. 136r where Ficino copies a schematic scholion that he found in MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 87.03 into the margins near Ennead 4.3.9; on fol. 140r where Ficino draws from Hermias, Damascius, Egidius, and Basil to understand Ennead 4.3.18–19; and on fol. 142r where Ficino appeals to Synesius and Psellus to gloss Ennead 4.3.24. 30 Again to clarify: the two compared sections are Plotinus, 1964–83, 2:83–114 (Ennead 4.4.26–45), on prayer and magic, and Plotinus, 1964–83, 2:26–27 (Ennead 4.3.11), on divine statues and images. 31 Plotinus, 1964–83, 2:83 (Ennead 4.4.26). What follows does not include all of the annotations to Ennead 4.4. I only focus on the most important notes for reconstructing Ficino’s exegesis. While some of the notes passed over are of interest to the present study, they would not alter the present argument significantly. For an overview of Plotinus on prayer, see Rist, 199–212. 32 MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 157v: “δύναμις μάγων πόθεν. ψυχαὶ σφαιρῶν ἀκοῦoσιν τῶν εὐχων καὶ ἐπινεῦουσιν εὐχαῖς.” 29 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 51 perceive and feel. Or others will assert otherwise. Read Al-Kindi, Proclus’s On Magic and On Images, and consider how many animals can sense from far away, as for example a boar can discern the odor and an eagle the color of a dog through traces and odors left behind that remain hidden to us. Which means that from things powers are projected and act on us from far away and we act on others in a wonderful manner, especially because many think that not only accidental forms that are manifest to the senses multiply species and emit their powers, but all the more substantial forms hidden to us. Indeed the heavens chiefly produce their own strong celestial species, from which light, which is the image of the sun, has such a power.33 Ficino thus interprets Plotinus’s initial discussion on the heavens’ ability to receive our prayers by glossing it with the ninth-century Arabic philosopher Al-Kindi’s (Ya‘qūb ibn ’Ishāq al-Kindī) De radiis (On rays) and the fifth_ century Neoplatonist Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia (On sacrifice and magic).34 Al-Kindi’s modern editors and translators, Marie-Therese D’Alverny and Françoise Hudry, have claimed that De radiis’s explanations are more akin to Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia than any other work.35 In fact, one can see how Ficino made a similar connection between the two insofar as Al-Kindi’s optical explanation for linear radiation and Proclus’s concept of ontological series are analogous philosophical accounts of action at a distance.36 Ficino’s gloss also indicates that he is interested in 33 Ibid.: “Alchindus de magia dicit esse in nobis quemdam naturae sensum communiorem et 5 sensibus in illo communi qui trahit a 5 ad quem perveniunt omnia hec. et ultra hec item quedam sensibilia aliis sensibus occulta. ex cuius passione fiat fascinatio et alteratio ab aliquo absente, remoto, occulto. Hunc sensum naturae appellabit aliquis primum fontem et unitatem ipsam sensuum tam intimorum quam exteriorum vel sensum in anima mundi convenitur adstantem omnibus, cuius contiguitate sensus nostri percipiant et conpatiantur. Vel alii aliud afferent. Lege Alchindum et Proculi magicam et de Imaginibus. Considera quam procul multa animalia sentiant ut aper [fort. apes] odorem et aquila colorem canis discernat per vestigia odorem relictum nobis occultum. Quod significat a rebus vires longissime proici et agere in nos et nos in alia mirum in modum praesertim quia plerique putant non solum formas accidentales quae sunt manifeste sensibus multiplicare species et vires iaculari suas; sed multo magis substantiales nobis occultas maxime vero celestia producunt species suas valde celestes unde lumen quod est imago solis tantum vim habet.” Gentile and Gilly, 106. 34 Bidez, Cumont, Delatte, et al., 139–52; Copenhaver, 1988; Al-Kindi; Lindberg, 1976, 18–32; Burnett; Vescovini, 2008, 5–14. 35 Al-Kindi, 158–59. 36 On the Proclean concept of series (τάξεις, σειραί) see Copenhaver, 1988, 85–86. The terminology that Ficino employs in his translation of Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia also conveys the transmission of divine power as a series participating mimetically in celestial rays. Copenhaver, 1988, 107 (lines 35–45); ibid. (lines 63–66). This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 52 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 Al-Kindi’s notion of the unitas regitiva (ruling unity, which itself draws from Proclean metaphysics), which acts as a principle of unification, assuring a continuity between the plurality of perception and the cosmos, and connects the individual soul to the world soul.37 Al-Kindi’s scientific writings in the De radiis and in the De aspectibus (On aspects) offered one of the first coherent geometric theories for extramission: he analyzes the cone of radiation emitted from our eyes and the radiation emitted from the surfaces of other bodies as discrete points transmitting linear rays. The De radiis employs a geometric analysis of extramission to understand occult action at a distance and speaks directly to Plotinus on prayer, since by far the largest section in the De radiis is devoted to explaining the power of words, invocations, and prayers.38 Ficino’s interests in glossing Plotinus on the function of prayer are therefore equally directed toward scientific epistemology and metaphysical cosmology. He investigates how various beings (animal, human, and heavenly) can sense manifest and occult influences (fascinatio, animals smelling and seeing hidden traces at a distance, and the powers of light). His use of “multiplication of species and powers” in his explanation of the causal operation of action at a distance also recalls Roger Bacon’s (ca. 1214–94) scientific theory of optics and perspective that an object projects linearly its imitative likeness (or species), which in turn projects another likeness on the same vector, and so on.39 Drawing directly from a passage in Al-Kindi that influenced medieval optics, Ficino also raises the issue of the difference between the transmission of manifest and accidental species, on the one hand, and occult and substantial forms, on the other.40 Regarding Al-Kindi’s influence on Ficino, researchers already have noted a direct reference to him in De Vita 3, and Copenhaver has discussed Ficino’s marginalia to the opening paragraph of his Greek manuscript of Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia, now in the Vallicelliana library: “Porphyry says the same thing in his Sententiae. See Mercurius, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Al-Kindi, and your own writings” (fig. 1).41 Yet scholars have also contested the relative 37 For the unitas regitiva, see Al-Kindi, 160–67. Ibid., 233–50. (De radiis 6). 39 Lindberg, 1976, 113–15; Lindberg, 1983; Lindberg, 1996, lxviii–lxx, 104–06, 140–44. 40 Al-Kindi, 224 (De radiis 3). Lindberg, 1976, 19; Vescovini, 2003, 53–55. The fact that Ficino refers to species and substantial forms should be noted since some have debated whether Ficino’s magic is beholden to the notions. See Copenhaver, 1984 and 1986; Blum (pro); and Zambelli, 321 (contra). 41 The reference to Al-Kindi is at De Vita 3.21. See MS Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana (hereafter VALL), F 20, fol. 138r: “Eadem dixit Porphyrius in propositionibus. Vide Mercurium et Plotinum et Iamblichum et Alchindum et tua scripta.” Copenhaver, 1988, 88–90; Toussaint published a reference to Al-Kindi in a marginal annotation to Ficino’s manuscript of Synesius: Toussaint, 22n16; Kaske’s introduction to Ficino, 2002, 28, 46, 50, 51; Weill-Parot, 2002a, 647–708; Weill-Parot, 2002b, 74, 84, 88; Zambelli, 320; Gentile and Gilly, 95–98. 38 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 53 Figure 1. Ficino’s annotations to Proclus, De sacrificio et magia. MS Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, F 20, fol. 138r. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 54 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 weight that one ought to attribute to Al-Kindi over Neoplatonists for Ficino’s theories in De Vita 3.42 When one takes Ficino’s marginalia in the Parisian manuscript into consideration, it is not solely a question of rating one source over another, e.g., Al-Kindi instead of Plotinus, since one in fact notices how Ficino deploys a type of circular hermeneutics. He glosses the passage above from Plotinus with Al-Kindi’s De radiis and Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia; in turn, Ficino glosses Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia with Plotinus and Al-Kindi (along with Porphyry, Hermes, Iamblichus, and Ficino’s own writings).43 As for the brief mention of the De imaginibus (On images) in the marginal note, Ficino is likely referring either to a work by the ninth-century Sabian Thabit (Thebit/Thābit ibn Qurra al-Harrānī) or to another by Pseudo_ Ptolemy, who wrote a work sometimes designated with the same title. It is difficult to determine whether Ficino alludes only to Thabit or also to PseudoPtolemy since he mentions both authors explicitly in the same breath in De Vita 3.44 He may very well have been denoting both since they circulated in the same manuscript corpus. But the matter may be even less certain since there are a number of medieval tracts on astronomical images that are preserved with descriptive titles referring to imagines, e.g., De imaginibus et horis (On images and hours) and De imaginibus sive annulis septem planetarum (On images or the rings of the seven plants)—the latter of which Ficino probably knew.45 Ficino may have simply shortened the title of one of these works, or perhaps even referred to a complete manuscript containing various works as De imaginibus. Since the note is a personal reference, he would have known its designation without the need of further precision. Because De Vita 3 provides explicit corroboration, Thabit (or Thabit and Pseudo-Ptolemy) is 42 Kaske assigns a high value to Al-Kindi (and the Picatrix) and diminishes Walker, Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl’s opinion that Ficino relied most heavily on Plotinus and other Neoplatonists: Ficino, 2002, 50. Kaske is correct that this previous group of Warburg scholars could not benefit from D’Alverny and Hudry’s 1975 critical edition of the De radiis and Pingree’s 1986 edition of the Picatrix. It is the very nature of scholarship to reevaluate claims with new sources, as the evidence produced by Ficino’s marginalia in the Parisian manuscript allows one to do at present. 43 Walker, 1958; as well as Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, 1964, focus on Ennead 4.4.26; Kaske, on Al-Kindi’s De radiis, in Ficino, 2002, 50; and Copenhaver, 1988, on Ficino’s marginal glosses to Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia. 44 Ficino, 2002, 278 (1576, 541); 340 (1576, 558). 45 For example, MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 30.29, and MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale (hereafter BNCF), II.iii.214. See Carmody, 167–97; Pingree; the catalogue description of MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 89, sup. 38 in Gentile and Gilly, 107–12; Thorndike; Weill-Parot, 2002a, 40–79, 91–102; Lucentini and Perrone Compagni, 59–61, 64–66; Ockenstr€om, 10–11, 22–25. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 55 the more cautious conclusion.46 Despite this ambiguity, the note offers clear connections between the manuscript and Ficino’s De Vita. Usually categorized either as popular or technical Hermetica, Thabit’s and Pseudo-Ptolemy’s treatises are works of practical magic that explain how talismans, statues, images, or figures function according to astrological theories of decanic personifications. Although Ficino’s annotation does not address talismanic magic as such, by including Thabit in the note he reveals that he glosses the Plotinian passage not only with Al-Kindi’s theoretical magic and Proclus’s philosophical explanations of celestial series, but also with medieval works of practical magic. A final thought remains on the Neoplatonic terminology found in Ficino’s marginal note. The term συναφή (union, contact, or connection) in the Plotinus passage that Ficino comments will gain importance for Iamblichus and later Neoplatonism: “Their knowledge of prayers comes about according to a contact [σύναψιν] and according to an order of dispositions such as this, and the same goes for their productions. And in the magi’s art all is done toward this union [συναφὲς]; but these things follow powers sympathetically.”47 The term expresses the kind of union by which one comes into contact (without discursive reasoning) with the divine or the Neoplatonic One. While A. H. Armstrong employs “linking” for this term, Pierre Hadot, Henri Dominique Saffrey, and AlainPhilippe Segonds translate it respectively as “co€ıncidence” and as “entrer en contact,” and Ficino accurately stays within this semantic realm by translating it as “contactum” or “contiguum” and by expressing the concept in the note with “contiguitate.”48 In the following treatise on sight (Ennead 4.5) Plotinus employs this same concept to explain how sight comes into contact with and touches, so to speak, what is seen, so it is only appropriate that Ficino employs optical theories to gloss this earlier passage where Plotinus asks how prayer brings us into contact with the divine.49 If one continues to follow the traces of Ficino’s interpretation of Plotinus on prayer, one sees that the Greek notabilia multiply on the following folio of the Parisian manuscript, but that Ficino’s reading also turns to daemons: “All the senses are in the soul of the earth. Thus also Psellus attributes all the senses to daemons and discusses about magic.”50 Ficino continues: 46 Ficino, 2002, 287, 340 (De Vita 3.8 and 3.18). Plotinus, 1964–83, 2:84 (Ennead 4.4.26.3). 48 Iamblichus, 2013, 5–6. (De mysteriis 1.3), with Saffrey and Segonds’s translation. For Armstrong’s translation, see Plotinus, 1989, 4:307; for Hadot’s translation, see Plotinus, 1994, 101 (Ennead 6.9.8). Ficino’s translations, see Plotinus, 1580, 418; Iamblichus, 1497, a.iir. 49 See, for example, Vasiliu, 2015. 50 MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 158r: “πᾶσαι αἰσθήσεις ἐν ψυχῆ τῆς γῆς. sic item omnes sensus demonibus tribuit Psellus et de magia tractat.” 47 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 56 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 In the Meno the opinion of Empedocles is mentioned stating that certain effluvia emanate from us through pores into the pores of things, and that some [effluvia] are sensed but others are not at all. Remember that daemons have the most unnatural bodies. Therefore they act in many places at the same time, and also emit their effluences at a distance in the manner of stars, alter the air and move quickly, keenly sense from far away, see objects at a distance and act on them only by moving not so much across wide distances as by elevation on high, and bring together passives with actives, in the proper way, place, and time. Democritus also says that understanding happens from the emission of influxes of real presences by things, that is for example, from a human there is a human power. Roger Bacon and Blasius of Parma prove that in nature real impressions of hidden realities occur. On this see also Synesius.51 Here Ficino further reasons about Plotinus on prayer, comparing the effects of daemons and stars according to models of emission at a distance based on theories from Empedocles in Plato’s Meno and from Democritus.52 He also resumes his gloss of Plotinus with medieval scientific writings on geometric optics, perspective, and light, jotting down a comparison with the writings on occult impressions from Roger Bacon the philosopher, mathematician Blasius of Parma (ca. 1365–1416), and the Neoplatonist, rhetorician, and bishop, Synesius (ca. 373–ca. 414).53 51 Ibid.: “In Menone tangitur opinio Empedoclis ponentis emanare a nobis defluxus quosdam per poros in rerum poros et quosdam sentiri quosdam minime. Tu memento demones habere corpora ingentissima. Ideo agere simultim multis in locis, item emittere influxus suos procul more stellarum, et alterare aeres, et cito moveri, et acute proculque sentire, et non tantum per motum in latum quam in per elevationem in altum videre remota et agere in ea, et appropinquare passibilia agentibus, debito modo loco tempore; Intellegere de emissione a rebus influxuum realium id est ab homine hominis vis dicit etiam Democritus et proba[n]t Rogerius Bacho et Blasius Parmensis ut natura fiunt impressiones reales occultae. De his Synesius.” NB: square brackets are used here to indicate added text. 52 Plato, Meno, 76c, in Bekker, 2.1:337–38. One scholar argues that Empedocles was a magician: Kingsley, 1995. Democritus could refer, for Ficino, to the writings of Bolus of Mendes (ca. 200 BCE), known by the pseudonym Democritus, one of the first alchemical authors avant la lettre whose writings on the sympathetic relationship of occult powers, plants, gems, and celestial bodies were known in the Middle Ages through the works of Rhazes (Muhammad ibn Zakariyā Rāzī, 854–925), Avicenna (Ibn-Sīnā, ca. 980–1037), and Avenzoar (Ibn Zuhr, 1094–1162)—three authors known to Ficino. See Festugiere, 1:197–200. If the writings of Bolus are intended, this would offer a hint toward Ficino’s sometimes debated interests in alchemy, which does not figure prominently in his works. On the state of the question, see Forshaw; Matton. 53 Lindberg, 1976, esp. 18–32; Lindberg, 1996; Vescovini, 1979, 257–60; Vescovini, 2003, 45–103, 319–58; Vescovini, 2008, 403–23; Blaise de Parme, 2009. There are also interesting marginalia in Ficino’s Plotinus manuscript (MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816) about vision, light, rays, and eyes, referring to geometric theories of optics and pyramids of light rays on fol. 168v (Ennead 4.5.3) and fols. 169v–170r (Ennead 4.5.5.), with a reference to Ennead 1.7.1. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 57 Ficino puts forward a daemonological interpretation of a passage from the Enneads that does not speak explicitly about daemons by reading it through medieval science and late ancient pneumatology. The reference to Synesius, who writes on the spirit and the imagination, shows that for Ficino the terminology related to spirit (πνεῦμαspiritus) in the Plotinus passage encompasses a medium between body and soul (human or cosmic) and a personal spirit or daemon.54 Questioning how and whether prayers are received, Plotinus asks rhetorically if the earth has senses. He answers that not all beings in the cosmos have the same senses and organs and proposes that the sympathetic relationship between beings is accomplished through a “breath,” “spiritual being,” or “spirit.” Plotinus states that earth’s generative power is a “spiritual being,” that its soul “is a god,” and, in a passage that Ficino highlights in the margins, that the earth has a soul and intelligence, “which men, with a divinatory nature and in consultation of oracles, name Hestia and Demeter.”55 This passage is the source of inspiration for De Vita 3’s opening section on images and figures. Ficino notes that Platonists and Pythagoreans think that all rays converge their powers (transmitted along linear vectors) onto a single point at the center of the earth. “They believe,” he writes, “the fire that breaths out of the center to be Vesta’s [Hestia’s], since indeed they thought Vesta was the life and patron deity of the earth. And therefore the ancients used to construct the temple of Vesta in the middle of cities and place a perpetual fire in the middle of it.”56 A few chapters later, having explained that the heavens do not need memory to receive prayers, Plotinus asks if they are complicit when the one praying requests help to commit wrongs. There, Ficino writes a few notes about theurgy: “perception in the stars; for how prayers have strength, read in Iamblichus and Proclus’s commentary on the Timaeus; how the stars hear prayers; whether the power of magi comes from working with the gods or evil work.”57 It is clear that Ficino is not only concerned with prayers to commit wrongs but with prayers and magic in general. In another long exegetical Latin note he continues to draw on the kinship between Proclus, the De imaginibus, and Al-Kindi but also includes a gloss from Porphyry’s 54 Walker, 1958, 45–53. Plotinus, 1964–83, 2:84–85 (Ennead 4.4.26.23–31); 2:85 (Ennead 4.4.27.13–17). 56 Ficino, 2002, 323 (1576, 553). Ficino’s identification of Plotinus’s Hestia with Pythagorean doctrines leads him to misinterpret the Pythagorean Philolaus’s heliocentric cosmology since the Pythagorean postulated an unlimited fire, called hearth or Hestia, at the center of the universe not the earth. On Philolaus’s cosmology see Huffman, 231–88. 57 Ennead 4.4.30. MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 160r: “αἰσθήσεις ἐν τοῖς ἄστροις. Quod orationes valent et quomodo Iamblichum lege et Proculum in timaeo. πῶς ἄστρα κλύουσιν εὐχῶν. δύναμις τῶν μάγων πότερον θεοὶ συνεργοὶ γίνονται φάυλοις ἔργοις.” Ficino marks the passages on prayer in his manuscript of Proclus’s In Timaeum, MS Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana (hereafter RICC), 24, and translates them in his own Timaeus commentary. 55 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 58 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 De abstinentia (On abstinence) and a reference to the eleventh-century work on magic, the Ghāyat al-Hakīm, by the pseudo-Maslama al-Majrītī, known in the Latin _ _ translation as the Picatrix. The Picatrix has long been suspected as a source for De Vita 3—in fact, Ficino was perhaps one of the first to study it since the thirteenth century.58 He writes: Here consider the works De imaginibus, following Proclus, Al-Kindi, and the Picatrix. However, because a figure has power in some degree it is clear that it produces various aspects. Certainly also because species of figures and numbers follow their ideas they have a single power. They have efficacy, not as a quantity but as having something more formal, and they are properties of the figures. But if forms and numbers were not to have fixed powers they would be connected by chance, nor would one similarly observe these things in nature always in a fixed order. But see what you said about this in the first book on the stars of Plotinus; it concerns other things unless celestial figures and numbers act in an especially stable manner when either our figures are able to act on our eyes as much as possible or numbers from above on our ears. Porphyry says that the Pythagoreans would invoke gods with numbers and figures and would be filled with prophecy, and that indefinite dimension may be ineffectual as matter but a formal figure is something [effectual], and certain species in nature therefore have power.59 Here Ficino begins to develop what he further explains in De Vita 3: figures and numbers project a single efficacious power through a series of species that participate in the radiation of a noetic chain headed by an idea. Such a projection 58 Already in the 1920s Warburg and scholars associated with his library suspected that De Vita 3 drew from the Picatrix: Saxl, 232–33; Ritter, 114–15. The earliest indirect evidence of Ficino’s use of the Picatrix is a letter from Michele Acciari to Filiopo Valori, published by Delcorno Branca, which tells that Valori had asked Ficino for the Picatrix, to which Ficino responded that he already returned the manuscript to its owner (likely Giorgio Ciprio) but that he had taken what was valuable from it for his De Vita. Delcorno Branca; Garin, 1976b; Gentile also notes the next marginal annotation that refers to the Picatrix in Gentile and Gilly, 137–38; Perrone Compagni. 59 MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 162v: “Hic pone de imaginibus secundum Proclum, Alchindum, Picatricem. Quod autem figura aliquid possit patet quod movet aspectus varios. Item quia certe species figurarum et numerorum suas secuntur ideas unam vim habent. Hec habent efficaciam non prout quantitas sunt sed prout formalius aliquid habent et formarum propria sunt. Nisi vero figure et numeri certas vires haberent, casu contingerent, neque natura hec certo semper ordine similiter observaret. Sed vide quod de his dixistis in primo libri de astris Plotini; aliorum est, ni celestes figure et numeri praesertim stabiles aliquid agunt cum et figure nostre ad oculos et numeri insuper ad aures possint quam plurimum. Porphyrius dicit quod Pythagorici numeris et figuris advocant deosum et vaticinio implebanturque dimensio indeterminata sit inefficax qua materia sed figura formale aliquid est et certa species in natura ergo vim habent.” This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 59 travels on geometric vectors in line with celestial aspects. In essence, this ontological theory glosses how Plotinus’s Intellect emanates its reasons to the world, implanting them as seminal reasons in nature. Figures tap into the series with visual phenomena while numbers only require acoustic rhythm and tone. Reconstructing Ficino’s textual work through marginalia, it is possible to identify which books he had on his desk to gloss Plotinus on prayer. Drawing from Porphyry’s De abstinentia, which Ficino translated in 1488–89, the notes mention that the Pythagoreans invoke gods and perform divinatory prophecy with figures and numbers (which Ficino seems to interpret as Pythagorean songs).60 The manuscript in the Vallicelliana library that has the Greek text of Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia also contains a draft copy of Ficino’s translation of the excerpts of Porphyry’s De abstinentia. In this manuscript, next to the passage in De abstinentia just quoted in his marginalia to Plotinus, Ficino writes the same annotation verbatim. The only variant, “deos/deum” (“gods/god”; he gives both with a superscript in the Parisian text), offers the slightest glimpse into the shift from polytheism to monotheism (fig. 2).61 A little later in his Plotinus manuscript, Ficino again quotes Pythagorean sources and Porphyry to gloss Plotinus on whether invoking the heavens through prayer can be beneficial or maleficent to life. The note is written in the hand of his amanuensis Luca Fabiani: Pythagoras says that invocated gods approach us not voluntarily but compelled with a certain necessity that is not so much by election as with a certain lure of nature by which we are thus affected, and from this we seem to draw them out in such a manner. Porphyry speaks about this in his book On the Way to the Intelligible, and in his book On Oracles he explains that magic was delivered to us from the gods who taught what matter, images, and prayers they rejoiced in. Read about this in Eusebius.62 Ficino finds his material from Porphyry’s Sententiae, or De via ad intelligibile (Sentences or on the way to the intelligible), and De philosophia ex oraculis 60 Porphyry, 1979, 2:102–03 (De abstinentia 2.36). Ficino translated parts of book 2, paragraphs 37–61, which he sent to Braccio Martelli (1576, 876–79). He included them in the 1497 Aldine incunabulum with other extracts from books 1, 2, 3, and 4. See Toussaint’s introduction in Iamblichus, 2006, IV–VIII. The passage in question is found at ibid., i.vi r–v. 61 MS Rome, VALL, F 20, fol. 152v: “Pythagorici numeris et figuris advocant deum et vaticinio implebantur.” 62 Ennead 4.4.38. MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 164r: “Pythagoras ait Deos invocatos accedere ad nos non sponte, sed quadam necessitate compulsos id est non tam electione quam quodam tractu naturae quo nos sic affecti sic inde haurire videmur. De his Porphyrius dicit in libro de via ad intelligibile et in libro de oraculis tractat magicam fuisse nobis traditam a superis qui docuerint quibus materiis et imaginibus et orationibus gaudeant. Lege apud Eusebium.” This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 60 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 Figure 2. Ficino’s notes to Porphyry, De abstientia. MS Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, F 20, fol. 152v. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 61 haurienda (On philosophy drawn from oracles), a work openly critical of Christianity that Ficino simply calls Liber de oraculis.63 The brief passing reference to Eusebius indicates that his source is Praeparatio evangelica (Preparation for the Gospels), which preserves most of the extant fragments of De philosophia ex oraculis haurienda.64 In fact, based on Fabiani’s Latin, one can ascertain that Ficino was quoting from George of Trebizond’s (1395–1472/73) translation of Eusebius’s Praeparatio evangelica.65 The verb that Ficino uses in the annotation, “haurire” (“to draw out”), which George does not use in his translation of the specific passage, clearly fits within De Vita 3’s semantic field. De Vita 3 repeatedly employs “haurire” to denote how one can take in or drink life and influences from the heavens.66 Its connotation of draining, or pouring, as in water streaming downwards from a source, illustrates the concept’s emanative metaphysics. The verb figures prominently in Ficino’s previous formulation of the work’s title in the dedicatory letter to Mathias Corvinus (1443–90), king of Hungary: “Now among the books of Plotinus destined for the great Lorenzo de’ Medici, I had recently composed a commentary (numbered among the rest of our commentaries on him) on the book of Plotinus which discusses drawing favor down from the heavens [de favore coelitus hauriendo].”67 63 Porphyry, 2005, 1:308–11, 326–31; 2:795–96, 804–07 (Sentences: 1–6, 27–29). De philosophia ex oraculis haurienda is the Latin title commonly adopted since G. Wolff’s edition: Porphyry, 1856. 64 Eusebius, 1954–56, 43.1:236–42 (Praeparatio evangelica 5.8–9). Other Porphyry fragments about the gods’ teachings: 5.11–14 and 6.4. 65 Eusebius, 1480, fol. 112r (5.6): “Magnam vero naturam daemonum ea quae istis subiecit maxime ostendunt. Recte inquit a Pythagora dictum est non sponte invocatos deos: sed necessitate quadam impulsos accedere.” George’s translation of Praeparatio evangelica 5.6, or 5.8 in the standard division. For Ficino’s use of George’s translation, see Monfasani. On the Pythagorean “deos invocatos,” see also Plotinus, 1580, 433 (Ennead 4.4.38–39). 66 For example, Ficino, 2002, 242–63, 288–97 (De Vita 3.1–4, 11). 67 Ficino, 2002, 236–39 (1576, 529). The De Vita Coelitus Comparanda also seems to have been known in later generations by the title De Vita Coelitus Haurienda (On drawing life from the heavens); for example, Jacques Gohory (1520–76), cited in Walker, 1958, 104n1; Forshaw, 265n66. On the work’s title, see Kristeller, 1:lxxxiii–lxxxvi. Given certain thematic connections between Ficino’s and Porphyry’s work, it would be tempting to draw a direct line of transmission from Ficino’s title De Vita Coelitus Haurienda to Wolff’s choice of De philosophia ex oraculis haurienda for Porphyry’s Περὶ τῆς ἐκ λογίων φιλοσοφίας. Although Wolff knows Ficino’s Neoplatonic writings (especially through G. F. Creuzer’s edition of Plotinus), as far as I have been able to ascertain Ficino simply refers to Porphyry’s work as the Liber de oraculis. Moreover, since George of Trebizond uses Liber de oraculis, Liber responsorum, and Liber de responsis, I have not been able to identify a Latin translation for the title of Porphyry’s work that predates Ficino’s work that would indicate that Ficino’s choice of De Vita Coelitus Haurienda intentionally alludes to Porphyry’s De philosophia ex oraculis haurienda. In the first early modern scholarly study on Porphyry, Dissertatio De Vita et Scriptis Porphyrii Philosophi (1630), Lucas Holstenius employs De philosophia ex oraculis. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 62 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 How vocalizations (prayers, invocations, sacramental words of consecration, etc.) call the divine down to earth is important for the theologies and religious practices of both Christians and ancient Neoplatonists. In De Vita 3.21 Ficino asks why certain sounds carry specific meaning and how voice works with or on the divine: That a specific and great power exists in specific words, is the claim of Origen in Contra Celsum, of Synesius and Al-Kindi where they argue about magic, and likewise of Zoroaster where he forbids the alteration of barbarian words, and also of Iamblichus in the course of the same argument. The Pythagoreans also make this claim, who used to perform wonders by words, songs, and sounds in the Phoebean and Orphic manner. The Hebrew doctors of old practiced this more than anyone else; and all poets sing of the wondrous things that are brought about by songs. And even the famous and venerable Cato in his De re rustica sometimes uses barbarous incantations to cure the disease of his farm animals. But it is better to skip incantations. Nevertheless, that singing through which the young David used to relieve Saul’s insanity— unless the sacred text demands that it be attributed to divine agency—one might attribute to nature.68 Here Ficino is not interested specifically in prayers to god(s) or saints, but how voice works with or on the heavens in general. This is also Plotinus’s exact topic. Like Plotinus and Porphyry, Ficino notes that the heavens do not freely choose to react to certain utterances since they neither hear nor remember prayers. Invocations and prayers, however, do not constrain the divine either. Rather, words have powers that correspond to the heavens by way of natural influences that function sympathetically like harmonic ratios (sound) and geometric analogies (image). The final marginal annotation significant for analyzing the connecting tissues between Ficino’s interpretation of Plotinus and the origins of De Vita 3 addresses this very issue. After a short Greek note in his manuscript, next to Plotinus’s explanation that magic functions through love and sympathy, stating, “On magic, how is it done, what is its source?” Ficino reminds himself to: See Proclus On Magic, as well as Iamblichus, Al-Kindi, and the Picatrix, and how there may be an attraction of influxes to us not only through different reasons favorably disposed to the heavens but also through precise imaginations, aspects, prayers, and words. Zoroaster says about the power of words that you should not change barbarian names. See the Cratylus on how the air having thus been fractured by instruments [i.e., the tongue or a musical instrument] and having been unified with a specific signification 68 Ficino, 2002, 354–55 (1576, 562). This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 63 through the imagination draws vital power through the spiritual imagination from the world soul and from celestial rays. But note that an aspect is most powerful with the imagination. The Pythagoreans would perform wonders with words, and I pass over the fact that they would chant exercises [i.e., forms of incantations] publicly. Concerning these matters Virgil in his Bucolics and also the Orphic Hymns reveal this. However much more akin the vocalized matter is with the heavens than other matters, so much more it receives special power from heaven rather than the composition of other matters.69 Ficino here reiterates the same group of sources as the previously discussed notes to Plotinus and adds the Oracula Chaldaica (Chaldean oracles; Zoroaster), Virgil’s Eclogues, and the Orphic Hymns. The connections between this annotation and the paragraph from De Vita 3.21 quoted above are clear, and show Ficino working on the material at an earlier stage. He begins with the same argument that only specific vocalizations carry power, especially when they also correspond to precise aspects and imaginations. Although they differ from one another, the set of authoritative sources that Ficino quotes in the annotation and De Vita 3.21 are closely related. He repeats the Chaldean Oracle in both cases with similar terms.70 He also restates the reference to Pythagorean singing, taken from Iamblichus’s De secta pythagorica.71 Ficino, however, uses the Latin term “exercitatio” in the annotation to Plotinus Ennead 4.4.40–42. MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 165r: “Περὶ τῶν γοητείων, πῶς, πόθεν Vide Proculi magiam et Iamblichum et Alkindum et Picatricem et quomodo non solum per alias superis accommodatas rationes fit attractio influxuum ad nos sed etiam per certas imaginationes, aspectus, orationes, verba. De vi verborum dicit Zoroaster nomina barbara ne permutes. Vide Cratylum quomodo aer ita fractus et organicis et significatione certa per imaginationem unificatus trahit vitalem vim per spiritalem imaginationem ab anima mundi et a radiis celestibus. Sed nota quod cum imaginatione aspectus potest plurimum. Pythagorici nominibus mirabilia operabantur ut praetermittam quid exercitationes vulgo canant. De quibus Virgilius in Buccolicis etiam Hymni Orphici hoc ostendunt. Quanto vocalis materia cognatior est celesti quam alias tanto magis vim specialem celitus accipit quam materiarum aliarum compositio.” Two brief Greek notes follow: “πῶς ἄστρα νεύουσιν εὐχαῖς, καὶ πότερον [πότενον sic] ἀκοῦωσιν. πάντα ἐν κόσμω συμπάσχουσιν, ὥσπερ ὅμοιαι χορδαὶ ἐν λύραις” (“How do stars grant prayers, and whether they listen. All things in the cosmos are in sympathy just as strings on a lyre are alike”). 70 Ficino, 2002, 354 (1576, 562): “Item Zoroaster vetans barbara verba mutari.” MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 165r: “De vi verborum dicit Zoroaster nomina barbara ne permutes.” On the oracle, see Kroll, 58 (Psellus, expos. or. chald. 1132c); Lewy, 238–40. 71 Ficino, 2002, 354 (1576, 562): “Item Pythagoricis verbis et cantibus atque sonis mirabilia quaedam Pheobi et Orphei more facere consueti.” MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816, fol. 165r: “Pythagorici nominibus mirabilia operabantur ut praetermittam quod exercitationes vulgo canant.” The source is Iamblichus, 1975, 15–16, 25. 69 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 64 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 to translate precise Pythagorean terms for a kind of musical arrangement (ἐξάρτυσις) and its related exercises (ἄσκησις) and devout practices (ἐπιτήδευσις). He does this in his own translation of the De secta pythagorica as well, but he replaces “exercitatio” with the more general “verbum” and “cantus” (“song”; “incantation”) in De Vita 3.21.72 Ficino reiterates Iamblichus, Al-Kindi, and the Orphic Hymns in both the annotation and De Vita 3.21, but seems to replace Virgil’s Eclogues with Cato’s De re rustica (On agriculture) for a Roman example, and removes the references to Plato’s Cratylus, the Picatrix, and Proclus from De Vita 3.21, mentioning instead Origen, Synesius, the Hebrew doctors, and the first book of Samuel. Ficino’s alternative sources might simply indicate a later revision or they might show that he preferred to include biblical and Christian sources (even if unorthodox) instead of Platonic and magical ones. These omissions could account for his statement in the passage in question from De Vita 3.21 that “it is better to skip incantations.”73 In De Vita 3 Ficino specifies three performative steps for invoking heavenly forces. First, one needs to match the specific powers of stars, constellations, and aspects, with exact verbal significations. Second, one should imitate the correct region, persona, and tone that correspond to specific words bearing celestial signification. That is, one should pronounce the words in the manner of a specific persona, as, for example, Zoroastrian, Apollonian, Dionysian, Orphic, or Pythagorean personas. This second stage also includes the use of fumigations and the performance of gestures, dance, and ritual.74 Third, one ought to imitate those who observe the correct time to perform the rite—that is, when the stars have specific positions and aspects that best accommodate their influx to our words, personas, and performances.75 This argument shares its technical terminology with the annotations (for example, accommodare, aspectus, significatio, influxum, and cantus), and, like the annotations, all the mimetic dimensions of words, personas, and performances also depend on a philosophical theory of spiritual imagination. Despite De Vita 3’s forays into the power of sight (figures, images, talismans, statues, etc.), according to Ficino it is sounds—prayers, hymns, words, invocations, incantations, music—that best transmit spiritual influences from the heavens. Walker presented Ficino’s argument in these passages that the sound is the aerial spirit of hearing (aereus auris spiritus) as an Augustinian-Aristotelian epistemology 72 On the difficult term “ἐξάρτσυις,” see Delatte, 136–38. “Exercitatio” is also the term that Ficino uses in his own translation of the De secta pythagorica, which I am presently editing for publication. On this work in Ficino’s oeuvre, see Kristeller, 1:cxlv–cxlvi; Gentile; Celenza, 1999; Celenza, 2001; Robichaud, 2016. 73 Ficino, 2002, 354–55 (1576, 562). 74 On Ficino’s Orphic persona, see Walker, 1958, 12–35. 75 Ficino, 2002, 357–59 (1576, 562–63). This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 65 that the medium of sensation must correspond to its organ, but it is clear that it is grounded in Neoplatonic reasoning.76 After explaining the three steps, Ficino writes: But remember that song is a most powerful imitator of all things. . . . Now the very matter of song, indeed, is altogether purer and more similar to the heavens than is the matter of medicine. For this too is air, hot or warm, still breathing and somehow living; like an animal, it is composed of certain parts and limbs of its own and not only possesses motion and displays passion but even carries meaning like a mind, so that it can be said to be a kind of airy and rational animal. Song, therefore, which is full of spirit and meaning—if it corresponds to this or that constellation not only in the things it signifies, its parts, and the form that results from those parts, but also in the disposition of the imagination—has as much power as does any other combination of things [e.g., a medicine] and casts it into the singer and from him into the nearby listener.77 Ficino had already planted the seed to this theory in Neoplatonic terms in the argument of the last annotation to Plotinus quoted above. His marginalia reveal an identical principle: the closer the medium of voice is to the heavens, the more it will receive its power. Unlike the material medium of images or medicine, vocalization draws more power from the heavens since its very medium, spirit, is identical to the spiritual influx received from the heavens. To understand this last passage from Plotinus, Ficino pairs Neoplatonic pneumatology with various accounts of the symbolic power of barbarian divine names. Plato’s Cratylus is the root text for this kind of understanding of symbols, and in his manuscript margins Ficino glosses its discussion of barbarian names for gods with the Chaldean Oracle that states that one should not alter or translate barbarian names.78 Ficino theorizes that a tongue or an instrument breaks air, which according to Plato is a continuous flux, in order to produce a sound. The imagination then generates signification and tunes the sound in a harmonious ratio with the heavens.79 Our spiritual imagination, he believes, comes into contact with the spiritual imagination of the world soul and thereby reaches it without the aid of discursive reasoning. Since Plotinus claims that the heavens do not deliberately answer our supplications, Ficino reasons that the efficacy of prayers 76 Walker, 1958, 7–8. Ficino, 2002, 358–59 (1576, 563). 78 Plato, Cratylus, 425d–426b in Bekker, 2.2:89–92. De Vita 3.21 refers to Iamblichus, 2013, 189–93 (De mysteriis 7.4–5). 79 Plato, Cratylus, 410b in Bekker, 2.2:58–60. Ficino, 2001–06, 3:176–79 (Platonic Theology 10.7.5). 77 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 66 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 does not depend on a discursive process of communication to produce meaning and signification. Prayers and other vocalizations do not function by generating an understanding in discourse. Discursive communication could be translated into different languages, but the symbolic power of words comes from the very formal structure and measure of the vocalized spiritual sound itself: its mathematical ratio with the heavens. This theory reflects the formal progression of De Vita 3 as a whole, where modes of drawing influences from the heavens resemble something like a threefold heuristic structure (fig. 3). Following Ficino’s discussion of nature and the cosmos in De Vita 3, the formal Neoplatonic structure investigates art sequentially: from matter, to matter with form, to spiritual form and the figures and numbers that correspond to intelligible form. This three-stage order agrees with the principles expressed in the opening paragraph of De Vita 3.17: “For thus figures, numbers and rays, since there they are sustained by no other material, seem practically to constitute what things are made of [quasi substantiales]. And since, in the order of being, mathematical forms precede physical ones, being more simple and less defective, then deservedly they claim the most dignity in the primary—that is, the celestial—levels of the cosmos, so that consequently as much comes about from number, figure, and light as from some elemental property.”80 Additionally, in the middle section of this threefold categorization (De Vita 3.18), Ficino provides a further tripartite classification for engraved images and figures.81 Thus even within the middle section devoted to images and figures one notices a hierarchy that moves away from the visible body toward the intelligible form. It progresses from mimetic representations of visible phenomena (the zoomorphic representations of star constellations), to nonvisible but imaginable phenomena (the decanic personifications of the heavens), to nonrepresentational but still mimetic symbols. However, this diagrammatic structure of De Vita 3 remains only a heuristic guide since Ficino’s cosmos does not separate absolutely between nature and art, nor between sensible and intelligible. Instead of a definite separation between sensible and intelligible, there is a constant that pervades throughout the complete spectrum of the cosmos: the continuous emanation of the superabundant power of the Neoplatonic One. Ficino conceives the whole order of De Vita 3 with a Neoplatonic method whereby one removes levels of complexity from phenomena to reach simple unity.82 When sound is performed in a nondiscursive, or noetic, manner (as in certain prayers or vocalizations of 80 Ficino, 2002, 328–29 (1576, 555). Ficino, 2002, 333–35 (1576, 556). 82 Aphaeresis, for instance, abstracts levels of complexity in mathematics; one moves from the study of bodies in motion (astronomy) and their complex ratios (music), to static bodies (stereometry), to plane figures (plane geometry), to lines, and, finally, to a point (a simple and singular arithmetical unit). 81 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 67 Figure 3. Diagram of the structure of Ficino’s De Vita 3. Created by Joseph Bowling of the Renaissance Society of America. divine names) it acts as a nonrepresentational but mimetic symbol directly signifying the divine intelligible. Such noetic symbols are closer to intelligibles insofar as the ontological status of their mathematized medium (spirit) is prior to material images (statues or otherwise) and medicine. While images are depicted on a material medium, sound does not require a material substrate. Yet Ficino employs theories of light to understand how sound travels. The importance of Plotinus’s metaphysics of light is here central to his thinking. Like light, prayer becomes a link by which one touches the divine. According to Ficino, therefore, Plotinian prayers and invocations turn one away from the variety of complex connections in the cosmos. These spiritual conversions are intellectual (re)alignments to accommodate a simpler contact with the heavens and intelligibles, and perhaps to participate in the most simple contact, a union with the One.83 DATING FICINO’S ANNOTATIONS AND PLOTINUS ON ASPECTS One of the notes discussed above (to Ennead 4.4.34) includes Ficino’s own reminder to see what he wrote on the topic of astrological aspects in Plotinus’s first book on the stars (Ennead 2.3.1). Ennead 2.3 contains one of Plotinus’s most severe attacks on the belief that stars cause events. Instead, Plotinus argues that stars may merely serve as signs for events. This argument greatly influenced Ficino’s own thinking about astrology, and aligns well with his Disputatio 83 See Giglioni, 24–30. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 68 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 Contra Iudicium Astrologorum (Disputation against the judgment of astrologers, 1477).84 Ennead 2.3 argues against the astrological theory of aspects. Plotinus ridicules the belief that celestial bodies can act on us in various ways (benevolently or malevolently) in different aspects—that is, depending at which point of their course they are located (for example, whether they are at their zenith or are in decline) and depending on which other celestial bodies or figures are in their line of sight. However, in working through Plotinus’s texts on celestial influences, Ficino began to see inconsistencies in the philosopher’s arguments. He encountered a possible textual corruption at Ennead 2.3.5.85 Briefly, the text of Ennead 2.3.5 ends abruptly mid-sentence in Plotinus’s case against the effect of aspects in lunar and planetary conjunctions, and then at 2.3.12 an argument contending against Plotinus’s previous position resumes just as unexpectedly. Ficino notes the textual corruption and the philosophical contradiction in his commentary. The claim at Ennead 4.4.34 that heavenly bodies have different powers in different positions also seems to leave open the possibility of influential celestial aspects. Ficino’s marginal annotation to Ennead 4.3.34 records that it might contradict Ennead 2.3.1. The reference in the note to Ficino’s commentary on Ennead 2.3.1 also establishes a terminus post quem for the marginalia. The printed commentary to Ennead 2.3.1 includes its own reference that at first glance could lead one to conclude that Ficino had already finished writing De Vita 3 by the time he wrote the commentary: “[Plotinus] seems to concede that on account of the various aspects of stars, even if the change in them is small, a certain natural change can, nevertheless, occur in things, which we examine in our Liber De Vita.”86 A few important dates and manuscript evidence demonstrate the contrary. First, a letter written by Ficino to Pierleone da Spoleto (17 January 1486) indicates that Ficino finished translating the Enneads the previous day, and that after this he turned to writing its commentary.87 Second, Ficino completed his commentary to Ennead 2.3 between September 1486 and March 1487. 88 In another letter to Pierleone (21 August 1490) Ficino quotes the prayer with which he closes the Plotinus commentary and writes that on the day of 84 See Kristeller, 1:cxxvi–cxxvii, 2:11–76. On Ficino and astrology, see Kaske; Walker, 1986. I study this in detail in Robichaud, 2017. 86 Plotinus, 1580, 110: “Concessurus tamen videtur propter varios aspectus siderum, etsi minus in illis, tamen in rebus naturalem aliquam varietatem posse contingere: quod inquirimus in lib. de vita.” 87 Ficino, 1576, 879. 88 Kristeller, whose Supplementum Ficinianum remains invaluable for studying Ficino’s manuscripts, established the chronology of Ficino’s work on his Plotinus commentary from his epistolography: Kristeller, 1:cxxvi–cxxviii. For an accurate summary, see Gentile, Niccoli, and Viti, 147–50; Toussaint’s introduction in Plotinus, 2008, I–IV. See also Clark, 1983, 158–64. 85 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 69 Saturn (or the Sabbath) his labors on the commentary came to rest.89 This reveals that Ficino conceived of the completion of his commentary under the auspices of Saturn.90 Furthermore, the dedicatory letter to Matthias Corvinus, the king of Hungary (10 July 1489), establishes when Ficino sent him De Vita 3 as a single work detached from his commentary on Plotinus.91 How could Ficino refer to De Vita 3, which he separated from the Plotinus commentary near Ennead 4.3.11 and finished only in 1489, in a section of the Plotinus commentary that he wrote between September 1486 and March 1487?92 This can be explained by the fact that Ficino did not originally include in the commentary to Ennead 2.3.1 the reference to the De Vita and the statement that Plotinus concedes that various celestial aspects can have changing effects on humans. If one turns to the manuscript copy of the Plotinus commentary prepared for Lorenzo de’ Medici, one finds verbatim in the margins the comment that Ficino later inserted into the body of the printed text to the commentary on Ennead 2.3.1 (fig. 4).93 This marginal annotation in the Laurentian manuscript therefore discloses an editorial revision, which corresponds directly to, and therefore postdates, the marginal annotation on Ennead 4.4.34 in the Parisian manuscript. However, since the colophon of the second Laurentian manuscript indicates 12 November 1490 as the completion date of Fabiani’s transcription, one should not conclude too quickly that Ficino’s annotations to Ennead 4.4.34 postdate the completion of the Laurentian manuscript, and therefore also De Vita 3. It is possible that Fabiani copied the first sections of the Laurentian manuscript at an earlier date, but the most likely hypothesis is that Fabiani transcribed the Laurentian manuscript from a previous copy of the commentary that is now missing. This hypothesis agrees nicely with the fact that there is also an extant copy of Ficino’s translation of the Enneads in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale 89 Ficino, 1576, 914; Plotinus, 1580, 769. The deluxe manuscripts of Ficino’s translation and commentary of the Enneads produced for Lorenzo de’ Medici (MSS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 82.10–11)—the very manuscripts where Kristeller first noticed that De Vita 3 began as a commentary to Enneads 4.3.11—were finished, as the colophon indicates, on 12 November 1490, that is, as Ficino writes in his preface to Lorenzo, during the portentous time under the influence of Saturn: MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 82.11, fol. 407r. The letter confirms what I have argued elsewhere: that Ficino accomplished his textual labors under astrological influences, especially Saturn. See Robichaud, 2017. 91 Ficino, 1576, 529. 92 Only the first book (1480) of De Vita Libri Tres predates 1486. Ficino wrote the second book in August 1489, shortly after the De Vita 3. See Kristeller, 1:lxxxiii. Ficino is clearly referring to the De Vita 3 in the reference found in the commentary to Ennead 2.3.1. The reference at Plotinus, 1576, 437 (Ennead 4.4.43), would therefore seem to postdate De Vita 3’s completion. 93 MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 82.10, fol. 156r: “Concessurus tamen videtur propter varios aspectus, etsi minus in illis, tamen in rebus naturalem aliquam varietatem posse contingere: quod inquirimus in libro di vita.” 90 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 70 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 Figure 4. Ficino’s revision to his commentary to Plotinus, Ennead 2.3.1. MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 82.10, fol. 156r. di Firenze (BNCF) that predates the deluxe copy made for Lorenzo.94 Ficino revised and edited his work on Plotinus until its printing, which he personally oversaw, in Florence with Miscomini on 7 May 1492.95 Traces of these editorial changes are visible at various stages: the translation in the manuscript in the BNCF differs on occasion from the text included in the Laurentian manuscripts, on which marginal corrections and variant readings were added before the 1492 printing. In sum, in addition to establishing the very likely possibility of another draft manuscript for the Plotinus commentary, which would have been the basis for the Laurentian manuscripts, the present reconstruction of Ficino’s work corrects the anachronistic reference to De Vita 3 in the commentary to Ennead 2.3.1. It also establishes a terminus post quem September 1486–March 1487 and a terminus ante quem 10 July 1489 for the annotation to Ennead 4.4.34 in the Parisian manuscript. In other words, it confirms that Ficino was annotating the section of Plotinus on prayer in the Parisian manuscript exactly when he was composing the De Vita 3 and translating Iamblichus’s De mysteriis, Proclus’s De sacrificio et magia, and Porphyry’s De abstinentia.96 Given the very close textual correspondences between the annotations to the Parisian manuscript, the annotation about Pythagoreans in the Vallicelliana manuscript (a verbatim reduplication), and the Pythagoreans performing miracles with words in De Vita 3.21, it is beyond doubt that Ficino wrote the set of annotations to Plotinus on prayer while he was working on (or immediately leading up to) De Vita 3.97 IAMBLICHUS, PLOTINUS, AND HERMES Ficino’s marginalia lead to broader conclusions concerning the much-debated question of De Vita 3’s sources. First, while Yates tethers her argument for De Vita 3 94 MS Florence, BNCF, Conventi soppr. E.1.2562. See Ficino, 1576, 928; Kristeller, 1:lxi; Gentile, Niccoli, and Viti, 150–51. 96 Ficino used MS Paris, BnF, Gr. 1816 at various times in his life. F€orstel dated another annotation in the manuscript to 1479–80. 97 Other shared references like the Oracula Chaldaica also corroborate this. 95 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 71 solely to a Hermetic interpretation of Plotinus on statues, Ficino preferred to untie his work from the traditional lemmatic moorings of the commentary form and sail his ship, so to speak, into the waters of Plotinus on prayer, where he found more significant material.98 Second, although the annotations to Plotinus on prayer serve as sources for De Vita 3, the notes require their own detailed source criticism. Plotinus’s arguments act as a matrix to hold together rich and difficult intertextual connections in Ficino’s exegesis. Each text that Ficino deploys has shared family resemblances with these Plotinian passages. To be sure, De Vita 3 is even more abundant with sources than the marginalia. In the margins Ficino explicitly cites Plato, Plotinus and other Neoplatonists (namely Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Synesius), Democritus, Empedocles, Virgil, and Eusebius, as well as Pythagorean, Zoroastrian, and Orphic references among ancient sources. Among medieval sources, one encounters the names of Roger Bacon and Blasius of Parma for Latin authors; the Greek Michael Psellus; Latin translations of two Arabic texts, Al-Kindi’s De radiis and the Picatrix; and the Latin translation of the Sabian Thabit’s De imaginibus (perhaps also PseudoPtolemy). Ficino’s use of ancient sources, especially Platonic ones, comes as no surprise, even if his study of Iamblichean and Pythagorean material is too often overlooked.99 However, the names of Blasius of Parma and Roger Bacon do not appear in any of Ficino’s printed works (he mentions Al-Kindi once).100 These notes therefore reveal that Ficino knew a significant and coherent corpus of medieval scientific literature on geometric perspective and optics. This makes perfect sense given Ficino’s deep engagement with Neoplatonic metaphysics of light and Iamblichean-Neopythagorean mathematics, and because such geometric optical theories were useful for studying Plotinus on prayer (especially for conceptualizing astrological, magical, daemonological, and acoustic forces acting at a distance).101 98 As a reminder, the two sections in question are Ennead 4.3.11 or 4.4.26–45. Yates, 70-71; and Garin, 1976a, 73, argued for the former, whereas Klibansky, Panofsky, Saxl, 263n67; Walker, 1958, 3n2, 14n5, 14–15n7; and Copenhaver, 1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1993 (who refers more broadly to Ennead 4.3–5), had suspected the latter without direct manuscript evidence. 99 Exceptions are Celenza, 1999; Celenza, 2001; Allen, 1982, 1994, and 2014; Robichaud, 2016. 100 Ficino, however, tells Giovanni Pico della Mirandola that he read Arnaud de Villeneuve’s De retardatione senectute, which we now know was the De retardatione senectutis attributed to Roger Bacon. Ficino, 1576, 900–01. See Clark, 1986. 101 Michael Allen once remarked: “The relationship in Ficino’s mind between optics, and notably daemonic optics, and music—that is, between light wave theory and sound wave theory and the ‘harmonic’ proportions that govern them—has yet to be explored”: Allen, 1999, 131. The present paper is a further exploration into this topic. Allen also writes about how Ficino conceives of the ratios of souls and the heavens with figures and numbers. On Ficino, geometry, and optics, see Allen, 1994 and 1999; Otto; Albertini, 76–85, 273–92; Quinlan-McGrath. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 72 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 The one source that is conspicuously absent in Ficino’s marginalia to Plotinus on prayer is the most debated source: the Corpus hermeticum. Ficino could have drawn from the Corpus hermeticum to discuss the question of the symbolic power of words and the translation of divine names, or again from Asclepius on divine names and how voice striking air generates meaning.102 He chose instead to refer to Iamblichus, the Oracula Chaldaica, Pythagorean materials, and Plato’s Cratylus. Corpus hermeticum is the title that normally designates the Asclepius and a set of Greek dialogues that Ficino translated in 1463 as the Pimander. The body of works considered Hermetic, however, is much larger and will likely expand with the study of Arabic Hermetica.103 Following Andre-Jean Festugiere, most scholars divide the Hermetica into two categories, philosophical (learned/higher) and technical (popular/lower). The philosophical texts (principally the Corpus hermeticum) deal with the salvation of the soul, gnosis, and the cosmos. The technical Hermetica include a vast number of works (never gathered into a single corpus) that deal with questions of magic, astrology, alchemy, and occult sciences.104 With this distinction in mind, Copenhaver has argued that Ficino’s Hermes is a theologian and not a magician, and more recently Maurizio Campanelli proposed that Ficino fashions a persona for Hermes Trismegistus that is specifically modeled on classical and Christian sources (instead of the medieval, Arabic, alchemical Hermes) in order to make his new translation of the Corpus hermeticum harmonize better with Christianity and Platonism.105 The strong modern demarcation between the technical and philosophical Hermetica can be seen in a nascent stage in Ficino’s presentation of Hermes in the Pimander’s argumentum.106 The separation of the philosophical from the technical Hermetica surely had earlier roots in the editorial process that grouped certain texts together into the corpus that Ficino inherited.107 Paradoxically, while his portrait of Hermes in the Pimander’s argumentum may have helped solidify the distinction between the two categories, Ficino’s later De Vita 3 may have undermined the process insofar as it does not easily accept an absolute division between theory and practice. 102 Corpus hermeticum, 2:135–38 (Corpus hermeticum 16), and 2:320–21 (Asclepius 20). The publication of F€orstel’s complete edition of the marginalia will confirm whether references to Hermes Trismegistus appear elsewhere in manuscript, but my initial survey of the material does not locate any. 103 Van Bladel. 104 The categories are Festugiere’s organizing principles in La R ev elation d’Herm e s Trism egiste; see Fowden, xiii–xvii, 1–11, 116–20; Copenhaver, 1992, xxxii–xl. Fowden makes the case that the two categories are more fluid than previously thought. 105 Copenhaver, 1993; Campanelli, xxxix–xxxx. 106 The discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts undermines the modern division. See Fowden. 107 Copenhaver, 1992, xl–xlv; Kingsley, 1993, 18, and the works cited in 18n71. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 73 There is no doubt that to study astrological images and talismans Ficino made use of what modern scholars call technical Hermetica. But this does not mean that when Ficino drew on them he thought they were works by Hermes Trismegistus.108 In De Vita 3 Ficino reports that some “astrologers say that certain major stars discovered by Mercurius have the greatest power possible.”109 Scholars have at times argued that Ficino intentionally conceals his own opinion by ascribing them in his writings to certain Egyptians, Arabs, astrologers, or other similar designations.110 However, even if Ficino writes that some astrologers attribute certain works or discoveries to Hermes, it is not necessary to conclude that he is hiding his true opinions. Ficino knew about the pseudepigraphic nature of the Hermetica from the first paragraph of Iamblichus’s De mysteriis, where the Neoplatonist writes that numerous Egyptian authors ascribed their writings to Hermes. He also knew that Iamblichus argued against Porphyry’s philological doubts concerning the authenticity of the Hermetica by claiming that the Egyptian Hermetica contain Greek philosophical terminology because the Hermetica’s Greek translators contaminated the text with their own vocabulary.111 It is possible that Iamblichus’s arguments about the pseudonymous and pseudepigraphic nature of the Hermetica persuaded Ficino to avoid attributing these works directly to Hermes, preferring only to relate that other astrologists make these claims. This would not necessarily mean that Ficino considered one part of the Hermetica authentic and another spurious. In relating the attribution of others, he may simply be distinguishing medieval (usually Arabic) sources from what he considers more ancient Hermetic writings. 108 Picatrix and Thabit are usually classified as technical Hermetica, some of which survives under the purported authorship of Hermes, but not the Picatrix, which still sometimes conveys Hermes’s sayings. Ficino mentions “Thebit the philosopher” and “Thebit Benthorad and Ptolemy and the rest of the astrologers”: Ficino, 2002, 278–79 (1576, 541); 340–41 (1576, 558). Thabit’s De imaginibus is neither attributed to Hermes nor includes Hermetic writings. It simply begins with, “Dixit Thebit Bencorah: Dixit Aristoteles” (“Thebit Bencorah said: Aristoteles said”): Carmody, 180. While there is no indication that Ficino considered these texts as part of a specific class of Hermetic works (nor written by Hermes), there is evidence that he knew that these astrologers attributed materials to Hermes. For example, Ficino knew the eighth-century Mashalla’s De quindecim stellis (On the fifteen stars), or its variants attributed to Enoch, Thabit, or Hermes himself. The work contains Hermetic sayings, “dixit Hermes” (“Hermes said”), and commentaries: Festugiere, 1:160–86; Gentile and Gilly, 112; Thorndike. 109 Ficino, 2002, 276–77 (1576, 540). 110 Ockenstr€om; Weill-Parot, 2002a, 639–74; Weill-Parot, 2002b; Zambelli, 320. 111 Fowden, 31–44. Ficino was also aware of the whole pseudonymic construction of Iamblichus’s De mysteriis, since he follows the introductory scholion in his manuscript by presenting the complete work as a correspondence between Porphyry and Iamblichus writing under the pseudonymous dramatis personae of the Egyptian priest Abamon and his disciple Anebon. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 74 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 Most importantly, Iamblichus’s claim that ancient writers attributed their works to the pseudonymous Hermes implies for Ficino that ancients believed that their writings were divinely inspired under the guidance of Hermes. In fact, Ficino says just this in his commentary to Plato’s Republic: “In turn they [the Egyptians] claim that nothing can be understood without a certain divine inspiration, to the extent that Iamblichus reports that all the books of those who philosophize among them are ascribed to the name of the god Mercurius as if they were not invented by men but by god.”112 In The True Intellectual System of the Universe, Ralph Cudworth (1617–88) would later revisit these same Iamblichean arguments in his critique of Isaac Casaubon’s (1559–1614) debunking of the Hermetica: “probably [Casaubon] was led into this mistake, by reason of his too securely following that vulgar Errour (which yet had been confuted by Patricius) that all that was published by Ficinus under the name of Hermes Trismegist, was but one and the same Book Poemander, consisting of several chapters, whereas they are all indeed so many Distinct and Independent Books, whereof Poemander is only placed First.”113 Ficino’s 1463 translation of the Pimander may have committed the “vulgar Errour” of assembling various texts into a single volume under the authorial name Mercurius, but by the time he had digested Iamblichus’s De mysteriis he was certainly aware that the Hermetica were pseudonymous. Yet Ficino’s positive appeal to divine inspiration to understand their pseudepigraphic nature is certainly a far cry from later philological dismissals of the Hermetica’s anachronisms. Yates thought that the greatest concealment in the De Vita was that Ficino posed as a Neoplatonic interpreter when he was in fact a Hermetic magus. She argued that this deception was tied to Ficino’s concerns that his work transgressed the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy, particularly since it elicited concerns from Rome.114 Its loose commentary form permits Ficino to inquire into unorthodox sources without explicitly sanctioning them. Al-Kindi, whose De radiis was censured around 1270 in Giles of Rome’s Errores philosophorum (Errors of the philosophers), is cited once by Ficino in the De Vita but repeatedly in the Plotinus manuscript.115 Ficino makes no explicit mention of the infamous Picatrix in De Vita 3, and he is said to have told a friend 112 Ficino, 1576, 1409: “Nihil rursus absque divina quadam inspiratione intelligi posse adeo afferebant, quemacmodum refert Iamblichus, ut omnes apud illos philosophantium libri Mercurii Dei nomini sint ascripti, quasi non hominum sint inventa, sed Dei.” 113 Cudworth, 320–21, 322–23. Kingsley, 1993, notes Cudworth’s appeal to Iamblichus but is quiet on the fact that Ficino does so earlier. For Casaubon’s critique of the Hermetica, see Grafton, 145–77. 114 Kraye; Celenza, 2004, 100–14. 115 D’Alverny and Hudry’s introduction to Al-Kindi, 139–41. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 75 that it includes some “frivolous, vain, [material] condemned by the Christian religion.”116 Yet his annotations to his Plotinus manuscript make it obvious that he used Al-Kindi and the Picatrix as interpretive tools. As for Hermes, although he had a mixed reception among the Christian fathers he tended to fare better than some Neoplatonists. While Cyril of Alexandria and especially Augustine attacked the Asclepius for demonological idolatry, other church fathers, such as Lactantius and to a lesser degree Eusebius, had a more favorable opinion of the Hermetica for prophesying the ruin of paganism and the coming of Christianity. Porphyry, in comparison, seems to have been almost universally condemned. Almost all Christian apologists attacked the fifteen books of his Adversus christianos (Against the Christians) for its sharp philological critique of the Bible, questioning of Jesus’s genealogy, and philosophical examination of Christian theology. The emperors Valentinian III and Theodosius II thought the books so dangerous that they commanded all copies be burned.117 Porphyry’s De philosophia ex oraculis haurienda is explicitly antiChristian according to Eusebius and, along with his De regressu animae (On the return of the soul), is Augustine’s favorite target in the De civitate dei (City of God)—more than the Asclepius. Nevertheless, Ficino does not hide the references to Porphyry in the margins of his Plotinus manuscript, and cites him explicitly on multiple occasions in De Vita 3 (to say nothing of printing some of his translations). Thus if Ficino was honeying the De Vita’s cup with Neoplatonism, its brim may have tasted to some palates just as bitter as the medicine, and if Ficino had made repeated use of the Asclepius to interpret Plotinus, then surely traces of this use would have remained in the marginalia. In fact, if Ficino is playing down anything, it is his Neoplatonism. De Vita 3 according to Neoplatonic logic gives metaphysical priority to the spiritual form of sound and vocalizations, yet in a way that does not necessarily exclude Christianity’s sacramental words of consecration. The present findings do not eliminate altogether the impact of the Corpus hermeticum (or Ennead 4.3.11) either on Ficino’s writings in general, or even on De Vita 3 in particular. Ficino’s explicit references to Asclepius in De Vita 3 and in the Plotinus commentary remain. Even if one ought to temper Yates’s conclusion that Ficino, under the mask of a Neoplatonic exegete, deviously conceals his true identity as a Hermetic magus, it would be a mistake to disregard completely Ficino’s association of Hermes with Plotinus. The most significant material for considering the conundrum is the very end of De Vita 3: But now let us get back to Hermes, or rather to Plotinus. Hermes says that the priests received an appropriate power from the nature of the cosmos and 116 Delcorno Branca. Bidez, 65–79. 117 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 76 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 mixed it [i.e., its materials in the statues, 13.37]. Plotinus follows him and thinks that everything can be easily accomplished by the intermediation of the Anima Mundi, since the Anima Mundi generates and moves the forms of natural things through certain seminal reasons implanted in her from the divine. These reasons he even calls gods, since they are never cut off from the Ideas of the Supreme Mind. He thinks, therefore, that through such seminal reasons the Anima Mundi can easily apply herself to materials since she has formed them to begin with through these same seminal reasons, when a Magus or a priest brings to bear at the right time rightly grouped forms of things—forms which properly aim towards one reason or another. . . . Sometimes it can happen that when you bring seminal reasons to bear on forms, higher gifts too may descend, since reasons in the Anima Mundi are conjoined to the intellectual forms in her and through these to the Ideas of the Divine Mind. Iamblichus too confirms this when he deals with sacrifices.118 Ficino’s exposition of Plotinus is not simply a repetition of the Asclepius. In comparing the two, Ficino starts to reveal his understanding of the enigmatic statues of antiquity that also fascinated his Renaissance contemporaries. To understand ancient statues Ficino turned to Neoplatonic explanations. Images (ἀγάλματα), especially of gods, became important for Neoplatonists. In addition to the material found in De mysteriis, Porphyry and Iamblichus wrote treatises on the subject entitled Περὶ ἀγαλμάτων (On statues or divine images)—Iamblichus’s is now lost but Porphyry’s exists in fragments. Even before Iamblichus and Porphyry, Plotinus wrote about divine images. He argued that gods do not think discursively about the divine like humans through language, propositions, and axioms, but directly contemplate the forms as “beautiful images” (“ἀγάλματα”). Plotinus believed that because Egyptian sages understood this about the gods, “the Egyptian sages did not use the forms of letters that signify words and propositions, and imitate the prescribed voices and utterances, but drawing images [ἀγάλματα], and inscribing a particular image [ἄγαλμα] for each singular thing onto their temples they displayed the nondiscursivity of the intelligibles, insofar as each particular image is a type of science and wisdom, a subject and a whole, and is neither discursive reasoning nor deliberation.”119 Likewise, Porphyry gives these divine images a privileged place in his organization of the Enneads since the final chapter of the corpus uses the memorable metaphor of the mysteries to describe a union with the One in the temple’s inner sanctum. The intellect must go beyond the intelligible forms, beyond itself, to reach the One, “as someone entering into the inner sanctum 118 Ficino, 2002, 390–91 (1576, 572). Plotinus, 1964–83, 2:276 (Ennead 5.8.6.1–9). 119 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 77 leaves behind him the statues [ἀγάλματα] arranged in the temple.”120 Ficino’s argumentum to the first passage from Plotinus shows that he understands the images of the gods not only as statues, but also as hieroglyphs, that is, nondiscursive symbols, figures, or barbarian divine names. Likewise, he ends his commentary on the second by expressing that the images of the gods (ἀγάλματα) are intellectual forms.121 Ficino’s two interpretations, moreover, do not explicitly mention the Hermetica, even if they do not exclude a possible comparison.122 Thus the closing interpretation of Plotinus’s statues in De Vita 3 offers Ficino’s accurate assessment of Plotinus’s thought, namely that according to Plotinus the images of the gods ought to be understood according to an emanative continuum. The images of the gods are first the intelligibles but also the nondiscursive forms that emanate from the intelligibles into seminal reasons. These reasons are present in various ways and degrees, including medicines and figures, vocalizations like prayers and divine names, symbols like hieroglyphs, or religious images and statues of worship. There is a growing consensus among modern scholars of Neoplatonism that although Plotinus philosophized on occasion about magic, there is no evidence that he practiced it.123 However, Ficino begins a process of transforming Plotinus into, to borrow an expression from Christopher Celenza, a “post-Plotinian” Neoplatonist;124 he does so when he identifies Plotinus’s possible self-contradiction regarding astrological aspects and when he uses Plotinus’s theoretical framework for magic, heavenly images, and prayers. Garth Fowden argues that Plotinus has no interest in the Hermetica, perhaps because of its close affinity with certain Gnostics, and that among later Neoplatonists only Iamblichus demonstrates any sustained engagement with these texts.125 Iamblichus’s use of the Hermetica was not lost on Ficino, and although he had an exceptionally keen sense of the differences among late ancient Neoplatonists, Ficino recast certain features of both the Egyptian 120 Ibid., 3:289 (Ennead 6.9.11.17–19). On Ficino’s use of the image of the inner sanctum, see Robichaud, 2014 and 2017. 121 Plotinus, 1580, 547, where Ficino mentions the image of the serpent eating its tail (the ouroboros). See Boas, 28–29, for the source of this image; Plotinus, 1580, 769. The same prayer discussed above and quoted in Ficino’s letter to Pierleone da Spoleto (Ficino, 1576, 914) follows. Ficino plays on the rest of union with the One, the rest of his labors on Plotinus, and the rest of the Sabbath (Saturn’s day). 122 Allen studies three passages from Ficino on statues that I do not discuss, which have nothing to do with the Asclepius: Allen, 2008. 123 Dodds, 285–89; Armstrong; Luck; Brisson. 124 Celenza, 2002. 125 Fowden, 177–212. Ficino, as Gentile and Toussaint observe, marks the sole instance where Proclus mentions the Hermetica while discussing Iamblichus in his In Timaeum manuscript: MS Florence, RICC, 24, fol. 143v. Gentile and Gilly, 98; Toussaint’s introduction in Iamblichus, 2006, XIV. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 78 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 Plotinus and the Asclepius in an Iamblichean mold. Yates ignored the Iamblichean dimension of Ficino’s understanding of Hermes in De Vita 3, and it is only very recently that scholars have begun to pay serious attention to Ficino’s immense debt to Iamblichus.126 However, it is principally because of him that Hermes joins Plotinus’s company in De Vita 3. Guido Giglioni explains how Ficino’s translation of Iamblichus’s De mysteriis encompasses such textual strategies as paraphrastic condensing, exegetical additions, and accurate translations, all of which indicate that certain topics had “an impact on his mind.”127 If one turns to the opening paragraph of De mysteriis one finds that Ficino condenses over 111 lines of Greek text (in Saffrey and Segonds’s most recent critical edition) into the very terse passage: Egyptian writers, thinking that all discoveries were from Mercurius, entitled their books with his name. Mercurius oversees wisdom and eloquence. Pythagoras, Plato, Democritus, Eudoxus, and many others joined the Egyptian priests. The dogmas of the books of the Assyrians and Egyptians are from the columns of Mercurius. Pythagoras and Plato learned philosophy from the columns of Mercurius in Egypt. The columns of Mercurius are full of doctrines. Before all use of reason there is naturally in us the innate knowledge of the gods. Rather a certain contact with divinity is better than knowledge, from which our natural appetite, discursive reasoning, as well as our judgment is inspired for the good. The essential cognition of divine things, which is perpetually in our soul, in truth is not the cognition by which we enjoy god. For in cognition there is alterity, but this certain contact is essential and simple. For we are not able to touch unity itself, unless with a certain most unifying unity of mind, which is beyond soul, and stands above the property of mind.128 126 Exceptions are Sicherl; Copenhaver, 1987; Celenza, 2002; Saffrey and Segonds; Toussaint’s introduction in Iamblichus, 2006, I–XVII; Giglioni. 127 Giglioni, 14. 128 Iamblichus, 1497, a.iir, which corresponds to Iamblichus, 2013, 1–6 (De mysteriis 1.1–3.11): “Aegyptii scriptores putantes omnia inventa esse a Mercurio, suos libros mercurio inscribebant. Mercurius praeest sapientiae et eloquio. Pythagoras, Plato, Democritus, Eudoxus, et multi ad sacerdotes aegyptios accesserunt. Dogmata huius libri sunt assyriorum, et aegyptiorum et ex columnis Mercurii. Pythagoras et Plato didicerunt philosophiam ex columnis Mercurii in aegypto. Columnae Mercurii plenae doctrinis. Ante omnem rationis usum inest naturaliter insita deorum notio. Immo tactus quidam divinitatis melior, quam notitia, ex quo incitatur naturalis appetitus boni, et ratiocinatio atque iudicium. Essentialis cognitio divinorum, quae anima est perpetua ac re vera non est cognitio haec, qua deo fruimur. In cognitione enim est alteritas, sed contactus quidam essentialis et simplex. Non enim possumus attingere unitatem ipsam, nisi unitissimo quodam et unitate mentis, quae super animae, mentisque proprietatem extat.” This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 79 Ficino’s paratactic brevity reflects that his translation was originally composed as marginalia in his Greek manuscript (fig. 5). It distills what he deems essential: the pseudonymous attribution of ancient texts to Hermes; that ancient philosophers sat at the feet of Egyptian priests, and that Plato and Pythagoras learned from the writings inscribed on the columns of Hermes; and also the idea that a union with the One is not possible by discursive reasoning but by a certain contact. Iamblichus’s and Plotinus’s shared attention to nondiscursive union or contact with the divine (whether noetic or theurgic) allows Ficino’s comments to harmonize their intellectual origins and goals. Thus, at the end of De Vita 3 Ficino claims that Plotinus’s and Hermes’s reflections on statues confirm what Iamblichus says about sacrifices. In fact, the final passage in De Vita 3 on Hermetic statues also begins and ends with Iamblichus. Continuing the investigation that started as a marginal note on his Plotinus manuscript about whether the invocation of gods and daemons necessarily compel their presence, Ficino surveys a variety of materials from Iamblichus’s De mysteriis, which contains his famous debate with Porphyry on religious worship, philosophy, theology, and theurgy. Ficino uses the comparison between Hermes and Plotinus to conclude the De Vita: “And although daemons cannot be enclosed in statues by any astronomical principle, nevertheless where through worship proffered to them they have been present, Porphyry says they have rendered oracles by astronomical rules and therefore frequently ambiguously. Porphyry is right to say ‘ambiguously,’ since Iamblichus demonstrates that true and certain prophecy cannot come from such evil daemons, nor is it produced by human arts or by nature; it is only produced in purified minds by divine inspiration.”129 As recalled from Ficino’s marginal notes, it is Porphyry who inquires whether invocations can compel daemons to inhabit statues, and who states that their oracles would deceive.130 Ficino cites Iamblichus to argue that neither nature nor art leads to prophetic truth, and that only the theurgic purgations of the mind prepare it to receive divine spirit. In Ficino’s interpretation it is this divine inspiration that guides Egyptians to ascribe their writings to Hermes. Ficino’s final remarks in De Vita encapsulate the heuristic structure of the third book as a progression through nature, art, and theurgic performances to prepare the self to receive a contact with the divine. In the end, one cannot subsume De Vita 3 simply under the category Hermetic magic. One needs to acknowledge that De Vita 3 originates in Ficino’s reading of Plotinus on prayer, which in turn is filtered through Iamblichus. Ficino’s Iamblichean interpretation 129 Ficino, 2002, 390–91 (1576, 572). A Porphyrian framework would, therefore, lend itself better to a demonological interpretation of Ennead 4.3.11 in the mode of Augustine’s disparagement of the Asclepius. 130 This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 80 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 Figure 5. Ficino’s marginal translation of Iamblichus, De mysteriis. MS Rome, Biblioteca Vallicelliana, F 20, fol. 1r. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). FICINO ON FORCE, MAGIC, AND PRAYERS 81 of Plotinus’s famous Phaedrean saying, “never quit forming your own statue [ἄγαλμα],” is representative of his thinking. He looks to Iamblichus for a performative philosophy, which seeks to form the self through external images, prayers, and symbols, like a sculptor chiseling—purging or purifying—his material to shape a beautiful face.131 131 Plotinus, 1964–83, 1:103 (Ennead 1.6.9.13). Ficino’s commentary to Ennead 1.6 is inflected by Iamblichus’s De mysteriis: Plotinus, 1580, 49–50. Other sources for Ficino’s understanding of Hermes as ancient theologian, as Toussaint remarked, are Ficino’s commentaries to Ennead 3.4 and 4.4.43: Iamblichus, 1497, VI–VIII. See also the material indicated by Moreschini; Allen, 1990 and 2008. A detailed study of Ficino’s work on Iamblichus and on his manuscripts—benefiting from the promised editions of the notes to his Plotinus (F€orstel) and his Iamblichus (Saffrey) manuscripts—will also improve our knowledge of this Renaissance archaeology of ancient philosophy. This content downloaded from 129.074.250.206 on March 10, 2017 14:21:01 PM All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). 82 R E N AI S S A N C E QU A RT E R L Y VOLUME LXX, NO. 1 BI B LI O GR A PHY Archival and Manuscript Sources MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 30.29. Cited as MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 30.29. MSS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 82.10–11. Cited as MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 82.10–11. MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 87.03. Cited as MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 87.03. MS Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Plut. 89, sup.38. Cited as MS Florence, LAUR, Plut. 89, sup. 38. 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