There is therefore, I believe, a close correspondence for these humanists between the dialogue and the epistolary form. Christopher Celenza has singled out the term disputatio from Cortesi’s description of his correspondence with Poliziano, explaining how rules of public epistles would allow for disagreement on good terms.71 Given Poliziano’s variegated style, responding to his call for debate would have been a particularly difficult task, especially since the short length of his letter reveals one of his strongest arguments: that he has little time for rehearsing Ciceronian routines.72 Giovanni Pico and Barbaro stage their letters as two courtroom orators, Pico’s eloquent barbarian philosopher and Barbaro’s Paduan ape, argue similarly over the defense of scholastic argumentation, almost self-consciously testing the limits of compatibility between humanist and scholastic disputatio. One can also easily imagine how the letters between Poliziano and Cortesi, and even Pico and Barbaro, could resemble oral conversations that might have occurred in person. Their letters could in fact include reworked versions of oral arguments that they transcribed onto paper for a larger public. Indeed, the letters between Gianfrancesco Pico and Bembo make it explicitly clear that they were restaging in writing what originally took place face to face. There certainly are, as Bembo remarks in his letter, differences between their oral conversations and their letters. Nevertheless, their epistles mark an attempt at transferring this oral debate into writing. They describe their own exchange as a disputatio and a controversia (a term they also apply to Poliziano and Cortesi’s letters), but also importantly as sermones, colloquia, and orationes.73 The language introducing Bembo’s response places it firmly within the field of rhetoric, and the humanists in whose circle it circulated would immediately have recognized it as such. It reveals the performative nature of their epistles and sets the stage for the written debate. Bembo carefully documents the resemblances as well as the differences, even noting improvements, carried over from their previous oral conversations and speeches into letters. Despite the effects of time and memory on writing, in Bembo’s opinion, the previously spoken words are not completely separated from their transposition into a literary form. These humanist epistolary forms are thus fabrications of discursive rhetorical personae that anchor themselves more firmly into the memory of their readers. In short, whether it is through Ciceronians reanimating only the single corpse of Cicero or eclectic imitators stitching together various body parts to form a creature of their own design, examinations of past languages are akin to necromantic desires to raise dead voices by evoking fragmentary bursts from various otherwise silent prosopa. Prosopopoeia and enargeia are thus key ways in which Renaissance humanists investigated and related to the past.
Ficino’s Persona: A Platonic Republic of Letters
Ficino is absent from these famous epistolary conversations of friends and at times amicable competitors. He is also almost completely absent in scholarly studies on Ciceronianism, rhetoric, and Renaissance dialogue.74 Nevertheless, Ficino’s epistolography is directly relevant to these topics. The eldest of the aforementioned humanists by at least twenty-one years, Ficino corresponded with many of them, often expressing a common bond of friendship. Cortesi and Bembo are two exceptions, but Bembo’s father, the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Bembo (1433–1519), was one of Ficino’s favorite correspondents. When surveying these controversies a generation later in his Ciceronianus (1528), Erasmus claimed that only Pietro Bembo could be considered Ciceronian, explaining that Barbaro’s style is overworked like that of Quintilian and Pliny, the styles of Giovanni and Gianfrancesco Pico are harmed by their zeal for philosophy and theology, and Poliziano’s great talent for all kinds of writings does not compare to Cicero. He groups Ficino in their company, but the philosopher fares only slightly better than Cortesi, whom Erasmus ignores altogether, since Erasmus simply says that he would not dare to speak about Ficino’s style.75 Why would Erasmus hesitatingly write of Ficino’s style as being on the periphery of Ciceronian debates?
Like his contemporaries, and like the generation of humanists before him, Ficino continued the Petrarchan project of collecting his epistles for publication. Like other humanists of his day, Ficino sent his letters to individual addressees, had scribes prepare second versions of some meant for transmission to other recipients in his network, and circulated collections in manuscript copies dedicated to important patrons. He was, however, also one the first humanists, and certainly one the first philosophers, to make use of the printing press to publish his collected letters, bringing out twelve volumes of his epistolography in Venice in 1495. In writing these epistles Ficino does not immediately follow the two traditional models for philosophical letters, Seneca and Cicero, yet philosophical style was nonetheless important to him.76 If Ficino did not participate in the above-mentioned epistolary controversies and disputations on Ciceronianism, his writings neglect neither to address the question of rhetorical personae nor to develop a particular philosophical style. As I pointed out in the Introduction to this book, Ficino employs a trope inspired by Plato’s Phaedrus in the preface to the 1495 printing of his letters, addressing the prefatory letter to his letters themselves, which he personifies as his children. On the first page of the volume, therefore, Ficino signals to his readers that his letters will be written in a Platonic style.
The fact that the Platonic philosopher and excellent Hellenist also received an education both in scholastic philosophy and in the Latin curriculum of the liberal arts in humanist schools in Florence should not be neglected in the present discussion.77 These latter two facets of his education are evident throughout his life. First, concerning his scholasticism, Ficino cites numerous scholastic authorities, and with the exception of so-called Averroists and Alexandrians, he usually does so positively. He regularly adopts scholastic terminology in his Latin prose, which demonstrates that he did not fear employing Latin as a lingua artificialis, but he also constantly returns to the Greek sources and demonstrates a certain willingness to critique scholastic neologisms and rethink their Latin prose in Platonic terms.78 For instance, in his epitome to the Euthydemus, Ficino critiques the terminological confusion of logic and dialectic present throughout the Middle Ages.79 More than just orthographic and terminological preferences lie behind Ficino’s critique of dialecticen, dialectica, and logica. In fact, there is a Platonic critique of syllogistic methods. Plotinus and later Neoplatonists argued that dialectic is the highest part of philosophy and not merely an external instrument to clarify its subject matter and formulate arguments, and in doing so differentiated themselves from most Stoics and Peripatetics.80 Ficino pairs dialectic with rhetoric and also distinguishes rhetoric from pure sophistry, which he often characterizes as magically enchanting or bewitching (fascinationis maleficae speciem) its audience’s mind by manipulating appearances instead of speaking truth. Ficino, however, stakes his claim on Platonic grounds. Dialecticen (the medieval arts of logic and syllogistics) concerns itself with terms, predicates, and propositions, and if not correctly used is also capable of approaching sophistry when it employs enthymeme. Dialectica or Platonic dialectic, conversely, concerns itself not with terms, predicates, and propositions as such but rather with the movement of the mind itself in analysis and synthesis, that is, the division and weaving together of the presence of intelligibles as logoi in the mind. Ficino’s argument closely resembles Plotinus’s in Enneads 1.3.4, where Plotinus explains that the discursive process of dialectic comes to rest in the quiet tranquility (ἡσυχία) of Plato’s noetic “Plain of truth” (Phaedrus 248b6), and leaves logic behind to busy itself by meddling in the affairs of propositions and syllogisms (πολυπραγμονοῦσα).81 Thus Ficino thought of dialectic as the philosophical or even metaphysical-theological capstone to the demonstrative and mathematical sciences.
Ficino’s commentary on Plato’s Parmenides once more places Latin neologisms under the light of Platonic metaphysics.82 When some