Plato's Persona. Denis J.-J. Robichaud

Order for Plato’s Corpus

      Since Plato sowed the seeds of all wisdom throughout all of his dialogues, in the Republic he harvested all the principles of moral philosophy, in the Timaeus all of the knowledge of nature, in the Parmenides he encloses all theology as a whole…. On account of this in the present dialogue [i.e., the Parmenides], first Zeno the Eleatic, the disciple of the Pythagorean Parmenides, proves that the One is in the sensibles, by showing that if these many were in no way participating in the One, a number of errors would follow…. One ought to pay attention to the fact that in this dialogue [i.e., the Parmenides] when Plato speaks of “the One” in a Pythagorean manner (Pythagoreorum more) it can signify any one substance completely free from mater, for instance, God, intellect, and soul. But when he speaks of “other” and “others” one can understand both matter and those [forms] that come to be in matter.⁶⁵

      Both philosophers, therefore, understand the Timaeus and the Parmenides as complementary Pythagorean dialogues: one dealing with questions of nature, the other with theological questions. Furthermore, like Iamblichus, Ficino arranges the corpus of dialogues according to a specific philosophical order. He writes in the preface to Cosimo:

      Moreover, one can certainly conjecture that the titles of these dialogues proceed in an ordered mode of succession (successionis ordinem) from this reason, because the desire for the Good is inborn in all. In truth, in their youth men, deceived by their senses and by opinion, think that the Good is the possession of wealth, whence they labor with all their force to attain it, and it is for this reason that the De lucri cupiditate [Hipparchus] is first. But since in advanced years and whenever prompted by reason they begin to love the knowledge of divine things as a good, and the love of wisdom is philosophy, the book De philosophia [Amatores] is assigned the following place according to this order. For this reason the book De sapientia [Theages] follows them, since wisdom is sought through love, before we can possess it.⁶⁶

      Also like Iamblichus, Ficino employs a tripartite Neoplatonic scale of virtues to explain the philosophical order. I continue where I left off from the preface:

      To this the Meno, or De virtute, is added, since the light of wisdom, when it first appears, establishes decorum with each power and motion of the rational soul (animus), which clearly is called by the name virtue. But virtue bestows three things on the rational soul, that it may revert to itself, that it may convert toward its cause, and that it may oversee things below it. Since clearly the rational soul is an intermediary nature between divine and bodily things, it is then provided with virtue, when it cares for its own nature and does not mingle with worse things, and when it is converted to superior truths, while not neglecting the providence of inferior things. So that it reverts to itself, the First Alcibiades presents the nature of man (De natura hominis), and so that it is turned toward supernal realities, the Second Alcibiades makes visible the subject of prayer (De voto), and so that it governs inferior things, the Minos expounds on law (De lege).⁶⁷

      Despite all these similarities, there is one fatal problem with the argument that Ficino followed Iamblichus’s curriculum as we know it: namely, the fact that this specific order of dialogues is only available in one source text, the Anonymous Prolegomena to Plato’s Philosophy, which is extant in only one manuscript—and there is no evidence that Ficino knew it. In fact, Ficino’s order of dialogues is not identical to Iamblichus’s. How, then, does one make sense of the fact that the schema that Ficino developed bears resemblances to a Iamblichean model without his knowledge of this single valuable manuscript that contains Iamblichus’s precise order for the dialogues?