The following three chapters examine how Ficino employs a prosopopoeic interpretation of the corpus by identifying dialogues and passages where Plato speaks in particular voices. Chapter 3 is dedicated to Socrates, Chapter 4 to Pythagoreans, and Chapter 5 to Plato himself. Ficino cultivated his role as the gatekeeper to the Platonic tradition, and he liked to tell his readers that he had the task of being Plato’s interpreter, teaching the Athenian foreigner in Italy how to speak Latin. Plato, for Ficino, played a similar role to that of Janus, since his writings were fundamentally doorways into the philosophy of two great predecessors who chose principally to communicate their thought orally: Pythagoras and Socrates. According to Ficino, therefore, Plato wrote in three principal prosopa or personae: his own persona, as Socrates, and as a Pythagorean. The dialogues’ interlocutors are in other words mouths through which Plato can transcribe and communicate voices of philosophical traditions in order to record them in writing.
FIGURE 6. Diagram of Ficino’s reading of Plato.
The reading of Plato that Ficino offers relies on his understanding of Socrates and Pythagoras, but since neither of them wrote—although there is pseudepigraphic material ascribed to Pythagoras that I discuss in Chapter 4—his interpretation of them in turn relies on Plato and later Platonic (principally Middle Platonic and Neoplatonic) sources, which themselves depend on Plato. This can be represented in a rudimentary diagram (Figure 6). There is therefore a central hermeneutic circle present in most of Ficino’s interpretations. This diagrammatic structure, however, is, sensu stricto, too simplistic. Ficino’s interpretation relies on a multiplicity of other Greek and Latin sources, such as Aristotle, Xenophon, Speusippus, Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Quintilian, and Apuleius, to name a few, including also Christian ones, such as Augustine, Eusebius, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (to keep the list short).
The theologian, biblical scholar, and Plato translator Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), whose writings have fundamentally shaped how we now conceive of the hermeneutic circle, sought to break through the circular reading of the Platonic corpus by proposing that an authentic Plato can be formed only from internal and direct sources. One ought to interpret the parts of the corpus in light of the whole, and the whole in light of the parts. Ficino was quite simply a bibliophile (or bibliomaniac) who read a vast number of works of various genres, which found their way into his exegesis of the Platonic corpus. Therefore, in order to describe more adequately the hermeneutic circle that I attributed to him above one would need to punctuate it on all sides with exegetical influences from external and indirect sources—“contaminations” according to Schleiermacher’s sola scriptura hermeneutics.32
Whether or not Ficino got Plato right by Schleiermacher’s or present standards is not, however, of primary concern in the book. Rather the questions how and why Ficino interpreted Plato guide my work’s historical approach toward its subject matter. The use of the dialogue form by Plato has often puzzled his interpreters. Modern developmentalists tend to smooth out the wrinkles of inconsistencies, if not outright contradictions, in the fabric of the different dialogues by dividing Plato’s corpus into early, middle, and late periods.33 Even if Ficino follows the ancient tradition of assuming that Plato wrote the Phaedrus first, as he also believes that Plato wrote the Laws last as an old man, and puts forward something like a developmental account of Plato’s epistemology (which I examine in Chapter 3), his reading of the corpus would fall closer to what is now called a unitarian approach. Whereas developmentalists aim at arranging the differences in the dialogues into coherent stages of Plato’s philosophical development, Ficino tries his hand early on at arranging a set of ten dialogues into a philosophical order. In general he discusses the differences in Plato’s dialogues in terms of the philosopher’s polyphony or symphony of voices. Ficino’s Plato speaks in different registers and adopts various personae for different purposes.
My book examines Ficino’s appropriation of Plato and Platonisms to form a Plato, who in turn becomes the primary Plato of the Italian (and later) European Renaissance. The book adopts the hermeneutical strategy of following Ficino’s own prescriptive hermeneutics of dividing the Platonic corpus into three primary personae—Socratic, Pythagorean, and Platonic—and studies the historical effect of this approach on the formation of Ficino’s Platonism. It analyses the specific sources for Ficino’s hermeneutics and does not shy away from pointing out the limits of his schema, identifying moments where Ficino strays from his own route. The structure of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 follows Ficino’s map, but the reader should bear in mind that the parameters of Socratic, Pythagorean, and Platonic personae are at times nothing more than a heuristic roadmap even for Ficino.
It is not my aim to convince the reader to adopt any particular Ficinian interpretation of Plato. Just as scholars of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) would presumably not try to convince present-day students to follow him in rejecting the Laws as a completely spurious dialogue, so I have no intention of persuading the reader to adopt Ficino’s opinion that Plato wrote the Laws in his own persona (the Athenian Stranger) but the Republic in Pythagorean personae. Today the Republic is certainly one of the most popular works assigned in university classrooms. The Laws by contrast are normally studied only by more advanced students of Plato. Given the centrality of the Republic and the peripheral place of the Laws to many modern understandings of Plato, Ficino’s interpretation might appear at first glance odd or simply wrong. Yet a few recent interpreters, like Ficino, have identified of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws as Plato, albeit for different reasons.34 The Republic has a central role in Ficino’s interpretation of Plato, but often for reasons alien to Plato scholars today. Simply stated, the supposed Pythagorean dimensions in the Republic and in Plato’s works as a whole take on an importance for Ficino rarely found today.
Beyond this historical interest, Ficino’s reading of the Platonic corpus through a series of personae may have the salutary effect of distancing and destabilizing our own hermeneutical prejudices towards the Platonic corpus. They force us to think about our own interpretation of Plato in the longue durée of Plato interpretations.35 Renaissance philosophy has long endured the disparagements of eclecticism, syncretism, and lack of system that has been flung in its direction on occasion since the time of Johann Jakob Brucker (1696–1770).36 In certain respects there is a way in which Ficino’s Plato is more familiar to present readers than some ancient traditions of Platonism. On the one hand, we possess much more of Ficino’s writings than the fragmentary works of some Academic or Middle Platonists. With Ficino we are even better off than with most Neoplatonists for whom we still have many of their voluminous commentaries. Yet, on the other hand, Ficino stands at a point of convergence of many of these older interpretive traditions. To understand Ficino’s