Marsilio Ficino

[Anonymous No.16522795]

How come this lad gets completely slept on? His Sun analogy for the Trinity might possibly be the best one ever composed;

>There is nothing in the world more like the divine trinity than the Sun. For in one substance the Sun a three-foldness exists, distinct in relation yet united. Firstly a natural fecundity which is completely hidden from our senses, secondly, a manifest light flowing out of this fecundity, ever equal to it, and thirdly a heating virtue quite equal to both.
>The fecundity represents The Father; light, likened to intelligence represents The Son conceived of intelligence; heat stands for the loving Holy Spirit.

[Anonymous No.16522958]

>brought back Plato
yea, I'm thinkin based

[Anonymous No.16523002]

>>16522795
>How come this lad gets completely slept on?
Because /lit/'s mindset is still meme-oriented, in the broadest sense of the term. These people are used to determine what is worth and not worth reading on the basis of an osmotic and rather confused sensorial perception of the 'literary myth', whatever it could mean, as long as it is something 'in the air', something that they have alread heard, something that they feel is cool.

Marsilio Ficino is one the few giants of Philosophy that the world has.

[Anonymous No.16523228]

>>16522795
which of his writings is this from? I'd like to read more.

[Anonymous No.16523315]

>>16523228
My guess is The Platonic Theology. I Tatti has a 4 volume version (I Tatti is the Renaissance division of the Loeb Classical Library series, the ones with the sky blue book covers)

[Anonymous No.16523330]

On the topic of the Florentine Platonists, I will be eternally butthurt about how that retard destroy Pletho's Nomoi before it could be archived.

[Anonymous No.16523350]

>>16523315
thank you.

[Anonymous No.16523358]

>>16523002
>on the basis of an osmotic and rather confused sensorial perception

[Anonymous No.16523364]

>>16523002
based

[Anonymous No.16523419]

>the Sun is like three persons with a shared essence because I can come up with three things the Sun does
WOW NOW THIS IS PHILOSOPHY

[Anonymous No.16523528]

>>16523419
It’s a metaphor you dip.

>The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances.
(Aristotle’s Rhetoric)

[Anonymous No.16523532]

>>16523002
>Marsilio Ficino is one the few giants of Philosophy that the world has.
Based on what criteria.

[Anonymous No.16523551]

>>16522795
Has anyone read his “three books on life”? I’m interested in his health advice.

[Anonymous No.16523986]

>>16523532
I shall refrain from expanding on the fact that Ficino translated the entirety of Plato and Plotinus into Latin, which was not even his day-to-day language, just for the benefit of Western culture in the centuries to come. For that alone, he should already be considered a genius. But the main fact is that the inhuman job he did was also accompanied by another huge work, the process of rewriting, reinterpreting and ultimately rebuilding from the ground up that complex philosophy he was mediating into our world. The 2000 pages of the 'Theologia Platonica' represent the most perfect synthesis (or harmonisation) ever created between the Pagan world and the Christian world. It is uncountable how many modern thinkers have been racking their brains to find a solution of this contrast, devoting their energies to determine which one was better, if the Pagan or the Christian world, with the result that they always split into opposing factions... And the only reason why this happened was that they hadn't read Ficino. Everything was there, ready to be absorbed, and studied... everything on the sheets since the 15th century. That compromise, that bright solution of all the contrasts between Antiquity and Christianity was already settled by Ficino in a perfect system of thought that draws from multiple doctrines and sciences. Some contemporary scholars even said that Ficino invented psychology (as the science of the soul) 500 years before Freud and Jung... All of Jung, indeed, is already in Ficino. Only a retard would disagree on the fact that he's one of the greatest philosophers of all time.

[Anonymous No.16524025]

>>16523986
Anon you have peaked my interest. Where should I start with Ficino? Platonic Theology looks interesting

[Anonymous No.16524091]

>>16523986
>which was not even his day-to-day language
He spoke Italian. Close enough.
>The 2000 pages of the 'Theologia Platonica' represent the most perfect synthesis (or harmonisation) ever created between the Pagan world and the Christian world.
Isn't that basically what all those church fathers and medieval philosophers were already doing? Reconciling Abrahamic and Greek thought?
>Some contemporary scholars even said that Ficino invented psychology (as the science of the soul) 500 years before Freud and Jung
Freud and Jung did not invent psychology. Thanks for outing yourself pseud.

[Anonymous No.16524632]

>>16523228
its from De Sole, The Book of the Sun

[Anonymous No.16524685]

>>16524025
Start with his commentaries on Plato
Theres a compilation by Arthur Farndell, who has published most if not all of his commentaries in English and each text is fairly short.
His most famous commentary is on the Symposium but start with the collection of commentaries Farndell titled "Garden of Philosophy".
Then jump into the Platonic Theology and do his Three Books on Life last, and his commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius and Plotinus might be unintelligible unless you've read them too.
If you really like Ficino, then check out (obviously Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius) Eriugena and Meister Eckhart.
Ficino does use both St. Thomas and St. Augustine's thinking too, more so Aquinas.
Lastly, he was very well versed in Hermeticism so that's worth looking into on the side as well.

[Anonymous No.16524714]

>>16524025
Some contemporaneous reading

[Anonymous No.16524741]

>>16524714
kino

[Anonymous No.16525021]

>>16523986
Translations by themselves don't require genius, it's just a very arduous thing to do when you have an entire corpus to work with.

[Anonymous No.16525032]

>>16523986
Also, you haven't provided a single inference from his work that would convince us of his genius. Sucking him off is not enough. Do better.

[Anonymous No.16525050]

>>16522795
>His Sun analogy
>his

[Anonymous No.16525059]

>>16525021
His platonic theology isn't a translation

[Anonymous No.16525101]

>>16522795
>>16524714
Somewhat unrelated question, but have you ever read Giulio "Delminio" Camillo? The picture of this publication by Adelphi brought him to my mind and I was curious about his work.

[Anonymous No.16525113]

>>16523330
Just read a Plato's Laws.

[Anonymous No.16525186]

>>16525059
I was talking about what Anon said in the very first line of his post.

"I shall refrain from expanding on the fact that Ficino translated the entirety of Plato and Plotinus into Latin"

[Anonymous No.16525550]

>>16524025
I do not join the other anon in the recommendation to start with the commentaries. Do it only if you're so interested in Ficino that you desire to read all his works and deepen his figure to the maximum degree. But beware, his written production is enormous. Otherwise, just pick his masterpiece, the 'Platonic Theology', and plunge into it for a while. You don't need particular requirements to understand it, just basic knowledge of Greek mythology, Plato (obviously) and the Church fathers. Other great works are 'The book of Love' and his writings on astrology.

>>16524091
>Isn't that basically what all those church fathers and medieval philosophers were already doing? Reconciling Abrahamic and Greek thought?
I wouldn't say so. They were *converting* ancient thought into a new one. They drew from the Greeks and Romans only those concepts that they liked or needed, to build something radically different. They didn't harvest that tradition for what it was, they used it. Even from a trivial linguistic or aesthetic perspective, Ficino restores the Greeks for what they are, as a philologist would do. To indicate the psychopomp or the divine mind, he uses Hermes or Mercury, not the Holy Spirit. But in his mind most of these concepts coincide. Keep in mind that he was born in a very imaginative environment, the golden age of the Florentine Academy, where philosophers where friends with painters such as Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, Piero di Cosimo. And just a few miles away from Florence, at the court of Ferrara, there were Francesco del Cossa and Cosmè Tura, both committed to resurrect the ancient esoteric imagery through painting.

>Freud and Jung did not invent psychology. Thanks for outing yourself pseud.
I know, but Freud invented psychoanalysis and took psychology to a new level. The psychology of the 19th century is completely irrelevant for us today. What I meant is that Ficino did not simply anticipate that shallow, romanticism-drenched form of psychology, but even a lot of concepts that you find in Freud and especially in Jung.

>>16525021
Fair enough. My point was that Ficino's philosophical genius was also combined with an incommensurable effort in front of which most translators of today would pale. And this must be considered *despite* the fact that his written production is truly immense. The guy had limitless energy.

>>16524714
There it is, another masterpiece of Neoplatonic Renaissance. The 15th century was really the most kino age.

[Anonymous No.16525597]

>>16525101
>'L'idea del theatro' ('The idea of the theatre') is among the works that best embody the splendor that the art of memory – nourished by hermeticism and lullism, neoplatonism and magical, astrological and cabalistic suggestions – knew in the sixteenth century. Compared to mnemotechnical treatises, the difference is dizzying: the classification grid that its author, Giulio Camillo, offers us (forty-nine "places", marked by one or more images, which arise from the intersection between the vertical order of the seven planets and the horizontal one of the seven degrees) functions in fact as a chessboard which, thanks to the movement and the combination of its components, is able to generate new meanings and new knowledge: like an artificial mind, therefore, so that remembering becomes dangerously similar to creating, or recreating, the world. But there is much more: Lina Bolzoni, who has long investigated the intricate and fragmentary manuscript tradition, reveals to us that 'L'idea del theatro' is actually only the synthetic re-enactment of a huge project, a theater of memory (or House of Wisdom) whose nature remains uncertain (book, building, wooden maquette, purely mental model), but which we see boldly suspended between idea and machine, metaphysics and alchemical myth. A project so captivating as to seduce entire generations and to resurface, through plagiarism and rewriting, in the most surprising and unpredictable forms: from a mysterious villa in Friuli described by Doni to the contemporary works of art by Marino Auriti and Achilles Rizzoli. Which is not surprising: as Lina Bolzoni observes, the history of the Theatro of Giulio Camillo leads us to the heart of the role of images in the sixteenth century, sheds light on their extraordinary power – the ability to cross "the mind of the reader who reads a poem and displays, theaters of memory, palaces and collections, real or imaginary, and of course the library".

[Anonymous No.16525654]

>>16525550
>What I meant is that Ficino did not simply anticipate that shallow, romanticism-drenched form of psychology, but even a lot of concepts that you find in Freud and especially in Jung.
Not the anon you're replying to, but could you provide some examples?

[Anonymous No.16525677]

>>16525550
>>drew from the Greeks and Romans only those concepts that they liked or needed

It's not really possible to draw everything from every tradition. What notions does Ficino adopt from the Epicureans or the Old Academy, for example?

[Anonymous No.16525682]

>>16523986
>It is uncountable how many modern thinkers have been racking their brains to find a solution of this contrast, devoting their energies to determine which one was better, if the Pagan or the Christian world, with the result that they always split into opposing factions...
Yeah pagans and christcuck retards. There is a reason why all these synthesizers always polish Christianity with Platonism and never the other way around. Nothing in the Bible could ever improve upon the Platonist doctrines.

Therefore men of class and virtue forsake everything inferior for the better and so leave Christianity in the trash heap of history, where it belongs.
>the process of rewriting, reinterpreting and ultimately rebuilding from the ground up that complex philosophy he was mediating into our world. The 2000 pages of the 'Theologia Platonica' represent the most perfect synthesis (or harmonisation) ever created between the Pagan world and the Christian world.
Maybe that is why he is forgotten though. Because this have all been attempted before and every time it was "fulfilled". But guess what, Christianity still died. And it wasn't because there wasn't enough Platonism infused into it, nor that X or y Christian mystic didn't sometimes say something profound, or that people just haven't read Aquinas, or that people stopped thinking churches are aesthetically appealing. It happened because what is essential to Christianity. Christianity collapsed because of the Bible, because of Jesus Christ, because of heaven and hell, because of Adam and Eve, because of the future physical resurrection, because of creation ex nihilo.

I dream of a world without Christian copes.

[Anonymous No.16526976]

bump

[Anonymous No.16527249]

>>16525654
The idea that the consciousness is not one, but multiple – which is central in the works of Jung – is already in Ficino. He says: «The soul is multiple and mobile». To know oneself means to look within the soul, in order to find those multiple "affections" that constitute the soul (this is psychoanalysis in nuce). Another common point is the centrality of images. Cosciousness depends on imagination, without imagination there wouldn't be consciousness. A severe disfunction of the soul is the absence of images in our thought, the unawareness of them. Just like Jung used the psychoanalytic therapy to bring to light the deepest images from the unconscious of his patients, in order to integrate them into their psychic life, Ficino believed in the importance for us to be aware of our own soul's affections, which are, in short, images. This is why there is this huge similarity between the interest of Jung in alchemical imagery and the interest of Ficino in ancient mythology. If we look closer, the metaphors and concepts that Ficino was studying (he also translated Hesiod) are nothing but archetypes, the same thing as Jung's archetypes. The importance of being aware of images in Ficino's "science of the soul" also explains his interest in reviving ancient mythology and religion (a concern central to the entire Renaissance) and his exceptional intellectual fellowship with painters like Botticelli (a collaboration that is unparalleled in the history of Western culture). Think about Primavera, such a complex and obscure painting: its aim was not purely aesthetic... it was more like a study based on Ficino's teachings, and once it was placed in the Medici's Villa di Castello where the intellectuals of the Florentine Academy used to gather, it served as a powerful reminder of our deepest nature that is both human and divine thanks to the soul, which is, again, made of images. Another extraordinary resemblance between Jung and Ficino is in the concept of the anima mundi, which became the "collective unconscious" of Jung. Ficino talks about the individual soul in the same way as he talks about the universal soul, which is exactly what Jung does when he says that the archetypes put the individual in relation with the rest of humanity. Even the different parts (or manifestations) of the soul are similar in Jung and Ficino: according to the latter, the soul (psyché) is composed of Mind (rational soul or celestial soul), Idolum (imaginative soul or fantasy) and Body (corporeal soul or soul of the beasts... which is absolutely not the same thing as the "body" as we understand it). Now, since the third is not only interconnected with the others, but is also the part that interconnects us to Nature, it is surprising to see that Jung conceived in the same way the strict relationship between the archetypal imagination and the instincts. For both, fantasy is the key function of the soul, the instrument that enables us to impose our destiny upon nature.

[Anonymous No.16527712]

>>16525677
He doesn't adopt any notion from the Epicureans, only from the Hermetic, Orphic and Platonic traditions.

[Anonymous No.16527777]

>>16525682
>I dream of a world without Christian copes.

[Anonymous No.16528145]

>>16527777
based and checked

[Anonymous No.16529293]

for me it's a bump

[Anonymous No.16529305]

>>16527777
Based and checkkked

[Anonymous No.16530786]

bump

[Anonymous No.16530884]

The Father: The autistic shitposter, who tries to minmax words with the replies he will receive
Jesus: The OP who actually delivers
Holy Spirit: The guy that posts the sauce