The soul is a triangle

“All Things Natural” is an English translation of Renaissance humanist Marsilio Ficino's commentary on Plato's dialogue “Timaeus”. I admit that it was a hard read, harder than the original dialogue, and that I skimmed most of it. A great part of the difficulty is that Ficino deals with (sacred?) geometry and musical harmony, which despite copious notes from one of the editors is completely above my head. The Platonists believed that God had created the world with perfect mathematical proportions, and Ficino is eager to prove the point to his patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent, to whom the work is dedicated.

Other sections are easier to understand. Ficino attempts to harmonize the creation story of “Timaeus” with the Biblical ditto. Plato seems to be suggesting that the Demiurge (his “creator-god”) fashioned preexistent, chaotic matter into an ordered cosmos in accordance with equally preexistent Forms or Ideas. Even worse, the Neo-Platonist commentators on whom Ficino is heavily dependent suggests that the world is eternal and emanates from God. By contrast, the Christian tradition talks about creatio ex nihilo and God's free will in creation. Ficino tries to prove that Plato says the same thing as the Christian exegetes. Of course, some suspect that this was just for show, and that the Platonic theologian was really a closeted pagan!

In the Platonist system, there is no Biblical fall, since “creation” or emanation itself is a kind of fall, the material world being an imperfect image of the world of Ideas precisely because it's several steps removed from the divine source. Here, Ficino doesn't attempt a harmonization, but seems to accept the Platonist scenario at face value. The legend of Atlantis is interpreted as an allegory of the fact that conflict and opposition are built-in features of the material world. Heraclitus is quoted in this context.

Ficino has a huge problem with Plato's belief in reincarnation, arguing that rebirth as an animal should be taken in the allegorical sense, while rebirth as a human or higher spiritual being is apparently more acceptable (although a Christian presumably can't believe that is happening either). Weirdly, I didn't see any discussion on Plato's famous statement that the Son of God is lying crosswise in the universe. Ficino's compendium hardly ever mentions Jesus.

As already indicated, Marsilio Ficino's interpretation of Plato owes much to Iamblichus, Porphyry and Proclus. He was presumably also familiar with astrological and magical treatises. Between God or The Good and the material world, there are a vast amount of daemonic creatures arranged in a hierarchy. The various classes of daemons are described in a surprisingly “initiated” manner. Some of them are malevolent, and the Renaissance philosopher actually discusses two exorcisms he supervised personally! Apparently, Saturnine demons are best thrown out when the Sun is in positive aspect with Jupiter, the demons positively loathing things Jovian.

“All Things Natural” isn't for the general reader, but advanced students of the Renaissance (or musical theory) might perhaps find it, shall we say, illuminating…