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November 29 - December 28, 2021
“it is difficult, or rather impossible, either to maintain a republican form of government in states which have become corrupt or to create such a form afresh.”
Final disaster comes not from outside, but from within.
doctrine of love as the desire for beauty had a peculiar attraction in quattrocento Florence.
Thomistic man’s proper place is at the center of creation, because he is the crucial mediating point between spirit and matter. Ficino’s Platonic man occupies the same slot in the divine hierarchy.
Plato locates Love at the very heart of the primeval Chaos from which cosmic order will emerge.
This was to prove that all religions and philosophies, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, actually formed a single body of knowledge.
Pico even drew up a final list of nine hundred theses that underpinned all philosophies and religions and doctrines, drawing from such diverse sources as the followers of Plato and Aristotle, but also from Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, the Hebrew Kabbalah and Arab philosophers and Pythagoras—even the magical treatises of the mysterious ancient alchemist Hermes Trismegistus.
why Pico immersed himself in the Kabbalah and studied the ancient Orphic hymns in hopes that their harmonies might reveal special magical properties.
“Divine subjects and the secret Mysteries must not be rashly divulged,” Pico says. All “divine knowledge … must be covered with enigmatic veils and poetic dissimulation.…”
but by design.
would lead the Renaissance mind down some dark passageways, including alchemy and black magic.
Rosicrucians and the possibility that a secret brotherhood of the Rosy Cross controlled access to the world’s final hidden truths.23 Still
“Virtue’s what Heaven must despise … seeing they would give us a dead tree from which to pluck our fruit.”
Michelangelo constantly compares love to a burning fire that sears the consciousness and torments the body, but also scours away worldly corruption, so that the soul “like gold purged in a fire returns to God.”
By the time he finished four years later, he had transformed the pope’s commission into his personal statement on the grand themes of the Platonism of his day—and into the artistic masterpiece of the Renaissance. It is the perfect counterpart to The School of Athens, and Giovanni Pico would have been the perfect person to decipher the ceiling’s rich complexity and its various veiled meanings. For instance, he would have immediately recognized why Michelangelo broke the ceiling down into three separate zones, each stacked above the other. The lowest, running along the tops of the chapel’s
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The third realm, the great spine of Michelangelo’s plan, are the panels depicting the Book of Genesis, where the soul experiences God’s presence directly. The entire work gives us a visual tour of what a disciple of Ficino would call deificatio, or the soul’s return to God, the final consummation of spiritual enlightenment. The Sistine ceiling contains no direct references to Christianity or Christ. Michelangelo the Platonist didn’t feel the need for any, because his message is more universal. Instead all the scenes are from the Old Testament, which every Renaissance Platonist knew to be the
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It is only when we come to the central panels that we see that Michelangelo has moved Renaissance Platonism to a new level of consciousness. As art historian S. J. Freedberg observes, there is nothing like it anywhere in th...
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Physics and Metaphysics and On the Soul.
Oxford
In Praise of Folly.
Most teachers were scarcely older than their teenage charges. They preferred to stick to rote memorization and to the traditional trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the last of which had come to mean memorizing the rules for conducting a formal dialectical disputation. No one ventured to discuss God or the soul or the Bible in class. With the Inquisition always watching, it was much too dangerous.
Still, both Luther and Calvin display the power of Plato’s thymos in action. It is the enemy of moderation—but
I pull out a ruler and compass. I begin tracing circles and measuring their diameter and their circumference. I split them into sections, first on paper, then in my mind. I am in Plato’s realm of dianoia, the realm of geometry and number.3 I continue to draw and calculate and watch as the shapes dissolve into lines, points, triangles, and parabolas. Finally, only the numbers are left. I realize they express mathematical formulae that exist in perfect proportion to each other, with each ratio (1:2, 1:3) leading constantly to a higher and higher level of abstract order. Then I have it. This
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am in Plato’s realm of dianoia, the realm of geometry and number.
Book VI of Plato’s Republic.
Ficino and Michelangelo to Erasmus. It also lurks in the deepest recesses of modern science.
Ficino’s divine and profane love.
Padua’s teachers stressed the original principle of Aristotle’s philosophy of nature: that knowledge is a process of discovery using the power of our senses.
The reason is that Vincenzo Galilei was a mathematician as well as a musicologist. His goal was to return musical theory to its Pythagorean roots. The father, like the son, understood the power of number not as a way to count or measure, as Aristotelians did, but rather as Number, reason’s window into the hidden order of nature.
Aristarchus.§
Hermetic
dialogue in everyday Italian, called Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
Bruno’s belief in Egyptian magical religion, which he shared with Ficino, would go on to become a key ingredient in Freemasonry.
Harvey’s fellow Englishman, Sir Francis Bacon, supplied one answer: It leaves us firmly in charge. As self-declared pundit of the new science, Bacon was delighted to see Aristotelian natural philosophy with its “contentiousness” (an odd complaint from a lawyer) and its fetish for words, not deeds (ditto), get swept away.2
Descartes was steeped in it. Reducing the operations of the universe to a series of lines, circles, numbers, and equations suited his reclusive personality. His most famous saying, “I think, therefore I am”
“What is beyond geometry, is beyond us,”
Marsilio Ficino.
1661
After Newton’s death in 1727, when he was the acknowledged scientific genius of his age, the dozens of folio notebooks he had filled with his biblical studies were discovered.
These forces, Newton showed, exert a palpable and mathematically predictable influence on the behavior of all physical bodies. Yet they are entirely invisible and beyond any purely physical or mechanical explanation.
Gematria
His spirit provides the space through which all objects pass, from birds and trees to comets and stars in the sky; and His infinitude is found in the infinity of the cosmos, stretching out beyond our solar system into eternity.
Supreme Being supervised and guided the complex workings of the universe, including their own actions.
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge,
1660.
Alexander Pope
the notion of a cosmic order built on the will of God was about to show a very different, more sinister face.
What the visitors were seeing was more than a prodigious appetite in action. They were witnessing how the richest and most populous kingdom in Europe had been made to revolve around a single man, in a ritual of obedience as solemn as the Last Supper. They were also watching the poverty of politics in 1600s’ Europe.
Self-governing societies seemed doomed to be free but unstable. Because they existed in time, and were therefore subject to the vicissitudes of change and to men’s passions, they would inevitably hit a wall.† Like ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence, they were doomed to fall into the hands of a despot in order to save society from mob rule. Freedom, in short, must eventually lead to unfreedom.
Freedom ends with unfreedon
Like the Sun King, all of them turned their nation’s printing presses and church pulpits into royalist propaganda machines. What was then “the mainstream media” routinely pointed to the monarch as an essential link in the Great Chain of Being, the center of a divinely preordained and fixed order.
Versailles was clear: Your only alternative is mob rule and apocalypse.
Jefferson had to conclude that Plato had always been a fraud, “a dealer in mysticisms incomprehensible to the human
