Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love Quotes

“For almost two hundred years, the De Amore was an 'in' book in courts all over Europe. Since the people who read the De Amore and talked about it were the same people whose patronage supported the artists of the period, the beneficiaries of that patronage were not slow to incorporate the secrets of Ficino into their works of art.

[...]Discussion of the nature of love had long figured in the social life of the Italian ducal courts, and the De Amore gave these courts something new to discuss, the topic of idealized love. Though the work had been written for and about men, its doctrine that the love of the body is a step toward a higher kind of love was especially welcomed by women.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“Because the De Amore was written as a Platonic work and because it was written for the Medici, any renaissance reader would have expected it to follow the Platonic mode of non-discursive form but also to conceal some more esoteric meaning that was apparent on the surface. This is, in fact, the way in which Giovanni Pico della Mirandola read De Amore. He ignored the external paraphernalia of the banquet discussion of the Symposium and discussed the work as if it were a treatise on love. This is the way Ficino intended the De Amore to be read. He intended that any ordinary person outside his own group be preoccupied by the fictions (the banquet and the commentary) which constitute the exoteric fable. What he intended for his friends to see in it was its esoteric meaning, the reasoned defense of 'Socratic' love. The fictions and the multiple authorities, the confusing aspects of the method of the work, are deliberate strategies of the technique of esotericism, the desire to write a work which says different things to different groups of people.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“The distinction between esoteric and exoteric meaning was particularly important to the Florentine Platonists for a social reason as well. Florence was a far more democratic society than most societies in northern Europe, and there was a tendency in Florence for the elite class to try to shore up the merely financial basis of its superiority by artificial intellectual devices; lacking the argument of birth which sufficed in other societies to sustain the dichotomy between the upper and lower classes, they tried to reinforce the distinction between the haves and have-nots by generating an intellectual dichotomy between those who understood and those who did not. Though Ficino himself was a have-not, he was employed by the social elite of the Medici circle, and almost everything he wrote up to his death of Piero was designed to serve the ends of developing an intellectual elitism to reinforce the Medici's financial elitism.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“The renaissance conception of esotericism is only a particular version of the ancient principle that writers who wish to conceal their meaning from some readers while making it available to others have always used one of two techniques for doing so. One is the technique of saying something which is perfectly clear but which will mean one thing to an uninstructed reader and another to an instructed reader. Myth is an example of this technique: to the child the myth is only a story; to an instructed reader the myth may be an allegory of some deeper meaning. The other technique is to use language which does not mean anything to anyone who does not know the code. This is the technique of encipherment, such as the system of using numbers in place of letters, or letters in place of other letters, or code names instead of ordinary names. In the renaissance each of these two techniques was associated with an ancient philosopher. The first with Plato and the second with Aristotle. [...]

A related distinction between the Platonic and Aristotelean methods of writing was that Plato wrote non-discursively, casting his ideas in the form of imaginary dialogues and myths [...] "The Platonic style is more poetic than philosophical," said Ficino.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“Most historians have explained Ficino's method on the ground that he is a syncretist: that he believed that Platonism was compatible not only with Christianity but also with all three of the other classical philosophies, and with the theologies of ancient Greece, Babylonia, and Egypt as well.

Another possible rationale which has been given for Ficino's method is that it stems from his anti-rationalism, that the reason he does not conduct a clear, logical argument is that he does not believe that reason leads to truth. [...] What we call the unconscious Ficino called divine inspiration, and he firmly believed that there was no need for him to understand any sentence came into his mind to say, since all sentences were put there by God; St. Thomas himself had pointed out that God does not think discursively.

But I think that there may be a slightly different explanation for the method of the De Amore. It was intended to say one thing to the initiate and something else to the rest of the world; it was meant to have two meanings, one esoteric and the other exoteric.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“In other places, however, Ficino appears to endorse a view more like that of Plato and Plotinus [regarding human love]: the soul begins in heaven, falls into the body, and then reascends to heaven, but the individual soul is free to eschew the desire for the body which causes it to fall and free also to decide when, or if, it will return to the desire for ideal beauty, which causes it to rise. That is, once born into the flesh, man is free to choose between earthly love and heavely love.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“[B]oth of the Greek authors whom Ficino had been reading more recently, Plato and Plotinus, define love as the desire for beauty. Thus in the De Amore, beauty becomes an important subject. Unfortunately, as soon as Ficino tried to define beauty, he found himself once more confronting a disagreement between Platonists and the Aristoteleans. The Platonists defined beauty as an abstract universal existing separately in the mind of God, whereas the Aristoteleans define beauty as an abstraction generated by the individual human mind from many particular sense experiences. Moreover, most medieval and renaissance theorists, from Bonaventure to Alberti, believed that beauty was a form which was given to the matter, an order or arrangement imposed upon objects of experience, whereas the Platonists held that beauty was an abstract quality in which physical objects participated in various degrees.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“As we have seen, Ficino had at his disposal in writing the De Amore three principal groups of authorities, the "Latin" Platonists, the Scholastic theologians, and the "Greek" Platonists whom he had just translated. In writing about the human soul, Ficino skips eclectically from one to another among these three sources.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“Ficino, too, can sound very Christian (e.g. the chapter heading of VII.17), but in places he sounds neither Christian nor Proclean, but Plotinian, as where he stresses the point that the One is above being (e.g. I.3). In VI.16 we are told that the stages of love are: World Body, World Soul, Angelic Mind, and God; but in VII.13 that the levels are Nature, Opinion, Reason, and Intellect. In still other places (e.g., IV.3-4) Ficino speaks as if man were not a participant in the ebb and flow of cosmic love at all, but only a spectator who stands apart and tries to make up his mind whether to love God or himself. [...] In short, the concept of cosmic love in De Amore is not based on any single authority and indeed is not any one concept. What Ficino is trying to do in De Amore is to defend the propriety of personal love by showing that it is merely a natural part of a perfectly respectable cosmic process; he is simply trying to persuade the reader, by celebrating the universality of love in the world, that love is a good thing: "So my friends, I urge and beg you to give yourselves to love without reservation, for it is not base but divine." (II.8)”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“Dante's Convivio, like Ficino's De Amore, is a banquet, a philosophical feast in which Dante celebrates as his key idea the cosmic nature of love. He describes the universe as a hierarchy in which every level of being is united in a desire to ascend to God.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“Ficino decided to use the Symposium of Plato as his vehicle. It was an appropriate vehicle because it was on his subject and because it was new; his was the first complete translation of the dialogue ever written. It was because of the convention of the commentary as a substitute for the discursive treatise that Ficino wrote his treatise on love in the form of a commentary, and it was because of the relevance of the Symposium to his own subject, Socratic love, that he chose to attach his commentary to the Symposium. But, as in the case of the banquet fiction, Ficino does not carry out the commentary fiction systematically because both fictions are there only for the sake of the argument which he wanted to advance, his defense of human love.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“For most modern readers, the chief difficulty in reading the De Amore is not the unfamiliarity of its ideas but the unfamiliarity of its method. Most modern works of prose are either works of fiction or of non-fiction; the De Amore is a little bit of both.

(P8)”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“The main point made by most literary scholars is that Ficino was responsible for shifting the emphasis in treatises on love from an Aristotelean (and medieval) emphasis on the physiology and psychology of love to a Platonic (and renaissance) emphasis on love as desire for ideal beauty.

P3”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love

“Всеки, който обича, умира. Защото неговата мисъл, забравяйки себе си, винаги се обръща към любимия. Ако не мисли за себе си, той очевидно не мисли в себе си. Затова и дейността на душата не се осъществява в самата нея, доколкото главното нейно действие е мисленето. А който не действа в себе си, и не съществува в себе си. Защото битието е действието са равнозначни. Нито има битие без действие, нито действието надхвърля самото битие. Никой не действа там, където не е, и винаги действа там, където е. Следователно душата на влюбения не е в него, защото не действа в самия него. Щом не е в него, тя и не живее в него самия. Който не живее, е мъртъв. Значи всеки, който обича, е мъртъв в себе си. Живее ли той поне в другия? Разбира се.”
― Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium on Love