3 The immortality of the soul

The question of the souls immortality was perhaps the most hotly debated
philosophical issue of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth century. After a long period
in which the common doctrine of the philosophers (that is, Averroism) had reigned
almost unchecked in Italian universities, the 1470s saw a revival, in the religious orders
and among secular thinkers like Ficino and Apollinaris Offredi, of attempts to establish
rational proofs for the immortality of the soul. The campaign culminated with the Fifth
Lateran Council (1512-7), summoned by Ficinos former pupil Leo X, which denounced
those who assert that the intellective soul is mortal or is one for all mankind. Ficino,
like Thomas Aquinas and many others who argued for immortality, held that those who
denied personal immortality were undermining the traditional belief in rewards and
punishments in the afterlife, and thus removing a key sanction against immoral behavior.
In his argument to the tenth book of Platos Laws Ficino went so far as to say that the
immortality of the soul was the main foundation for religion.
This historical background does not however account fully for Ficinos
preoccupation with human immortality. Ficino was the first philosopher to give the
immortality of the soul the central place in his thought, a prominence indicated by the full
title of his principal work, Theologia platonica de immortalitate animae (Platonic
Theology, On the Immortality of the Soul) (1474). In his classic study of Ficinos thought
(1943), P.O. Kristeller maintained that immortality was central to Ficinos work because
of its close connection with contemplative experience. For Ficino, the experience of God
which may be attained in contemplation constitutes the highest human act of
consciousness, and it therefore both defines the essence of humanity and establishes the
end of human existence. Since the contemplative experience of God in this life is only
partial and transitory, the soul must be capable of some form of separate incorporeal
existence in which its natural appetite for the knowledge and enjoyment of God may be
fulfilled. Ficino does not seem to realize that this is at best an argument for the souls
survival after death and not necessarily for eternal existence, since he admits elsewhere
that souls are created in time. But in fact, many of the dozens of immortality arguments
that fill the last thirteen books of the Theologia platonica begin from similar subjective
analyses of acts, habits, faculties, appetites and affinities of soul. The arguments from
affinity, drawn in the first instance from Platos Phaedo, are of particular importance, but
Ficino also employs the argument from self-motion found in the Phaedrus, while the
arguments from appetitus naturalis have Augustinian and Thomistic antecedents.
The immortal soul is also central to Ficinos philosophy in a broader metaphysical
context. The early books of the Theologia platonica lay out an ontological hierarchy of
five substances, God, angel, soul, quality and matter. This hierarchy was probably taken
from Proclus, though the hypostasis of quality seems to be original with Ficino. Within
the hierarchy soul functions as the central link: what is above soul is eternal, immaterial,
unchanging, intelligible; what is below it is temporal, material, mutable and sensible. It is
soul that binds the two spheres together and makes them a unity. Paradoxically, the
unifying functions of soul within total metaphysical reality mean that the soul is radically
divided within itself. It contains within itself two separate and opposing impulses. It has a
natural desire for God which drives it to cut itself off from the body and empirical reality,
to turn within and upwards to the source of its being through rational activity. In addition
to this contemplative nisus, obviously inspired by Plotinus, Ficino posits another which
leads the soul to care for lower things such as the body, for which it has a natural
affection. To these two natural tendencies or affections there correspond the higher parts
of the soul, pre-eminently the reasoning and noetic powers, and the lower parts of the
soul such as sensation and vegetation which are responsible for its empirical activity.
Ficinos definition of the soul, partly in consequence of this radical division
within the soul, is not entirely satisfactory. In some passages he asserts following
Aristotle and Aquinas, that it his hylomorphic relationship to the body, that is, it is the
substantial form of the body. He rejects the Plotinian formulation of the relation of soul to
body, in which the soul, while remaining separate from body, controls it by means of a
physis or reflection of itself which it projects into the body. He also will not endorse the
implausible solution of some medieval Augustinians, which calls for the soul to be a
distinct substance, though composed of form and spiritual matter. Yet in most contexts
Ficino does speak of the soul in Platonic terms as though it were an independent
substance and not subject to material potencies. He infers from the fact that we form
simple concepts and can conceive of pure simplicity that the soul itself is simple; he uses
many of the old Platonic analogies, such as that the soul is imprisoned in the body, that
the soul is to the body as the person at the helm is to the ship, and so forth.
Platos doctrine of the pre-existence and transmigration of souls presented Ficino
with a major interpretative challenge, since it threatened the Florentines larger project of
demonstrating the compatibility of Platonism and Christianity. Be doctrine had been
confidently attributed to Plato by Plotinus, Augustine, the standard commentary on the
Bible (where King Herod is also said to have believed in it) and Thomas Aquinas.
Several of Ficinos contemporary opponents, such as the Dominicans Savonarola and
Dominic of Flanders, used it to discredit Ficinos Platonic revival and the doctrine was,
significantly, condemned by the Inquisition in articles published at the University of Pisa
in 1490. Ficinos response was to deny that Plato had ever really held the doctrine.
Metempsychosis as referred to in Plato and the other ancient theologians was to be
understood as a mystery; to understand it in a literal sense was a vulgar error fast put
about in the late Academy. In reality the doctrine of transmigration must be taken as an
allegory of the return of the soul to the One in contemplative experience, or typologically
as a prophecy of the resurrection of the body, or as an obscure, proto-Christian
premonition of the doctrine of purgatory. Ficino also employed the not wholly consistent
argument that when Plato discussed transmigration in his works he was simply retailing a
Pythagorean doctrine to which he was not himself necessarily committed. To the
metaphysical problem of explaining how an eternal substance could have been created in
particular souls at particular moments of time, Ficino argues that creation in this instance
is to be understood as the ontological dependence of the temporal manifestations of soul
on their eternal source, not as the production ex nihilo of new substances in time.

4 Platonic love
If the Theologia platonica was Ficinos most substantial independent work of
philosophy, his most influential work was his commentary on Platos Symposium, known
as De amore (On Love) (1469). Unlike Ficinos other commentaries, the De amore was
cast in the form of a literary dialogue, in the villa of Lorenzo deMedici, with Ficinos
friends and patrons as the interlocutors. Each interlocutor gives a speech which is
effectively a Neoplatonic reading of the several speeches in Platos Symposium. It was
this work, and translations of it into Italian, French and German, that popularized the
concept of Platonic love, a concept that became a popular poetical conceit in the later
Renaissance and is still used in a debased sense in modern colloquial speech.
Ficino is usually credited as the inventor of this concept, and the expression amor
platonicus actually occurs in one of his letters (though not in the De amore). Ficinos
account of love, however, is closely based on Plotinus (in particular Enneads 3.5), and a
similar Plotinian reading of the Symposium can be found in Cardinal Bessarions In
Calumniatorem Platonis (Against Platos Calumniator), printed within a few months of
the publication of Ficinos De amore in 1469. Nevertheless, it was certainly Ficino who
gave the concept its currency in Renaissance Europe and invested it with the
philosophical richness that gave it its wide appeal. As Kristeller (1943) points out, the
concept combines a Plotinian reading of love with the will of St Augustine, the charity of
St Paul, and ideas on friendship found in Aristotle, the Stoics, and Ciceros Laelius.
Ficinos basic move is to interpret our experience of love in terms of the spiritual
dynamics of the Neoplatonic cosmos. A true experience of love awakens one to the
natural desire of the soul for union with God. It may begin with a sensual element but that
is a mere preparation for genuine love, which is the love of God. The instantiations of
beauty or goodness that kindle mutual desire between human beings are to be understood
as reflections of the divine beauty and goodness. What we love in others rightly belongs
to God; to give love to another without at the same time giving love to God, as Ficino
says in a striking formulation, is nothing but robbery. Yet the true basis of active love is
not the unconscious dependence of attributes on their divine source, but a conscious
striving of souls together towards God in contemplative experience. It is the active search
for truth in the philosophical life which is the true basis of love and forms a genuine
union between lovers. Real, divine love is thus independent of the sex of the lovers and
can exist between members of the same or opposite genders. Ficinos concept of love in
this way subsumes the Pauline and Augustinian concept of charity; it also absorbs the
classical pagan concept of friendship. In the Nicomachean Ethics, for example, Aristotle
argues that true friendship is necessarily between equals and has as its subject common
pursuits. Ficino understands this to mean that souls united in contemplation of the same
object are eo ipso equal. Such souls are always present to each other even when
separated, and love even has the power to transform the lover into the image of the
beloved.
Ficino insists that the biblical command to love one another has a metaphysical
basis; he argues that unrequited love is, so to speak, spiritually defective. Mutual love
which constitutes a concrete communion between persons is the only true and perfect
form of love; it is not only a moral obligation but a cosmic necessity. If love is based on a
similarity or equality between the souls of lovers and has the same divine source, then it
must exist in both souls equally. A failure of charity is a denial of ones essential nature.
It has recently been suggested that Ficinos emphasis on Platonic love has a political
meaning, that it was meant as a cure for the endemic divisions in Florentine civil society.
It has also been argued that Ficino feared criticism of Plato on account of the numerous
scenes of homosexual gallantry depicted in the dialogues, and that the doctrine of
Platonic love was in part intended as an exegetical device to protect Plato from this
charge. Both statements may well be true. But the doctrine of Platonic love is one that
grows naturally from the central themes of Ficinos philosophy, especially his emphasis
on the special dignity of contemplative noesis among human cognitive powers and his
belief in the unitive functions of soul within creation.