Abstract
This chapter explores some striking aspects of Marsilio Ficino’s many-sided engagement with Saturn. It focuses, however, not so much on the old god’s traditional mythological and astrological associations, though these played important roles for Ficino for both personal and medical reasons, as on Ficino’s deployment of Saturn in his exploration of Platonic metaphysics. In particular I am concerned with two interrelated problems: 1) with Ficino’s analysis of the theology of the Phaedrus’s mythical hymn with its cavalcade of gods under Zeus as the World-Soul traversing the intellectual heaven, the realm of Saturn as Mind; and 2), more startingly, with Saturn in the context of the long and intricate rejection of Averroism in Ficino’s magnus opus, the Platonic Theology, and notably in the fifteenth book which has hitherto received little scholarly attention. His goal there was to reject what he saw as the capstone of Averroes’s metaphysics and psychology as articulated in the commentary on the De anima (which he only knew in Michael Scot’s Latin version): namely the theory of the unity (unicity) of the agent Intellect, even as he identified this Intellect too with Saturn. Combined with other Saturnian motifs and interpretations, we can now see that Saturn played a signal role in Ficino’s account of ancient Neoplatonism, in his own Christian transformation of it, and in its polemical attack on the great Muslim commentator on Aristotle.
I am especially indebted in this essay to conversations with Brian Copenhaver, Stephen Clucas, Peter Forshaw, Guido Giglioni, Dilwyn Knox, Jill Kraye, and Valery Rees. This article was first published in Bruniana et Campanelliana, 16 (2010), pp. 11–29. I would like to thank the publisher for allowing the article to be included in the present volume.
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Notes
- 1.
Now edited and annotated by Thomas C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling and Rhonda L. Blair, with introduction and commentary by J. B. Bamborough and Martin Dodsworth, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000). See Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and James Hankins, ‘Monstrous Melancholy: Ficino and the Physiological Causes of Atheism’, in Laus Platonici Philosophi: Marsilio Ficino and His Influence, eds Stephen Clucas, Peter J. Forshaw and Valery Rees (Leiden: Brill, 2011), pp. 25–43 (published in Italian as ‘Malinconia mostruosa: Ficino e le cause fisiologiche dell’ateismo’, Rinascimento, 47 (2007), pp. 3–23), which deals inter alia with some of Burton’s Ficinian sources.
- 2.
Problemata, XXX.1.953a10-955a39. See Hellmut Flashar, Melancholie und Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1966); Jackie Pigeaud, La maladie de l’âme: Étude sur la relation de l’âme et du corps dans la tradition médico-philosophique antique (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1981); and John Monfasani, ‘George of Trebizond’s Critique of Theodore of Gaza’s Translation of the Aristotelian Problemata’, in Aristotle’s Problemata in Different Times and Tongues, eds Pieter De Leemans and Michèle Goyons (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006), pp. 273–292.
- 3.
Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, ‘Dürers ‘Melencolia 1’: Eine quellen – und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1923). This was followed by Erwin Panofsky’s magisterial Albrecht Dürer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1943) – subsequent editions in 1955 and 1971 were entitled The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer.
- 4.
Harald Weinrich, Das Ingenium Don Quijotes (Münster: Aschendorf, 1956).
- 5.
Otis Green, ‘El Ingenioso Hidalgo’, Hispanic Review, 25 (1957), pp. 175–193.
- 6.
Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State College Press, 1951).
- 7.
Rudolf and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1963).
- 8.
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art (London: Nelson, 1964). On pp. 18–41 the authors provide the Greek text, a translation and a commentary on Aristotle’s Problemata XXX.1.
- 9.
Bridget Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy: Studies in Literary Treatments of Melancholy in Renaissance England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971).
- 10.
Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991). See also N. L. Brann’s The Debate over the Origin of Genius during the Italian Renaissance: The Theories of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Conflict on the Threshold of the Scientific Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2002).
- 11.
See esp. Gellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy, chapter 4.
- 12.
Rolf Soellner, Timon of Athens: Shakespeare’s Pessimistic Tragedy (Columbia, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1979).
- 13.
Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl argue that Ficino was the figure ‘who really gave shape to the idea of the melancholy man of genius’ (p. 255).
- 14.
André Chastel, ‘Le mythe de Saturne dans la Renaissance italienne’, Phoebus, 1/3-4 (1946), pp. 125–144; Id., Marsile Ficin et l’art (Geneva: Droz; Lille: Giard, 1954); Id., Art et humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique: Études sur la Renaissance et l’humanisme platonicien (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1959).
- 15.
Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (London: Faber & Faber, 1958; revised edition, New York: Norton, 1968).
- 16.
Saturn from Antiquity to the Renaissance, eds Massimo Ciavolella and Amilcare A. Iannucci (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1992).
- 17.
Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, XVII.2.12, eds and trans. Michael J. B. Allen and James Hankins, 6 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–2006), VI, p. 23.
- 18.
Macrobius, In somnium Scipionis commentarii, I.21.23-25, ed. James Willis, 2 vols (Leipzig: Teubner, 1970), II, pp. 88–89.
- 19.
Ibid., I.21.25.
- 20.
Ibid., I.21.26.
- 21.
Ibid., I.12.1-2, II, p. 48.
- 22.
Ficino, Platonic Theology, XIII.2.15-20. See P. O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 371–375; also, interestingly, Stéphane Toussaint, ‘Sensus naturae, Jean Pic, le véhicule de l’âme et l’équivoque de la magie naturelle’, in La Magia nell’Europa moderna: Tra antica sapienza e filosofia naturale, eds Fabrizio Meroi and Elisabetta Scapparone, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 2007 [2008]), I, pp. 107–145; and Brian Ogren, ‘Circularity, the Soul-Vehicle and the Renaissance Rebirth of Reincarnation: Marsilio Ficino and Isaac Abarbanel on the Possibility of Transmigration’, Accademia, 6 (2004), pp. 63–94 (64–79).
- 23.
With a play on Charites – the three Graces, Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia.
- 24.
Macrobius, In somnium Scipionis, I.12.14-15, II, p. 50.
- 25.
See his letters to Giovanni Cavalcanti in the third book of Letters, and to Martin Prenninger in the ninth; also his De vita, III.2 in Opera omnia, 2 vols (Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1576; repr. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), pp. 533, 732.3-733, 901.2 respectively.
- 26.
See n. 25 above.
- 27.
See Saturn and Melancholy, p. 252, for instance, on Jacopo della Lana.
- 28.
Ficino, Platonic Theology, XIII.2.2.
- 29.
Ibid., XIII.2.3.
- 30.
On the Pythagorean notion of the progression of the point to line to plane to solid, see Aristotle, Topics, VI.4.141b5-22; De caelo, I.1.268a7-a28; De anima, I.2.404b16-b24; Metaphysics, I.9.992a10-b18, III.5.1001b26-1002b11, XIII.9.1085a7-b3. In general see John Dillon, The Middle Platonists: 80 B.C. to A.D. 220 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 5–6, 27–28; and, for Ficino, see my The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 105 and n. 34; and Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of Plato’s Republic (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), p. 93 and n. 39.
- 31.
2 Corinthians 4:16.
- 32.
See summa 19 of Ficino’s In Phaedrum. I have just reedited this as Marsilio Ficino: Commentaries on Plato: Volume I: Phaedrus and Ion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), pp. 122–125.
- 33.
See my Nuptial Arithmetic, pp. 128–129, 134–135, 138.
- 34.
Ficino, Platonic Theology, XVIII.9.4. See my Nuptial Arithmetic, pp. 125–136; and ‘Quisque in sphaera sua: Plato’s Statesman, Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, and the Resurrection of the Body’, Rinascimento, second series, 47 (2007), pp. 25–48.
- 35.
For a detailed exposition of these four methods, see my Platonism of Ficino, chapter 5.
- 36.
Cicero’s De natura deorum, II.25.64 derives Saturn’s name from his being ‘saturated with years’ (quod saturaretur) in the sense that ‘he was in the habit of devouring his sons as Time devours the ages and gorges himself insatiably with the years that are past.’ That the name was derived from sacer nus comes from Fulgentius, while Varro’s De lingua latina, V.64 derives it from satum, the past participle of sero, meaning ‘what has been sown’. All three etymologies were entertained for centuries. Additionally, Romans identified Saturn’s Greek name Kronos with the like-sounding Chronos (as in Cicero’s work cited above).
- 37.
See esp. Proclus’s own Platonic Theology, IV.1.16; and my Platonism of Ficino, pp. 115–121, 249–251.
- 38.
For these transferences, see Kristeller, Philosophy of Ficino, pp. 168–169.
- 39.
Ficino, In Phaedrum X.5,12-13 (ed. Allen, pp. 84–85, 90–93).
- 40.
Ficino, In Timaeum, summa 24 (Opera omnia, pp. 1469–1470).
- 41.
Wind, Pagan Mysteries, pp. 133–138, has an interesting section on violent myths and their interpretation. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Celestial Hierarchy II.3, suggests that the more rebarbative the myth, the profounder its core.
- 42.
Ficino, In Phaedrum X.6-12 (ed. Allen, pp. 84–91).
- 43.
See Ficino’s epitome, Opera omnia, p. 1533.4. For the theology of this enigma, see my ‘Marsilio Ficino on Plato, the Neoplatonists and the Christian Doctrine of the Trinity’, Renaissance Quarterly, 37 (1984), pp. 555–584 (at pp. 568–571).
- 44.
Ficino, In Phaedrum, summa 28; cf. X.6 (ed. Allen, pp. 154–155; cf. 86–87).
- 45.
For the dating, see R. A. Gauthier, ‘Note sur les débuts (1225–1240) du premier averroïsme’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 66 (1982), pp. 321–374.
- 46.
In his Summa contra gentiles and De unitate intellectus contra averroistas. See Deborah L. Black, ‘Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Aquinas’ Critique of Averroes’ Psychology’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 31/3 (1993), pp. 349–385.
- 47.
John Monfasani, ‘The Averroism of John Argyropoulos’, in I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance, V (Florence: Villa I Tatti, 1993), pp. 157–208, calls this doctrine ‘the distinguishing mark of Averroism’ (p. 165).
- 48.
Ficino’s summary refutation continued to be influential: it was the basis for Pierre Bayle’s entry on Averroes in the Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam: Michel Bohm, 1720), p. 383, which in turn shaped Leibniz’s account of the history of monopsychism in his Theodicée as well as Johann Franz Budde’s view of Averroes in his Traité de l’athéisme et de la superstition, trans. L. Philon (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1740), VII.2, p. 271. Even more tellingly the first ‘modern’ history of philosophy, Johann Jacob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae, 6 vols (Leipzig: Weidemann & Reich, 1766), has a long passage in vol. III, pp. 109–110 on Averroes. But Brucker took this from Ludovico Celio Rodigino’s Lectionum antiquarum libri XVI (Basel: Ambrose and Aurelius Froben, 1566), III.2, p. 73, which in turn reproduced Ficino’s summary in XV.1 (see below)! See Emanuele Coccia, La trasparenza delle immagini: Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2005), pp. 22–27.
- 49.
See Ernest Renan, Averroès e l’averroïsme (Paris, 1852; third revised edition, Paris, 1866); Paul Oskar Kristeller’s two masterful essays: ‘Paduan Averroism and Alexandrism in the Light of Recent Studies’, in his Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; originally New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 111–118; and ‘Renaissance Aristotelianism’, now in his Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters, 4 vols (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1984–1996), III, pp. 341–357; and Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). See also Maurice-Ruben Hayoun and Alain de Libera, Averroès et l’averroïsme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991); Dominick A. Iorio, The Aristotelians of Renaissance Italy: A Philosophical Exposition (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen, 1991); Valeria Sorge, ‘L’Aristotelismo averroista negli studi recenti’, Paradigmi, 50 (1999), pp. 243–264; Ead., Profili dell’averroismo bolognese: Metafisica e scienza in Taddeo da Parma [fl. 1318/25] (Naples: Luciano, 2001); Coccia, La trasparenza delle immagini; and Dag Nikolaus Hasse, ‘Arabic Philosophy and Averroism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 113–133.
- 50.
See Monfasani, ‘The Averroism of John Argyropoulos’, p. 165, with further references. See also Brian P. Copenhaver, ‘Ten Arguments in Search of a Philosopher: Averroes and Aquinas in Ficino’s Platonic Theology’, Vivarium, 47 (2009), pp. 444–479.
- 51.
Ficino, Platonic Theology, XV.1.3–4.
- 52.
Ibid., XV.1.12.
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
Ibid., XV.1.13.
- 55.
Occasionalism plays a key role in medieval philosophy and is especially linked to Avicenna’s epistemology.
- 56.
Ficino, Platonic Theology, XV.1.13.
- 57.
It is difficult to determine who these Averroists might be, particularly given the later reference in 15.17.9 to ‘Averroists of more recent times’. Among the possibilities are John of Jandun, Paul of Venice, Niccolò Tignosi, and Nicoletto Vernia; but there must be other, more plausible candidates. See Copenhaver, ‘Ten Arguments’, pp. 457–464.
- 58.
Ficino, Platonic Theology, XV.1.14.
- 59.
Ibid., XV.1.15.
- 60.
Ibid.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
For this nexus of arguments, see Oliver Leaman, Averroes and His Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 82–103; and more generally Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). Ficino of course is presenting his own account.
- 63.
Ficino, Platonic Theology, XV.19.11.
- 64.
Ioan Petru Coulianu, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987); this was originally published in French as Eros et magie à la Renaissance, 1484 (Paris: Flammarion, 1984). Though provocative, Couliano’s claims with regard to Ficino are often over-stated and should be approached with considerable caution. On phantasms in Ficino, see my Icastes: Marsilio Ficino’s Interpretation of Plato’s Sophist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), chapter 5.
- 65.
Again, one could distinguish between mono-psychism and mono-nousism, but not surely when the highest soul is intellective as is the case in Platonism and Aristotelianism alike.
- 66.
Philip Merlan, Monopsychism, Mysticism, Metaconsciousness: Problems of the Soul in the Neo-Aristotelian and Neoplatonic Tradition (The Hague: Nijhoff, [1963] 1969); also his From Platonism to Neoplatonism (The Hague: Nijhoff, [1953] 1960).
- 67.
Dillon, Middle Platonists, passim.
- 68.
The term monopsychism has a history that goes back at least to Leibniz; see n. 48 above.
- 69.
We must leave aside the intricate story of Averroes’s own development and his prior encounter with various Neoplatonic texts and propositions in the work of his predecessors, notably al-Ghazālī and Avicenna.
- 70.
A cognate problem is the extent to which Averroes is in effect a Plotinian commentator, or one influenced by the Plotinian formulations of his Arabic predecessors, when it comes to interpreting the famous Aristotelian passage on nous.
- 71.
See my Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation (Florence: Olschki, 1998), pp. 90–92, and in general chapter 2. The appropriation of God’s words, ‘This is my beloved son’, to describe Plotinus is Ficino’s own choice in the closing lines of his preface for the Plotinus commentary (Opera omnia, p. 1548.1); see Wind, Pagan Mysteries, pp. 23–24.
- 72.
Ficino, Opera omnia, p. 732.3: ‘Omnes omnium laudes referantur in Deum.’
- 73.
Saturn and Melancholy, p. 273.
- 74.
Now collected in James Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004), II, pp. 187–395. Another version of one of these essays, ‘The Invention of the Platonic Academy at Florence’, has appeared as ‘The Platonic Academy of Florence and Renaissance Historiography’, in Forme del Neoplatonismo: Dall’eredità ficiniana ai platonici di Cambridge, ed. Luisa Simonutti (Florence: Olschki, 2007), pp. 75–96. For a contrary view, see Arthur Field, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Id., ‘The Platonic Academy of Florence’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, eds Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees, with Martin Davies (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 359–376.
- 75.
Fragment 118 in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Griechisch und Deutsch, ed. by Hermann Diels, 3 vols (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1903; 41922), I, p. 100, much quoted by Ficino: see, for example, Platonic Theology, VI.2.20.
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Allen, M.J.B. (2013). Marsilio Ficino on Saturn, the Plotinian Mind, and the Monster of Averroes. In: Akasoy, A., Giglioni, G. (eds) Renaissance Averroism and Its Aftermath: Arabic Philosophy in Early Modern Europe. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 211. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5240-5_5
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