On the dignity of the soul

The Renaissance Florentine philosopher Marsilio Ficino tells two stories from his family’s history to define some philosophical principals. The first story is how his maternal grandmother appeared to her mother in a dream to bid her farewell, even though she lived in the town over. The next day, his grandmother was dead. Some years later, his mother had a child and entrusted him to a wet nurse. She then had another dream where her mother came to comfort her telling her not to grieve. When she awoke, someone told her that her child had died that night, having been smothered by the wet nurse. Then she dreamt that her husband would fall from a horse, and it happened just as she dreamt it.

We probably all have stories of these types of premonitions. We have been taught to dismiss them as coincidences or freak occurences. The mind of man now presumes that human beings exist in an anti-metaphysical bubble, that our animal sensory world is all there is and all that affects our regular lives.

Ficino has a different explanation for these occurences. He explains as follows:

…the souls of men that are almost separated from their bodies because of a temperate disposition and a pure life may in the abstraction of sleep divine many things, for they are divine by nature; and whenever they return to themselves, they realize this divinity. The second thing that these stories confirm is that the souls of the dead, freed from the chains of the body, can influence us, and care about human affairs.

-taken from Meditations on the Soul

For Ficino, the fact that the soul is immortal means that it has a potential to absorb and dominate all things. (It is Aristotle I believe who said that the soul is in a sense all things.) Because we are immortal, because there is the spark of the divine nature in us, the potential of human beings is almost infinite. It is no surprise then that people can have such dreams, or can heal people using only an egg, or can create works of genius that approach audaciously the throne of Divine Beauty. That is just who we are. There is in this sense no such thing as the “paranormal”; such frenzies are part of our everyday life. We have just become blind and deaf to them in our society full of artificial lights and noise.

Maya Plisetskaya as Odette in Swan Lake

(Appropriate since the Greeks thought that the swan was one of the sacred animals of Apollo since they could divine when they were going to die.)

The Divine Frenzies

From all this it is now clear that there are four kinds of divine frenzy: love, poetry, the mysteries and prophecy. That common and insane love is a false copy of divine love; superficial music, of poetry; superstition, of the mysteries; and prediction, of prophecy. According to Plato, Socrates attributes the first kind of frenzy to Venus, the second to the Muses, the third to Dionysius, and the last to Apollo.

-Marsilio Ficino

On the Simplicity of Truth

You often ask me, Antonio, to define the virtues for you, expecting from me perhaps those very detailed analyses of the Aristotelians and Stoics. Calderini, this is not the way of our school of Plato. Surely, the power of virtue lies in unity rather than in division. Hence, the Pythagoreans held that unity belonged to the good, diversity to evil. So I shall be very brief in my definition, especially as it is better to practice the virtues than to know about them.

-Marsilio Ficino, from the book, Meditations on the Soul

I really like reading Josh S.’ blog, not because of how much I agree with him, but rather because of how much I disagree with him. In a sense, the way he puts things is really the way most modern Western people would put them, just without the often hypocritical nuances. Those nuances only try to mask the real similarities between supposedly disparate worldviews. In reality, the modern Lutheran, the modern Roman Catholic, and the modern atheist inhabit the same moral and metaphysical universe. It is simply one that I personally refuse to live in.

Between High Theory and Low Praxis

image credit

Some notes towards a Christian theory of magic

In response to some of Christina’s concerns :

I think Christina is correct in asserting the first principle to consider: magic that manipulates and does harm is demonic and against the will of God. In Mexican folk practices, the women and curanderos who practice these feats of preternatural healing are usually devout Catholics. Magic is often considered a defensive mechanism against los brujos  and la brujeria  (witches and witchcraft). As E. Bryant Holman, an expert in Mexican folk religion, points out, it would be an insult to these people to associate them with Wicca or other New Age forms of the occult. Most curanderos  are merely trying to clean up the mess that witches cause, and they do so using common objects: a cross, an egg, a branch from a tree, water etc. Many sociologists would like to see in these practices survivals of a pagan past, but in reality these practices are tied into the Catholic nature of these societies. The priest is often seen as the curandero  par excellence, and many treatments in Mexican folk medicine involve taking the patient to the priest.

The Soul as Sphere

Christian Platonic Tiptoeing Around the Transmigration of Souls

One issue that most concerns any person who is both an advocate of Platonic doctrines and a Christian is the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The most famous crystallization of this idea comes in the Phaedrus myth, where the soul falls into matter and takes 10,000 years to ascend back to the heavens. This doctrine, shared with the divines of the East, was first formulated explicitly in the West many years before Plato in the doctrine of the Pythagoreans. When the fullness of Platonic writings were recovered by many intellectuals in Renaissance Florence in the fifteenth century, these scholars had to invent ingenious if at times inaccurate explanations to reconcile this heretical doctrine with Christian cosmic principles. Their solutions, however, always affirmed the dignity of man as made in the image and likeness of God, having a nobility and mutability that can create, encompass, and rule all things.

Two Venuses

Heav’nly, illustrious, laughter-loving queen, sea-born, night-loving, of an awful mien;
Crafty, from whom necessity first came, producing, nightly, all-connecting dame:
‘Tis thine the world with harmony to join, for all things spring from thee, O pow’r divine.
The triple Fates are rul’d by thy decree, and all productions yield alike to thee:
Whate’er the heav’ns, encircling all contain, earth fruit-producing, and the stormy main,
Thy sway confesses, and obeys thy nod, awful attendant of the brumal God:
Goddess of marriage, charming to the sight, mother of Loves, whom banquetings delight;
Source of persuasion, secret, fav’ring queen, illustrious born, apparent and unseen:
Spousal, lupercal, and to men inclin’d, prolific, most-desir’d, life-giving., kind:
Great sceptre-bearer of the Gods, ’tis thine, mortals in necessary bands to join;
And ev’ry tribe of savage monsters dire in magic chains to bind, thro’ mad desire.
Come, Cyprus-born, and to my pray’r incline, whether exalted in the heav’ns you shine,
Or pleas’d in Syria’s temple to preside, or o’er th’ Egyptian plains thy car to guide,
Fashion’d of gold; and near its sacred flood, fertile and fam’d to fix thy blest abode;
Or if rejoicing in the azure shores, near where the sea with foaming billows roars,
The circling choirs of mortals, thy delight, or beauteous nymphs, with eyes cerulean bright,
Pleas’d by the dusty banks renown’d of old, to drive thy rapid, two-yok’d car of gold;
Or if in Cyprus with thy mother fair, where married females praise thee ev’ry year,
And beauteous virgins in the chorus join, Adonis pure to sing and thee divine;
Come, all-attractive to my pray’r inclin’d, for thee, I call, with holy, reverent mind.

-Orphic Hymn to Venus, translated by Thomas Taylor

Therefore, let there be two Venuses in the World Soul, the first heavenly and the second vulgar. Let both have a love: the heavenly for contemplating divine Beauty, the vulgar for creating the same in the Matter of the World. For such beauty as the former sees, the latter wishes to pass on as well as it can to the Machine of the World. Or rather both are moved to procreate beauty, but each in its own way. The heavenly Venus strives, through its intelligence, to reproduce in itself as exactly as possible the beauty of the higher things; the vulgar Venus strives, through the fertility of its divine seeds, to reproduce in the Matter of the World the beauty which is divinely conceived within itself. The former love we sometimes call a god for the reason that it is directed toward divine things; but we usually call it a daemon since it is halfway between lack and plenty. The other we always call a daemon since it seems to have a certain affection for the body, and to be more inclined toward the lower region of the world. Which is certainly foreign to God but appropriate to the nature of daemons.

-Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on the Symposium

On Soul

Pas de deux from Antony Tudor’s The Leaves are Fading as danced by Amanda McKerrow and John Gardner

There is nothing to be found in this whole living world so deformed that Soul does not attend it, that the gift of the Soul is not in it.

-Marsilio Ficino, De Vita Coelitus Comparanda

On the Animation of Idols

 

Above: the golden idol solo from the ballet, La Bayadère

Plotinus uses almost the same examples in that place where, paraphrasing Hermes Trismegistus, he says that the ancient priests or Magi used to capture in statues and material sacrifices something divine and wonderful. He holds, moreover, with Hermes Trismegistus that through these materials they did not, properly speaking, capture divinities wholly separate from matter but deities who are merely cosmic… Hermes himself put together statues from herbs, trees, stones, and spices, which had within themselves, as he says, a natural force of divinity. He added songs resembling the heavenly bodies; he says the divinities take delight in such songs and so stay a longer time in the statues and help people or harm them.

-Marsilio Ficino, De vita coelitus comparanda

Don Marsilio el Curandero

Or… The Fifteenth Century Translator of Plato Confronts Modernity with Christianized Shamanism

From Leonard George:

Dawn light spills into a large room decorated lavishly in early Italian Renaissance style. Through a window we glimpse the silhouette of Brunelleschi’s famous dome. We are in Florence, in 1464. In the room, a sumptuous four-poster bed frames a dying old man – Cosimo de Medici, Prince of Florence. Huddled nearby, worried courtiers and relatives. When will the Doctor come? Is it already too late? A page enters, followed by a striking gentleman, early thirties, in a white gown. He carries a lyre. “Hail, Doctor Ficino. The Prince is waning fast.” “We haven’t much time. I will need some instruments of medical practice.” “Sir, what do you require? We will fetch it immediately!” Ficino peers intently at Cosimo’s grey face. “Bring me – a statue of Apollo. A gold mirror. Sunflowers in a vase. And a live cockerel. Quickly!” Off scurry the courtiers as the Doctor intones, “Hear me, great Prince! You suffer from a deficiency of solar spirits. A transfusion is needed to save your life. Visualize the sun. I have ordered symbols of solar power with which to surround you; imagine golden spirits flowing into your body with each breath.” Strumming his lyre, Ficino begins to sing the ancient Orphic Hymn to the Sun God. This was holistic healing, Renaissance style …

Hear golden Titan, whose eternal eye
With broad survey, illumines all the sky.
Self-born, unwearied in diffusing light,
And to all eyes the mirrour of delight:
Lord of the seasons, with thy fiery car
And leaping coursers, beaming light from far…

-from the Orphic Hymn to the Sun as translated by Thomas Taylor

Lovers

Hence it happens that the passion of a lover is not extinguished by the sight or touch of any body. For he does not desire this or that body, but he admires, desires, and is amazed by the splendor of the celestial majesty shining through bodies. For this reason, lovers do not know what they desire or seek, for they do not know God Himself, whose secret flavor infuses a certain sweet perfume into His works. By which perfume we are excited every day. The odor we certainly smell; the flavor we undoubtedly do not know. Since, therefore, attracted by the manifest perfume, we desire the hidden flavor, we rightly do not know what we are desiring or suffering.

-Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love