Giovanni Pico's warning against pantheistic implications in Ficino's Neoplatonism

Intellectual History Review ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rihr20 Giovanni Pico’s warning against pantheistic implications in Ficino’s Neoplatonism Paul Richard Blum To cite this article: Paul Richard Blum (20 Nov 2023): Giovanni Pico’s warning against pantheistic implications in Ficino’s Neoplatonism, Intellectual History Review, DOI: 10.1080/17496977.2023.2281391 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2023.2281391 Published online: 20 Nov 2023. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rihr20 INTELLECTUAL HISTORY REVIEW https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2023.2281391 Giovanni Pico’s warning against pantheistic implications in Ficino’s Neoplatonism Paul Richard Blum Department of Philosophy, Loyola University Maryland, Baltimore, USA; Department of Philosophy, Palacký University Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic ABSTRACT KEYWORDS The famous controversy between Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is known to regard the proper use of Platonism in humanist and Christian context. With special attention to Pico’s Commentary on a Canzone, the point of disagreement with Ficino, which is not at all obvious, is examined through a close reading. The result is that Pico sees the temptation of a pantheistic and anthropocentric understanding of the relationship between the human realm and God. Whereas Ficino engaged in making pagan philosophy amenable to Christian theology, Pico was concerned with upholding the otherness of the divine. For the humanist agenda, Ficino made plausible that the human world is divinized, while Pico called for the ascent to God. In Pico’s view the Neoplatonists secularized the divine, as was evident in Ficino’s philosophical theology. Marsilio Ficino; Giovanni Pico della Mirandola; pantheism; Renaissance Platonism; anthropocentrism; paganism Pantheism typically identifies God and World, and it comes in various degrees and aspects. Barely any philosopher discussing theological matters straightforwardly asserts the identity of the principle of everything with everything.1 In that sense, pantheism overcomes the dualism between things and their foundation and takes recourse to monism. But monism is in and of itself paradoxical,2 for universal identity would be a blatant logical error. Theology that is institutionalized in doctrines would equally reject it. However, pantheism is an important symptom of the hard question about the ontological and epistemological relation between principium and principiatum, creator and creation, absolute and relative, infinite and finite, etc. Of these relationships, the most engaging is that between humans and God. While pantheism appears to make both components of the relation, as it appears to be a duality, overlap if not identical, any refutation or avoidance of such abolishment of dualism has to argue for the ontological and epistemological consistency of the non-identical relationship: if the universe is not God, then how are both necessarily related; and if union with God is not the same as becoming God, how is the divine realm accessible to humans? These are the problems in the background of the debate between Marsilio Ficino and his pupil or younger colleague Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. Pico famously criticized Ficino’s version of Neoplatonic philosophical theology, and the aim of this paper is to show that what Pico had pointed out CONTACT Paul Richard Blum prblum@loyola.edu © 2023 International Society for Intellectual History 2 P. R. BLUM was the danger of pantheism. To do this, I will offer a close reading of key passages of their debate. Since it was characteristic of the humanists and Renaissance Platonists to clothe every statement and reasoning in authoritative sources, be these of the scholastic or the (Neo-)Platonic traditions,3 I will refrain from tracing those sources in this essay and take Pico’s and Ficino’s claims by their content. The biographical circumstances and contexts have been frequently described4 and I have no new information to contribute. Giovanni Pico made a number of critical references to Ficino’s interpretation of Plato in his Commento sopra una canzona de amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni, which are all puzzling or at least in need of interpretation. One such passage, in which Pico appears to warn Ficino against grave errors, is in Book 2 of the Commento. Explaining the myth of Saturn, Pico interprets the government of Jove as saying, “the World Soul could not move the heavens in an orderly way, or properly manage the rest of creation, if it did not participate in the paternal wisdom of the Angelic Mind.” The comment supplies here a reference to Plato’s Laws with the affirmation that this meaning is clear “to anyone who reads him with a sound mind [sana mente]” and a warning that “misunderstanding his words in that passage has been a source of serious mistakes, both for certain Platonists and for all Manicheans.”5 The translators of the text, reviewed for this passage (Sears Jayne, Stéphane Toussaint, and Thorsten Bürklin), cite Laws 10, 896e-897c, and Jayne surmises Ficino to be the addressee. Now, the question is, what is said by Plato and how could it be misread by Platonists to the extent that it verges on Manicheism? In the cited passage, the Athenian claims that the soul indwells everything, including the heaven with its motions, such as “wish, reflection, forethought” and more, so that the soul extends to secondary motions that apply to bodies (897a-b). The intention of the discourse, however, is to claim that the soul does all this “rightly and happily as a true goddess, in conjunction with reason, and when, in converse with unreason, it produces results which are in all respects the opposite.” So far, the parallel with Pico’s argument is only that the World Soul guides everything from heaven down to earthly things. There is no mention of paternal wisdom in Plato. Reference to Manicheans may have been prompted by Plato’s entertaining the possibility of unreason (and probably implicit ill will). Indeed, shortly before the quoted lines, he had the Athenian postulate that “that soul is the cause of things good and bad, fair and foul, just and unjust, and all the opposites, if we are to assume it to be the cause of all things” and has his interlocutor admit that this must be the case, that is, the dualism of good and evil (896d). Plato then pursues a lengthy proof that this is actually contradictory to the concept of an ordering force, and the Athenian nudges the interlocutor Clinias to admit “Yes; everyone at least who has not reached the uttermost verge of folly,” and that no one denies “that ‘all things are full of gods’,” to which Clinias agrees, “There is not a man, Stranger, so wrong-headed as that” (899bc).6 We may take this conclusion of the argument to be repeated by Pico’s invoking “sana mente,” thus confirming the reference to that passage. So far this is the philological status of Pico’s interpretation. The philosophical fruit of this passage is the doctrine that the world is governed by a spiritual force, namely, the soul that is endowed with superior wisdom, which is both orderly and beneficial, derived from divine goodness. The question that remains open concerns the suspicion that Ficino might have misinterpreted this passage of the Laws and thus introduced an erroneous philosophy. Ficino’s introduction to book 10 of