?Introduction to the Renaissance and seventeenth century.
?Baldwin, A, and S Hutton. Eds. Platonism and the English Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1994.
67
The image of Plato which dominates the Renaissance
is that of Moses Atticus, the Attic Moses, or Greek sage whose wisdom echoed
the teaching of the Bible...
?Raphael?s portrait of Plato?Milton in ?Il Penseroso??seer
of the soul,,?secrets of ?the immortal mind that hath forsook/Her
mansion in this fleshly nook? (ll 88-9)
?key importance of the Italian Renaissance in the
recovery of the Platonic corpus
...they believed to be like minds, Orpheus, Hermes
Trismegistus and Plotinus...
Nor did Platonism?succeed in dislodging Aristotelianism
as the core of the university curriculum...
None the less?valued more than at any time since
the closure of the Athenian Academy by the emperor Justinian...
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?humanists of the Renaissance?Petrarch (1304-1374)?high
valuation of Platonic philosophy?(on the authority of Cicero and Augustine)?
Marsigli,
Filelfo, and Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444)...
?promotion of Greek studies by? Salutati (1331-1406)
and Niccolo Niccoli ?Plato?s writing ?read in Greek in Italy for the
first time since antiquity...
Byzantine scholars who traveled to Italy? Chrysolaras
(d. 1414)?Pletho (d. 1452)?Cardinal Bessarion (d.1472)
1513?works of Plato?original Greek, by Aldus Manutius...
69
?Latin?George of Trebizond?s translation of Parmenides...
Bruni?Phaedo and Republic...
Ficino (d.1499)?all 36 dialogues?still current
three and a half centuries later?(1484).
Ficino ?Enneads of Plotinus?(1492)...
Hermetic writings, Pimander and Asclepius?1460?s?mixture
of Neoplatonic, Gnostic and Jewish elements?attributed to Hermes Trismegistus,
believed then to have been an ancient sage living in pre-Christian times
...(1614) Isaac Casaubon demonstrated the spurious antiquity of these writings.
Ficino?in his prefaces and his Platonic Theology?1469?harmonised
Plato and Neoplatonism with Western Christianity
Ficino?s?Plato?Neoplatonic reading: ?regarded Plotinus?as
authoritative?
?the fortune of Plato in the Renaissance cannot be
separated from that of Neoplatonism.
?doctrines compatible with Christianity: that the
world was created, not eternal; that the soul was immortal; even a version
of the Trinity...
70
?included Zoroaster, Orpheus and Hermes Trismegistus.
Thus
in the Renaissance, the Neoplatonic interpretation of Plato rendered his
philosophy at once more systematic as a coherent whole, and more eclectic,
incorporating strands of thought not properly belonging to Plato.
?earliest direct contact between Italian Platonism
and England was Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, patron successively of two
translators of the Republic, Leonardo Bruni and of Pier Candido Decembrio
(1392-1477)...
Humanist visitors to England, like Desiderius Erasmus
(c.1466/9-1536)?
?in England?did not become institutionalised within
traditional seats of learning...
71
On the continent, it flourished in newly founded
academies, described by Kristeller as ?half learned society half literary
club?. To my knowledge there were no such academies in England...
?colleges founded on humanist lines were well supplied
with texts of Plato?Corpus Christi College, Oxford, founded by Bishop Fox
in 1517.
?assimilation of Platonism even by Aristotelians?Oxford
don, John Case.
Plessis Mornay?s A Worke concerning the trewness
of the Christian Religioun...
?appeal of Plato to the earlier humanists?authority
of Augustine?reinforced by their negative assessment of scholastic philosophy...
Plato?s concern with moral philosophy ?coincided
with the central pre-occupations of the humanists.
Later humanists?Erasmus (d.1536)?Sir Thomas More
(d.1535)?interest in the political Plato.
?most influential aspect of Ficino?s Neoplatonism
was his development of the doctrine of Platonic love in his commentary
on Plato?s Symposium (1469)...
Ficino?s transformation of Plato?s philosophy of
love is the subject of Jill Kraye?s paper?deals with the trattati d?amore?the
most influential of these treatises?Castiglione?s Il cortegiano...
72
In addition to sources like Castiglione, Pietro
Bembo and Pico della Mirandola, the Platonism of much English poetry was
probably mediated indirectly to English writers from French sources such
as Du Bellay and the Pleiade?
Doctrine of Platonic love was assimilated into?Petrarchan
poetry so fashionable in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries...
Spenser?s Amoretti (1595)?Ficinian transformation
of Plato?s philosophy of love?Drayton?s Idea...
Sidney and Chapman?parody of Neoplatonism is light-hearted,
by contrast with the dismissive ridicule of Platonic love by the libertine
love poets of the seventeenth century.
Ben Jonson?The New Inn (1629)?celebrates
Platonic love, while Neoplatonism underscores the idealisation of monarchy
in his masques for the Jacobean and Caroline courts.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
?golden age of English vernacular Platonic philosophy?Cambridge
Platonists?
73
More?first published adventures into Platonism?Psychodia
Platonica (1642)?Immortality and Pre-existence of the Soul, in Spenserian
stanzas.
?latitudinarian spirit and their antipathy to the
harsh predestinarian theology of Calvinism...
?emphasise the freedom of the will.
Theory of Recollection?adapted Renaissance Platonism
to ?scientific and philosophical revolution of the seventeenth century...
?alternative to the increasingly irrelevant Aristotelianism?official
philosophy of he universities.
?defence of spirit in?combat?atheistic tendencies
in contemporary thought?
?antipathy to the deterministic philosophies of
Hobbes and Spinoza...
74
?demise of Platonism in the eighteenth century...
The religious poetry of such writers as Milton, Vaughan, Traherne and Marvell is in many ways the poetic counterpart of the Cambridge Platonists philosophical theology...