(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
RENAISSANCE PLATONISM
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The history Western philosophy may be characterized as a series of footnotes to Plato
It is only during the last 150 years or so that modem scholarship has attempted to cleanse the genuine thought of Plato from the mire of the Platonic tradition...
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Since Plato rarely speaks in his own name, it seems difficult to identify his own definite opinions, or to separate them from those of Socrates, Parmenides, and his other characters.
Plato’s influence upon later Greek thought was dependent not only on his dialogues which were generally available to the reading public, but also on the school which he founded and which continued as an institution for many centuries until 529...
Plato left no systematic writing... subject to much greater changes and fluctuations than in the other philosophical schools of antiquity...
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...during the third century B.C. the Academy turned towards a more or less radical skepticism... for more than two hundred years
Around the beginning of our era, a popular and somewhat eclectic kind of Platonism that borrowed various elements from Aristotle and especially from Stoicism had replaced Skepticism in the Athenian Academy, had established a kind of school in Alexandria and perhaps in other centers...
...Middle Platonism ... that the transcendent ideas or intelligible forms are concepts of a divine intelligence... elements in common with the Neopythagoreanism which flourished during the first centuries of our era...and with the Hermetics, a circle of pagan theologians who flourished in Alexandria and composed a corpus of writings that were attributed to the Egyptian divinity Hermes Trismegistus...
...Philo the Jew, and after him the Alexandrian Church Fathers Clement and Origen, made the first attempts to combine the teachings of Biblical religion with Greek philosophy
... ground was well prepared both among pagans and Christians when philosophical Platonism was revived during the third century A.D. in Alexandria by Ammonius Saccas and by his great pupil, Plotinus.
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Plotinus added a more explicit emphasis on a hierarchical universe that descends through several levels from the transcendent God or One to the corporeal world, and on an inner, spiritual experience that enables the self to reascend through the intelligible world to that supreme One.
...Proclus... Elements of Theology and Platonic Theology ... Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics, divested of their specific and concrete reference, are used as elements of a highly abstract and comprehensive ontology.
Neoplatonism supplied practically all later Greek Church Fathers and theologians with their philosophical terms and concepts, most of all that obscure father of most Christian mysticism who hides under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite...
...Byzantine East... Plato and of the Neoplatonists were always available ... combined with that of the ancient Greek poets and of Aristotle. The prevalence of Plato over Aristotle within a synthesis of both was justified by Neoplatonic precedent, and the tendency to harmonize Plato rather than Aristotle with Christian theology, sanctioned by the Greek patristic authors
In the eleventh century Michael Psellos ... combining with it the Chaldaic Oracles, attributed to Zoroaster, and the Corpus Hermeticum. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Gemistus Pletho attempted another revival of Plato’s philosophy based on Proclus and ... gave, after the model of Proclus, an allegorical explanation of the Greek divinities...convinced that Plato ...representatives of a very old pagan theology...Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster, Orpheus and Pythagoras, and which parallels both in age and content the revelation of the Hebrew and Christian Scripture.
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Among the Arabs, Plato’s position was inferior to that of Aristotle...
...under the influence of the Arabic tradition, medieval Jewish thought included a strong Neoplatonic current. ... medieval Jewish mysticism known as the Cabala contains several ideas derived from Neoplatonic and other late ancient philosophies... astrology, alchemy, and magic ... pseudo sciences also derived... from the later phases of Greek antiquity ...became associated with Platonist and Hermetic philosophy... shared such notions as the world soul... affinities and antipathies of all things natural...
...Cicero... first phases of that eclectic...Middle Platonism...
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...Middle Platonic ideas appear in Apuleius...Seneca...
...Neoplatonism...basis...Macrobius...Boethius...
...most important representative of Platonism... St. Augustine...
...early Middle Ages, when philosophical studies were not much cultivated in Western Europe... Dionysius the Areopagite... identified with the patron saint of St. Denis near Paris.
...Eriugena ...strongly imbued with Neoplatonic concepts...
Petrarch...in his attack on the authority of Aristotle among the philosophers of his time, he used at least Plato’s name...then carried out by his humanist successors.
...Renaissance Platonism... possesses independent significance as a philosophical not merely as a scholarly or literary, movement; it is connected both with the Augustinian and Aristotelian traditions of medieval philosophy... three major thinkers of the late fifteenth century, it became a major factor in the intellectual history of the sixteenth, and even afterwards. The earliest and greatest of the three, Nicolaus Cusanus
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...Marsilio Ficino, in whom the medieval philosophic and religious heritage and the teachings of Greek Platonism are brought together in a novel synthesis. ... Platonic Theology ... authoritative summary of Platonist philosophy, in which the immortality of the soul is emphasized, reasserting to some extent the Thomist position against the Averroists.
...human soul the central place in the hierarchy of the universe, he gave a metaphysical expression to a notion dear to his humanist predecessors whereas his doctrine of spiritual love...later Renaissance literature.
...inner ascent of the soul towards God through contemplation... doctrine of the unity of the world brought about by the soul...
... Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. ... attempt to reconcile the Cabala with Christian theology and to associate it with the Platonist tradition. His Oration on the dignity of man...
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...Bruno is a Platonist... Heroic Enthusiasts... theory of love theory of love derived from the Symposium ...
...astrological and alchemical literature, which continued and even increased during the sixteenth century, also presupposes such notions as a world soul or the inner powers and affinities of things celestial, elementary and composite, notions that go back to Arabic sources...
Sir Thomas More translated the life and a few letters of Pico into English... Utopia ... could hardly have been conceived without the reading of Plato’s Republic.
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Ficino’s notion of Platonic love, that is, of the spiritual love for another human being that is but a disguised love of the soul for God ... found favor with such contemporary poets as Lorenzo de’ Medici ...and this
Platonizing poetry had among its successors in the sixteenth century Michelangelo and Spenser...
Ficino’s doctrine of Platonic love was repeated and developed not only in many sonnets and other poems of the sixteenth century, but also in a large body of prose literature which grew up around the literary academy ... the trattati d’amore. ... the nature and beneficial effects of spiritual love in the Platonist manner ...the immortality of the soul or the existence and knowledge of the pure Ideas. Among the numerous authors who contributed to this...Bembo and Castiglione, for whom Platonist philosophy was but a passing fancy...also a poet like Tasso...
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...Plato’s doctrine of divine madness as expressed in the Ion and Phaedrus appealed to many poets and literary critics...
...the analogy between the conceptions of the artist and the ideas of the divine creator which appears in Cicero, Seneca, Plotinus, and other Middle and Neoplatonic authors...
...Platonist origin ...in the iconography of the works of such masters as Botticelli, Raphael, and Michelangelo...
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...Kepler... rooted in Renaissance Platonism, from which he borrowed not only his mathematical conception of the universe but also his notion of cosmic harmony...
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...Cambridge Platonists...constitute the most important phase of professed Platonism after the Florentine Academy.