(excerpted by Clifford Stetner)
Ficino’s Orphic Singing/ The Orphica. The tradition of the Prisci Theologi. The veiling of truth/ The Beginnings of Renaissance religious syncretism: Ficino, Pletho and Bessarion/ Orpheus’ monotheism. His Palinode in the Renaissance/ Trinitarian Orphica. The drift towards heresy/ summary of the ways in which theological Orphica are important in the Renaissance.
I Ficino’s Orphic singing
100
...richness of meaning that makes him stand out against all other Greek mythical heroes, religious teachers, and poets... believed to be the founder of an esoteric mystery religion...learnt his religious rites in Egypt.
...as Proclus says “All the Greeks theology is the offspring of the Orphic mystic doctrine.”
Orpheus could thus become the ultimate source of the Timaeus.
...poetic teacher possessed by Platonic furor who reformed and civilized his barbarous contemporaries, “the stony and beastly people” ...
102
...In a letter of ...1462... to Cosimo de’ Medici, Ficino tells that...he had been singing... the Hymnum ad Cosmum... Just after he had sung it again “ritu Orphico” a few days before writing, he received a letter telling how generously Cosimo was to patronize his studies; Cosimo must have been inspired by “celesti quodam afflatu” at the very time that Ficino was singing the hymn, and have thus granted the prayer it ends with.
II The Orphica. The tradition of the “Prisci Theologi.” The veiling of truth
103
The Orphica can...be...divided into three groups:
(1)
Fragments of verse embedded in various ancient writers... Pseudo-Justin... Clement of Alexandria...Eusebius and in Proclus.... possibly going back to pre-Platonic times.
(2)
The Hymns...second or third century A.D.
(3)
...The Argonautica. This is a poem of the late fourth century A.D.
105
Either: there were partial pre-Christian revelations, other than that given to the Jews, and/or a continuous tradition of divine knowledge deriving ultimately from pre-lapsarian Adam; Or: the only pre-Christian revelation was the Jewish one; but this filtered through to the Gentiles. The usual channel of communication was Egypt; Moses had taught the Egyptian priests, or had left books there.
... lists of ancient thinkers, the prisci theologi, all teaching the same religious truth... (Adam, Abraham), Zoroaster, Moses, Hermes Trismegistus, (the Druids), Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato... ....New Testament... Neoplatonists... and Denis the Areopagite, the disciple of St. Paul...
106
...Pico ...Moses seems “rudis” only because he is talking in fables...Thus Plato and Orpheus are only following their master’s example when they too conceal the truth in enigmas... Socrates’ death was due to imprudently unveiled talk about religious truth.... ancient polytheism can be explained away, or rather accepted allegorically.
n6 C.29 Plato’s theory of Ideas derived from his failure to understand the mystical sense of Moses’ writings; he took too literally Exodus XXV.9.40 (the tabernacle to be made after the pattern shown to Moses on the mountain) and the double account of the creation in Genesis. Clement ...on the other hand, thinks that Platonists rightly deduced the intelligible and sensible worlds from the double creation of heaven and earth and of man... Pico finds his three worlds (angelic, celestial, sublunar) clearly represented in Moses’ division of the tabernacle into three parts...
...Jean Dorat taught the Pléiade: . . . comment/On doit feindre et cacher les fables proprement,/ Et à bien desguiser la verité des choses/ D’un fabuleux manteau dont elles sont encloses: which they certainly did their best to carry out.
III The beginnings of Renaissance religious syncretism: Ficino, Pletho and Bessarion
107
In the Renaissance the Orphica appear in company with the Hermetica, the Chaldaean Oracles (i.e. Zoroaster), the Sybils, etc., all of which are used for the same end: to link Moses with Plato, Genesis with the Timaeus, and both with Christian doctrine.
Ficino influenced... the two Picos, Symphorien Champier, Amaury Bouchard, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Agostino Steuco, La Boderie, Duplessis-Mornay, Walter Raleigh . . . Cudworth. . .Thomas Taylor. ... further back than Ficino. - Gemistus Pletho...
.
Kristeller... from Pletho—the idea of an ancient tradition of pagan theology that led directly from Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, and Pythagoras to Plato and his followers..
Ronsarde in his Hymnes considered himself to be an Orphic poet...
108
...Ficino’s interest in Orpheus as a theologian probably began with the Hymns, which are among his very earliest translations from Greek (1462)...
109
... Bessarion... only cites Orpheus once ...does state that Plato, when in Egypt, learnt much from Mosaic writings. ... that Plato was prevented from clearly publishing his true religious views by the example of Socrates’ death. ...examines ...resemblances and differences between Platonic and Neoplatonic triads and the Christian trinity. All these are ...persistent themes of the Renaissance Platonists...
IV Orpheus’ monotheism. His Palinode in the Renaissance
...Ficino and his followers found in the Orphica and in other prisci theologi... monotheism, the trinity, and the creation as recounted in Genesis.
110
Orphic fragment is that known as the Testament or the Palinode now usually considered to be a Jewish forgery... Orpheus, after shutting the doors against the profane, announces ...let not Musaeus deprive himself of blessèd eternity through those things he previously believed, but look to the Divine Word, to the one Ruler of the universe... one, self-created, creator of all things...seated in the heavens on a golden throne...
The Greek Fathers, except Eusebius, cite this as ...Orpheus, having visited Egypt and there read Moses’ writings, realized the error of his former polytheism...
...Ficino...Latin version of the Palinode ...appearance of its being a recantation has gone.
111
...Trebizond’s translation of Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica... manuscript in the Bibl. Mediceo-Laurenziana, bearing the Medici arms ...1462... having a family-tree of the Medici in the margin...
112
Sir Waiter Raleigh also omits the recantatory beginning when quoting this fragment;’ he introduces it thus: “And as in Pythagoras, in Socrates, and in Plato: so we find the same excellent understanding in Orpheus, who everywhere expressed the infinite and sole power of one God, tho’ he uses the name of Jupiter, thereby to avoid the envy & danger of the time...
and then quotes the Pico Conclusion: “The name of those Gods of whom Orpheus doth sing are not of deceiving devils. . . but they are the names of natural and divine virtues.” Raleigh, History of the World (first ed. 1614)...
...period, after the Council of Trent and the establishment of Protestantism as an irremediable fact, in which the acceptance of the ancient gods, in any form, was more uneasy.
113
Raleigh ...paeans of triumph on the final destruction of the pagan gods by Christianity... a note of elegiac nostalgia...
“Jupiter is no more vexed with Juno’s jealousies; death hath persuaded him to chastity & her to patience; and that time which hath devoured itself; hath also eaten up both the bodies and images of him and his: yea, their stately temples of stone & dureful marble. The houses & sumptuous buildings erected to Baal, can nowhere be found upon the earth; nor any monument of that glorious temple erected to Diana. There are none now in Phoenicia that lament the death of Adonis: nor any in Libya, Creta, Thessalia, or elsewhere, that ask counsel or help from Jupiter. . . The great God Pan has broken his pipes: Apollo’s priests are become speachless: and the trade of riddles in oracles with the devil’s telling men’s fortunes therein, is taken up by counterfeit Egyptians and cozening astrologers.”
114
This change of attitude towards Greek theology, due to historical developments between the generation of Ficino and that of La Boderie...
Orpheus was the inventor of the amor puerorum, and this, says Pico, is an unnatural vice which usually accompanies the unnatural belief in many gods.
Agrippa... De Vanitate, he contemptuously dismisses the “gentilium theologiam Museo, Orpheo, Hesiodo quondam descriptam, quam omnino poeticam & fabulosam esse in confesso est; quam Eusebius & Lactantius & aliorum Christianorum doctores jamdudum validissimis rationibus profligarunt.
Bessarion...in clearing Platonic homosexual love from imputations of vice he gives as examples of pure love: Orpheus and Musaeus, Socrates and Alcibiades (and “quasi tutti e’ piu ingegnosi e leggiadri della gioventù di Atene”)...
V Trinitarian Orphica. The drift towards heresy
115
...monotheistic fragments... lead us on to the trinity... Orphic theogony, in which Zeus swallows the first-born god, Phanes, and thus unites the multiplicity of the whole universe, as Proclus explains.
...the Hymn of Jove, is possibly referred to in Plato’s Laws, and is quoted ... by Porphyry ...and Proclus. ... “Zeus is the first, Zeus the last, high-thunderer: Zeus the head, Zeus the middle; from Zeus all things spring; Zeus is male and immortal bride.” Then are enumerated: “fire and water and earth and aether, night and day, and Wisdom, first creator and sweet Love”...
The final fate of the Palinode... may be seen in Cudworth. ... concludes that he [Orpheus] “acknowledged one supreme unmade Deity” and that “the Pythagoreans and Platonists not only had Orpheus in great esteem, he being commonly called by them... the theologian, but were also thought in great measure to have owed their theology and philosophy to him, as deriving the same from his principles and traditions” ... but, as to the Palinode, the Fathers were misled by “certain counterfeit Orphick verses in Aristobulus ...made probably by some ignorant Jew; wherein Orpheus is made to sing a palinodia”...
116
...near to making Jove into the creative Logos, God the Son. This step is taken by Steuco; all these things in the Palace of Jove are, he says; what the Platonists call Ideas, what the Christians and Hermes Trismegistus call Wisdom or Logos. He then quotes... St. Paul as a parallel:
Who [sc. Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in the earth,. visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him ...and for him...
Though Steuco was Librarian of the Vatican, this is by no means the most startling of his unorthodoxies...
...Steuco believed that the Jews knew only the second person of the Trinity”...
117
...Steuco ...identifies the persons of the Trinity with Platonic or Neoplatonic metaphysical principles: the Father is the One and the Good, the Son is Mind and Being.
The third person of the Trinity was sometimes provided with anima, or anima mundi. But, on the whole, attention was concentrated on the first two persons; probably because the equation Holy Ghost = anima mundi was too obviously heretical...
118
...the Greek Fathers, as opposed to the Western, tend to emphasize the distinctness of the persons of the Trinity...come near to destroying their consubstantiality ... Renaissance scholars... strong insistence on the Son as creative Logos; ...due, in some measure, to the interest in Orphica which sent them back to these Fathers. It is an easy transition to pass from regarding Platonic or Neoplatonic triads (e.g. One, Mind, Soul) as foreshadowings of... the Christian Trinity to regarding them as helpful ways of partially understanding a mystery, and thence to taking them as real explanations of it, or as identical with it. In the case of the equation Mind-Intelligible World = Son-Logos, this seems already to be happening in Clement of Alexandria, and it happens in Eusebius in an unmistakably Arian way:’ he quotes Plato on the Good beyond Being, identifies it with God the Father, and then emphasizes that it absolutely transcends all Being, so that the Ideas cannot be coessential with it, i.e., the Son is not of one substance with the Father. And Eusebius, it will be remembered, is one likely starting-point of Ficino’s, and hence of his followers, syncretism.
VI Summary of ways in which theological Orphica are important in the Renaissance
119
...some of the Orphica have a positive pantheistic content ... Secondly, there is the context in which the Orphic fragments were found: Clement and Eusebius, with their dangerous Platonic expositions of the Trinity, and Proclus, with his multiple interpretation of pagan gods as metaphysical and natural principles.