Episode 14: Ficino’s Republic of Letters idealinthewest.com /episode-14-ficinos-republic-of-letters Stream Audio Throughout most of the Middle Ages, learning had been the domain of the church. But the appearance in the fourteenth century of poets such as Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, along with rising literacy, helped to create a market for works written in vernacular Italian as well as Latin. The rediscovery and translation of so many works in Greek from the Roman era and before helped to feed this market, and to bring prestige to those who sponsored them. Another component which furthered the spread of ideas in the Renaissance was the printing press. Italy was an early adopter of the new technology, which allowed Ficino’s translations of Plato to spread quickly throughout Europe, and Ficino went on to write books of his own on Platonic and astrological themes. Although written in Latin, the language of the educated class, the mere fact of Plato’s works being printed and made widely available throughout Europe constituted a revolution in its own right. Ficino also maintained relationships with many intellectuals throughout Europe through the exchange of letters, presumably a side benefit of the wide-ranging Dante Aligheri (1265-1321) Medici banking enterprise. And although most of these letters were intended for publication (Ficino had copies made as they were written) they still reveal a more personal and candid side than do his scholarly works. They are frequently written to one individual, known personally to Ficino, about one topic of immediate practical interest. The same sense of being personally addressed by Ficino still comes through in reading them today. (All the quotes below are taken from the collection of letters published under the title Meditations on the Soul.¹) I’ve already spoken of the ascendance of humanism; the redefinition of the human being not as a miserable sinner, but as the noblest being in the creation. This idea was expressed perhaps most thoroughly by Pico, but Ficino also espoused it.
It was not for small things but for great that God² created men, who, knowing the great, are not satisfied with small things. Indeed, it was for the limitless alone that He created men, who are the only beings on earth to have rediscovered their infinite nature and who are not fully satisfied by anything limited, however great that thing may be. MOS 12
At the same time, he was all too aware of the tendency of humans to ignore their “infinite nature,” and concentrate on the limited and illusory world of the sensible.
I can only judge it the most foolish act of all, that many people most diligently feed a beast, that is, their body, a wild, cruel, and dangerous animal; but allow themselves, that is, the soul, insofar as they have one, to starve to death. MOS 19
How many people will you find who value a man as much as money; who cultivate themselves in the 1/3