OF NEO-PIiATONISM
X]
of the Neo-PIatonists that the Florentine
19^
Academy read Plato
himself. Marsilio Ficino, having translated Plato, turned next
to Plotinus. His Latin translation of the
Enneads appeared in was now set by its new adherents against Aristotelianism, whether in the Scholastic form or as restored by some who had begun to study it with the aid Of the Greek instead of the Arabian commentaries. The name of Aristotle became for a time to nearly all the innovators the synonym of 1492^. Platonism
intellectual oppression.
The
Platonists of the early Renaissance were sincere Chris-
own manner. This was not the manner of the Middle Age. The definitely articulated system of ecclesiastical
tians in their
dogma had no
real part in their intellectual
Christians in a general
way;
life.
They were
in the details of their thinking
they were Neo-Platonists. In relation to astrology and magic, indeed, they were Neo-Platonists of a less critical type than the ancient chiefs of the school. astrology,
it is
Belief in both magic
hardly necessary to say, had run
the whole course of the intervening centuries
was
;
and
down through so that there
modern time that could lead to a renewal of the sceptical and critical sifting begun by thinkers like Plotinus and Porphyry, The influence little
as yet in the atmosphere of the
of Christianity shows itself in the special stress laid on the religious aspect of Neo-Platonism. An example of this is to be met with at the end of Marsilio Ficino's translation of Plotinus. In the arguments prefixed to the closing chapters,
Ficino tries to
make
Plotinus say definitely that the union of
is perpetual. He has himself a feeling that the attempt is not quite successful; and he rather contends that Plotinus was logically bound to make the affirmation than that it is there in his very words. As a matter of fact, Plotinus has nowhere definitely made it; and it seems inconsistent alike with his own position that differences of individuality proceed with necessity from eternal distinctions in the divine intellect, and with his hypothetical use
the soul with God, once attained,
of the Stoic doctrine that events recur in exactly repeated * The Greek was printed for the with the translation.
first
time in 1580, when
it
appeared along
13—2