History of philosophy

PHILOSOPHY (THE) OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE

The philosophy of the Italian RenaissanceJill KrayeTWO CULTURES: SCHOLASTICISM AND HUMANISM IN THE EARLY RENAISSANCETwo movements exerted a profound influence on the philosophy of the ItalianRenaissance: scholasticism and humanism, both of which began to take root innorthern Italy around 1300. Differing from one another in terms of methods andaims as greatly as the scientific-and humanities-based cultures of our own times,scholasticism and humanism each fostered a distinctive approach to philosophy.The centres of scholasticism were the universities, where philosophy teachingwas based on the Aristotelian corpus, in particular the works of logic and naturalphilosophy. In Italian universities the study of philosophy was propaedeutic tomedicine rather than, as in Oxford and Paris, theology. This encouraged anatmosphere in which philosophy could operate as an autonomous discipline,guided solely by rational criteria. Scholastic philosophers consistently defendedtheir right to explain natural phenomena according to the laws of nature withoutrecourse to theological arguments.¹But although theological faculties wereabsent in the universities, religious authorities had enough power within societyat large to challenge thinkers whose single-minded pursuit of naturalexplanations was perceived to move beyond the territory of philosophy and intothe sacred domain of faith. Aristotelian philosophers who dared, for instance, toargue that the soul was material and hence mortal were quickly forced to recantby the ecclesiastical authorities.²On the equally sensitive subject of the eternity of the world, most scholasticslimited themselves to pointing out the opposition between the Peripatetichypothesis that the world was eternal and the ‘truth of the orthodox faith’ that itwas createdex nihiloby God.³In such cases where religious and philosophicaldoctrines were in conflict, Aristotelians maintained that Christian dogma, basedon faith and revelation, was superior to explanations founded on mere reason.The scholastic doctrine of the ‘double truth’ did not present a choice betweenequally valid alternatives, but rather took for granted the subordination of therelative truth of philosophy to the absolute truth of theology.Philosophers had nodesire to challenge this hierarchy. Their primary concern was instead to maintainthe separation of the two realms, thus protecting their right to use rational, andonlyrational, arguments in philosophical contexts. Just as it was necessary, theyasserted, when discussing matters of faith, to leave behind one’s philosophicalmentality, so when discussing philosophy, one had to set aside one’s Christianfaith.⁴Scholastics read Aristotle in late medieval Latin translations, which wereunclassical in style and terminology. This type of Latin continued to be one ofthe hallmarks of scholastic treatises produced during the Renaissance. Anotherwas their rigidly logical format: works were divided and subdivided intopropositions or questions; arguments for and against were laid out; a solutionwas reached; possible objections were raised and appropriate responses supplied.This structure had the advantage of covering issues from all possible angles andensuring that the opinions of a wide variety of ancient and medieval thinkerswere aired, even if Aristotle’s were the most frequently endorsed.In the judgement of Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca, 1304–74), the founder ofItalian humanism, such treatises were barbaric, tediously pedantic, arid andincomprehensible.⁵His own style was diametrically opposed to that of thescholastics. He modelled his Latin prose on that of the best classical authors,avoiding terms and expressions which were unknown in antiquity. He alsoeschewed the methodical rigour and systematic presentation found in scholastictreatises, favouring instead a loose—almost at times rambling—structure andadopting genres such as the letter, dialogue and invective which had been usedby the Roman authors he most admired.Deeply interested in the state of his own soul, Petrarch ridiculed thescholastics for devoting so much of their energies to natural, rather than moral,philosophy: ‘What is the use,’ he asked, ‘of knowing the nature of quadrupeds,fowls, fishes, and serpents and not knowing or even neglecting man’s nature…?’The secrets of nature were ‘mysteries of God’, which Christians should acceptwith ‘humble faith’ rather than attempt to seize ‘in haughty arrogance’.⁶As forscholastic logicians, Petrarch had nothing but contempt for what he regarded astheir empty loquacity and their addiction to disputation for its own sake: ‘Theyget the greatest pleasure out of strife and set out not to find the truth but toquarrel.’⁷He especially disliked thelogica modernorum,a highly technical andsemantically orientated form of dialectic associated with William of Ockham andhis followers, which had come over to Italy from England in the mid-fourteenthcentury. Petrarch believed that it reduced all speculation to problems of formalterminology, thereby deflecting philosophers from more important matters andturning theologians into mere dialecticians.⁸Another aspect of scholasticism attacked by Petrarch was the dominance ofAristotelianism. While there was much of value in Aristotle’s philosophy, therewas also a great deal that from a Christian point of view was harmful, inparticular his failure to give a firm endorsement to the immortality of the souland his belief in the eternity of the world. Aristotle was not alone among pagansin holding these erroneous views, but he presented the greatest danger, Petrarchbelieved, because he had the most authority and the greatest number of followers.And while the pagan Aristotle could not be blamed for holding these errors, hispresent-day acolytes had no excuse.⁹Despite their adulation of Aristotle, the scholastics failed, in Petrarch’sopinion, to understand his thought. They disdained eloquence, treating it as ‘anobstacle and a disgrace to philosophy’, whereas Aristotle had believed that it was‘a mighty adornment’.¹⁰He blamed the inelegant style which characterized Latinversions of Aristotle not on the author’s inattention to style but on the ignoranceof his medieval translators—a censure which was to be frequently repeated bylater humanists.¹¹Yet aside from the ethical treatises, Petrarch’s acquaintancewith Aristotle’s writings was neither wide nor deep.If Petrarch was ill-informed about ‘the Philosopher’, he was positivelyignorant about ‘the Commentator’, Averroes, probably never having readanything at all by him. This did not stop him from criticizing the Arabicinterpreter even more strongly than he had done the Greek philosopher.¹²Insharp contrast to the scholastics, who considered Arabic learning to be animportant part of their intellectual legacy, Petrarch and his humanist successorsrestricted their philosophical interests almost exclusively to the Greco-Romanpast. Among the doctrines traditionally associated with Averroism was thedouble truth,¹³which theologians such as Thomas Aquinas rejected, maintainingthat there was only one truth, the truth of faith, and that any philosophicalproposition which contradicted it was necessarily false. Petrarch shared thispoint of view, arguing that since ‘knowledge of the true faith’ was ‘the highest,most certain, and ultimately most beatifying of all knowledge’, those whotemporarily set it aside, wishing ‘to appear as philosophers rather than asChristians’, were in reality ‘seeking the truth after having rejected the truth’.¹⁴According to him, scholastics were forced into this position not by an inevitableconflict between philosophy and religion, but rather by their support for oneparticular philosophy, Aristotelianism, which on certain crucial issues —theeternity of the world and the immortality of the soul—denied the fundamentaltruths of Christianity. The solution was therefore not to abandon philosophyperse,but to adopt a different sort of philosophy, one which avoided thesetheological errors.That philosophy, for Petrarch, was Platonism. Plato, who offered convincingrational arguments in support of both the immortality of the soul and the creationof the world, had risen higher ‘in divine matters’ than other pagans. BecausePlato ‘came nearer than all the others’ to Christian truth, he, and not his studentAristotle, deserved to be called ‘the prince of philosophy’. By promoting Plato asa more theologically correct, and hence more profound, philosopher thanAristotle, Petrarch was able to mount yet another challenge to the scholasticphilosophy of his day.¹⁵But for all his advocacy of Plato, Petrarch’s knowledgeof his works—like that of all Western scholars in this period—was very limited.Of the four dialogues then available in Latin, he made extensive use only of theTimaeus,in which Plato was believed to describe the creation of the world.¹⁶Heowned a manuscript containing many more of the works in Greek; but to hisgreat regret, he never managed to learn the language.¹⁷The bulk of Petrarch’sunderstanding of Platonism was therefore gained from secondary sources: Cicero,Macrobius, Apuleius, but above all Augustine. It was primarily on Augustine’sauthority that Petrarch came to believe to strongly in the essential compatibilityof Platonism with Christianity and to regard Plato as a Christian byanticipation.¹⁸Petrarch’s Platonism amounted to little more than a propagandacampaign, but it was an effective one, which paved the way for the morephilologically and philosophically ambitious efforts of fifteenth-centuryscholars.THE NEW ARISTOTELIANISMPetrarch’s antipathy towards Aristotle was far less influential among hisfollowers, many of whom helped to create a new style of Aristotelianism. Thekey figure in this movement was the humanist Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), apapal secretary and later chancellor of Florence, who became the most importanttranslator of Aristotle in the early fifteenth century.¹⁹It was not that he made newtexts available, since virtually all of Aristotle had been translated into Latin bythe end of the thirteenth century. Rather, he pioneered a novel method oftranslation. Medieval translators had attempted to find a Latin equivalent foreach Greek word and to reproduce as far as possible the exact order of theoriginal. Bruni, who had been trained by the Byzantine scholarManuel Chrysoloras (c.1350–1414), regarded such word-for-word renderings asworthless since they distorted the meaning of the Greek. From Chrysoloras helearned to translate not individual words but units of meaning—phrases and evensentences.²⁰From Cicero, on the other hand, Bruni learned to follow the wordorder and syntactic structure of the target language (Latin) rather than that of thesource language (Greek); this meant adopting the prose style of the best classicalLatin authors, above all Cicero himself.²¹A ‘classical’ Aristotle who wrote in Ciceronian Latin was a direct challenge tothe scholastic culture of the universities, where a very different sort of LatinAristotle had been the mainstay of the curriculum for centuries. By retranslatingAristotle in this way Bruni was tampering with the fundamental terminologyused by scholastics and deliberately calling into question all interpretations basedon the medieval versions. Following up a line of attack opened by Petrarch, Brunimaintained that it was impossible for the self-professed Aristotelian philosophers‘to grasp anything rightly…since those books which they say are Aristotle’s havesuffered such a great transformation that were anyone to bring them to Aristotlehimself, he would not recognize them as his own’.²²Yet for all his criticisms ofthese translations, Bruni himself relied on them quite heavily, using hisknowledge of Greek to correct their worst mistakes, but for the most part simplypolishing their rough-hewn Latin.²³For Bruni and his fellow humanists these stylistic changes were by no meanssuperficial. Misled by Cicero’s praise of Aristotle’s writings, they believed thatthey were restoring his lost eloquence. They saw this as a significant contributionto their larger programme of, replacing the rebarbative treatises of the scholasticswith a classically inspired and rhetorically persuasive form of philosophizing.²⁴Hardline scholastics responded to the humanist rewriting of Aristotle bycomplaining that wisdom and philosophy had not been joined to eloquence andrhetoric but rather subordinated to them. Although willing to concede thatBruni’s translations were more readable than the medieval versions, they thoughtthat his lacked the scientific precision necessary in a philosophical work. Ciceromight be an appropriate model to follow in oratory but not in philosophy, wheresubtle distinctions had to be made on the basis of careful reasoning.²⁵Bruni’s desire to remove Aristotle from the scholastic camp and claim him forthe humanist cause was a reflection of his high regard for the philosopher. In hisVita Aristotelis,he ranked him higher than his teacher Plato, reversing Petrarch’sevaluation. The grounds for this judgement were Aristotle’s greater consistencyand clarity as well as his caution and moderation, which led him to ‘supportnormal usages and ways of life’, in contrast to Plato, who expressed ‘opinionsutterly abhorrent to our customs’, such as the belief that ‘all wives should be heldin common’. Although he extolled Aristotle’s methodical presentation of materialin all his teachings, whether ‘logic, natural science or ethics’, Bruni’s interestwas in practice limited to moral and political philosophy, as his three Aristoteliantranslations—theNicomachean Ethics, OeconomicsandPolitics—clearlyshow.²⁶In hisIsagogicon moralis disciplinae,he contrasted ‘the science ofmorals’, whose study brought ‘the greatest and most excellent of all things:happiness’, with natural philosophy, a discipline ‘of no practical use’, unless, headded, in words reminiscent of Petrarch, ‘you think yourself better instructed inthe Good Life for having learned all about ice, snow and the colours of therainbow’. Also reminiscent of Petrarch was Bruni’s belief that Ockhamist logic,‘that barbarism which dwells across the ocean’, had reduced contemporarydialectics to ‘absurdity and frivolity’.²⁷The narrow range of Bruni’s philosophical interests was typical of Italianhumanists in the first half of the fifteenth century. The next wave of Aristotletranslators, however, were Greek émigrés, who took a much broader view ofAristotelian philosophy. Johannes Argyropulos (c.1410–87), a Byzantinescholar who taught in Florence, began by lecturing on theNicomachean EthicsandPolitics,but soon moved on to thePhysics, De anima, MeteorologyandMetaphysics.²⁸He was able to bring to his teaching and translating of Aristotlean impressive blend of linguistic and philosophical competence, having receivedhis early training in his native Constantinople and later studying at the Universityof Padua. Argyropulos was concerned to present the entire range of theAristotelian corpus, which he regarded as the culmination of the Greekphilosophical tradition. He did not shy away from logic, producing acompendium on the subject, based primarily on the AristotelianOrganon(mostof which he himself translated into Latin) but also drawing on Byzantinecommentaries and on standard Western authorities such as Boethius and Peter ofSpain.²⁹Natural philosophy, another subject shunned by humanists like Petrarchand Bruni, was embraced with enthusiasm by Argyropulos, who began hiscourse on thePhysicsby exclaiming: ‘How great is the nobility of this science,how great its perfection, its strength and power, and how great also is itsbeauty!’³⁰In his lectures onDe anima,delivered in 1460, Argyropulos tackled the sameproblems which had exercised scholastic commentators since the thirteenthcentury: whether there was only one immortal intellect for all mankind, whichdirected the body’s operations in the way that a sailor steered his ship, asAverroes maintained; or whether the soul was instead the substantial form ofeach individual person, giving the body existence(esse);and if so, whether itdied with the body, as Alexander of Aphrodisias—according to Averroes—believed, or continued to exist after death, as Christian tradition asserted.Argyropulos rejected both the opinion of Alexander of Aphrodisias that the soulwas mortal and the Averroist doctrine of the unity of the intellect, which manybelieved to be the authentic position of Aristotle. Challenging the double-truthdoctrine, which dictated that reason should be kept separate from faith,Argyropulos asserted that there were philosophical as well as religiousarguments in favour of the Christian dogma of the immortality of individualsouls.³¹On other issues, however, Argyropulos had no qualms about relying onAverroes, whose works he had studied while at Padua.³²And in his lectures ontheNicomachean Ethics,he made use of Albertus Magnus, Walter Burley andother medieval commentators. These lectures were assiduously taken down byhis devoted student, Donato Acciaiuoli (1429–78), who later reworked them inthe form of a commentary, which, despite his humanist credentials, had a greatdeal in common, in terminology, organization and content, with scholastictreatises.³³Humanism and scholasticism were still moving down their separatepaths, but in the second half of the fifteenth century those paths wereoccasionally beginning to cross.A large number of Aristotle’s works, mostly in the field of natural philosophy,were translated by another Greek émigré, George of Trebizond (1395/6–1472/3),as part of a plan, devised and financed by the humanist pope Nicholas V, toproduce a new version of the entire corpus.³⁴Like Bruni and most other fifteenthcenturyAristotle translators, George made use of the medieval versions; butunlike them, he went out of his way to acknowledge and praise them. His owntranslations resembled the medieval ones in that he tried as far as possible toproduce word-for-word versions, avoiding, however, their readiness to violatethe rules of Latin syntax and usage. George had a sophisticated understanding ofAristotle’s style and was aware that he had not attempted, or had not been able,to write eloquently when dealing with technical subjects. It was thereforemisguided to impose elegance where it was lacking in the original.³⁵George’s comments were directed not at Bruni but at his fellow Greek,Theodore Gaza (c.1400–75). Gaza was the protégé of Cardinal Bessarion (c.1403–72), a distinguished Byzantine theologian and philosopher who hadtransferred his allegiance to the Roman Catholic church. Bessarion’s politicaland intellectual clout (he himself had translated theMetaphysics) helped toconvince Nicholas V that he should commission Gaza to make new Latinversions of some of the Aristotelian texts translated by George.³⁶George’s loss ofpapal favour and patronage was no doubt caused by his notoriously difficultbehaviour,³⁷as well as his failure on occasion to live up to his own highstandards of translation. There was a theoretical difference between his positionand that of Gaza, however. Gaza’s primary concern was to ensure the eleganceand Latinity of his translations even when this entailed imprecision andinconsistency. George, by contrast, took the view that in rendering philosophicalworks exactitude and fidelity to the author’s words were all-important; judged bythis criterion, the medieval translators, for all the inadequacies of their Latinstyle, had been more successful than Gaza.³⁸George believed moreover that Gaza’s version, or rather ‘perversion’, ofAristotle would undermine scholasticism, which relied on the long-establishedterminology of the medieval translations. For George, a Greek convert to RomanCatholicism, a humanist admirer of medieval thinkers such as Albertus Magnusand Thomas Aquinas, and a deeply paranoid personality, the classical Latinwhich Gaza put in Aristotle’s mouth was part of a conspiracy to destroyChristian theology by removing the scholastic Aristotelianism whichunderpinned it.³⁹And that, he believed, was only the beginning. The hiddenagenda of Gaza and his patron Bessarion included the replacement ofAristotelianism by another ancient philosophical system, one which (as we shallsee) George thought was destined to pave the way for a return to paganism.George’s merits as a translator of Aristotle found at least one admirer. AngeloPoliziano (1454–94), the most learned Italian humanist of his day, recognizedthat Gaza’s much-praised translation of the zoological works borrowed heavilyfrom the earlier version by George, whom Gaza had ungenerously referred to asa ‘brothel keeper’.⁴⁰The fact that Poliziano, a teacher of Greek and Latinliterature at the Florentinestudio,was sufficiently concerned with Aristoteliannatural philosophy to study these translations is an indication of the wideningphilosophical interests of late fifteenth-century Italian humanists. In 1490Poliziano lectured on theNicomachean Ethics,a treatise which was within thetypical humanist ambit of moral philosophy; but during the next four years heworked his way through the entireOrganon. Though keenly interested inAristotle’s logic, Poliziano—like Petrarch and Bruni—held no brief for theBritish logicians who dominated the scholastic curriculum. He wanted to applyhumanist philological methods to Greek philosophical texts in order to reformsubjects such as logic and natural philosophy, corrupted by centuries ofscholastic ignorance.⁴¹The professional philosophers whose ability to understand Aristotle Polizianocalled into question and whose preserve he invaded, responded, not surprisingly,by accusing him of teaching technical subjects which he knew nothing about.These vampires(lamiae),as Poliziano called them in his 1492 inaugural lectureon thePrior Analytics,had taken to ridiculing him as a would-be philosopher.He in turn replied that he had never claimed to be a philosopher, but rather aphilologist(grammaticus),a scholar who used his knowledge of classicallanguages and culture to interpret ancient texts, be they literary, legal orphilosophical.⁴²Another philologist who brought his talents to bear on philosophical andscientific works was Poliziano’s great friend, the Venetian humanist ErmolaoBarbaro (1454–93).⁴³In 1474–6 Barbaro lectured at Padua on theNicomacheanEthicsandPolitics,using the medieval Latin versions—no doubt because ofuniversity requirements—but correcting them against the Greek.⁴⁴Hisexperiences in the citadel of traditional scholastic Aristotelianism convinced himof the need to promote the new, humanist approach to philosophy. This involvedan ambitious plan to retranslate all of Aristotle, although owing to his early deathhe completed only a version of theRhetoricand a humanistic reworking of theLiber sex principiorum,a twelfth-century Latin treatise on the categories whichhad become a regular part of the Aristotelian logical corpus. The latter workallowed him to prove that even the most technical philosophical subjects couldbe rendered with elegance. Barbaro also wrote a brief treatise whichdemonstrated that the English calculatory tradition, a highly technical form oflogico-mathematical physics developed in fourteenth-century Oxford, could betreated in classical Latin. His overall goal was to reunite eloquence andphilosophy, which he believed had been artificially sundered, to the detriment ofboth, by generations of scholastics.⁴⁵Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–94), although on good terms with bothBarbaro and Poliziano, did not share their humanist disdain for the ‘dull, rude,uncultured’ scholastics. Pico, who had spent ‘six years on those barbarians’,denied that their lack of eloquence detracted from the quality of theirphilosophical thought. In his view it was rhetoric and oratory which were thegreatest obstacles to philosophy, for they were nothing but ‘sheer mendacity,sheer imposture, sheer trickery’, while philosophy was ‘concerned with knowingthe truth and demonstrating it to others’. A philosopher’s style should thereforebe not ‘delightful, adorned and graceful’ but ‘useful, grave, something to berespected’. Orators who sought the roar of the crowd’s approval had to be wellspoken, but not philosophers, who wanted only the silent respect of thediscerning few.⁴⁶Pico’s disparagement of eloquence is itself so eloquent thatirony is almost certainly in play. But the argument he presented was a seriousone, which highlighted a long-standing difference between the scholastic andhumanist styles of philosophy.There were substantive as well as stylistic differences between humanist andscholastic Aristotelianism. While Averroes still reigned supreme as ‘theCommentator’ in the universities, humanists like Barbaro, echoing—from a moreinformed position—Petrarch’s hostility, were determined to replace this Arabicinfluence with ancient Greek expositors more acceptable to their classicaltastes.⁴⁷A few works by the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle had beentranslated into Latin in the Middle Ages, and some of their views, especiallythose of Alexander of Aphrodisias, were known through reports given byAverroes; but the vast bulk of the material was unavailable to Western readers.⁴⁸To help remedy this situation, Barbaro in 1481 published a Latin translation ofthe paraphrases of Themistius; and in 1495 Girolamo Donato, a Venetianhumanist who belonged to Barbaro’s circle, published a translation of Alexanderof Aphrodisias’s commentary onDe anima. These versions were soon to have asignificant impact on philosophical discussions in Padua.⁴⁹While Barbaro and Donato were producing their Latin translations of Aristotleand his ancient commentators, other humanists also working in Venice weredirecting their efforts towards editing the Greek texts of these works. Theirsupreme achievement was the Greek Aristotle published between 1495 and 1498by Aldus Manutius (c.1452–1515).⁵⁰This multi-volume deluxe edition wasprimarily the fruit of humanist philology, but important contributions came fromthe scholastic side as well: Francesco Cavalli (d. 1540), a physician who taught atPadua, worked out the proper arrangement of the treatises on natural philosophyand convinced Aldus to substitute Theophrastus’s botanical works forDeplantis,a work he recognized to be pseudoAristotelian.⁵¹Aldus also hadambitious plans to publish Greek editions of the Aristotelian commentators, butthe project did not get off the ground until early in the next century.⁵²The rest of the thriving Venetian publishing industry, with an eye to profitrather than to intellectual lustre, focused its energies on producing Latin editionsof Aristotle, still, and for some time to come, the staple diet of the philosophicalcurriculum. One such work, published in 1483–4 and containing thecommentaries of Averroes as well as the medieval translations of Aristotle, wasedited by Nicoletto Vernia (d. 1499), the leading professor of natural philosophyat the University of Padua. For much of his career Vernia was a typicalscholastic, who regarded Averroes and Albertus Magnus as the greatest ofAristotelian commentators. Insisting on the double-truth distinction betweentheological and rational discourse, Vernia maintained that although the belief inthe soul as the substantial form of individual human beings was true according tofaith, it was nevertheless completely foreign to Aristotle, whose thought shouldnot be interpreted as if he had been a Christian. Averroes, not Thomas Aquinas,had correctly understood Aristotle, recognizing that according to Peripateticprinciples (e.g. the indivisibility of separate substances) there was only oneintellective soul for all mankind.⁵³Vernia’s stance had to be altered when, in 1489, the bishop of Padua bannedany further discussion of the Averroist doctrine of the unity of the intellect. Justas earlier scholastics had been forced to recant views which were unacceptable tothe Church, Vernia abandoned his Averroist beliefs. In the 1490s he completelyrethought his position on the controversial problem of the soul, makingconsiderable use of the newly Latinized works of Themistius and Alexander ofAphrodisias. No longer accepting Averroes as a reliable guide to Aristotelianpsychology, Vernia turned to the Greek commentators, who he believed(wrongly in the case of Alexander) provided evidence that Aristotle, like Plato,had argued for the immortality of individual souls. Christian doctrine wastherefore not simply an article of faith but could be demonstrated on purelyrational grounds.⁵⁴This standpoint had already gained philosophical respectability earlier in thecentury through the influence of Paul of Venice (1369–1429), the most famousscholastic of his time. Although Paul never ceased to regard the Averroist unityof the intellect as the correct interpretation of Aristotle’sDe anima,he did notthink that this in itself made the position a demonstrable doctrine, for a number ofobjections to it could be raised, objections based on reason as well as faith.Although Paul and Vernia came to their conclusions by different routes, theyboth maintained that there were rational as well as theological arguments infavour of Christian dogma.⁵⁵The barrier separating the realms of philosophy andtheology, used by generations of scholastics to defend the autonomy of theirdiscipline, was starting to crumble.THE REVIVAL OF PLATONISMInterest in Plato had been stirred among Italian humanists by Petrarch’s portrayalof his philosophy as a theologically acceptable alternative to Aristotelianism, onewhose closeness to Christianity, moreover, had been endorsed by no less anauthority than Augustine, But until the end of the fourteenth century little firsthandknowledge of the dialogues was possible since so few Latin versionsexisted: theTimaeuswas widely accessible in the fragmentary fourth-centuryversion of Chalcidius; thePhaedoandMenohad been translated in the twelfthcentury by Henricus Aristippus; and part of theParmenideswas embedded inWilliam of Moerbeke’s thirteenth-century translation of Proclus’s commentary.⁵⁶Although thePhaedowas already available in medieval Latin, Bruni chose toproduce a new humanist version in 1405. This allowed him, as with his Aristotletranslations, to demonstrate the stylistic superiority of the humanist approach tophilosophy. But there was another reason for this choice. The theme of thePhaedo,the personal immortality of individual human souls, was a minefield forAristotelians. As such it was an ideal means to emphasize the superiority, from aChristian point of view, of Platonism. In his dedication of the translation toInnocent VII, Bruni told the pope that, although Christian doctrine on theafterlife did not require any confirmation from classical philosophy, it wouldnone the less ‘bring no small increase to the true faith’ if people were made tosee ‘that the most subtle and wise of pagan philosophers held the same beliefsabout the soul as we hold’ and about many other matters as well.⁵⁷These othermatters included, as Bruni specified in the dedication of hisGorgiastranslationto John XXIII (1410), God’s creation of the world: the doctrine which, alongwith immortality, had determined Petrarch’s preference for Platonism overAristotelianism.⁵⁸As he translated more of the dialogues, however, Bruni became increasinglydisillusioned with their ethical and political doctrines. In his partial translations ofthePhaedrus(1424) and theSymposium(1435), he resorted to extensivebowdlerization in order to remove any hint of homosexuality; and he refused totranslate theRepublicbecause it contained so many repellent notions, amongthem the community of wives and property, one of those ‘abhorrent’ opinionswhich led him to transfer his philosophical loyalties to the less waywardAristotle.⁵⁹Bruni’s intense dislike of theRepublicwas not shared by his teacherChrysoloras, who appears to have had no scruples about divulging its contents tothe Latin reading public. He had produced in 1402 a literal version of the text—the best he could do with his limited knowledge of Latin—which was thenrevised and polished by one of his Milanese students, Uberto Decembrio (c.1370–1427). Unfortunately this collaboration resulted in the worst of bothworlds: a crude mixture of word-for-word translation and inaccurate paraphrase,which garbled the technical terminology and utterly failed to convey thecomplexity and sophistication of Plato’s doctrines.⁶⁰Thirty-five years laterUberto’s son Pier Candido (1399–1477) decided to make a new translation, onewhich would ensure that theRepublic,a byword for eloquence among Greeks,would not appear lacklustre in Latin. He was also anxious to prove thatAristotle’s account of Plato’s work inPoliticsII.1 was misleading—that, forinstance, the common ownership of wives and goods was not meant to beuniversal but rather was restricted to the class of guardians. In line with otherhumanists, Pier Candido emphasized the points of contact between Platonismand Christianity, identifying in his marginal notes to the translation the Form ofGood in Book VI with God, and drawing attention to Plato’s proofs ofimmortality in Book X. Aspects of the dialogue which he found offensive— theequality of the sexes and homosexuality—were treated as ironic or weredeliberately mistranslated or, when all else failed, simply left out.⁶¹Since none of these humanists had the philosophical training to come to gripswith the elaborate conceptual apparatus of Platonism, they were unable to gobeyond an appreciation of Plato’s style, his (carefully censored) moral thoughtand his agreement with Christianity. Similarly, humanist educators taught theirstudents to read the dialogues in Greek but were not in a position to provide aphilosophical framework that would allow them to interpret what they read in itsPlatonic context. Instead, they encouraged their pupils to use the works as aquarry for wise sayings and pithy maxims, which they could then insert in theirthematically organized commonplace books for future use.⁶²The sheer difficultyof Plato’s teachings on metaphysics and epistemology forced humanists to relyon more straightforward second-hand accounts even when they had access to theoriginal works. Thus an accomplished Greek scholar such as Francesco Filelfo(1398–1481), who had translated Aristotle(Rhetorica ad Alexandrum)as well asPlato (theEuthyphroand some of theLetters), did not turn to the dialogues whenwriting his treatise on Platonic ideas but relied on the more accessible treatmentsof the subject in Cicero, Augustine and certain Middle Platonic sources.⁶³As in the case of Aristotle, it was the Byzantine émigrés who brought a newdepth to the study of Plato. Since Platonism was part of their educationalbackground, they were more capable of dealing with the entire range of Plato’sphilosophy, speculative doctrines as well as practical ethics and politics.Argyropulos allowed a small Platonic element to seep into his university courseson Aristotle and gave at least one private lecture on theMeno.⁶⁴Even Aristotle’sstaunchest defender, George of Trebizond, had gone through a Platonic phase inhis youth and was later commissioned by Nicholas of Cusa to make a completeLatin version of theParmenides,only a portion of which was available in themedieval translation. George, who needed the money, agreed with reluctance,and in 1459 produced a reasonably accurate rendering of the text.⁶⁵Eight years earlier George had made a far less successful translation of theLawsandEpinomis,this time at the behest of Nicholas V—another offer hecould not afford to refuse, although his slipshod and distorted version may havebeen an attempt to subvert the dialogue’s potential influence. After falling outwith the pope,⁶⁶George transferred the dedication to the Venetian Republic,suggesting in the new preface that the city’s founders must have read theLaws—Greek, he pointed out, was spoken in Italy during the early Middle Ages—because their government perfectly exemplified the mixed constitution describedby Plato in Book III (692–3): the Grand Council representing democracy, theCouncil of Ten aristocracy and the doge monarchy. George’s real opinion of thedialogue and its author is not to be found in the flattering words he addressed tothe Venetians but rather in some marginal notes which he wrote in his own copyof the translation: ‘What shallowness!’ ‘Look at his arrogance!’ ‘The man shouldbe stoned!’⁶⁷These harsh remarks were inspired by George’s increasing fear that Platonismwould not only replace Aristotelianism as the dominant philosophy of the Westbut would also be the springboard for a world-wide return to paganism. Heblamed Cardinal Bessarion and his accomplice Gaza for promoting Platonism,but theéminence griseof this ruinous movement was, he believed, Bessarion’steacher, Georgios Gemistos Plethon (c.1360–1454).⁶⁸During the Council ofFlorence (1439), a last-ditch attempt to reunify the Eastern and Western churchesin the face of the approaching Turkish menace, Plethon, a member of the Greekdelegation, had written a brief treatise,De differentiis Aristotelis et Platonis,which compared the doctrines of the two philosophers to Aristotle’s greatdisadvantage. The work was addressed to Westerners, both the minority whowere already convinced of Plato’s supremacy and the majority who, taken in bythe extravagant claims of Averroes, gave their preference to Aristotle.⁶⁹Plethon,who for many years had taught Platonic philosophy at Mistra in the Peloponnese,discussed a wide range of topics—metaphysics, epistemology, cosmology,psychology, ethics—in each case demonstrating the superiority of Plato’s viewsto those of his student Aristotle.One of the aims of Plethon’s treatise was to suggest that Aristotelianphilosophy was unfit to serve as a mainstay of Christian theology and thatPlatonism would more suitably fill that role. Pouncing on the two issues whereAristotelianism’s claims to support Christianity were weakest, the creation of theworld and the immortality of the soul, Plethon pointed out, first, that Aristotle‘never calls God the creator of anything whatever, but only the motive force ofthe universe’; and, second, that Aristotle’s position on the afterlife of the soul wasat best ambiguous, since he asserted the eternity of the human mind inDe anima(408b19–20) and theMetaphysics(1070a 26–7), but never applied this belief tohis moral philosophy and even suggested in theEthics(1115a26–7) that ‘nothingwhatever that is good lies in store for man after the end of his present life’, apremise which had led Alexander of Aphrodisias to the ‘deplorable conclusion’that ‘the human soul is mortal’.⁷⁰Plethon’s views do not seem on the face of it very far from those of Petrarchand other humanist supporters of Plato. But the difference between them was infact considerable. While the Italians genuinely wanted to use Platonic philosophyto buttress Christianity, Plethon envisaged it as the foundation on which torebuild the polytheistic paganism of ancient Greece. Convinced that the Turkswere soon to destroy both the Eastern and Western churches, Plethon saw theonly hope for the disintegrating Byzantine Empire in the replacement ofChristianity by a revitalized paganism, solidly grounded in Platonic metaphysics.He therefore composed—but did not dare to publish—The Laws,modelled onthe Platonic dialogue of the same name, in which he presented a concreteprogramme for the revival of the beliefs and moral values of the pre-Christianpast.⁷¹Plethon’s paganism contained Stoic as well as Platonic elements: heregarded absolute determinism as a necessary concomitant to the divineprovidence of Zeus, who had fixed the entire future in the best possible form.Free will, therefore, consisted of voluntary subjection to the absolute good whichZeus had decreed.⁷²InDe differentiisPlethon had revealed nothing of hisrevolutionary plans, pretending for the benefit of his Italian readers to besincerely concerned about the conflicts between Aristotelian philosophy andChristian theology. But his long-term goal seems to have been to destroyconfidence in Aristotelianism so that it could be supplanted by Platonism, whichwould then sever its ties with Christianity and renew its former alliance withpaganism.De differentiis,written in Greek and requiring a level of philosophicalunderstanding far beyond the competence of most Italian humanists, made littleimpact on its intended audience. It did cause quite a stir among the Byzantines,however, many of whom rushed to Aristotle’s defence.⁷³Writing in Latin andtherefore attracting a wider public, George of Trebizond produced theComparatio Platonis et Aristotelis(1458), in which he unstintingly praisedAristotle while heaping abuse on Plato and his present-day followers. Georgeclaimed to have had a conversation with Plethon during the Council of Florencein which the latter predicted that the whole world would soon be unified underone religion: neither Christianity nor Islam, but a religion which would ‘differlittle from paganism’.⁷⁴This proved to him that Plethon was the mastermindbehind a Platonic conspiracy to overthrow Christianity. As it turns out, George,who had probably heard rumours about Plethon’sLaws,was not far from thetruth, although he was certainly wrong to assume that Bessarion and his circlewere involved in (or even knew anything of) the plot.In the first book of theComparatioGeorge argued that Aristotle’s knowledgeof all intellectual disciplines was superior to Plato’s. In the second, he showedthat although Platonism appeared to be close to Christianity, in reality itsdoctrines, above all Plato’s belief in the pre-existence of souls and in the creationof the universe from pre-existent matter, were inimical to religion. Aristotle, onthe other hand, was in complete agreement with Christianity since he believed inthe personal immortality of the soul, creationex nihilo,divine providence, free willand even had some inkling of the Trinity. These extravagant claims went farbeyond what Thomas Aquinas, the father of Christian Aristotelianism, hadmaintained, for Thomas had always insisted on a firm demarcation between theproofs of philosophy, which could be borrowed from the pagans, and the truths ofreligion, which were accessible only through revelation.⁷⁵In the third and finalbook George, drawing on theSymposium, Phaedrusand theLaws(in his ownmisleading translation), disclosed the sexual depravity and moral corruption ofPlato and his disciples, among whom he numbered Epicurus and Mohammed.According to George, Mohammed had been a second Plato, Plethon an evenmore pernicious third and worse might be in store: a fourth Plato, the mostdangerous of all, could soon arise— presumably a reference to CardinalBessarion, who was a strong candidate for the papacy, a position which wouldgive him the power to destroy Christianity from the inside.⁷⁶George knew, however, that this nightmare would not come to pass, for he hadbeen granted an apocalyptic vision which allowed him to predict (just as his archenemyPlethon had) the defeat of Western as well as Eastern Christendom by theTurks. This Islamic triumph would not, he knew, be the prelude to the reemergenceof a Plethon-style paganism: the sultan Mehmed II was destined to beconverted to Christianity by none other than George himself, who wouldconvince him to turn his might against the true enemies of the Church, Bessarionand his band of paganizing Platonists. Unfortunately, when George travelled toConstantinople, twelve years after its fall to the Turks, in order to play hispivotal role in world history, he failed to gain even an audience with the sultan.On his return to Rome he was imprisoned on suspicion of apostasy, a prophetwithout honour in his own country.⁷⁷While George’s bizarre drama was unfolding, scholars from the Greekcommunity in Italy were busy composing responses to hisComparatio. By 1459Bessarion, the chief spokesman for Christian Platonism and—as he probablysuspected—the main target of George’s attack, had drafted a reply, which hesent to Gaza for comments. Gaza, although identified by George as one of thePlatonic conspirators, thought of himself as an Aristotelian and had earlierwritten two tracts against Plethon, one refuting his concept of substance and theother answering his uncompromising determinism. In the second work Gazaattempted, following a long-established Byzantine tradition, to reconcile theviews of Plato and Aristotle, demonstrating that the Stoic-inspired determinismpostulated by Plethon had been rejected by both philosophers.⁷⁸In the comments which he sent to Bessarion, Gaza set out his Aristoteliancritique of the hyper-Aristotelianism of George’sComparatio. Such a correctivewas necessary, he said, because George lacked ‘all understanding of Aristotle’slanguage and subject matter’. Similar charges had been levelled against Gazahimself by George in his blast against Gaza’s ‘perversion’ of Aristotle; it wasnow time to settle old scores.⁷⁹Gaza focused on the two issues which were at thecentre of the debate about the relationship between classical philosophy andChristianity: the doctrines of creation and immortality. On the first, he showedthat Aristotle had not, as George claimed, believed in creationex nihilobut hadmaintained that the world was eternal, as indeed had Plato, although with far lessclarity than Aristotle. The problem of immortality was more complex. Gazaadmitted that the Averroist doctrine of the unity of the intellect was difficult torefute on philosophical grounds but pointed out that Aristotle had neverexplicitly endorsed it; on the other hand, he had never given any indication thathe supported the notion of personal immortality. Given, however, that theexpectation of just rewards and punishments in the afterlife is essential for themaintenance of public and private morality, Gaza argued that we should adoptPlato’s belief in immortality, even though it is not capable of rationaldemonstration.⁸⁰A decade later Bessarion published his own refutation of theComparatio,which appeared in a Latin translation so as to reach the same large readership asGeorge’s work. The aim of Bessarion’s treatise,In calumniatorem Platonis,wasto defend Plato against the calumnies which threatened to destroy his reputationamong Christians and also to damage the reputation of his calumniator byrevealing the shoddy scholarship on which his work was based. Following upGaza’s claim that George censured Platonic doctrines which he could no moreunderstand cthan some rustic fresh from tilling the fields’, Bessarion gave apractical demonstration of George’s ignorance and incompetence by pointing outover two hundred errors, philosophical as well as linguistic, in his translation oftheLaws.⁸¹But while Bessarion wanted to lower George’s standing, he had nodesire to harm that of Aristotle, whom he respected as a philosopher and whoseMetaphysicshe had translated. Like Gaza, he accepted the Byzantine positionthat there were no fundamental differences between the two philosophers,although Bessarion tended to follow the ancient Greek commentators in rankingPlato, the supreme metaphysician, higher than Aristotle, the supreme naturalphilosopher and logician.⁸²What Bessarion could not accept was George’s insistence that Aristotle wascloser than Plato to Christianity. Both philosophers, Bessarion asserted, werepolytheistic pagans who held many beliefs which were entirely foreign to truereligion. He therefore had no intention of turning Plato into a Christian, as Georgehad done with Aristotle. Nevertheless, he maintained that if one was looking forphilosophical confirmation of Christian dogmas, there was far more in Plato’sworks than in those of Aristotle. Although Plato had not fully understooddoctrines such as the Trinity, he had received enough illumination from the lightof nature to allow him to gain a shadowy knowledge of the mysteries of faith, aknowledge which, however imperfect, could play a valuable role in leading mentowards the ultimate truths of the Bible.⁸³Bessarion’s ability to find intimationsand anticipations of Christianity in Plato’s dialogues was greatly aided by hisfamiliarity with the hermeneutical techniques of the ancient Neoplatonists,especially Plotinus and Proclus. He learned from them how to go beyond theoften embarrassing literal sense of Plato’s words: his accounts ofmetempsychosis, for example, or his frank references to homosexual love, whichthe Italian humanists had deliberately mistranslated or excised. TheNeoplatonists taught Bessarion to look for the deeper meaning of such passagesby reading them in terms of allegory, myth and symbol—devices which Platohad used to hide his profoundest doctrines from the gaze of the vulgar.⁸⁴Thesetools of analysis, combined with his understanding of Platonic metaphysics, alsogained from the Neoplatonists, permitted Bessarion to discredit George’sslanders of Plato and, far more importantly, to lay the philosophical andtheological foundation for a systematic Christian Neoplatonism.The philosopher who was to construct that system, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99),had just completed the first draft of his Latin translation of all thirty-six Platonicdialogues when Bessarion’sIn calumniatorem Platoniswas completed in 1469.Like many others, Ficino wrote to the cardinal to congratulate him on histreatise, from which he clearly learned a great deal.⁸⁵Adopting Bessarion’sfigurative method of reading the dialogues, Ficino insisted that Plato’s doctrine ofthe transmigration of souls should be interpreted in a moral key, as an allegoricalrepresentation of what happened to those who behaved like animals. Similarly,passages describing Socrates’s sexual passion for his young disciples were, inFicino’s view, marvellous allegories, ‘just like the Song of Solomon’.⁸⁶Although Ficino relied on the work of the earlier humanist translators of Plato,especially Bruni, he did not share their stylistic concerns. He simply wanted tomake his translations as accurate and clear as possible, which meant employingan unadorned Latin and not avoiding useful philosophical terms just because theywere unclassical or non-Ciceronian. The fact that Ficino’s version remained thestandard Latin translation of Plato until the nineteenth century is sufficienttestimony of his success.⁸⁷He also made advances in the analysis of Platonicworks. Instead of mining the dialogues for isolated nuggets of ethical wisdom, asthe humanists had taught their students to do, he offered complex and coherentanalyses of themes—metaphysical and epistemological as well as moral—whichran through the entire corpus.Humanists quickly began to take account of Ficino’s work, which inspired newinterpretations of classical literature. Cristoforo Landino (1425–98) used Ficino’sphilosophical ideas in his exegesis of Vergil’sAeneid,which he saw as aPlatonic allegory of the soul’s journey from sensuality and hedonism,symbolized by Troy, to a life of divine contemplation, represented by Italy.⁸⁸Ficino was himself influenced by humanists, sharing many of their prejudicesabout contemporary scholastics, whom he referred to as ‘lovers of ostentation’(philopompi)rather than ‘lovers of wisdom’(philosophi). Like Bruni andPoliziano, Ficino accused so-called Aristotelians of not understanding the textsthey professed to expound, reading them as they did in barbarous medievaltranslations. He also displayed a humanistic distaste for the logical nitpicking towhich scholastics were addicted, leaving them little time, he felt, for moreserious philosophical endeavour.⁸⁹Not that Ficino was a stranger to scholastic Aristotelianism. His earlyuniversity training in logic, natural philosophy and medicine gave him athorough grounding in Aristotle, Averroes and Avicenna, not to mention morerecent writers such as Paul of Venice. Although he soon turned against most ofthe ideas and doctrines associated with this tradition, it left a lasting impact onhis terminology and method of argument: there is a definite scholastic feel aboutthe presentation of most of his treatises.⁹⁰De vita libri tres(1489), Ficino’s mostpopular work, contains many scholastic elements. Book II, on methods ofprolonging life, borrows liberally from the thirteenth-century English FranciscanRoger Bacon; Book III deals with medical astrology, as transmitted to themedieval West by Arabic thinkers, and also develops a theory of magic based onthe doctrine of substantial form elaborated by Thomas Aquinas and otherscholastics.⁹¹Even in his Platonic commentaries scholastic ideas often make anappearance: his defence of the superiority of the intellect to the will in thePhilebusis taken verbatim from Thomas.⁹²Although significant, this scholastic strain in Ficino’s work was overshadowedby ancient Neoplatonism. The philosopher whom he most revered after Platowas Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, whoseEnneadshe translated andcommented upon. He also translated works by Proclus, Iamblichus, Porphyry andSynesius, all of whom helped to shape his understanding of the Platoniccorpus.⁹³By promoting Neoplatonic interpretations, already ventilated to acertain extent by Bessarion, Ficino altered the Western perception of Plato,transforming him from a wise moral philosopher into a profound metaphysician.It was Plotinus who first systematized Platonic ontology, dividing reality intoa series of hierarchical levels of being or hypostases, extending from the highest,the transcendent One, which was above being, to the lowest, matter, which wasbelow it. This metaphysical scheme was taken over, with various modifications,by the later Neoplatonists, who used it, as Plotinus had done, to explain thedeepest layers of meaning in the dialogues. Proclus, for instance, saw theParmenidesas a metaphysical work dealing with the nature of the One and inparticular its ontological priority to being. According to the Neoplatonists, beingwas co-terminous not with the One but with the second hypostasis, Mind, for itwas in Mind that the Platonic Ideas, the primary components of reality, werelocated. Ficino adopted this view of theParmenides,treating it as a masterpieceof Platonic theology, in which essential truths about the One—God in Ficino’sChristian version of the scheme—were revealed.⁹⁴This interpretation of the dialogue, however, was challenged by othermembers of the intellectual circle of Medicean Florence. Giovanni Pico, in hisDe ente et uno(1491), recounts how Poliziano asked him to defend theAristotelian position that being and one are convertible against the Neoplatonicclaim that the One is beyond being. To discredit the main evidence for theNeoplatonic stand, Pico went back to the Middle Platonic account of theParmenides,which portrayed it not as a dogmatic exposition of unknowabletruths about the ineffable One, but rather as ‘a sort of dialectical exercise’ inwhich nothing was definitively asserted or denied. He also criticized theNeoplatonists for misreading theSophist,in which—according to Pico—Platoactually maintained that one and being were equal.⁹⁵Ficino, of course, sidedwith Plotinus and Proclus against Poliziano and Pico. His commentary on theSophistis likewise deeply indebted to the Neoplatonic view of the dialogue as ametaphysical discussion of Mind, with special emphasis on the variousrelationships between the Platonic Ideas.⁹⁶Although Ficino used such Neoplatonic insights to give Renaissance Platonismgreater depth and coherence, he never lost sight of the primary motivation whichhad led his contemporaries to admire this philosophy: its compatibility withChristianity. This was in fact the mainspring of his own commitment toPlatonism. At the end of 1473 Ficino became a priest, and in the following yearhe produced an apologetic work,De christiana religione,which attempted toconvince the Jews to abandon their obstinate rejection of the true faith. Thisinterest in religious polemics in no way conflicted with his enthusiasticpromotion of Platonism. He believed that scholastic Aristotelianism, with itsdoctrine of the double truth, had given rise to an artificial rift between reason andfaith, which were in reality natural allies. By maintaining, as scholastics hadtraditionally done, that philosophy was of no use to religion and vice versa, theformer had become a tool of impiety, while the latter had been entrusted toignorant and unworthy men. To show those who had separated philosophicalstudies from Christianity the error of their ways it was necessary to reunite pietyand wisdom, creating a learned religion and a pious philosophy.⁹⁷The answer to this dilemma lay for Ficino, as it had for Petrarch, in Platonism.Plato had been both a theologian and a philosopher, many of whose doctrineswere in harmony with the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Church Fathers hadrecognized this when they repeated Numenius’s description of him as a ‘GreekspeakingMoses’ and speculated that he had learned of the Bible on his travels inEgypt.⁹⁸Plato was also believed to be the last in a long line of ‘ancienttheologians’, which included Hermes Trismegistus, an Egyptian priest and nearcontemporaryof Moses. The Hermetic corpus—like the other documentscomprising the ancient theology, a Greek forgery from the early Christian era—was translated by Ficino, who thought that it contained a gentile revelationanalogous to that granted to the Jews. This quasi-Mosaic wisdom, which hadbeen transmitted to Plato via Orpheus, Pythagoras and other venerable figures,helped to account for the similarity between Platonic doctrines and those of theOld Testament.⁹⁹But Plato had not only followed the Mosaic law, he hadforetold the Christian one.¹⁰⁰All this made Platonism an ideal gateway toChristianity, especially for those intellectuals who so admired pagan antiquitythat they could not be convinced by arguments based on faith alone.¹⁰¹Aristotelianism,paceThomas Aquinas and George of Trebizond, had beenunequal to this formidable task, for on those two crucial issues —the immortalityof the soul and the creation of the world—it had failed to provide solidphilosophical support for Christian dogma. One had therefore to turn instead toPlatonism.Early humanists like Bruni had looked primarily to thePhaedofor Plato’sdemonstration of immortality. So too did Ficino, but he found further proof inthePhaedrus(245C–246A), where Plato puts forward the thesis that the soul, asthe self-moving principle of motion, moves and hence lives perpetually.¹⁰²Thecentrality of this issue for Ficino’s synthesis of Platonism and Christianity can beseen in his major philosophical treatise,Theologia platonica de animorumimmortalitate,‘The Platonic Theology of the Immortality of Souls’. Maintainingthat in order to accomplish the goal of our existence as human beings, which isthe eternal contemplation of God, our souls must be immortal, he producedfifteen different philosophical arguments which established conclusively, on thebasis of reason rather than Christian dogma, that the soul survives the body.¹⁰³Ficino’s primary philosophical authorities were Plato and the Neoplatonists, buthe believed that Aristotle too had supported the doctrine of immortality, althoughin a vague and confused manner. Ficino had been persuaded by Themistius andother ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle, as well as by Bessarion, that thetwo philosophers were in essential agreement in most areas.¹⁰⁴Aristotle’sambiguous presentation of this doctrine, however, had given rise to twoerroneous interpretations, both ‘wholly destructive of religion’: Alexander ofAphrodisias’s belief that the soul was mortal and Averroes’s contention thatthere was only one rational soul for all mankind.¹⁰⁵The best way to combat thesepernicious opinions was to go back to the pristine Platonic source from whichAristotle’s muddled teachings derived.No such reconciliation of Plato and Aristotle was possible on the issue ofcreation, since Aristotle had declared the world to be eternal, while Plato hadproduced in hisTimaeusa Greek counterpart to the Book of Genesis. Yetalthough Plato’s description of creation was in agreement with the Mosaicaccount, Ficino questioned its congruence with Christian theology.¹⁰⁶Recognizing that Plato, as a pagan living long before Christ, was necessarilydenied access to mysteries such as the Trinity, Ficino was careful to keep sightof the fact that Plato was not a Christian and that he himself was one.¹⁰⁷The revival of Platonism which Petrarch had wished for in the mid-fourteenthcentury was brought to completion by Ficino at the end of the fifteenth. All thedialogues were now available in reliable Latin translations, as were the majorworks of the Neoplatonists. A systematic framework of interpretation, closelylinked to Christianity but clearly distinguishable from it, had also beenestablished. Platonism had been put on an entirely new and much surer footing.But despite the efforts of its adherents, it had not displaced Aristotelianism,which would continue to be at the centre of Italian Renaissance philosophy foranother century.THE ARISTOTELIAN MAINSTREAMDuring the fifteenth century the traditional separation of reason and faith hadbegun to break down as philosophical arguments were increasingly used toconfirm religious doctrines, above all the immortality of the soul. Ficino, as wehave seen, had employed Platonism as a source of rational support for theChristian belief that individual souls were immortal. Even scholastics like Paulof Venice and Nicoletto Vernia had taken the view—in Vernia’s case underpressure from the Church —that personal immortality was demonstrable inphilosophical terms. The culmination of this trend was the Fifth LateranCouncil’s decree of 1513, which compelled professors of philosophy to presentphilosophical demonstrations of the Christian position on immortality. Thedecree meant that it would no longer be permissible to have recourse to thedouble-truth doctrine in order to discuss the issue on strictly philosophicalgrounds, independent of theological criteria.This deliberate attempt by the Council to restrict philosophy’s claims tooperate autonomously within its own intellectual sphere was soon challenged byPietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), a student of Vernia who succeeded him as theleading natural philosopher at Padua, before transferring in 1512 to Bologna.Throughout his career Pomponazzi lectured and wrote on Aristotelian texts in thetime-honoured scholastic fashion: addressing the standard questions, reviewingthe opinions of previous commentators and employing the philosophicalterminology established during the Middle Ages. Though he was in no sense ahumanist himself, he was nevertheless influenced, like Vernia, by the humanistapproach to Aristotelianism, particularly by the new availability of the Greekcommentators on Aristotle, whom he regarded not as replacements for medievalauthorities but rather as further reserves in the arsenal of Aristotelianinterpretations on which philosophers could freely draw.¹⁰⁸In his early Paduan lectures onDe anima,Pomponazzi rejected Alexander ofAphrodisias’s materialist and mortalist view of the soul. According to Aristotle(I.1), the crucial question in relation to immortality was whether the soul neededthe body for all its operations. Pomponazzi accepted the answer given byThomas Aquinas, who admitted that the body was necessary as the soul’s objectbut not as its subject, thereby preserving the soul’s immateriality andimmortality. Alexander’s belief that the soul was the material form of the bodyhad the additional failing of being unable to account for the intellect’s capacity tounderstand immaterial universals. The Averroist thesis, which in these yearsPomponazzi regarded as the authentic interpretation of Aristotle, was able toexplain the comprehension of universals, but at the unacceptable cost of severingthe essential unity of body and soul, since the single immortal intellect for allmankind merely guided the activities of individual bodies rather than serving astheir substantial form. Pomponazzi never questioned the truth of the Christianbelief in personal immortality, but he remained undecided for many years as tothe correct position on purely philosophical grounds.¹⁰⁹The breakthrough came during a series of lectures onDe caelowhich he gaveat Bologna in 1515–16. In discussing the eternity of the world (I.10), Aristotleestablishes an indissoluble link between generation and corruption. Pomponazzirealized that, following this principle, if the soul was immortal it did not have abeginning in time; and if it did have a beginning, it was not immortal. FollowingDuns Scotus, Pomponazzi now recognized that since Aristotle believed the soulto be generated, he could not have regarded it as immortal.¹¹⁰Consequently, itwas Alexander, not Averroes, who offered the most accurate interpretation ofAristotle and the most satisfactory answer, in terms of philosophy, to thequestion of immortality. More importantly, since neither this answer nor theAverroist one bolstered the Christian position, as the Lateran decree demanded,it was essential to defy the Council’s pronouncement, reasserting philosophy’sright to treat philosophical issues philosophically, without theological constraints.This is precisely what Pomponazzi did inDe immortalitate animae(1516),which is an attempt to resolve the problem of immortality, remaining entirelywithin natural limits and leaving all religious considerations aside. Pomponazzinow maintained, against Thomas, that the body was necessary for all the soul’soperations, because thought, for Aristotle, always requires the images providedby the imagination from the raw material of sense data. Therefore, based solelyon philosophical premises and Aristotelian principles, the probable conclusionwas that the soul was essentially mortal, although immortal in the limited senseof participating in the immaterial realm through the comprehension ofuniversals.¹¹¹Despite this, Pomponazzi claimed that his belief in the absolutetruth of the Christian doctrine of personal immortality remained unshaken, ‘sincethe canonical Scripture, which must be preferred to any human reasoning andexperience whatever, as it was given by God, sanctions this position’. In ‘neutralproblems’ such as immortality and the eternity of the world, natural reasoningcould not go beyond probabilities; certainty in such matters lay only with God.¹¹²Nevertheless Pomponazzi’s treatise made the point that, however provisionaltheir conclusions, philosophers must be allowed to pursue them without externalinterference—wherever they might lead.Since the thirteenth century theologians had looked to Aristotle forphilosophical support of the Christian doctrine on the soul. Pomponazzi waseffectively ruling out this role. The theologians were quick to fight back, publiclyburning the treatise, lobbying the pope to compel Pomponazzi to retract the workand writing, along with philosophers who shared their perspective, a stream ofattacks on him. Pomponazzi responded to this onslaught by restating his positionthat immortality was not rationally demonstrable since it was contrary to naturalprinciples. As an article of faith, it could—and should—only be founded onsupernatural revelation.¹¹³The theologians, for their part, continued to insist thatit was possible to demonstrate immortality. But Pomponazzi forced them to shifttheir ground. No longer did they argue in terms of natural philosophy; instead,discussions of the soul were transferred to the discipline of metaphysics, wheretheological considerations were allowed to hold sway. Aristotelian naturalphilosophy, abandoned by the theologians, was left to the natural philosophers,who were much freer to interpret Aristotle as they chose and to develop anautonomous science of nature.¹¹⁴Pomponazzi himself contributed to the development of this science in hisDenaturalium effectuum causis sive de incantationibus,in which he demonstratedthat events normally regarded as miraculous could be explained in natural terms.Dismissing the supernatural agency of angels and demons, he argued that thecelestial spheres, governed by the Intelligences, were responsible for most socalledmiracles.¹¹⁵Scholastic natural philosophy, combining Aristotle withArabic astrology, regarded the stars as secondary causes by means of which Godcontrolled the sublunary realm.¹¹⁶The heavens, though mediators of divineaction, were part of nature, operating according to constant, regular andpredictable laws, which could be studied scientifically. So Pomponazzi’semphasis on astrological causation transformed miracles into naturalphenomena, accessible to reason. He did not, however, apply this scientificexplanation to all miracles: those in the New Testament were exempted on thegrounds that they, unlike other wondrous occurrences, violated the natural orderand could therefore only have been brought about by direct divineintervention.¹¹⁷As with the immortality of the soul, he conceded that in religiousmatters the probable hypotheses provided by scientific enquiry were overruledby the absolute truths of Christian revelation. But in the domain of nature, fromwhich he had excluded theological and supernatural explanations, rationalcriteria constituted the sole authority.Alongside the scholastic Aristotelianism of Pomponazzi, the humanist varietycontinued to thrive, even moving into the universities. Pomponazzi’s Paduancolleague Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (1456–1531) was the first professor to lectureon the Greek text of Aristotle. As a Venetian of Greek parentage, LeonicoTomeo inherited the mantle of Byzantine scholars such as Gaza and Argyropulosalong with that of Italian humanists like Poliziano and Barbaro. He brought, likehis predecessors, an increased accuracy and enhanced elegance to an ever widerrange of Aristotelian texts. His finely tuned philological skills— good enough towin the admiration of Erasmus—were deployed in translations of theParvanaturalia, Mechanicsand other scientific works. In his prefaces all the standardhumanist complaints about contemporary scholastics were repeated: theirinability to understand Aristotle, their barbaric language and their futile searchfor answers to pointless questions. And in his learned scholia ample space wasgiven to the Greek commentators, whose method of exposition he tried toimitate.¹¹⁸For humanists like Leonico Tomeo the Greek commentators represented apurer and more authentic exegesis of Aristotle than could be found in the scholastictradition. By the middle of the sixteenth century virtually all the ancientcommentaries on Aristotle were in print, both in the original and in Latintranslation. Access to these works affected the way that Aristotle was read in anumber of ways. Alexander of Aphrodisias’s doubts about the second book oftheMetaphysicsset off a long-lived debate (continued in the twentieth centuryby Werner Jaeger) about its authenticity and correct placement within thecorpus. While Alexander’s views on the soul decisively influenced Pomponazzi,many in the Averroist camp preferred Simplicius’s exposition ofDe anima,which they believed could be used in support of the unity of the intellect.Simplicius, along with Themistius, also provided evidence for the essentialharmony of Aristotle and Plato. And Philoponus, by arguing for the existence ofa void in nature, gave ammunition to those—Galileo among them—who werechallenging the fundamental principles of Aristotelian physics.¹¹⁹The philhellenic bent of humanist Aristotelianism provoked a backlash amongscholastic philosophers, who feared that Arabic and medieval expositors werebecoming unfashionable as the Greek commentators gained in popularity. Inorder to remain competitive, they produced up-to-date editions of approvedauthors such as Thomas Aquinas, replacing the accompanying medievaltranslations of Aristotle with modern ones, making editorial improvements to thetext and providing indexes, cross-references and other scholarly tools.¹²⁰Themost elaborate of such enterprises was the eleven-volume Giuntine edition ofAristotle and Averroes (1550–2). Its editors were happy to borrow what they couldfrom the humanists. They adopted the Aristotle translations of Bruni, Bessarion,George of Trebizond and Leonico Tomeo; and they applied philologicaltechniques to Averroes, collating different texts, revising them to enhancereadability and including versions recently translated from Hebrewintermediaries. But this edition was designed to strike at the heart of thehumanist assumption that the Greeks had a monopoly on philosophicalachievement. ‘Our age’, wrote the publisher Tommaso Giunta, ‘worships onlythe Greeks’, while the writings of the Arabs are treated as ‘nothing other thandregs and useless dirt’. Giunta and his editorial team set out to counter thisprejudice by presenting Averroes as the only Aristotelian commentator worthy ofthe name and as a substantial philosopher in his own right, one who haddeveloped and refined the material he found in Aristotle.¹²¹Progressive Aristotelians in the second half of the sixteenth century tookadvantage of both the Arabic and Greek traditions. Jacopo Zabarella (1533–89),a professor of logic and natural philosophy at Padua, developed an extremelyinfluential theory of method by drawing in equal measure on Averroes andSimplicius. Certain knowledge, he concluded, could be attained through ademonstrative regression, proceeding first from effect to cause(resolutio),andthen working back from cause to effect(compositio).¹²²Zabarella regardedinduction, which dealt only with the effects known to the senses, as an inferiorform of ‘resolutive’ ora posterioridemonstration, but he recognized that it wasessential for disciplines like natural philosophy.¹²³Zabarella was himself a greatbeliever in observation, often calling on his experience of meteorologicalphenomena or his acquaintance with contemporary technological processes tocorroborate Aristotelian theories.¹²⁴The best Peripatetic science in this periodshowed a similar empirical basis: Andrea Cesalpino (1519–1603), who revisedthe Aristotelian taxonomy of plants, made extensive use of the botanical gardenat Pisa and even took into account specimens recently brought back from theNew World.¹²⁵Yet even the most advanced Aristotelians did not progress from empiricism toexperimentalism. They remained content to observe nature passively in order toconfirm established doctrines rather than trying to devise methods of activeintervention or validation. They saw their task not as searching out newapproaches to the study of nature but as explaining and at best extending theAristotelian framework within which they operated. This also meant leaving asidematters on which Aristotle had not made explicit pronouncements, such as theimmortality of the soul—a problem which Zabarella referred to thetheologians.¹²⁶Territorial disputes between philosophy and theology were not, however, at anend. Zabarella’s successor Cesare Cremonini (1550–1631) was attacked by theInquisition for discussing from a Peripatetic viewpoint the eternity of the worldand the absence of divine providence in the sublunary realm. Reiterating thetraditional Paduan commitment to a naturalistic exposition of Aristotle,Cremonini replied: ‘I have acted as an interpreter of Aristotle, following only histhought.’¹²⁷This statement was a strong reaffirmation of the autonomy ofphilosophy.¹²⁸But in the context of the early seventeenth century, it alsosignified that Aristotelian natural science was a spent force, reduced to sterileand pedantic exegesis of set texts. Cremonini, the most eminent (and highlypaid) Aristotelian of his day, was a completely bookish philosopher, lacking theinterest in direct observation displayed by the previous generation but sharingtheir unwillingness to question the doctrinal foundation of Aristotelianphilosophy. He is best remembered—appropriately, if perhaps apocryphally—asthe man who refused to look in Galileo’s telescope, preferring to learn about theheavens from the pages of Aristotle’sDe caelo.¹²⁹ALTERNATIVE PHILOSOPHICAL CURRENTSFlowing around the edges of the Aristotelian mainstream were a number ofalternative philosophical currents. Not all of them were hostile to Aristotelianism—though most were—but each challenged the prevailing Peripatetic orthodoxyby putting forward a new model of philosophical enquiry.Complaints about the impenetrable jargon of scholastic logic werecommonplace among humanists, but few critics were as incisive as LorenzoValla (1407–57). Believing that the limits of allowable discourse were fixed bythe usage of the best classical authors, Valla banned virtually the entire logicaland metaphysical vocabulary of scholasticism. Not satisfied with assaultingmedieval and Renaissance Aristotelianism, he attacked Aristotle himself,rejecting his basic terminology (e.g. potentiality and actuality) and reducing histen categories to only three (substance, quality and action). Even more radicalwas Valla’s refusal to consider logic as an independent discipline, treating itinstead as a part of rhetoric, on the grounds that the logician’s repertoire waslimited to the syllogism, while the orator could draw on the full range ofargumentative strategies, both necessary and probable, both demonstrative andpersuasive. Moreover, orators, who needed to be understood by their audiences,respected the common manner of speech of learned men (by which Valla meantgood classical Latin), whereas logicians created their own language, which wasmeaningless to non-specialists. This subordination of logic to rhetoric entailed adrastic lowering of Aristotle’s authority and a concomitant rise in the prestige ofCicero and Quintilian.¹³⁰Valla’s programme did not find another champion until the mid-sixteenthcentury.¹³¹Mario Nizolio (1488–1567), a fanatical Ciceronian, who compiled aLatin lexicon devoted entirely to words used by his hero, was indignant whensome of his contemporaries questioned Cicero’s competence in philosophicalmatters. In reply to these ‘Cicerobashers’(Ciceromastiges)Nizolio wrote aseries of works, culminating in the treatiseDe veris principiis et vera rationephilosophandi contra pseudophilosophos(1553). The ‘pseudo-philosophers’ ofthe title were Aristotelian logicians and metaphysicians, whose false, obscureand useless disciplines he wanted to replace with a ‘true method ofphilosophizing’, one which combined Ciceronian rhetoric, Latin grammar andphilological expertise. Nizolio cited Valla’s attacks on Aristotelianism withapproval and shared his humanist contempt for scholastic terminology as well ashis desire to demote logic to a mere subdivision of rhetoric. But Valla had notgone far enough, merely cutting off the foliage and branches of Aristotelianphilosophy while leaving its trunk and roots intact.¹³²To eradicate it completelyNizolio employed a thorough-going nominalism, dismissing Platonic ideas asharmless poetic fictions, but arguing forcefully against the reality of Aristotelianuniversals, which he regarded as the pillars of scholastic logic and metaphysics.Through philological and philosophical analysis, he demonstrated that universalswere simply collective names given to concrete particulars belonging to the sameclass.¹³³The treatise, which had little impact in the sixteenth century, wasreissued in 1670 by Leibniz, who was interested in Nizolio’s nominalism and inhis attempt to produce a linguistic reform of logic. Leibniz, however, pointed outa number of errors committed by Nizolio, not least his failure to appreciateAristotle’s real merits.¹³⁴He also criticized Nizolio’s claim that there were serious doubts about theauthenticity of the works attributed to Aristotle. This line of attack had appealedto Nizolio because it made Aristotelians appear foolish as well as servile bysuggesting that theipseof their reveredipse dixitwas not the genuineAristotle.¹³⁵The evidence for his assertion was borrowed, with acknowledgement,from Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533), a follower of Savonarola,who had learned from him to distrust all human learning and to rely solely on thedivine philosophy of the Scriptures. In hisExamen vanitatis doctrinae gentium etveritatis Christianae disciplinae(1520), Gianfrancesco set out to prove thefutility of pagan doctrine and the truth of Christianity. The first half of the workemploys arguments from the ancient Greek sceptic Sextus Empiricus—virtuallyunknown in the West—to discredit secular knowledge by showing that on everyconceivable issue scholars have disagreed with one another and adhered toincompatible views. The second half targets Aristotle, by far the most influentialpagan thinker and therefore the most important to subvert. Displaying immenseerudition about the Aristotelian tradition, particularly the Greek commentators,Gianfrancesco revealed that all facets of Peripatetic philosophy lacked certitude:the works assigned to Aristotle were doubtfully authentic; his sense-basedepistemology could not produce reliable data; his doctrines, often presented withdeliberate obscurity, had been disputed by opponents and followers alike and hadbeen criticized by Christian theologians; even Aristotle himself was uncertainabout some of them.¹³⁶Aristotelian philosophy, the pinnacle of human wisdom,was therefore shown to be constructed on the shakiest of foundations. Christiandogma, by contrast, was built on the bedrock of divine authority and thereforecould not be undermined by the sceptical critique. Or so he believed, unawarethat scepticism, which he had revived as an ally of Christianity, would eventuallybecome a powerful weapon in the hands of its enemies.¹³⁷By stressing the dissension among competing philosophical schools and theirfundamental irreconcilability with each other and with Christianity,Gianfrancesco was intentionally deviating from the path set out by his famousuncle Giovanni Pico.¹³⁸Giovanni, the literal and metaphorical ‘prince ofconcord’—he was the hereditary ruler of Concordia and Mirandola—devoted hisbrief life to demonstrating that, although different philosophical and religioussystems appeared to be in conflict, their disagreements were primarily a matterof words, which disguised an underlying unity. The centrepiece of his projectwas an attempt to reconcile the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, partiallyrealized in hisDe ente et uno,a treatise which managed to antagonize bothPlatonists and Aristotelians.¹³⁹Another part of his synthesis involved bridging thegap between the humanist and scholastic approaches to Aristotle. Differing fromhis friends Poliziano and Barbaro, Pico’s interest in the Greek commentators didnot prevent him from paying equal attention to scholastic thinkers such asThomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus—whom, characteristically, he wanted toreconcile—nor from studying the works of Averroes and commissioningtranslations of those extant only in Hebrew.¹⁴⁰With help from Jewish scholars,he also acquired enough knowledge of Cabbala, a mystical theology purportingto derive from Moses, to apply its hermeneutic techniques to the first verses ofGenesis.¹⁴¹Pico believed that each of these traditions—Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew—despite apparent discrepancies, was an incomplete manifestation of a singletruth, whose fullest revelation was to be found in Christianity.¹⁴²The realobjective of his syncretism was the confirmation of Christian dogma,¹⁴³althoughhe scrupulously denied that profound mysteries such as the Trinity had any trueparallels outside the Church.¹⁴⁴For Ficino it was Platonism, supplemented by theancient theology, which provided the philosophical justification of religiousbeliefs.¹⁴⁵Pico had a much grander design: to prove that every genuine form ofwisdom was a witness to some aspect of the ultimate truth embodied inChristianity.¹⁴⁶Since there was no room in this scheme for a double truth,doctrines which conflicted with the demands of faith (the attribution of miraclesto the power of the stars, the eternity of the world and the mortality of the soul)were excluded as the products of false philosophy and pseudo-science.¹⁴⁷Pico’s Christian syncretism exerted a formative influence on Francesco Giorgi(1460–1540), a Franciscan theologian, whoseDe harmonia mundi(1525) usedthe metaphor of musical harmony to express the universal concord of ideas.¹⁴⁸Giorgi found prefigurations of Christianity wherever he looked and was far lessdiscriminating than Pico in registering the differences between Christian and non-Christian doctrines. He also departed from Pico in his hostility to Aristotelianism,especially the Averroist variety, favouring a more Ficinian synthesis in whichNeoplatonic philosophers were combined with Hermes Trismegistus, Zoroasterand other putative ancient theologians.¹⁴⁹To this mixture he added an interest inthe Christian application of Cabbala, which was more enthusiastic—though lessinformed—than Pico’s.¹⁵⁰Pico’s concordism was also the inspiration behindDe perenni philosophia(1540), in which Agostino Steuco (1497/8–1548) presented a learned account ofthe ‘perennial philosophy’, a divinely revealed wisdom known to mankind sinceearliest times. Steuco was an Augustinian biblical scholar, bishop and prefect ofthe Vatican Library,¹⁵¹with a solid knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic alongwith Greek and Latin. Using the Old Testament—but not Cabbala, which hescorned—and the (spurious) works of ancient theologians, he showed that Jews,Chaldeans, Egyptians and other early peoples had transmitted to the Greeks abody of doctrines which, beneath a diversity of forms, contained the same truths.These included the existence of a triune God, the creation of the world and theimmortality of the human soul.¹⁵²Christianity’s advent had not brought newtruths, as Pico believed, but had simply renewed the knowledge of old ones,which had been corrupted in transmission. Even though Steuco shared Giorgi’spredilection for Neoplatonic authors, he did not exclude Aristotle from theperennial philosophy. His Aristotle, however, was the author ofDe mundoandother misattributed works, containing hints—amplified by Steuco—of belief indivine providence and immortality, though not, alas, in creation.¹⁵³Despite (ormore likely because of) having studied in Bologna during Pomponazzi’s finalyears there, he distanced himself from scholastic Aristotelianism and stronglyopposed the notion that philosophical truth was independent of theology. ForSteuco, reason and revelation, which both flowed from God, necessarily led to thesame conclusions.¹⁵⁴Ficino’s Christianized Neoplatonism, although a key element in the syncretismof thinkers like Giorgi and Steuco, did not gain much support as an independentphilosophical system. The only aspect which excited general interest was thetheory of love elaborated by Ficino in hisSymposiumcommentary, a theorywhich became so popular that it dominated the public perception of Platonismthroughout the sixteenth century and beyond.¹⁵⁵Even Francesco da Diacceto(1466–1522), Ficino’s Florentine successor, concentrated on the issues of loveand beauty, investing them, however, with a metaphysical and theologicalsignificance absent in the stylized, literary treatments that proliferatedthroughout Italy. Beauty, for Diacceto as for Ficino, was a divine emanation,which inspired the human soul with a celestial love that fuelled its spiritual ascentand guided it to an ecstatic union with the One.¹⁵⁶As a philosophy professor atthe University of Pisa, Diacceto was constrained to lecture on Aristotle; but hetook every opportunity to defend Plato against Aristotle’s attacks and attemptedto establish a concord of the two philosophers which, in deliberate contrast toPico’s, squeezed Aristotle into a Platonic mould.¹⁵⁷Not until 1576 did Platonism enter the curriculum at Pisa. Even then it wasmerely an ancillary subject assigned to a professor whose main job was to lectureon Aristotle.¹⁵⁸Professorships specifically devoted to Platonism were establishedin the universities of Ferrara (1578) and Rome (1592), but both were essentiallyad hominemchairs created for Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–97). Anencounter with Ficino’sTheologia platonicahad converted Patrizi, then studyingmedicine at Padua, into a fervent Platonist, committed to overthrowing theAristotelian monopoly of the universities.¹⁵⁹The first stage in this crusade wasthe demolition of Aristotelianism. Combining superb humanist erudition withunflagging polemical energy, he accused Aristotle of both plagiarizing andmisrepresenting earlier philosophers; questioned—like Nizolio andGianfrancesco Pico—the authenticity of the Aristotelian corpus; and challengedthe philosophical competence of ancient, medieval and RenaissancePeripatetics.¹⁶⁰His most damning charge against Aristotelianism, however, wasthe same as that made by Petrarch two centuries earlier: its fundamentalincompatibility with Christianity. Addressing Pope Gregory XIV, Patrizi pointedout the absurdity of teaching a philosophy so manifestly detrimental to religionin universities throughout Europe and of using its impious tenets as thephilosophical foundation of Christian theology. In its place he wanted tosubstitute the pious philosophy set out in hisNova de universis philosophia(1591), which was entirely consonant with Catholicism and which was capableof providing such strong rational proofs of dogmatic beliefs that not only Jewsand Muslims but even Lutherans would be won over.¹⁶¹What Patrizi offered the Pope was a Ficinian amalgam of Platonism,Neoplatonism and Christianity, with particular emphasis given to the ancienttheology. By the late sixteenth century the genuineness of texts like the Hermeticcorpus was beginning to be doubted. But Patrizi, who had read his Steuco, clungto a belief in them as documents of a primitive, divinely inspired wisdom, whichhad prefigured Christianity and formed the core of Platonism before beingcrushed by the weight of Aristotelian rationalism.¹⁶²In only one treatise hadAristotle incorporated material from this ancient tradition: theTheology(actuallya ninth-century Arabic reworking of Plotinus’sEnneadsthat had come to beattributed to Aristotle) which, according to Patrizi, was a record of his notes onPlato’s lectures concerning Egyptian religion. For Patrizi, as for Steuco, it waspseudonymous works such as this, containing uncharacteristic affirmations ofdivine providence and immortality, which represented the acceptable face ofAristotelianism.¹⁶³TheTheologywas therefore included, along with the worksof Hermes, Zoroaster, Plato and the Neoplatonists, in the new canon of godlyphilosophy which Patrizi hoped would replace the ungodly Aristotelian one.¹⁶⁴The Roman Inquisitors, evidently unconvinced by Patrizi’s claims, placed theNova philosophiaon the Index—a fate which had earlier befallen Giorgi’sDeharmonia mundi.¹⁶⁵These authors, attempting to protect Christianity from theimpieties of Aristotelianism, discovered that the Church was not prepared toabandon its long alliance with Peripatetic philosophy.Patrizi’s ‘new philosophy’, aiming to be as comprehensive as the Aristoteliansystem it was designed to supplant, was basically Neoplatonic. The cosmosconsisted of a hierarchical series of nine levels of being, all emanating ultimatelyfrom the One. Patrizi’s One was not, like Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, the finalcause of motion, but rather the efficient cause of light, which he regarded as oneof the four fundamental principles of the physical world, the others being heat,space and fluid or flux(fluor).¹⁶⁶In substituting these building-blocks for thoseof Aristotle (fire, air, water and earth), Patrizi was working along similar lines toanother anti-Aristotelian philosopher, Bernardino Telesio (1509–88). In hisDererum natura iuxta propria principia(1565–86), a treatise which Patrizi knewwell, Telesio too postulated heat as one of the principles of nature, although theother elements in his tripartite scheme were cold and matter.¹⁶⁷Telesio’sphilosophy was also presented as an alternative to Aristotelianism—and alsoended up on the Index. But he rejected Platonic as well as Aristotelianmetaphysics, grounding his system on an extreme form of empiricism, whichmaintained that nature could only be understood through sensation andobservation—a manifesto which would earn him the qualified praise of FrancisBacon.¹⁶⁸Coming from very different directions, Telesio and Patrizi both attacked manyof the same weaknesses in the Peripatetic structure, especially Aristotle’sconcept of space or place as an attribute of body and his denial of the existenceof a void in nature. Telesio, appealing to the evidence of the senses, argued thatspace could indeed exist without bodies and that empty space was thereforepossible.¹⁶⁹Patrizi, building on statements in Plato’sTimaeus(49A, 52B),regarded space as prior to all bodies, an empty receptacle which, althoughincorporeal, was an extended, dimensional entity.¹⁷⁰These views of Patrizi weretaken up in the seventeenth century by Pierre Gassendi, whose atomist physicsrequired precisely this sort of vacuist conception of space.¹⁷¹Patrizi alsomaintained, against Aristotle, that there was an infinite stretch of empty spacebeyond the outermost sphere of the heavens. Below the heavens, however, hiscosmos was the traditional Ptolemaic Aristotelian one: finite and closed, with theearth—despite Copernicus —at its centre.¹⁷²A more radical cosmology was proposed by Giordano Bruno (1548–1600),who not merely accepted Copernican heliocentrism but expanded it by makingour solar system only one of an infinite number of worlds which existed withinan infinite universe.¹⁷³Bruno did not come to these conclusions on the basis ofmathematics, for which he had little respect or talent.¹⁷⁴Nor did he approve ofthe scholarly method of Patrizi, which he described as ‘soiling pages with theexcrement of pedantry’. And while Telesio had ‘fought an honourable battle’against Aristotle, his empirical epistemology was unable to grasp essentialnotions like infinity, which were imperceptible to the senses.¹⁷⁵Bruno lookedinstead to the cosmological poetry of Lucretius, the metaphysical theories of theNeoplatonists and, above all, the theological speculations of Nicholas of Cusa.¹⁷⁶For Bruno, the infinity of the universe was a reflection of the infinity of its divinecreator, although God’s infinity was simple and indivisible, while that of theuniverse consisted of a multiplicity of finite constituent parts. He furthermoremaintained that the universe, as the image of God, partook in His eternity, thusgiving an entirely new slant to the standard Peripatetic doctrine. In like manner,Bruno—a renegade Dominican monk, thoroughly trained in Peripateticphilosophy—retained much of the accepted metaphysical terminology whiledramatically transforming its significance. He still talked of form and matter,actuality and potentiality, but he treated them (as Spinoza would later treatCartesian thought and extension) as aspects of a single, universal substance,whose accidents were the particular objects which we perceive.¹⁷⁷When put on trial by the Inquisition in the 1590s, Bruno stated that he pursuedphilosophical ideas ‘according to the light of nature’, without regard to anyprinciples prescribed by faith.¹⁷⁸This was as clear a statement of the autonomy ofphilosophy as any made by the scholastic Aristotelians that he despised. Unlikethem, however, he did not believe in a double truth. There was only one truth forBruno; but it was not the single truth of faith upheld by non-Aristotelian thinkersfrom Petrarch to Patrizi. While they were aiming for a pious philosophy, Brunosought a philosophical piety: a rationalistic and naturalistic religion, patterned onthat of ancient Egypt, as portrayed in the Hermetic corpus; a religion which leftbehind Christian superstitions, such as transubstantiation and the virgin birth, andadopted in their place beliefs and values that reflected the cosmological, physicaland metaphysical principles which he had uncovered.¹⁷⁹Bruno was not simplydefending the rights of reason, he was usurping those of faith; and it was this, farmore than his espousal of Copernicanism or the infinite universe, which led theChurch to burn him at the stake on 17 February 1600.¹⁸⁰Some of Bruno’s ideas had a limited influence after his execution, but hisphilosophy never gained a wide following.¹⁸¹Nor did that of other sixteenthcenturyopponents of Aristotelianism, although individual doctrines gained theapproval of later thinkers. The critiques of Peripatetic philosophy formulated inthe late Italian Renaissance undoubtedly helped to weaken it, but it was thescientific and epistemological revolutions of the seventeenth century whichdelivered the death blow.NOTES1 Pietro d’Abano (c.1250–1316) noted that this outlook had been endorsed byAlbertus Magnus: Pietro d’Abano [1.29], diff. IX, propter 3; see also Paschetto [1.40].2 E.g. Blasius of Parma (Biagio Pelacani,c.1365–1416): see Blasius of Parma [1.22], I.8, and also Federici Vescovini [1.33].3 Pietro d’Abano [1.29], diff. IX, propter 3; Blasius of Parma [1.22], 58. SeeAristotle,De caeloI.10 andPhysicsVIII.4 Blasius of Parma [1.22], 71; see also Federici Vescovini [1.33], 395–402; Nardi [1.14], 47–8, 55–8, 71–3.5 Petrarch [1.25], 21; see also Foster [1.34]; Mann [1.39]; Kristeller [1.11], ch. 1.6 Petrarch [1.30], 58–9, 76; see also Garin [1.6], 149–50.7 Petrarch [1.31], vol. 1, 37 (I.7); see also Petrarch [1.27], 52 (SecretumI); Petrarch[1.28], 75.8 Petrarch [1.25], vol. 3, 213 (XVI.14); Petrarch [1.32], 245–8 (SenilesV.2); see alsoGarin [1.6], 150–2; Gilbert [1.36], 210–16; Vasoli [1.19], 9–15.9 Petrarch [1.24], 40, 62, 65; see also Kamp [1.37].10 Petrarch [1.30], 53; see also Petrarch [1.26], 65 (II.31); Petrarch [1.24], 61.11 Petrarch [1.26], 65 (II.31); Petrarch [1.24], 67.12 Petrarch [1.30], 142–3 (SenilesXII.2 and XV.6); Petrarch [1.32], 247 (SenilesV.2); see also Kamp [1.37], 37–9; Kristeller [1.10], vol. 1, 210; Garin [1.6], 147–9.13 See, for example, Kuksewicz [1.23], 127–46.14 Petrarch [1.30], 93, 95, 117.15 Petrarch [1.26], 27–9 (I.25); Petrarch [1.30], 58, 72, 75; Petrarch [1.25], vol. 1, 93(II.9), vol. 3, 255 (XVII.8); see also Gerosa [1.35]; Kamp [1.37]; Garin [1.6], 269,277.16 Petrarch [1.24], 58, 94. On the availability of Plato in Latin see p. 26 below.17 Petrarch [1.24], 76. On the Greek manuscript see Kristeller [1.12], 57, 153–4.18 Petrarch [1.24], 66, 78–9; Petrarch [1.26], 31 (I.25); Petrarch [1.28], 662–4;Augustine,De civitate DeiVIII.9–10 and XXII.7,De vera religioneIII.3,ConfessionsIII.iv.7; see also Foster [1.34], 170; Gerosa [1.35], 246, 252–3.19 On Bruni seeDizionario[1.4], vol. 14, 618–33; Bruni [1.56], 21–42. Aside fromAristotle, Bruni translated works by Plato, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Xenophon andPlutarch.20 Bertalot [1.57], vol. 2, 132–3; Bruni [1.46], vol. 1, 17 (I.8); see also Cammelli [1.63], vol. 1; Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 86–7; Schmitt [1.16], 68; Gerl [1.65], 125–6.21 Bruni [1.46], vol. 2, 88, 216 (VII.4; X.24); Bruni [1.56], 208, 210, 213; Bruni [1.47],77, 84–6.22 Bruni [1.56], 68–9(Dialogi);see also Gilbert [1.36], 209; Vasoli [1.19], 26.23 Garin [1.64], 62–8.24 Petrarch [1.24], 67; Bruni [1.56], 82, 91, 226, 229; Bruni [1.47], 48, 77; see alsoSeigel [1.18], ch. 4. Cicero’s praise (AcademicaII.xxxviii.119,De finibusI.v.14;TopicaI.3) was based on Aristotle’s lost exoteric works, not on the so-calledschool treatises we now have.25 See Alonso de Cartagena’sLiberin Birkenmajer [1.59], 168, 173, 175; Bruni [1.56], 201–6; see also Garin [1.64], 63–4; Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 79, 90.26 Bruni [1.56], 45. For the prefaces to his Aristotle translations, see Bruni [1.47], 70–81, 120–1.27 Bruni [1.56], 59–60, 268; see also Garin [1.6], 151–2; Vasoli [1.19], 23–7; Gilbert[1.36], 205–13.28 Cammelli [1.63], vol. II;Dizionario[1.4], vol. 4, 129–31; Field [1.92], ch. 5; forhis inaugural lectures, see Müllner [1.51], 3–56.29 Argyropulos [1.42]. He translated Aristotle’sCategories, De interpretation, PriorandPosterior Analytics,as well as Porphyry’sIsagoge:see Cammelli [1.63], vol. 2,183–4; Garin [1.64], 83–5.30 Müllner [1.51], 43. He translated thePhysics, De caeloandDe anima:Cammelli[1.63], vol. 2, 183; Garin [1.64], 84–5.31 Müllner [1.51], 51–2: he describes Alexander’s opinion as ‘quite false and totallyabhorrent’, and Averroes’s as ‘extremely dangerous’; in support of the Christianposition, he produced ‘some rational arguments based on natural philosophy’, aswell as those based on ‘faith’; see also Garin [1.5], 102–5.32 Argyropulos [1.43].33 Acciaiuoli [1.41]; see also Bianchi [1.58]; Field [1.92], ch. 8. He wrote a similarcommentary on thePolitics.34 George translated thePhysics, De anima, De generatione et corruptione, De caelo,the zoological works and theRhetoric,as well as the Pseudo-AristotelianProblems:Garin [1.64], 75–81; see also Monfasani [1.103].35 George of Trebizond [1.49], 142–3, 191, 268; see also Monfasani [1.103], 26, 42,76–7; Minio-Paluello [1.67], 264–5; Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 77, 88.36 George of Trebizond [1.49], 106–7. Gaza retranslated the zoological works and theProblems,as well as translating Latin works, such as Cicero’sDe senectute,intoGreek; on Gaza see Monfasani in Hankinset al.[1.8], 189–219, esp. 207–19; onBessarion see Mohler [1.102], vol. 1; Garin [1.64], 74–5.37 In 1452 he was imprisoned for brawling with another humanist in the chancery ofthe papal Curia: Monfasani [1.103], 109–11.38 George of Trebizond [1.49], 107, 132–3; George of Trebizond in Mohler [1.102],vol. 3, 277–342(Adversus Theodorum Gazam in perversionem ProblematumAristotelis);see also Monfasani [1.103], 152–439 George of Trebizond in Mohler [1.102], vol. 3, 319(Adversus Theodorum Gazam);George of Trebizond [1.49], 142; see also Monfasani [1.103], 155–6; Garin [1.6],288–9. He also treated scholastic logicians with respect and drew on their works inhisIsagoge dialectics.40 Poliziano [1.53], 303 (MiscellaneaI.90); see also Garin [1.64], 78–80;Dizionario[1.4], vol. 2, 691–702.41 Poliziano [1.53], 310 (MiscellaneaI, Coronis), 529–30(Praelectio de dialectica),502(Praefatio in Suetonii expositionem);see also Klibansky [1.97], 316; Branca[1.61], 13. ThePraelectio de dialectica,a by-product of Poliziano’s teaching,became a standard introduction to Aristotelian logic: Schmitt [1.16], 61.42 Poliziano [1.54], xiv–xxiii, 18; Poliziano [1.53], 179 (EpistolaeXII); see alsoWolters [1.69].43Dizionario[1.4], vol. 4, 96–9; Branca [1.60]; Branca [1.61], 13–15. Aside from hisAristotelian work, Barbaro also produced philological commentaries on Pliny’sNatural History (Castigationes Plinianae)and on Dioscorides.44 Barbaro [1.44] is based on his lectures; see also Kristeller [1.10], vol. 1, 337–53.45 Barbaro [1.45], vol. 1, 16–17, 92, 104–5 (Epp.XII, LXXII, LXXXI), vol. 2, 108(Oratio ad discipulos);see also Garin [1.64], 87–9; Dionisotti inMedioevo[1.13],vol. 1, 217–53; Branca [1.62], 131–3.46 Pico [1.166]; see also Kristeller [1.182], 56–8; Valcke [1.197], 191; Roulier [1.193], 85–6; Branca [1.60], 227–8.47 BarbaroEpistolae,vol. 1, 77–8 (Ep.LXI); see also Branca [1.62], 132.48 See Kretzmannet al.[1.38], 74–8; Kristeller [1.10], vol. 1, 341–2 n. 13.49 Branca [1.62], 131, 166–7; Nardi [1.14], 366–8.50 Manutius [1.50], vol. 1, 5–7, 13–18, 22–3; see also Minio-Paluello [1.67], 489–93.51 Cavalli [1.48], a 2v; Manutius [1.50], vol. 1, 14; see also Schmitt in Poppi [1.68],287–314.52 Manutius [1.50], vol. 1, 7, 17; see also p. 40 below.53 Minio-Paluello [1.67], 489, 496; Mahoney [1.66]; Mahoney in Poppi [1.68], 135–202.54 Vernia [1.55], 89v; see also Mahoney [1.126], 169–70; Mahoney in Poppi [1.68],156; Mahoney [1.66], 149–63; Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 493–4; Di Napoli [1.3],181–93. Vernia corresponded with Barbaro: see Barbaro [1.44], vol. 1, 79–80 (Ep.LXII).55 Paul of Venice [1.52], z7r–8r; see also Kuksewicz in Olivieri [1.15], vol. 2, 297–324; Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 490.56 Klibansky [1.96].57 Bruni [1.47], 4; translation in Hankins [1.95], vol. 1, p. 50; Bruni [1.46], vol. 1, 15–16 (I.8); see also Garin inMedioevo[1.13], vol. 1, 339–74, esp. 361–3; Di Napoli[1.3], 125.58 Bertalot [1.57], vol. 2, 269.59 Bruni [1.46], vol. 2, 148 (IX.4); Hankins [1.95], vol. 1, 58–81. For Bruni’s secondversion of theCrito(1424–7) see Plato [1.82]; he also translated theApology(1424):see Garin inMedioevo[1.13], vol. 1, 365; for his knowledge of theCratylusseeBruni [1.46], vol. 1, 11–12 (1.6).60 Bruni [1.46], vol. 2, 148 (IX.4), described the translation as very inept; see alsoGarin inMedioevo[1.13], vol. 1, 341–4; Hankins in Hankinset al.[1.8], 149–88,esp. 149–60.61 Hankins [1.95], vol. 1, 105–54, vol. 2, 548–75; Garin inMedioevo[1.13], vol. 1,347–57. A third version of theRepublicwas undertaken by the Sicilian humanistAntonio Cassarino (d. 1447): Hankins [1.95], vol. 1, 154–60.62 Hankins in Hankinset al.[1.8], 166–76.63 Kraye [1.98]; Hankins [1.95], vol. 2, 515–23.64 See, for example, his lectures on theEthicsin Müllner [1.51], 15, 20, 22–3; see alsoGarin [1.5], 119–20; Field [1.92], 107–26.65 George of Trebizond [1.49], 304; Klibansky [1.97], 289–94; Monfasani [1.103], 18–19, 167; Garin inMedioevo[1.13], 372–3.66 See p. 22 above.67 George of Trebizond [1.49], 198–202 (Preface), 746–7 (marginal notes); see alsoMonfasani [1.103], 102–3, 171–2 and appendix 10 (for the original Preface toNicholas V); Hankins [1.95], vol. 2, appendix 11.68 Woodhouse [1.105]; Mohler [1.102], vol. 1, 335–40.69 Plethon [1.84], 321, trans. in Plethon [1.87], 192; see also Woodhouse [1.105], ch.10.70 Plethon [1.84], 321–2, 327–8, trans. in Plethon [1.87], 192–3, 198–9; Monfasani [1.103], 157, 205–6.71 Plethon [1.83], Woodhouse [1.105], ch. 17; Webb [1.104]; Hankins [1.95], vol. 1,193–208.72 Plethon [1.83], 64–79 (II.6); Woodhouse [1.105], 332–4. This portion of thetreatise circulated independently in the West under the titleDe fatoand wastranslated into Latin for Nicholas of Cusa: Kristeller [1.100].73 Woodhouse [1.105], chs 13 and 15.74 George of Trebizond [1.80], V viv; see also Monfasani [1.103], 39.75 George of Trebizond [1.80], D iir–Niiir; see also Hankins [1.95], vol. 2, appendix14; Monfasani [1.103], 157; Labowsky [1.101], 175–6.76 George of Trebizond [1.80], T vr–X iiv; Monfasani [1.103], 159; Garin [1.6], 290–2.77 Monfasani [1.103], 179–94; for his earlier spell in jail see note 37 above.78 Gaza [1.79]; for hisAdversus Plethonem de substantiasee Mohler [1.102], vol. 3,153–8.79 Labowsky [1.101], 180, 194; see also p. 23. Argyropulos also wrote a refutation oftheComparatio,which is now lost: Monfasani [1.103], 212, 228.80 Labowsky [1.101], 180–4, 194–7.81 Labowsky [1.101], 180, 194. Bessarion’s critique of George’s translation occurs inBook V, which is not printed in the edition of Bessarion’s treatise in Mohler [1.102], vol. 2; see Hankins [1.95], vol. 1, 191; Garin [1.6], 287.82 Bessarion in Mohler [1.102], vol. 2, 72–3 (I.7), 90–3 (II.4), 154–5 (II.9), 410–13(III.28); see also Hankins [1.95], vol. 1, 246–7; Monfasani [1.103], 219–20.83 Bessarion in Mohler [1.102], vol. 2, 3 (I.1), 102–3, 109 (II.5), 282–95 (III.15).84 Bessarion in Mohler [1.102], vol. 2, 161–3 (II.8), 443–59 (IV.2), 467 (IV.2); seealso Hankins [1.95], vol. 1, 255–9, vol. 2, appendix 13.85 Ficino’s letter is published in Mohler [1.102], vol. 3, 544–5, as are the letters ofArgyropulos (545–6) and Filelfo (599–600). On Ficino see Kristeller [1.99]; Kristeller [1.11], ch. 4; Kristeller in Garfagnini [1.93], vol. 1, 15–196;Copenhaver and Schmitt [1.2], 143–63.86 Ficino [1.70], vol. 2, 1304, 1427, 1438, 1484; see also Hankins [1.95], vol. 1, 312–14, 345, 358, 361.87 Hankins [1.95], vol. 1, 310–12, vol. 2, appendix 18A.88 Landino [1.81], Books III and IV; see also Field [1.92], ch. 9.89 Ficino [1.72], 176–7 (I.100); Ficino [1.70], vol. 2, 1300–3(In Euthydemumepitome).90 Kristeller [1.10], vol. 1, 35–97. The major exception is his exposition of theSymposium(Ficino [1.73], trans. in Ficino [1.85], where he adopted a dialogueformat and gave more than usual care to literary elegance. It was also the onecommentary which Ficino himself translated into Italian.91 Ficino [1.78]; see also Copenhaver [1.91]. Ficino’s attitude towards astrologyfluctuated considerably: see, for example, his attack on judicial astrology: Ficino [1.71], vol. 2, 11–76(Disputatio contra indicium astrologorum);see also the articlesby Walker and Kaske in Garfagnini [1.93], vol. 2, 341–9, 371–81.92 Ficino [1.75], 35–48, 368–83 (I.37); he later moved to a more voluntarist position:see Ficino [1.72], 201–10 (I.115), trans. in Ficino [1.86], vol. 1, 171–8.93 For his Plotinus commentary, first published in 1492, see Ficino [1.70], vol. 2,1537–1800; see also Wolters [1.69]; Gentile [1.94], 70–104.94 Ficino [1.70], 1154(In Parmenidem):see also Allen [1.88].95 Pico [1.155], 386–9 (Prooemium), 390–6 (cap. II), trans. in Pico [1.165], 37–8, 38–41; see also Allen in Garfagnini [1.93], vol. 2, 417–55; Schmitt and Skinner [1.17],582–4; Klibansky [1.97], 318–25; Garin [1.175], 75–82; Valcke [1.197], 221–3;Roulier [1.193], 96–7.96 Ficino [1.77], esp. chs 32–5.97 Ficino [1.74], vol. 1, 36 (prohemium); Ficino [1.70], vol. 1, 1–2(De christianareligione),853–4, 871; see also Vasoli [1.20], 19–73.98 Ficino [1.70], vol. 1, 774, 866, 956. For an earlier use of this argument see Bruni [1.47], 4, 136; Bertalot [1.57], vol. 2, 269. For Numenius, see Eusebius,PraeparatioevangelicaII.10.14 and Clement of Alexandria,StromateisI.22.150.99 Ficino [1.70], vol. 1, 156, 268, 386, 854, 871, vol. 2, 1537, 1836; see also Walker[1.21]; Allen in Henry and Hutton [1.9], 38–47; Schmitt [1.195], 507–11; Gentile[1.94], 57–70.100 See his letter to Prenninger in Klibansky [1.96], 45; Ficino [1.70], vol. 1, 899 (Ep.IX).101 Ficino [1.74], vol. 1, 36 (I.1), vol. 2, 283 (XIV. 10); Ficino [1.70], vol. 1, 855 (Ep.VII).102 Ficino [1.70], vol. 2, 1390–5(In Phaedonem epitome);Ficino [1.76], chs 5–6; seealso Allen [1.89], ch. 3.103 Ficino [1.74], vol. 1, 174–222 (V); see also Kristeller [1.99], ch. 15; Di Napoli [1.3], ch. 3.104 Ficino [1.70], vol. II, 1801(Expositio in interpretationem Prisciani Lydi superTheophrastum).105 Ficino [1.70], vol. 1, 872 (Ep.VIII), vol. 2, 1537(In Plotinum).106 Ficino [1.70], vol. 2, 1442, 1449, 1463(In Timaeum commentarium);see alsoAllen in Hankinset al.[1.8], 399–439.107 Ficino [1.70], vol. 1, 956, vol. 2, 1533(Argumentum in sextam epistolam Platonis);see also Allen [1.90]; but see Pico’s criticism of Ficino in note 144 below.108 Kristeller in Olivieri [1.15], vol. 2, 1077–99, esp. 1080–4; Kristeller [1.11], ch. 5.109 Pomponazzi [1.114]; Pomponazzi [1.115]; see also Nardi [1.127], ch. 4; Di Napoli[1.3], 229–34.110 Nardi [1.127], 197–9; Di Napoli [1.3], 235–8; Olivieri [1.128], 69–76.111 Pomponazzi [1.112], 36–7, 82–137; see also Aristotle,De animaI.1, III.7; DiNapoli [1.3], 245–64; Olivieri [1.128], 76–84.112 Pomponazzi [1.119], 302, 377; Pomponazzi [1.112], 82, 232; see also Pine [1.129],109–12.113 Pomponazzi [1.110], 52–75(Apologia),81–108(Defensorium);see also Di Napoli[1.3], 265–75; Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 504–7.114 Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 602–5; Lohr [1.125].115 Pomponazzi [1.111], 198; see also Pine [1.129], 235–53; Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 273. The treatise, writtenc.1520, was published posthumously in 1556; it wasthe only work by Pomponazzi to be put on the Index.116 The astrological determinism postulated by Pomponazzi inDe incantationibuswasreiterated in Books I and II of hisDe fato(Pomponazzi [1.113], in which he attemptsto refute Alexander of Aphrodisias’s defence of contingency.117 Pomponazzi [1.111], 315; see also Pine [1.129], 256–8; Kristeller in Olivieri [1.15], vol. 2, 1093–6.118 De Bellis [1.122]; Branca [1.60], 225.119 Schmitt [1.134]; Kraye [1.124]; Cranz [1.120]; Nardi [1.14], 365–442; Mahoney [1.126]; Schmitt [1.135].120 Cranz [1.121].121 Aristotle [1.106], vol. 1, A A II 2v–3r; see also Schmitt [1.132]; Minio-Paluello [1.67], 498–500.122 Zabarella [1.117], 178–9 (De methodisIII.18); see also Gilbert [1.7], ch. 7; Poppi[1.130], ch. 6.123 Zabarella [1.117], 180–1 (De methodisIII. 19); see also Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 689–93.124 Zabarella [1.118], 69, 541–56, 1056, 1067, 1069; see also Schmitt [1.131]; Poppi[1.130], ch. 7.125 Cesalpino [1.108]; his treatise on minerals and metals,De metallicis(1596), alsomakes use of observational material.126 Zabarella [1.118], 1004 (De speciebus intelligibilibus8); see also Schmitt andSkinner [1.17], 530–4.127 Cremonini [1.109], † 3r; see also Schmitt [1.133], 15; Schmitt [1.16], 101–12, 33,138;Dizionario[1.4], vol. 30, 618–22.128 Another late Aristotelian, Francesco Buonamici (1533–1603), one of Galileo’steachers at the University of Pisa, was equally insistent on the separation ofphilosophy and religion: Buonamici [1.107], 810; see also Helbing [1.123], 65.129 Viviani [1.116], 610; see also Schmitt [1.133], 14; Kessler in Henry and Hutton [1.9], 137–4, esp. 141; Lohr [1.125], 99.130 Valla [1.159], vol. 1, 1–8 (I, proemium), 128–9 (I.16), 148 (I.17), 175–6 (II,proemium), 277–8 (III, proemium); see also Camporeale [1.171]; Seigel [1.18], ch.5; Vasoli [1.19], 28–77; Monfasani [1.185], 181–5; Copenhaver and Schmitt [1.2],209–27; Kristeller [1.11], ch. 2. For Valla’s critique of Aristotelian moralphilosophy see Schmitt and Skinner [1.17], 335, 340–1.131 HisRepastinatiohad only limited manuscript diffusion and was not printed until1496–1500.132 Nizolio [1.146], vol. 1, 21–31 (I.1), 34–5 (I.2), vol. 2, 52, 62 (III.5), 92 (III.8), 140(IV.2); see also Monfasani [1.185], 192; Vasoli [1.19], 606–13.133 Nizolio [1.146], vol. 1, 29 (I.1), 52 (I.4), 59–68 (I.6), 89–96 (I.8), 112 (I.10); seealso Rossi [1.192]; Wesseler [1.202].134 Leibniz [1.144], 398–476.135 Leibniz [1.144], 429–30; Nizolio [1.146], vol. 2, 165–77 (IV.6).136 Pico [1.151], 1011–1264 (IV–VI); see also Schmitt [1.194]; Siraisi in Henry andHutton [1.9], 214–29, esp. 217–21.137 Pico [1.151], 853 (II.20), 913 (II.37), 1007 (III.14), 1029 (IV.3); see also Popkin [1.189], ch. 11.138 Pico [1.151], 738 (I.2), 1026 (IV.2); see also Schmitt [1.194], 47–8, 62.139 Pico [1.155], 385–441(De ente),trans. in Pico [1.165], 24–5, 37–62; see also p. 35above. For his announcement of the project in 1486 see Pico [1.154], 54: ‘There isno natural or divine enquiry in which Aristotle and Plato, for all their apparent verbaldisagreement, do not in reality agree.’ For an earlier attempt to establish a concordof Plato and Aristotle see Bessarion in Mohler [1.102], vol. 2, 411–13 (III.28).140 Pico [1.154], 34–5 (for his Averroist theses), 54 (for the concord of Thomas andDuns Scotus); Pico [1.155], 144–6(Oratio);see also Nardi [1.14], 127–46.141 Pico [1.155], 167–383(Heptaplus),trans. in Pico [1.165], 65–174; see alsoWirszubski [1.204].142 See his letter to Aldus Manutius (11 February 1490) in Pico [1.152], 359:‘Philosophy seeks the truth, theology finds it and religion possesses it’.143 See, for example, Pico [1.154], 83–90, where he puts forward Cabbalistic thesesthat ‘confirm Christianity’; see also Pico [1.155], 160–1(Oratio),246–8(Heptaplus,III, proemium); Pico [1.152], 124(Apologia).144 Pico [1.155], 466–7 (Commente1.5); he also pointed out important differencesbetween the Christian and Platonic accounts of the angelic intelligence andcriticized Ficino for attributing to the Platonists the Christian doctrine of God’sdirect creation of individual souls: ibid., 464–6 (I.3–4).145 On the ancient theology see p. 36. Pico shared Ficino’s interests: see Pico [1.154],41–50, for theses taken from Neoplatonists and ancient theologians.146 Roulier [1.193], ch. 2; Valcke [1.197]; Garin [1.175], 73–89; Kristeller [1.182];Schmitt [1.195], 511–13.147 Pico [1.153], vol. 1, 126–37 (II.5), vol. 2, 474 (XI.2). Like Vernia, with whom hestudied in Padua 1480–2, Pico brought Alexander of Aphrodisias into his Christiansynthesis by denying his mortalist view of the soul: Pico [1.154], 40; see also DiNapoli [1.3], 172; Nardi [1.14], 369; on Vernia, see p. 25.148 Giorgi [1.143], esp. D iir–E viv (I.ii.1–13); see also Schmitt [1.195], 513–14.149 For his anti-Aristotelianism see Giorgi [1.143], B viiv–viiir (I.i.13), c viiv (III.ii.7);see also Vasoli [1.198]; Vasoli [1.20], 233–56.150 Giorgi [1.143], D viv–viir, for a list of Cabbalistic books (not necessarily read)which he compiled; and A viir (I.i.5) for a parallel between Cabbala and Aristotle’sten categories; see also Wirszubski [1.203].151 During the late 1520s, Steuco was in charge of the library of Cardinal DomenicoGrimani, who had purchased Pico’s books: see Kibre [1.178], 18–20; Crociata [1.172], 16–17.152 Steuco [1.156], 1–122 (I–II), 279–411 (VII), 490–560 (IX); see also Schmitt [1.195], 515–24.153 Steuco [1.156], 166–207 (IV), 364 (VII.15), 537 (IX.22); like Vernia and Pico,Steuco believed that Alexander of Aphrodisias, as well as Aristotle, supported theimmortality of the soul; see also Kraye [1.181], 344–5.154 Steuco [1.156], 539–43 (IX.25); see also Vasoli [1.200]; Muccillo [1.187]; Crociata[1.172], ch. 1.155 Ficino [1.173], trans. in Ficino [1.85]; see also Nelson [1.188]; Kristeller [1.12],59, 61–2.156 Diacceto [1.139]; Diacceto [1.141]; see also Kristeller [1.10], vol. 1, ch. 15.157 Diacceto [1.140], 19, 216, 246, 263, 345; he defended Ficino and the Neoplatonistsagainst Pico by arguing, on the basis of theParmenides,that the One is superior tobeing: ibid., 14; see also p. 35.158 According to Francesco de’ Vieri, one of the holders of the chair, his philosophicalcolleagues objected to Plato being taught in universities because of the lack oforder and method in the Dialogues and their use of probable, rather thandemonstrative, arguments: Vieri [1.160], 97; see also Kristeller [1.10], vol. 1, 292.159 See his autobiographical letter of 1597: Patrizi [1.150], 47; see also Muccillo inGarfagnini [1.93], vol. 2, 615–79. The only subject on which he departed fromFicino was love, all manifestations of which, even that between man and God, hebelieved to be motivated by self-interest: Patrizi [1.149]; see also Vasoli [1.201];Antonaci [1.167]; Kristeller [1.11], ch. 7; Copenhaver and Schmitt [1.2], ch. 3.4.160 Patrizi [1.147]; see also Muccillo [1.186].161 Patrizi [1.148], a 2r–3v.162 Purnell [1.190]; Vasoli [1.199]; Muccillo in Garfagnini [1.93], vol. 2, 636, 650,660, 665.163 Like Steuco, he regardedDe mundoas authentic (Patrizi [1.147], 44r–45v) but hedid not place it on the exalted level of theTheology.164 See the appendix to Patrizi [1.148] for his editions of theTheology,the Hermeticcorpus andChaldaean Oracles(attributed, by Gemistos Plethon, to Zoroaster).Patrizi also had high regard for Proclus’sElements of Theology,which hetranslated, together with theElements of Physics,in 1583.165 Kraye [1.180], 270–3, 282–4; Vasoli [1.198], 229 n. 249. Steuco’sCosmopoeia,acommentary on Genesis, was also placed on the Index, though for differentreasons: Muccillo [1.187], 51 n. 21, 59 n. 37.166 Patrizi [1.148], 1r–3r (PanaugiaI), 74r–79v (PancosmiaIV–VI); see alsoBrickmann [1.170].167 Telesio [1.157]. For Patrizi’s constructive criticisms of Telesio’s work, seeFiorentino [1.174], vol. 2, 375–91; for Telesio’s reply, see Telesio [1.158], 453–95;see also Kristeller [1.11], ch. 6; Copenhaver and Schmitt [1.2], ch. 5.3.168 Bacon referred to Telesio as ‘the first of the moderns’, but criticized him because,like his Peripatetic opponents, he devised theories before having recourse toexperimentation: Bacon [1.136], 107, 114; see also Giachetti Assenza [1.176].169 Telesio [1.157], vol. 1, 188–97 (I.25).170 Patrizi [1.148], 61r–73v (PancosmiaI–III).171 Gassendi [1.142], 246 (I.iii.3); see also Henry [1.177], 566–8.172 Patrizi [1.148], 63v–64r (PancosmiaI); see also Henry [1.177], 564–5; Brickmann[1.170], 62.173 Bruno [1.137], vol. 1.1, 191–398(De immense et innumerabilibus);Bruno [1.138],343–537(De l’infinito, universe e mondi),trans. in Bruno [1.163]; see also Michel[1.184], chs 6 and 8; Koyré [1.179], 39–55; Kristeller [1.11], ch. 8; Copenhaverand Schmitt [1.2], ch. 5.2.174 See, for example, his criticism of Copernicus for being ‘more interested inmathematics than in nature’: Bruno [1.138], 28(La cena de le ceneri);Bruno [1.137], 380–9 (De immensoIII.9).175 Bruno [1.138], 260–1(De la causa, principio e uno).176 See Lucretius,De rerum naturaII.1048–89, and Nicholas of Cusa [1.145], 57–75(II.1–4), for discussions of the infinite universe and plurality of worlds. For theinfluence of Plotinus on Bruno see Kristeller [1.11], 131, 135; his mostNeoplatonic work,De gli eroici furori(Bruno [1.138], 925–1178, trans. in Bruno[1.161], transforms Platonic love into a heroic but doomed struggle to comprehendGod’s infinity.177 Bruno [1.138], 225–53 (De la causaII), trans. in Bruno [1.164], 108–23; see alsoBlum [1.169], ch. 3; Deregibus [1.173]; Kristeller [1.183], 4.178 See the trial document published in Spampanato [1.196], 708.179 See, for example, Bruno [1.138], 547–831(Spaccio de la bestia trionfante),trans.in Bruno [1.162]; see also Badaloni [1.168].180 For a summary of the charges against Bruno seeDizionario[1.4], vol. 14, 663–4.181 Ricci [1.191].BIBLIOGRAPHYItalian Renaissance philosophyCollection of texts1.1The Renaissance Philosophy of Man,trans. 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