Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) believed the oldest pagan teachers could help strengthen Christianity. Their apparent knowledge of divine truth suggested that the faith fulfilled a wisdom already glimpsed by earlier peoples. Recovering their books was therefore part of a Christian undertaking, even when those books described a world full of unfamiliar spiritual powers. He had thought so since the mid-1450s, when he could not yet read Greek and assembled his first account of an ancient wisdom out of Latin books. Plethon (c. 1355–1452) had looked beyond Greece for the same thing and would later supply one piece of the scheme, but the frame was in place before any of Plethon’s writings reached him.
James Hankins has reconstructed that first account from a school oration in praise of philosophy. Its succession of sages comes from the first book of Diogenes Laertius, which Ficino read in Ambrogio Traversari’s Latin. Its bridge to Christianity runs through Pseudo-Dionysius, “first a Platonist, then a Christian,” and through Augustine. There is no Orpheus in it and no Zoroaster. By a letter of 1457 Hermes is already the source of ancient philosophy, six years before Ficino translated a word of him, and in his own copy of Proclus he wrote out the succession of the pagan theologians in Proclus’s order: Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Plato. Hankins’s verdict is that there is no reason to suppose that Ficino’s original versions of the ancient theology came from Plethon. They came from a shelf of Latin and patristic books, with Proclus beside them, most of which had been in Florence before the Greeks arrived.
He had not always been sure, Sebastiano Gentile notes, which way the debt ran. In the colophon of one of his manuscripts Ficino once wrote in his own hand that Mercury had been a disciple of Plato, and later struck the note out. In 1458, in the Italian treatise On God and the Soul, Hermes was an Egyptian philosopher far older than the Greeks, and so close to Plato that his spirit seemed to live on in Plato’s breast.
The manuscript and the patron
His patron, Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–1464), gave the work a memorable order of priority. Ficino was preparing to translate Plato when Cosimo asked him to turn first to a manuscript attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, the legendary sage of ancient Egypt. If Plato had inherited an older teaching, this manuscript seemed to bring its source within reach, and the ageing Cosimo wanted the translation while he was still alive to read it. Ficino finished it in April 1463. On the eighteenth of that month Cosimo gave him a villa at Careggi. Giovanni Corsi, Ficino’s early biographer, said the villa was the reward for Hermes, and Gentile points out that the deed of gift bears him out on the date. Cosimo died the next year.
The manuscript had come from Macedonia with a monk, Leonardo da Pistoia, and is generally identified with one still in the Laurentian Library. It held fourteen treatises, now called the Corpus Hermeticum, on the making of the world, knowledge of God, and the renewal of the soul, and Ficino stretched the title of the first, Pimander, over the whole collection. His preface told Cosimo what to look for. Hermes was thrice greatest because he was the greatest philosopher, the greatest priest and the greatest king. He spoke as a prophet as well as a philosopher, and, in Gentile’s translation, “He foresaw the destruction of the old religion, the rise of the new faith, the coming of Christ, the judgement to come, the resurrection of men, the renewal of the world, the glory of the blessed, the punishment of sinners.”
Florence wanted it at once. Tommaso Benci had an Italian version finished by September 1463, and the Latin survives in some forty manuscripts, more than any other work of Ficino’s. It was printed at Treviso in 1471 without his involvement and went through some two dozen Latin editions by 1641, Jean-Pierre Mahé counts, and its first printer advertised it as a theology so ancient and so singular that it had astonished the Egyptians and the barbarians. In 1488 the pavement of Siena cathedral set Hermes in marble near the entrance, with the legend Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus contemporaneus Moysi.
A date with two authorities
The legend on the pavement was more decided than Ficino had been. His preface to the Pimander opens with a genealogy taken from Augustine. In the time when Moses was born flourished Atlas the astrologer, brother of Prometheus and maternal grandfather of the elder Mercury, whose grandson was Mercurius Trismegistus. That put Hermes some generations after Moses. Ficino sets beside it the five Mercuries of Cicero and Lactantius, the fifth of whom, called Theuth by the Egyptians and Trismegistus by the Greeks, gave the Egyptians their laws and letters, and goes no further. Wouter Hanegraaff points out that he reports Augustine without adopting him and never returns to the question. Hankins reads the same preface as following Augustine. Gentile notices that Ficino’s text tilts the reckoning. Where the usual text of Augustine says that Atlas is found to have lived when Moses was born, Ficino’s says that he flourished then, in the prime of his life. And by making Trismegistus the Mercury who killed Argus, Cicero and Lactantius made him Augustine’s elder Mercury, Atlas’s grandson rather than his great-great-grandson, two generations nearer to Moses.
Lazzarelli read it as Hankins does. In 1482 Lodovico Lazzarelli, praising Ficino’s preface, corrected it. Hermes, he wrote on the authority of Diodorus, did not live after Moses but long before him, among the gods who ruled Egypt before the pharaohs. The pavement at Siena split the difference. Within twenty-five years of the translation, the date of Hermes had become a question on which a theology turned, and Ficino had left it open.
The genealogy in the same preface runs Hermes, Orpheus, Aglaophemus, Pythagoras, Philolaus, Plato. Except for Hermes, it is Proclus’s list.
Zoroaster at the head
Within a year the order had changed. By 1464, in a summary of Plato’s Minos, the dialogue on law, Ficino set Zoroaster as a lawgiver before both Hermes and Moses. Hanegraaff takes the date from Michael Stausberg against the usual later one. In the Philebus commentary of 1469 the list Ficino would keep for the rest of his life appears, and in the Platonic Theology, finished in 1474, he states it as fact, in Allen’s translation: “six theologians, once supreme, were in mutual accord. The first is said to have been Zoroaster, the chief of the Magi, and the second Mercurius Trismegistus, the prince of the Egyptian priests.” Orpheus, Aglaophemus and Pythagoras follow, “and after Pythagoras came Plato who embraced the universal wisdom of all of them.” Philolaus has been dropped to make room.
The promotion is the one thing Hankins allows to Plethon, who had made Zoroaster the source of Platonic theology. In his own copy of Plethon’s reply to Scholarios, Ficino wrote in the margin, in Greek, that Platonic theology began with Zoroaster. The date makes the route uncertain. Ficino can be shown to have had Plethon’s commentary on the oracles by 1467 or 1469, and Hankins, who places the change after 1469, sees no difficulty; Hanegraaff, who accepts 1464, still credits Plethon, whose Zoroaster could have reached Florence by other ways than his book. Hankins also names the cost. Putting a Persian first “throws the priority of the Judaic to the Gentile revelation into doubt.”
Hankins traces what the mature scheme became. Ficino ended by thinking of three schools of gentile theology, Persian, Egyptian and Greek, in that order of age, and Hankins suggests the reason was geography. Medieval cosmography knew three continents, and the scheme gave each its own tradition, a Chaldaean one for Asia, a Hermetic one for Africa and an Orphic one for Europe. Ficino stated the principle in On the Christian Religion, in the Toronto translation: “divine providence does not at any time permit any region of the world to be utterly devoid of every religion, though He does permit different rites of worship to be observed in different times and places.”
Ficino knew another way to tell the story, and he kept it in the same book. There he reports from Eusebius that Abraham taught astrology to the Chaldeans, the Phoenicians and the Egyptian priests, who said they had it from the successors of Enoch, “who invented it and was named Atlas,” and that whatever was said of Mercurius Trismegistus, Artapanus showed to have been done by Moses, who “himself was Mercurius.” That is a single Hebrew line, with Enoch at its head and Hermes dissolved into Moses. Moshe Idel, who traces the same unilinear scheme among Jewish writers of the period, reads Ficino’s refusal to use it in his pagan lists as a choice. He let “a separate, independent pagan line of transmission” stand beside the Hebrew one. The two lines met only in the figure of Abraham, who in Michael Allen’s reading of Ficino carried the wisdom of Zoroaster with him out of Ur of the Chaldees. And Ficino read the Magi at Bethlehem as Zoroastrians kneeling before what Allen calls “the ultimate Zoroastrian.”
The chapters after Ficino inherit the independent line, and spend four centuries trying to make it agree with Genesis.
The Christian end of the line
Plethon’s doctrines were, in Siniossoglou’s phrase, coeval with man and the universe, and ended nowhere. Ficino’s ended in Christ. Niketas Siniossoglou draws the distinction exactly. Ficino’s ancient philosophy is not indifferent to Christian doctrine but culminates in it, and cannot stand without it. The phrase prisca theologia is Ficino’s own. He uses it in the oration of the mid-1450s, in the preface to the Pimander, and in On the Christian Religion, and in that book the ancient theologians become something like prophets of the nations. Among the ancients, he writes, the same men were philosophers and priests. The Persians called them Magi, the Indians consulted the Brahmins, the Egyptians made their metaphysicians priests and kings, and the same tradition prevailed in Greece under Linus, Orpheus and Pythagoras, and “in Gaul under the governance of the druids.” The Sibyls and Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue prepared the Latins for the Incarnation.
The same book closes the circle from the other end. The ancient theology of the pagans, Ficino writes, “is entirely contained in the volumes of our Plato,” but it was first understood only in the age of Philo and Numenius, just after the apostles, because “the Platonists used the divine light of the Christians for interpreting the divine Plato.” He had discovered for himself, he says, that the principal mysteries of Numenius, Philo, Plotinus, Iamblichus and Proclus “had been taken from John, Paul, Hierotheus, and Dionysius the Areopagite.” The oldest wisdom was in Plato, and the key to Plato was in the New Testament.
Hanegraaff notices what the scheme implies. A theology that was whole at the beginning, was lost, and is now being recovered is a call for reform. Ficino issued it and a generation after his death other reformers, from the opposite direction, would ask for a return to the sources of the faith.
He also knew how the scheme could be read. Late in life he told a correspondent, in Hankins’s translation, that he had always been reluctant to publish the literal translations of the Orphic hymns and of Proclus he had made in his youth. “I did not want readers to think I was trying to bring back the ancient worship of the gods and demons, now for so long rightly condemned.”
He kept the translations from print. He did not keep the hymns from use. Corsi reports that Ficino expounded the hymns of Orpheus and sang them to the lyre in the ancient manner, and Ficino counted the revival of the ancient song to the Orphic lyre among the achievements of his age. D. P. Walker argued that this singing was the same thing as the astrological music of the Three Books on Life, and that the Orphic hymns recommended themselves because Orpheus was one of the ancient theologians.
What he missed
Ficino was a better Platonist than a Hermetist. Hanegraaff has shown that the 1463 translation missed the religious sense of the Greek gnosis, the saving knowledge of oneself and of God that the treatises are about, and at one point omitted part of a passage on it that stood in the manuscript before him. What Ficino meant by a higher knowledge he found in Plato instead, in the four divine frenzies of the Phaedrus. His contemporary Lazzarelli, reading the same treatises from another manuscript, understood them as Ficino had not. Brian Copenhaver puts Ficino’s admiration for the Hermetica down not to an interest in magic but to “his mistaken theory of history and his eclectic optimism.” Ficino was, in Hanegraaff and Bouthoorn’s phrase, a Christian neoplatonist with a strong interest in the Hermetica. Lazzarelli was a Christian Hermetist with only a moderate interest in Plato. The next two chapters follow the difference.
The book on life
Ficino wanted philosophy to affect how people lived. In 1489 he published Three Books on Life, written for scholars, whose health he thought the planets governed. The third book, On Obtaining Life from the Heavens, carries a subtitle that states its programme: in what, according to Plotinus, the power of attracting favour from the heavens consists, namely that well-adapted physical forms can easily allure the world-soul, the souls of the stars and the daemons. It recommends images, songs, scents, stones and the right hours. Its reference point is a passage of Plotinus on the ancient sages who made temples and statues so that the gods would be present to them.
Ficino said he was only interpreting Plotinus. He also said that Plotinus was paraphrasing Hermes, and in the same chapter, as Kaske and Clark translate it, he described how Hermes put together statues “from herbs, trees, stones, and spices” that held a natural force of divinity, and added songs that the divinities delighted in. Those are the god-making passages of the Asclepius, which Augustine had condemned as idolatry. Plotinus’s ancient sages become, in Ficino’s paraphrase, “the ancient priests or Magi,” and Ficino adds Hermes’s account of why the statues were made. The wise men of Egypt, who were also priests, being “unable to persuade the people by reasoning that there were gods,” thought up “this magical lure” to show that divinities exist. Hanegraaff reads the book as a commentary on the god-making passages in disguise, safer under the name of Plotinus. Frances Yates made those passages the basis of Ficino’s magic. Copenhaver finds them “problems for him to solve, not a platform to be mounted,” and traces the method to Proclus instead, whose short treatise On Sacrifice Ficino used in the book without naming it.
David Pingree, who edited the Latin Picatrix, counted Ficino among the heirs of the astral magic of Harran. The Picatrix was a source Ficino named only in private. In a letter written at his dictation to Filippo Valori, which Kaske and Clark report, Ficino said he could not lend Valori a manuscript of the Picatrix and did not recommend reading it, but that everything in it that was neither frivolous nor condemned by the Christian religion had gone into the third book. Kaske and Clark call the Picatrix “an influential but not a predominant source,” a quarry rather than a model.
Ficino expected trouble. He wrote an Apologia in September 1489, before the book was printed, and added protestations of orthodoxy to the printed text. By May 1490 it had been denounced at the papal court. Friends intervened, and in August Ermolao Barbaro wrote that Innocent VIII had spoken kindly of him. Ficino never wrote another medical book, and in 1494 he told Poliziano that even in this one he had only reported other men’s opinions about images.
The head of the chain had made the question unavoidable. Zoroaster was the inventor of magic for every reader of Pliny, and the oracles reached Ficino under Plethon’s title, the Magical Oracles of the Magi. A Latin version of them in a Florentine manuscript, which Karl Dannenfeldt, following an eighteenth-century catalogue, assigned to Ficino, is headed Magica (idest philosophica) dicta magorum ex Zoroastre, the magical, that is philosophical, sayings of the Magi from Zoroaster, though Hankins reports that the attribution has since been doubted. Once the chief of the Magi stood first among the theologians, Hanegraaff writes, “nothing could be more logical than seeing the ancient wisdom and mageia as equivalent.” Ficino himself was too cautious to say it in his own books. Pico della Mirandola and Cornelius Agrippa would say it for him. One of Pico’s theses of 1486, in Walker’s translation, reads: “In natural magic nothing is more efficacious than the Hymns of Orpheus, if there be applied to them the suitable music, and disposition of soul, and the other circumstances known to the wise.”
The heir
In 1492, in the preface to his translation of Plotinus, Ficino told the story of how the work had begun. Cosimo, hearing the Greek Plethon speak at the council of 1439, had resolved to found an Academy in Florence and had chosen the son of his physician to carry it out. The chapter on Plethon gives the reasons to doubt it. Two more belong here. Gentile points out that Ficino, who owned most of Plethon’s surviving works, had named him only once before in all his writings. And Hankins has argued that the Academy of the preface is a figure of speech that Ficino used a dozen times for the books of Plato. What Cosimo resolved to found, on this reading, was a library of Plato in Latin, and if Ficino kept an academy at all, it was an informal school for his own pupils. The institution grew in the retelling. It was first formally called a Platonic Academy in 1638, and in one nineteenth-century account Plethon himself appointed the six-year-old Ficino as its head.
The shape of the story is the point. The translator of the ancient theology ended his career by placing himself at the end of a chain that ran from the East through a Greek sage to a Florentine patron, and named himself its heir. He described his own descent in the form he believed truth always took.
The date
The date on which this history depended was mistaken. These were writings from the Roman imperial period, close enough to early Christianity to belong within some of the same philosophical and religious debates. Their similarities called for an explanation very different from a revelation of the age of Moses.
The first attack came half a century before Casaubon’s. In 1567 Gilbert Génébrard, professor of Hebrew at Paris, placed Hermes in Ptolemaic Egypt on the ground that he wrote in Greek, and in 1580 he added that the Pimander mentions the Sibyls, who lived long after Moses. Francesco Muti, a defender of Hermes, answered in 1588 that the Sibyl was Ficino’s mistranslation. Frederick Purnell has shown that it was neither a mistranslation nor Ficino’s. Where the Greek has God foretelling the future dia dryos, through an oak, Ficino wrote per silvam, through a wood. The Treviso edition, printed without him, read per sibyllam, and nearly every later edition followed it. For a few years an argument about the date of Hermes turned on a corrupt reading, perhaps no more than a slip of the typesetter.
In 1614 Isaac Casaubon supplied the explanation that lasted. But readers had also found instruction in the texts, and correcting their date did not by itself remove the value they believed that instruction possessed. The Zoroaster at the head of Ficino’s list kept his place for longer still.
Sources
Michael J. B. Allen, Synoptic Art: Marsilio Ficino on the History of Platonic Interpretation (Olschki, 1998).
Brian P. Copenhaver, “Hermes Trismegistus, Proclus, and the Question of a Theory of Magic in the Renaissance,” in Ingrid Merkel and Allen G. Debus, eds., Hermeticism and the Renaissance (Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988); Hermetica (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Magic in Western Culture: From Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2015), ch. 5.
Giovanni Corsi, Vita Marsilii Ficini, in Raymond Marcel, Marsile Ficin (1433–1499) (Les Belles Lettres, 1958), as cited by Gentile and by Walker.
Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “The Pseudo-Zoroastrian Oracles in the Renaissance,” Studies in the Renaissance 4 (1957), 7–30.
Marsilio Ficino, Argumentum to the Pimander (1463), in Opera omnia (Basel, 1576); Platonic Theology, ed. and trans. Michael J. B. Allen and James Hankins, 6 vols. (Harvard University Press, 2001–2006), XVII.1; On the Christian Religion, trans. Dan Attrell, Brett Bartlett and David Porreca (University of Toronto Press, 2022), chs. 2, 4, 22 and 26; Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989), with the editors’ introduction, III.26 and the Apologia; Di Dio et anima (1458), as discussed by Gentile.
Gilbert Génébrard, Chronographia (Paris, 1567; enlarged 1580); Francesco Muti, Exercitationum libri V (Ferrara, 1588); both as discussed by Purnell.
Sebastiano Gentile and Carlos Gilly, Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Ermete Trismegisto / Marsilio Ficino and the Return of Hermes Trismegistus (Centro Di, 1999), esp. Gentile, “Ficino and Hermes.”
Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012), ch. 1; “Better than Magic: Cornelius Agrippa and Lazzarellian Hermetism,” Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 4, no. 1 (2009), 1–25.
Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Ruud M. Bouthoorn, Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447-1500): The Hermetic Writings and Related Documents (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005).
James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Brill, 1990), esp. vol. II, Appendix 17, “The Development of Ficino’s ‘Ancient Theology’”; “The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence,” Renaissance Quarterly 44 (1991), 429–475.
Moshe Idel, “Prisca Theologia in Marsilio Ficino and in Some Jewish Treatments,” in Michael J. B. Allen and Valery Rees, eds., Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy (Brill, 2002).
Jean-Pierre Mahé, “La Renaissance et le mirage égyptien,” in Roelof van den Broek and Cis van Heertum, eds., From Poimandres to Jacob Böhme (In de Pelikaan, 2000).
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones (1486), Orphic conclusion 2, in D. P. Walker’s translation.
David Pingree, “Indian Planetary Images and the Tradition of Astral Magic,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 52 (1989), 1–13; “The Ṣābians of Ḥarrān and the Classical Tradition,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 9, no. 1 (2002), 8–35.
Frederick Purnell, Jr., “Hermes and the Sibyl: A Note on Ficino’s Pimander,” Renaissance Quarterly 30 (1977), 305–310.
Niketas Siniossoglou, Radical Platonism in Byzantium: Illumination and Utopia in Gemistos Plethon (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Michael Stausberg, Faszination Zarathushtra: Zoroaster und die europäische Religionsgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (de Gruyter, 1998).
D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (Warburg Institute, 1958), ch. 1.
Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1964).