Quotes About Ficino

Ficino offered the age a new intellectual master. "Aristotle's genius is purely human," he wrote, while "Plato's is both human and divine.

It was also Colet who suggested to Erasmus that he fuse his two interests, the Bible and ancient literature, into one. He urged him to do for ancient Christian literature, including the New Testament, what Ficino had done for Plato: use the techniques of philology to produce a clean, definitive text free from copyists' errors and scholastic muddles, a "pure Scripture" that would show people what the Bible really said, not what tradition or the allegorists said it meant.

By a mental sleight of hand, Ficino effortlessly merged Plato's theory of love with Christian Neoplatonist ideas about divine love derived from familiar authors like Augustine or Saint Bernard—not to mention Italy's two most famous love poets, Dante and Petrarch. And Plato's doctrine of love as the desire for beauty had a peculiar attraction in quattrocento Florence.

What Ficino had proved (or at least seemed to prove) was that there was no real clash between Christian and pagan systems of theology. In the end, they arose from the same source: the soul's love of beauty and perfection and its relentless aspiration for knowledge of God and therefore of ourselves.

For Ficino and his followers, inside every human body is a soul struggling to get out and realize its creative powers through the pursuit of the Eternal.

Saturn seems to have impressed the seal of melancholy on me from the beginning.