4.2. Revival of Platonic Tradition. Nicolas of Cusa

Neoplatonism was an idealistic philosophy which aimed the development of Plato’s teaching with its further systematization and delimination of contradictions. They suggested a new picture of the world which was less dependent on God, but the importance of the universals was stressed. They regarded man as an independent microcosm, though they did not deny his devine nature. They aimed to work out an integral philosophical system which could combine all the existent philosophies.

Four thinkers who illustrate something of the freer atmosphere of the time were Marsilio Ficino, Pica della Mirandola Girolamo Cardano and Nicolas of Cusa.

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was more than a typical product of the Renaissance: he was a major symbol of it. Patronized by Cosimo de Medici, he with his help founded the Florentine Academy, which for many summed up the new spirit of the times. It was a kind of spiritual community of like-minded people interested in the revival of Platonism. There was banquets in honor of Plato, readings of dialogues, lectures by well-known visitors and so forth. Ficino himself was a clergyman and not at all disployal to the Church, but he had a wide-ranging and outward-reaching mind. He thought that philosophy was not a maid-servant of theology, but rather its sister, that provided maturnity of theology, the latter depending on the level of philosophical theoretical analysis. He was well acquainted with many classical works, from Aristotle and Lucretius to Porphyry and Proclus. He also knew the Hermetic corpus, and had some nodding acquaintance with Zoroastrianism. He thought that the Hermetic tradition was ancient and going back to a similar period to that of the Hebrew Bible. So he saw Zoroaster and Hermes as parallel forebears to the Hebrew ancestors of the Christian faith. Thus, Platonism and philosophy, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other, were two parallel streams which could commingle. As one who translated all of Plato’s dialogues and issued the first complete edition of them, his Platonism was brighter and more well-informed than many earlier interpretations, and he placed especial emphasis upon Plato’s treatment of love and friendship. The love of friends is itself a prelude to the love of God. His most celebrated writing was his Platonic Theology on the Immortality of Souls which was printed in 1482. For him the issue of immortality was the central. This was in part because in his hierarchical vision of the cosmos, ranging down from God through angels to minerals and qualityless matter, the human soul stood at the midpoint. It is the center of the universe. And this universe is dynamic, being bonded by love, and the soul’s love is in the end to find its true expansion in union with God. For this ultimate satisfaction humans were created. Now for many the chance to ascend through the contemplative life to union with the divine is limited. We need immortality to realize our destinies. Ficino, with his generous view of other religions, his positive attitude to the philosophical tradition, his esotericism, his love of love, his integration of astrology into his thinking, and so forth, displayed himself to be a Renaissance figure par excellence. His Theologia Platonica continued to have influence even after scientific knowledge cut at the roots of the hierarchical cosmos he envisaged. He was one of the originators of the tradition of “perennial philosophy”, which sees a convergence between philosophy and religion largely through the mystical traditions.

Pico della Mirandola and Universalism. Count Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) was the younger son .in a princely family from Mirandola and Concordia in Northern Italy in the Po valley. He was remarkably fruitful in his writings and learning, considering that he died rather young. He studied not just the Classics, but Hebrew and Arabic as well. When he was 23 he rather boldly assembled 900 thesis which he offered publicly to defend in Rome. Some were ecclesiastically condemned and he was in due course arrested in France, where he had fled, but the intervention of Italian princes secured his release. His last days were spent in Florence. His most important work was his Oration on the Dignity of Man, which he had prepared as the start of his defense of the 900 theses.

In this work he most eloquently affirmed human freedom. Because of human liberty humankind does not exist in a fixed place in the cosmic hierarchy, but occupies a world which differs from the other orders (the divine, angelic and elementary levels of being). Man is exclusively responsible for creating his own personality, his destiny, his existence by making free choice on the base of his will. His being purpose is divine perfection which he himself chooses and builds up. But more important than anything for Pico was his universalism or syncretism. He tried to bring together all the major traditions. He thought that Plato and Aristotle were essentially compatible. But more than that he wove Kabbalism, which he saw as being with Christian belief, into his scheme, and took great pains to interpret ancient mythology in allegorical and figurative senses. He was influenced in his interpretation of the scriptures by the esoteric number symbolism of the Hebrew Kabbalah. And so he perceived himself as a kind of universal philosopher and religious teacher, drawing on all traditions. Perhaps he never got his various ideas into a thorough system because of his early death, so that he is more syncretistic than a successful perennial philosopher or universalist. But universalism was what he strove for. He was thus an important figure in helping to create a Renaissance ideology, which would not be afraid to find truth and insight anywhere.

Because of his stress on freedom Pico attacked astrology, since it implied some kind of determinism; he showed himself very much aufait with a variety of astrological theories. He did believe in the interconnectedness of the cosmos; however, inside this unified structure human beings were free agents. And through the sacrifice of Christ they had access even to the highest level, to God himself. But here he went beyond philosophy, into mystical religion, beyond thought.

Like a number of other prominent thinkers of the period, Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576) was a medical man, being professor of medicine at Pavia. He had an interesting holistic philosophy, seeing the world as an organic system. Empty space comes to be filled with animated beings through the operation of the World Soul. All objects in the world have souls, and so have relationships of sympathy and antipathy. The mortal souls of various beings including human beings can be distinguished from the immortal soul with which God has endowed humanity. It is involved in the process of reincarnation.

Unlike Pico, Cardano believed in astrology and natural magic. The idea of the interconnectedness of things in his hylozoic organicism helped to produce a theory of why magic and indeed alchemy could work. So it was that Cardano illustrates another trend in the Renaissance; the acceptance of a range of ideas not destined to have much scientific future, and a fascination with some of the preoccupations with the occult, which came down from the ancient and the medieval world. But his restless search for an alternative to official Aristotelianism also illustrates a general uneasiness and critical attitude to the dominant scientific tradition which would soon burst forth in the new science.

Nicholas Cusanus (1401-1464) came from Kues on the Mosel River in Western Germany, and played a prominent role in negotiations aimed at healing the gap between the Eastern and Western Churches (which were temporarily at least successful). His writings covered the theory of knowledge, the nature of the Divine, cosmology, the relations between religious and other matters. His works had a wide circulation and a long vogue. They represented a revival of the Platonist tradition, but much more besides. Some of his ideas were startlingly original and surprisingly modern.

First of all, he held a theory of knowledge which underlined the finitude of the human intellect. We can approximate to the truth but not really get to it. Part of the reason lies in the fact that we are stuck with logic and the law of non-contradiction, and this inhibits us from recognizing that in God above all contradictories coexist. This is Cusa's famous idea of the coincidence of opposites. This was primarily applicable to God, who is simultaneously the absolute maximum and the minimum. Our logic resists this, but Cusanus used various similes to illustrate how the coincidence of opposites is realistic. As a circle expands so its circumference flattens: at the extreme the straight line and the circle will be identical. So, then, our knowledge is limited, and recognizing why is that learned ignorance which formed the title of one of his writings. Man can cognize things on the base of his sensations, reason and intellect, but ultimate understanding always cross the bounds of that man acknowledged and meet something unknown. In the depth of cognition there is a contradiction between ultimate and absolute knowledge, that is the truth which has divine character. This knowledge can be got only symbolically, mathematically in particular. Man is not a part of the whole. He himself is a new single whole, he is a personality. Nicholas of Cusa’s cosmology was highly original. He saw the universe of creatures as a kind of contraction of God who is mirrored in them. Indeed, every one thing mirrors everything else. Further he held that the universe, while not actually infinite, is without bounds and has therefore no circumference it follows from this that it has no center, or if you prefer, everywhere is the center. There are in the world no absolutes such as up and down, and Cusanus also denied the difference in substance, postulated by traditional Aristotelianism, between the heavenly bodies and the sublunary world.

The thought that the earth is not at the center and relatively is in motion might be thought of as a metaphor for his view of the religion. He prepared decay of Ptolemaic geocentric picture of the world. He was modern in the sense of taking the comparative study of religions seriously. He considered that beneath the contradictions exhibited by various doctrines there could be discerned a basic harmony. In many ways he was remarkably unorthodox, seeing that he was created a cardinal. In part he was a reviver of the Platonic tradition. This was something which in any event had a new vogue during the Renaissance. With his critical and revolutionary views, then, Cusanus stood between two worlds. He worked out grounds for further development of the philosophy of nature.