Work · Renaissance & Humanism
Platonic Theology
Eighteen books arguing for the immortality of the soul, which stands at the centre of the hierarchy of being and links the bodily and the divine.
Introduction
Ficino wrote the “Platonic Theology on the Immortality of Souls” between about 1469 and 1474; it was printed in Florence in 1482. Its eighteen books argue, against the Aristotelians of his time who followed Averroes or Alexander of Aphrodisias, that each human soul is immortal. Ficino places the soul at the centre of a fivefold order of being – God, angelic mind, soul, quality, body – as the bond that links the higher and the lower. Its restless striving for truth and goodness, which no earthly object satisfies, is for him a sign that it is destined for God. The work draws on Plato, Plotinus, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and presents Platonism as the philosophy closest to Christianity. In 1513 the Fifth Lateran Council made the soul’s immortality a doctrine; in 1516 Pomponazzi denied that natural reason can prove it.
Connections
Builds on
- Phaedoc. 380 BCE · Plato
Taken up in
- Oration on the Dignity of Man1486 · Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
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