Marsilio Ficino as Reader of Plotinus: The 'Enneads' Commentary

by Stephen Gersh

Overview

This book represents the first ever systematic philosophical study of Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plotinus’ ‘Enneads’ (first published in Florence, 1492), this work of Ficino being arguably as definitive for the Florentine thinker’s later work as the Platonic Theology was for his earlier. Publication of the present study uniquely illuminates the extent to which Plotinus had always been the crucial influence over Ficino’s revolutionary projects of introducing Platonic thought based on original Greek sources to western Europe, correcting certain features of late medieval and Renaissance Aristotelianism, and laying the foundations of a new Christian Platonism. The study can be read both as an independent introduction to Ficino’s later philosophy and as the complement to the first modern edition and translation of the Commentary on the 'Enneads' itself also by Stephen Gersh (I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2017-).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789004701113
Publisher:	Brill Academic Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	08/29/2024
Series:	History of Metaphysics: Ancient, Medieval, Modern , #5
Pages:	576
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Stephen Gersh, Litt. D (2019), Cambridge University, former Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge and Emeritus Professor of Medieval Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, has published many books on ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy including From Iamblichus to Eriugena (Brill, 1978).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Citations of the Plotinus Commentary
Preface

General Introduction: The Commentary on Plotinus’ Enneads
 1 Religious Philosophy or Philosophical Religion
 2 Plotinus’ Disclosure of Plato’s Mysteries
 3 The Correction of Peripateticism
 4 The Exegetical Approach to the Enneads
 5 The Place of the Plotinus Commentary in Ficino’s Work
 6 The Place of the Commentary in the Earlier “Plotinian” Tradition

Excursus 0: The Problem of Ficino’s exhortatio

Part 1: Analogy and Trinity

1 Plotinus and Christianity
 1.1 The Christian Context
 1.2 The Three Primary Substances: Terminology
 1.3 The Heretical Errors

2 Ficino’s Logic of Analogy
 2.1 The Platonic Genera and Their Mysteries
 2.2 The Analogy between Platonic Genera and Peripatetic Categories
 2.3 Ficino and Analogy
 2.4 Ratio and Analogy

Excursus 2: Substance and Quality
 x2.1 Substance
 x2.2 Quality

3 The Trinitarian Analogue
 3.1 Ficino, Plotinus, and Aquinas on the Trinity
 3.2 The “Plotinian” Trinity

Part 2: From Ontology to Agathology

4 The Structure of Soul
 4.1 Importance of the Commentary on Ennead I
 4.2 Soul and Animate Being
 4.3 From Microcosm to Macrocosm

5 The Unembodied Soul
 5.1 The Higher Soul in the Commentary on Ennead I
 5.2 Summary of Ficino’s Doctrine of Soul
 5.3 The Higher Soul in the Commentary on Ennead IV

6 The Embodied Soul
 6.1 The Embodied Soul in the Commentary on Ennead IV

7 Transmigration and Embodiment
 7.1 Ficino against Transmigration
 7.2 Ficino and Origen

8 Sensation
 8.1 General Theory of Sensation
 8.2 Ficino’s Innovations
 8.3 Vision

9 Intellect and Ideas
 9.1 Intellect and Intellectual Soul
 9.2 Analogies of Light
 9.3 The Divine “Splendour” and “Figure”
 9.4 Intellect’s Relation to the Ideas
 9.5 The Relation of Ideas to One Another
 9.6 The Range of Ideas
 9.7 The Distinction between Intellect and the Intelligible
 9.8 Agent and Possible Intellect
 9.9 The Distinction between Discursive and Non-discursive Thinking
 9.10 Ideas, Formulae, and Seminal Reason-Principles
 9.11 The Temporalization of the Ideas
 9.12 Intellect’s Relation to Number

10 Soul’s Choice between Good and Evil
 10.1 The Good
 10.2 The Multiplicity of Goods
 10.3 The (Sub-) Contrariety of Good and Evil
 10.4 The Soul’s Choice: Ficino between Plotinus and Augustine

11 The Threefold Reversion
 11.1 Return and Triplicity
 11.2 The Triadic Preamble to Ennead I. 3
 11.3 The Commentary Proper

12 Ascent to Beauty
 12.1 Irradiation of Beauty: lumen and color
 12.2 The Divine Nature of Beauty: lumen
 12.3 Reception of Beauty: splendor

13 Ascent to the One and the Good
 13.1 Presence
 13.2 Futurity
 13.3 Ascent by Will

Excursus II: Daemons and Soul
 xII.1 Internal and External Daemons
 xII.2 Plotinus’ Daemon

PART 3: Matter, Reason, Spirit

14 Matter
 14.1 Negative and Affirmative Approaches
 14.2 The Structure of the Commentary on Ennead II. 4
 14.3 Quantity
 14.4 Dimensionality
 14.5 Privation
 14.6 Infinity

Excursus 14: Potency and Act
 x14.1 The Structure of the Commentary on Ennead II. 5
 x14.2 Potency and Act
 x14.3 The Metaphysical Continuum of Potency and Act
 x14.4 The Intelligible World
 x14.5 Potency and Act in Relation to Soul
 x14.6 The Sensible World
 x14.7 The Relation of Primal Matter to Being-in-Potency and Being-in-Act

15 Ratio
 15.1 The Primal Ratio in Christianity
 15.2 The Primal Ratio in Plotinus

Excursus 15: Non-formal Ratio
 x15.1 Ratio as Principle of Form
 x15.2 Ratio between the Real and the Nominal
 x15.3 Ratio above and below Form

16 Spirit
 16.1 Heaven, Fire, and Spirit
 16.2 Heaven as Macrocosm
 16.3 Fire as Macrocosm
 16.4 Spirit as Macrocosm and Microcosm
 16.5 Conspiration
Conclusion
Bibliography