Philosophy, physiology, and medicine

After Marsilio Ficino published it in 1489, his Three Books on Life enjoyed great success. Almost thirty editions by 1647 made it the most influential account of magic of its day, perhaps of all Western history. De vita libri tres is therefore a monument of Renaissance culture. Like other works of that period, it revives ancient wisdom - the magical learning of ancient Greece and, so Ficino thought, older revelations from Persia and Egypt. But De vita applies this primordial knowledge to problems of Ficino’s day, showing his contemporaries how to use ordinary natural objects to better themselves in magical ways. Ficino’s philosophical magic aims to give people power. But how? To answer that question, we need to know more about the great Platonist and his book.

“Plotinus the philosopher, our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body.” This stunning proclamation of ascetic immaterialism opens the Life of Plotinus, the first Neoplatonic philosopher, written by Porphyry, his student and successor. Ficino, the last major voice of this tradition, learned to think about magic from the Neoplatonists, sharing the Platonic goal of rising beyond the merely physical and temporal to the bodiless and eternal. But Ficino also practiced medicine and theorized about it, using all his five senses to diagnose the ills of diseased and aging bodies. The ailments that Ficino treated were natural particulars, concrete material phenomena, and so were the cures that he used to heal them. Natural objects - people, animals, plants, and stones - were also the primary topic of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Like the ancient Neoplatonists, Ficino assimilated Aristotelian physics and metaphysics and adapted them to Platonic purposes.