Marsilio Ficino—Savonarola—Machiavelli

Marsilio Ficino was the greatest of the fifteenth century Platonists. His love for Plato was at least equal to his erudition. His influence both as an individual and as head of the Platonic Academy of Florence, extended over the whole of Europe. In an early period of his life he was a humanist and a philosopher of more or less pagan tendency. In maturity of thought and years, he was deeply conscious of the Christian values that many of the learned were too ready to overlook. His ideal was the conciliation of Platonism and Christianity, pagan classicism and Christian thought, the ethics of antiquity and Catholic morals. He was fascinated by St. Augustine, but it seemed to him that the Augustinian synthesis could not appeal to the world of his time. The problems of nature, of ethics, of history were set in other terms. What he sought was to christianize Plato and to platonize the Gospel. This two-fold tendency is to be found in the Theologia platonica, in which he saw a new Summa Theologica, under the aegis of Plato instead of that of Aristotle.

Three elements in the work of Marsilio Ficino render it representative of the period—the sovereignty or autonomy of philosophy as the instrument of reason, as against the criterion that made of it the handmaid of theology; secondly, a concrete realism in respect of the object of knowledge, in nature and history, as against the universalizing abstractionism of the Schools; thirdly, a natural animism, the result of the principle of Third Essences, and which formed the substructure of the astrology of the time, as against the Aristotelian conception of Forms.