Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I

14Many other things of the same kind took place there at once and followed one another, all from the motion of that single ball alone. In the same way, through his own being—which is in reality identical with understanding and willing, and is the perfectly simple center of all things, from which, as we have said elsewhere, all the rest are drawn like lines—God sets in motion with the slightest nod whatever depends upon him. Let the Epicurean Lucretius therefore be silent. He would have the world arise and be carried along by chance, and imagines that the stable condition of a most beautiful order proceeds from an unstable and shapeless absence of order—as though wisdom could be born from folly, or light from darkness.

15Tell me, Lucretius: whenever you move at random, without deliberation or a proposed end, do you always advance along one straight path to the same definite destination? By no means; you wander this way and that. Or when you handle stones without skill and without an end prescribed, do you then construct a building whose walls are most orderly and interwoven, most beautiful to behold and most convenient to use? By no means.

16You would make only a shapeless and useless heap. Consider plants and animals. Their individual members are so arranged that each is placed for the sake of another and each serves another. Remove one, and nearly the whole structure is dissolved. Every member is disposed for the sake of the composite whole, while the composite itself—a plant or an animal—is furnished with suitable instruments for the works required by its own nature. Food, places, and seasons are provided for all; earth and water prepare their nourishment, and heaven tempers water and earth. At last, all the parts of the world converge upon a single beauty of the whole world, so complete that nothing can be taken away and nothing added.