Diotimos Library · Renaissance Collection · Bilingual Edition
Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I
Proem and Books I–IV · Latin with an independent English translation
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English Page · Branch 157 of 174
Book IV · Chapter 1 · §§ 66–70
Latin
p. 316Quid tandem est istud per se mobile, quod proxime caelum volvit? Nihil est aliud praeter animam. Haec enim est quae et per se ipsam est mobilis et talis motionis vestigium praestat corporibus. Nam et si dicatur semotus motor aliquis movere caelum, non prius tamen caelo dabit motionis actum quam vim motricem caelo coniunctam infuderit. Vis huiusmodi una cum caelo extensa esse non debet. Alioquin a se ipsa discederet, ideoque caelo facultatem ad se ipsum redeundi perpetuo praestare non posset.
Igitur erit indivisibilis, non tamen adstricta dimensionibus sicut punctum, quia non posset se ipsam et dimensiones ab eodem in idem libere volvere. Est autem in toto caelo ubique tota, ut moveat efficacissime totum. Est itaque vis illa coniuncta indivisibilis, libera ubique, qualis est rationalis anima. Illius praesentia vivit caelum, cuius motus vivificus est, cum vivificet omnia.
Denique cum in animalibus instrumenta illa vivant per quae animae viventia generant, quis dubitabit vivere caelum, siquidem vitae alicuius instrumentum est ad viventia generanda?
Nonne motus, ut ita loquar, spontaneus, ubicumque est, vitae interioris est signum? Talis autem maxime est ubi naturalis est circuitus.
Quid enim magis sponte movetur quam quod in se ipsum naturaliter recurrit et circa naturalem cardinem atque intra naturalem superficiem se volutat? Nulli ergo corpori vita magis intrinseca est quam mundi sphaeris.
Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I: Book IV
p. 317What, then, is this self-moving thing that most immediately turns heaven? It is nothing other than soul. Soul is both moved by itself and imparts to bodies the trace of such motion. Even if some remote mover is said to move heaven, it will not give heaven the act of motion until it has infused into heaven a motive power joined to it. A power of this kind must not share heaven's spatial extension. Otherwise it would depart from itself and could not continually grant heaven the power to return into itself.
This power will therefore be indivisible, yet not confined by dimensions like a point, for then it could not freely turn itself and the dimensions from the same to the same. It is wholly present everywhere in the whole heaven, so that it may move the whole with the greatest efficacy. The conjoined power is thus indivisible and free everywhere—such as a rational soul is. By its presence heaven lives; heaven's motion is life-giving, since it gives life to all things.
Finally, since in living creatures those instruments through which souls generate living things are themselves alive, who will doubt that heaven lives, seeing that it is the instrument of a certain life for generating living things?
Is not spontaneous motion, so to speak, wherever it occurs, a sign of inward life? Such motion is present above all wherever there is a natural circuit.
For what moves more spontaneously than that which naturally returns into itself, revolving about its natural axis and within its natural surface? In no bodies, therefore, is life more inwardly present than in the spheres of the world.
Socrates
Reading Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I · Book IV · IV.1.66–IV.1.70
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Socrates will begin with this book and its sources.About This Reading Edition
Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology places the immortality of the soul at the center of an extended philosophical ascent through body, soul, angel, and God. This exact page-aligned Renaissance edition presents the authorial Proem and Books I–IV in a newly established Latin reading text with an independent English translation prepared by Diotimos Editions.
Historical Text and Translation
The Latin reading text is based on the Florence editio princeps printed by Antonio Miscomini on 7 November 1482 and principally collated against the Paris 1559 printing, with a 1641 Opera printing used only as a late control and OCR aid. Abbreviations are expanded, spelling and punctuation are conservatively normalized, and substantive departures among the witnesses are documented in the edition’s apparatus.
About Diotimos Editions
Diotimos Editions prepared this independently worded English translation in house. It aims for a dignified but readable modern register while preserving Ficino’s argumentative sequence, metaphors, technical distinctions, repetitions, conditions, purpose clauses, and direct appeals; long periods are divided only where clarity requires it.
Rights
Ficino’s Latin source work is in the public domain. The 2026 English translation and Diotimos editorial matter are original to this edition and remain © 2026 Diotimos.