Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I

Name: Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I
Author: Marsilio Ficino

Proem and Books I–IV · Latin with an independent English translation

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Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume IBook I · Chapter 6 · §§ 10–12

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Book I · Chapter 6 · §§ 10–12

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Latin

p. 88

Quippe si ad veritatem percipiendam instituta mens est, aliud est mens indiga veritatis, aliud veritas. Neque ipsi veritati opus est mente per quam capiat veritatem. Atqui si ipsa mens idem esset atque ipsa veritas, mens quaelibet veridica esset et omne verum particeps foret mentis. Nunc autem et mentes humanae falluntur et multae res verae sunt quodammodo quae mente carent.

Veritas non modo aliud est quam mens, sed et superius aliquid. Eget quippe mens veritate. Veritas mente non indiget. Ac latius se fundit veritatis quam mentis imperium. Ars enim intellectualis in formis singulis invenitur, in materia vero informi nequaquam. Vere tamen materia dicitur et omnium naturalium revera subiectum.

At vero si veritas est supra mentem et quod superius est non caret bonis inferioribus, non deest mentis perspicacia veritati. Neque tamen duo quaedam sunt in ipsa, perspicacia videlicet atque veritas, sed simplicissima veritas se ipsam minime latens, perinde ac si lumen, quamvis non habeat oculum a se distinctum, tamen non lateat semetipsum. Est enim Deus perspicacissima veritas et verissima perspicacia sive perspectio, lux se ipsa videns, visus se ipso lucens, intellectualis perspicaciae luminisque fons, cuius lumine et cuius lumen dumtaxat mentis perspicacia perspicit. Et sicut lignum per participationem quandam calidum dicitur, ignis vero secundum formam calens, sol denique excellentiori modo secundum eminentem virtutem causamque caloris, sic anima mentis partem, angelus mentis formam habet. Deus est efficacissima mentis origo. Atque, ut more Plotini loquar, Deus ipsa intellectio est, non in aliquo intellectu tamquam potentia, non veritatis velut obiecti, sed in se ipsa suique ipsius exsistens.

Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I: Book I

p. 89

For if mind was instituted to perceive truth, a mind in need of truth is one thing and truth another. Truth itself has no need of a mind through which it may apprehend truth. Moreover, if mind itself were the same as truth itself, every mind would be infallible and everything true would participate in mind. Yet human minds are deceived, and many things that lack mind are nevertheless true in a certain sense.

Truth is not only something other than mind, but something higher as well. Mind needs truth; truth has no need of mind. And the dominion of truth extends more widely than that of mind. Intellectual art is found in each individual form, but never in formless matter. Yet matter is truly called matter, and it is truly the substrate of all natural things.

But if truth is above mind, and what is higher does not lack the goods of what is lower, the insight of mind cannot be absent from truth. Yet insight and truth are not two distinct things within truth. Rather, truth is utterly simple and in no way hidden from itself, just as light, although it had no eye distinct from itself, might nevertheless not be hidden from itself. For God is the most penetrating truth and the truest insight or vision: light seeing itself, sight shining by itself, the fountain of intellectual insight and of light, by whose light the insight of mind sees, and whose light alone it sees. And just as wood is called hot by a certain participation, fire is hot according to form, and the sun is hot in a still more excellent way through its eminent power and its causation of heat, so soul possesses a part of mind and the angel the form of mind. God is the most efficacious origin of mind. And, to speak in Plotinus's manner, God is intellection itself—not a potency in some intellect, nor the intellection of truth as though truth were its object, but intellection existing in itself and taking itself as its object.

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.

Discussion Questions

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.