Weaving and world fabric · Lexicon

From the book

Marsilio Ficino’s Platonic Theology, Volume I

Marsilio Ficino · Diotimos Editions · 2026

Orientation

At a Glance

The wordMachina designates an organized construction or fabric here; tela is a woven web, and retexere is to weave again or renew the weaving.
In the Platonic TheologyThe recurring world-order “weaves anew” a similar fabric in a similar way.
In this edition“Fabric” keeps machina’s sense of an arranged whole without introducing machinery absent from the passage.
A place to readHarmony in the cosmic fabric and the renewed web of recurrent order

Meaning

Machina designates an organized construction or fabric here; tela is a woven web, and retexere is to weave again or renew the weaving. Neither noun by itself implies a modern mechanical machine or an electronic web.

Use in the book

The recurring world-order “weaves anew” a similar fabric in a similar way. Repetition, not just the existence of an intricate product, is the feature used against chance. Later, the enormous manifold cosmic fabric’s uniform motion over the ages serves as evidence of its governor’s inexhaustible power.

The image is then qualified in the debate between reason and imagination. Imagination takes the bodily fabric to be the whole nature of things and therefore treats divine presence as a spatial filling problem. Reason calls that fabric a slight shadow, limited in magnitude though indefinitely divisible. A word that first evokes impressive order thus later warns against confusing the visible organized whole with the full scope of reality.

Places to read

II.2.2, II.2.9Harmony in the cosmic fabric and the renewed web of recurrent order
II.4.7The vast manifold fabric supports the inference to an unwearied governor
II.6.13The bodily fabric is contrasted with the fuller nature of things

Translation in this edition

“Fabric” keeps machina’s sense of an arranged whole without introducing machinery absent from the passage. “Always” in the weaving sentence is Ficino’s description of cosmic regularity, not a modern observational finding.

machina / tela / retexere

machina / tela / retexere. Printed forms: machina; machinae; machinam; retexit; telam.

Organized fabric; a woven web; to weave again. Repeated cosmic order is likened to renewed weaving, while bodily fabric is later distinguished from all reality. References: II.2.2, II.2.9, II.4.7, II.6.13. See Weaving and world fabric.