Platonic Theology, Volume I
Two hundred reviewed questions organized around the volume’s central movements and arguments.
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Questions for discussion
The Proem: Philosophy, Piety, and Self-Knowledge20 questions+
What does the sight-and-light analogy imply about the mind's freedom to know?→ Why does Ficino call returning all gifts to God both just and pious?→ How might moral purification make the divine light easier to perceive?→ Why should a search for causes culminate in veneration rather than explanation alone?→ How does Ficino turn moral, logical, mathematical, and natural inquiry toward God?→ Why does Plato's own practice of piety matter alongside his teaching?→ What does the mirror image reveal about the soul's relation to the divine?→ Why must self-knowledge precede knowledge of God in Ficino's reading?→ How might worship of God and the divinity of souls illuminate each other?→ Why does Ficino make these two truths foundations of knowledge, life, and happiness?→ What tension arises when Plato is named the philosopher nearest to Christian truth?→ What may be gained or lost by fashioning Plato in the likeness of Christian truth?→ How does the created mind mediate our view of the Creator and his works?→ Why does Ficino join the immortality of souls to the title Platonic Theology?→ What can rational argument accomplish for minds unmoved by religious authority?→ Why does Ficino pair true understanding with a rightly ordered will?→ How do sensory shadows become more compelling than the realities behind them?→ How can reverence for divine truth discipline a philosopher's claims?→ What tension joins imitation of Plato with reliance on divine aid?→ How does Lorenzo's patronage link philosophical leisure with public responsibility?→
Book I: Body, Action, and the Indivisible Soul20 questions+
How does human misery become evidence for immortality rather than against providence?→ What might it mean to loosen earthly fetters while one is still alive?→ Why does Ficino arrange earlier philosophies as stages in an ascent?→ How can a form undergo change yet remain undivided within the body?→ What does the divine-Sun image imply about truth and the knowing mind?→ How can the soul be both a middle rank and the bond of the whole of nature?→ What assumption allows Ficino to infer passivity from bodily extension?→ Why should dispersed power weaken while concentrated power grows stronger?→ How does the ideal of perfect action lead Ficino toward the incorporeal?→ What does fire show about agency, and where might the analogy reach its limit?→ How does the opposition between God and matter organize Ficino's causal order?→ Why do diverse effects point to forms rather than their shared matter?→ What does perceiving size through color and light reveal about quantity?→ What does appetite reveal about the force of goodness compared with magnitude?→ How can whiteness remain the same in kind when a white body is divided?→ How can recognizing a lesser form disclose the existence of a truer one?→ Why can indeterminate matter not explain the arrival of determinate forms?→ What does the recurrence of natural order require from a higher cause?→ What does the mind's ascent from particulars to universals reveal about the mind?→ What could unite a body's parts if neither the parts nor the whole can do so?→
Book I: The Ascent from Soul to God20 questions+
How does causing restless qualities require motion within their source?→ Why must Ficino place an intermediary between total motion and total rest?→ What is gained by assigning stability to essence and motion to operation?→ How does the soul's changing thought coexist with an unchanging essence?→ Why does motion imply dependence on an end the moving thing does not yet possess?→ What forms of stability must exist for motion itself to remain intelligible?→ How does a mind always in act explain the soul's passage into understanding?→ Why would possessing mind from itself make every soul wholly intellectual?→ How does abstraction support the claim that mind is naturally free from body?→ What distinction allows an angel to move another thing without being moved?→ How does ordered heavenly motion serve as evidence for many immobile minds?→ Why might angels be counted by acts of understanding rather than by motions?→ What principle leads Ficino from intellectual possibility to many actual angels?→ Why does a mobile multiplicity require an immobile multiplicity before unity?→ What kind of multiplicity can belong to an intellect without bodily parts?→ Why must unity stand above number in Ficino's ascent?→ How does the eye-and-light analogy distinguish mind from truth?→ What does human fallibility add to Ficino's distinction between mind and truth?→ Why does universal desire for the Good make it prior to mind?→ How can supreme necessity and supreme freedom coincide in the Good?→
Book II: Unity, Truth, Goodness, and the One20 questions+
What makes unity, truth, and goodness one rather than three?→ How does yearning for unity, truth, and goodness point toward a first source?→ What contradiction arises if unity depends upon a higher principle?→ How does placing something above truth make that higher thing false?→ Why can nothing surpass goodness without owing its superiority to goodness?→ How would evil's supremacy depend upon goodness and thereby undo itself?→ How does ranking two gods reduce them to one first principle?→ Why would total difference between two gods disrupt the world's harmony?→ How does partial agreement make rival gods composite rather than first?→ Why would a nature shared by two gods point beyond them to a higher source?→ How does admixture prevent any quality from being supreme?→ What does the army-and-commander analogy assume about the source of order?→ Why does stable, recurring order count against chance?→ Why would two equal creators be idle, redundant, or duplicative?→ What follows if two divine wills can defeat one another?→ Why must a wholly evil god lose being, life, knowledge, and action?→ How does a graded ascent of perfection imply a highest source?→ What stable pivot does Ficino think ordered change requires?→ Why would an infinite regress of causes erase genuine knowledge?→ How do procession and return unite the roles of unity, truth, and goodness?→
Book II: Divine Power, Eternity, and Presence20 questions+
Why does Ficino regard pure act, unlike passive potency, as unbounded?→ What normally limits being, and why do those limits not apply to God?→ What does the mind's power to conceive ever greater degrees imply about God?→ Why does creating or preserving without prior matter require immeasurable power?→ How does enduring cosmic order serve as evidence of indefatigable power?→ In what sense can God be both an end and inexhaustibly infinite?→ How does truth before beginnings and after endings argue for eternity?→ Why can the first source neither come to be nor pass away?→ How does imagination turn the stability of eternity into temporal flux?→ What changes when God is understood as 'always' itself, not a lasting being?→ How does Ficino replace bodily contact with presence through power?→ Why must a universal cause be present wherever any effect has being?→ How do infinite purity and power remove barriers to divine presence?→ In what sense can God be everywhere without occupying a bounded place?→ Why does goodness reach farther through the world than life does?→ How can God be 'nowhere' and yet absent from nothing?→ What does visible light reveal - and conceal - about divine ubiquity?→ How does imagination misrepresent God's presence as spatial extension?→ What does it mean for the world to extend through God, rather than the reverse?→ Why is existing always more inward than existing everywhere?→
Book II: Creation, Intellect, and Infinity20 questions+
How do multiplicity and composition point back to unity and simplicity?→ Why does goodness both produce things and draw them home?→ What does it mean for every action to move from good, through good, to good?→ Why can changing bodies not secure their own continued existence?→ Why must a being that exists necessarily through itself be simple?→ How does dependence upon an external end imply dependence in essence?→ Why would an eternal world still require preservation at every moment?→ What does the shadow analogy reveal about an effect's dependence on its cause?→ In what sense does God produce an angel's act more fully than the angel does?→ How does colored glass distinguish divine action from secondary causes?→ Why is being the deepest trace of the first cause within every effect?→ Why does acting through being eliminate deliberative labor?→ Why would requiring a prior choice for every choice keep action from beginning?→ How does acting through pure being differ from acting through a power?→ Why does separation from matter make both intelligibility and intellect possible?→ Why must God's primary object of knowledge be God himself?→ How does divine self-knowledge yield distinct knowledge of every individual?→ How does knowing all things as one avoid distraction by particulars?→ Why can no finite set exhaust the ways creatures imitate an infinite exemplar?→ How can God know an infinite multitude through a single intuition?→
Book II: Will, Freedom, Love, and Providence20 questions+
How can forms be distinct in their effects yet perfectly one in God?→ Why would bare nature yield only one undifferentiated divine effect?→ How can many divine ideas arise without compromising God's simplicity?→ Why must will approve the end that intellect foresees?→ How do seeing and willing respectively fold forms inward and unfold them?→ How does free will explain a varied creation better than natural necessity?→ How can divine necessity itself be the ground of divine freedom?→ What does it mean for God to be 'necessarily free and willingly necessary'?→ How does the identity of being, understanding, and willing ground freedom?→ Why is God's willing of himself more necessary than his willing of creatures?→ Why need not willing boundless goodness create every possible image of it?→ How can providence will contingency without abolishing order?→ How does divine self-love become love for God's images and works?→ Why does being sole cause of matter and form intensify divine love?→ How does acting for God's own sake become care for each creature's good?→ What does one mechanism moving many figures reveal about divine governance?→ Why does reliable natural order suggest intuition rather than deliberation?→ How can a local defect contribute to the perfection of the whole?→ How does divine foreknowledge confirm rather than cancel free action?→ What distinguishes divine attraction and persuasion from compulsion?→
Book III: Descent, Mediation, and the Middle Soul20 questions+
What does the sequence from ‘many’ to ‘one’ reveal about Ficino’s hierarchy?→ Why must the angel preserve stability yet lose simple unity?→ How can soul remain stable in substance while changing in operation?→ What work does ‘shadow’ do in Ficino’s account of descent from God?→ Why does one degree between God and angel become an infinite distance?→ How do kinds of motion distinguish body, quality, soul, angel, and God?→ What breaks down if every mover is moved only by something else?→ How does the Apelles example separate an occasion of motion from its source?→ In what sense does soul paint itself after the likeness of higher things?→ Where does the sun-Mercury-moon analogy illuminate or strain the argument?→ Why must the middle essence both ‘always be’ and ‘always become’?→ How does soul unite eternity and time without collapsing their difference?→ Why can neither angel nor quality serve as the bond of the world?→ What does soul gain by being wholly present in every bodily part?→ How does the circle’s center clarify soul’s presence without spatial extension?→ In what respects is soul divisible, and in what respects indivisible?→ What follows from calling soul the world’s chain, countenance, knot, and bond?→ Why does Ficino treat circular motion as the most perfect kind of motion?→ How does self-return become both motion and self-knowledge?→ What does discursive reasoning add to - and limit in - rational soul?→
Book IV: Rational Souls, Cosmos, and Fate20 questions+
What makes earth’s generation and nourishment evidence of an indwelling soul?→ Why must celestial influence work through a proximate elemental life?→ What changes when nature is imagined as a carpenter working inside the wood?→ How do ‘spiritual seeds’ explain generation where bodily seeds are absent?→ Why can neither God nor angel be the immediate soul of a sphere?→ How does Ficino infer distinct souls from distinct bodies and motions?→ What does the hierarchy of twelve rulers contribute to cosmic order?→ What conception of character emerges from Ficino’s twelve human lives?→ Why cannot a bodily quality account for the heavens’ varied circular motion?→ How does desire for the Good become a cause of heavenly motion?→ Why must heaven’s immediate mover be a self-moving, indivisible soul?→ What makes a sphere and its soul one living being rather than two partners?→ How does the magnet analogy recast apparently natural elemental motion?→ What binds contrary cosmic members into one living world?→ Why does ordered celestial motion signify rational soul rather than blind necessity?→ How does Ficino balance Platonic argument with theological reservation?→ How do fate and desire cooperate in moving a heavenly sphere?→ Why does multiplicity enter through time before it enters through place?→ How does Euclid’s journey illuminate the relation of plan, desire, and action?→ Why is circular motion ‘almost no motion at all,’ and what does that reveal?→
Volume I: Synthesis and Critical Dialogue20 questions+
How does Ficino transform philosophy into a practice of returning gifts to God?→ How does self-knowledge turn nature’s middle into a path toward God?→ How does soul as mirror join knowledge of God to knowledge of oneself?→ What religious task does Ficino assign philosophy for his intended audience?→ What tension or harmony does Ficino create between inquiry and Christian authority?→ How does human misery become an argument for life beyond bodily death?→ What is gained by presenting reality as an ascent through five levels?→ How does the claim that body cannot act reshape ordinary causal explanation?→ Why must rational soul combine stability and change?→ How does the light metaphor make mind both a receiver and a seeker of truth?→ How does ascent beyond mind prepare the union of the One, True, and Good?→ How does rejecting an infinite regress support Ficino’s argument for one God?→ What does it mean for God to be always and everywhere without extension?→ How does continual preservation alter the meaning of creation?→ How can divine causality be deepest without displacing secondary causes?→ What follows from God knowing singular things through their causes?→ How can divine will be both necessary and free?→ How does providence preserve rather than erase the soul’s judgment?→ How does Book III’s middle soul prepare for Book IV’s living cosmos?→ Where does Ficino’s cosmos leave room for contingency, novelty, or responsibility?→