Plato's Persona: Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions by Denis J.-J. Robichaud

Abstract

Reviewed by: Plato's Persona: Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions by Denis J.-J. Robichaud Sergius Kodera Denis J.-J. Robichaud. Plato's Persona: Marsilio Ficino, Renaissance Humanism, and Platonic Traditions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 344. Cloth, $79.95. Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) was not only the first translator and commentator of Plato's and Plotinus's Opera omnia (as well as of numerous other works of the Neoplatonic tradition of late Antiquity). He also developed a fascinating and highly complex synthesis of Platonism, Christian doctrine, Renaissance magic, and medicine. Well beyond the sixteenth century, [End Page 611] Ficino's texts were very influential. Over the past four decades, authors like Michael Allen, Brian Copenhaver, James Hankins, and Valery Rees (to name just a few of the most high-profile scholars from the Anglo-American world) have substantially increased our awareness of Ficino's intricate and substantial contributions to the Platonic tradition and Renaissance culture in general. With an enviable erudition and a superb command of printed and manuscript sources, as well as of the rhetorical tradition, Robichaud's book has enriched this already impressive tradition of Ficino scholarship. A mere glance into the index locorum of the book reveals the scope of Robichaud's research. Plato's Persona is an important and timely contribution to our understanding of Ficino's work; the book has enormous potential to engender new scholarship on Renaissance Platonism and its cultural environment in general. It is a must-read for any specialist in the field, because its author substantially enhances our sensitivity to Ficino's approach to Platonism in some crucial, but hitherto rather neglected, aspects: Ficino's sense of different literary registers, his word play, and his awareness of the ludic and the histrionic aspects of Plato's dialogues. Through a series of close readings that cut through an enormous amount of Ficino's texts, Robichaud shows how Ficino, by putting on different literary masks, imitates Plato and forged a humanistic rhetorical persona for himself with the intent to become "Plato's Latin spokesman in the Renaissance" (16). The first chapter is on the semantic field of the Greek word prosopon (which means both "mask" and "face") and argues that Ficino's large corpus of letters—veritable "epistolary games" with "dialogic traits»expose "an interior prediscursive self that participates in a divine principle of unification; on the reverse side, however, the very same letters also present Ficino's discursive exterior public persona with the mask of the Platonic philosopher" (67). Ficino thus aims at "the fabrication and presentation of vivid personae (prosopopoeia and enargeia)" (17). The second chapter provides a new perspective on Ficino's well-known understanding of Plato's dialogues as a coherent body of work. Robichaud explains that Iamblichus's De secta Pythagorica was a formative text for Ficino because it allowed him to categorize Plato's dialogues into texts "refuting sophists, exhorting youth and teaching adults»a threefold division that, according to Robichaud, is associated by Ficino to the Neoplatonic metaphysical order of "conversion procession and remaining" (103, 110). The following three chapters are dedicated to Ficino's "prosopopoetic" readings of passages in the Platonic corpus where Socrates, the Pythagoreans, and Plato speak "in particular voices" (19). Ficino believed that Plato wrote under the guise of three primary personae: his own, Socrates, and Pythagoras. "The dialogue's interlocutors are in other words mouths through which Plato can transcribe and communicate voices of philosophical traditions in order to record them in writing" (19). This is, by the way, a set of ideas that was already discussed long ago in Martha Nussbaum's 1986 book The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy. Her important contribution is curiously absent from the book under review. Robichaud arrives at his nuanced exposition of Ficino's complex relationship to Augustine and hence the Christian tradition through a series of intricate close readings, which produce a series of very interesting results. First, even though Ficino was a Christian, he advocated a hitherto unprecedented pagan virtue-ethics, with the goal of a deification that does not come about by the mediation of Christ (129, 171). Another and...