The Theory of Immortality in Marsilio Ficino

Abstract

In the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, the leader of Renaissance Platonism (1433-1499), the doctrine of immortality occupies an especially important place. A possible way of dealing with it would be to consider one by one the numerous arguments which Ficino uses to prove the thesis of immortality, examining their content and their logical force and also trying to determine to what extent he modified and enlarged in each case the conceptions and arguments of earlier philosophers. In doing so, we certainly should make some contribution to the history of the problem, but the most significant aspects of Ficino's approach to the question would hardly thereby become apparent. Our intention is rather to interpret this part of Ficino's philosophy in a different way. The doctrine of immortality as such was, of course, an element in a long tradition, and Plato, Plotinus and St. Augustine had already made it the subject of separate treatises, to mention only those philosophers whom Ficino certainly knew and utilized. The new and distinctive feature in Ficino is that he devoted to the problem of immortality his most important and most extensive work, with the sub-title De immortalitate animorum; in other words, that he gave to his main work, explicitly dedicated to the task of expressing his whole philosophical doctrine, at least the external form of a Summa on the immortality of souls, and in it subordinated all other problems and doctrines to that of immortality. The question thus arises why the topic of the immortality of the soul, which occurs so frequently in the history of philosophy as one among many metaphysical problems, became for Ficino the central and organizing one, and why it plays in his system a more dominating role than in the thought of any other thinker before or after him. This question, at least in this form, has never been raised by his interpreters; but the answer given to it seems to be decisive for any real understanding of his philosophy. It is our intention to attempt an answer to this question. For this purpose, we must inquire first of all how the concept of immortality as such is connected with the basic premises of Ficino 's philosophy. Many of his separate arguments used for the demonstration of the thesis we shall omit as be-