BOOK: Marsilio Ficino, "Commentary on Plotinus" (Vol. 4)

Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on Plotinus. Vol. 4: Ennead III, Books I–IV. Edited and translated by Stephen Gersh. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 80. Harvard University Press, 2017. 9780674974982. vi + 705 pp.

Plotinus was a leading Neoplatonic philosopher from the 3rd century AD. His work consists of 50-ish short treatises, which his disciple Porphyry arranged into 6 groups of nine treatises each, whence they became known as the Enneads. I had heard of Plotinus before (and not just because he was obviously a major influence on Ficino's various Neoplatonic commentaries that we've already seen in the ITRL series here), and was occasionally tempted to wonder if I should try to read his work, to get a full dose of undiluted Neoplatonism straight from the spring, so to speak, but could never quite bring myself to do it — I was afraid it would be too boring. But now that we started getting Ficino's commentary on the Enneads in the ITRL, I figured there's nothing else to do but to read each of Plotinus's treatises before reading the corresponding commentary by Ficino. So this and the subsequent posts in this series will be partly about Plotinus's Enneads and partly about Ficino's commentary.

Since the ITRL edition of Ficino's commentary doesn't include the text of the Enneads (although Ficino did produce a Latin translation of this work), I read them in the recent Slovenian translation by Sonja Weiss where available (two out of three volumes have so far appeared: 1, 2), and in Stephen MacKenna's English translation otherwise. Occasionally I noticed some minor discrepancies between the two, but this is probably mostly because MacKenna worked at the beginning of the 20th century when the editions of Plotinus's Greek text were not yet as good as they are now. They both struck me as surprisingly readable, more than I had dared to expect.

Porphyry's Life of Plotinus

Both editions also include Porphyry's Life of Plotinus, which proved to be a pleasantly uplifting read. Many philosophers were (and are) assholes in their everyday life, but Plotinus seems to have been quite a nice person; he made no enemies during his twenty-six years in Rome, and several people trusted him so well that they appointed him as guardian to their children (§9). We find him leading a quiet but active philosophical life, giving lectures and debates (§3), surrounded by colleagues and disciples, in frequent contact with other philosophers, and among his followers there were even some notable politicians and senators (§7). Emperor Gallienus himself took an interest in his work, and there was even talk of setting up a “city of philosophers” where Plotinus and others would live “under Plato's laws” (§12).

He wrote his treatises relatively late in life, and only after much persuasion by his students. Apparently his style of writing was rather hard to understand, and he couldn't bring himself to revise his work (§8). Porphyry has a funny anecdote where a colleague, having been sent some manuscripts with Plotinus's works, complained that the scribes had done a sloppy job because the manuscripts were full of faulty and unclear passages — but it turned out that this was the best possible manuscript, it's just that Plotinus's style of writing was simply that unclear (§19). Porphyry lists Plotinus's writings both in chronological order (§4–6) and in the thematic grouping into six Enneads (§24–6).

Porphyry records a few paranormal anecdotes as well. Apparently Plotinus achieved on four occasions a kind of mystical union with the divine, and Porphyry himself once (§23). A rival tried to harm Plotinus with magical spells, but found them backfiring upon himself (§10). An Egyptian priest summoned Plotinus's daimon (guardian-spirit) into visible shape, and it turned out to be a particularly powerful one (§10).

The Analytical Study

The volume starts with a 140-page “Analytical Study” by the translator, with another 90 pages of notes. Most of this was too technical for me to really get much out of it, but I don't doubt that it will be of a lot of interest to its target audience. I mostly just marvelled at the various odd things that Ficino was up to in his arguments. For example, there's a section about his use of metaphors from music, such as harmonics, ratios, proportions, consonance, etc., complete with lots of numeric examples (pp. xiii, xvii — but see p. cxxv for an example where Ficino really puts these proportions to work). There's also an interesting section about the relationship between neoplatonism and christianity; there were obviously some incompatibilities, but also plenty of overlap, and Ficino seems to have tried his best to interpret the works of the ancient neoplatonists in ways compatible with christianity, finding analogies to the trinity everywhere, etc.

There's also a longish section about Ficino's interest in something called the “reason-principle” or “ratio”, of which both he and Plotinus imagined many different kinds and levels; the translator even includes a helpful illustration of them (p. lxxvi). I can't say that I really understood anything much even after looking at it, but I was definitely impressed by how he managed to assemble this general picture from pulling together little bits of information scattered here and there throughout Ficino's commentary.

But I couldn't help thinking how unfortunate it is that neither Ficino nor the ancient platonists seem to have taken any interest in describing their philosophical system(s) from scratch, in the form of some sort of introduction that wouldn't assume the reader to have any previous familiarity with it. Your typical modern translation of the Enneads begins with a translator's introduction to Plotinus's system, his three hypostases and the like, because Plotinus himself certainly doesn't bother introducing these things, he just sort of assumes that you are vaguely familiar with them the way his original audience (i.e. his friends and disciples) had been.

There's also a section about various other ancient authors, both christian and neoplatonic, that influenced Ficino's commentary on Plotinus. He did, however, reject some of their ideas that were too obviously incompatible with christianity, such as the transmigration of souls (p. lxiii). Ficino seems to have been much more keen than Plotinus to systematize everything into lots of levels and sublevels, and in doing so he seems to have been influenced by a slightly later neoplatonist, Proclus.

We can also see how in the hands of these later neoplatonists, what might have started as a philosophical school was slowly turning into what looks more and more like a full-blown religion, complete with chants and magical rituals (“theurgy”) “to ameliorate the complex but troublesome relation betwen soul and body by increasing the former's independence either in the present life or in that beyond” (p. lxii). [Cf. Porphyry's report, already mentioned above (Life of Plotinus, ¶23), that the Plotinus achieved on four occasions a sort of transcendent state, a “union with god”, and Porphyry himself once.] Ficino himself went so far as to incorporate “prayer combined with singing” in his “medical-astrological praxis [. . .] for attuning the human spiritus for the reception of influences from the cosmic and planetary spiritus” (n. 259 on p. clxxviii; but see also n. 263: there were limits as to how far Ficino could go in endorsing such practices).

But what really takes the cake here is Ficino's bizarre obsession with what is here called “daemonology”. I was vaguely aware that in ancient Greek paganism they believed that every person had his own daimon, a kind of guardian spirit; the fact that we now mostly think of demons as evil is presumably due to later christian efforts to put a negative spin on pagan beliefs (see e.g. p. cxi here). (Porphyry actually describes a ritual at which an Egyptian priest conjured up Plotinus's personal daimon into a visible shape, and it turned out to be a particularly strong sort of daimon; Life of Plotinus, ¶10. See also p. cxix in the present volume.)

Anyway, some of the late neoplatonists, and Ficino after them, seem to have been downright obsessed with studying daimons in a way that would better suit a more than usually pedantic 19th-century entomologist. Porphyry said that “different daemons are assigned to souls according to the planet in the ascendant within their horoscope [. . .] earthly daemons need to be conciliated by the vapors emitted from the cooking of animal flesh [. . .] pride exists to such a high degree in those daemons that the chief of them wishes to be worshipped as though he were the highest God himself” etc. etc. (p. lviii). I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I am. How is it possible that his colleagues and disciples didn't shake him by the shoulders and shout at him ‘you blabbering old fool, you're obviously pulling all this nonsense straight out of your ass, why on earth should anybody listen to it?’

Nowadays they could at least turn their penchant for this sort of thing into honest work by becoming writers of science fiction or fantasy... There's lots of good stuff here: “Ficino argues [. . .] that there are many daemons on every level, that there are daemons of Saturn below Saturn, and daemons of Jupiter below Jupiter [. . .] The highest aerial daemon leads, having been led in its turn by the highest aetherial daemon, which has itself similarly been led by the highest celestial daemon” (p. lxvii); “saturnine daemons rule saturnine souls and perform saturnine functions, jovian daemons rule jovian souls and perform jovian functions” etc. (p. cxxix; from 3.1.11, p. 39). “Ficino explains how daemons act upon us by means of their rays, and how magicians who have learned to collect these rays can not only see them but show them to others.” (P. lxii.) “[T]he ‘spiritual bodies’ of the daemons must be tempered by having in descending order an abundance of air, subtle water, a rarefied type of fire, and a most subtle earth.” (P. cxiv; see also pp. cxxi–ii for more on the daimonic bodies and their composition: celestial or fiery daemons, aetherial or airy daemons, watery daimons, earthly daemons.) Daimons at different levels of the hierarchy manifested in different colours (p. cxix; see also 3.4.4, p. 289)! “[T]he daemons in class 1 [. . .] are placated with chanting and lighting, whereas those in classes 2 and 3 have effusions that must be restored by perfumes and vapors, and those in class 4 effusions that must be restored by the denser vapors of cooking animal flesh” (pp. cxxii—iii). Some daemons “have a round shape” (p. cxxiii) — well, maybe they have gone beyond just inhaling vapors of animal flesh then :]

They seem to have thought of daimons as a necessary linking mechanism; whenever two levels from one of their many hierarchies had to be connected or have anything to do with each other, they would imagine that some sort of daimons were involved to implement this connection. Ficino “indicates that the ‘daemonic’ and the ‘mediating’ are virtually synonymous” (p. cxi).

Ficino, “having identified the so-called golden race of mankind with those having intelligence to reason in the ratio of 4:3, reason to the irascible power in that of 3:2, and the irascible power to concupiscence in that of 2:1”, argues that they should have “air exceeding fire by the ratio of 4:3, fire exceeding water by that of 3:2, and air exceeding water and earth by that of 2:1” (p. cxxv), etc. (See also e.g. 3.3.18 for some of this nonsense in action.) How was he not embarrassed to write this stuff with a straight face? Well, nevermind, I'll just go back to reading this as if it were fantasy fiction, which makes it quite delightful.

III.1 — On Fate

In this treatise, Plotinus writes about the causes of things, not only immediate ones but also more distant ones (§1). First he summarizes the opinions of various philosophical schools about this subject (§2); then he explains why he thinks they're all wrong (§3–7), and finally he presents his own theory (§8–10).

Of the various rival theories he discusses, the one I liked best was the Epicurean one, where things are caused by atoms randomly colliding into each other (§4). I think this is probably the closest to the truth, except that the movements aren't quite random but are governed by the rules of physics. Plotinus rejects this theory because while atoms can collide with other atoms, surely they can't collide with something non-material such as the soul, so this theory can't explain why a person's soul would do something. Well, from my point of view the soul is just a convenient abstraction that doesn't really exist, but Plotinus seems to simply take its existence for granted.

He also discusses the astrological explanation (§5–6): things are caused by the influence of the stars. I liked his counterarguments here: different people born at the same time don't all turn out the same, so you can't explain it all by the influence of the stars at the time of their birth; and this theory also wouldn't explain why people turn out similar to their parents, etc.

Plotinus's own theory is that the individual's soul can act more or less freely by itself, but since it is trapped in the material body is is also constrained by outside restrictions, and things happen the way they do because of the combination of these two factors. My impression was that he didn't really explain much thereby, as in the next step you could ask why the individual soul behaves the way it does, and you wouldn't be much better off than if you had just gone to the random collisions of atoms from the start...

Ficino's commentary starts by pretty much restating everything Plotinus said, only at slightly greater length; I didn't get the impression that this really made me understand anything any better. He does add a few things about daimons, which apparently are the mechanism whereby stars and planets influence people (¶11). Later he has a “summary of Marsilio's opinion”, which is very misleadingly titled; it isn't a summary at all, and is in fact longer than the whole preceding part of the commentary. It seems to be taken from an earlier work of his (n. 35 on p. 341) and mostly argues against the astrological explanation, along similar lines as Plotinus himself had done.

Bonus daemonological content from ¶17: Porphyry “says that human bodies are full of malign daemons, and especially the bodies of those who live on luxurious banquets. When we eat, they come and attach themselves to the body.” Somebody should tell the fat acceptance movement about this, it'll provide them with an excellent new excuse :)))

III.2 — On Providence, part 1

My impression of this treatise is that Plotinus is basically trying to deal with the question of why the world is so full of bad or imperfect things. He starts by observing that the true cosmos is where the intellectual-principle (his 2nd hypostasis, I guess) exists, but we live in a lower kind of cosmos, which lies halfway between the true cosmos above it and mere matter below it (§1–2); it was formed by a “reason-principle” (logos) emanating from the intellectual-principle and the universal soul (3rd hypostasis) and interacting with matter (§16). Thus our world consists of many parts, which can be at discord with each other; and the reason-principle doesn't necessarily penetrate everywhere to the same extent (§2, 4); but overall our world still tends towards the Good (§3), even bad things in it might lead to something good in the bigger scheme of things (§5).

Now if you ask how people should cope with living in such an imperfect world, you might be disappointed — Plotinus's answers struck me as being little more than warmed-over Stoicism. We aren't good enough to deserve being happy anyway (§4, 8); nothing really bad can happen to a good person (§6, using the usual tinkering with definitions). Humankind is halfway between gods and beasts, so you can't expect them to be perfect (§9, 14). Partly he blames bad things on free will, which existed in the souls even before they got incorporated, so you can't blame divine providence on what they do when they exercise it (§7).

Section 8 consists of plenty of particularly horrible victim-blaming: considering a group of people that got victimized by a gang of robbers, Plotinus blames them for not taking every conceivable precaution and training harder in the gymnasium so they could defend themselves! “Bad men rule by feebleness of the ruled: and this is just; the triumph of weaklings would not be just.” Wow. This sounds like something I would expect from, say, Nietzsche or Hobbes, but I imagined Platonists to be somehow warmer and fuzzier than that :(

He also seems to believe in some sort of reincarnation, and says that what people suffer now they must have themselves perpetrated in an earlier life (§13).

Much of this treatise could be summarized as ‘just get over it’, and he likes to use metaphors from art to illustrate this. You wouldn't like a drama where all characters are good, or a painting where colours are beautiful everywhere; so likewise the reason-principle that orders the world “cannot desire all to be good” (§11). Conflict and strife are merely another kind of change (§15), and besides, doesn't harmony in music come from the clash of different elements (§16)? Life is just a stage-play (the reason-principle being its playwright), death is merely a change of costume (§15). And you wouldn't say that a play is bad just because it has some negative characters or because some bad things happened in it (§17).

He ends with a section full of questions (§18) that suggest he still isn't quite happy with these answers, and which I guess opens the way for the next treatise, which is a sequel to the current one. (E.g. if the individual souls are just actors in a play, can you really blame them for any evildoing they are guilty of? Earlier he insisted that yes, you should; §10.)

This treatise was an interesting read, and I liked his metaphors from art, even if I didn't have the impression that any of his answers were all that useful. If all you can do is tell people to get over it (while dressing this up in nicer-sounding language), you haven't really accomplished much.

As for Ficino's commentary, for the most part I found it quite incomprehensible, or at least after reading it I didn't get the impression that I understood Plotinus any better than before. There were a few interesting things in it anyway. In what seems to be a regular thing in these commentaries, Ficino likes to make things a bit more rigidly systematic than Plotinus does, and split everything more finely into levels, classes, etc.; in this he often follows the example of the later Neoplatonists. For example, where Plotinus just vaguely talks about two worlds, the true cosmos above and our imperfect one below (§1–2), Ficino upgrades this to four levels, of which ours is of course the lowest (¶13). He talks about several levels of souls more explicitly (¶57), and inevitably returns to the subject of daimons (¶14, 58*). He mentions, citing Proclus and Dionysius the Areopagite, that evil is only “quasi-existent” (¶23), which I guess is true given the right definitions, though it still doesn't strike me as particularly useful for someone trying to cope with an imperfect world.

[*Both daimons and souls are grouped into species associated with different planets: solar, venereal, etc. (¶58). I couldn't help thinking that venereal daimons must be what gives people venereal diseases :))]

III.3 — On Providence, part 2

This is a continuation of the previous treatise, and goes along much the same lies, with Plotinus providing yet more of the same excuses for why the world sucks. The Universal Soul and the Reason-Principle have different and unequal parts, and so the things they bring into being are also unequal and may be in conflict with each other (§1, 5).* The Universe is a thing of variety, so there have to be higher and lower things in it (§7). Man is a mixture of his reason-principle and of matter, coalesced into one being (§6), so if he is evil, this comes from matter, which has been insufficiently permeated by the reason-principle; this happens because of what he has done in his past lives (§4). Besides, an individual's soul and reason-principle are naturally inferior to the Universal Soul and universal Reason-Principle, so you can hardly expect people to be perfect (§3).

[*Ficino has a pithy remark about this: “to ask why the world itself consists of so many different levels of things is to ask why the world itself is the world”; it is like asking “why a plant has life and not sense, and why it has roots and branches” etc. (¶11).]

He describes Providence with the metaphor of a general in battle: he makes the plans, and then the subordinates carry them out more or less well (§2). An individual's actions are not done by Providence, but by that individual; they may or may not be in accordance with Providence (§5).

Although the universe consists of many different things, Plotinus also emphasizes that they are linked together as proceeding from the same universal Reason-Principle, as if they were “members of one living being” (§6); he has a nice metaphor of the universe as a tree, the Reason-Principle being the (single) root out of which everything grows and branches out.

An interesting remark from Ficino's commentary: Fortune is “not thoughtless or blind, but a divine or daemonic power that gathers together into a single outcome causes that have been dispersed” (¶9). If you could look at the universe as a whole, you'd find “that everything has the greatest consonance with the whole” (¶9).

There's a fairly bizarre paragraph where Ficino finds geometrical sequences everywhere (¶18): “if you proceed according to length, you will see that the first created thing surpasses the second in power according to a duple (2:1) proportion [. . .] so does the second surpass the third in a similar manner through the duple” etc. And “things accompanying the first created thing or standing around it are exceeed by it accoridng to a sesquialter (3:2) or rather sesquitertius (4:3) ratio” and similarly for later created things. I don't know what to marvel at more, his dedication to this numerological nonsense, or his cavalier attitude to mathematics — ‘3:2 or rather 4:3’, as if these were one and the same thing...

III.4 — Our Tutelary Spirit

In this treatise Plotinus goes into a bit more detail about his views on reincarnation and on the daimon or tutelary spirit of an individual soul. There are different forms of soul: vegetative, sensitive, reasoning; and when a man dies, he will be reincarnated as a plant, animal or human depending on which form has predominated in his life (§2). He gives several concrete examples as to what sort of person might become a tree, an eagle, a bee etc.

Each soul has a guardian spirit or daimon; there are many levels of these, and what kind your soul gets in your current life depends on its behaviour in the previous life. After the current life ends, it will get a new daimon again for the next one (§3). Thus you can move up and down the levels from one life to another. This reminded me very much of the way we usually hear about reincarnation in buddhism, except without daimons.

In a way, you could say that the soul, before being reborn, ‘chooses’ its new daimon (§3), but this should be understood alegorically: the soul makes this choice based on its “tendency and temperament”, which reflect its past life (§5).

The daimon is always one level above the soul, which can thus aspire towards its level but can't quite reach it (§3, 6). Thus for example a “sage”, who lives mostly by following his intellect rather than one of the lower faculties such as reason or imagination, his daimon, being one step above him, is almost a sort of deity (§6); cf. the story of Plotinus's own daimon in Porphyry's Life. Plotinus ends this treatise with a nice metaphor of the soul as a voyager, the body as a vessel, while the motion of the universe provides the breeze.

This is, on the one hand, nice and poetic and all; on the other hand, it's obviously all just fiction, a quasi-religious fairy-tale that he is pulling out of his ass and not even pretending to provide any sort of evidence that any of this is true. I suppose I shouldn't be annoyed by this fact, as I already knew that Neoplatonism is more like a religion anyway; but it's still annoying. Besides, I find Plotinus's idea of reincarnation just as repulsive as the buddhist one; both of them strike me as nothing more than an effort to provide excuses for why people often undeservedly suffer bad things. The reincarnationists' excuse is that they must have deserved this after all by having done something bad in a past life; therefore this world is basically OK and there's no real need to help the unfortunates.

Ficino in his commentary objects to some aspects of Plotinus's theory of reincarnation, especially the part where a human soul can get reincarnated as an animal or plant (¶9–10). This was apparently already controversial amongst the ancient Neoplatonists themselves (¶13). I got the impression that people like Ficino would prefer a more metaphorical interpretation: you won't literally be reincarnated into a beast, but into a more bestial sort of man, etc. I guess that from a christian point of view, the whole idea of reincarnation must have seemed rather dubious anyway.

He also adds a detail that I don't remember seeing in Plotinus's text: between incarnations in our material world, the soul will spend some time in an “aerial body” in a sort of purgatory-like state, “tortured among the lowest daemons who will prick the soul with soft cushions similar goads” (¶12). He seems to be getting this from Plato's Timaeus, which I guess I should read at some point. But in another sense this is just another example of the religious nature of Neoplatonism. They are only half a step away from lakes of fire and brimstone...

Ficino also, as usually, goes into a bit more detail on the subject of daimons. We learn that daimons of different levels have different colours (¶4), and for each planet there are (several levels of) daimons associated with that planet: jovian, saturnine, solar, etc. (¶4). These correspond to different types of human character: a person dedicated to lust must be led by a venereal daimon; one dedicated to trade by a mercurial daimon; a warrior by a martial daimon, a religious man by a jovial daimon (¶17). Daimons are also a way to explain talents: if you're talented for something, that means your daimon is particularly powerful in that area (¶6).