BOOK: Marsilio Ficino, "On Dionysius the Areopagite"

Marsilio Ficino: On Dionysius the Areopagite. Vol. 1: Mystical Theology and The Divine Names, part 1. Edited and translated by Michael J. B. Allen. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 66. Harvard University Press, 2015. 9780674058354. lxxi + 516 pp.

Marsilio Ficino: On Dionysius the Areopagite. Vol. 2: The Divine Names, part 2. Edited and translated by Michael J. B. Allen. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 67. Harvard University Press, 2015. 9780674743793. xxxvii + 483 pp.

Here we have two more volumes of Ficino's Neoplatonic commentaries, this time about two works by Dionysius the Areopagite: the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names. It seems that Dionysius was a Greek theologian from the late antiquity who was heavily influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy, e.g. the work of Plotinus and the like. However, until the 19th century or so, it was widely thought that he actually lived in the 1st century, not in the late antiquity, and that he was a disciple of St. Paul. This probably made some people give his work an even greater weight than they otherwise would. (It also shows occasionally in Ficino's commentary, e.g. where he talks about how the late Neoplatonists were influenced by Dionysius, even though in reality it was the other way around.)

I found the structure of these books interesting. Ficino sliced the two works by Dionisius into fairly short sections, rarely more than two pages long, and often just one or two paragraphs. Then he translated each section and prefixed it with his own commentary, which is on average a little longer than Dionysius's text itself, but not by much. Sometimes he basically restates the same things that Dionysius said, just in a slightly more sober style (Dionysius himself seems to have been something of a mystic, struggling and straining at the boundaries of what human language can express about god and the like, and it shows in his style). Sometimes, however, he goes into much more detail and spends one or two pages of commentary on something that Dionysius hinted at briefly in one short paragraph. I had the impression that Ficino often tries to be more systematic, listing and explaining and even numbering things explicitly where Dionysius vaguely alluded at them in passing.

Thus, as you read the book, you sort of read each thing twice, first from Ficino's perspective and then from that of Dionysius. I thought this was fairly interesting and it was nice to see what Ficino made of Dionysius' enthusiastic but often hard-to-understand writing. Occasionally I did feel that his commentary helped me understand things a little better, or at least notice things that I wouldn't have noticed were present in Dionysius's text at all, although for the most part I of course still can't claim that I really understood anything much.

Still, I knew to expect something like this after my previous encounters with Ficino's Neoplatonic commentaries (see my previous posts about the Phaedros and the Parmenides), so I wasn't in any way disapponted. From my point of view, what we have here is another two volumes of Neoplatonist fairy-tales, readable enough in small increments (as long as I didn't worry too much about whether anything made any sense), though at the same time, having read these two volumes, I will be quite glad if the next few volumes of the I Tatti Renaissance Library don't contain any more Neoplatonism.

I read a Slovene translation of Dionysius a few weeks ago (see my post about it) and I don't really feel that reading Ficino's commentary has improved my understanding all that much. In particular, since his commentary more than doubles the total length of the text, the whole thing starts getting a bit long and unwieldy, and it was easy for me to start losing sight of the big picture. I wished that Ficino had introduced some sort of structure to the work, beyond just splitting e.g. the Divine Names into 351 short sections (and the Mystical Theology into 29). I also felt that in Ficino's version of Dionysius, the latter's style comes across as less excited and less bold in the use of language, the coining of words and the like, though I don't mean this as a complaint against Ficino; it might be due to the way he translated Dionysius into Latin, or it might be due to way that Michael Allen, the ITRL translator, then translated Ficino's translation from Latin into English, or it might be due to the fact that I was reading this in a foreign language, in which things always feel vaguer and blander than in one's own; or it might be due to the somewhat literal approach taken by the Slovene translator of Dionysius. Anyway, the fact is that as far as Dionysius' own style is concerned, I enjoyed it better in that Slovene translation than here as mediated through Ficino.

Mystic Theology

This is a fairly short work by Dionysius and is mostly on the subject of negative or apophatic theology. I remember seeing a little of this in Ficino's commentary on the Parmenides, and it was interesting to see more along these lines here. Basically, the idea is that god is so inscrutable and poorly accessible to our understanding that it's easier and safer to say what he isn't like than what he is like. (Of course, this also has its downsides, as pointed out in a classic Jesus and Mo strip: it's hard to use this approach to tell people what to do :))

I liked this sentence from Dionysius (12.1), which could almost be a summary of these two volumes: “We ought to affirm of God all that can be posited of things, God being the cause of all; and in turn with even better reason we ought to deny of God all these same attributes, God being more excellent than all things.” (Ficino says something similar in the Divine Names, 258.1–2).

Ficino points out (26.6–7) what they mean by negative statements about god: “When we deny the soul is a corporeal essence, we do not deny at the same time that it is a better essence, namely an incorporeal essence. Similarly, we deny that God is in the order of essence [. . .] yet we grant that God is absolute essence in a transcendent and simpler way. Again, in denying that God is life which is an act of essence, we do not prevent him from being life in the sense of being the cause of such an act.” Etc. etc.

In 6.1, Ficino has a nice classification of the cognitive faculties into four kinds: sensation, imagination, reason and intellect. (He then goes on to argue why god is inaccessible to all four.)

As we already saw in Ficino's commentaries on Plato, it was very important to the Neoplatonists that the One (the principle of unity) is higher than or prior to being. In 8.4–5, Ficino has some more arguments for why this is the case. They cannot be equal, he says, for then you would need yet another principle to unify them; and being cannot be higher than the One, as then unity, by participating in being, would lose its simplicity and wouldn't even be unity.

Divine Names

Frankly, I had the impression that it's mostly the second half or so of this work that is really about divine names; previously, he talks about various things, e.g. there's a fairly long discussion of the nature of evil, and I mostly wasn't really trying to keep track of whether the earlier parts of the work have some meaningful larger structure or not. As for the discussion of divine names, I found it fairly interesting. Perhaps calling them names is a bit confusing; it seemed to me that they were really more like properties. Dionysius talks about what it means when they say (e.g. in the bible) that god is good, life, great or small, like or unlike, old and young, etc. etc. (there's a nice summary by Ficino in 287.1). Ficino points out (11.1) that since we can't understand god directly, it's a good idea to study him through these names or appellations; these names do not “signify the nature itself of God” but at least “they make known the many and various goods that flow [. . .] from the divine goodness” (15.1). The only alternative to describing god through these names would be to not say anything, since he is so far above everything else (23.1).

The problem I had here is that it all seems to amount to little more than pointless playing with words. It's all along the lines of ‘yeah, well, we can say that god is life because all life comes from him, but then also that he is not life because obviously he isn't alive in the sense that regular living beings are alive, and he is super-duper-above life, etc.’ and you can replace life by being, goodness, etc. etc. and the argument always stays pretty much the same.

I often had a strong urge to yell at these people and tell them that if you are constantly getting into situations where you claim ‘A is B’ and ‘A is not B’ at the same time, then you are either wrong about at least one of these claims, or you are expressing yourself too vaguely. Basically a big part of Divine Names consist of Dionysius trying to explain such vague statements as ‘god is [not] life’ and arguing that, when you interpret them suitably, they make some sort of sense and they aren't contradictory at all. Maybe so, but it would have still been much better if they hadn't been making those vague statements to begin with.

Ah, but then I am missing the point again — this is religion, after all. Vagueness is no doubt a feature here, not a bug. It allows them to say pithy and impressive-sounding things about god on the one hand, and then on the other hand if anyone points out the self-contradictory nonsense in their statements, they can have someone like Dionysius produce excuses and explanations.

In his commentary to the Mystical Theology (11.3), Ficino actually explicitly acknowledges that yes, normally “affirming and denying something with regard to the same object cannot be simultaneously true [. . .] But the divine unity is so effective that within itself it can reconcile even contraries among themselves as one.” Interestingly, he points out a similarity between god as the highest thing and matter as the lowest thing: “So you will say that God is or has this or that thing or form, since He makes it; and then again that He does not have it because He is superior to it. But you will affirm that matter has or is this same thing because it receives it (passively); in turn you will deny that matter has this same thing because matter is inferior to it.”(11.4) Later (Divine Names, 89.5) he explains that god and matter are both without form, though of course for different reasons (“God is higher than every form and creates every form; but matter is lower than every form and is subject to all forms”). He says more about this in 132.1.

(I must admit that this talk of matter not having form strikes me as very odd, since I am used to think of matter as having all sorts of structure, atoms in intricate arrangements and the like; but I guess that to Plato and his ilk, both the words ‘matter’ and ‘form’ meant something rather different than to most of us today.)

Incidentally, these arguments along the lines of ‘god is X because he has created X’ strike me as very silly. By the same logic, you could argue that a carpenter is a chair, because he makes chairs...

Ficino has a nice paragraph (202.3) about how the different names of god refer to the various more or less broadly distributed “gifts that have come from divine providence”: ‘good’ for those that come to everything, entities and non-entities; ‘being’ for those that come only to entities; ‘life’ for those that come to living beings; etc.

There's an interesting analogy to try to explain how the trinity works (Ficino in 41.3, Dionysius in 42.1): imagine several lamps in the same hall; their light is united so that we can't see the light of each lamp separately; and yet it remains distinct, so that e.g. if we remove one lamp, its light goes away as well without affecting the others. But elsewhere Ficino admits (317.3): “But even the angels cannot know, by way of the understanding and the will, how three persons or subsistences may dwell in God, and yet on that account God be no less one, no less than the One. It is entirely beyond them.”

An interesting factoid from Ficino's commentary (93.5): he says that the Sun is 166 times larger than the Earth. I wonder how they estimated it. They weren't too far off — the wikipedia says that it's actually 109 times larger.

A funny example of the mania to classify everything that seems to have been so popular with the Neoplatonists, especially the later ones: “The Platonists postulate five lights: first the super-intelligible, second the intelligible, third the cogitable, fourth the imaginable, and fifth the visible.” (From Ficino's commentary, 97.1. And see 152.2 for another example of classification gone mad.) The last of these, of course, is the one we know from our normal everyday world. I guess we should be thankful that they resisted the temptation to add the semi-superintelligible, the subintelligible, the utterly inscrutable, the anti-intelligible, the edible, etc. etc. :))

If I remember correctly, there is an old philosophical debate about whether god does things because they are good, or are things good because god does them. Ficino ‘settles’ this by a simple assertion (122.4): “God does not, like us, will the things that He wills because the things in themselves are good, but to the contrary, because He wills, the things themselves are good.”

Ficino equates goodness with god and thus places it above being (134.7): “because all things are turned through their appetite back toward the Good, it serves as an argument for us that all entities have proceeded from this Good, and thus that it is superior to universal being”.

A funny-sounding consequence of placing god above being is that, in a certain sense, god does not exist :] Thus Dionysius says: “He neither was, nor will be; nor was He made, nor does He become, nor will He become. Rather, He does not even exist, but He is the being itself in all entities” (109.1).

Apparently, people used to believe that the ostrich keeps its eggs warm not by sitting on them like other birds, but by staring at them! :)) See Ficino's 57.1 and the translator's note 108 (p. 476): “according to the medieval Physiologus, ‘The ostrich lays eggs but does not brood them in the usual way: it sits facing them and stares at them intensely. They grow warm in the heat of its gaze, and the young are hatched.’ ”

On the subject of evil, Dionysius and Ficino mostly explain it as not something in itself, but simply as a shortage of good: “whatever is usually said to be bad is not entirely bad, but lacking good” (Dionysius in 155.2); “Every natural instinct and motion in any animate being that is proper to its own species is unquestionably good as it is providentially infused from the Good in order to preserve the species; and it is directed to the good of each. But the bad in animate beings is said to be some defect” (Ficino in 162.1).

From the translator's introduction (vol. 1, p. xxxii): “Given the difficulty of the enterprise, I must have erred and strayed like a lost goat, and I would welcome pastoral suggestions for corection or amendment.” :))