Oldal 201 [201]
OCR
INITIATION INTO MYSTERIES IN PIco’s WORKS Olympic gods, but merely in a philosophical way. Later, the Greek Patriarch Scholarios banned Plethon’s book (for political reasons), but this did not stop the local ruler Cosimo de’ Medici from giving it to the young Ficino in about 1462. Cosimo was impressed by Plethon’s knowledge of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy and also by his concept of ancient wisdom which persists through different civilizations. In Plethon’s opinion, religion and philosophy began together with the Persian Zoroaster and were spread throughout Greece by Orpheus and Pythagoras. Ficino borrowed many ideas from Plethon’s work and made his plan for translations according to Plethon’s list of the greatest philosophers.’ In 1462, when he started his monumental undertaking to translate all Plato’s dialogues, he prepared several other translations, including translations of Orpheus’s and Homer’s hymns and Hesiod’s Theogonia, and he also made comments on the Chaldean Oracles. In the same year (1462), Cosimo also gave him the 14 lectures and dialogues from the Corpus Hermeticum to translate urgently before completing his translation of Plato’s works. According to Ficino, Platonic philosophy was a tool which could be used to give back to Christianity the depth and significance that it had lost because of a lack of philosophical background in the Church’s everyday life. His most important work, besides his Platonic and Hermetic translations and commentaries, is surely Platonic Theology, in which he merges the knowledge acquired not only from these ancient authors, but also from Plotinus, Proclus, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’. The latter is one of the key figures, given his attempt to reconcile Platonism with Christianity. Ficino did not doubt that the Areopagite was St. Paul’s Athenian convert, and he considered him a perfect example of the concordance of Platonism and Christianity. Among the Church Fathers, his ideal was Augustine for the same reason. The subtitle of Platonic Theology is On the Immortality of the Souls, and it refers to Augustine’s work On the Immortality of the Soul. This subtitle also goes back to Plotinus’s 7" treatise from the 4° Ennead: On the Immortality 8 Gentile, Introduzione alle Lettere I. di Ficino, XXV. See also Brigitte Tambrun, Ficin, Gémiste Pléthon et la doctrine de Zoroastre, in Marsilio Ficino — Fonti, testi, fortuna. Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Firenze, 1-3 ottobre 1999. A cura di Sebastiano Gentile e Stéphane Tuissant, Roma, Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2006, 121-143. For a thousand years it was not doubted that the works attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite (Corpus Dionysiacum or Corpus Areopagiticum) were written by Paul the Apostle’s convert (Acts 17:34). The author pseudonymously portrays himself as such. Although Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard and Nicholas of Cusa expressed some suspicions about the authorship’s authenticity, the first textual criticism was made by Lorenzo Valla in 1457 in his Commentaries on the New Testament. William Grocyn pursued his work, and from 1504 onward Erasmus accepted and publicized their view that the author of the Corpus Dionysiacum could not have been St. Paul’s Athenian convert. Ficino did not accept Valla’s opinion, or at least he did not write about this issue, so he quotes this author as Dionysius the Areopagite. + 199 + Daréczi-Sepsi-Vassänyi_Initiation_155x240.indb 199 6 2020.06.15. 11:04:20
