Chapter 2 Matter as a Mirror: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance ...

Matter as a Mirror 73
into female. The fear about soul’s boundaries thus harks back to the violence
implicit in the Narcissistic act of creation that left no room for otherness or
for the world. Ironically, it is precisely this negation that is decisive for the
fate of Narcissus. According to Ficino’s readings he drowns in the pond of
matter because he fails to acknowledge the reflection in the water as his own
image. In the end, this is a male strategy of self-fashioning, which not only
entails a fantasy of absolute power intrinsic to that process, but at the same
time betrays a deep anxiety that female matter actually will not be fully
dominated. 85 Obviously the erotic, potentially uncontrollable involvement
of soul with matter deeply worried Ficino, yet, paradoxically, he developed
a cosmology that put particular emphasis on the domination of matter by
soul by transferring the model of the Narcissistic and creative gaze to the
story of divine Creation.
Ficino’s Narcissistic Account of Divine Creation:
Matter, Shadow, Reflection
The idea of a Narcissistic gaze that orders or even creates the world is rooted in
one of the most fascinating (in the literal sense of the word) accounts of cosmogenesis
to be found in Ficino. A crucial passage in this context is Theologia
platonica, XVII, chapter 2, which promises to explain the ideas of the two last
Platonic academies about soul. 86 Ficino sets out by stating that, according to
85 These remarks are indebted to Stanley Cavell’s essay on the relationship between
Othello and Desdemona in Shakespeare in Cavell (1987) 125–142. One may well wonder
why I do not mention the fate of Echo. After all, Narcissus is punished because he refuses
the Nymph’s love, which emphasizes his reckless attitude towards the other humans, the
embodied world. I was deliberately reluctant to include Echo here, for several reasons (a)
the gendered relationship between Narcissus and Echo again is very complex; I believe
that Ovid mainly wanted to emphasize the parallelism between the voice that is thrown
back by Echo on the one hand and the image that is reflected in the pond on the other (a
similar parallelism between voice and image is to be found in Aristotle, De anima 419ab;
and (b) because my focus here is on the Narcissus story in the broader context of the Corpus
hermeticum and in Plotinus, and (c) because Echo is not mentioned in Ficino’s account
of the Narcissus story.
86 Theologia XVII, 2: III, 149–151: “Plato in Parmenide [137D] quidem Deum vocat
infinitum, in Philebo [16D–23C] vero nominat terminum. Infinitum scilicet, quia nullum
aliunde accipit terminum, terminum autem, quia formis quasi mensuris passim
distributis omnia terminat. Hinc Platonici disputant, quatenus Deus tanquam infinitus
omnem a se excludit terminum, eatenus ferme ex eo quasi umbram pendere po-