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

Matter as a Mirror 49
as forebears of the truths of Christian doctrine. 3 Ficino’s translation of Plato
adhered closely to the original text and was therefore highly influential well
into the nineteenth century. 4 To write about the concept of matter and its
relationship to gendered ideas in the works of a Renaissance Platonist will
perhaps seem strange at first, especially since Ficino is known mainly as a
‘doctor of souls,’ and as the promulgator of the intricate metaphysics expressed
in the system of hypostases by Plotinus, Proclus and other Neoplatonists.
5 Being ‘the shadow of a shadow,’ ‘a corpse adorned,’ ‘evil itself ’ (to
quote Plotinus), matter is either not mentioned at all in such Neoplatonic
hierarchies or else it is unmistakably placed on the lowest level in the scale
of being. 6 And indeed, neither matter nor women are prominent topics in
Ficino’s writings. Nevertheless, Ficino’s cosmology, as well as his metaphysics,
refer implicitly (and hence perhaps even more decisively for this philosophy)
to a gendered substructure: the partition of creation into male
and female aspects. This becomes especially obvious in Ficino’s ideas about
matter, which he inherits and transforms from a complex amalgamation
of divergent traditions from Classical Antiquity. During the past decades,
scholars such as Evelyn Fox-Keller have sought to make this gendered and
highly metaphorical discourse explicit; a mode of thinking that pervades
even modern science to an amazing degree:
[…] gender and norms come to be seen as silent organizers
of the mental and discursive maps of the social and natural
worlds we simultaneously inhabit and construct even in those
worlds that women never enter. I call this the symbolic work
3 Copenhaver (1992) 155; Allen (1984) passim.
4 For a positive assessment of the quality of Ficino’s translations, see Hankins (1990)
1: 311–313.
5 Allen (1982) 19: “Indeed, the whole philosophy of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism,
is a consequence of his dividing reality into a hierarchical series of ontological states
where the higher subsumes the lower and the lower emanates from the higher and ultimately
prime hypostasis, the transcendent one.” For a clear exposition of the hierarchy of being by
Ficino himself, see Ficino (1975) chapt. 4: 88–102. The relevant passages from Plato are Laws
X, 892A; 896A–898B; Parmenides 137C–142D and 159B–160B. For a detailed exposition of
Plotinus’ system of hypostases, see for example, Armstrong (1940) passim.
6 See O’Brien (1996) 182–184, with references.