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

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Disreputable Bodies
receives nothing,” a “repellent base.” Plotinus thinks that if matter does not
remain by itself, it would swallow the forms. 151 Porphyry’s Sententiae, translated
by Ficino in 1488, repeats the same concept. 152 In commenting on the
passage in the Enneads, Ficino says that Plotinus wants to alert us to the difference
between divine and earthly things because the latter are just specular
images of the former in the way the Apostle Paul had said nunc videmus per
speculum in enigmate (1 Cor. 13:12). Ficino must have deliberately wanted
to blur the specific implications of Plotinus’ idea, namely that earthly matter
is like a repellent base, a mirror that reflects but does not take up any forms
whatsoever. Ficino applies this idea to another level of the hierarchy of being,
that is, to the paradoxical relationship between God and creation in general
that is characteristic of Negative Theology. 153
151 Enneads III, 6, 15; on this, see also Ferwerda (1965) 19; O’Brien passim; Enneades
III, 6,14; trans. Plotinus (1966–88) III: 271: “But if matter was really participant and received
being in the way one thinks it does, what came to it would be swallowed and sink
into it. But as things are, it is apparent that it is not swallowed but matter remains the same
and receives nothing, but checks the approach as a repellent base and as a receptacle which
for the things which come to the same point and there mingle; it is like the polished objects
which people set against the sun when they want to get fire (and they fill some of them
with water), so that the ray, being hindered by the resistance within, may not pass through,
but be concentrated on the outside.” On Plotinus claiming that matter is incapable to unite
with forms, see also Corrigan (1996) 1.
152 Porphyrios (1987) chapt. 20: 69: “Sed dum ab ente deficit (sc. materia) quamobrem
quae in ea sunt imagines insunt in deteriori rursus imagine, quemadmodum in speculo id
quod alibi situm est apparet alibi et ipsum speculum plenum esse videtur nihilque habet
dum omnia videtur habere.” Also cited, for example, in Pereira (1585) V, 11: 307.
153 Commenting Enneads III, 6, 15 Ficino says in Plotinus (1559) 161vE–162rA:
“Post haec, memento materiam quidem esse inanem essentiae primae umbram, formas
vero materiales esse varias imagines idearum, quae in prima continentur essentia,
nullam habentes cum illis similitudinem in natura, quamvis in effectu repraesentandi
similitudinem aliquam videantur habere. Atque ideo materiam instar speculi, dum
vel solas imagines accipit, vel forte nec istas quidem accipit sed videtur accipere, revera
nihil pati, praesertim quoniam materia in aliud cum ipsa sit ultimum, resolvi non
potest, ideoque nec pati. […] Item materia ex praesentia formae nullam sibi propriam
qualitatem contrahit, vel virtutem, & idcirco non patitur. […] Materia utique quum sit
malum, id est maxime distans ab ipso bono, non sic appetit bonum, ut naturale aliquid
inde sibi vindicet, sed ut quandam imaginariam vestem inde induat, atque fallat: &
quo magis in sua informitate permanet, eo magis est mala, sive malum […]. Maxime
vero inter haec observabis, quod ait naturalia si cum divinis comparentur, non maiorem
habere substantiam, quam imagines corporum in speculis apparentes. Nec aliter haec
a divinis perpetuo dependere, quam imagines ab obiectis. Huc Salomonis illud tendit