Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM 25
to John XXIII (1410), God’s creation of the world: the doctrine which, along
with immortality, had determined Petrarch’s preference for Platonism over
Aristotelianism. 58
As he translated more of the dialogues, however, Bruni became increasingly
disillusioned with their ethical and political doctrines. In his partial translations of
the Phaedrus (1424) and the Symposium (1435), he resorted to extensive
bowdlerization in order to remove any hint of homosexuality; and he refused to
translate the Republic because it contained so many repellent notions, among
them the community of wives and property, one of those ‘abhorrent’ opinions
which led him to transfer his philosophical loyalties to the less wayward
Aristotle. 59
Bruni’s intense dislike of the Republic was not shared by his teacher
Chrysoloras, who appears to have had no scruples about divulging its contents to
the Latin reading public. He had produced in 1402 a literal version of the text—
the best he could do with his limited knowledge of Latin—which was then
revised and polished by one of his Milanese students, Uberto Decembrio (c.
1370–1427). Unfortunately this collaboration resulted in the worst of both
worlds: a crude mixture of word-for-word translation and inaccurate paraphrase,
which garbled the technical terminology and utterly failed to convey the
complexity and sophistication of Plato’s doctrines. 60 Thirty-five years later
Uberto’s son Pier Candido (1399–1477) decided to make a new translation, one
which would ensure that the Republic, a byword for eloquence among Greeks,
would not appear lacklustre in Latin. He was also anxious to prove that
Aristotle’s account of Plato’s work in Politics II.1 was misleading—that, for
instance, the common ownership of wives and goods was not meant to be
universal but rather was restricted to the class of guardians. In line with other
humanists, Pier Candido emphasized the points of contact between Platonism
and Christianity, identifying in his marginal notes to the translation the Form of
Good in Book VI with God, and drawing attention to Plato’s proofs of
immortality in Book X. Aspects of the dialogue which he found offensive— the
equality of the sexes and homosexuality—were treated as ironic or were
deliberately mistranslated or, when all else failed, simply left out. 61
Since none of these humanists had the philosophical training to come to grips
with the elaborate conceptual apparatus of Platonism, they were unable to go
beyond an appreciation of Plato’s style, his (carefully censored) moral thought
and his agreement with Christianity. Similarly, humanist educators taught their
students to read the dialogues in Greek but were not in a position to provide a
philosophical framework that would allow them to interpret what they read in its
Platonic context. Instead, they encouraged their pupils to use the works as a
quarry for wise sayings and pithy maxims, which they could then insert in their
thematically organized commonplace books for future use. 62 The sheer difficulty
of Plato’s teachings on metaphysics and epistemology forced humanists to rely
on more straightforward second-hand accounts even when they had access to the
original works. Thus an accomplished Greek scholar such as Francesco Filelfo