Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

30 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
What Bessarion could not accept was George’s insistence that Aristotle was
closer than Plato to Christianity. Both philosophers, Bessarion asserted, were
polytheistic pagans who held many beliefs which were entirely foreign to true
religion. He therefore had no intention of turning Plato into a Christian, as George
had done with Aristotle. Nevertheless, he maintained that if one was looking for
philosophical confirmation of Christian dogmas, there was far more in Plato’s
works than in those of Aristotle. Although Plato had not fully understood
doctrines such as the Trinity, he had received enough illumination from the light
of nature to allow him to gain a shadowy knowledge of the mysteries of faith, a
knowledge which, however imperfect, could play a valuable role in leading men
towards the ultimate truths of the Bible. 83 Bessarion’s ability to find intimations
and anticipations of Christianity in Plato’s dialogues was greatly aided by his
familiarity with the hermeneutical techniques of the ancient Neoplatonists,
especially Plotinus and Proclus. He learned from them how to go beyond the
often embarrassing literal sense of Plato’s words: his accounts of
metempsychosis, for example, or his frank references to homosexual love, which
the Italian humanists had deliberately mistranslated or excised. The
Neoplatonists taught Bessarion to look for the deeper meaning of such passages
by reading them in terms of allegory, myth and symbol—devices which Plato
had used to hide his profoundest doctrines from the gaze of the vulgar. 84 These
tools of analysis, combined with his understanding of Platonic metaphysics, also
gained from the Neoplatonists, permitted Bessarion to discredit George’s
slanders of Plato and, far more importantly, to lay the philosophical and
theological foundation for a systematic Christian Neoplatonism.
The philosopher who was to construct that system, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99),
had just completed the first draft of his Latin translation of all thirty-six Platonic
dialogues when Bessarion’s In calumniatorem Platonis was completed in 1469.
Like many others, Ficino wrote to the cardinal to congratulate him on his
treatise, from which he clearly learned a great deal. 85 Adopting Bessarion’s
figurative method of reading the dialogues, Ficino insisted that Plato’s doctrine of
the transmigration of souls should be interpreted in a moral key, as an allegorical
representation of what happened to those who behaved like animals. Similarly,
passages describing Socrates’s sexual passion for his young disciples were, in
Ficino’s view, marvellous allegories, ‘just like the Song of Solomon’. 86
Although Ficino relied on the work of the earlier humanist translators of Plato,
especially Bruni, he did not share their stylistic concerns. He simply wanted to
make his translations as accurate and clear as possible, which meant employing
an unadorned Latin and not avoiding useful philosophical terms just because they
were unclassical or non-Ciceronian. The fact that Ficino’s version remained the
standard Latin translation of Plato until the nineteenth century is sufficient
testimony of his success. 87 He also made advances in the analysis of Platonic
works. Instead of mining the dialogues for isolated nuggets of ethical wisdom, as
the humanists had taught their students to do, he offered complex and coherent