Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

32 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE
Parmenides as a metaphysical work dealing with the nature of the One and in
particular its ontological priority to being. According to the Neoplatonists, being
was co-terminous not with the One but with the second hypostasis, Mind, for it
was in Mind that the Platonic Ideas, the primary components of reality, were
located. Ficino adopted this view of the Parmenides, treating it as a masterpiece
of Platonic theology, in which essential truths about the One—God in Ficino’s
Christian version of the scheme—were revealed. 94
This interpretation of the dialogue, however, was challenged by other
members of the intellectual circle of Medicean Florence. Giovanni Pico, in his
De ente et uno (1491), recounts how Poliziano asked him to defend the
Aristotelian position that being and one are convertible against the Neoplatonic
claim that the One is beyond being. To discredit the main evidence for the
Neoplatonic stand, Pico went back to the Middle Platonic account of the
Parmenides, which portrayed it not as a dogmatic exposition of unknowable
truths about the ineffable One, but rather as ‘a sort of dialectical exercise’ in
which nothing was definitively asserted or denied. He also criticized the
Neoplatonists for misreading the Sophist, in which—according to Pico—Plato
actually maintained that one and being were equal. 95 Ficino, of course, sided
with Plotinus and Proclus against Poliziano and Pico. His commentary on the
Sophist is likewise deeply indebted to the Neoplatonic view of the dialogue as a
metaphysical discussion of Mind, with special emphasis on the various
relationships between the Platonic Ideas. 96
Although Ficino used such Neoplatonic insights to give Renaissance Platonism
greater depth and coherence, he never lost sight of the primary motivation which
had led his contemporaries to admire this philosophy: its compatibility with
Christianity. This was in fact the mainspring of his own commitment to
Platonism. At the end of 1473 Ficino became a priest, and in the following year
he produced an apologetic work, De christiana religione, which attempted to
convince the Jews to abandon their obstinate rejection of the true faith. This
interest in religious polemics in no way conflicted with his enthusiastic
promotion of Platonism. He believed that scholastic Aristotelianism, with its
doctrine of the double truth, had given rise to an artificial rift between reason and
faith, which were in reality natural allies. By maintaining, as scholastics had
traditionally done, that philosophy was of no use to religion and vice versa, the
former had become a tool of impiety, while the latter had been entrusted to
ignorant and unworthy men. To show those who had separated philosophical
studies from Christianity the error of their ways it was necessary to reunite piety
and wisdom, creating a learned religion and a pious philosophy. 97
The answer to this dilemma lay for Ficino, as it had for Petrarch, in Platonism.
Plato had been both a theologian and a philosopher, many of whose doctrines
were in harmony with the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Church Fathers had
recognized this when they repeated Numenius’s description of him as a ‘Greekspeaking
Moses’ and speculated that he had learned of the Bible on his travels in
Egypt. 98 Plato was also believed to be the last in a long line of ‘ancient