Theological Origins of Modernity

84 chapter three
this vision, he drew not merely on Plato but on Augustine, although more
on Augustine’s earlier anti-Manichean thought that attributed more importance
to human free will than his later anti-Pelagian works that called
such a free will into question. He also was deeply infl uenced by his study
of later Neoplatonism (he translated Plotinus and Proclus) and especially
the work of Pseudo-Dionysus, who Ficino thought was the fi rst of Paul’s
Athenian followers (mentioned in Acts 17:34) but who we now know to
have been a follower of Proclus. 50
For Ficino, man is above all else the imago dei, and as such he has an
intrinsic dignity and power. Plato and his followers, according to Ficino,
assert such a point with their doctrine of the immortality of the individual
soul. 51 Th is is the basis for man’s divinity, and it is through the cultivation
of the soul that we become like God. Ficino thereby revived the Neoplatonic
doctrine of the world-soul as the center of the universe and gave the
human soul a privileged place in the universal hierarchy, as the bond of
the universe and the link between the intelligible and corporeal worlds. 52
Cultivating the soul in his view allows humans to “become all things.” Ficino
even believed that man could “create the heavens and what is in them
himself, if he could obtain the tools and the heavenly material.” 53 Since he
cannot, he must content himself instead with recreating this world mimetically
through the use of his skills and his imagination.
At the core of Ficino’s theology was a vision of God that was at odds
with that of scholasticism but in continuity with the God of his humanist
predecessors. Th is God was a God of will, not of reason, modeled not on
Aristotle’s prime mover but Plato’s artifi cer. Plotinus had demonstrated
and Augustine accepted the notion that a trinitarian God must not merely
love but be love in order to be at all, since it is only love that can solve
the problem of the one and the many within divine being. Reason cannot
bring this about. God’s creation of the world must thus be an act of loving
will. Moreover, if God is essentially love, then all his creatures and human
beings as well must be governed and guided by love. Such a view of love,
however, is precisely the view that Ficino discovered in Plato’s Symposium
and that he described in great detail fi rst in On Pleasure (1457) and then
more fully in On Love (1466), which has rightly been called the most important
literary work of the Renaissance. While Ficino accepted the ontological
individualism posited by nominalism, he saw all individual beings
fi lled with and united by sparks of divine love. Motivated by love, they are
naturally attracted to the good and thus to God. 54 He thus asserted that
behavior based on instinct and natural passions, including sexual desire,
draws humans toward the divine. Nature was itself thus a form of grace
that Ficino concluded leads humans toward the good and thus to God.