Plato's Persona. Denis J.-J. Robichaud
ancient rhetoricians.110 Ficino plays on the identification of his letter’s authorial persona with Valori’s oratorical persona, and even with Valori’s very face/mask. The letter exists for us as a written document, but in order for the rhetorical device to work one needs to imagine the letter’s oral delivery: Valori reciting the letter face to face with Pico. Ficino invokes Eros as the god responsible for the transformation of external appearances, like a spiritello hiding behind a mask (see Figure 7 above). Pico’s response in turn appeals to his union with Ficino, whom he addresses as the father of the Platonic family, due to their participating in a common Saturnine intellect (νοῦς). Beneath the exterior persona one finds a Saturnine ingenium. Far from a correction of Ficino’s invocation of love, Pico’s turn toward Saturn would have greatly pleased Ficino, the Renaissance’s greatest orchestrator of the notion of a melancholic and Saturnine genius.111
Ficino’s rhetorical strategies are especially evident in letters that he writes to recipients who share a certain enthusiasm for Platonism. In these, he examines the various personae of the author, the letter, the messenger, and the recipient, and often postulates a divine principle of unification for the different personae (the One, Eros, Saturn, intellect, spiritus, soul). We can look at a final excellent example in this regard from his correspondence with Pierleone Leoni (also known as Pier Leone da Spoleto, c. 1445–92), the court physician of Lorenzo de’ Medici, whom Ficino calls his “alter ego,” along with his German humanist friend Martin Prenninger (1450–1501), known in Latin circles as Martinus Uranius. Lest Cavalcanti, whom Ficino designates as his unique friend (amicus unicus), think that he is the philosopher’s sole beloved, Ficino also repeats this rhetorical stratagem with other close correspondents. In fact, by 1491 he would also refer to Prenninger with the same epithet, “amicus unicus.”112 Thus Cavalcanti, Pierleone, and Prenninger had to share the roles of being Ficino’s “alter egos” and/or “unique friends.” On 12 May 1491 Ficino wrote to Pierleone a letter entitled “How someone thinking under another persona can encounter himself”:
In [your letters] you clearly write that when at first something Platonic occurs to you, Marsilio immediately comes to mind. But beware perhaps that you are not deceived by an exterior image. Indeed, I think that Pierleone himself is there lurking underneath the persona of Marsilio. For if any human species presents itself to you while contemplating Platonic matters, it is probable that it is the greatest Platonic species above all that presents itself. But what is more Platonic among human matters than Leo the great abode of the Platonic sun. Perchance, therefore, just like Narcissus, you are admiring yourself, when you think that you are admiring another. But Love clothes you especially in the image of Marsilio. But since we have happened upon the image, you surely know that reason is between the imagination and the intellect, and that natural images flow into it from the source of the imagination, and that divine species flow into it from the intellect. On account of this does it not often happen that a certain divine species assumes the form of a certain natural image when it emanates to human reason, and so does not what is divine on the inside often appear as natural to the eyes of reason? What if a similar reason does not explain why Pierleone often meets himself under the mask (persona) of Marsilio?113
The Platonic, or Neoplatonic, emanative metaphysics is evident in the letter. It acts as a philosophical grounding for the imitative practices of Ficino’s rhetoric and as a principle of unification for the identities of Ficino’s and Perleone’s persons. It further reveals how Ficino understood self-knowledge discursively on the one hand as an encounter with others, and on the other as a contact with the divine.
Ficino’s epistolography plays with central epistemological problems concerning the intellect and its unity with what it thinks. The thesis of the unity of the intellect and its thinking has its clearest origins in Aristotle’s De anima.114 The fortune of this theory has a long and manifold history among Aristotle’s many interpreters, much of which turns on the twofold nature of Aristotle’s identity thesis, that the intellect somehow becomes like what it intelligizes so that, on the one hand, when it intelligizes something, a tree for instance, it takes on the form of the tree but, on the other hand, when it intelligizes itself, the intellect and its thinking are identical. Aristotle’s thesis that the intellect becomes like and even identical to its thoughts becomes in Plotinus a core tenet of his epistemological and metaphysical theory that the hypostasis Intellect is identical to the intelligibles (one and many). In its Platonic appropriations, however, Aristotle’s identity thesis does not necessarily lead to an epistemology that posits the human intellect as a blank slate capable of becoming like anything that it intelligizes. On the contrary, something of the divine intelligibles is communicated to all human intellects insofar as a portion of our intellects always touches the Intellect.
Thus Ficino’s Platonic arguments in the previously quoted letter to Givoanni Cavalcanti, where Ficino recounts his philosophical discussions with Bernardo Giugni and Bartolomeo Fortini, can be distilled accordingly: the intellect is not only identical to its thinking, the human intellect becomes like the divine Intellect—like a form of divine painting—when it intelligizes. Here are Ficino’s words: “From intellect to intellect, from light to light. How easily does this happen? Most easily: for on account of a certain natural relationship, visible light immediately illuminates a transparent medium when it is first clear and pure, and visible light forms it into this very form, and through its own form, it forms the forms of all visible things. Similarly, the intelligible and the hyperintelligible light, that is God, forms the transparent intellectual medium, when it is first clear; it forms, I say, its form, and this is divine, and through this form, it forms all intelligibles into forms.”115 It is because of this common participation in the divine Intellect that humans can truly know one another. Ficino is not simply appealing to fairly common Augustinian theories of divine illumination on human thought. In his explaining the identity of the knower both with the known and with the divine, it is apparent that Ficino draws directly on Neoplatonism. Beginning with Plotinus, the late ancient Neoplatonists themselves had long appropriated Aristotle’s identity thesis between the intellect and what it thinks in order to argue that the Intellect qua hypostasis is identical to the intelligible forms. What is more, by his calling God hyperintelligible it is also clear that the explanation Ficino offers is based on a Neoplatonic philosophy of emanation. Even though the Neoplatonic Intellect is the first being, it is nevertheless posterior to the One. Ficino’s God is thus akin to the One as hyperintelligible and thus also, to use the language of Proclus, beyond being, or hyperousios. The exercise in Socratic self-knowledge of Ficino’s Platonic epistolography reveals that when one knows oneself through knowing another, one also begins to know God. Instead of positing that one knows others as though they were painted images external to us, like separate objects, in his correspondence Ficino expresses the unification of persons according to an identity thesis between intellect and what it intellegizes—all the while distinguishing his thinking from the Averroist theory of the single intellect. Ficino appreciated Plotinus’s description of the Intellect as a many-faced or innumerably-faced being, glowing with individual living faces.116 The communicated participation between two persons and God, both visual and sonorous, is expressed according to a metaphysics of light, which Ficino often understands according to geometrical optics whereby a voice is projected on a linear vector to touch its listener like a ray of light extending a transparent medium (diaphane).117 Ficino becomes like his interlocutors in his letters, and in turn, following the goal of deification or assimilating to the divine in the Theaetetus, he becomes like God.
At first glance one can understand Ficino’s Platonic letters as a correspondence network strengthening the social bonds of fifteenth-century philosophers, theologians, poets, statesmen, and scholars. That is, they simply perform a literary game in which members of an inner circle of elites are cast in roles played for their own amusement. They do indeed form a network of connections. In a famous letter to the aforementioned Martinus Uranius, Ficino catalogues a long list of his friends for his German correspondent. He classifies them into three kinds (genera): first, his Medici patrons, which he characterizes as a race of heroes; second, auditors (auditores), who are not necessarily disciples but friendly acquaintances and partners in dialogues who share a common bond in the liberal arts (included in this group are the likes of Naldo Naldi, Cristoforo Landino, Leon Battista Alberti,