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17 pages, 326 KB

Open AccessArticle

Marsilio Ficino and the Soul: Doctrinal and Argumentative Remarks Regarding His Use of the Elements of Physics and the Elements of Theology

by Sokratis-Athanasios Kiosoglou

Philosophies 2025, 10(1), 14; https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies10010014 - 23 Jan 2025

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2081

Abstract

The depth and extent of Ficino’s reception and use of Proclus has already attracted much scholarly attention. The present paper builds on and tries to enrich these results, focusing specifically on Ficino’s reception of Proclus’ Elements of Physics and Elements of Theology. In the first part I discuss a marginal annotation of Ficino, in which he makes use of arguments about the circular motion of the soul from the Elements of Physics. I provide some clarifications about the annotated text (of Plotinus) and propose one additional possible echo of the Elements of Physics in Ficino’s Platonic Theology and its arguments about the immortality of the soul. The second part of the paper turns to the link between the Elements of Theology and Ficino’s Platonic Theology. Together with some further doctrinal borrowings I suggest that also the structure of the two works bears important affinities. The soul is a central case in point. To ground this claim, I compare specific sections of the two texts. Also, I selectively examine Ficino’s commentary on the Philebus, which is prior to the Platonic Theology and is strongly influenced by the early theorems of the Elements of Theology. Overall, the paper wishes to shed further light on Ficino’s multiform (and not yet fully unveiled) appropriation of Proclus. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ancient and Medieval Theories of Soul)

19 pages, 363 KB

Open AccessArticle

Beauty Is the Gravitas Amoris: A Trinitarian Correlation of Beauty and Love

by Sean Luke

Religions 2024, 15(9), 1044; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel15091044 - 28 Aug 2024

Viewed by 2637

Abstract

There have been many attempts to give a precise definition of beauty. In this article, I join a tradition of trinitarian reflection on beauty and attempt to add further clarity to a trinitarian definition of beauty. Beauty, in my construal, is the gravitas amoris of the triune being of love—it is, in other words, the objective attractional “force” or “weightiness” exerted by triune love on the soul by which one, if she yields to triune love, experiences the bliss and delight of triune love and is thereby drawn into deifying union. This article will proceed as follows: First, I will survey the relationship between beauty and love found in the classic philosophical tradition represented by Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. Then, I will survey this beauty–love relation in Christian thought from Augustine, Aquinas, Ficino, Edwards, and von Hildebrand. These figures will provide supporting evidence for my construal of beauty. I then turn to the constructive task. I argue that there is an abductive fit between the features of beauty and the nature of the Trinity. In light of this fit and the sources of traditional thought above, beauty is best thought of as the gravitas amoris—the weighty impression of God’s triune love in created things that draws one into the triune life and is experienced as delight when perceived. I conclude by answering objections and reflecting on how this account reframes the transcendentals and coordinates the experience of beauty with Christian love. Full article

27 pages, 25360 KB

Open AccessArticle

The Sublime Divinity: Erotic Affectivity in Renaissance Religious Art

by Maya Corry

Arts 2024, 13(4), 121; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13040121 - 17 Jul 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 9315

Abstract

In the context of the Catholic Reformation serious concerns were expressed about the affective potency of naturalistic depictions of beautiful, sensuous figures in religious art. In theological discourse similar anxieties had long been articulated about potential contiguities between elevating, licit desire for an extraordinarily beautiful divinity and base, illicit feeling. In the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in the decades preceding the Council of Trent, a handful of writers, thinkers and artists asserted a positive connection between spirituality and sexuality. Leonardo da Vinci, and a group of painters working under his aegis in Lombardy, were keenly aware of painting’s capacity to evoke feeling in a viewer. Pictures they produced for domestic devotion featured knowingly sensuous and unusually epicene beauties. This article suggests that this iconography daringly advocated the value of pleasurable sensation to religiosity. Its popularity allows us to envisage beholders who were neither mired in sin, nor seeking to divorce themselves from the physical realm, but engaging afresh with age-old dialectics of body and soul, sexuality and spirituality. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)

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20 pages, 320 KB

Open AccessArticle

Shakespeare’s Bookish Rulers: Philosophy and Nature Poetry in the Henry VI Trilogy and The Tempest

by Aviva Farkas

Religions 2023, 14(12), 1511; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel14121511 - 7 Dec 2023

Viewed by 1919

Abstract

Shakespeare’s early Henry VI trilogy and late The Tempest both feature reclusive, bookish rulers who are deposed because their rivals perceive an opportunity in the rulers’ trustingness and lack of interest in political affairs. Furthermore, the deposed rulers also share an interest in Platonic philosophies of the Renaissance; they differ, however, in their respective preferences for particular Platonist authors and writings. Henry VI is devoted to Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy. While Prospero, the protagonist of The Tempest, may have focused on Boethius and similar authors when he was in Milan, by the time we meet him on his island, he prefers Neoplatonic magic, bequeathed to the Renaissance by Ficino. While the two stories are not often read together, I argue that doing so yields a fascinating contrast in the modes of existence dictated by different streams of Renaissance philosophical thought. While Henry VI’s credulity and Boethianism lead him to express a preference for a contemplative life and to adopt an attitude of extreme passivity and surrender, Prospero’s suspicion and powerful use of magic associate him with the active life. The ultimate expressions of Henry’s preference for the contemplative life and of Prospero’s association with the active life both involve nature poetry. Henry expresses yearning for the peaceful lifestyle of a shepherd in a pastoral lyric he delivers in 3 Henry VI, while Prospero celebrates human labor and achievement in a georgic masque which he produces. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue The Platonic Tradition, Nature Spirituality and the Environment)

14 pages, 279 KB

Open AccessArticle

Eros and Etiology in Love’s Labour’s Lost

by Darryl Chalk

Humanities 2022, 11(6), 152; https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060152 - 6 Dec 2022

Viewed by 2614

Abstract

In Love’s Labour’s Lost, the creation of an academe where study is posited as the antidote to the diseases of the mind caused by worldly desire results in an epidemic of lovesickness. Lovesickness, otherwise known as ‘erotic melancholy’ or ‘erotomania’, was treated in contemporary medical documents as a real, diagnosable illness, a contagious disease thought to infect the imagination through the eyes, which could be fatal if left untreated. Such representation of love as a communicable disease is drawn, I suggest, from a neoplatonic tradition led by the work of Marsilio Ficino, particularly his fifteenth-century treatise Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Ficino’s construction of eros as a kind of ‘vulgar love’, distinctive from ‘heroic love’, emphatically denotes lovesickness as a kind of material contagion with the eye as its primary means of transmission, an idea that had a more significant influence in England and on the work of playwrights like William Shakespeare than has previously been acknowledged. For all its lighthearted conceits, Love’s Labour’s Lost takes lovesickness and its etiology very seriously, in ways that have been almost entirely ignored by scholarship on this play. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue New Directions in Medicine and Embodiment on the Shakespearean Stage)

12 pages, 399 KB

Open AccessArticle

East Meets West: The New Gnoseology in Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming

by Zheng Wang

Religions 2022, 13(9), 854; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13090854 - 14 Sep 2022

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3665

Abstract

This study examines the various explanations of the deliberative humanity, regarding a new gnoseology in the intellectual contexts of Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming during the 15th and 16th centuries. In a similar way to Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno for the European Renaissance, Wang Yangming is the enlightener among the representatives of Neo-Confucianism in early modern China. Each of these three takes an individual’s mind as the point of departure. They then modify the traditional theory of gnoseology, in search of the good and principle. Nevertheless, behind these similarities on the surface, the metaphorical and theoretical interpretations follow different directions. Marsilio Ficino translates hierarchic Platonism as a transcendent norm. Giordano Bruno and Wang Yangming, however, seem to liberate the individual’s humanity from the traditional norms of gnoseology. In their methodologies, they both have developed a generative gnoseology that differs from the orthodox pattern of knowledge in their respective traditions. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Epistemic Issues in Non-classical Religious Belief)

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