Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The Platonic Academy of Florence," in Renaissance Thought and the Arts, /p. 89: Since the beginnings of its greatness, Florence was a town of merchants and of craftsmen where the arts, literature, and religious devotion were highly cultivated and where the vernacular tongue...was used as a literary language much earlier than in the rest of Italy.... The example of Dante alone is sufficient to show that the interest in philosophy and theology was very much alive in early Florence. Yet the university which was founded during the fourteenth century never occupied a predominant place in the intellectual life of the city, and hence the learned disciplines characteristic of the medieval unversities were less strongly represented in Florence than in the old unversity centers. Yet for this reason, Florence was more open and more accessible to intellectua currents of a different kind. In the period between Dante and Ficino, the intellectual life of Florence was dominated by the civic humanism of such writers as Baccaccio, Salutati, Bruni, Marsuppini, and Alberti, that is, by a literary culture which had its centers in the chancery of the republic and in the private circles of the leading /p. 90: families rathe than in the university, although the latter also played at times its part. This was a literary culture, or to use the terms of the period, a rhetorical and poetical culture, as well as a classical culture nourished by the study of ancient Greek and Latin authors. It included, to be sure, a good deal of thought on problems of the state, of education, and of moral conduct, but it lacked a specific interest in metaphysical speculations....

[T]his gap in traditional Florentine culture was filled by Marsilio Ficino and his Platonic Academy. We should not interpret this development merely as the result of a Medici policy to distract the attention of the citizens from the affairs of the state towards metaphysical speculation, as has been said a number of times; for Ficino's influence affected the enemies as well as the friends of the Medici. His Platonism, as a metaphysics based on reason and on the Platonic tradition, was able to satisfy the spiritual needs of those who were accustomed and inclined to hold on ot Christianity and ot the study of the ancients at the same time, and who were looking for a new historical and philosophical justification of their twofold commitment. This seems to be the reason for Ficino's astonishing success and for the profound change he brought about in the general climate and direction of Florentine culture....

/p.91:Marsilio Ficino, the leader of the Florentine Academy, was born in 1433, the eldest son of a physician.... In /p. 92: 1462 Cosimo de' Medici gave him a house in Careggi and commissioned him to translate Plato and the other sources of Platonist thought. In 1463 Ficino finished his first translation intended for publication, that of the Hermetic Corpus, and it had a tremendous success. He then proceeded to translate Plato, beginning with ten dialogues which he thought had not been translated before. His translation of all dialogues of Plato was finished around 1468. In 1469 Ficino wrote his famous commentary on Plato's Symposium, and during the following years, his main philosophical work, the Platonic Theology. In 1473 he became a priest, and on that occasion he composed his apologetic treatise on the Christian religion....

He spent the better part of his life under the personal patronage of the Medici family, and his political sympathies evidently went with them. Yet he was not a man of strong political interests....

/p. 93: The Platonic Academy of Florence was not, as historians formerly thought, an organized institution like the academies of the sixteenth century, but merely a circle around Ficino, with no common doctrine except that of ficino, and closely linked, but not identical with, the circle or court of the Medici. The name 'Academy' was merely adopted in imitation of Plato's Academy. The circle included scholars and writers who had ideas and interests of their own, sometimes quite different from those of Ficino....

Erwin Panofsky, "Neoplatonic Movement in Florence and Northern Italy," in Studies in Iconology, /p. 129: [T]he 'Platonic Academy' of Florence [was] a select group of men held together by mutual friendship, a common taste for /p. 130: conviviality and human culture, an almost religious worship of Plato, and a loving admiration for one kindly, delicate little scholar; Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)

This 'Philosophus Platonicus, Theologus and Medicus,' who seriously, half playfully patterned his life after Plato, and whose modestly comfortable villa at Careggi (a gift from Cosimo de Medici) purported to be the Academe redivivus [reborn Academy of Plato], was not only the life and soul but also the constructive mind of an informal 'society' which was a combination of club, research seminat and sect, rather than an Academy in the modern sense. In included, among others: Christoforo Landino, the famous commentator of Virgil, Horace and Dante and author of the well-known Quaestiones Camaldulenses; Lorenzo the Magnificent; Pico della Mirandola, who widened the intellectual horizons of the 'Platonica familia' by introducing the study of oriental sources, and generally maintained a comparatively independent attitude twoards Ficino; ...and Angelo Poliziano.

The task which Ficino had shouldered was threefold: First: to make accessible by translations into Latin --with epitomes and commentaries-- the original documents of Platonism, including not only Plato but also the 'Platonici,' viz., Plotinus and such later writeres as Proclus, Porphyrius, Jamblichus, Dionysius Pseudo-Areopagita, 'Hermes Trismegistos' and 'Orpheus.' Second: to co-ordinate this enormous mass of information into a coherent and living system capable of instilling a new meaning into the entire cultural heritage of the period, into Virgil and Cicero, as well as into St. Augustine and Dante, into Classical mythology as well as into physics, astrology, /p. 131: and medicine. Third: to harmonize this system with the Christian religion.

True, Philo of Alexandria had tried to subject Judaism (or rather an alloy of Judaism and Hellenistic mystery-cults) to a Platonic interpretation, and it had been a basic problem for Christian thinkers to incorporate an ever increasing amount of classical ideas into the framework of their thought. But never before had an attempt been made to fuse Christian theology, fully developed as it was, with a great pagan philosophy, without impairing the individuality and completeness of either. The very title of Ficino's proudest work, Theologia Platonica, announces his ambition both to integrate the 'Platonic' system and to prove its 'full consonance' with Christianity....

/p. 132: [For Ficino, the] universe... unfolds itself in four hierarchies of gradually decreasing perfection: 1) The Cosmic Mind (Greek: Nous, Latin: mens mundana, intellectus divinus sive angelicus), which is a purely intelligible and supercelestial realm; like God it is incorruptible and stable, but unlike him it is multiple, containing as it does the ideas and intelligence (angels) which are the prototypes of whatever exists in the lower zones. 2) The Cosmic Soul (...Latin: anima mundana), which is still incorruptible, but no longer a realm of pure forms but a realm of pure causes; it is therefore identical with the celestial or translunary world divided into the familiar nine spheres or heavens; the empyrean, the sphere of the fixed stars and the seven spheres of the planets. 3) The Realm of Nature, that is: the sublunary or terrestial world, which is corruptible because it is a compound of form and matter and can therefore disintegrate when these components are parted.... 4) The Realm of Matter which is formless and lifeless; it is endowed with shape, movement and even existence only in so far as it ceases to be itself and enters a union with form, so as to contribute to the Realm of Nature.

This whole universe is a divinum animal; it is enlivened and its various hierarchies are interconnected with each other by a 'divine influence emanating from God, penetrating the heaven, descending through the elements, and coming to an end in matter....'

/p.133: With all its corruptibility the sublunary world participates in the eternal life and beauty of God imparted to it by the 'divine influence.' But on its way through the celestial realm the 'splendour of divine goodness,' as beauty is defined by the Neoplatonists, has been broken into as many rays as there are spheres or heavens. There is therefore no perfect beauty on earth. Every human being, beast, plant or mineral is 'influenced'... by one or more of the celestial bodies....

/p. 135: [T]he Realm of Nature, so full of vigour and beauty as a manifestation of the 'divine influence,' when contrasted with the shapelessness and lifelessness of sheer matter, is, as the same time, a place of unending struggle, ugliness and distress, when contrasted with the celestial, let alone the supercelestial world. With a Florentine Neoplatonist it is not inconsistent but /p. 135: inevitable to revel in the 'presence of the spiritual in the material,' and yet to complain of the terrestial world as a 'prison' where the pure forms or ideas are 'drowned,' 'submerged,' 'perturbed,' and 'disfigured beyond recognition....'

Ficino and his followers shared the age-old belief in a structural analogy between the Macrocosmus and the Microcosmus. But they interpreted this /p. 136 analogy in a peculiar manner.... As the universe is composed of the material world (nature) and the immaterial realm beyond the orbit of the moon, man is composed of body and soul, the body being a form inherent in matter, the soul a form only adherent to it. And as the spiritus mundanus interconnects the sublunary world with the translunary, a spiritus humanus interconnects the body with the soul. The soul, now, consists of five faculties grouped under the headings of anima prima and anima secunda.

The anima secunda, or Lower Soul, lives in close contact with the body, and consists of those faculties which both direct and depend on physiological functions: the faculty of propagation, nourishment and growth; external perception, i.e. the five senses which receive and transmit the signals from the outer world...; and interior perception or imagination which unifies the scattered signals into coherent psychological images....The Lower Soul is, therefore, not free, but determined by 'fate.'

The anima prima, or Higher Soul, comprises only two faculties: Reason (ratio) and Mind (mens, intellectus humanus sive angelicus). Reason is closer to the Lower Sould: it coordinates the images supplied by the imagination according to the rules of logic. The Mind, however, can grasp the truth by directly contemplating the supercelestial ideas. Where Reason is discursive and reflective the Mind is intuitive and creative. Reason becomes involved with the experiences, desires and needs of the body as transmitted by the senses and imagination. The Mind, on the contrary, communicates, or even participates in, the intellectus divinus, proof of whichis found in the fact that human thought would not be able to conceive the /p. 137: notions of eternity and divinity if it did not share in an eternal and infinite essence....

All this accounts for the unique position of man in the Neoplatonic system. He shares the faculties of his Lower Soul with the dumb animals; he shares his Mind with the intellectus divinus; and he shares his Reason with nothing in the universe: his Reason is exclusively human, a faculty unattainable to animals, inferior to the pure intelligence of God and the Angels, yet capable of turning in either direction. This is the meaning of Ficino's definition of man as ' a rational soul participating in the divine mind, employing a body.' which definition says no more nor less than that man is the 'connecting link between God and the world,' or the 'centre of the universe' as Pico della Mirandola puts it: 'Man ascends to the higher realms without discarding the lower world, and can descend to the lower world without forsaking the higher.'

This position of man is both exalted and problematic. With his sensual /p. 138: impulses vacillating between submission and revolt, his Reason facing alternate failure and success