Marsilio Ficino
1433–1499 · Italian
Italian Renaissance humanist who revived Neoplatonism and translated Plato’s complete works, founding the Florentine Academy.
In the record
- Born
- 1433, Figline Valdarno, Italy
- Training
- Physician; student of John Argyropoulos (Greek language and literature)
- Affiliation
- Florentine Platonic Academy (founder and head); Catholic Church (priest from 1473)
Key works
- Theologia Platonica de immortalitate animae (1474)
- De Christiana Religione (1474)
- Plato’s complete works (Latin translation) (1484)
- De amore (1484)
- De vita libri tres (1489)
- Hermetica (translation)
Sebastian reads Ficino
Ficino is where the Platonic bypass becomes institutionalized in the West — and where it becomes, paradoxically, beautiful enough to seduce every depth psychologist who follows. He did not merely translate Plato; he built the pneumatic preference into a complete cosmology, sealing the deal Plato had opened by giving the ascent from matter to spirit a household address: the Florentine Academy, the *prisca theologia*, the chain of ancient wisdom that runs from Hermes Trismegistus to Plato to Christ without interruption. Hillman returns to him repeatedly, and not without ambivalence — Ficino’s *spiritus* is the site where soul and spirit are distinguished and then dangerously blurred, where the *anima mundi* breathes through image and beauty yet always risks dissolution into the pneumatic. Read Ficino when you need to understand why Renaissance humanism and its descendants kept reaching upward, and why the soul’s ground-level refusal of that ascent reads, against this backdrop, as genuine counter-movement rather than mere reaction.