Marsilio Ficino: Renaissance Patron of Archetypal Psychology
Excerpt - James Hillman - Revisioning Psychology
Renaissance Neoplatonism is mainly the work of one man: Marsilio Ficino—a loveless, humpbacked, melancholy teacher and translator who lived in Florence, still one of the most neglected important figures in the movement of Western ideas. An exploration of why he is important and neglected will perhaps help us to understand more about the psychology of the Renaissance.
Every psychological system rests upon a metapsychology, a set of implicit assumptions about the nature of the soul. Behaviorists require the associationist theory of mind developed from Aristotle through Locke and today’s information theory; Jungians depend upon Kant and the Protestant tradition of a transcendent unknowable, and Freudians on a metapsychology derived from the nineteenth century’s assumptions about science, matter, and evolution. Renaissance metapsychology, Neoplatonism, was based mainly on Ficino’s translations and reformulations of Plato and Plotinus, Proclus, and other Neoplatonist writers in Greek. Ficino himself noted the parallel between his revival of Platonism and “the rebirth of grammar, poetry, rhetoric, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and astronomy which had been accomplished in his century.”