Plato

Description

Lyons edition of Plato's famous opera omnia (all works) with commentary by Marsilio Ficino, edited by the German humanist Simon Gryner (1493-1541). It is a typically Renaissance hybrid Plato (as the title, ‘Divini’, indicates), re-read in a neo-Platonic key, a mystical Plato and initiator propaedeutic to the Christian faith, understood within that metaphysical humus dominant at the time, the ‘Prisca Teologia’ or ‘Philosophia Perennis’. There is a single original wisdom from which every path flows, a unique source from which every stream emerges, a universal and primordial transcendent root from which every tradition branches out into immanent multiplicity. Ficino reconstitutes the golden chain of immortal wisdom, Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglappophamus, Pythagoras, Plato, all the way to Christian revelation. From the work's prologue: «For this very reason, God almighty at the appointed time sent the divine spirit of Plato from on high, so that by his life, his wit and his admirable eloquence, he might show the sacred religion to all peoples» (Marsilio Ficino). Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), Florentine philosopher and humanist among the most influential of the Italian Renaissance. He was a follower of Neo-Platonism, founder of the illustrious Accademia Neoplatonica (1462), the first translator of Plato's Opera Omnia, and editor of the works of Plotinus, Porphyry, Giamblicus, Proclus, Hermes Trismegistus and Pseudo-Dionysius. Ficino is also the author of the famous “El libro dell'Amore” (The Book of Love), one of the most significant texts of 15th-century Neoplatonism, an obligatory reference for all subsequent Renaissance treatises on love.