3
Eugenics, the Habitus , and the Spirit

"Iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna"

In the next two chapters I will explore several interrelated mythological and historical themes that Ficino raised in the De Numero Fatali . In the process I shall be plowing some fresh ground in our understanding of his philosophy and entertaining speculative possibilities that scholars may wish to refine or challenge, or at least to measure against other texts more familiar to them. Throughout we should bear in mind that this commentary was one of Ficino's last scholarly enterprises, and certainly his last Plato commentary; and it was undertaken under the influence of planetary configurations quite different from those that had marked out 1484 as a year propitious for the course of the Platonic revival, which this commentary, along with the other commentaries that preceded it, was intended to expedite and serve.^[1] Nevertheless, as an instauratory text, it is itself concerned

[1] 1484 was the year of the publication of Ficino's Platonis Opera Omnia . As Donald Weinstein observes in his Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970), it was also "a key year in much of the apocalyptic speculation of the time, . . . the annus mirabilis of contemporary prophetic speculation about religious change. Astrologi, profeti, uomini dotti e santi as well as men of lesser degrees of holiness were predicting for that year some great turning point in the history of Christianity, indeed in the religious history of the world" (pp. 75, 88). Indeed Eugenio Garin, Lo zodiaco , p. 86, speaks of the 1480s themselves as a decade "satura di profetismo ermetico, di annunzi escatologici de eversione o de adventu Antichristi ." In his Prognostica ad Viginti Annos Duratura of 1484, Paul of Middelburg, the astrologer

bishop of Fossombrone and Ficino's friend and correspondent, calculated on the basis of his reading of the ninth-century Arab Albumasar that the year 1484 would see a conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter that heralded mighty changes in the Christian religion (Weinstein, Savonarola , pp. 87–88, 89, notes that his calculations were taken over by Johannes Lichtenberger, court astrologer to the Emperor Frederick III, who in 1488 heralded the coming of a second Charlemagne to purify the Church). Cristoforo Landino, another of Ficino's friends, predicted on the basis of the same conjunction the return in 1484 of the veltro of Dante's Inferno 1.101–111 to inaugurate religious reform. The Hermetic prophet Giovanni Mercurio da Correggio chose 1484 as the year to appear on Palm Sunday in Rome and later on the Florentine streets calling for repentance before the coming millennium and proclaiming the advent of a new world religion (see Weinstein, Savonarola , pp. 199–202). And a contemporary dialogue entitled Trialogus in Rebus Futuris XX Annorum Proximorum and attributed to Lodovicus Rigius (Cornarius)—see Martin C. Davies, "An Enigma and a Phantom: Giovanni Aretino and Giacomo Languschi," Humanistica Lovaniensia 37 (1988), 1–29 at 17–21—calculated that a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn would occur between 1484 and 1504 and that this would announce the end of the world and the coming of Antichrist. See too Pico's Disputationes adversus Astrologiam Divinatricem 5 passim (ed. Eugenio Garin, 2 vols. [Florence, 1946–1952], 1:520–623, with bibliography and notes on pp. 635–639 and 667–669). In the event, it turned out to be the year of the death of Pope Sixtus IV.

Both Sebastiano Gentile, in his edition of the first book of Ficino's Epistulae , pp. xxxvi–xlii, and James Hankins, in his Plato in the Italian Renaissance 1:302–304, have recently called our attention to the role of "astrological considerations" in general in Ficino's career. Hankins cites the astrological significance Ficino assigned to the publication date of his Plotinus translation (Opera , p. 1537), and also his reply to Janus Pannonius (Opera , pp. 871–872). He concludes—and Gentile concurs—that, in view of the evidence, "it is difficult to believe that the appearance of Ficino's Platonis opera omnia in the Great Year 1484 was not related to Ficino's millennial hopes for a renewal of Christianity through the pia philosophia of Platonism" (p. 304). He observes, moreover, that for Ficino the "conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter signified the conjoining of wisdom and power, the precondition for a Golden Age," and refers to Ficino's argumentum for Plato's Second Letter : "Wisdom which remains distant from power is lame. The great conjunctions of the planets teach us this. Jupiter is the lord; Saturn the philosopher. Surely, unless these be conjoined nothing either great or stable may be established" (his trans., p. 304). On the other hand, Ficino devotes chapter 4 of his De Christiana Religione of 1473–1474 (Opera , pp. 12–13) to refuting the idea that the laws of Christianity could be influenced by the stars.

with an instauration that Ficino still saw in the mid 1490s as imminent: the generation and the birth of a Florentine Platonism that would restore the fabled golden age and reunite religion with philosophy, Themis with Pallas.^[2] In that hallowed time both goddesses would exercise a sovereign, a jovian sway over the just state, its wise ruler or rulers in their nocturnal council, and its tempered offspring. But what goes to the generation of such offspring? What are the factors that the guardians of the ideally constituted republic must always take into

[2] See Ficino's prologue to his De Christiana Religione (Opera , p. 1), where he mourns the lot of the present iron age and the separation of Pallas from Themis, that is, of wisdom from integrity (honestas ). Cf. Ficino's letter to Giovanni Francesco Ippoliti

in the fourth book of his Epistulae (Opera , pp. 761.3–763; trans. in Letters , 3:28–31 [no. 18]), which declares that the golden age will return "only when power and wisdom come together in the same mind," and the ruler is a philosopher. Cf. also his speech in praise of philosophy in the same book (Opera , pp. 757.3–759; trans. in Letters 3:18–21 [no. 13]), which asserts that "there was once a golden age when wisdom reigned, and that if ever philosophy reigns again the golden age will return." In general see Hankins, Plato , pp. 284–297.

consideration if they wish to preserve it as long as possible from internal dissolution? What kind of magic must they call upon when they ordain the day and the hour for its citizens to marry and to breed?^[3]

Plato's radical views on eugenics are principally set forth in two dialogues: in the Republic 5.458C ff. and in the Laws 6.772D ff. and 783D ff. Ficino's argumenta for both these discussions, however, are summary in nature and turn aside to other issues;^[4] and the theme of best breeding only comes to the forefront of his mind much later, in the course of writing the thirteenth chapter of his De Numero Fatali . Even then, as we might anticipate, it occurs in the context of the accompanying mathematical speculations bearing their own burden of interpretative challenges.

Ficino undertakes to expound what he regards as the Pythagorean and Platonic view of eugenics with its basis in the musical theory of proportions. Good offspring require both parents to be good, while bad offspring issue from a union between two bad parents, and mixed offspring from a union between a good and a bad parent. If this sounds too simple and schematic, we should recall that elsewhere, notably in the De Vita , Ficino expatiates on the many ways a scholar particularly can set about overcoming hereditary traits and harnessing a bad remperament—what we would now think of as a bed set of genes—to a rational pursuit of the true and the good. Indeed, for all its medical and psychological preoccupations with pathological moods of melancholy, lassitude, and compulsion, and for all its astrological concerns with environmental and stellar conditioning, the De Vita is remarkably optimistic about the possibilities of establishing personal autonomy, about elective as well as predictive astrology;^[5] and about achieving a

[3] The magus operates by way of reconciling or exploiting the attractions and repulsions of nature, and the breeder does the same in a way with regard to stock. The breeder is therefore a kind of magus, and Plato's magistrate is among other things a breeder. For Ficino the implication that he is therefore a magus would not be wholly fanciful.

[4] Opera , pp. 1404–1406, 1503–1505.

[5] Kaske in her "Introduction" to Marsilio Ficino: Three Books on Life , ed. and trans. Kaske and Clark, p. 37, defines elective or catarchic astrology as "a matter of timing one's activities to coincide with the predicted dominance of favorable stars, of availing

oneself of general, already-existing forces, much as one does when launching a ship with the ebbing of the tide." Predictive astrology, by contrast, is keyed either to the casting of nativities (genethliacal astrology) or to the establishment of the horoscope of any particular moment in order to seek answers "to specific personal questions (called 'interrogations' or 'judgements') in the position of the stars at the time of asking" (interrogatory or horary astrology). For the distinctions and for an account of the deep tension in the humanists between their belief in human autonomy and their sense of a rebirth governed by the movements of the stars, see Garin, Lo zodiaco , chapter 2.

degree of choice even over biological and psychological matters usually subordinated to forces—natural, daemonic, planetary, and zodiacal—outside our normal control. Ficino compiled it so that readers could prolong and improve their lives, though this is hardly the impression one gets from the pertinent sections of the monumental study by Panofsky, Saxl, and Klibansky, Saturn and Melancholy , which overstate the case for Ficino's melancholy by ignoring his wit, his playfulness, and the fundamental optimism of his philosophical premises.^[6] Clearly, we are off to a much better temperamental (and therefore philosophical) start if we were begotten by good parents; but Ficino never supposed that inherited characteristics are unassailably determinative of our intellectual and spiritual lives, since he was a believer, as we shall see, in disciplina and in the notion of free will or at least of free choice (arbitrium ) which undergirds it.^[7]

[6] This was first published by Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl as Dürers "Melencolia I": Eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung (Leipzig and Berlin, 1923) and then revised with the help of Raymond Klibansky as Saturn and Melancholy (London and New York, 1964); see especially chapter 2, pp. 241–274, with my criticisms in Platonism , pp. 93–94, 192–194, esp. 194 nn. 29, 31. See also Panofsky's The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer , 4th ed. (Princeton, 1955), pp. 165–171; Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York, 1943), pp. 208–214; and André Chastel, Marsile Ficin et l'art (Geneva and Lille, 1954), pp. 163–171. Eugenio Garin too has drawn an attractive but unwarrantably gloomy portrait of Ficino in "Immagini e simboli in Marsilio Ficino," in his Medioevo e Rinascimento (Bari, 1954; 2d ed., 1961), pp. 288–310. The essay has been translated by Victor A. Velen and Elizabeth Velen in Eugenio Garin, Portraits from the Quattrocento (New York, 1972), pp. 142–160.

See the exchange of letters in 1476 between Ficino and Cavalcanti now in Ficino's third book of Epistulae (Opera , pp. 732–733; trans. in Letters 2:31–34 [nos. 23 and 24]). Burdened with a horoscope where Saturn was almost in the midst of his ascendant sign of Aquarius, where Mars was situated too, Ficino wittily acknowledges his melancholy disposition and says he has to temper it frequently by singing to his lyre. He concludes that a saturnian nature might be "a unique and divine gift" as Aristotle had argued in the Problemata 30.953a. Note that the lyre, presumably the apollonian lyre, is what makes saturnian influence tolerable; for other antidotes see his De Vita 1.10. Corsi had claimed in his Vita Ficini 15 (ed. Marcel in his Marsile Ficin , pp. 685–686; trans. in Letters 3:143) that, though Ficino was publicly cheerful, festive, and witty, his friends suspected he sat long in solitude numb with melancholy. Corsi also states that Ficino shunned all casters of horoscopes, along with disputatious Scholastics, as if they were dogs and snakes (ibid. 19).

[7] As Kaske points out in her "Introduction," pp. 57–59.

Numbers themselves, from the Pythagorean standpoint, are marriage partners. To begin, Ficino states simply that the odd numbers are male, and hence bridegrooms and fathers, because of the strength and vigor in "their middle knot, the one"; and that even numbers are female, and hence brides and mothers.^[8] But this simple view entails endless contradictions, as we shall see. For to argue that all mothers must be evens and at the same time that all evens are bad voids the possibility of there ever being a good child, even in the equilateral series. Thus Ficino goes on to say that gender subordination must also pertain within these categories in that a more outstanding (a higher?) even number should be thought of as the groom for an inferior (a lower?) even bride; and similarly with odd numbers. This must be the key to what would otherwise be a baffling observation; for chapter 13 goes on to declare that the equilaterals—that is, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, and so on—are the filii of good parents; that the unequilaterals—that is, 6, 12, 20, 30, 42, and so on—are the filii of bad; and that the trigons—that is, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, and so on—are the filii of mixed parents. Now filii here must mean "children," not just "sons," since half of the equilaterals and trigons and all of the unequilaterals are even and therefore female. Moreover, the basic spousal union is conceived of as multiplication between adjacent numbers—2x3, 3x4, 4x5, and so forth—and thus as a union between male and female. But such a union produces not the equilateral but the unequilateral series, though the subsequent multiplication of adjacent equilaterals, being male and female, could obviously be seen as a union that produces good offspring, but only insofar as it produces equilaterals (though they will always be even and therefore female!)—for instance, 4x9=36. Furthermore, the unequilaterals, at least the long ones that are Ficino's sole concern, being entirely male, could not be said to beget together, unless, that is, we adopt his second category, namely that a higher number in any one series is the groom for a lower one in the same series.^[9] The same pertains mutatis mutandis for the trigons.

Nevertheless, for Ficino composite numbers are produced by addition as well as by multiplication. Thus, when he declares that the equi-

[8] Cf. Plato, Laws 4.717AB: the gods below "should receive everything in even numbers, and of the second choice, and ill omen, while the odd numbers, and the first choice, and the things of lucky omen, are given to the gods above." Cf. Proclus, Platonic Theology 4.29 (ed. and trans. H. D. Saffrey and L. G. Westerink, 5 vols. to date [Paris, 1968–], 4:86.19–87.4); and Ficino's Commentary on St. Paul 10 (Opera , p. 445): "Numero Deus impari gaudet, id est, ternario."

[9] Ficino does not say that they have to be adjacent, but again remote liaisons are of little or no interest to him, or to the arithmological tradition.

laterals are the children of good parents, he cannot mean that they are the products of 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, and so on; for such would be homoerotic or autoerotic unions, and marriages in the Platonic commonwealth are strictly heterosexual, being designed to produce children for the state. Rather, he must mean that the equilaterals spring from the addition of (presumably adjacent) numbers in the equilateral series—4, for instance, is the child of 1+3, 9 the child of 4+5.^[10] Similarly, the unequilaterals must be the children of bad parents insofar as they spring from the addition of (presumably adjacent) numbers in the unequilateral series—6, for instance, is the child of 2+4. Again, a similar situation pertains for the trigons.

In short, Ficino is not thinking here of the offspring of the spousal series, that is, of products resulting from the multiplication of adjacent odd and even numbers in the regular series of numbers, though initially this is what we might be led to expect; for such spousal unions produce the "bad" unequilaterals as we have seen. Rather, he has in mind offspring that are the sums in the various addition series and notably in the equilateral, unequilateral, and trigon series. However, it is from additions in the equilateral series alone, a series in which each parent possesses "an equal and right complexion" and a unitary power, that children proceed who are "indissoluble, strong, well-ordered, and fertile."^[11]

The fatal "geometric" or "proportional" number is "universal," Ficino declares, since it embraces many kinds of number—odd and even, equilateral and unequilateral, square and oblong, plane and solid, lateral and diagonal—as well as the better harmony (i.e., diapente) and the worse (i.e., diatessaron). Hence it contains within itself "an immense," that is, a universal, "power" to produce both good and bad progeny. It triples, if you will, the ambivalent power of the 12; and as a "discordant concord" it presides alike over birth and death, over benign opportunities and malign occasions. Hence its existence considerably complicates the apparent simplicity of Ficino's injunction

[10] We cannot press the logic of this too curiously, for the resulting sums of the lower numbers soon become greater than the higher numbers in the series to which they are added; e.g., 9 (as the sum of 1+3+5) is greater than 7, the next addend.

[11] Presumably, Ficino would consider unions between nonadjacent numbers in any addition series either illegitimate or sterile unions, and a fortiori those between numbers in different series, though the notion of sterility has a paradoxical cast to it in this mathematical context. Again, we must guard against pushing the logic of Ficino's analogies too far, or taking a passing remark as a principle; and we must also recall that numbers can be members of more than one series.

at the end of chapter 13 to mark the "praiseworthy" and "unpraiseworthy" numbers in the life spans of men, and in the larger spans of nature and the world, in order to seize the moments most opportune for fertility or to shun those most vulnerable to evil and sterility. He clearly envisages a subtle play between the role of such numbers in individual lives and their role in the often longer, sometimes immeasurably longer, destinies of groups, of societies, of peoples—their role, that is, in personal and impersonal, and in national and natural history. In either event the antithetical notions of fertility and sterility apply to every kind of sublunar activity: to the begetting of artistic, moral, intellectual, and spiritual, as well as physical, offspring by men, by political and other social entities, by nature, by time itself.

In addressing the specific issue of physical procreation and the group marriages to be orchestrated and not just arranged by the state's magistrates, Ficino sees Plato as prescribing three things: first, an "equable air"—presumably not just in the sense of climate or season generally, but in the specific sense that the air must be perfectly tempered in its mixture of humidity and heat;^[12] second, a "solid" disposition or habitus , the result of the right temperament and the right age; and third, an astrologically favorable arrangement in the heavens of the Sun, Venus, Jupiter, and the Moon—the life-giving planets.^[13] As a general rule, moreover, the less powerful families in the state should be married into the more powerful in order that marriage might serve as the vital leveler and conditioner of a commonwealth.^[14]

The Republic 's book 5.454–463, and especially 458D and 460E, had established as the optimum time for men to beget children the

[12] Ficino frequently refers in his Epistulae to the temperate air of particular places, particularly at Careggi (his retreat on Monte Vecchio) and at Fiesole; see, for instance, Opera , pp. 843.4 (on Careggi and the reconciling of Apollo with saturnian Pan), 844.2 (on Monte Vecchio), 893.2.

[13] It would be interesting to discover whether Ficino linked this in his mind with any particular Florentine marriage or set of marriages. His letter in praise of marriage to Antonio Pelotti in the fourth book of his Epistulae (Opera , pp. 778.3–779; trans. in Letters 3:69–71 [no. 34]) stresses the parallels between governing the domestic and governing the greater republic, though it says nothing about Pelotti's wedding itself; and the famous letter to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, now in the fifth book of his Epistulae (Opera , pp. 805.2–806; trans. in Letters 4:61–63 [no. 46]), speaks of Lorenzo marrying the nymph humanitas . We might bear in mind that this letter has been adduced as a likely source for the program of Botticelli's masterpiece, the Primavera , recommissioned, apparently, for Lorenzo's wedding to Semiramide Appiani in 1482.

[14] Given the tripartite model for the soul, does Ficino see Plato as advocating the leveling of the irascible power by means of the concupiscible? Or is it rather a question of modulating differing aspects within the irascible power itself?

span between thirty and fifty-five, and for women that between twenty and forty, intervals of twenty-five and twenty years respectively, the first being an equilateral, the second an unequilateral number. But in uniting the right parents together, Ficino argues in chapter 16, the magistrates must do more than check the birth dates of the mating partners; they must ensure that both parents' ingenia are good, and not so much equal as proportionate to each other. He invokes both the Statesman and the Laws 6.772DE (where Plato argues for an earlier age for men to begin procreation, namely twenty-five) in order to gloss the notion that there is an ideal eugenic mixture of gentler temperaments with the more vehement, and that this ensures the procreation of offspring who are neither cowardly nor ferocious.^[15]

Of especial interest in this context is the term ingenium , which can be variously rendered as character, mood, temperament, nature, bent, inclination, disposition, natural abilities, talent, wit, ingenuity, skill. It and its cognates such as ingeniosus and ingeniatus are etymologically related to the word gignere meaning "to beget or create" and to the word genius meaning the attendant daemon or spirit that in Latin folklore watches over our begetting and birth and thereafter over our physical fortune and our eventual death. In the Christian West the daemon-genius became seen too as the guardian over our destiny as an intellectual and spiritual being, until it became equated eventually with our inmost potential, our unique gifts. Geniuses or daemons were even thought to preside over the destinies of places, peoples, movements, and institutions.^[16]Ingenium , in other words, is linked

[15] But at 785B Plato goes on to declare that the span of marriageable years for a woman should be 16 or 20 and for a man 30 or 35. This implies that a considerable difference in age between partners does not in itself render their union untempered.

[16] Of particular importance for Ficino were Plato's several references to Socrates' "warning voice," his daimonion (in the Alcibiades I 103A, 105E, 124C, Apology 31C, 40A, Euthydemus 273A, Euthyphro 3B, Phaedrus 242C, Republic 6.496C, Theages 128D, etc.); his great myths of the guardian daemons in the Phaedo 107DE and in the Republic 617DE and 620DE; his definition in the Symposium 202DE that "every daimonion is midway between a god and a mortal"; and his refusal to accept in the Laws 905D–907D that gods or daemons can be influenced by spells or rituals. Of singular importance too were: Plotinus's treatise on the personal daemon, the Enneads 3.4; the treatise on Platonic daemonology by Apuleius, De Deo Socratis , and that by Plutarch, De Genio Socratis ; Porphyry's De Abstinentia 2; the daemonological sections in Calcidius's In Timaeum , in Iamblichus's De Mysteriis , and, in a hostile context, in Augustine's Civitas Dei ; and the work of Proclus in its entirety. See D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958), pp. 3–29, 44–53; Maurice de Gandillac, "Astres, anges et génies chez Marsile Ficin," in Umanesimo e esoter-

ismo: Atti del V convegno internazionale di studi umanistici , ed. Enrico Castelli (Padua, 1960), pp. 85–119; also my Platonism , chapter 1; and "Summoning Plotinus: Ficino, Smoke, and the Strangled Chickens," In Reconsidering the Renaissance: Papers from the 1987 CEMERS Conference , ed. Mario A. Di Cesare (Binghamton, 1992), pp. 63–88.

from the beginning with the notion of the natural capacities given a person from birth; the innate bent, disposition, and acuity of a thinking individual. Ficino seems to be using it here also to signify what is then passed on to children—the physical, temperamental, and above all mental powers of the father, and secondarily of the mother, that make for balance and therefore fertility, success, and eudaimonia —inner harmony. Given Ficino's Platonic assumptions, the term is linked to the ability and will to acquire knowledge and wisdom; and given his astrological assumptions, he thinks of it as governed in part at least by starry influences, or more questionably by various daemons in the celestial spheres following in the trains of their planetary gods.^[17]

Ingenium seems, furthermore, to be closely linked with the notion of the habitus , from which indeed we and the monks get the word "habit," and which is etymologically linked to the verb habere , "to have." Habitus too can be rendered in English as "character" and "condition," though its range of meanings is quite different from that of ingenium , and it cannot be used to signify the interdependent notions of skill, talent, wit, and ingenuity. For the Schoolmen it became the standard equivalent for the Greek hexis and was therefore linked antithetically with actus , the Greek energeia .^[18] For Ficino's deployment of this difficult technical term, however, let us turn to his magnum opus, the eighteen-book Platonic Theology .^[19] The habitus can refer, he says, to the natural optimum condition of the body, the goal,

[17] In the lexicon Ficino copied out during the 1450s as a tool for learning Greek and now preserved in the Laurenziana's MS Ashb. 1439—see Gentile in Mostra , pp. 23–25 (no. 19)—he merely glosses ingenium along with natura at f. 88r as the equivalent for physis . But this clearly does not conform to his normal usage where ingenium connotes talent, wit, ingenuity, mental acuity. The lexicon has been edited by Rosario Pintaudi as Marsilio Ficino: Lessico Greco- Latino: Laur. Ashb. 1439 (Rome, 1977), where the reference appears on p. 131 (LXIII.16).

[18] See my Icastes: Marsilio Ficino's Interpretation of Plato's "Sophist" (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford, 1989), pp. 137 ff. May I take this opportunity to note some corrections and an addition: p. 12.13 "wiser"; p. 116.19 "which bend"; p. 133.22 "within our minds"; p. 143.3 "nature, while"; p. 149 n. 50.3up "the creative power, the mother of the good things that pertain to"; p. 214.14 "f.62r"; p. 307 col. 1.6up "Icastes" should be a new entry.

For Zeus as a sophist at p. 96.12 ff., cf. Ps.-Plato, Minos 319C (which Ficino considered authentic), and Proclus, In Timaeum 2 (ed. Diehl, 1:316.2–3).

[19] See the index notabilium in Marcel's edition.

if you will, of medicine;^[20] and as such it can be said "to pass into" or "to take over" our nature or to become as it were a second nature that moves us while remaining immobile itself.^[21] It can also "play the part of" or "do duty for" our "natural form."^[22] The soul itself, even when separated from the body, has a habitus by which it is moved.^[23] Ficino believes of course that the soul only (re)acquires its true habitus when it has returned to its "head," that is, to its "intelligence" (mens ).^[24] Indeed, the acquisition of such a habitus becomes man's primary goal, since it contains the soul's formulae idearum which when led forth (eductae ) into act enable the soul to rise from the sensible to the intelligible, and to be joined with the Ideas.^[25] For the true habitus contains the species or Ideas as they are present in us,^[26] the species indeed that correspond to all things that exist in the world in act.^[27] Moreover, because all such forms and species do exist in the world in act, we must postulate a universal habitus , a habitus for the world.^[28] Interestingly, the antithetical relationship with actus enables Ficino on some occasions to use habitus as a synonym for potentiality (though strictly speaking it signifies one kind of potentiality: that which is acquired). Hence he can argue that, whereas individual human beings

[20] Platonic Theology 11.5 (ed. Marcel, 2:129): "Complexio quoque plantarum et animalium quam mirabili medicinae artis solertia utitur in conservando habitu naturali aut recuperando" (Marcel renders habitu here as "équilibre").

[21] Ibid. 15.18 (ed. Marcel, 3:98): "habitus, qui transit in subiecti naturam, immo subiecti naturam usurpat ipse sibi, certam praestat proclivitatem et subiectum movet immobilis."

[22] Ibid. 15.19 (ed. Marcel, 3:103): "habitus non imaginarium quiddam est, sed naturalis formae gerit vicem."

[23] Ibid. 18.8 (ed. Marcel, 3:200): "Ita enim animus habitu movetur et agit, sicut natura formis. . . . Remanere vero in anima separata habitus tum morum tum disciplinarum tam bonos quam malos . . . dicitur habitum ita in naturam converti."

[24] Ibid. 16.7 (ed. Marcel, 3:134–135): "motus et habitus animae, quatenus intellectualis rationalisque est, circuitus esse debeat . . . cum primum animus in caput suum, id est mentem, erectus, in habitum suum prorsus restituetur."

[25] Ibid. 12.1 (ed. Marcel, 2:154): "Igitur mens per formulam suam ex habitu eductam in actum ideae divinae quadam praeparatione subnectitur."

[26] Ibid. 15.16 (ed. Marcel, 3:83–4); "habitum reformandi, . . . respondebimus vim mentis eamdem, quae et contrahit et servat habitum in eius naturam iam pene conversum, contrahere in intima sua speciem atque servare. Siquidem habitus fundatur in speciebus, species in habitu concluduntur. Proinde si habitus fit a mente, specie atque actu, ab aliquo istorum stabilitatem suam nanciscitur. . . . A specie igitur."

[27] Ibid. 13.2 (ed. Marcel, 2:210): "Mens autem . . . habitu quodam et, ut vult Plotinus, actu simul continet omnia."

[28] Ibid. 15.18 (ed. Marcel, 3:97): "si modo actus intelligendi dispositio est ad habitum, et ubi fit dispositio, ibi fit forma, id est habitus, habitus universalis ex universalibus actibus atque formis [est]."

possess all the arts secundum habitum , yet different arts are practiced by different individuals secundum actum ; but in the angel all the arts are united habitu atque actu .^[29] On other occasions, however, he finds it useful to preserve the distinction between one's innate potentia and one's acquired or nurtured habitus .^[30] What makes for the acquisition of a perfect habitus , whether of the body, the soul, the human mind, or the angelic mind, is both praeparatio and affectio .^[31] The habitus is thus tied conceptually both to the notion of form—the habitus being the condition of ourselves or of some part of ourselves which most nearly approximates to the perfection of our form—and to the notion of power, the power that we have been born with but have nurtured by praeparatio and by what the De Numero Fatali refers to alternatively as disciplina . As the fifth reference (that from 16.7) suggests, we can even think of it as the potentiality in our soul for becoming pure mind in the actuality of its perfect circular motion, the motion-in-rest of contemplation. Immobile itself, it nevertheless provides the soul with the "proclivity" for the absolute motion that is its blessed, its eternal life.

In the De Numero Fatali Ficino mentions the habitus in chapters 2.8–9, 3.113–115, and 16.1 (title), 21–25.^[32] His most important observation, however, occurs in chapter 12.49–51: "as long as all proportions and harmonies of this kind prevail among mankind, then a good habitus endures in bodies, spirits, souls, and states." In other words, the object of the philosopher-guardians is to ensure by way of their determination of breeding times that the republic's citizens are endowed with a good habitus in their bodies, spirits, and souls, the assumption being that we need to achieve this optimum condition at all three levels simultaneously.^[33] If this threefold goal is achieved, then

[29] Ibid.: "Artes igitur dividantur oportet in hominum specie secundum actum, quia alii alias meditentur, non tamen secundum habitum, quia singuli cunctas possideant. Siquidem in angelo quolibet uniuntur cunctae habitu atque actu."

[30] E.g., at 14.3 (ed. Marcel, 2:258).

[31] Ibid. 14.6 (ed. Marcel, 2:268): "Nam praeparatio sive affectio formam habitumque respicit, atque certa quaedam affectio certum habitum"; and again 15.19 (ed. Marcel, 3:102): "praeparationes, quantum ad certos habitus conferunt atque cum illis proportione aliqua congruunt, tantum habitus diversos impediunt."

[32] "when number reaches six, which is perfect, it designates the perfect habit" (2.8–9); "For the condition of mobile nature does not suffer it to remain for a long time in the same or in a similar habit" (3.113–115); "concerning the body's habit" (16.1); "even habits are generated from odd numbers . . . but odd habits are generated from even numbers" (16.21–22); "the opportune time for public marriages requires evenness in the air and solidity in each body's habit, desire, and age" (16.23–25).

[33] This points to a holistic obsession in the Platonic tradition with the notion

of harmony binding every ontological level and thus of uniting a beautiful soul to a beautiful body. Set against it are the arguments of the Phaedo and the vivid example of the virtuous soul of Socrates trapped in a satyr's body.

the state itself will possess a good habitus , at least for its allotted time; for ultimately, observes chapter 3's concluding line, "the condition of mobile Nature does not suffer it to remain in the same or a similar habitus for any length of time."^[34]

In arguing Platonically in chapter 16 that our "composed body" is a "discordant concord"—like, we recall, the geometric number—Ficino turns predictably to two analogies, a musical one and a mathematical one, for what endows it with concord, namely an even habitus . "Even habitus " are like the harmonies of different voices in a choir, he says, the different harmonies that unite in the diapason, and they are like the sums (and clearly not just the even sums which alternate with the odd) that are generated from the odd numbers in the equilateral addition series. "Odd habitus ," by contrast, are generated from even numbers, meaning from the even numbers in the unequilateral addition series (and not from the alternating even square numbers in the equilateral series).^[35] Thus an even-tempered habitus is like any equilateral: as a sum it is the child of the odd numbers, but as a product it is the result of equality and balance, of a number having multiplied itself, raised itself to a higher power. It is the soul's inner concord, and when joined to the discordant body it creates the discordant concord of human harmony on earth.^[36]

If the habitus is a kind of mathematical and specifically a geometrical power—indeed, in the Platonic Theology , as we have seen, Ficino treats it as the equivalent almost of our combined potentialities—then must we think of it as functioning like such a power, at least in particular contexts? In other words, does the habitus of the soul (and of its

[34] Interestingly, Ficino is now contrasting the permanent "condition" of "mobile Nature" with the transitory existence of a particular "habitus."

[35] The latter would only be possible if we conceived of odd habits arising from the addition of the even sum of the preceding odd numbers to the next odd number, as 25=16+9 where 16 is the sum of 1+3+5+7. But this recondite possibility cannot be what Ficino has in mind.

[36] Does Socrates' argument in the Phaedo that the soul itself is not a harmony prevent the habitus of the soul from being a harmony? And if so, is Ficino disregarding the Phaedo 's position at this point? Ficino addresses the discrepancy between the Phaedo 's claim that the soul is not a harmony and the Timaeus 's counter claim that it is in his Timaeus Commentary, chapter 28 (Opera , p. 1451.2). At 69B the Timaeus argues that the Demiurge created everything with harmonies; at 81E–82A and 86A–87C that there is a harmonious tempering of the elements in us; and at 87D–88C that soul and body must be harmoniously balanced together.

spirit and its body) work like the power, rational or irrational, of the hypotenuse of an isosceles right-angled triangle (or of the diagonal of a square constituted from two such triangles, which is the same thing); and is it therefore equal to double the square of either side (i.e., to the sum of the squares of both sides)? If so, we must entertain the possibility that the Pythagorean theorem has come to haunt the face of Ficino's faculty psychology. But what is the evidence that this is anything more than just an arresting image or a mere turn of phrase?

The traditional schema of the point progressing to the line to the plane to the solid goes back at least to the Pythagoreans and is repeated throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages.^[37] Ficino turns to it on occasions to help define the serial subordination of the four hypostases in the Plotinian metaphysical system, the One, Mind, Soul, and Body;^[38] and in doing so he often identifies the point with the One and the solid with Body—examples abound throughout his work. But he also identifies the line (and certainly the circular line) with Mind, and the plane with Soul.^[39] While, to my knowledge, he nowhere advances all the elements of this series of analogies in one formal argument, he does introduce them dispersedly, and the schema obviously serves as one of his paradigms for metaphysical progression and hierarchical subordination. The implications for our understanding of the soul's internal structure and of its position on the Platonic scale of being in Ficino are extraordinary, I believe—though no scholar so far has ventured to entertain them.

Ficino's governing text here is the Timaeus 53C ff. on the role of

[37] Ficino was probably introduced to it in Aristotle: see, for example, the Topics 4.141b5–22 and Metaphysics 3.5.1001b26–1002b11.

[38] On Ficino's variations on this system, see Kristeller, Philosophy , pp. 106–108, 167–169, 266, 370, 384, 400–401; and my "Ficino's Theory of the Five Substances and the Neoplatonists' Parmenides ," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 12 (1982), 19–44, with further references. See also Tamara Albertini, "Marsilio Ficino: Das Problem der Vermittlung von Denken und Welt in einer Metaphysik der Einfachheit" (Diss. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, 1991).

[39] See, for instance, Ficino's letter to Lotterio Neroni, the penultimate letter in the third book of his Epistulae (Opera , p. 750.3; trans. in Letters 2:82–83 [no. 65]). Here he speaks of being either in "the undivided and motionless center" as in the one God, or in "the divided and mobile circumference" as in heaven and the elements, or in the "individual lines" that mediate between them, beginning at the center as undivided and motionless but gradually becoming divided and "mutable" as they approach the circumference. In these lines are the souls and minds. Cf. Pico della Mirandola, Conclusiones DCCCC, Conclusiones secundum Mathematicam Pythagorae , nos. 13 ("Quilibet numerus planus aequilaterus animam symbolizat") and 14 ("Quilibet numerus linearis symbolizat deos") in his Opera Omnia (Basel, 1572), p. 79.

triangles, duly bracketed by Timaeus himself as presenting views that are only "probable." Timaeus introduces the two kinds of right-angled triangles, the isosceles and the scalene (specifically the half-equilateral), that are the constituent parts of the regular solids constituting the four elements and the cosmos itself (to pan 55C4–6). At 69C ff. he goes on to describe the creation by the Demiurge's sons of the irrational soul and at 73B ff. their taking of the primary triangles (i.e., before their combination into the regular solids) to mix them in "due proportions" to make the marrow, which will serve as a "universal seed" and a vehicle for the soul. Ficino clearly rejoiced in some at least of the figural extensions (with the puns this term implies) of the Pythagorean mathematics which Timaeus is propounding in this, Plato's master dialogue on cosmology (second only in its overall authority to the dialogue named after another and even greater Pythagorean, Parmenides).^[40] For in his own Timaeus Commentary he had explored the implications of this analysis and arrived at an interpretation that identified the soul itself as the exemplary triangle, its triple powers corresponding to the three angles and the three sides of the archetypal geometrical figure. At the end of chapter 28, having observed that "mathematicals accord with the soul, for we judge both of them to be midway between divine and natural things," Ficino proceeds as follows:

We use not only numbers to describe the soul but also [geometrical] figures so that we can think of it by way of the numbers as incorporeal but consider it by way of the figures as naturally declining towards bodies. The triangle accords with the soul; for just as the triangle from one angle extends to two more, so the soul, which flows out from an indivisible and divine substance, sinks into the entirely divisible nature of the body. If we compare the soul as it were to things divine, then it seems divided; for what the divine achieve through one unchanging power and in an instant, the soul achieves through many changing powers and actions and over intervals of time. But if we compare the soul to natural things, then we judge it to be indivisible. For it has no sundry parts as they have, separated here and there in place, but it is whole even in any one part of the whole; nor, as they do, does it pursue everything in motion and in time, but it attains something in a moment and pos-

[40] In his Timaeus Commentary 1 (Opera , p. 1438.2), Ficino followed Proclus (who followed Iamblichus) in linking the two dialogues and attributing Pythagorean speakers and a Pythagorean inspiration to them; see Proclus's In Timaeum 1 (ed. Diehl, 1:1.25 ff., 7.17 ff., 13.15–14.2, etc.). We might note that together they constituted the climactic second part of the Neoplatonists' two-part teaching cycle, for which see L. G. Westerink, Anonymous Prolegomena to Platonic Philosophy (Amsterdam, 1962), pp. xxxvii–xxxviii.

sesses it eternally. In this we can compare the soul, moreover, to the triangle, because the triangle is the first figure of those figures which consist of many lines and are led forth into extension (in rectum ). Similarly, the soul is the first of all to be divided up into many powers—powers that are subjected in it to the understanding—and it seems to be led forth into extension when it sinks from divinity down into nature. In this descent it flows out from the highest understanding down into three lower powers, that is, into discursive reasoning, into sense, and into the power of quickening, just as the triangle too, having been led forth from the point (signum ),^[41] is drawn out into three angles. But I say the soul is the first in the genus of all to be mingled from many powers in a way, and to fall, so to speak, into extension (in rectum ). For above the soul the angelic mind requires no inferior powers within itself at all. The mind is pure and the mind is whole and sufficient; likewise it does not turn to inferiors, but it is turned back to divinity alone (from whence it exists) in the manner of a circle. And therefore its action is compared to a circle. For its action is one and equal, just as from a line that is one and equal comes the circle and with it a certain wonderful capacity for being both. Moreover, the circle is the first and last of the figures: first, because it has been enclosed by one line; last, because the figures constituted from the many lines, in that they submit to many faces [i.e., become polyhedra], to that extent they seem to approximate gradually to the circle's form as to their end. Similarly, the intellect too is the first of all to be created by God; and the intellectual countenance,^[42] that is, the absolute order of things, is the last of all to blaze back in the mirror of nature, to which as to their end the natural forms gradually approach ever more closely.^[43]

[41] Cf. Ficino's Timaeus Commentary 22 (Opera , p. 1449.3): "Quatuor apud mathematicum: signum, linea, planum atque profundum."

[42] With a play on the preceding reference to the "many faces" of polyhedra.

[43] Platonis Opera Omnia (1491), fol. 246v (sig. G[6]v) (i.e., Opera , pp. 1452–1453 [misnumbered 1450 and 1417]): "Congruunt animae mathematica, utraque enim inter divina et naturalia media iudicantur. Congruunt musici numeri animae plurimum, mobiles enim sunt; proptereaque animam quae est principium motionis rite significant. Non solum vero per numeros sed etiam per figuras describitur anima ut per numeros quidem incorporea cogitetur, per figuras autem cognoscatur ad corpora naturaliter declinare. Convenit triangulus animae. Quia sicut triangulus ab uno angulo in duos protenditur, sic anima ab individua divinaque substantia profluens in naturam corporis labitur penitus divisibilem. Ac si cum divinis conferatur, divisa videtur; quae enim illa per unam et stabilem virtutem agunt atque subito, haec per plures mutabilesque vires actionesque peragit ac temporis intervallis. Sin autem conferatur cum naturalibus, indivisa censetur; non enim alibi habet partes alias loco disiunctas ut illa [Op. alia], sed etiam [Op. est] in qualibet totius parte tota; neque omnia mobiliter temporeque persequitur sicut illa, sed nonnihil etiam subito [Op. subiecto] consequitur aeterneque possidet. Licet in hoc insuper animam cum triangulo comparare, quod triangulus prima figura est earum quae pluribus constantes lineis producuntur in rectum; anima similiter prima omnium in plures distribuitur vires quae in ipsa intelligentiae subiguntur, ac produci videtur in rectum dum a divinitate labitur in naturam. In quo quidem descensu ab intelligentia summa in tres profluit vires inferiores, id est, in discursum quendam rationalem, in sensum, in vegetandi virtutem, quemadmodum et triangulus a signo productus in tres deducitur angulos. Dico autem animam ex omnium genere primam

et ex pluribus quodammodo viribus commisceri et in rectum, ut ita dixerim, cadere. Mens enim angelica super [Plat. Op. semper] animam inferioribus intra se nullis indiget viribus, sed pura [Op. plura] mens est totaque mens atque sufficiens. Item ad inferiora non vergit sed in divinitatem solam, unde est, circuli more convertitur. Ideoque eius actio circulo comparatur. Una enim actio est et aequalis, sicut ex una et aequali linea circulus et mira quaedam utriusque capacitas. Praeterea circulus prima [Op. om. ] est et ultima figurarum: prima quidem quia una circum contentus est linea; ultima quia figurae ex pluribus lineis constitutae, quo [Op. qua] plures subeunt facies eo propinquius [Op. proquinquius] paulatim ad circuli formam quasi finem videntur accedere. Similiter et intellectus omnium primus procreatur a Deo; et intellectualis vultus, id est, absolutus ordo rerum ultimus omnium in speculo naturae refulget. Ad quem [Op. om. ] naturales formae quasi finem magis gradatim magisque accedunt."

Chapter 28 is entitled "De compositione animae et quod per quinarium in ea componenda opportune proceditur."

Given this fully worked-out analogy of the soul with the triangle, preeminently the right-angled triangle, and given that the triangle is the premier figure of the planar realm, Ficino clearly thinks of soul, or at least of soul in its fallen triplicity as planar.^[44] Indeed, given the variety of geometrical and arithmetical structures that govern our notion of a two-dimensional realm, the plane and its subdivisions are ideally suited to modeling the complex and ambivalent status of soul and its various faculties as intermediary between the three-dimensional body and the paradoxically linear or circular realm of pure mind—linear because it is both one and many, and circular because it is "one and equal" like the line that returns upon itself to constitute the figure that is not a figure but rather the principle and end of figures. Furthermore, the secret of the planar realm of the triangle for Ficino is the notion of power, of squaring and square-rooting;^[45] for it is this alone which enables us to comprehend the complex, invisible proportionality and comparability of hypotenuse to side.

If the habitus is, or functions like, a planar, and specifically a square, number or the root of such a number, it would serve in unexpected ways to validate the efficacy of, and to enlarge the scope of, a purely

[44] In his Timaeus Commentary 34 (Opera , p. 1460), having discussed the lambda numbers, Ficino goes on to describe a metaphysical triangle governed by the double, sesquialteral, and sesquitertial properties: its apex is essence and its two sides consist of the infinite, difference, and motion, and of the limit, identity, and rest (the fundamental ontological categories explored in the Sophist and Philebus , see my Icastes , chapter 2). He concludes with postulating a corresponding triangle for the soul: its unity is its essence, its will the infinite, its understanding the limit, its imagination difference, its reason identity, its power to procreate (generandi vis ) motion, its power to join (connectendi virtus ) rest. The whole topic awaits investigation.

[45] In Greek the term dunamis can refer either to the square of a number or to its square root; compare, for instance, Plato's Republic 9.587D9 (square) with the Theaetetus 147D3 ff. (square root). See Thomas L. Heath, A History of Greek Mathematics , 2 vols. (Oxford, 1921), 1:155.

mathematical magic and with it privilege the beings preeminently gifted in Ficino's view for the subtleties of mathematics, namely the daemons. We might imagine a special mathematical dimension for the lower daemons on the one hand in supervising the diet, regimen, and exercise that ensure an even habitus in the body; and for the higher daemons on the other in disciplining the soul—over and beyond, that is, instructing it in ordinary mathematical procedures—so that it too attains an even habitus . But nowhere would their role be more arresting than in the case of the habitus of the spiritus , since the spiritus is for Ficino the object of manipulation by magicians using the resources of natural and of astral magic (and using perhaps, however unconsciously, the mathematical structures and powers that underlie such magics). The habitus of the spirit, the hypotenuse if you will of the spirit, would be subject a fortiori to expressly mathematical manipulation, and especially to the manipulation of human and daemonic geometers, those skilled above all others in the understanding of planes and surfaces. It would lend a novel and dramatic dimension to the monitory exhortation in the vestibule to the Platonic Academy, "Let no one enter here who is not an adept in geometry,"^[46] and to Plutarch's declaration, in a phrase he attributes to Plato, that "God is always working as a geometer" ("Aei theos geômetrei ").^[47]

Ficino had an abiding fascination for the branch of applied geometry with a singular role in daemonic magic, namely the science of optics.^[48] I have argued elsewhere that Ficino seems to have thought of the magician using his own spiritus as a mirror to catch, focus, and reflect the streams or rays of idola or images that flow ceaselessly out from animate and inanimate objects.^[49] For the idola , and the spiritus that focuses the idola , are the means whereby he can work with and work upon anything, living as well as inert, from a distance. Aspects of

[46] Ficino gives a Latin rendering of this inscription in his Vita Platonis (sub Discipuli Platonis praecipui ) (Opera , p. 766.1; trans. in Letters 3:38) and glosses it thus: "Understand that Plato was intending this to apply not only to the proper measurement of lines but also of [our] passions (affectuum )." See Chapter 1, n. 1 above.

[47] Quaestiones Convivales 8.2 (Moralia 718B–720C, specifically 718BC); the treatise is entitled: "Pôs Platôn elege ton theon aei geômetrein ." We might note that in his De Defectu Oraculorum 12 (Moralia 416C), Plutarch says that Xenocrates assimilated the equilateral triangle (where all parts are equal) to the divine class, the scalene (where all parts are unequal) to the mortal, and the isosceles (where they are mixed) to the daemonic. See Richard Heinze, Xenokrates (Leipzig, 1892), pp. 166–167, fr. 24; and Fowler, Mathematics of Plato's Academy , p. 299.

[48] See now Stephan Otto, "Geometric und Optik in der Philosophie des Marsilio Ficino," Philosophisches Jahrbuch 98 (1991), 290–313.

[49] Icastes , chapter 5.

his skill may be irrational or sophistical, and controlled in large part by his phantasy; but a particular magician, one skilled in mathematics, Ficino imagines as being able to draw upon numbers, I believe, and notably upon figured numbers, to effect a rational magic by way of his spiritus upon the idola . Such a magician might even consciously program his spiritus like a radar dish, tilting and rotating its planes according to geometrical formulas epitomizing and controlling particular magical operations, those formulas in other words best suited to affecting the dimensions, the angles, the powers that govern a physical world constituted from triangles and from the five regular solids to which they give rise. After all, such a geometer-magus would be exercising his sovereignty over the powers governing the optical triangles formed by the objects and the idola he wished to perceive or manipulate, the reflecting surface of his spiritus , and the line of his intelligence. Obviously such triangles would themselves consist of laterals and diagonals and have irrational and irrational powers; and double the sum of the degrees of their varying angles would invariably equal the degrees of the perfect circle of the understanding.

In exercising these geometrical powers, the geometer-magus would be drawing upon the computative and manipulative skills that Ficino and the later Platonic tradition he inherited had already assigned to the daemons. For daemons are not only the masters of mathematics, they also preside over the world of light and its optical effects and illusions, and preside too over the singular role that mirrors and prisms, reflections and refractions, play in our understanding of, and in our manipulation of, light. Moreover, they are the denizens preeminently of the world of surfaces, planes, and powers, and only the basest of them choose regularly to inhabit the three-dimensional cubicity of the physical world. In this they resemble other higher souls; for all souls are properly inhabitants, in Ficino's Platonic imagination, of the realm of planes and surfaces, though they may be imprisoned for a time in solids. In that they aspire to attain the intellectual realm, however, to become pure intellects and to contemplate the mathematicals and the Ideas of numbers, they aspire, mathematically speaking, to reach the "one and equal" line, the circling line of Nous, and ultimately to return to the unity at the apex of intelligible reality, to the One in its transcendence. Specifically, given the unique role of the triangle in Platonic mathematics and psychology (and of the Pythagorean theorem in computing the relationship of the power of the hypotenuse to the powers of the sides), we must think of the highest rational souls, those of the daemons, or at least of the higher ones who dwell far

above the terraqueous orb, as the lords of triangularity and of the "comparability" that governs it, triangularity being the essence of the planar realm. We might even speculate over the devious ways the daemons practice on our mathematical sanity with irrational hypotenuses and surds!

The planar world occurs of course in Nature herself in the mirrors of lakes and pools and of other water and ice surfaces, though one can think of snow, salt, sand, and even various rock surfaces, as well as of certain mist and cloud phenomena, that have planar qualities and whose surfaces reflect or refract light. Preeminently, however, it occurs in the natural faceting of crystals and precious stones. It is in the play of light on such planar surfaces that the presence of daemonic geometry and its science of powers can best be glimpsed by the geometermagus. On occasions he is able even to use his own spiritus as a mirror-plane to capture and affect the idola , immaterial and material alike, that stream off objects, and to refigure them by way of recourse to the laws of figured numbers. For physical light is the intermediary between the sensible and the purely intelligible realms, and in this regard it is spiritual in the sense that it resembles, and therefore, given the ancient formula that like affects like,^[50] can be influenced by, the spiritus , the substance that mediates between the body and the soul and serves as the link, as light itself does, between the otherwise divided realms of the pure forms and of informed matter.

It was this eccentric nexus of concerns which, I believe, slowly emerged in Ficino's mind and led him to posit a problematic set of interdependent connections between magic, geometry, figural arithmetic, the daemons, and light in its various manifestations. Underlying the nexus is the notion of a mathematical power and the mysterious hold it exercises over our understanding of both planes and solids. For with this understanding, predictably, comes actual power to affect and change. In all this we can glimpse the profound impact on him of Plato's Pythagorean mathematics, and specifically of the Pythagorean theorem, and with it of Theon's discussion of diagonal powers on the one hand, and of Plato's fanciful but influential presentation in the Timaeus of a triangle-based physics on the other.

The relationship in Ficino's mind between optics, and notably daemonic optics, and music—that is, between light-wave theory and sound-wave theory and the "harmonic" proportions that govern them—has yet to be fully explored. What we must now realize, how-

[50] Cf. Plato's Gorgias 510B, Lysis 214B, Republic 1.329A, 4.425C, etc.

ever, is that for him the plane numbers and especially the square numbers occupy a mysterious but all-powerful position between the prime numbers and the cubes; and the mathematical functions of squaring and of square-rooting are envisaged as the powers that above all govern these plane numbers and therefore govern two-dimensional space. This is the space that constitutes preeminently the realm of the daemons, or at least of the airy daemons and the daemons inferior to them, whose spiritual "bodies" or airy "envelopes" we might think of as themselves functioning like two-dimensional surfaces, governed by their habitus , by squares and by square roots. Hence the manipulative power the daemons exercise over all two-dimensional surfaces, including each other's, and hence their innate attraction to such surfaces and especially to crystals, to faceted stones and gems, and to mirrors. But this entire planar world is, from a Platonic viewpoint, presided over by the Pythagorean geometry of hypotenuses and thus of triangles, themselves vestiges of the greatest triangle of all, the Trinity. From the geometry of the triangle we ascend to the more mysterious geometry still of the circle and thence of the point, of the unextended monad that is the image of the One.

Underlying the related concepts of the ingenium , and of the habitus of souls, spirits, and bodies, and underlying particularly their role in eugenics, Platonically conceived, is the central notion as we have seen of proportion. For the best offspring are generated, not by the mating of equals—for how can the male and the female be biologically equal?—but by the mating of unequals that are proportionate to each other. This profound commitment to proportionality underlies, of course, Ficino's and his contemporaries' hierarchy of values for marriage, for social and economic justice (which were deeply indebted to Plato's and to Aristotle's notions of distributive justice). It also underlies their artistic, educational, medical, and psychological ideas, centered as they were around the cognate idea of temperance. Indeed, it has profound and far-reaching ethical, epistemological, and ontological implications at almost every turn. Proportionality, moreover, governed the medieval and Renaissance science of harmonics, the key to the twin disciplines of music and astronomy. Hence the logic of the order in which such handbooks as Theon's and Nicomachus's treat of figural mathematics (that is, of arithmetic and geometry), stereometry, astronomy, and music.^[51]

[51] Ficino again justifies this order in a 1477 letter to Giovanni Francesco Ippoliti now in the fourth book of his Epistulae (Opera , pp. 761.3–763.1; trans. in Letters

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The subject is complex but we should look briefly at some of the psychological extensions Ficino himself raises. Chapter 12 sets out the basic model: proportion should dictate the relationships between our soul's three powers—those Ficino had invoked in chapter 28 of his Timaeus Commentary, as we have seen: the rational power (divided as it is between the exercise of the speculative intellect and that of the discursive reason), the irascible power (best conceived of as spiritedness, as vigorous striving), and the concupiscible or appetitive power.^[52] During the golden, the saturnian age, the relationship of the intellect to the reason was in the ratio of 4:3, that of the reason to the irascible power in the ratio of 3:2, and that of the irascible power to the concupiscible power in the ratio of 2:1.^[53] These are the three primary ratios, and they are contained musically within the diapason. During the silver, the jovian age, moreover, the same proportions pertained except that the ratio of the intellect to the reason was reversed. If we ever hope to recapture the conditions of either of these two Hesiodic ages, we must use our disciplina to ensure that these proportions are observed. But before disciplina can be effective, the same proportions, he argues, must be established, presumably by diet and by regimen, in the medical spiritus , which is composed of blood, meaning here the sanguineous vapor compounded from the vapors of all four elements.^[54] In it air must exceed fire by 4:3, fire exceed water by 3:2, and water exceed earth by 2:1, the spirit being above all an airy substance related to the supremely airy beings, the daemons. In

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[3] 28–31 [no. 18]) on the grounds that numbers come before figures (meaning planes), figures before solids, solids at rest before solids in motion, and motion before "the order and reasons of voices" (meaning the musical ratios) that proceed from the motion of the heavenly spheres. Ficino derived the order from Plato's Republic 7.525B–531C, which goes on to sing "the hymn to dialectic" as the crown of the five disciplines.

[52] Following Timaeus 69C ff. and 89E ff. Other key texts on the tripartite soul are the Republic 4.436AB, 4.439D–442D, and 9.588C–589C, and the Phaedrus 246A ff. and 253C–254E. Cf. Ficino's letter of 1 July 1477 to Giovanni Nesi now in his fourth book of Epistulae (Opera , pp. 774.2–776.1; trans. in Letters 3:59–62).

[53] In his Conclusiones secundum Mathematicam Pythagorae (see n. 39 above), nos. 8, 9, and 10, Pico had declared to the contrary that the musical proportions governing the relationship of the reason to the concupiscible power, of the irascible power to the concupiscible, and of the reason to the irascible power were respectively the diapason, diapente, and diatesseron (i.e., the ratios 2:1, 3:2, and 4:3).

[54] In the De Amore 7.4 (ed. Marcel, p. 247) Ficino had defined spiritus as "a vapor of the blood." For the various senses of spiritus in Ficino see my Platonism , pp. 102–103n. In his provocative study, Eros et magie à la Renaissance, 1484 (Paris, 1984), translated into English by Margaret Cook as Eros and Magic in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1987), Ioan Petru Couliano does not observe Ficino's distinctions with sufficient care. This is a pity since spiritus , spiritual magic, and Ficino form the nub of his concerns.

terms of the four qualities of hot, cold, wet, and dry, the spirit is preeminently hot and dry like the heart from which its vapors arise, and unlike the two other major organs, the liver, which is hot and wet, and the brain, which is wet and cold. However, Ficino accepts the traditional prescription that in general heat should exceed coldness in us by 2:1, wetness exceed dryness by 3:2, and heat exceed wetness by 4:3. We need a daily cooking that would not be possible without these governing ratios, since heat is more important for life than wetness and is as it were that which "forms" wetness. Hence the propitiousness of such climates, places, seasons, airs, and times as observe the like proportions.^[55] If they cease to obtain in us or in the surrounding air, then we die. The consequences of unbalanced proportions for nature, however—those that are themselves the result of the disruption of such primary proportions among the planets as preside over nature—are cataclysmic inundations and conflagrations.

As long as men individually and as a group are governed by these proportions, then a good habitus can be said to govern their bodies, spirits, and souls, and to govern the republic in which they dwell. Such a habitus can be maintained by disciplina . But at some point, either prematurely if disciplina is lacking, or at the duly appointed time, men begin to age and the body politic likewise. Such a duly appointed time for the state occurs at the coming of the fatal number of 1728 units—and presumably Ficino has years rather than months or days or still lesser units in mind. Individuals, whatever their own proportions and appointed times, are necessarily subject to this greater cycle of change. And 1728 is so significant precisely because, as the cube of 12, it contains the three primary ratios, 12 being, as Ficino observes, the number "in which the proportions and harmonies are first unfolded." Even at the squaring of 12—that is, even after 144 years have elapsed—"a great mutation occurs among men," though we can exploit such a mutation if we exercise our disciplina . But whatever we do by way of disciplina , we cannot prevent the greatest of all fatal mutations occurring at the 1728th year, the "highest end" of a state's destined life, and therefore of the lives of those citizens lucky or unlucky enough to be born into the state at that culminating time. For

[55] Interestingly the site of Plato's Academy was notoriously insalubrious! and Ficino's scholarly haunts were by his own admission a deal more attractive (see n. 12 above). In his epitome for the Critias (Opera , p. 1487), he examines the various conflicting views in antiquity as to whether the air of Attica was or was not tempered, views he derived, incidentally, from Proclus's In Timaeum 2 (ed. Diehl, 1:162.11–30), glossing the Timaeus 24C.

thereafter the fatal "law"—and this is fraught with Platonic connotations from the myth of Er at the end of the Republic —requires a falling away, though such falling away can occur long before if the magistrates have allowed the state's disciplina to relax and therefore imprudentia to take over. Ficino adds, inconsistently perhaps, that sometimes an infelicitas —presumably some kind of inscrutable misfortune—can also thwart the best of disciplines before the onset of the fatal decline.

At this point in his twelfth chapter Ficino cites the contentious passage from Aristotle's Politics 5, where Aristotle nevertheless seems to be agreeing with Plato that the onset of the fatal mutation is marked by the number that is among those whose proportions are "contained in the ratio of 4:3 joined to the 5." As we have seen, Ficino interprets Aristotle to mean that Plato is signifying first the 12, the number that contains, like the diapason, the three ratios of 4:3, 3:2, and 2:1; and then the process by which 12 becomes a plane as the equilateral 144, and next, "at the third augmentation," a solid as 1728. Furthermore, Aristotle also introduces the contrasting notions of "nature" and of "discipline."

Behind this analysis of the principles of auspicious breeding and sturdy citizen disciplina lies a haunting sense of inauspicious time and of fatal necessity, and a classical-medieval awareness, found memorably too in the Book of Ecclesiastes, of the inexorable cycling of history. Both are seemingly at odds with Ficino's humanist commitments to the theme of the dignity of man and his will and the autonomy of his choices and deliberations. We are many degrees distant certainly from the naive anthropocentrism sometimes attributed to Ficino (and to Pico) by historians in the Burckhardtian tradition, often in laudatory or admiring tones.^[56] But this duality of mood and expectation was implicit in Plato's own dual prescriptions in the Republic . On the one hand, and with the zeal of a dedicated social engineer, he had detailed in book 5 the correct times and conditions to mate couples; and on the other, and with the disengagement of a quietist or contemplative, he had spoken in book 8 of the ineluctable sway exercised over such mundane concerns by the greater numbers of time. In effect, two very

[56] Guilty in this regard are the stimulating chapters recently devoted to Ficino and Pico by William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden in The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore and London, 1989), pp. 101–133, where to Ficino is attributed an "unrepressed, unembarrassed, trouble-free" account of "self-deification" (p. 114), and where "Piconian man" appears as "Pac-Man, existing only in the act of devouring the essential excellences of others" (p. 120)!

different scales of time were being addressed. The deliberated mixing by the philosopher-magistrates of castes, classes, types, and temperaments in order to produce the tempered, equable citizen in a tempered citizen body was an on-going problem dominated not only by the notion of the spousal and breeding numbers and their computation for each individual couple, but also by general considerations of seasonal propitiousness and fecundity and of astral influences. The magistrates of book 5 would have required constant access to an almanac of optimum mating times based on predictions concerning the climate, the season, and the positions of the stars; indeed, reference to such an almanac would have been part of their responsibilities, part of their exercise of the city's disciplina . But they could never have been expected to predict, at least on rational computational grounds, the onset ofthe fatal turn. The cycle is too immense for any ordinary mortal to be able to obtain a perspective on it: to plot the moment of its inception or termination and thus the period of its duration and his own location in that period. Such a determination, as we shall see, can onlybe made, if made at all, by a divinely inspired prophet or prophetastrologer.

Nonetheless, Ficino's optimism tries to assert itself: even the fatal time, once it is upon us, can provide us with an opportunity, not an occasion—to use his own antithetical terms; can provide us, that is, with the possibility of changing some things qualitatively for the better, and not merely, as in Aristotle, with an explanation as to why an ideal republic begins to disintegrate. This is because 1728 is a number that embraces various kinds of numbers, benign and malign, those signifying favorable as well as those signifying unfavorable conditions. Moreover, Ficino again adduces the mathematical schema that presents us with the cube returning to the plane, thence to the line, and thence to the point, implicitly rejecting in the process the alternative notion of a collapse into the mathematics of unequilaterals or worse. He is thereby suggesting that Plato intends both an emanation and a return of numbers and of the years they signify to the One, a systole and a diastole of time, and not an end of time for the republic, a fatal and inexorable mutation into something inferior, though this is what Plato probably had in mind.

The troubling element in this analysis remains the stars and prediction based upon the stars. For it is the knowledge of the figures, the "crossings" and "the relative reversals and progressions," of their "choric dances" as the Timaeus 40C calls them, which lies at the heart

of our sense of cyclicality and therefore of rebirth and renewal,^[57] dances that will determine the advent of the fatal number and signify therefore whether our disciplina can yet prevail. To this astrological dimension of the De Numero Fatali we must now turn.

[57] See Garin, Lo zodiaco , chapter 1.