Divine Fury (15 page)

Ficino followed Plato in elaborating four distinct varieties of divine madness. He subscribed to a more favorable view of poetry than his predecessor, but he concurred with him in ranking the divine fury of love—prepared by philosophy, the love of wisdom—as the highest type. “The most powerful and most excellent of all [forms of madness] is amatory,” Ficino stressed in his commentary on the
Symposium
, fittingly entitled
De Amore
—“most powerful, I say, on account of the fact that all the others necessarily need it. For we achieve neither poetry nor mysteries, nor prophecy[,] without vast zeal, burning piety, and sedulous worship of divinity. But what else do we call zeal, piety, and worship except love?” For Ficino, the divine madness of love permeated all the furors—it lay behind true oracular, prophetic, and mystical power just as it animated the ecstatic visions of the genuine poet, who was blessed by God with the ability to see and re-create the beauty of the world. All those special abilities were divine gifts, which raised us to something higher than ourselves. That was the transformative power of the
furor divinus
, without which, Ficino judged, “no man has ever been great.”
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But how was this power conferred? Plato, recall, had been somewhat ambiguous on the point, entertaining the notion that the heavenly seeker was possessed by a higher being while also suggesting that this
daimon
might simply be the rational part of our soul. He himself never fully developed the thought, but it had been kept alive by Platonic and Neo-Platonic interpreters with whom Ficino was intimately familiar. In a chapter devoted to “Our Tutelary Spirit” in the
Enneads
, for example, a work that Ficino translated in full, Plotinus explains how, for the fully
developed philosopher (the “achieved Sage”), it does not suffice to have only the
daimon
allotted to all men as a “co-operator in life.” “The acting force in the Sage,” rather, is the “diviner part of the human Soul,” which is “itself his presiding spirit (
daimon
) or is guided by a presiding spirit of its own, no other than the very Divinity.” The genius of the highest man, in other words, was his own rational soul, guided directly by God.
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Ficino developed this same thought with greater precision than anyone before him. His language is technical, and the details are involved, but the final consequence is perfectly clear: in Ficino’s account, the soul becomes the sole intercessor between the individual and God, occupying the place of the angels. Despite Ficino’s flirtation elsewhere with the prospect of engaging the angels through magic, and despite his own unquestioned belief in their existence, he largely dispenses with their services in his articulation of the
furor divinus
and the soul’s divine ascent. The soul becomes its own messenger and mediator, what Ficino explicitly calls the “middle term of all things in the universe,” a
genius
or angel unto itself.
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Although there were certainly precedents for this understanding—in mystical practice as much as in Platonic and Neo-Platonic thought—Ficino’s account was no less influential for that. Clearing the space between heaven and earth, it presented the human soul as the true miracle of the universe. Man could be anything he wanted, it seemed, if he loved the right things, a thought that was given famous expression by Ficino’s student Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in his celebrated
Oration on the Dignity of Man
(1486). God had planted in man “every sort of seed and sprouts of every kind of life,” and man could cultivate them as he best saw fit, living vegetatively like a plant, sensuously like an animal, or intellectually, like “an angel and a son of God.” The miracle of man was precisely that he had no established place on the Great Chain of Being, no fixed and determinate nature. A shape-shifter, he was a “molder and maker” of himself who might soar beyond the highest of the angelic orders and every created being, to the very throne of the Creator.
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But did all souls, all minds, really possess such angelic seeds? In the aftermath of Martin Luther’s initial confrontation with the church in 1517, the Protestant Reformers would trample on such optimistic accounts, recalling, with Augustine, the limitations on human freedom and the necessity of God’s redeeming grace. When the Reformers spoke of seeds, it was more often to recall Christ’s parable of the sower: God’s word could be scattered freely, but in most cases it fell on barren ground (Luke 8:1–15). Only those who received his grace could begin to imitate God.

Yet even before this point, those grappling with the implications of Ficino’s account—including Ficino himself—were generating pointed questions about the nature of the
furor divinus
, asking why it was that some, and not others, should receive it. Aided in their inquiries by a renewed engagement with the writings of Aristotle, whose own vast oeuvre underwent a major recovery in this period, they focused, in particular, on his doctrine of the soul, conceived as the “act” or expression of the body. Aristotle seemed to offer a less ethereal, more corporal account than Plato, his Athenian master, a point that was particularly apparent in the pages of the
Problems
, a work universally, if falsely, attributed to Aristotle himself. Could it really be true, as the opening line of Problem 30.1 declares, that “all those who have become eminent in philosophy or politics or poetry or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious [melancholy] temperament”? In weighing this question in the extensive debates of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Renaissance observers cut to the heart of an issue bound up with genius as we now conceive it, asking where extraordinary intellectual and creative capacity came from.
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Ficino had already provided one answer to that question: great artists, philosophers, poets, and prophets were inspired directly by God, who kindled their souls and enlightened their minds, which they could use to raise themselves to Him. Ficino never abandoned this position, but in wrestling with the
Problems
, he came to modify his views, and in so doing he introduced the seeds of another. Reading the text through the prism of his Platonic assumptions, Ficino came to believe that it provided a physiological account of the convulsion of the soul, described by Plato as the mania of divine possession. The Pseudo-Aristotelian melancholy and the Platonic
furor
, in short, were the same phenomenon, only differently described.
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This was a seminal insight. For although medieval commentators had been familiar with the theory of the humors and some of the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, they tended to regard the superabundance of black bile as an affliction—a condition to be avoided or cured—styling melancholy as the “devil’s bath.” It was only with the rediscovery of the Pseudo-Aristotelian
Problems
and the wide dissemination of Galen’s humoral theory during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that critics began to consider in earnest the potential benefits of the disease. Here, again, Ficino’s contribution was crucial. His great final work, the
Three Books on Life
(1489), was devoted to helping scholars use knowledge of the humors to help maximize their intellectual strengths. A melancholic himself, born under the sign of Saturn,
the planet thought to exert the greatest influence on the fluctuations of black bile, Ficino was acutely sensitive to the suffering this condition could bring. And yet, as he also made clear, melancholy was the natural counterpart to the supernatural impetus of divine illumination: “Divine madness,” he affirmed, “is never incited in anyone else but melancholics.” And so it was incumbent on those who would aspire to the heavenly heights to manage this humor effectively. As a “doctor of the soul,” Ficino dispensed counsel ranging from advice about diet (for “the mind that is choked up with fat and blood cannot perceive anything heavenly”) to warnings against the “monster” of intercourse, which “drains the spirits” and “weakens the brain.” He urged scholars to initiate study at the most propitious hours (“right at sunrise” or an hour or two before) and advised on a whole range of pills, syrups, electuaries, and elixirs to manage the effects of melancholy and the other afflictions to which scholars were prone. Finally, and critically, he gave detailed instructions in the idiom of natural magic about mediating the influence of the planets: Venus, Mercury, and the Sun, which favored reflection and eloquence, and, above all, Saturn, at once dangerous and alluring to the melancholy mind.
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Conceived at a time when Renaissance humanists were making concerted attempts to reconcile the two greatest thinkers of antiquity, Ficino’s effort to harmonize the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Pseudo-Aristotelian accounts was hugely influential in moving others to think of melancholy as potentially beneficial; it even gave rise to a “vogue” for that condition among humanists and literary elites, ensuring that for centuries thereafter, melancholy and madness would figure centrally in discussions of genius. Yet it also prompted a critical response, led on the one hand by Christians, who continued to worry about the dangers of the devil’s bath, and who argued that the melancholy humor was more conducive to a
furor daemonicus
than a furor divine, and on the other by Aristotelian purists who questioned the need to resort to any supernatural explanations at all in accounting for melancholy’s extraordinary effects. Had not Ficino himself declared, in the
Three Books on Life
, that “black bile makes people intelligent”? If that were the case, surely an account like that of the
Problems
, which explained intellectual operations in terms of the bodily humors alone, was more compelling than that of Plato or Ficino, with their recourse to a divinely inspired (or demonically bestowed) fury acting on the soul. As one of the more robust polemicists of this position, the medically trained Paduan philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi, insisted superabundance of black bile and its natural effects could alone account for the various “gifts”—prophetic,
poetic, philosophical, and creative—that such a condition conferred. “It is a custom of the vulgar,” he stressed, “to assign to demons or angels that of which the causes are unknown.”
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Thus, even though the revived Aristotelian theories of melancholy might be employed to contest Ficino’s Platonically inspired understanding of the
furor divinus
, they only strengthened his general tendency to banish the angels from accounts of extraordinary mental achievement. Together, they drove the
genius
within, and because both theories focused on the soul as the source and site of human prowess, they had the further effect of emphasizing the fortunes of birth. This was particularly the case with the Aristotelian theories. For although it was certainly possible to manipulate the humors, through medicine or other means, all individuals possessed a particular humoral constitution that impinged on their souls, shaping their intelligence and natural endowments—what the ancients had called
ingenium
. Drawing on their example, Renaissance authors employed the word widely to describe an inborn capacity for mental activity, natural talent, innate intelligence, and inherent ability. They also used the word more broadly to describe a person’s natural bent, something akin to individual character or personality, the kind of human being each of us was born to be. As Pomponazzi put it,
ingenium
is “nothing else but the product of the birth of a man, so that those who have good birth have good
ingenium
, and those who have bad birth have bad
ingenium
.”
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A great many humanists developed the implications of that thought over the course of the sixteenth century, but the most famous was the Spanish physician Juan Huarte, whose treatise on
ingenium
, the
Examen de Ingenios
(1575), was quickly translated into every major European language, going through more than sixty-five editions in Spanish alone. Huarte was an Aristotelian naturalist who read the
Problems
with special care. He cites the work over fifty times, using it to deny that the furors described by Plato are born of divine inspiration and to help justify a rigorously physiological view of human intelligence. As any schoolmaster will confirm, he claims, some pupils are quick and bright and others useless and slow, a difference that no amount of instruction can overcome. Such differences are rooted in nature, determined by the humors and what Huarte calls the “temper” of the brain, the particular balance between its heat, dryness, and humidity. “From these three qualities alone, proceed all the differences of
ingenium
observed among men,” he concludes. And though Huarte acknowledged that such factors as environment, upbringing, and climate may affect the brain’s temper, his overwhelming emphasis was on the fate of one’s birth.
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Huarte took a great interest in educational reform, and so part of his aim was to be able to identify and direct students toward the vocations that best suited their natural aptitudes. In this respect, he was a pioneering psychologist, engaged in one of the first formal efforts to evaluate personality types. Not unlike many later practitioners, he was supremely confident in his ability to identify a person’s unique endowments, even attempting in the book’s final pages to apply his theories to the brain of Christ: of “subtle
ingenio
,” its temper was undoubtedly humid as a young man, Huarte assures us, but dried as he grew older. Less daringly, he drew on the prevailing Galenic and Aristotelian assumption that women were but imperfectly formed men to stress that “they should not be blamed for their simple nature” (
rudeza
), as this was due to the coldness and humidity of their constitutions, which were “at odds with all talent and
ingenio
.” He advised parents who desired intelligent children “to seek to have boys”—and in the work’s final chapters he gives detailed instructions about choosing mates and the sexual techniques most conducive to spawning children of superior birth.
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