Nothing ever happens the way one supposes. If we are paying attention, the path always astounds us. Our plan for my sabbatical was for me to research the poetry and writings of Coleridge with an eye towards his theory of the human imagination, following his rubric that the human imagination is one and the same as the Holy Spirit. Indeed the research that I did confirmed as much, but I found that the aesthetic sensibilities of this brilliant, eccentric, and passionate poet owed to the succession of wisdom come before him reaching far into history… into the middle ages; to the writings of Plato; to the cults of alchemy and mysticism; even to the Hermeticism of ancient Egypt.
In other words, Coleridge didn’t invent anything new, but restored a philosophical tradition that has informed civilization for millennia. As would any great genius, he borrowed from the great minds before him: the idealism of Kant, the dialectical processes of Hegel; the universal symmetry of Descartes; the pantheistic mysticism of Boehme and Schlagle; the writings of the ancient sage, Thrice Greatest Hermes. The common thread among these great minds was the belief in humanity’s capability to create, to imagine the world into being, to express in the particular the truth of the One. As post-Enlightenment thought leaned toward the notion that reality was quantifiable, that science and empiricism were the principal means of knowledge, Coleridge held to the claim that it is the imagination, born of our innate desire for mystery, that spoke authoritatively of our deepest knowledge and desire; that the goal of the human enterprise was not so much for knowledge and understanding, but for beauty, beauty of the beginning… our deepest desire.
Our plan was for me to complete my research in Cambridge, to travel to places in England where Coleridge lived and worked, and to begin writing “something”… an essay, an article, some poetry, a book, perhaps. That still may well happen. The words are swarming in my soul. Our ending the sabbatical in Florence was to be the vacation part of our three months away… but to my utter surprise, my research led me to the mid fifteenth century, to where the Renaissance, the resurrection of the western human spirit began… to Florence, Italy.
I discovered that Coleridge was enthralled with a little-known scholar/doctor/priest/philosopher named Marsilio Ficino. Ficino was financed by the Medici family of Florence to translate Plato’s works from Greek to Latin. Ficino accomplished the task, making him the very first to re-present Plato to the western world, thereby establishing the philosophical language which would give words to the phenomenon known as The Renaissance… its purpose, its place in the sweep of intellectual history. Plato believed that the human mind had the ability to articulate ultimate truth; that the human mind shared in the creativity of God; that the creativity of the human could engender heaven on earth, or at least a representation of it, a symbol, a taste. The soul, Plato would say, was immortal, and had immortal powers and sensibilities. Coleridge would call this gift of immortality the imagination.
Ficino also translated into Latin the Egyptian texts of the legendary, if not mythological figure of the sage, Thrice Greatest Hermes, whom the alchemists and mystics have followed for some two thousand years… never in the intellectual mainstream; always at the periphery. The alchemists believed that mundane elements of earth could be transformed into gold… a symbolic witness to the notion that the divine is found in earth; that the “forms” of earth reflected the forms of heaven. Hermes argued for an immanent God, a God who inhabited all of nature, drawing the created order into one being… all things animate, all things connected, all things of God. Some of the more radical followers of Hermeticism believed that Hermes was actually Moses, the progenitor of all wisdom, who saw God in the very solitude of the desert face to face. Ficino saw the beginnings of Christianity shot through the multiplicity of the religious consciousness of the ancient world. He saw it not as a unique and exclusive experience of God, but as an experience connected deeply with many traditions and cultures. A collective, confluent experience, a collective experience repeating itself throughout history since time immemorial.
Under normal circumstances, someone like Ficino would have been condemned as a heretic. He argued for a God far more universal and available than Christianity’s exclusive propositions. But Ficino was the darling of the Medicis, and the wealthy Medicis were financiers of the papacy, so Ficino, needless to say, had immunity.
We have found Ficino’s image all over Florence. In frescoes, in statuary. He is buried within the walls of the Cathedral of Santa Maria di Fiore. I’d never known of him, and indeed, one has to look closely to find him among the greats of the history of Florence. One fresco depicts the consecration of Pope Leo X, surrounded by all the “important” dignitaries of Florence, but there in a lonely corner of the gesso are three unassuming sages, and one is Marsilio Ficino, a solitary soul of inestimable genius, who quite literally gave the emerging modern world its creative voice.
Ficino, despite his relative obscurity, brought Platonism to his own day and time. Plato’s philosophy had been lost during the middle ages. While empiricism and science blossomed in the post-Renaissance Enlightenment, the Platonic idea of universal truth and being expressed by the human imagination also travelled into the modern world. The Romantic poets of both Germany and England drew from Platonic philosophy, and spoke of nature herself as imaginative disclosure of God’s very being. Coleridge would extend that mantle onto the human imagination itself, an awareness essential to our humanity, an idea, a touchstone of our true nature, to be retrieved again and again by passionate souls whose aim it is to engender truth and beauty for all to see.
I have so much to tell you, good people. By now, Katharine and I are yearning for home. We miss you, but we will see you soon.
