The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Socrates, the creator of the Republic’s ideal constitution, stands beside Plato; just as Solon, creator of Athens’s real constitution, stands beside Aristotle. In a similar way, the astronomer Ptolemy stands opposite the Neoplatonist pagan priestess Hypatia, each reflecting the two aspects of the school of Alexandria.28

  Each pairing, in fact, helps us to see Plato and Aristotle as Pico or any student of Ficino’s would have seen them: as the twin “princes of philosophy,” the unsurpassed masters of understanding the two halves of man’s existence.

  Plato holds a copy of his Timaeus, since Pico and his colleagues understood that Plato was superior to Aristotle in his understanding of metaphysics and of man as part of the divine order.29 Aristotle, on the other side, holds his Nicomachean Ethics, the work that offered the key to understanding the principles of human virtue and happiness—the key to understanding man as a part of nature. Both stand under an architectural setting with three magnificent barrel vaults, suggesting the triad of perfection and the Trinity, since the unity of Plato and Aristotle, Pico wrote, prefigures the unity of God.30

  At first glance, The School of Athens seems to sum up a heritage of timeless wisdom. In reality, it reveals a daring new synthesis and heralds a new beginning for Western thinking. Giovanni Pico never completed his Concord of Plato and Aristotle, from which he claimed he would build “a new philosophy.” However, he did leave his program for both Raphael’s painting and his 900 Theses, which expressed an attitude to knowledge best summed up by the modern physicist Niels Bohr, “We achieve clarity through breadth.” For the Platonist, the Big Picture is always what counts. Our job is to figure out how all the small bits and fragments, even seeming opposites, actually fit together into a coherent whole.

  Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (facing the viewer, right), in Raphael’s School of Athens. (To his lower right are Pythagoras and the Arab philosopher Avveröes). Pico is the only thinker to appear twice in the painting.

  Indeed, mention of the Big Picture leads our attention down the hall from Raphael’s fresco to what in artistic as well as philosophical terms is the biggest picture of all: the Sistine Chapel.

  What is this thing called love,

  [which] Through the eyes invades the heart,

  And seems to swell in the small space inside?

  And what if it burst out?

  Even as a boy, Michelangelo Buonarroti tells us, “I had a gift for beauty.” Born in 1475, he grew up in the palace of Lorenzo the Magnificent, where he absorbed the ideas of Ficino’s Academy and Platonist theology from the tutor of Lorenzo’s sons, Angelo Poliziano. He may have met Giovanni Pico and heard him expound the reconciliation of Platonism and Christianity. Contemporaries all noted that Michelangelo’s poetry was “full of Platonic conceptions”; so was his art.31 In fact, if a single idea dominates Michelangelo’s life and career, it was the notion that in moments of deep feeling and Platonic exaltation, the human mind can break through to God’s perfection.

  The Florentine Academy taught Michelangelo that the aim of all art was to re-create a preordained harmony, whose elements and proportions were laid down by God Himself. The best example was music. Ficino sang Orphic hymns, and Pico was fascinated by Pythagorean theories of mathematical harmony. Painting enjoyed a similar status thanks to the science of perspective.‡ Michelangelo turned sculpture into a similar pursuit of divine perfection. When he was a teenager, contemporaries considered his works the equal of the ancient Greeks and Romans. He told astonished friends that in his mind the perfect images he carved were already there, like Plato’s Forms, embedded in the block of marble. They were only waiting for the hand of the artist to set them free.32

  Michelangelo was a child of Florence in other ways. He was briefly a follower of Savonarola, as Machiavelli had been; and like Machiavelli, he was a true believer in the restored republic.33 His earliest monumental work, the David, is a visual tribute to that older civic humanist philosophy of virtue and self-sacrifice for the sake of liberty.

  But Michelangelo’s hopes, like those of the author of The Prince, ended in disillusionment. When the Florentine republic fell in 1512, he wrote from Rome to tell his brother to stay inside, not speak or reveal his thoughts to anyone but God, “because the end of things is not known; just attend to your own affairs.”34

  This is just what Michelangelo did during his nearly decade-long stay in Rome, from 1505 to 1513. What he saw at the court of Pope Julius II only confirmed his gloomiest suspicions: “Virtue’s what Heaven must despise … seeing they would give us a dead tree from which to pluck our fruit.” He had stormy dealings with a pope more interested in waging war with his neighbors and building the most grandiose church in Christendom (the new Saint Peter’s) than in reforming the Church, and who appeared as often in a suit of armor as in papal vestments.

  These were times, Michelangelo wrote, that would try the patience of Christ himself.

  He should not come again into this province,

  Up to the very stars his blood would spread;

  Now that in Rome his skin is being sold;

  And they have closed the way to every goodness.

  Yet if High Heaven favors poverty,

  But other goals cut off our other life,

  What is there in our [inner] state that can restore us?35

  The answer is love. However, Michelangelo’s perspective on love is far more turbulent and disturbing, almost self-defeating, than the tranquil version he learned in the garden of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s palace. It is underlined by a kind of anguish. Michelangelo constantly compares love to a burning fire that sears the consciousness and torments the body, but also scours away worldly corruption, so that the soul “like gold purged in a fire returns to God.”

  In other words, the creative ascent is not easy or carefully calibrated, as the scholars of Ficino’s Academy imagined. It is filled with self-doubt and inner pain. But the process of suffering also makes us worthy of our spiritual perfection.

  Only with fire can the smith bend the iron

  As he’s conceived his beautiful work;

  And gold, except with fire, to its high mark

  No artisan can carry and refine.

  The phoenix cannot live again unless it first burns.…

  If by its nature [fire] goes up to Heaven,

  To its own element, and I’m converted

  Into fire, how can it be it will not take me?36

  Michelangelo began work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling in the spring of 1508. We know from his letters that the plan of the ceiling was largely his own.37 By the time he finished four years later, he had transformed the pope’s commission into his personal statement on the grand themes of the Platonism of his day—and into the artistic masterpiece of the Renaissance.

  It is the perfect counterpart to The School of Athens, and Giovanni Pico would have been the perfect person to decipher the ceiling’s rich complexity and its various veiled meanings. For instance, he would have immediately recognized why Michelangelo broke the ceiling down into three separate zones, each stacked above the other.

  The lowest, running along the tops of the chapel’s walls, are peopled with Old Testament figures who represent the human earthly realm. The second, with its enormous figures of prophets and sibyls, is the realm where the human mind first grasps the meaning of the Eternal through prophecy (which Plato compared with the “divine madness” of love) but also through the vision of physical beauty, symbolized by the nude so-called athletes arranged above each architectural bay.38

  The third realm, the great spine of Michelangelo’s plan, are the panels depicting the Book of Genesis, where the soul experiences God’s presence directly. The entire work gives us a visual tour of what a disciple of Ficino would call deificatio, or the soul’s return to God, the final consummation of spiritual enlightenment.

  The Sistine ceiling contains no direct references to Christianity or Christ. Michelangelo the Platonist didn’t feel the need for any, because his message is m
ore universal. Instead all the scenes are from the Old Testament, which every Renaissance Platonist knew to be the ground zero of docta religio, the true religion shared by all peoples and faiths. In the same way, Michelangelo has paired each male biblical prophet with a female Roman pagan prophet, the sibyls who had prophesied the coming of a future Savior. This symbolizes the harmony of the religious revelation of the Hebrews not only with Christianity, but with the religion of the ancients.

  It is only when we come to the central panels that we see that Michelangelo has moved Renaissance Platonism to a new level of consciousness. As art historian S. J. Freedberg observes, there is nothing like it anywhere in the writings of the age—perhaps not even in Plato’s own works.39

  The theme is the struggle of the human soul to escape its physical limitations of the body in order to realize its true freedom. The panels depict the central episodes from Genesis in a dynamic but abruptly edited sequence like a Stanley Kubrick movie, starting with creation and God’s separation of light from darkness: a visualization of spiritual energy at its most divine and abstract. However, Michelangelo has arranged the sequence in reverse order. When we enter the chapel and look up at each panel, what we actually see is a chronicle of the soul’s ascent from the realm of matter to that of pure spirit.

  We start with the Drunkenness of Noah, where the body has completely taken over. All the same, just as in the Symposium, the ecstasy of inebriation paradoxically also hints at the spark for future transformation. Then comes the Great Flood, where physical catastrophe (like those engulfing Machiavelli’s beloved Florence and the rest of Italy) stirs the human spirit to respond with courage and resolution.

  Then comes man’s recognition of the divine with the Sacrifice of Noah. As yet, however, this knowledge of the divine comes to us darkly and from a distance, thanks to the episode that comes next: the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Through Adam’s Fall, humanity has lost touch with its spiritual side. Without that vital root, the world is no longer a garden of delights. Instead, it is “a dead tree from which to pluck our fruit,” namely the fruit of virtue: a barren testing ground for man’s free will.

  What’s missing is revealed in the central panel and the most famous, the Creation of Adam. It is also the most potent in terms of the Platonist tradition. Adam appears as the epitome of the classical ideal of male physical beauty—except that he is passive and inert, a dumb block of flesh waiting for the spark of the Holy Spirit, which Saint Augustine had identified as the finger of God. That divine finger now transmits the gift of life and spirit, reminding us of Pico’s words in Oration on the Dignity of Man: “On man when he came to life the Father conferred the seeds of all kinds and the germs of every way of life.”

  By the act of creating Adam, God has transferred His own creative powers to man, “the mortal counterpart of God.”40 This is Michelangelo’s secret message to his viewers: the secret of our own divine nature. We need only to recognize and unlock its potential to transform our lives and ourselves.

  Plato taught that if you wish to be able to recognize God, Ficino wrote, “you must first learn to know yourself.”41 The same is true for Michelangelo. As Machiavelli noted, the world is a grim place, especially in 1512, where it seemed that every trace of freedom or liberty had been snuffed out. The slave “grows so much accustomed to his anguish that he would hardly ask again for freedom.”

  Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel ceiling

  But the freedom is there, first revealed by love.

  Love wakens, rouses, puts wings to feather

  So that the soul will soar

  And rise to its maker.…

  Michelangelo’s ceiling was finished in 1512. The next year a church council officially endorsed Ficino’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The world seemed on the verge of a final reconciliation of ancient philosophy and Christian theology, exactly what Raphael had made visible in his frescos in the Stanze.

  Instead, a chain of events was about to abruptly change the direction of European thought once again—a chain that started virtually outside the Stanze’s doors.

  * * *

  * Ficino found further confirmation in Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates says that the soul that has glimpsed the Form of beauty in heaven naturally seeks it out on earth with the passionate frenzy of a lover for his beloved, in a kind of “divine madness.”

  † Ficino also identified this Pythagorean triad with the triad of Truth, Harmony, and Beauty in Plato’s Philebus, plus Mercury, Apollo, and Venus in astrology, and even the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Confusing? From the Platonist point of view, the great advantage of allegory is that its meaning is never limited to a single proposition, as in Aristotle’s logic. A symbol like the Graces can refer to all three triads or trinities at once, or more. “Whichever among these you assume,” wrote Plotinus’s disciple Proclus, “it is the same with the others, because all of them are in each other, and [all] are rooted in the One.”

  ‡ An idea that also inspired Leonardo da Vinci. See chapter 19.

  Martin Luther (1463–94): He believed Satan himself had introduced the study of Aristotle.

  Eighteen

  TWILIGHT OF THE SCHOLASTICS: THE REFORMATION AND THE DOOM OF ARISTOTLE

  Compared to the study of theology, the whole of Aristotle is as darkness is to light.

  —Martin Luther, 1517

  “I’m not in a good place,” Michelangelo wrote gloomily to a friend as the Sistine ceiling took shape, “and I’m no painter.”1 In those last weeks of 1510, Michelangelo would have risen every day before dawn, while the stars still shone in the darkness. As the sky turned a chilly gray, he would have made his way past the massive unfinished piers of the pope’s basilica, Saint Peter’s. Bramante’s workmen would have appeared like shadows, as they yawned and stretched among the piles of masonry and coils of rope. Like Michelangelo, they were readying themselves for another day of back-crushing labor.

  On his way to the Vatican Palace, Michelangelo might have caught sight of another man, a thickset young man with large flashing eyes and a firm, determined jaw. It was the kind of striking face Michelangelo might have used for one of his athletes, maybe for Adam himself. Then again, he might not have noticed him at all. The young man was in a monk’s habit, blending in with the hundreds of other clerics, both lay and regular,* who wandered the winding streets of Rome.

  The young monk was from the north, from Germany. He was in Rome on ecclesiastical business. While he was waiting for an audience with the head of his order, the Augustinians, he had decided to see the Eternal City’s sights.

  Unlike the modern tourist, he had no interest in seeing the Sistine Chapel or Raphael’s School of Athens in the papal Stanze. Nor did he pay attention to the Forum or other monuments of the ancient Rome admired by the humanists. This monk had come to see the holy sites of medieval Rome, the City of Martyrs. There were the catacombs where the early Church had been born; the cemetery at San Sebastiano, where forty-six popes and eighty thousand martyrs were buried; and St. Peter’s, where the relics of Christianity’s two greatest saints, Peter and Paul, were laid.2 The monk was twenty-seven years old, and no callow, inexperienced youth. Still, he was horrified by what he saw.

  He had expected to find these holy sites surrounded with a hushed, hallowed atmosphere. Instead, the atmosphere was like a carnival, with priests saying Mass for weary, grimy pilgrims and their bawling children and then telling them to move on, with cries of, “Next! Next!” Other pilgrims pushed and shoved to get a glimpse of the severed arms of Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary, or Jesus’s footprint on a slab of marble, or one of thirty pieces of silver given to Judas Iscariot. One touch of the coin, it was said, was enough to spare a sinner 1,400 years in purgatory, the Church’s vestibule between heaven and hell. That wasn’t bad, although the monk knew that back home in the reliquary of Wittenberg Castle, a glimpse of a thorn from the crown of thorns and a branch from the burning bush could save a person 127,000 ye
ars of purgatorial torment, give or take a decade or two.3

  The holy relic that drew the young monk most was Pilate’s Staircase, the Scala Santa. It stood in a small chapel near Saint John Lateran. It consisted of twenty-eight white marble steps and was supposed to have been trod by Jesus when he was brought before Pontius Pilate. Constantine’s mother, Saint Helen, had brought the staircase from Jerusalem to Rome in the fourth century. Legend had it that the dark stains in the marble were drops of Christ’s own blood.

  Penitents stood in a long line to crawl up the Scala Santa on their knees. They were supposed to kiss each step on the way up, then at the top utter a short prayer. The reward for this feat, according to a recent papal decree, was a plenary indulgence—in effect a Get Out of Purgatory Free card.

  Finally it was the young monk’s turn. Grasping his rosary firmly in one hand and balancing himself with the other, he began his spiritual ascent—a very different one from Michelangelo or Ficino’s.

  Shoving off from his knees, the monk managed to climb the first step. He steadied himself and recited a short prayer:

  Holy Mother, pierce me then

  In my heart each wound anew

  Of my Savior crucified.

  With a grunt he moved to the second step and repeated the same prayer. Then the third; and the fourth. It was easier than he had imagined. If only his parents were dead, he thought, so that he could use this miraculous staircase to save them from purgatory as well.4

  He had just reached the last step, breathing heavily and perspiring under his monk’s cowl, when suddenly he heard himself say, almost in a trance:

  “Who knows if any of this is true?”

  That terrible thought haunted him the rest of his stay in Rome and on the journey home to Germany. What if all the elaborate penances, pilgrimages, and viewing of relics—in effect the whole machinery of rituals and ceremonies that the Church classified under the heading “Penance and Good Works”—actually did nothing to save the human soul? He knew that certain reform-minded writers were dismissing the whole cult of relics and saints as a disgrace and a fraud. Still, he had gone to Rome hoping to feel spiritually cleansed. Instead, he came back feeling dirtier and more disgraced in the eyes of God than before.