Ficino’s Christian Platonism is characterized by two overriding features. First, it is expressed in works that are elaborated along traditional medieval lines in the form of commentaries either standing alone or incorporated into writings in other genres. Second, the configuration of this Platonism is inseparable from the history of Platonism as a tradition embodying both a continuous progress towards the light and a rhythmic alternation of revelation and concealment. After exploring this material in detail, it will become clearer how Ficino’s Christian Platonism is at the same time a psychology and a theology grounded in a sort of two-directional hermeneutic. Plato the non-Christian writer is prophetic of his own reading by later non-Christian Platonists who acquired the possibility of this reading on the one hand, through their partial illumination by Christian intermediaries and on the other, through their judicious distinction between the literal truth and non-literalness of some of the master’s most important teachings.

This chapter calls into question the longstanding notion that early Franciscans simply systematized or rehearsed ideas from Augustine and highlights instead how they employed Avicenna and Arabic philosophy to forge a completely new understanding of the bishop’s thought. Although this version of Augustinianism was initially passed off as a reading of the Aristotelian tradition as well, it became disassociated with Aristotle as the next generation came to a more authentic understanding of the Greek philosopher’s thought. By contrast, the Augustinianism invented by early Franciscans continued to be widely promulgated and defended for generations and thus impacted conceptions of Christian Platonism that remain influential to this day.

In this chapter I discuss the paradigmatic function which music, as a theoretical science (‘harmonics’), can have in relation to practical philosophy, in particular ethics, for the Platonists of Late Antiquity, going from Iamblichus (end of the 3rd century) and Proclus to Damascius (mid 6th century). Inspired by some passages in Plato’s Republic, in Nicomachus of Gerasa and in Ptolemy’s Harmonics, these Platonists also introduced a hierarchy of types of music and a hierarchy of types of virtue. I will attempt to show the relation between these two hierarchies, starting with the ‘ethical’ and ‘political’ levels of virtue, showing how harmonics provides conceptual paradigms for the description of these virtues, and then moving up to the higher levels of virtue, the ‘purificatory’ and ‘theoretical’ virtues, asking how music, as harmonics, might relate to the higher virtues.

The distinctive features of Plato’s philosophical system are examined, especially his rejection of naturalistic philosophic and scientific approaches and his postulation of an absolutely simple first principle. The Platonists after Plato are then considered, including Aristotle, Alcinous, Numenius, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus. Platonism is conceived as a collaborative project that developed over against opposition – such as Stoicism and, in late antiquity, Christianity – as well through internal debates among its rival schools. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Platonism’s encounter with Christianity after the Edict of Milan.

Philo’s interest in music is as known as it is overlooked in its philosophical implications. This chapter focuses on the importance of the musical paradigm in Philo’s thought and its relation to the other complementary model adopted by the philosopher: the pattern of the scala naturae, inherited from Stoicism. More specifically, Philo’s appeal to the notion of harmony introduces the idea of some orderly discontinuity in nature, implying both the transcendence of God and the limited condition of human rationality: the world is indeed governed by harmony, but only in the very qualified sense that it implies harmonically defined relationships between very distant entities. This ‘vertical’ harmony, however, is combined with a ‘horizontal’ one, for God also exerts his providence through harmony, while, in turn, music is the intellectual means by which man can contemplate the heavens and draw closer to God. These are not mere metaphors, for music represents a proper philosophical model for Philo that he applies to aspects which will prove fundamental in the post-Hellenistic age.

The relation of early Christianity to ancient Platonism has been a conflicted issue in historical scholarship, bringing to the fore latent questions about the nature of philosophy and shape of Christian theology. This chapter is intended to build upon recent advances in the scholarly interpretation of both Platonism and Early Christianity, in order to disentangle some long-standing interpretive issues. It emphasizes the role of Platonism and Christianity in the emergence of monotheism in late antiquity and the importance of Platonism in the development of the philosophical idea of transcendence.

The first chapter of De mundo sets the tone and object of the treatise and aims to capture the reader’s attention with highly polished rhetoric, admittedly worthy of an address to Aristotle’s most famous pupil, Alexander. It advances the claim that philosophy is a divine matter because it deals with eternal, divine truths. Unlike specialised sciences, which study one or more parts of the universe in isolation, philosophy seeks to appreciate the universe as a harmonious, well-ordered whole. However, without understanding God and the way he is related to the world, the essential features of the world – its order, unity, eternity, beauty and goodness – cannot be appreciated. For this reason, the author of De mundo urges his addressee – Alexander, ‘the best of leaders’ – to pursue philosophy, which amounts to studying the universe as an effect of God and, in this sense, to theologise. This is a conception of philosophy that the author of De mundo seeks to ascribe to Aristotle.

At different places in his writings Alexander expands on Aristotle’s criticism of Pythagorean and Academic doctrines making numbers principles of beings. On these accounts, harmoniai and symphōniai are singled out as paradigmatic cases illustrating a more general explanatory strategy. This chapter analyzes Alexander’s understanding of this strategy and explores the extent to which he may or may not have found room for its use within his account of Aristotle’s philosophy. The chapter is divided into four sections. Section 1 outlines the Aristotelian background of the discussion; sections 2 and 3 focus on the textual evidence from Alexander’s writings (in particular: from the commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De sensu, and from Alexander’s De anima). Finally, section 4 sets Alexander’s analysis within the broader context of Aristotelian metaphysics and sketches out a possible account of the interplay between the shaping of Alexander’s views and the development of different stances about the nature and role of forms, quantities and quantitative determinations both in opposition to the Pythagorean and the Platonic traditions and within the Peripatetic tradition as such.

The Editors provide an overview of the background, outline the chapters’ content and explain the overall narrative of the volume

Sextus Empiricus brings his discussion of the so-called ‘liberal arts’ (Math. 1–6) to a close by attacking the epistemic and therapeutic pretences of a would-be science of musicology. He presents two kinds of arguments that bring about and preserve a state of suspension of judgement about the claims of those who profess knowledge in this domain. First, he borrows material from Epicureans purporting to establish that expertise in matters of music holds no prospects for a happy life. Second, he argues that fundamental notions of music theory do not correspond to anything in reality, and thus that the science itself does not exist. The emerging Sextan critique of musicology provides an interesting angle on the Pyrrhonian project as well as on Sextus’ authorial methods. In this paper, I present the agenda of the treatise as being compatible with Pyrrhonism as described in Sextus’ Outlines (Section 1), discuss the arguments employed by Sextus (Sections 2–4), and argue that the treatise does not support readings according to which his treatment of music requires Sextus to abandon the suspensive stance (Section 5).

Early Christians were certainly inclined to look upon Plato as an ally. The first part of this chapter considers how far Eusebius and other apologists succeeded in making out the case that the Bible and Plato proclaim the same God. In the second part it proposes that the Johannine concept of the Logos was at once more foreign to Plato and more palatable to certain of his followers than Augustine supposed it to be. It concludes by examining two indictments of the hermeneutic method of the Fathers – first, that they co-opted the Platonic device of allegoresis to overwrite the plain sense of the scriptures, and secondly that under Platonic influence they surrendered faith to philosophy in their mystical readings of the Song of Songs.

Chapter 6 is the longest and the most elaborate chapter of De mundo. The topic of the chapter is God and his relation to the cosmos. This relation is explained by a sequence of no less than twelve analogies. It is argued that this proliferation of analogies is not an extravagant rhetorical profusion, but an elaborate explanatory device that affords the reader a fuller grasp of God: the sequence is composed in such a way that one analogy corrects or supplements another, thus building a complex conception of God in the mind of the reader. Following a detailed analysis of the analogies and their relations, the conception of God that emerges is discussed. It is argued that this conception is a distinctly Aristotelian one, albeit with some interesting elaborations and additions. The absence of Aristotle’s technical terms in the explanation of God and his relation to the world, it is suggested, is a consequence of the author’s attempt to make the Aristotelian conception of God attractive to non-Aristotelians as well. This contribution ends with a note on the use of quotations in Chapter 6, since nine out of the twelve quotations in De mundo are found in this one chapter.