Francesco Patrizi da Cherzo

Patrizi da Cherso, Francesco (1529–97)

Francesco Patrizi was an Italian humanist and anti-Aristotelian who took up a newly-founded chair of Platonic philosophy at Ferrara in 1578, the first such chair in Europe. Through his various writings he contributed to poetic theory, rhetoric, and historiography, as well as to military history and hydraulics. His two most influential works were his Discussiones Peripateticae (1581) and his Nova de universis philosophia (New Philosophy of Universes) (1591). Patrizi cast doubt on the authenticity of many of the works attributed to Aristotle, and argued that Aristotle’s philosophy was incompatible with Christianity. He believed it should be replaced with his own synthesis of Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticism (or Hermetism). Patrizi saw light as the basic metaphysical principle, and interpreted the universe in terms of the diffusion of light (lumen) from God, the primary light (prima lux). His most influential doctrine concerned space, which he argued to be infinite, three-dimensional, and distinct from the bodies it contained.

1 Life and works

Francesco Patrizi (Franciscus Patritius) was born in Cherso, near Trieste. He studied in Venice and Ingolstadt, before going to Padua where he studied and taught private pupils for a number of years (1547–54). It was at this leading Aristotelian institution that he was introduced to Marsilio Ficino’s Theologia platonica (Platonic Theology) (see Ficino §3), and became a Platonist. He spent some years away from the university, serving as secretary and administrator to various Venetian noblemen, and travelling extensively in France, Spain and Cyprus (where he perfected his knowledge of Greek). His return to the academic world marked the belated institutional recognition of Platonic philosophy. Shortly after Francesco de’Vieri (Verino) had begun teaching Platonic philosophy at Pisa in 1576, Patrizi took up a newly-founded chair of Platonic philosophy at Ferrara in 1578. In 1592 he was called to Rome by Pope Clement VIII and became professor of Platonic philosophy at the Sapienza. He still held this post at his death, despite ecclesiastical censure of his writings by the Roman Congregation of the Index, which ordered changes in his Nova de universis philosophia (New Philosophy of Universes).

Patrizi’s humanist and literary interests are shown in his works on poetry, rhetoric and history. He wrote poetry himself, one of his earliest writings was a discourse on types of poetic inspiration (Discorso della diversità dei furori poetici) (1553), and he later entered into a dispute with the poet Torquato Tasso about poetics. In his Della poetica (1586) he attacked the Aristotelian theory of poetry as mere imitation, and appealed to the marvellous as an aesthetic category (see Aristotle §29). The poet, who is ‘maker of the marvellous’, operates on the soul, putting it in tune with cosmic harmony. His views about the relationship between words and things also appear in his earlier work on rhetoric (Della retorica) (1562), where he claimed that search for rhetorical ornamentation had corrupted the original Adamic language which gave direct access to things (see Language, Renaissance philosophy of §2). In his work on history (Della historia) (1560), which had a great influence on later historiography, he attacked Ciceronian orthodoxy (see Cicero §2). He wanted to separate history from rhetoric, seeing it as an autonomous discipline with its own intellectual justification based on a grasp of causes and effects.

His other works included discussions of love, unpublished during his lifetime, in which he blended Neoplatonism with a naturalistic materialism. In another vein entirely, he wrote on military history, and was also the author of treatises on hydraulics, stemming from the conflict between Ferrara and Bologna over the silting of the river Po. Surviving correspondence shows his links with various intellectual circles.

His two most important works were the Discussiones peripateticae (Discussionum peripateticarum tomi quattuor) where we find his main attack on Aristotelianism, and the Nova de universis philosophia which presents his light-metaphysics and his philosophy of nature.

2 Anti-Aristotelianism

The prime source for Patrizi’s attack on Aristotle is his Discussiones peripateticae published at Basle in 1581, though the first volume had been issued separately at Venice in 1571. This volume contained a biography of Aristotle which highlighted his personal shortcomings, such as stealing the ideas of his predecessors, and a history of Peripatetic philosophy. The three additional books discussed Aristotle’s sources, the discord between Plato and Aristotle, and the defects of particular Aristotelian doctrines. Patrizi cast doubt on the authenticity of many of the works attributed to Aristotle, and he foreshadowed modern commentators by arguing that Aristotle’s Metaphysics was a series of fragmentary treatments of diverse topics rather than an integrated whole (see Aristotle §11).

Patrizi’s main philosophical quarrel with Aristotle was that his philosophy was incompatible with Christianity, especially with respect to the providence and omnipotence of God. In his Dedicatory Epistle to Nova de universis philosophia, he blamed the study of Aristotle for the fact that ‘Common men laugh indiscriminately at Philosophers with this saying, which is now a commonplace: this man is a philosopher, he does not believe in God’ (Henry 1979: 559–60). The remedy for this situation was to be found in Patrizi’s own philosophical synthesis of Platonism, Neoplatonism and Hermeticism (also known as Hermetism).

In order to understand Patrizi’s synthesis, we must recognize his belief, taken from Ficino (see Ficino, M. §2), in an ancient theology (prisca theologia) handed down to sixteenth-century thinkers by a long and continuous tradition which began with Moses or even Noah, and which had the work of Plato as its ancient culmination. Both Plato himself, whom Patrizi presented as a genuinely systematic thinker, and the various works of the Hermetic tradition, were fitted into a Neoplatonic framework (see Neoplatonism).

Patrizi’s attachment to non-Aristotelian sources is shown by his textual work. He translated John Philoponus’ commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1583) (see Philoponus §2) and Proclus’ Elements of Theology and Physics (1583) (see Proclus §§2, 4, 9). One of the works he appended to his Nova de universis philosophia was his Latin translation of the Theology of Aristotle, a ninth-century Arabic compilation of extracts from Plotinus (§4) which Patrizi described as ‘the mystic philosophy of the Egyptians dictated by Plato and taken down by Aristotle’. He also added an edition and Latin translations of the Greek Corpus Hermeticum and some other Hermetica, including the Latin Asclepius, all probably dating from between ad 100 and 300, as well as the Chaldaean Oracles, a work of the second century ad, which he attributed to Zoroaster (see Chaldaean Oracles). Contemporaries such as Teodoro Angelucci in his Exercitationes (1585) were already beginning to cast doubt on the historicity of the Corpus Hermeticum, when viewed as the work of the mythical Egyptian sage, Hermes Trismegistus, and as part of the prisca theologia handed on by Orpheus to the ancient Greeks, but Patrizi insisted on its authenticity and importance. In his Dedicatory Epistle he wrote: ‘Surely Hermes’ little book on piety and philosophy contains more philosophy than all of Aristotle’s work’ (Henry 1979: 553). He also claimed that Hermes was a little earlier than Moses, and had spoken more clearly of the Trinity (see Hermetism).

3 Light-metaphysics

Patrizi’s main philosophical work, Nova de universis philosophia (Ferrara, 1591; Venice, 1593), is divided into four parts. Part One is called ‘Panaugia’ (all-splendour), a word borrowed from Philo Judaeus (see Philo of Alexandria). In the Platonic tradition, light had always been seen as a symbol of goodness and as the closest analogy to God in the physical world, and had early been turned into a metaphysical or ontological principle. Patrizi presented God as the primary light (prima lux), who produces light (lumen), first in his Son, then in all other incorporeal creatures. Finally, God produces all corporeal creatures via the diffusion of light in space. The roots of Patrizi’s view can be found, not just in Plotinus and Proclus, but also in the medieval Jewish philosopher Ibn Gabirol and the Christian Robert Grosseteste (§3) (see Illumination).

Part Two is called ‘Panarchia’ (all-principle) and discusses the first principles that stem from God, who is One but who is also called the One-all. The highest principles are unity, essence, life and intelligence. The four lowest principles are nature, quality (see Ficino, M. §3), form and body. The intermediate principle is soul, which is midway between spirit and matter. In his discussion of this hierarchy of being, Patrizi was mainly concerned with the higher principles and the nature of God.

Part Three is called ‘Pampsychia’ (all-soul), and discusses all types of soul, from the irrational souls of plants to the world soul which animates the entire cosmos.

The fourth part is called ‘Pancosmia’ (all-world), and it is here that we find Patrizi’s views on mathematics and natural science.

4 Philosophy of nature

Patrizi’s view of space, which he called a ‘corporeal incorporeal’, is fundamental to his philosophy of nature. Space has to be corporeal because it is extended or three-dimensional; it has to be incorporeal because it lacks both resistance and density, and can serve as a container for fully corporeal things. A similar analysis can be applied to light, which Patrizi also called a ‘corporeal incorporeal’; both space and light can then be seen as borderline entities between the realms of matter and spirit. Indeed, the analysis can be extended to soul, which also falls between the realms of matter and spirit (see §3), because soul is diffused throughout the physical world without itself being a physical thing.

Patrizi argued that space is prior to ordinary corporeal objects both metaphysically and temporally, and that it is a condition of the existence of other things. He was clearly influenced here by Plato’s Timaeus (see Plato §16), but his presentation was strengthened by his systematic, principled, rejection of Aristotle’s conclusions about place. Aristotle was confused because he had no notion of an incorporeal corporeal and did not see that what distinguishes space from body is not merely dimensionality but resistance.

Patrizi’s theory of space led him to new views of the void. Most notably, he called for an actually infinite void outside the physical world. Betraying some confusion (since an infinite space will have no centre), he added that it must be round, with the rotating earth as its centre. He also accepted an inter-particulate void, made of the naturally existing spaces between corpuscular bodies. Finally, like Telesio, he took stock arguments about the possibility of a naturally occurring intra-mundane void or vacuum, and used them against Aristotle’s denial of such a vacuum. He included reference to empirical data such as the operation of bellows and water clocks and what happens to closed containers of frozen water, but no actual experiment seems to have been involved. Theoretical reasoning predominated, and he did not really go beyond knowledge already available from ancient and Arabic sources. Both here and in his general discussion of space, Patrizi can be seen as preparing the way for modern science, but his role should not be overemphasized.

Another part of Patrizi’s philosophy of nature involved replacing Aristotle’s four basic qualities, hot, cold, wet and dry, with the four principles space, light (lumen), heat and fluor (fluidity, flux), which combine to form a hierarchy of mixed bodies. Particularly important here is the claim that fluor offers resistance to lumen. A corollary of this list of basic principles which were not hard or solid, was Patrizi’s claim that the heavens were fluid, and that the heavenly bodies were not fixed in hard, solid spheres as had commonly been thought. It is important to note that while Patrizi’s contemporary Tycho Brahe had astronomical arguments for the same view, Patrizi’s arguments were basically metaphysical.

A cautious assessment is also appropriate when one considers Patrizi’s praise of mathematics, especially geometry, for this seems more closely linked with his belief in an intelligible world and ideal forms than with any belief that mathematics could provide a tool for developing philosophy or for explaining the physical world.

Patrizi seems to have been more influential than the other so-called philosophers of nature, Bruno, Campanella and Telesio, and he was widely read in the seventeenth century. His theory of light was attacked by Mersenne (§3), while his views on space may have been handed on to Newton (§4) through the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More (§5), as well as Gassendi (§4).