Reassessing the speech on Platonic love by the interlocutor Pietro Bembo in The Book of the Courtier (1528), this essay discusses Castiglione’s Platonic love ideology both as a philosophy and as the theoretical underpinning of an amorous praxis. After an overview of the reception of Platonic love during this stage of the Italian Renaissance, it examines to what extent Bembo’s discourse reflects Ficinian Neoplatonic notions of love as enjoyment of beauty and ascent toward the divine. While Castiglione echoes Ficino in his emphasis on the role of reason, Bembo creates a more permissive standard for younger lovers and for older lovers sanctions the kiss as a pivotal point on the ascent towards spiritual love, thus reconciling contemplative aspects of Platonic love with the concrete amorous dynamics of court life. Moreover, Bembo’s speech is predicated on the awareness that desire can degenerate into fury, an aspect that is discussed in the context of the contra amorem tradition. Literary form is a constant consideration: as a Ciceronian dialogue, the text not only projects an ideal Renaissance court, but also has a mimetic function in that its medium reflects and supports its content.

Marsilio Ficino adopted the concept of love from Plato and the Neoplatonists in order to elaborate his philosophy of humanity and divinity. In commenting on Plato’s Symposium, he employed amor/eros for his philosophical theology according to which God and the universe are united: love is that which binds all levels together. As such a mediator and power, it engages humans as a species, as individuals, and in societies. Love is the formula that makes the metaphysical reality intelligible and teachable. Love divides the good from the abject and sets the standard that is attainable and binding for all.

Elite friendship discourse in the Renaissance was shaped by a set of commonplaces inherited from classical antiquity according to which friends were virtuous, male, and few in number, and their relationships egalitarian and non-sexual. Neoplatonic love had the power to disrupt many of these received ideas. Ficino’s account of male friendship in his Lysis commentary emphasized the importance of spiritual desire in initiating relationships and foregrounded a pedagogical dimension more in keeping with a chaste version of Greek pederasty than the non-hierarchical models of friendship inherited from Aristotle and Cicero. In a poem on the Platonic androgyne, Antoine Héroët used the language of friendship to describe heterosexual unions as offering a potential step towards union with God. Bonaventure des Périers warned instead of the dangers of earthly erotic entanglements in a verse commentary to his translation of Plato’s Lysis, thereby concurring with the beliefs of his benefactor Marguerite de Navarre while suggesting that female community might offer the soul some solace before death provided the possibility of joining with God. Finally, Montaigne’s unorthodox account of his relationship with his deceased friend La Boétie engaged with the Neoplatonic tradition while eschewing the possibility it might facilitate spiritual ascent.

When Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) translated the ancient Corpus Hermeticum in 1460 and unlocked the secrets of the mysterious figure known as Hermes Trismegistus, he discovered a wellspring of knowledge that promised to transform humanity’s understanding of both the world and its Creator. He and many others believed that the writings of Hermes conveyed the prisca sapientia, or ancient wisdom, once vouchsafed to Adam in the Garden but then lost after humanity’s fall from divine grace. The philosophical tradition known as hermeticism quickly spread across Renaissance Europe, alongside renewed interest in the mystical Judaic practice of the Kabbalah, another source of wisdom that sought to reveal the hidden traces of God in the universe. These traditions of learned magic inspired the archetypal Renaissance magus, the English philosopher John Dee (1527-608), in his quest for knowledge. He conversed with angels and advised some of Europe’s most powerful monarchs, but like the fictional figure of Faustus, who dabbled in dark arts and damned himself for eternity, Dee had to contend with the distrust and fear of contemporaries who believed that magic was the work of demons.