41. Leone Ebreo, The Philosophy of Love (Dialoghi d’Amore), trans. J. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes, and intro. C
Judah Abrabanel, or Leone Ebreo, as his gentile friends called him, physician to Don Gonsalvo de Cordoba, reputed friend of Pico della Mirandola, and Platonic theologian, is a figure not perhaps sufficiently familiar to English students of the Renaissance. The catalogue of one great library reveals only the Spanish version of the Dialogues of Love; and the present translation – indeed any translation – of the Italian text is to be welcomed.
The Dialogues, written apparently as early as 1502, are of equal interest to the literary historian and to the philosopher as a document of that mode of thought which is loosely called ‘Renaissance Platonism’. The title is somewhat misleading, as may be gauged by Ficino's list of summi theologi, which includes, along with Plato and Pythagoras, names such as Zoroaster, Orpheus and Trismegistus. The physics of the school came from Aristotle and the Stoics: its pneumatology is in the direct line of descent from the semi-philosophical paganism which St Augustine attempted to strangle in the De Civitate, but which escaped his grip to survive into the Middle Ages; and Oriental elements are present, perhaps from the outset, certainly in the sixteenth century.
It is something very different from Platonism as Jowett and Bosanquet understood the term, though perhaps it does no more violence to the spirit of Plato in one direction than academic and secularizing idealists have done in another. Its vitality carried it far into the seventeenth century, and the philosophy of Locke is partly to be understood as a reaction against it. Without some insight into this unsystematic yet strangely homogeneous effort of thought and imagination and some sympathy for its picture of the universe – a universe packed, as it were, to bursting with anthropomorphic life and tingling with desire – no real understanding of Renaissance art and poetry is possible.
Abrabanel's place in this tradition is among the moderates. He may claim, and justly, to ‘have discussed the love of the universe more widely than Plato in the Symposium’, but he shows no taste at all for the rankly magical elements we find in Ficino or even for the milder occultism of Henry More. He has a great deal to say about the gods, but it is all in the way of allegorical interpretation, and that at such length that the pupil in the Dialogues marvels to see ‘so many meanings’ drawn out of the myths ‘and each nobler than the last’. In this respect the whole of the second Dialogue is an important reminder of something we easily forget – that the gods were never, to the men of that age, devils (as to the Fathers) nor figments (as to the Augustans), but always something more: planets, elements or moral allegories. He has much, too, to tell us of angels and intelligences, but it is all about their relations to God and to the system of things, and not about their possible contacts with one another or with human individuals. He writes, in fact, as a genuine theologian, and on the theological side a permanent value may be claimed for his work.
The editors of this translation tell us that Spinoza ‘according to a view which has recently gained ground’, may have derived from the Dialogues ‘his doctrine of the Intellectual Love of God’. If such a view is gaining ground, this is surely to be deplored: for what is most important in Abrabanel is his difference from Spinoza. Professor Nygren has emphasized the antagonism between systems based on Eros, the love of the lower for the higher, with an unmoved mover, an unloving Beloved, as the Highest of all, and those based on Agape, the love of higher for lower, where the Highest is a god conceived as purposive and capable of interfering in history. Philosophy, and specially Greek philosophy, inclines to the former: religious experience, and specially Jewish and Christian experience, to the latter. Spinoza walked the Eros road as far as any man has ever done: Abrabanel, with equal temptation to do so, obstinately refuses it, and his central problem is how to combine his philosophical conception of God as the Beloved with his religious conception of God as the Lover. He has two methods of doing so. One is to argue that Eros in practice is Agape, that love for the end or the Higher must work to raise the lower, since the perfection of the lower somehow or other (he is timid, though immovable, on this point) contributes to the perfection of the end. The other is to introduce within the Deity itself distinctions between God as self-loved, and God as self-lover, united to beget Love, which bring him to the verge of Trinitarianism.
In true Platonic style the author has put all this forward in the form of conversations between a lover (Philo) and his mistress (Sophia). The latter, despite her name, is not an allegorical figure, and remains, in philosophy, a mere pupil to the end. Most often the two speakers are not dramatically conceived, but there are some interludes of high comedy. The lady's determination to keep Philo off the subject of his love for her and on the subject of love in general (for he tends to stray in both directions) is well conceived. The translation is, on the whole, readable and dignified, but sometimes betrays an uncertainty about English idiom.