Ficino's treatise is referred to as the 'De Amore,' 'On Love' among Ficino-lovers. This English translation by Sears Jayne is an indispensable tool for a series of classes I'm teaching on "Platonic Traditions: Virtue Ethics and the One" in theory and practice. As the first text in the series, I'm teaching the 'De Amore' as a foundational treatise in Renaissance Natural Magic. As such, it can be called a sacred "magical text" in the sense that Ficino's treatise embodies the Love itself that he so effortlessly confers on his disciples at the Florentine Platonic Academy, and which modernday readers are fortunate to also receive. Ficino's is a wisdom received through reading Plato's 'Symposium,' making this philosophical treatise truly a text for today's philosophers, lovers of wisdom.
An example of how this text embodies the creative "magic" of Love is the fact that Ficino delineates the entirety of the treatise in the first few chapters, so that, like the emanation of creation itself from God, called "the Good," the treatise embodies spheres within spheres of the genesis of creation out of that One.
In Speech I Chapter 3 "On the origin of love," Love is found to be the oldest, or first god, created by the Good and residing in the bosom of Chaos before the World. Out of that Love in the bosom of Chaos, the Good creates the World composed of three worlds: "first the Angelic Mind, then the World Soul, as Plato calls it, and last the World Body " (38). So, from the beginning of the treatise, Ficino guides the student using the Theological theory and practice of Lover and Beloved, with divine Love as the most useful god for this journey of return to God.
Coming full-circle, in the final chapter of Speech VII, Chapter 17, Ficino praises Love: "O the wonderful magnificence of this god! O the incomparable beneficence! For other gods finally reveal themselves with difficulty, for a short time, after you have sought them for a long time. Love runs to meet us even before we start looking. [. . .] divine Love, the giver of all goods, we are not able not to love. Let us worship this love, which is so propitious to us, with such a mind that we may revere his Wisdom and admire his Power, so that under the leadership of love we may keep the whole of God, so to speak, propitious, and loving the whole with the burning of love, we may also enjoy the whole God with eternal love" (174).
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