The four Platonic frenzies: poetry, mysteries, prophecy, love

In Plato's Phaedrus Socrates delivers a surprising praise of madness. Not every madness is an evil, he says: there is one that arises from illness, and another that is a gift of the gods and brings humans the greatest goods. This divine madness, called mania in Greek and furor in Latin, appears in four forms. Taken up by the Neoplatonists and above all by Marsilio Ficino, the doctrine of the four frenzies became in the Renaissance one of the keys to explaining poetry, prophecy, religious experience and love.

Plato's text

Socrates distinguishes prophetic frenzy, inspired by Apollo, which shows itself in the priestesses of Delphi and Dodona; initiatory frenzy, linked to Dionysus, which purifies through rites and mysteries; poetic frenzy, a gift of the Muses, without which no one becomes a true poet by technique alone; and finally amorous frenzy, attributed to Aphrodite and Eros, the highest of all. The beauty contemplated in the beloved's face, the dialogue explains, awakens in the soul the memory of the Beauty seen before birth.

To illustrate this process Plato uses the image of the soul as a winged chariot, driven by a charioteer and drawn by two horses, one docile and the other unruly. Amorous frenzy makes the soul's lost wings grow again, allowing it to rise back towards the world of ideas. The myth became one of the most quoted images of ancient philosophy.

Ficino and the ladder of frenzies

Marsilio Ficino tackled the theme while still young, in a letter of 1457 addressed to his friend Pellegrino Agli and devoted to divine frenzy. He returned to it later in his commentary on the Symposium, known as De amore, and in his commentary on the Phaedrus. Ficino ordered the frenzies on an ascending ladder: first the poetic, which harmonises the discordant parts of the soul; then the mysteric, which gathers them into unity; then the prophetic, which raises the mind; finally the amorous, which joins it to God.

Each frenzy was placed under the protection of a deity: the Muses, Dionysus, Apollo and Venus. In this form the doctrine spread through the academies and humanist circles of all Europe, offering poets a philosophical justification of inspiration and philosophers a model of the soul's ascent. The relationship between genius and divine frenzy became a commonplace of Renaissance culture.

The frenzies in occult philosophy

Cornelius Agrippa devotes some chapters of the third book of De occulta philosophia to the frenzies. He describes them as illuminations of the soul that come from the gods or from the celestial powers, and he links them to the Muses, Dionysus, Apollo and Venus, following Ficino. Alongside them he also deals with dreams and prophecies, presented as forms of knowledge that surpass ordinary reason.

Agrippa further links poetic frenzy to melancholy, taking up the ancient idea that exceptional people have a particular temperament. For him the soul, when it frees itself from the distractions of the body, can receive gifts that reason alone does not attain. This is a philosophical and religious doctrine, not a practice, and it should be read as such.

In 1585 Giordano Bruno published in London De gli eroici furori, a dialogue in which love for divine knowledge becomes a passion that consumes the philosopher. It is perhaps the last great Renaissance variation on the Platonic theme, which has since continued to nourish reflections on artistic inspiration up to the Romantic age.