The Minor Works of Marsilio Ficino

...after midday, from which the sun is ignited: the day, already born, then begins to decline into the evening, to be completed on the following morning. He Referring to God the Creator. certainly confirmed the royal authority of the sun when he first assigned the "Lord’s Day" to the world—that is, the solar day. original: "diem dominicum... i. solarem." The author is equating the Christian Sunday (the Lord’s Day) with the Day of the Sun, a common Neoplatonic-Christian synthesis. For if God finished the world in six days and rested on the seventh, then the world’s beginnings were clearly inaugurated from the very day of the sun—that is, from the solar power. Truly, He judged Saturn, being farthest from the sun, to be adverse to generations and actions, which is why He commanded that on the day of Saturn The Sabbath (Saturday). one should be vacant from action. Did not even Christ, that author of life—whom the sun, like a prophet, mourned with a darkened face when he expired in the middle of the sky—rise again from the dead on the day and hour of the sun? A reference to the solar eclipse reported during the Crucifixion (Luke 23:44-45) and the Resurrection on Sunday morning. Thus he restored intelligible light (lux intelligibilis) to us, just as the sun restores visible light.

The two lights of the sun. The gift of Apollo: The degrees of light. The sun reflects all divine things. Chapter 11.

If we consider the sun in 그 first property of its nature, which it received at the first moment of its creation, as if numbered in the company of the planets, we will recognize that its natural and first light was not so great at first as it soon became. For it does not exceed the other stars as much in size as it does in light. For in size, it exceeds Jupiter by less than double, but in light, perhaps a hundredfold. This reflects Renaissance astronomical measurements; while the Sun's volume is much larger than Jupiter's, early calculations often underestimated the scale of the solar system. The quantities of these are certainly measured in comparison to the earth. We have stated from the beginning how many times the sun contains the earth. Jupiter, indeed, is thought to equal the earth ninety-five times. Therefore, another immense light shone forth from elsewhere entirely, added from above to the natural light of the sun. All celestial bodies surely brought their own light with them at birth. But it was either tiny or hidden from us, whether it lies hidden because of a certain thinness and brightness, or for some other reason. A similar light, and a little...