Renaissance Italian scholar
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, count di Concordia, (born Feb. 24, 1463,
Mirandola, duchy of Ferrara [Italy]—died Nov. 17, 1494, Florence) Italian
scholar and Platonist philosopher whose De hominis dignitate oratio (“Oration
on the Dignity of Man”), a characteristic Renaissance work composed in 1486,
reflected his syncretistic method of taking the best elements from other
philosophies and combining them in his own work.
His father, Giovanni Francesco Pico, prince of the small territory of
Mirandola, provided for his precocious child’s thorough humanistic education at
home. Pico then studied canon law at Bologna and Aristotelian philosophy at
Padua and visited Paris and Florence, where he learned Hebrew, Aramaic, and
Arabic. At Florence he met Marsilio Ficino, a leading Renaissance Platonist
philosopher.
Introduced to the Hebrew Kabbala, Pico became the first Christian
scholar to use Kabbalistic doctrine in support of Christian theology. In 1486,
planning to defend 900 theses he had drawn from diverse Greek, Hebrew, Arabic,
and Latin writers, he invited scholars from all of Europe to Rome for a public
disputation. For the occasion he composed his celebrated Oratio. A papal
commission, however, denounced 13 of the theses as heretical, and the assembly
was prohibited by Pope Innocent VIII. Despite his ensuing Apologia for the
theses, Pico thought it prudent to flee to France but was arrested there. After
a brief imprisonment he settled in Florence, where he became associated with
the Platonic Academy, under the protection of the Florentine prince Lorenzo de’
Medici. Except for short trips to Ferrara, Pico spent the rest of his life
there. He was absolved from the charge of heresy by Pope Alexander VI in 1492.
Toward the end of his life he came under the influence of the strictly orthodox
Girolamo Savonarola, martyr and enemy of Lorenzo.
Pico’s unfinished treatise against enemies of the church includes a
discussion of the deficiencies of astrology. Though this critique was religious
rather than scientific in its foundation, it influenced the astronomer Johannes
Kepler, whose studies of planetary movements underlie modern astronomy. Pico’s
other works include an exposition of Genesis under the title Heptaplus (Greek
hepta, “seven”), indicating his seven points of argument, and a synoptic treatment
of Plato and Aristotle, of which the completed work De ente et uno (Of Being
and Unity) is a portion. Pico’s works were first collected in Commentationes
Joannis Pici Mirandulae (1495–96).
Life
Pico was born on February 24, 1463, to a noble Italian family, the
counts of Mirandola and Concordia near Modena in the Emilia-Romagna north of
Tuscany. At the age of fourteen he left for Bologna, intending briefly to study
canon law, but within two years he moved to Ferrara and shortly afterward to
Padua, where he met one of his most important teachers, Elia del Medigo, a Jew
and an Averroist Aristotelian. By the time he left Padua in 1482, he had also
felt the attraction of the Platonism being revived by Marsilio Ficino, and by
1484 he was corresponding with Angelo Poliziano and Lorenzo de’Medici about
poetry.
In 1485 he traveled from Florence to Paris, the citadel of Aristotelian
scholasticism. Before he left, at the age of twenty-two, he had made his first
important contribution to philosophy—a defense of the technical terminology
which since Petrarch’s time had incited humanist critics of philosophy to
attack scholastic Latin as a barbaric violation of classical norms. Having
refined his literary talent while developing his philosophical skills, Pico
issued his manifesto in the form of a letter to the renowned Ermolao Barbaro,
using the occasion and the genre to show, like Plato in the Phaedrus, how
rhetoric could equip a philosopher to defend his calling against rhetorical
assault.
After a short stay in Paris, Pico returned to Florence, and then Arezzo,
where he caused a scandal by abducting a young woman named Margherita, already
married to Giuliano Mariotto de’ Medici. Despite the support that came from
Lorenzo de’ Medici, the commotion that followed and then a plague kept Pico on
the move, just at the time he was writing a Commento on a love poem by Girolamo
Benivieni and planning his larger scheme of philosophical concord. At its core
this project aimed to secure human happiness by way of a philosophical harmony
between Platonists and Aristotelians. But in keeping with Pico’s immense
ambition, the scope of the effort became global, striving to join all schools
of thought in a single symphony of philosophies. Pico planned to underwrite a
magnificent conference on this theme in Rome early in 1487, and in preparation
he assembled 900 theses from numerous authorities—ancient and medieval, pagan
and Christian, Moslem and Jewish. He had these Conclusions printed in Rome at
the end of 1486, and to introduce them he composed a work of eventually immense
fame, the Oration on the Dignity of Man—as it came to be called.
Intervention by the Holy See derailed Pico’s plans and blocked the
conference. Innocent VIII appointed a commission that first declared six of the
theses suspect and condemned seven others, then rejected Pico’s clarifications
and repudiated all thirteen. When the Apology that Pico hastily published
provoked Innocent to denounce all nine hundred Conclusions, the audacious young
Count left for Paris, but at the pope’s request he was detained by French
authorities and briefly jailed. By the summer of 1488 he was back in Fiesole as
the guest of Lorenzo, to whom in 1489 he dedicated a short work called
Heptaplus, on the Sevenfold Account of the Six Days of Genesis.
Since 1483 Pico had a third of the income produced by his family’s
estates, which along with his Mirandola property he transferred in 1491 to his
nephew Gianfrancesco, who was to become an important philosopher in his own right
and an early voice for the revival of scepticism as an instrument of Christian
faith. At this time, however, even after the dust had settled on the
provocative Conclusions, contemporaries were unsure of the elder Pico’s
orthodoxy, and the Kabbalist exegesis of Genesis in the Heptaplus—tame though
it is by Pico’s earlier standards—could scarcely restore their confidence.
Meanwhile, Pico pursued safer philological inquiries with Poliziano, who
received the dedication of a fragment On Being and the One in 1492. Even though
De ente et uno was meant as the first installment of the great work that would
prove Plato’s thought in concord with Aristotle’s, not everyone accepted Pico’s
position harmoniously—least of all Antonio Cittadini, a Pisan professor who was
still fighting about it with Gianfrancesco Pico two years after his uncle’s
death.
In 1493 Pico achieved reconciliation with a higher authority when
Alexander VI pardoned him for his earlier misadventures. By this time he had
already grown close to Girolamo Savonarola, the fearsome millenarian preacher
who had recently become Prior of the Dominican Convent of San Marco in
Florence. Pico had known the prophetic friar for some time, but now Savonarola
was on his way to establishing a theocratic tyranny in Florence. Growing ever
more saintly, Pico disposed of more of his property, giving some to the Church
and some to his family, as his habits became less and less worldly. He was
working hard on another huge project, the unfinished Disputations Against Divinatory
Astrology, when death (hastened by poison, some said) came to him on November
17, 1494. Florence fell to the French armies of Charles VIII on the same day,
ending the dazzling age of Florentine culture that Pico’s blazing genius made
all the brighter, though only briefly. Ficino, a steadier spirit, survived him
by five years.
Works and Reputation
Pico’s modern fame comes mainly from a speech that he never gave, the
Oration on the Dignity of Man that got its title only after he died. He wrote
the Oration in 1486 to introduce his 900 Conclusions, having chosen the capital
of Christendom as just the place to dispute the outrageous theological
novelties advertised by them—including the claim that magic and Kabbalah are
the best proofs of Christ’s divinity. The Pope quashed Pico’s rash project, but
not before the Conclusions were already in print. To make matters worse, Pico
then defended them in an unsubmissive Apology that printed half of the
original, and not yet published, Oration—though not the half that later became
famous. As a whole, and mainly because its language is enigmatic, the Oration
was less inflammatory than the Conclusions; it first appeared in the collection
of his uncle’s works (Commentationes) published by Gianfrancesco Pico in 1496.
Gianfrancesco, the main source of biographical information about the elder
Pico, says that his uncle thought little of the speech, regarding it as a piece
of juvenilia. For the next three centuries, few of Pico’s readers were moved to
challenge this verdict, despite the author’s continuing fame. Until
post-Kantian historians of philosophy were charmed by it, the Oration was
largely (though not entirely) ignored, in part because of its publishing
history.
Shortly after 1450, Giannozzo Manetti had completed a book On Human
Worth and Excellence, which—unlike Pico’s speech—really is about dignitas as
that word had been used by ancient Romans and medieval Christians: what they
meant by it was ‘rank,’ ‘status,’ ‘value’ or ‘worth,’ not what Kant would mean
later by Würde. Manetti’s dignitas was still essentially a Christian notion
made less otherworldly by the example of ancient sages like Cicero and by the
changed conditions of Italian life in the fifteenth century. The last part of
Manetti’s book is an attack on a twelfth-century treatise On Human Misery by
Cardinal Lotario dei Segni, before he became Pope Innocent III. Manetti took
his lead from two contemporaries—Antonio da Barga and Bartolomeo Facio—who had
already written about his topic but in much more conventional ways. Pico’s
speech pays no attention at all to these three earlier texts on dignitas
because dignitas is not his subject. Instead, he wanted to convince people to
use magic and Kabbalah in order to change themselves into angels.
Except as part of Pico’s collected works, the Latin text of the Oration
was printed only once before the 1940s, when the first translation into English
also appeared, just after the first Italian version in 1936. What readers saw
on the title-page of the 1496 Commentationes was simply A Very Elegant Oration,
which in 1530—in the only separately published Latin text of the pre-modern
era—expanded into On Man by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, explaining the
loftier mysteries of sacred and human philosophy. Meanwhile, the front-matter
of the five collected editions or reprints between 1498 and 1521 stayed with
the 1496 formulation, Oratio quaedam elegantissima, which in 1557 finally
became On the Dignity of Man in a Basel collection and, in a Venice edition of
the same year, A Very Elegant Oration on the High Nobility and Dignity of Man.
The two other early modern collections of 1572 and 1601 used a new format that
no longer listed contents by title at the front of the book.
The British Library Catalog, which has about 1300 entries for books by
Erasmus published by 1700, has about 100 for Pico. During the same period, when
Marsilio Ficino’s De vita libri tres went through more than thirty editions,
Pico’s Latin Oration—far better known to modern readers than Ficino’s Three
Books on Life—got almost no attention from publishers. Of the five dozen or so
Pico titles that found a publisher by 1700, about half were collections of
letters. The first two, called Golden Letters, were incunabular editions, and
the letters also figured prominently in early collections of Pico’s works,
whose front-matter listed Ficino, Poliziano and other cultural celebrities with
whom Pico corresponded
Two things made Pico’s Latin letters a durable commercial hit: celebrity
and education. Since Latin was still the main medium of learned communication
in the late seventeenth century, when Isaac Newton published his Principia in
that undead language, educated people kept writing letters in Latin and used
writers like Pico as models. And Pico was attractive not only because of his
elegant style but also because he had been a celebrity in his own lifetime and
remained so in Newton’s day. He stayed famous in three ways: as a critic of
astrology; as an expert on Kabbalah; and as the amazing Pico—as the Phoenix who
blazed through a brief life in the triple glare of an old aristocratic society,
a new mandarin culture of classical scholarship and, in his last years, the
millenarian fantasies of Savonarola’s Florence. Noble origins, fashionable
friends, physical beauty, prodigious learning, capacious memory, scholarly
journeys, youthful sins, trouble with the Church, eventual repentance and a
pious death: these are the motifs of the family hagiography by his nephew that
have kept Giovanni Pico famous for being famous over the centuries.
Because he died so young, Pico finished very little and published less:
the vernacular Commento was neither completed nor published by him; the
Conclusions are just bare statements of theses; half of the rushed Apology was
lifted from the unpublished Oration; On Being and the One is a small piece of a
larger effort to harmonize Plato and Aristotle; and Gianfrancesco found the
unfinished Disputations Against Astrology bundled with his dead uncle’s papers.
Unless we count the two epistolary essays on poetry and philosophical language,
the only substantial and completed work that Pico gave to the world in his
lifetime was the Heptaplus (1489), a Kabbalist commentary on the first 26
verses of Genesis.
That topic, called Ma’aseh Bereshit or the Work of the Beginning, was a
favorite of Menahem Recanati, Abraham Abulafia and other Kabbalists whom Pico
knew through learned Italian Jews, including Elia del Medigo, Flavius
Mithridates and Yohanan Alemanno. Kabbalah, which Pico saw as the holier Hebrew
analog of the gentile ‘ancient theology’ revealed by Marsilio Ficino, is
provocatively on display in the 900 Conclusions: 119 of them, including the
final and culminating 72, are Kabbalist theses—outlandishly Kabbalist from a
Christian point of view. Pico’s project, part of a search for harmonies
connecting all the world’s wisdom traditions, was to ground primary doctrines
of Christology and trinitarian theology in Kabbalah, which he traced to the
oral Torah confided to Moses and passed on in secret through Esdras and other
sages. Because of its Mosaic origin, Kabbalah was holier to Pico than the pagan
wisdom that Ficino had traced to Zoroaster and Hermes Trismegistus, in ancient
Chaldaea and Egypt, where Ficino found the beginnings of Platonic philosophy.
Pico was the first Christian who had the expertise, including a little Hebrew
and Aramaic, to back up the astonishing claims that would make Kabbalah the
core of the ancient theology.
Although Kabbalist writings had first appeared in the twelfth century,
Christians before Pico knew almost nothing about them. The Kabbalah that he
discovered for the Latin West is a theory as well as a practice, at bottom a
kind of biblical hermeneutics. And for some Kabbalists, then and now, textual
theorizing underwrites a spiritual practice whose aim is mystical ascent for
the excitation of prophetic or messianic states by various techniques,
including magic and theurgy. Many Kabbalists believe that the Hidden God,
called the Infinite, reveals himself not only in the Bible but also through ten
emanations or attributes, the Sefirot. Hypostasized in myths, made concrete by
images and symbolized by letters and numbers, the Sefirot are at the core of
Kabbalist speculation, whose other major focus is the names of God and their
resonance in words of scripture.
Kabbalists regard the meaning of God’s sacred speech, the Hebrew text of
the Bible, as infinite, finding significance even in its smallest particles—not
only the divine words but also their letters (which are also numbers) and even
the shapes of those letters. The most powerful words are God’s names, the
holiest of which, the Tetragrammaton, cannot be uttered; written as YHWH, it is
pronounced Adonai, a spoken name like Elohim, Ehyeh, El Shaddai and others used
of God in the Hebrew Bible. Other words of great power are the names of the
Sefirot, which are unknown, as such, to the Bible; they are names not of God
but of aspects or manifestations or emanations of divinity.
Since God in his highest essence remains hidden, finite beings can know
the Infinite only in so far as it descends from its secret heights. The last
moments of that descent make up the world of common human awareness. The first
moments, far beyond the reach of ordinary perception, are the ten Sefirot. Much
of the literature of Kabbalah tries to describe the Sefirot, often as shown in
Figure 1, where all ten (designated S1 through S10) are arranged in a diagram
or ‘tree.’ The major names in Hebrew of S4, for example, are Gedullah and
Hesed, meaning Greatness and Love or Piety, rendered by Pico as Amor or Pietas.
The divine name usually associated with S4 is El, but Pico knew that Kabbalists
use many other words and names (Abraham, Michael, the South, Water) to describe
S4. The terminology that Pico used for the Sefirot, which he called
‘numerations’ is in Latin
No comments:
Post a Comment