Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)
and Renaissance Philosophy
Paul Richard Blum
[Presented at Istituto Italiano di Cultura, New York, 11 November 2014]
and Renaissance Philosophy
Paul Richard Blum
[Presented at Istituto Italiano di Cultura, New York, 11 November 2014]
A presentation on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola should have
at least nine hundred chapters – but I will reduce it to four or five.[1]
1. Pico contributed to the
discovery of the human being as the center of the world.
Let me start with a quotation about philosophy:
“Philosophy is man's knowledge of himself. …
Man, if he acquires a true knowledge of himself, viz. of his own spirituality
and corporeality, comprises the knowledge of everything ....”[2]
If I had let you guess the author,
you certainly would have come up with Pico or some other Renaissance thinker. For
it makes philosophizing a feature of humanity that expands on everything there
is. However, it is from Isaac Israeli in the early Middle Ages. Closer to that matches our expectations of medieval
pessimism is this famous saying of Pope Innocent III:
“Indeed man is shaped like an upside down tree.
His hair forms the roots; his head and neck the trunk; the breast and stomach
the stock; the arms and legs the branches. Man is a plant tossed to and fro by
the wind and, like straw, dried out by the sun.”[3]
It was the humanist Giannozzo
Manetti who opposed this view by saying:
“…the fruits proper to man are not those
shameful and incidental kinds of filthiness … mentioned above; rather our human
fruits are to be deemed the many operations of intelligence and will.”
To the humanists, man is man in action. And Pico will elaborate
on that and drive it to near exhaustion. In order to show that, I simply quote
one of his most famous statements in his Oration
on the Dignity of Man:
“[God] … took man, … set him in the middle of
the world, and said to him: ‘We have given you, Adam, no fixed seat or form of
your own, no talent peculiar to you alone. … Once defined, the nature of all other beings is constrained within the
laws We have prescribed for them. But you, constrained by no limits, may
determine your nature for yourself, according to your own free will ... We have
set you at the centre of the world so that from there you may … easily gaze
upon whatever it contains. … you may, as the free and extraordinary shaper of
yourself, fashion yourself in whatever form you prefer. It will be in your
power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish.
Alternatively, you shall have the power … to be reborn into the higher orders,
those that are divine.’ …”[4]
Here we see the specific humanist take on humanity: after
the medieval thinkers and theologians had realized that the essence of human
beings and of being human consists in reflecting upon oneself and thus
experience life as misery, the humanists say: to be miserable does not exclude
thinking about it, and human awareness of filthiness is the mother of
invention. Now in a giant leap, Pico concludes that the status of being human
utterly depends on the spiritual powers of the individual. He clothes it in
this speech of God to Adam saying that humans have no predetermined position in
the hierarchy of things. A human being can ascend to the level angels or
degrade to the baseness of beasts, depending on how one uses one’s mind.
The progress from the image of man as an uprooted tree to
that of the individual intellect as the center of the world was life-changing.
Giordano Bruno, about 100 years later, would extend it to the theory of the
cosmos, claiming that the center of the
world is, wherever one happens to stand. And yet, when Descartes would say,
another 50 years after that, the “I think” is the only thing that is certain,
he is still banking on Pico’s discovery: Man is man in action, and the world is
the place where man is at the center.
2. Pico was probably the
first encyclopedist, that is, he believed it is impossible to know too much,
and all there is to know is worth knowing.
The quotation from the Oration
on the Dignity of Man is the most popular. But in this speech that
apparently elevated the appreciation of humanity there followed a second part,
in which Pico calls for a universal system of knowledge that includes all
disciplines and traditions. Since no place in the chain of being is assigned to
him, man is a Divine afterthought after the completion of the universe, a being
meant to oversee, and thus to appreciate, the perfection of God’s masterwork;
and that requires appropriate skills. Therefore he called upon the world of
learning to embrace all intellectual achievements of the ancients and of his
contemporaries. Truth is contained in all sciences, and it is the call for
humanity to find and unfold it. Pico’s syncretism is condensed in the formula:
“I am not sworn into the words of any one.”
I should now mention that this famous Oration was intended as the opening speech of a mammoth disputation
to be held in 1487 in Rome.[5]
Pico invited the entire world of learning and even promised to pay the expenses
for those who attended. For this disputation Pico had prepared no less than
nine hundred theses, which he promised to be able to defend.
Within parentheses, it should be stated that such
publication of theses for public discussion was academic practice and as an
event nothing out of the ordinary. We might also remember the famous 95 theses
that Martin Luther nailed at the church gate in Wittenberg, merely 30 years
later in 1517. Again, he did not intend to start a religious war, but just
posted his program inviting everyone to challenge his ideas.
Still, the number 900 sounds somewhat exaggerated. Even more,
Pico said, he could easily have expanded the number by elaborating even more on
details. Those 900 theses are grouped by schools of thought, including
scholasticism, Platonism, Cabala, and many others. The message is this: human
thought is one for all and it evolves and diversifies indefinitely. If man is
at the center of the world, the world is worth knowing as far as possible.
Pico was in agreement with the Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa who
discovered the coincidence of contraries in the power of the human mind.[6]
Nicholas died one year after Pico was born. Indeed, Pico planned to pay a visit
to the Cardinal’s legendary library in Germany. But more importantly, Pico’s
project of an all-encompassing debate triggered the projects of producing an
encyclopedia of all that can be known. Most of these projects were pursued in
the 17th and 18th centuries and came to a completion with
the Encyclopedia Britannica and present day’s Wikipedia.
3. As a syncretist (that is
one who combines virtually all schools of thinking), Pico was against dogmatism,
including that of the Renaissance Platonists.
To pay every branch of learning its due comes with a price:
Does it mean that everyone has his or her own mind and everyone is right? In a
way yes, but also no. First of all, not to be sworn into any one’s school is
the necessary condition for intellectual curiosity. On the flip side, it means
that understanding a school of knowledge does not entail endorsing it.
Therefore, Pico was able to present theses of some scholastics that he did not
endorse; and to ‘defend’ them in the great disputation would have meant
explaining their validity without endorsing them.
Most importantly, intellectual curiosity – to be a polymath or
an intellectual omnivore, as Anthony Grafton had it – is the opposite of
dogmatism. Pico wanted to know all dogmas of the world without being dogmatic. And
here was his enemy: the meanwhile popular Platonism of the Renaissance.
Frequently, Giovanni Pico was associated with Marsilio
Ficino[7]
as one of the Florentine Platonists. But the story is more complicated.
In 1438-39 a council was held in Florence, sponsored by the
Medici trust, that was to reconcile the Byzantine and the Roman Christian
Churches. For some obscure reason, a neo-pagan scholar, who called himself
Plethon, so as to sound like “Platon”, was part of the Greek delegation.[8]
And during his stay in Florence he published a book in which he attacked the
Western Christians for being Aristotelians. He advocated a return to Platonism.
Of course Platonism had dominated Christian thought from St. Paul on; but
lately, thanks to the rediscovery of Aristotle, theology was basically
Aristotelian. Plethon now blamed Aristotelianism to be heretic and – shrewdly –
suggested returning to Platonism, which in his own agenda, was paramount to
ancient wisdom. This idea was picked up by the banker and ruler of Florence,
Cosimo de’Medici, who appointed Ficino to translate works by Plato and the
Neo-Platonists from Greek into Latin. Ficino also commented on all those works,
among others on Plato’s Symposium.[9]
In doing so, Ficino denounced Aristotelian scholasticism as un-Christian and
created his own system that should reconcile dogmatics with ancient wisdom.
This Renaissance Platonism vexed the young friend Pico. He
got interested in Plato while he stayed with Ficino in Florence, but he saw in
Plato only the advocate of the reconciliation of all philosophies rather than a
dogmatic system. For Pico, the major danger, in very few words, is this:
First: every interpretation of Christian thought in terms of
pagan Greek philosophy runs the risk of making Christian revelation
superfluous.
Second: Ficino aligned Plato’s theory of Forms or Ideas with
the notion of God; and this interpretation disturbs the balance between
rational philosophy and revelation. One important example is the notion of God
as the one that transcends every being. Ficino elevated God to a level that
detached God from His Creation. Against this theory Pico protested fiercely in
his De ente et uno.[10]
He did the same in a comment on a love poem written by a friend in the
footsteps of Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s
Symposion.[11] On
the same occasion he criticized the Byzantine scholar Plethon for his misinterpretation
of Greek mythology.
4. On his search for unity of
knowledge, Pico explored new methods of interpreting the Bible.
One anecdote from his life needs to be told. Pico as a man
of action worked simultaneously on his 900
Theses and the introduction, the Oration
on the Dignity of Man, and on this commentary on the love poem. On his way
to Rome in early May 1486, he found time and energy to kidnap Margherita, the
wife of Giuliano Mariotto dei Medici. However, after a fight and his
humiliating arrest that ensued, he seems to have had a conversion and
concentrated all his vigor on studies of Hebrew, the Qur’an, and other reading.
While preparing his great event in Rome, he met for further briefings with his
teacher of Averroist Aristotelianism, Elia del Medigo. From their exchange of
letters we learn that Pico paid Elia with a horse, but also infected him with
scabies. More importantly, Elia was one of the sources for Pico to learn about
Cabala.[12]
Here is, how Elia del Medigo explained this system of Jewish
mysticism:
“[The cabalists] believe that in this world
there are beings of a lower degree than the degree of the glorious God, who is
called the Infinite, and these flow – that is: they are not made nor produced –
from Him, who is named the Infinite. … The order in which the produced beings
are produced and maintained within the order is this, namely by the [ten]
Sephiroth, i.e. numberings. Thus they call these 'flowed from the Infinite'. … According to [the cabalists], the order
we find in the world is that of the Sephiroth.”[13]
We should notice that Elia does not endorse this theory,
being an Aristotelian. But Pico kept learning and had texts of Jewish mysticism
translated for him.
Now, following his idea that as a human being one is
invited, if not urged and obliged, to get to know as much of the world as
possible, and in doing so to elevate oneself above the realm of the beasts,
Pico understood, as Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida in the 20th
century did, that being human means interpreting the world, reading the world
like a book. We all know that famous adage of Galileo Galilei that the book of
the world is written in the language of mathematics. On hearing that we see
Einstein writing formulas on the blackboard. This notion, that the world can be
read in the language of numbers, was actually an old idea. In Greece it was
formulated by Pythagoras. And among the Jews of the Middle Ages it was
expressed in their reading of the Holy Writ. As in other languages, in Hebrew
every letter represents also a numerical value. Therefore it offered itself to
wise people that God’s creation is achieved through that flow, mentioned by
Elia del Medigo, that proceeds in 10 Sephirot and from there structures the
world according to occult numbers. Now, as for the Christians, so even more for
the Jews, the Bible is the primary text that helps reading the book of the
world. Consequently, Jewish sages started discovering numerical hidden messages
in the word of God.
This was what interested the young scholar. For Pico, Cabala
gives access to the secret of divine creation through the alphabet. The letters
of the Bible are nothing but a numerical reconfiguration of God's word and
work. This he elaborated in his commentary on Genesis, by the title Heptaplus
- Sevenfold.[14]
His method of interpretation of the Creation story in the
Bible is as follows. First Pico establishes these two assumptions:
(1) Moses must have spoken adequately and in a learned
manner, even though he addressed an uneducated audience;
(2) Moses cannot have
said anything "alien to the nature of things" since the Holy Spirit
speaks through him.
Therefore, the nature of things as created by God
must necessarily be the very message of the story of Genesis. For all those whom
we now term literalists: it is not so that the Bible is a source of a
scientific interpretation of the world; rather, the other way round: for Pico, the
world is the expression of God’s power and plans; therefore the structure of
the world is necessary for an understanding of the Word of God. Both have the
language and their hidden meaning in common.
As an example we may see Pico’s cabalistic interpretation of
the first word of the Bible, “In the beginning” (in Hebrew bresit or bereshit): After describing a series of dissections and
re-compositions of its letters, Pico discloses the meaning that was implied in
this single word:
“The Father, in the Son and through the Son,
the beginning and end or rest, created the head, the fire, and the foundation
of the great man with a good pact.”
If that sounds mysterious – it is. The point is that by way of numerical
relations, the name of Jesus is implied in the very beginning of the world.
5. Pico reconciled the
humanist, theological, and philosophical trends of Renaissance philosophy.
In searching for new methods of interpreting texts, and
specifically the Bible, Pico continued the efforts of humanists like Giovanni
Boccaccio and Giannozzo Manetti; and he bestowed on the history of ideas what
can be called Christian Cabala; a reconciliation of Jewish and Christian piety.
That attempt at reconciliation did not remain uncontested: Giordano Bruno
ridiculed it,[15]
others mixed it up with magic and astrology; eventually, a version of it
appeared in Baruch Spinoza in the 17th century, who then was accused
of atheism.
But reconciliation was Pico’s long term project. By his
family estate, he had the title Prince of Concordia, and he planned to write a
book on the concord of Plato and Aristotle from a higher point of view. His aim
was syncretism, as we heard, that is, the freedom to apply various methods
depending on the matter at hand. Therefore he defended the scholastic style of
argumentation after having studied not only with Ficino but also in Paris, the
most important scholastic university.[16]
This came handy in his most ambitious project, that great
disputation in Rome. The great event was cancelled, because censors had found
13 out of the 900 propositions to be suspicious of heresy. Pico defended
himself with a long Apology, in which
he argued like a scholastic theologian. However he points out that there are
various schools, and he refers to the history of theology, which is a typical
humanist move. Another humanist argument Pico applied was to say that all
dogmas are expressed in language, and language is always open for
interpretation – even the words of God, as we saw.
In conclusion we may observe that Pico absorbed all trends
of humanism and philosophy. Some people think that humanism has nothing to do
with philosophy and that in the Renaissance philosophy took shape only with
Ficino’s new Platonism. Pico, who was 30 years younger than Ficino but died 5
years earlier, Pico proves to the contrary: Renaissance philosophy was as much
indebted to Aristotle as to Plato and all their medieval Christian
interpretations; and the new turn was made possible through the humanist
emphasis on the central perspective of man on the world and the role of
language in it. Pico achieved much less, personally, than his ambition pursued,
but he handed over to the following generations the insight that knowledge is
hard to come by but worth having.
[1]
Only references to primary sources are given. For Pico’s biography and
philosophy see, among others, Dougherty,
M. V., ed. Pico Della Mirandola: New Essays. Cambridge ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2008., 2008. Stéphane
Toussaint, “Giovanni Pico” in Paul Richard Blum,
ed., Philosophers of the Renaissance, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2010,
69-81.
[2]
Isaac Israeli (ca. 832-ca. 932), Book of definitions, in: Alexander Altmann and
S. M. Stern, Isaac Israeli a Neoplatonic Philosopher of the Early Tenth
Century: His Works Translated with Comments and an Outline of His Philosophy.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009, p. 27.
[3]
Bernard Murchland (ed.). Two Views of Man: Pope Innocent III [1161-1216] On
the Misery of Man. Giannozzo Manetti [1396-1459] On the Dignity of Man. New
York: F. Ungar Pub. Co, 1966.
[4]
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Oration
on the Dignity of Man: A New Translation and Commentary. Ed. Francesco
Borghesi, Michael Papio, and Massimo Riva. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012.
[5]
Farmer, S. A. Syncretism in the West: Pico’s
900 Theses (1486); Conclusiones Nongentae; English & Latin., Tempe,
Ariz. : Medieval & Renaissance Texts &
Studies, 1998.
[6]
Nicholas of Cusa [1401-1464]. On Learned
Ignorance: A Translation and an Appraisal of De Docta Ignorantia,
trans. Jasper Hopkins, Minneapolis: A.J. Benning Press, 1981,
http://jasper-hopkins.info/DI-I-12-2000.pdf.
[7]
Marsilio Ficino
[1433-1499]. Platonic Theology, ed. James Hankins, trans. Michael J.B.
Allen et al., I Tatti Renaissance Library 2, 4, 7, 13, 17, 23, Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001-2006.
[8]
C. M. Woodhouse. George
Gemistos Plethon [c. 1355 –
1452/1454]: The Last of the Hellenes Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1986.
[9]
Ficino, Marsilio. Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love. Translated by
Sears R. Jayne. Dallas, Tex.: Spring Publications, 1985.
[10]
Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola. Of Being and Unity; (De Ente et Uno), trans. Victor M.
Hamm. Milwaukee, Marquette University Press, 1943.
[11]
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni.
Translated by Sears R. Jayne. New York: P. Lang, 1984.
[12]
On Cabala [Kabbalah] see Busi, Giulio, and Ebgi, Raphael. Giovanni Pico
della Mirandola: mito, magia, qabbalah. Torino: Einaudi, 2014.
[13]
Elia's [1458-ca. 1493] letter to Pico in: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. De
hominis dignitate; De ente et uno; e scritti vari. Edited by Eugenio Garin.
Edizione nazionale dei classici del pensiero italiano. Firenze: Vallecchi,
1942, pp. 68-71.
[14]
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni. Heptaplus: Or, Discourse on the Seven Days
of Creation. Translated by Jessie Brewer McGaw. New York: Philosophical
Library, 1977.
[15]
Bruno,
Giordano. The Cabala of Pegasus. Translated by Sidney L. Sondergard and
Madison U. Sowell. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.
[16]
Breen,
Quirinus. “Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola on the Conflict of Philosophy and
Rhetoric.” Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 3 (June 1, 1952):
384–412. doi:10.2307/2707604. Barbaro, Ermolao, and Giovanni Pico della
Mirandola. Filosofia o eloquenza? Edited by Francesco Bausi. Sileni 2.
Napoli: Liguori, 1998.
