Pico Della Mirandola
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola
(Mirandola 1463 – Florence 1494)
Potted biography
Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola was born near Ferrara and was trained at Bologna University. A disciple of Marsilio Ficino, scholarly, mastering numerous languages including Hebrew and Aramaic, having one of the best-stocked libraries of his time in works expressing the thinking of the three monotheistic religions, Pico della Mirandola is the perfect embodiment of the humanist ideal.
One of the richest men in Italy of his time, he offered, at the age of twenty-four, to bring together in Rome at his own expense, a private council in the course of which he would have upheld, in the presence of the Pope and the principal living theologians, his nine hundred theses of 1486, Conclusiones philosophicæ, cabalisticæ et theologicæ. The Pope, who judged certain of these theses heretical, opposed the project, of which all that is left to us is the opening speech written by Pico but never given, published in 1504 after his death, under the title of Discourse on the Dignity of Man. In it, Pico shifts the emphasis from the traditional question of the nature of Man to the question Man’s place in Nature: Man’s eminent dignity comes from his central position in the world: an intermediary between the spirit and the material, between time and eternity, Man does not have a nature of his own to be able to acquire them all. Man will be that which he wishes to become, that which he will make of himself.
In 1489, Pico completed his Heptaplus, a philosophico-mystical account of the creation of the universe. In 1491, he wrote On Being and the One, a text addressed to a friend on the question of the relationship between the Being and the One. In it, Pico defends the identity of these two notions, and the consensus between Plato and Aristotle on this question. He also studied the Kabbala and worked hard at commenting the Bible.
Pico died in 1494, while planning to write a book on The Concord of Plato and Aristotle. A year earlier, Pope Alexander VI had absolved him from any accusation of heresy.
Life and work
Giovanni Pico and his legend
Unfortunate Man was hardly any longer more than a name — and rather ridiculous at that — that Voltaire’s irony had for a short time brought out of oblivion, or so they thought. However, in the 19th century, Jacob Burckhardt and Jules Michelet “invented” the Renaissance, and Giovanni Pico too would be reborn — but only on condition that he conformed to what history expected of him. So it was necessary that he should have been a sign and ferment of renewal, that he should have had the intuition of the things to come and the new mentalities — in short, that he should have made himself the inspired prophet of our modern emancipations.
Now unluckily for him, Giovanni Pico had written one of the finest pages of neo-Latin literature, this “very elegant discourse” to which posterity would give the evocative title of ‘Discourse on the Dignity of Man’.
Written in an eloquent style, calling on all the resources of the most noble rhetoric, sprinkled with classical references all the subtler for being, for the most part, only suggested or mentioned as if in passing, the Discourse is beautifully developed, and even in translation manages to retain some of its original ‘punch’.
Burckhardt himself saw in it “one of the finest legacies of this period of high culture”, and when he wanted to evoke what he thought was the ‘spirit’ of the Italian Renaissance in a text, it was to the Discourse he referred. But out of this multi-facetted text, he would only extract the words by which the Creator conferred on the first man the privilege of freedom. The paragraph is short and would become famous; it is worth quoting here:
“I have placed you at the world’s centre so that you may thence more easily look around and see whatever is in the world. By making you neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, I have sought to give you yourself the power to shape and to conquer yourself; you shall have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, and you shall have the power to be reborn into the higher orders, which are divine When they came into the world, the animals received everything they need, and the spirits of a higher order are right from the principle, or at least soon after their formation, that which they should be and which they shall remain through all eternity. You alone have the power to grow and develop as you wish, you have within yourself the germs of your life in all its forms.
It’s easy to imagine the rest: from this brief passage, often quoted, underlined, truncated, and taken out of all context, they thought they had discovered in the Oratio de hominis dignitate the quintessence of Pico’s thinking, the proclamation of his doctrine, if not, as has even been claimed, the symbol and manifesto of Renaissance humanism as a whole: a Promethean vision of free man, master of his own destiny, from now only the only one responsible for what he becomes and his choices. There was no hesitation, when the need or opportunity arose, to give translations the few little nudges necessary to make the texts more in line with this expectation, and from then on, Giovanni Pico became the ideal example, the prototype of the humanist of the quattrocento, and this paradigmatic rôle would henceforth become part of his legend…
Burckhardt had read the Discourse, he had defined its scope and range: from that moment on, classified, catalogued, labelled, the Discourse had found its canonic meaning and it is burdened with this meaning that it would to take its place in the modern anthology of sacred texts, those that are venerated without having been read. Whence a dangerous distortion, right from the start of the historiography of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. The fact is that Giovanni Pico wrote plenty of things other than his famous Oratio. Let’s look at a few figures: the whole of his Opera omnia, edited, with a biography, by his nephew Giovanni Francesco, though still incomplete, comprises over 730 folios. Now account is hardly ever taken of all this, apart from amongst the experts, of course — a closed circle of people who listen to each other talking and who have only that to do. So who has ever heard of the Heptaplus, De ente et uno, or theApologia? At most, we know that Pico wrote a criticism of astrology, because Kepler mentions it… In the face of this evidence, one question arises: to what extent is the Oratio representative of the whole of Giovanni Pico’s work?
Now, two things can be noticed: the first is that, as far as its contents are concerned, and in spite of what may have been said about it, the Oratio does not put forward a single new idea. Certainly, in it Pico gives Man a grandiose and exultant conception — but this is the traditional cosmocentric or theocentric conception that places Man at the centre of a world that is already there. From this “observatory” — the word is Pico’s — Man has a mission to contemplate the order of the universe. His freedom is employed there, but it is a freedom of acceptance, or of rejection — it is never a freedom of creation. The order of values is included within the order of nature and arises out of it. Hence Man has the ability to discover this order, but he does not have the power to modify it in any way, or substitute his own for it. Within this context and under these conditions, Man ‘is’ not, and ‘cannot be’, a law unto himself; he does not exist independently. In all, reading theOratio as it really is, it will be found infinitely closer, in the spirit it exudes, to Splendor veritatis than to Sartrean humanism!
But this content — perfectly ordinary for the period — is presented in an exceptionally compelling and convincing fashion: this is what made the glory of the Oratio. Now (and this is the second point that should be noted), precisely through this style of high rhetoric, the Oratio stands out radically from Pico’s other works, all written in a language that, though correct, is closer to what is known as the “Paris” style, specific to scholasticism, than to the precious, mannered style affected by the humanists. Now there’s something that ought to set us thinking, especially since, barely a year before, Pico had written a very long letter to Ermolao Barbaro, the man of letters who took his concerns over language as far as refining the style of Aristotle himself in his translations! Much to the horror of his correspondent and his humanist friends, Pico had sided with the scholastics, even though they wrote in a “barbarous” Latin, for in philosophy, he asserted, only the content matters, and the true philosopher would judge it unworthy of himself to embellish his discourse by the deceitful attractions of rhetoric. And it must be pointed out that to illustrate his remarks, Pico praises Duns Scot, whom he regards as one of the leading philosophers. In doing this, Pico knew full well that he was flying headlong in the face of the literary canons of the humanists, the style of the “subtle Doctor” being the very epitome of that which made them quiver with unanimous horror.
So for Pico to have written the Oratio in a literary Latin was in line with the expectations of humanist circles; but on the other hand, having thus once given sparkling proof of his perfect mastery of classical Latin, for him to nonetheless choose to write his other works in scholastic Latin — now there’s something that’s extremely revealing, especially in the context of the period. Following the stance he took in his letter to Barbaro, this was one way of saying that his Oratio mustn’t be taken too seriously — at any rate, not to the letter — and that furthermore, if one sought to find his ‘true’ thinking, it would be in his other writings that one would have to look for it.
And Giovanni Pico takes great care not to reject mediæval thinking ‘a priori’, over a simple question of style. He does not refuse to read the scholastics — where Valla, Erasmus, Barbaro, and the others make it a point of honour. He read them, even the most “barbarous” of them, “Averroïsts” in Padua, “Calculators” in Pavia, “Scotists and Nominalists” at the Sorbonne. He takes them seriously even — and indeed especially — when he criticizes them. Now there’s what it means to show proof of non-conformism, independence and intellectual audacity; there’s what his legend should have retained — but this is precisely one of the points that it has effaced.
The most astonishing thing in all this business — and here again, it is rare for this to be pointed out when discussing the Discourse — is that, following the circumstances that we’re going to be looking at, the elegant Oratio, the fruit of so much care, would never be given nor published in its author’s lifetime — not that this would stop one eminent French sixteenth-century specialist to see “Pico della Mirandola’s famous speech [...] as the proclamation urbi et orbi of the advent of a new world where Man becomes aware of his eminent rôle.” For a discourse that for all practical purposes and for the moment remained a dead letter — now there’s something to say the least unexpected. But such is the power of legend…
Of course, Burckhardt is not the only one responsible, and his selective — highly selective! — reading of Pico’s works has only been the triggering kernel around which the Mirandola myth has taken shape.
It was known that Giovanni Pico, young, handsome, and rich, adulated guest at the most noble courts of France and Italy, had shone with the full flush of his genius before the gods, jealous, brought his days to a premature end: he died when he was only 32, in circumstances that are still a mystery. What could be more romantic than this unfair death coming to mow down in his prime a man of such great promise? It was said that Pico had taken up magic, that he had dug into the deepest secrets of the Kabbala and had pierced the secret of the occult sciences and the impenetrable traditions. And also, and above all, that he had gone to Rome to confront the most celebrated Doctors of Christendom there in public debate. It was also known that the debate had been forbidden and that, the supreme accolade, several of his propositions had been condemned as heretical by a small band of reactionary theologians. Excommunicated, he could only have escaped pontifical prosecution and conviction by flight and exile. From then on, how could it be doubted that Pico was this Promethean hero, cut to the measure of a century of grandeur, of revolt, and of pride?
Such is the legend of Pico; assembling facts that are mainly true, but distorted and magnified by the prism of memory and historians’ uncertainty alike, it gives an essentially fallacious image of its hero, whilst obliterating the real place that is his due in the history of ideas.
So let’s try to evoke a more realistic figure. We shall discover a relationship between Pico and ourselves, but very different from the one that Marguerite Yourcenar and Jacob Burckhardt thought they saw. Fascinated by Neoplatonism, he would be seduced by diverse esoteric doctrines reminiscent of those of the New Age that so many of our contemporaries adhere to.
Discovery of Neoplatonism
In Florence, under the auspices of Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico would become fascinated by reading the Enneads by Plotinus, in this way discovering Neoplatonism in all the authenticity of its original form.
Plotinus’ conception, at once mystical and profoundly intellectualist, carried forward by an essentially religious intention, seemed to ideally meet Giovanni Pico’s expectations. In fact, had Plotinus himself not underlined the continuity that, from hypostasis to hypostasis, from matter to the One, from Man to God, links the different ontological levels? So it is a close and accessible God he reveals in his doctrine; yet it is just as much a God of mystery, for located beyond the very Being itself, and hence beyond all human comprehension, God is the Ineffable One. It will be understood that by these two apparently contradictory facets, Plotinus’ doctrine has always exercised an extremely powerful attraction for mystical souls… On the other hand, founded entirely on the notion of participation (so vague, moreover, and already criticized by Aristotle!), this doctrine claimed to merge the whole of reality into one organic unit, animated in part by the “affinities” and the “sympathies”. Thus the universe formed, according to Plotinus in the most literal sense of the term, a living being, this “cosmic animal” within which the network of equivalences was woven: equivalence of one thing to another, but also of each thing to its symbol, its representations, its denominations. In this poetic vision of the universe, the “occult” sciences — occult because they assumed the reality and the immediate physical effectiveness of transphenomenal relations and interactions — seemed to receive a rational justification. This is how astrology, for example, and the incantatory magics found a “natural” place within Plotinus’ cosmology. Whence the immense attraction this was able to exercise — and still does exercise! — on minds disoriented by the abandonment of the ancient certainties. Doubtless Plotinus himself preached strict ascetism, all oriented towards the slow and difficult purification of the soul by practising a rigorous research, but his epigones, using the most extravagant esoteric traditions as an excuse and claiming to be followers of Hermes, Orpheus and Zoroaster, were going to make an increasingly large place for magical and theurgic practices, in this way allowing the hope to gleam of an immediate contact with the beyond: the New Age is within reach…
We can understand that the young Giovanni Pico, welcomed as a “hero” within the brilliant Florentine academy, and basking in the feverish atmosphere that reigned there, should at first have let himself be dragged along by this common exaltation: the instantaneous spiritualities offered to our contemporaries are of the same order, and are equally successful.
And we can likewise understand — referring, as ever, to our contemporaries — that Pico let himself be tempted by the occult sciences and the incredible promises that they were constantly sowing; and doubtless in his initial enthusiasm he was able to hope that the investigation of magic would give him ‘a posteriori’ confirmation of the Neoplatonist cosmology and the metaphysics that this presupposes. However, nothing shows that he himself actually attempted to try the experiment. Pico was essentially a contemplative, and though the theoretical foundations that magic gained from Plotinus were extremely interesting to him, it seems that he always left the task of carrying out the empirical verification to others. In the same way, today we may be fascinated by the efficiency of scientific thinking, whilst only taking an interest in the theoretical vision it assumes and on which it is founded.
The “Roman dispute”
In March 1486, after a stay of several months in Paris that crowned his intellectual tour, Pico was back in Florence. This was when, in the splendid arrogance of his youth — he was just 23 — he conceived the incredible project of summoning the most learned minds in Christendom to a vast debate, to publicly discuss a long series of “theses” covering all the fields of knowledge. Impatient to reach in the highest summits of literary glory in a single bound, and seeking to give his “disputation” a universal range, he decided the debate should take place in Rome. A puerile pretension or the gesture of a great lord, he proposed paying the expenses of those of the doctors who might think twice about the travelling expenses…
Most of his contemporaries saw in his theses, of the mystical number of 900, only the conceited display of a superficial erudition crossed with a ridiculous pretension to universality. This is how this tenacious legend was born, to which Pascal would refer, that Pico would have been strong indeed to hold forth on omni re scibili — “all things which can be known” — to which Voltaire would add “quibusdam aliis” — “and a good many more besides”!
All this had to end in Pico’s excommunication by Pope Innocent VIII. Order was given to the apostolic nuncios to lay their hands on him. Thanks to the King’s protection and the effective interventions of Lorenzo de’ Medici, Giovanni Pico, who had tried in vain to escape the pursuit by fleeing to France, regained his liberty and returned to Italy to settle in Florence, where Marsilio Ficino welcomed him with these kind words of welcome: “Be happy, my Pico, you are going to be a Florentine!”
Censorship of public debate by the ecclesiastical authorities, an ‘auto-da-fé’ of the Conclusiones, condemnation, flight and exile of their author: so many elements that, alone, would have been sufficient to guarantee Giovanni Pico the crown of a martyr to liberty and turn him into this legendary hero that post-Burckhardt criticism needed…
Let’s go and take a little closer look at this, and let’s note immediately that, contrary to what this legend would have wanted, the great majority of the theologians appointed by Innocent VIII claimed to be followers of the via moderna. It was these “modern” theologians whom Pico grouped under the disdainful title of “Scotists and nominalists”. He had certainly known them when he stayed in Paris, where they took pride of place.
In opposition to these “moderns”, and clearly losing ground to them, there were the adherents to the “via antiqua”, who for their part claimed to be followers of St Thomas Aquinas. Now, in everything closely or remotely connected with scholasticism, Pico demonstrated a clear preference for the Thomist orientations. So if we seek to apply our schemes of today to judge the ideological conflicts of the 15th century, it would have to be said that the judges who condemned Pico represented avant-garde theology, while Pico himself seemed like a conservative.
Criticism of Neoplatonism and return to Aristotle
The failure of the Rome debate, from which Giovanni Pico had hoped for so much glory, had been total; no doctor had come to listen to him, his Conclusiones had been thrown on the fire and he’d had to put his elegant Oratio back into his pocket. Enough to shake any man up: for Giovanni Pico, this would be the opportunity for a profound reappraisal of his fundamental attitudes.
In his “De ente et uno”, published in 1491, Pico would have the audacity, against Ficino himself and against the opinion of ‘il Magnifico’, to criticise the fundamental thesis of the entire Neoplatonist tradition, which had it that “the One is superior to the Being”.
To deny the primacy of the One was to attack Neoplatonism in its vitals, it was above all to reject this “globalising vision” that had fascinated the most enlightened minds of the period, that had even fascinated Pico himself, but of which he had now got the measure and realized the implications.
For a very high price has to be paid for the attraction of this sublime vision. If in effect unity takes precedence over all differentiation — which the Neoplatonist thesis implies — if, as the old adage maintained, “everything is in everything”, and if, by the interplay of affinities, the reign of equivalences is established, the distinctions from thing to thing fade away — but also the distinctions between the different planes of reality. How then, in this totally sacralized cosmos, would it still be possible to distinguish between nature and supernature, between the order of the sacred and the order of the profane, between primary cause and secondary causes? Such was, under the influence of Neoplatonism, this “Orphic” representation of Nature, so characteristic of the Italian humanism of the quattrocento, that for a time would mark the lifeblood of Western thinking. Compared with the Aristotelian tradition, this representation, essentially animist and vitalist, seems like a regression insofar as it concerns the conception that Man makes of himself, of his relationship with the world, and of the cosmology that it assumes.
It is through this criticism that “De ente et uno” marks a fundamental turning-point for Giovanni Pico, who then comes back from it to a much more sober and measured discourse where he reasserts, with renewed concern for rigour, the necessity of establishing clear demarcations between the different orders of reality.
Nothing testifies better to this reversal of opinion than the twelve volumes of the Disputationes ‘adversus astrologiam divinatricem’, a radical critique of astrology to which, after De ente, Pico devoted all his energy. Left unfinished, this monumental work would be published by Giovanni Francesco after his uncle’s death.
The Disputationes are all the more significant because Pico encompasses within his criticism, not just astrology in all its multiple aspects, but the whole of the occult sciences — magic, geomancy, necromancy… — these “superstitions” as Pico now calls them, which would collapse of there own accord once he had destroyed astrology, their “mistress and queen”.
At pains to underline the point that Greek science owes nothing to the so-called Egyptian or Chaldean revelations, but is “entirely based on the most solid reasoning and the most thorough demonstration”, Pico combines in the same contempt these esoteric traditions that had inspired him to so many enthusiastic pages at the time of the Oratio. The supreme derision, Hermes himself is no longer designated here except scornfully as “a certain Egyptian by the name of Hermes”, while Zoroaster, this “Prince of the Magi”, is ridiculed for not having been able to predict his own defeat in his battle with Ninus, where he was to die.
However, the intellectual metamorphosis that Pico has undergone is nowhere more apparent than when he speaks of the relationship that links the natural and supernatural orders.
To Neoplatonism, it must be repeated, any event, be it celestial or terrestrial, is transmitted by affinity or by sympathetic resonance to all the levels of reality, which hence always affect each other reciprocally, and from that point on the orders, celestial and terrestrial, natural and supernatural, combine into a continuum such that it becomes impossible to find any clear criterion that would make it possible to distinguish them. Now, it is precisely the idea of such a continuum that Pico radically criticizes in his Disputationes, of which one chapter explicitly asserts that:
Divine miracles are neither caused, nor signified by [the heavenly bodies], but miraculous events are signified by miraculous events, in the same way that natural things are indicated by other natural things.
This radical about-turn compared with the implicit monism of Neoplatonism indicates that Pico has now got the measure of the full metaphysical range of Plotinus’ doctrine. Disappointed, he has abandoned the sublime hope that it splashed around and no longer believes that the human soul can unite with its Principle “from down here” through the practice of an intellectual ascetism. The order of reason is not the order of faith and it is not given to pass gradually from one to the other.
In this way, Pico arrives at the conclusions that were already those of late scholasticism. A link with the past undoubtedly; but equally a presage of the future, for the first stirrings of this radical dualism can already be seen, perhaps foreshadowing that of Descartes and undoubtedly arising from a same spirit: here, in this restricted but essential sense, it is undoubtedly legitimate to see in Giovanni Pico a precursor of modernity.
The last years
Innocent VIII died in July 1492, and his successor Alexander Borgia VI granted Giovanni Pico the Brief of full and complete absolution.
This much-awaited absolution was the only joy of his last years, which were sad and marked by painful bereavements. On 8th April 1492, Pico lost in Lorenzo de’ Medici a loyal protector, an intelligent admirer, and an unselfish patron. ‘Il Magnifico’ was succeeded by Piero, but it soon became apparent that the son had not inherited any of his father’s qualities, and soon, through his fiery sermons, Savonarola would to raise the people up against this indecisive prince, in whom he saw the symbol of the moral decadence of his time. A distraught Pico watched the collapse of the Medici dream and the fall of the Florentine Republic as a powerless witness…
LOUIS VALCKE, "Pico della Mirandola", L'Agora, vol 1 no 7, April 1994
© 2006 Umanista.Net