Notes on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola

Life

  • Giovanni Pico della Mirandola was born on February 24, 1463, to a noble Italian family in Mirandola and Concordia, near Modena.
  • Around age 14, he enrolled at Bologna to study church law but switched to Ferrara and then Padua, where he studied with Elia del Medigo, a Jewish Averroist Aristotelian.
  • By 1482, he was drawn to Platonism, which Marsilio Ficino was reviving in Florence.
  • By 1484, he corresponded with Florentine luminaries like Angelo Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici.
  • In 1485, Pico traveled to Paris, encountering the aftermath of conflicts between nominalists and realists in Aristotelian scholasticism.
  • At 22, he defended philosophical Latin against philological critics, arguing for rhetoric to defend philosophy.
  • After a short stay in Paris, Pico returned to Florence and Arezzo, where he caused a ruckus by abducting a young woman already married to Giuliano Mariotto de’ Medici.
  • Lorenzo de’ Medici supported him, but the commotion and a plague kept Pico moving.
  • He began writing a Commento in Italian and planned to harmonize Platonists and Aristotelians, aiming for a single symphony of ideas.
  • To promote this, he planned a conference in Rome in 1487, assembling 900 propositions from various authorities and challenging others to debate them publicly.
  • He printed these Conclusions in Rome at the end of 1486 and composed a speech to introduce them, which he never delivered or published, later mistakenly called an Oration on the Dignity of Man.
  • Intervention by the Holy See blocked the conference; Innocent VIII indicted 13 of the theses, condemning 6 as suspect and 7 others.
  • Pico’s Apology provoked Innocent to denounce all 900 propositions, leading Pico to flee to France, where he was briefly jailed.
  • By the summer of 1488, Lorenzo de’ Medici hosted him in Tuscany, and in 1489, he dedicated his Heptaplus to Lorenzo, describing it as a Sevenfold Account of the Six Days of Genesis.
  • In 1491, Pico transferred his family’s estates to his nephew Gianfrancesco, who became an influential philosopher advocating skepticism as an instrument of Christian faith.
  • Despite the fading controversy over the Conclusions, concerns about Pico’s orthodoxy persisted.
  • His Kabbalist exegesis of the Bible in the Heptaplus was considered insufficient to resolve all doubts.
  • Philological conversation with Poliziano led to the fragment On Being and the One after 1490, envisioning Platonism beneath Aristotle’s thinking.
  • Antonio Cittadini opposed the harmonizing effort, continuing the fight with Gianfrancesco after Pico’s death.
  • In 1493, Pope Alexander VI pardoned Pico’s earlier misadventures.
  • Pico and his nephew were in the orbit of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican Prior at San Marco.
  • Mesmerized by Savonarola, Pico gave away properties to the Church and his family.
  • He died on November 17, 1494, possibly by poison, coinciding with the French armies invading Florence.
  • Ficino, his older friend and rival, outlived him by five years.

Works and Reputation

  • Pico’s major works include the 900 Conclusions (1486), the Oration written to introduce it, the Apology defending the Conclusions (1487), the Heptaplus (1489), and the Disputations against Predictive Astrology, unfinished at his death in 1494.

Conclusions and Oration

  • Pico’s fame rests on a speech about human dignity that he never gave, titled posthumously.
  • His public debut was the 900 Conclusions, printed in 1486 as a pamphlet of unsupported statements, intended as a script and advertisement for a debate in Rome.
  • The propositions included theological novelties, such as magic and Kabbalah proving Christ’s divinity.
  • Legal proceedings against the Conclusions halted his plans and led to years of disgrace.
  • The pamphlet was divided into two parts, with Pico taking responsibility only for the second part.
  • The first part listed propositions under names of eminent figures in philosophy, theology, and theosophy:
    • Albert the Great
    • Aquinas
    • François de Meyronnes
    • Scotus
    • Henry of Ghent
    • Egidio Romano
    • Ibn Rushd
    • Ibn Sina
    • Al-Farabi
    • Isaac Albalag
    • Ibn Marwan
    • Maimonides
    • Tolletinus
    • Ibn Bajja
    • Theophrastus
    • Ammonius
    • Simplicius
    • Alexander
    • Themistius
    • Plotinus
    • Adeland
    • Porphyry
    • Iamblichus
    • Proclus
    • Pythagoreans
    • Chaldeans
    • Egyptians
    • Kabbalist Jews
  • The second part highlighted Pico’s ambitions:
    • Concord
    • Dissent
    • Novelty
    • Deviance
    • Platonism
    • Causes
    • Numbers
    • Chaldeans
    • Magic
    • Orphica
    • Christian Kabbalah
  • Pico defended his work in a recalcitrant Apology, part of which was the unpublished Oration.
  • His propositions were performative speech-acts, intended for theatrical combat.
  • Pico aimed to demonstrate philosophical harmony between Aristotle and Plato, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd, Aquinas and Scotus, and others.
  • He called his proclamation of concord ‘contrarian’ (paradoxus), echoing ancient commentators on Plato and Aristotle.
  • Simplicius of Cilicia noted that Pico chose propositions to optimize his advantages in debate.
  • The aim was victory in debate, not necessarily fidelity in presenting others' positions.
  • Readers who saw works by these sages as sources of Pico’s theses were sometimes correct.
  • The brevity of his propositions made it hard to diagnose his intentions or follow his trains of thought.
  • Most propositions were scholastic theology, with many others being Kabbalah and Platonism.
  • Kabbalah was unintelligible to Christian theologians, and Christian theology horrified learned Jews who had studied Kabbalah.
  • The Platonism of late antiquity, from Plotinus through Proclus, dominated the other third of the book.
  • There wasn’t much competent readership in Italy for Pico’s book at the time of publication.
  • Pico’s Conclusions were thoroughly medieval, not humanist.
  • Only three traditions were prominent in the Conclusions: Kabbalist, Peripatetic, and Platonic.
  • Pico’s Platonism was post-Hellenistic and medieval, centered on Proclus.
  • ‘Peripatetic’ was his label for scholastic Aristotelianism.
  • He explained in the Oration that ‘Kabbalah’ was “the Hebrew word for our ‘reception’”.
  • The Conclusions had nothing good to say for a tradition called ‘Hermetic’.
  • Pico was well informed about celebrated Peripatetics and tried to fix flaws in their theology with Platonic metaphysics.
  • Jean Cabrol, a Dominican explicator of Aquinas, was his main informant about mistakes made by Christians.
  • Elia del Medigo surveyed Pico’s path through quarrels about and among Muslims.
  • The Conclusions were Pico’s advertisement of his own learning—challenging orthodoxy and defying common opinion.
  • When he called some conclusions paradoxae, he was thinking of Cicero’s account of Stoic paradoxes.
  • The 900 theses were more inflammatory than the oblique oratory in the speech.
  • Giovanni’s silenced oratory embarrassed Gianfrancesco, who recalled that his uncle regretted the speech as a juvenile mistake.
  • Unlike the Oration, Giannozzo Manetti’s book was actually about dignitas, but as ancient Romans and medieval Christians used the word for ‘rank’, ‘status’, ‘value’, or ‘worth’.
  • Manetti’s dignitas was essentially Christian but slightly secularized.
  • Awareness of the speech—unpublished in Pico’s lifetime—was erratic after he died.
  • Bad publicity lingered from the pope’s denunciation of the Conclusions.
  • What readers had seen on the title page of the Commentationes in 1496 was just A Very Elegant Oration.

Other Works and Gianfrancesco’s Life

  • The British Library Catalog lists about 1300 books by Erasmus printed before 1701, and about 100 contemporary entries for Pico.
  • Pico’s Oratio attracted few publishers compared to Ficino’s De vita libri tres.
  • About half of Pico’s printed works were collections of letters, with Ficino and Poliziano named as his correspondents.
  • His letters succeeded commercially because of the writer’s fame and the needs of readers.
  • He was renowned as a critic of astrology, as an expert on Kabbalah, and as the talented Count Pico.
  • Noble origins, fashionable friends, physical beauty, prodigious learning, capacious memory, scholarly journeys, youthful sins, trouble with the Church, eventual repentance, and a pious death were motifs of the family hagiography by his nephew Gianfrancesco.
  • Because he died so young, the prince finished very little and published less.
  • The only works that Giovanni sent to a printer while he lived were the Conclusions, the Apology, and the Heptaplus.
  • The Apology, defending the Conclusions against heresy charges, was Pico’s longest piece of philosophical writing.
  • The fashionable classicism of Barbaro and Poliziano made no impression on Pico’s first two printed works.

Christian Kabbalah and the Heptaplus

  • Besides the Conclusions and Apology, the only project Pico completed for publication was the Heptaplus (1489), his Kabbalist commentary on the first 26 verses of Genesis.
  • These lines presented the Account of the Beginning (Ma‘aseh Bereshit), a favorite of Menahem Recanati, Abraham Abulafia, and other Kabbalists known to Pico.
  • He found Christology and trinitarian theology in an oral Torah confided to Moses.
  • Pico was the first Christian who had the expertise to make astonishing claims about Kabbalah as the core of a holier ancient theology.
  • The Kabbalah that he revealed to Latin Europe was a theory as well as a practice—biblical hermeneutics with devotional intent.
  • Kabbalists believed that the Hidden God, the No-End, revealed himself not only in the Bible but also through ten aspects, attributes or emanations, the sefirot.
  • The Bible’s Hebrew text was God’s speech, infinite in meaning.
  • God’s names were the most potent words; the holiest of them, the Tetragrammaton, could not be spoken. Written as יהוה (yhwh), the unutterable Name was read aloud as Adonai.
  • The Creator stayed hidden in his highest essence;
  • Much of the literature of Kabbalah described these numberings. There were ten of them, S1 through S10. Common designations of S4, for example, were Gedullah and Hesed, meaning Greatness and Love or Piety, Latinized as Amor or Pietas by Pico’s instructors in Kabbalah. A divine name associated with S4 was El
  • Pico’s term was numerationes, which he learned from Flavius Mithridates.
  • Pico was the first Christian who described Kabbalah in detail or treated it as worthwhile, hoping to persuade other Christians that this Jewish mysticism could help save their souls.
  • Wishing not just to mystify but also to provoke, Pico succeeded and paid the price of his Church’s anger.
  • Theology, spirituality, and philosophy were the main content of Pico’s Kabbalah, which showed how God revealed himself in the sefirot, in divine names, and in words of scripture.
  • From a Kabbalist point of view, the sefirot and the divine names were characters in stories about theology, cosmology, anthropology, and angelology.
  • Devotions advocated by the Conclusions were prayer and ritual as preparations for ecstasy and ascent to mystical union with God.
  • Magic and Kabbalah were essential for spiritual progress, relying on hermeneutics.
  • The Kabbalist theology in the Conclusions, hence the Kabbalah promoted by the Oration, was deliberately mystifying but finally Christological and trinitarian.
  • In the Heptaplus of 1489, readers now recognize the Kabbalist voice of the Conclusions: Pico’s earlier works since the Commento of 1485 have prepared them to hear it.
  • Was Salviati embarrassed by earlier works—the Commento, Conclusions, and Apology? It’s likelier that he thought them forgettable than that he knew nothing about them.
  • Pico’s analysis of the Hebrew letters of the first word of Genesis (Bereshit, “In the beginning”) would have seemed crude.
  • Moses himself had passed through 49 Gates of Understanding—7 × 7 sefirotic stations—on his way to a 50th Gate, the supreme and final portal to union with God.
  • Wisdom, the second serah (S2), built a palace in eternity for Intelligence at S3 and carved 50 Gates there, 7 to be opened at each of the 7 lower sefirot, S4 through S10, leaving another Gate beyond and still shut.
  • The 50 Gates, also called the Jubilee, corresponded to the 50-year festival ordained in Leviticus and also to a Great Jubilee of 50,000 years, when 7 sabbatical cycles or weeks of 7,000 years came to an end.

Oratory but not Dignity

  • In the first few pages of the Oration, the Creator tells Adam that he, alone of all creatures, can make himself what he wants to be.
  • Wilhelm Tennemann treated Pico’s stirring prelude as evidence of a morality grounded, like Kant’s, in human freedom and dignity.
  • The opening of the Oration is the most conspicuous part of the speech, praised by Garin and others as a declaration of dignity, freedom, and ‘humanism’.
  • Assured by initial statements that we can be what we want to be, we are then told that what we ought to be isn’t human at all. Our task is to become angels.
  • Personal extinction by mystical union with God was Pico’s goal: for people to be divinized, selves had to be discarded.
  • At the lowest level of this self-annihilating paideia, the initiate began as a student of philosophy, learning ethics, logic, natural philosophy and theology and then ascending, through arcana of magic and Kabbalah, to drown the self in God’s bottomless lake.
  • 1. Humans are amazing because they can choose to change what they are.
  • 2. To choose well, however, they must change into angels.
  • 3. And to emulate angels, they must live like Cherubs.
  • 4. Humans can learn this lesson from ancient saints:
    • i. Paul and Dionysius,
    • ii. Jacob,
    • iii. Job,
    • iv. Moses,
    • v. Orpheus, Plato, Plotinus, Socrates and other gentiles,
    • vi. Pythagoras,
    • vii. Abraham, Chaldeans, Jeremiah and Zoroaster.
  • 5. Because philosophy leads to the Cherubic life, Pico proclaims himself a philosopher.
  • 6. Philosophy has informed him about new practices, including magic and Kabbalah.
  • 7. Assured of philosophy’s benefits, Pico will ignore his critics and debate a philosophy of his own.
  • A curriculum reviewed 7 times in the middle of the Oration, at step 4 of 7, taught lessons leading to mystical union with God.
  • Stages of Pico’s paideia were
    • 1. moral philosophy
    • 2. dialectic
    • 3. natural philosophy
    • 4. theology
    • 5. magic
    • 6. Kabbalah
    • 7. mystical union
  • Magic and Kabbalah were preliminary but necessary.
  • Pico’s advice was for human persons to conjoin with the Agent Intellect.

Being and the One and Astrology

  • The Disputations Against Astrology is textually problematic because Gianfrancesco may have meddled with it.
  • Much of it repeated ancient and medieval objections to astrology.
  • The prince’s innovation was to weaponize philology against it.
  • But the Disputations that Pico died too soon to finish reformed this static mytho-history by bringing it down to earth and back to life with new evidence.
  • And yet Pico’s critical sense was far from modern.
  • The arithmetic in his own Conclusions was numerology, and his treatment of mathematics was generally unprogressive—more like Aristotle’s attitude than Plato’s.
  • Pico’s fragment On Being and the One challenged Ficino, who saw it that way and objected politely.
  • A larger purpose, harmonizing Aristotle with Plato, would have been germane.
  • The disasters of 1487 may be enough to explain Pico’s jarring reversal on astrology in the Disputations, also his muffling of Kabbalah in the Heptaplus.
  • In 1496, the Pico of the Commentationes was his nephew’s creation.
  • Now, more than five centuries later, Pico on the internet—even farther from his time and place—is an artifact of the last century’s scholarship, whose even older philosophical attitudes were shaped by Kant and Hegel.